“Are you sure this was our Patsy MacLaren?”
“I’m as sure as I can be, Gregor. A young woman named Patricia MacLaren left the United States on a Pan American flight in the late spring of 1969 in the company of another young woman, who was definitely Julianne Corbett, as far as we can be definite about these things. This isn’t the Soviet union , Gregor. This isn’t even England. People don’t have to carry identity papers or tell the police where they are.”
“I know. Keep going. They went Pan Am.”
“Right. They did. They went around for a while, in Europe some but mostly in India and Nepal and Pakistan and places like that. Then they both came down with dysentery.”
“Both?”
“Yeah,” John Jackman said. “I spoke to a couple of very nice people, Gregor, and they all spoke English, but there were language barriers just the same. Still, I think I got this straightened out. Julianne Corbett came down with dysentery first. Patsy MacLaren—they kept calling her the redheaded one; did you know she had red hair?”
“She didn’t by the time that we saw her. But she was middle-aged by then. And mostly gray.”
“She had red hair in 1969,” John Jackman said. “Anyway, she brought Julianne in and stuck with her all the time she was sick and then just as Julianne was getting better, Patsy got sick herself. They put her in a hospital bed and filled her full of rehydration therapy stuff, but it didn’t do any good. She never got any better. And one day she just died.”
“Of dysentery.”
“Right. I don’t think that was a well-hidden murder, Gregor. Dysentery is pretty distinctive stuff. I couldn’t begin to imagine how someone would bring on a fake attack of it in someone else. And it takes time. It’s not like poison. It goes on for weeks sometimes before people die of it.”
“All right. What happened then?”
“Well, the next thing was, in arrived this other friend of theirs, who from the description sounds to me like Karla Parrish. She was at least well, which Julianne really wasn’t at that point. Parrish looked into making some arrangements about bringing the body back to the States for burial, but it couldn’t be done right then. There was a cholera outbreak at the time and the State Department was holding up the repatriation of bodies—isn’t that bizarre, that you have to repatriate a body?—anyway, they were holding that up for a few months in cases like Patsy MacLaren’s, cases where there had been disease, because they didn’t want to risk causing a cholera outbreak here. So—”
“Did they repatriate the body at all?” Gregor asked. “Did they bury her in India?”
“Just relax, will you?” John Jackman said. “They buried the body there. They had to, I think. Refrigeration was expensive.”
“Patsy MacLaren was rich.”
“Patsy MacLaren was only sort of rich,” John Jackman corrected Gregor. “Anyway, the person I think was Karla Parrish went off and got all the forms to fill out for the United States Embassy and all those people, reporting the death of an American citizen abroad, and she made a bunch of arrangements with the funeral parlors and the caretaker of a Christian cemetery and that kind of thing. And then she gave them all to Julianne Corbett.”
“And then?”
“And then they had the funeral, a very small funeral with just the two of them in attendance, and the person I think was Karla Parrish left for Africa.”
“Did you talk to the person who conducted the funeral?”
“No,” John said, “but I talked to the priest who’s taken his place since and he went through his files and found me what I needed. He even faxed a copy of the death certificate and the paperwork they keep on Catholic burials. Somebody named Patricia MacLaren was definitely buried in a Catholic cemetery in New Delhi in that year.”
“What about the consulate and the embassy and all those people?”
John Jackman smiled. “Well, there, Gregor, you’ve got a few problems. Remember all those papers I was telling you about? The ones Karla Parrish got?”
“I remember.”
“Well, Gregor, not one of them was ever filed. Not one. There isn’t any record in the embassy in New Delhi at all of there ever having been a Patsy MacLaren in India, never mind a Patsy MacLaren who died in India. Of course, the embassy doesn’t always know all the Americans who are on hand in a foreign country.”
“This isn’t the Soviet union ,” Gregor said mildly. “And in the event of it, even the Soviet union seems not to have been the Soviet union .”