Sanctus and The Key: 2 Bestselling Thrillers. Simon Toyne

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      41

      Robbery and Homicide was calmer now. It was just after six o’clock in the evening. Quiet time, except for the steady clatter of keyboards being pecked by one-fingered typists. People didn’t tend to commit robberies or murder in the afternoon, so it was a good time to catch up on paperwork. Arkadian sat at his desk and frowned at his computer. His phone had hardly stopped. Somehow the press had got hold of his direct line and it rang every two or three minutes with someone new asking about the case whose file currently filled his screen. The chief of police had also called him personally. He wanted to know when they could issue an official statement. Arkadian assured him he’d have one as soon as the witness checks came back. And that was why he was frowning.

      Following his conversation with the girl he’d run the name she’d given him through the various personnel databases and managed to build up the beginnings of a dossier on Samuel Newton. He’d found his birth certificate at least, though even that seemed incomplete. It confirmed that he’d been born in a place called Paradise, West Virginia, to an organic horticulturalist father and a botanist mother, but the name of the infant was recorded simply as ‘Sam’, not ‘Samuel’. Several other parts of the form were blank, including the column recording the child’s sex, but his search had also thrown up an associated death certificate – recording the sad fact that his mother had died eight days later.

      His first few years were sketchy and a lot of the usual documents Arkadian expected to find were missing. A collection of assorted newspaper clippings picked up his story aged nine and charted the development of his precocious mountaineering abilities. One included a black-and-white photo of the young Sam clinging to a precipitous rock he had obviously just conquered. Arkadian compared the image of the skinny, grinning boy with the head shots he had taken during the post-mortem. There was definitely a resemblance.

      According to the last of the newspaper clippings, dated nine years later, it seemed that young Sam’s climbing skills had led indirectly to the death of his father. One spring, as they were driving back from a competition in the Italian Alps, their car had spun out of control during a freak blizzard and slid into a ravine. Both father and son initially survived the crash, though they had suffered some pretty significant injuries. Sam had woken up with snow coming in through a broken side window, not really remembering where he was or how he’d got there. His arm hurt like hell; other than that he felt cold, but OK. He discovered that his father, though awake and fairly alert, was bleeding from a large gash in his head. He was also trapped under the twisted wreckage of the dashboard and complaining that he couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.

      Sam had wrapped his father as warmly as he could with whatever he could find in and around the car, then made his way up the wall of the ravine in search of help. It had taken him quite a while to scale the icy rock face because he was fighting a raging blizzard and the arm he’d described as ‘hurting like hell’ was actually fractured in two places. He eventually managed to climb back up to the road and flag down a passing truck.

      By the time the Medivac team arrived, his father had lost too much blood, been in the cold too long and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered. He died three days later. Sam was just eighteen. He flew back to the US with his climbing trophy in his hand and his father in a box in the hold.

      Arkadian had also managed to track down a passport application made when Sam had first started travelling the world on climbing expeditions. In a section headed ‘Distinguishing Marks’ the bearer was described as having a lateral scar at the base of the ribs on the right-hand side of his body; a scar in the shape of a cross. Arkadian felt that he’d found his man; yet there was still a lot that didn’t add up.

      Standard procedure for victim identification required that checks be carried out on any person stepping forward to identify a body, a necessary precaution to prevent false witness. When Arkadian had run the checks on Liv Adamsen of Newark, New Jersey, he’d discovered all the usual stuff: where she lived, her credit history and so on, none of which was particularly noteworthy. But the deeper he’d looked, the more puzzled he’d become.

      Two things in particular rang alarm bells in his naturally suspicious mind. The first was her occupation. Liv Adamsen was an investigative reporter working on the crime desk of a large New Jersey paper. This was bad news, particularly on a case as public and newsworthy as this one. The second was less of a problem and more of a mystery. Despite the fact that Liv had correctly identified the dead man and reacted as a sister would, there was not one single record, in all of the checks he’d carried out, of any kinship. As far as Arkadian could establish from the complex paper trail weaving its way back through Samuel Newton’s life, there was absolutely no evidence at all that he had a sister.