‘Great stuff,’ I said. ‘When you started out on this I thought it was going to be pretty difficult, but so far it’s been fairly easy.’
‘So far,’ she said. ‘But it’s only two out of six. I haven’t any more info on the other four, so the hard bit may be ahead.’
It was long dark when we arrived home. I was picking up our bags after paying off the cab when the recollection of our homecoming from Somerset returned with a jolt. I carried the luggage inside and left Sheila in the sitting-room while I surveyed the ground floor. Nothing seemed out of place and a quick look out of the kitchen door revealed no more nasty surprises. Nevertheless, I was still uneasy.
While Sheila brewed coffee, I slipped out into the garden and sneaked round the edges, peering into the shadows. Finding nothing, I went out by the rear gate into the lane behind and came back along the dark walled alley that runs along one side of my premises. That place is as black as a coal-cellar at midnight and I walked through it pumping so much adrenalin that I was fully sober before I emerged.
When I came out I startled an old man whose dog was peeing against the lamp-post outside my gate. He jumped at my appearance and dragged his still-leaking dog away. I called ‘Goodnight’ but all I got was an unintelligible mutter from under his thick white moustache. I guessed that my paranoia had become infectious at a distance. But it’s not paranoia when they really are after you, is it?
Chapter 8
A long weekend usually means a long day’s catching-up at the office afterwards, and Monday was just that. When I’d finally lowered the in-tray to a respectable level and was just about to leave, the phone rang. I was tempted to leave it and let the answering machine tell whoever it was that the office was closed and emergency calls could be made to whichever of my staff was on duty that night. I knew it wasn’t me.
Conscience won. I have this feeling that if I’d been arrested and locked up (and I have been) I wouldn’t like my loved ones listening to answering machines when they went looking for assistance, so I picked it up.
As it happened it was John Parry Thought I’d catch you there,’ he said. ‘Why do you sit at your desk on a summer evening when you’ve got a beautiful Australian girl waiting for you at home?’
Partly because I have to make a living and partly because I know that she isn’t waiting for me — she’s sitting in front of her computer playing Waltzing Matilda round the Internet.’
‘Well, just remember that I warned you not to let her be alone, boyo.’
‘Is this just our friendly neighbourhood Voice of Doom calling, or was there a reason?’
‘Not much of a reason, but I thought you ought to know.’
‘To know what?’
That I had Somerset and Avon check out Norman Wainwright. I checked his car registration and gave it to them, saying we’d got a hit and run in the Midlands and that might be the car. Asked them to find out where he was on that Sunday evening.’
‘And where was he?’
‘In the arms of the Lord, boyo.’
‘You mean he’s snuffed it?’
‘No, no. Merely that he was in Bristol, at a Spiritualist meeting, that’s all. Got a whole load of respectable old biddies of both sexes to vouch for him. So he’s not your cat-killer.’
‘Never struck me as the spiritual type — but then one of his ancestors named his four sons Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and wrote lies in the front of the family Bible to cover up a bastard child. That’s your religious types for you.’
‘Have a care, bach. You’re talking to a son of the chapel. Any more of that and I’ll come round and sing Cwm Rhondda under your windows all night.’
I thanked John for his efforts and told him that we’d had no further manifestations.
On the way home I thought about chubby Norman at a Spiritualist meeting. Then it dawned on me — the greedy little berk was probably trying to drag old Matthew back from the grave to tell him where the family loot was. At least it put me in a good mood.
I was right about Sheila, though she did break off when I arrived and offer to cook dinner. Over the meal I told her about chubby Norman and his unearthly pursuits.
‘So it wasn’t him?’ she said.
‘John seems to think not.’
‘Well, who the blazes was it? The Wainwrights were the only family we’d been in touch with.’
‘If we’re right,’ I said, ‘and this really began with the Briefcase Incident, then that happened before you’d even started tracking the families. You’d only just got the birth certificates.’
‘You mean it could be anyone connected with any of the six families. But that’s God knows how many people!’
‘It’s worse than that, isn’t it? It could be someone who isn’t obviously connected with any of the families.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Like the Bartons. You’ve only found out about them by accident, more or less, but suppose one of the Bartons knows of the Sutton/Wainwright connection and wants to keep something hidden?’
‘This is crazy!’ she said. ‘I’m researching people who must have been dead for most of the twentieth century. What the blazes can I unearth that might bother somebody nowadays? I mean, look at Smythe — he thinks it’s a great joke having an ancestor who was nearly hanged and got transported for life instead.’
‘Not everybody has Smythe’s robust sense of humour, Sheila. And it probably isn’t about the convicts themselves — it’s probably about something between then and now.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Suicide, insanity, disgrace, scandal, bad blood, illegitimacy, murder, perversion — there are all sorts of things that people don’t like to be known about their families. Some people will get upset if a branch of the family has married beneath their social level. Everybody’s got skeletons in their closet.’
‘Poms!’ she snorted. ‘This whole thing is utterly ridiculous!’
‘And what about the Aussies who tell everyone they’re descended from starving peasants transported for sheepstealing, or brave Irish rebels, when they’re actually descended from rapists and murderers?’
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d never bought that damned penny.’
‘You’re not thinking of giving it up?’
‘No, I’m not!’ she snapped. ‘I am going to finish it and publish it and I don’t care if some sneaking psychopath who hates cats doesn’t like it. I just don’t like having to look over my shoulder all the time.’
The phone rang and she went off to answer it, returning with a thoughtful look on her face.
‘Guess what!’ she said. ‘That was young Smythe.’
‘What? The schoolboy — Simon?’
‘No, his elder brother, Stephen.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Wants to tell us some dark family secret. Says there is something I ought to know that his father didn’t tell me.’
‘And has he told you now?’
‘No, he’s coming up from London tomorrow evening to tell me in person.’
Stephen Smythe arrived early the following evening. He was in his mid-thirties, slighter built than his father (who must have been mortified by his son’s neck-length hair) and casually dressed. He was very nervous.
After trying to relax him with a drink we could only sit and wait for him to open up. He didn’t seem to be about to do so very fast.
‘Mr Smythe,’ said Sheila, after the pause had begun to embarrass everybody, ‘you said there was something that your father hadn’t told us. Was it about old John Smythe who was transported?’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. He’ll have told you all about him. Dad thinks that’s a great joke. He doesn’t mind talking about him. That’s what makes it so bad.’
He paused again, took a gulp of his drink and started afresh.
‘Look, me and my father don’t exactly see eye to eye. He thinks that the Smythe family has some kind of military destiny. To hear him talk
, you’d think we’d been soldiers ever since Agincourt.’
‘We gathered that,’ I said. ‘Three generations which happen to include two World Wars isn’t really much evidence for the proposition.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but he’s fixated on it. Wants Simon to go to Sandhurst and all that. Wanted me to go to Sandhurst, for that matter.’
‘But you didn’t,’ commented Sheila.
‘No, and when I told him what I wanted to do, he threw me out. That was years ago but I still only go home when he’s away.’
I settled lower in my chair. If Smythe had driven a hundred and fifty miles to pour out his heart about his rotten relationship with his father it was going to be a very dull evening.
He pulled a thick brown envelope out of his jacket pocket.
‘Did he tell you about Great-Aunt Alice?’ he asked.
We nodded.
‘Well, of course, she was his great-aunt really, not mine, but when she lived with us we all called her “great-aunt”. She was the youngest child of the Smythe that wasn’t hanged, as father calls him. Well, I was very fond of her when I was a kid. She was the one who always encouraged me to draw and paint and took my side when my father went on at me. If she hadn’t died and left me some money, I wouldn’t have been able to study art.’
He paused again, looked at the envelope in his hands then started anew.
‘A few years before she died, one Sunday, we were all sitting round watching telly It was Remembrance Sunday and the service was required watching in our house. Well, Great-Aunt Alice used to get pretty weepy and nobody took much notice, but that year — I think it was the year after the Falklands War — she got really upset. She said she couldn’t watch any more and she went off to her room.’
Sheila refilled his drink and he drank gratefully.
‘She didn’t come down to lunch and in the afternoon Mum seal me up with a tray for her. When I went to her room she was in bed, but she was awake and it was obvious that she had been crying a lot. Well, I must have been about sixteen, and you know how an adult crying really throws a teenager. I asked her if she was all right and was there anything I could do. She said to sit down, that it was time I knew something. She had these papers on the bed and she showed me.’
He opened the envelope and took out a photograph. It was a standard Great War, postcard-sized portrait of a young man in khaki — a very young man.
‘That’s her brother,’ he said, ‘one of them — Great-Uncle Arthur.’
‘He died in the Great War,’ said Sheila.
‘That’s right. Dad was always telling us about John, the elder brother who’d fought in the Boer War and died in the Great War, and about my great-grandfather, James, who fought in the Great War and died just before I was born, but we never heard much about Arthur. All we knew was that he died in 1916. Well, I’d read the history books and I knew what a mess that war was, so I just thought that he’d gone “Missing Presumed Dead” and no one really knew the details.’
‘And hadn’t he?’ Sheila said. ‘In 1916 there were a lot of places he could have died on the battlefield. Lots of blokes disappeared for ever.’
He shook his head again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He was at a base camp, a place called Etaples.’
‘Where the big mutiny was,’ commented Sheila.
‘You know about the mutiny?’
‘I’m a historian and I’m Australian,’ she said. ‘It was Aussies and Scots that started it, because a military policeman had shot a Scotsman over a girl.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘He was there before the mutiny. He wrote his sister some letters.’ He fumbled in the envelope and pulled out a worn letter, handing it to Sheila. ‘Great-Aunt Alice left them to me. Here’s one.’
She took the document, scanned it and read it aloud:
‘“Dear Sis, Thank you for your parcel. The food was very welcome I can tell you. The food here is awful. They get us up at five in the morning and drill us and we don’t get anything to eat till seven. They we get one biscuit like a dog-biscuit. They call them double baked but they’re so hard they must have been baked more than twice. We drill all day whatever the weather in a place called the bullring. When it is sunny it is like a desert and when it rains the sand is like a swamp and you can’t march or drill properly. The drill instructors are absolute beasts, I can’t tell you the things they do to people who make mistakes. We hate them because most of them have never been up the line and been shot at and all they do is shout at us and carry on all day. We cannot get any food except what we can buy at dinner time. There’s a canteen run by some society ladies who sell tea and buns but apart from that we have to wait till evening. I can’t wait to get out of here and go back up the line, but they won’t let me go because they say I’m too young. I wasn’t too young to join when I was fourteen but now there’s been a fuss about underage boys in the trenches so we’re all at Etaples until we’re old enough to be sent back. I’ve been wounded twice but that was nothing compared to here. There’s other things here that really make me sick. I can’t wait to get home and see you all again. Your loving brother, Arthur. PS We call this place Eat Apples and my friend Jimmy says that’s because you would eat horse apples here.”’
She frowned slightly. ‘What are “horse apples”?’ she asked.
‘Horse manure,’ I said. ‘He certainly didn’t pass that through the military censors.’
Sheila folded the letter and handed it back. ‘Was he in the mutiny?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘He got home on leave after that letter and he told his sister all about it, about the beatings by the drill instructors and everything. He told her that he was going crazy because they’d selected him as a marksman to be part of a squad that executed people — shot them to death. He said it was driving him mad. She said he cried like a baby when he told her.’
‘And what happened?’ I asked, though I thought I knew the answer.
He took another paper out of the envelope and handed it to Sheila.
‘He never went back from his leave,’ he said. ‘He deserted.’
Sheila read the second paper:
‘“Number 863423 Smythe A. W. Private, First Battalion Wiltshire Light Infantry. On 24th June 1916 Private Smythe was granted seven days’ leave from Etaples to return to England. After twenty-eight days he did not return to his unit and was accordingly posted as a deserter. Notification was sent to the military police and, by instruction of the Army Provost Marshal, officers called at his home but found him absent. Enquiries in the vicinity led to his arrest and interrogation, after which he was returned to his regiment at Etaples and detained in custody. On 6th August 1916 he was tried by court martial, found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad. Sentence was duly carried out on the morning of August 13th.”’
Smythe was staring at the wall and his eyes were wet. ‘That’s what happened to Great-Uncle Arthur in the Great War,’ he said bitterly, ‘and poor old Alice wept for him all her life.’
‘There was a war on,’ I said quietly. ‘Tough things get done in wartime.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and he’d done some of them, hadn’t he. He’d volunteered under age. He’d been in the trenches, he’d stopped two bullets, and never complained. Then they left him at Etaples, bullied him and harassed him and turned him into an executioner, shooting his own mates at sixteen.’
He poured himself a long drink and swallowed it at a gulp. ‘That’s why there’s no pictures of Arthur on Father’s study wall. He can joke about old John who was nearly hanged, but he can’t forgive a teenager who broke under the strain and was shot like an animal for it.’
‘You want me to write about this?’ asked Sheila.
‘It’s up to you,’ he said. ‘You can write about it or not. I just thought you ought to know about it. My sister rang to say that you’d been at Greyhanger. She was pretty fed up with the way Dad had gone on at you and she thought you were reasonable people. So I decided to tell you,’
He was calmer now that he’d said it all, maybe for the first time he’d ever mentioned it outside the family
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘how strong is your father’s devotion to his idea of a military dynasty of Smythes?’
‘Absolute,’ he said, promptly. ‘He wants Smythes in the history books. That’s why he was so co-operative with you and why he won’t have a word whispered about poor Arthur.’
I told him about the threats against Sheila. He shook his head slowly.
‘I suppose he might do that,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t seem like his sort of thing. He’s always talking about action, always blathering on about suing the neighbours, or pulling their fences down or selling their ponies for wandering on our land, but he never actually does anything. He just freezes them in public. I can’t really see him coming up here and killing your cat, although he doesn’t like them. No, that’s not his style at all. If he went after you, I’d have thought it would be merely a letter to The Times. Unless he’s barmier than I thought, in which case I’d have thought he’d try something military, like a bomb.’
With which we had to be satisfied, but of course we weren’t.
After Smythe had gone, Sheila asked, ‘Do you really think it might be Smythe?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We have to take account of his son’s views, but he may not be the best person to make a dispassionate analysis.’
‘Well, you did warn me about crazies who’d been trained to kill with a spoon. I suppose I’d just better keep clear of teacups and boiled eggs.’
Chapter 9
The ‘fan mail’ kept coming, along with occasional telephone calls from newspapers who had picked up the story of Sheila’s search from other papers. Occasional radio phone-in spots produced long lists of phone numbers to be checked out on the slender chance that the caller really did have some connection with the six convicts. Some of the mail was bizarre and some of it obscene after photographs of Sheila appeared in a couple of magazines. After the office mail-bag full of real problems every day, it was light relief to help Sheila sort her post in the evenings.
Bad Penny Blues Page 5