I Am Pilgrim(50)

Slowly, he went back to reading, and Marcie stayed with him every word of the way. Hours later, Bradley said he thought the author was too smart – he wasn’t accidentally going to reveal his identity. Jokingly, he told her the test of any great investigator would be to discover who the guy really was. They turned and looked at one another.

Without a word, Marcie went into the next room and got her laptop. From that moment on, discovering my identity became their project, their rehabilitation, the renewal of their love story.

And for me? It was a disaster.





Chapter Nine


NINETEEN WORDS. SITTING in the plaza Athénée, not admitting to anything, I’d asked Bradley what had made him think the author was in Paris, and that’s what he told me. Out of a total of three hundred and twenty thousand words in the book, nineteen fucking words had given my secret away.

Seven of them, he said, were an attempt by the author to describe the different colours of decaying blood. I remembered the passage exactly: I had compared the shades to a particular type of tree I had seen change from bright red to brown every fall of my childhood. So what? Checking every detail, Bradley said he called a professor of botany and asked him about the tree. Apparently, they were unique to the Eastern Seaboard and I had unwittingly identified at least the general area where I grew up.

The other twelve words, two hundred pages later, concerned a murder weapon: the stick used to play lacrosse, something which I said I recognized because I had seen students at my high school with them. Bradley told me that if you call the US Lacrosse Association you will learn there are one hundred and twenty-four high schools on the Eastern Seaboard which offer it as a sport. They were getting closer.

By then Marcie had located Garrett’s cousin living in New Orleans and learned that the guy’s reading extended to four letters: ESPN. The cousin said that Garrett had graduated high school in 1986, and Bradley guessed, from two references in the book, that the real author was from the same era.

He called the one hundred and twenty-four high schools which played lacrosse and, as an NYPD detective, requested the names of all male students who had graduated between 1982 and 1990 – expanding the search, just to be on the safe side. Very soon, he had a long list of names – but one which he felt sure included the identity of the real author.

Working through it would have been overwhelming – except they were mostly private schools and they were always looking for donations to increase their endowment. The best source of money was former students, and there were not many databases better than an alumni association with its hand out. They had extensive records of all their former pupils, and Bradley combed through pages of lawyers and Wall Street bankers, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

He had nothing to show for his trouble until, one night, in the names from a school called Caulfield Academy, he and Marcie came across a person called Scott Murdoch.

‘He had graduated high school in ’87,’ Bradley told me, biting into the world’s most expensive eclair. ‘He was accepted to Harvard, studied medicine and got a doctorate in psychology. A great career lay ahead of him, but then – nothing. The alumni association had no address, no work history, no news. From the minute he graduated they knew less about him than anyone else. He had simply disappeared. Of everyone we looked at, he was the only one like that.’

He glanced up to see what I was thinking. I didn’t speak, I was too preoccupied – it was strange hearing the name Scott Murdoch after so many years. Sometimes – in the worst moments of the secret life, when I was both judge and executioner – I wondered what had happened to that person.

After a long silence, Bradley soldiered on. ‘Following weeks of research, Harvard told me that Dr Murdoch took a job at Rand – they knew because he was recruited on campus and they found a record of it. But here was the strange part: Rand was certain it had never heard of him.

‘So were the professional associations, licensing boards and all the other organizations we contacted.

‘As far as we could tell, when Dr Scott Murdoch left Harvard, he walked off the face of the earth. Where did he go? we asked ourselves.’

A chill which had started at the base of my spine was spreading fast. They had unearthed Scott Murdoch and they knew that he had vanished. That was a fine piece of work, but not half as good, I suspected, as what was coming.

‘We had an address for Scott Murdoch from his years at high school,’ Bradley continued. ‘So we headed out to Greenwich, Connecticut. I spoke to somebody through an intercom, told ’em it was the NYPD, and the gates swung open.’