by GJ Minett
Except, of course, it wasn’t quite like that. I came to realise over the next few days that in much the same way that I’d never really thought of Martin Adams as a person, I’d been equally remiss in glossing over the details of his life. Now that I was imbued with this new determination to start again and look at my life afresh, it occurred to me for the first time that there were problems with the chronology of my version of events. I’d been guilty of grouping all the disasters together as if they were one and the same thing whereas in fact there had been significant intervals between them. His boy had been taken from him in November 1966, his wife sometime before that. But it wasn’t until March 1974 that he and Josef had made their separate ways to Inverness. That was an eight-year gap. And eight years is a long time. What had he been doing during that period?
I knew from O’Halloran that he’d moved away and started a new life under a different identity. So where had he been living during those missing years? It was safe to assume his new identity had held up, or it would have been headline news otherwise. How hard had he found it? I wondered. What was it like, living in constant fear that, at any moment, someone might recognise him and bring all he’d been building crashing down around his ears? Again, I was struck by the similarities with the way my own life had unfolded. Had he found an Oakham of his own, a Primrose Cottage where he could put down roots and dare to dream of a future which didn’t involve looking over his shoulder every few seconds? Had he made new friends? More than that, perhaps?
I gave this some thought, tried to picture him in the courtroom day after day, a sad, lonely figure, head bowed as if seeking to avoid the glares of others. He would have been in his mid-thirties. That was no age at all and eight years would easily be long enough for him to meet a lot of people and form all manner of attachments. For a while I tormented myself with mental pictures of a devoted wife and children, saying goodbye to their father for the weekend, unaware that they would never see him again. My own life seemed like a patchwork quilt of stories just like this, families snatched from cosy domesticity and plunged into a nightmare for which nothing had prepared them and from which there was no escape. I wouldn’t allow myself to imagine he could disappear without leaving an indelible mark on someone.
The more I tried to dismiss these notions, the more they came back like small brush fires in a forest. Eventually I came to the conclusion there was only one way I was going to be able to put them out. I had to find out as much as possible about what he’d been doing in those missing years.
Arriving at this decision was one thing, knowing how to go about it was another matter entirely. I had a date – March 5th, 1974. I had a location of sorts; it might not have been in Inverness itself but it seemed reasonable to suppose it wouldn’t have been far from the B&B that Josef had booked. But when it came to a name, I had nothing. I was fairly sure O’Halloran would know, but I was not about to ask him.
I turned instead to Derek Wilmot. His father, Hugh, was our family solicitor for years and had shepherded me through the legal minefield when Josef died. Derek joined the firm many more years ago than I care to remember and took over when his father retired. You will have met him by now, of course, and will know he can be a little particular, prissy even, but he is level-headed and resourceful and if integrity is not his middle name, it should be. If anyone was likely to be able to help, it was he.
He was a little dubious about the cloak-and-dagger nature of it all but otherwise offered no opinion on the matter, other than to say he knew of someone who might be able to help. He gave me the name of a local agency, one with something of a reputation for dealing with sensitive investigations. He knew the owner personally and had made occasional use of his services in the past. I emphasised strongly that this had to be handled with the greatest discretion. No one must know about my involvement. I wanted everything to be done through AWL and did not wish to meet in person with any of the investigators. I might have aged considerably in thirty years and certainly no one in the village had recognised me, but I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. There must be no chance of my identity being revealed. Derek assured me he understood what was at stake here and asked me to leave it with him.
He rang the following day to say that everything was in place, if I was happy to proceed. The owner of the agency, Stuart Mahon, had been apprised of the sensitive nature of the investigation and was happy to report to me only via the offices of AWL. In order to keep this on a need-to-know basis he would conduct the investigation himself and keep all paperwork, other than the final report, as non-specific as possible. He would be free to start the following week.
Derek warned me, as a matter of course, that this might be expensive and that I should prepare myself for the possibility that, with so little information to work with, the investigation might come to nothing. I was unconcerned about the money but spent an anxious few weeks, worrying about what I could possibly do next if this proved to be a dead end.
I have to say though that Mr Mahon more than lived up to his reputation. If you ever wish to read the final report in its entirety, you will need to visit AWL. The only copy is locked away in the safe and I have left instructions that it should stay there unless you arrive in person to take possession of it. When you have read it, you’ll find it easier to understand my caution. For now you’ll have to make do with my own summary of its contents. If nothing else, it should make clear the reasons for my decision.
Mr Mahon, it seems, realised from a very early stage that he would need to visit Inverness in person. He had been hoping that his preliminary checks might do much of the leg work for him but was puzzled to discover that his usual sources were unable to confirm any record of a hit-and-run in the Inverness area for the given date, even when he extended the period to one week either side. Several accidents were reported in the local newspapers due to unusually hazardous road conditions but he was unable to find a single instance of a fatality or of a driver leaving the scene of an accident.
In Inverness he gained the strong impression that he was being given what he described as ‘the runaround’. The local police seemed unimpressed that he was wasting their time with questions about an incident of which there appeared to be no official record. Far from wanting to help him, they seemed suspicious about his reasons for showing an interest in the first place. He had more or less resigned himself to the need to look elsewhere when a sympathetic officer suggested in private that he might like to speak with a former colleague named George Appleby, who had retired from the force some time ago. He was now working as a security consultant for a company in Dingwall and a visit to his home proved to be the turning point.
Appleby showed none of the reticence of his former colleagues and wasn’t remotely surprised when March 5th, 1974 was specified. He knew exactly which incident was being referred to and was surprised it had taken so long for someone to ask him about it. In these days of freedom of information, he’d been expecting something to surface long before now.
He claimed he and his partner had been first on the scene that evening, responding to a hit-and-run report. He remembered the weather and road conditions were atrocious and by the time they arrived at the village, most potential witnesses had already drifted away. The only person claiming to have seen what happened was able to offer no more than a vague description of the car that had driven off and had not managed to get the vehicle registration. As for the victim, it was obvious at first glance that his neck had been broken by the impact.
There was no wallet or documentation to establish his identity but they found keys in his pocket, attached to a fob with the initials IB, and eventually matched them to an old VW van in the car park. Appleby radioed the details through and as far as he was concerned, the whole business was over and done with.
The following day he was told there had been some confusion over the identity of the victim. Although the van was registered to an Ian Blair of Skegness in Lincolnshire, it had been loaned to a friend, a Peter Vaughan
, who lived in a village a few miles away. Appleby couldn’t recall the name but was sure he would recognise it if he heard it.
Then, two days later, Appleby and his partner were called in to speak with what he referred to as a ‘suit’, who was brief and to the point. The incident to which he and his partner had responded was not in fact a hit-and-run but a simple accident. No criticism would go on their record – Appleby and his partner had done a professional job and come to the only conclusion possible, given the evidence they had before them. Since then however, new evidence had come to light and the case was now closed. He and his partner were asked to get together their official reports and any other documents relating to the incident and hand them to the DCS in person. He was reminded that the entire interview was classified and was then dismissed.
Appleby was far from comfortable about what had just happened but his partner, who had been around a fair while longer and understood how these things worked, told him to forget it. He had no time for the ‘suits’ but wasn’t about to hand anyone a stick with which they might beat him. If they wanted him to believe black was white, that was fine by him.
Appleby might have been able to live with this, were it not for the fact that a few days later he was called in yet again. A close acquaintance of the deceased was asking to visit the scene of the accident and leave a bouquet of flowers there. Appleby was charged with driving her out to Lachlie and then making sure she was on the next train home. He picked her up on his way through Reception and drove her out to where the incident had occurred. She placed the flowers near the entrance to the car park, then bowed her head in prayer while he stood around awkwardly, wondering whether or not he should join in. Then she thanked him quietly and they returned to the car.
She said nothing during the drive back to the station until they drew up in the forecourt. As she got out of the car, she paused and asked him if he would clarify something for her. When she was first notified, the police were talking about a hit-and-run. Now it seemed the incident was being treated as nothing more sinister than a straightforward accident, and whenever she pressed for an explanation as to why, she found it difficult to get a straight answer. She asked him to swear, hand on heart, that there was nothing untoward about all this. He looked her straight in the eye and lied, and she burst into tears, thanking him for his kindness. As he drove off, he tried not to think of her on her long, lonely journey back home. She had travelled all that way to pay her respects and ask a simple question and he hadn’t been able to summon up the decency to answer it honestly. He claimed his disenchantment with the job started right there – he’d never felt so bad about himself in all his life.
When Mr Mahon asked again about the name of the village near Skegness, Appleby fetched a road atlas and came across what he thought might be the name. He couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure but Ashbury sounded familiar. The woman’s name though . . . he was quite clear about that. The surname might be lost in the mists of time but her Christian name, he said, was definitely the same as his wife’s. It was Barbara.
February 2008: Ellen
Kate was a gist reader – always had been. She supposed she was no different in this respect from any other small-business owner. Years of dealing with legal documents did that to you. You learnt to skim the surface, scanning for those few key words which might persuade otherwise interminable sentences and sprawling paragraphs to give up their meaning. It was that or go under – death by a thousand sub-clauses.
With Eudora’s documents she was paying much more attention to detail, fascinated by where the narrative might take her, and yet she still found herself finishing each sheet a good twenty seconds ahead of Ellen, who seemed to want to turn every shirt collar of a sentence inside out, looking for labels. Usually Kate was happy to wait patiently while her friend made her laborious way towards the foot of the page but this time, when she reached Barbara’s name, she sat back and made great show of rubbing her aching neck muscles. She wanted to be in a position to gauge Ellen’s reaction when she saw the name.
She’d expected Barbara to figure in this somewhere. Her lifelong obsession with keeping her past from Ellen suggested a guilty secret or two and Kate had started reading in the firm expectation that these papers would fill in a few blanks. But she hadn’t expected anything like this. Even after all this time, just the mention of John Michael Adams automatically catapulted things into another realm altogether. She was aware of all manner of implications, buzzing away in her subconscious, demanding to be heard, but there was no time to listen to them just yet. Taking stock could come later. For now she wanted to press on.
She watched closely as Ellen ran her finger along the bottom line of the sheet. There was a pause when she reached the name. A brief pause. There might even have been a slight shake of the head as she licked her finger and transferred the sheet to the bottom of the pile. Otherwise there was nothing to suggest her life had just changed for ever.
Not a thing.
August 2007: Ellen 2
When he reached Ashbury, Mr Mahon spoke with a number of people who still remembered Peter Vaughan. He’d appeared one day out of nowhere and was taken on at the New Inn, initially for a trial period, to look after the grounds and general maintenance. Before long he’d made himself indispensable to the Sutherlands and earned the respect and trust of the village as a whole. If he was a little on the quiet side and not at all inclined to talk about his life before he arrived in Ashbury, then good luck to him. A man’s private life was his own business. Deeds counted far more than words anyway and he was clearly of the old school, a man who appreciated the value of a job of work and wasn’t afraid to roll up his shirtsleeves. Old man Sutherland, who didn’t offer praise lightly, thought highly of him . . . and more than one villager suspected his daughter Barbara felt the same way.
His death certainly hit her harder than most. She had never been the most outgoing of people, but in those first few weeks after Vaughan’s accident the barriers went up with a vengeance. She shut herself away, rarely venturing out of the inn and keeping well clear of the bar during the evenings, as if determined to avoid all expressions of sympathy. Then, two or three months later, she left the village without a word to anyone. There was talk of a disagreement with her father, a lot of silly rumours such as you always get in such cases, but nothing was ever substantiated. Bob Sutherland stubbornly refused to talk about it, other than to say that she’d taken a job in London and wouldn’t be back. It was a private matter and respected as such.
She did in fact return just once . . . for his funeral eighteen months later. She accepted condolences and exchanged pleasantries as if she’d merely been away for a short holiday rather than cutting herself adrift but she was quick to slip back into her shell the moment any conversation edged its way towards the life she was now leading. She spent the afternoon on the arm of her uncle, who was remembered in the village as a scrawny young thing with holes in his socks before he went off and made a name for himself. He’d brought her there in his expensive-looking car in which, according to one of the villagers, a child’s rattle happened to be lying on the floor, just in front of the rear seat. Everyone knew young Sam and his wife had no children of their own so it made a few tongues wag.
Different villagers commented on different things. Some had picked up on the occasional glance between Barbara and Peter when they worked together behind the bar – nothing significant but just enough to put the sensors on alert. Others commented on her response to the news of his death, so much more extreme than anyone expected, and her insistence on setting off for Scotland to bring his body home. Everyone was intrigued by the unexplained disagreement with her father and her sudden disappearance. But above all else, there was the mysterious bouquet of lilies that was delivered to Peter Vaughan’s grave every year on the anniversary of his death, an anonymous tribute from someone who, if nothing else, clearly did not want him to be forgotten. For many in the village, it told a story.
Mr M
ahon followed up the bouquet lead and traced the direct debit back to an Interflora account in Chichester. His search for Barbara’s uncle, Sam Balfour, led to the same area. From there it was relatively easy for him to discover that Barbara had been working at the holiday park which Sam and his wife had set up on the outskirts of a village called Ryhill.
And that she had a daughter named Ellen, who was born on the 22nd of September 1974, some four or five months after Barbara disappeared from Ashbury.
When Derek forwarded the report to me, I knew immediately what I wanted to do. I’d failed Josef in so many ways as a wife – now I was being given one final chance to do the right thing as his widow. This woman – your mother – had lost the only man she really loved, not just lost him but had him ripped from her in the cruellest way imaginable. Then she’d travelled all the way to Scotland in search of answers, only to be denied them. She must have feared, when Appleby lied to her, that the truth was never going to come out and that she’d never know what really happened in Inverness that evening. Now I understood why God had seen fit to spare me for a short while longer. I would see her, explain everything and in so doing go some way towards wiping out the only debt that Josef ran up in his time on this earth. It all seemed so clear.
I decided to phone your mother, using the contact details Mr Mahon had provided. I might have realised, had I just taken the time to think it through properly, what a shock it would be for her. She certainly sounded very apprehensive, especially when I explained it was to do with Peter Vaughan. Heaven only knows what thoughts must have been going through her mind at that instant. Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising she hung up on me.
The following day I phoned the local coach company and booked a weekend return to Chichester, telling myself that if nothing else were to come of it, at least I could have a few days by the sea. When I pulled into the bus station, I took a taxi first of all to the address I’d been given for her. There was no reply but a neighbour suggested I try Langmere Grove. Apparently, although she’d supposedly retired the previous year, she still worked part-time plus occasional weekends if they needed extra staff. When I finally tracked her down there, she seemed alarmed at first but agreed to talk with me. I don’t know which was the more significant factor in her decision – the fact that I had travelled all that way or her fears that there might be some sort of scene. Whatever the case, we had a cup of tea and a slice of cake in the cafeteria next to the swimming pool and I spent the next half-hour explaining everything I knew about the death of Peter Vaughan, including both his real identity and the tragedy that bound us together.