The high street was picture box pretty with thatched cottages, and large Georgian houses. Most people would die for life in such a tranquil idyll, but Marsha shuddered as we walked up the high street, and opened the gate to Wisteria Cottage, where Aunt Sally lived.
A massive wisteria plant, covered the wattle and daub frontage, and looked like it had been growing there for two centuries. A couple of very late lilac petals clung on, as did the faint trace of their sweet aroma.
We knocked at an iron knocker and waited.
“It’s like being buried alive,” Marsha whispered “All grass and rabbits.”
“Hardly,” all Marsha knew of nature was you were never more than 20 feet away from a rat in London, and 4,000 of the vermin were born every hour in the city.
The heavy oak door creaked slightly as it was opened by two faces, as alike each other as peas in a pod.
“I’m Sally,” said a pretty, smiling woman, who could have been anything between 60 and 80 years old.
“And I’m Septimus, though everyone calls me Timmy,” her companion added.
“And one of you is Julia,” Sally addressed us jointly.
“I’m Julia,” I put out my hand first to Sally and then to Timmy, “And this is Marsha.”
“Won’t you come in,” Sally and Timmy said, with one voice.
We were shown into a pretty sitting room, warmed by a log fire.
“Tea?” Sally and Timmy offered again with one voice, which reminded me of the old nursery rhyme of Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Marsha and I were not left alone on the floral settee for long. Sally reappeared a few minutes later, carrying a tray with tea-pot, china cups, saucers, and milk jug all covered with a wisteria pattern. Timmy was close behind, clutching a plate of the same design, piled high with home-made cakes.
They placed the delicacies on a table in front of the sofa and sat on two armchairs on either side, facing each other across the fire.
“D’you think we look alike?” Sally, asked as she poured the tea.
“We’re twins,” Timmy answered before we could speak.
It turned out they had been widowed fast upon each other, and decided to set up home together. Now, well advanced into their seventies, they rubbed along, more content than many an old married couple. I could see where Jamie’s congenial nature came from. These two happy souls seemed incapable of a cross or black moment.
When it came to Maurice Patterson, we drew blanks. Yes, they could provide an address. His home, Upton Grey House, was barely 50 yards away. More than that, they couldn’t say.
“Most strange,” Sally began. “Haven't seen him for years.”
“Not for years,” Timmy echoed.
“Once a leading light round here. Church warden…”
“Captain of the cricket team…”
“Wife, Edna, stalwart of the WI.”
“Bell-ringer. St Mary’s bells are famous, you know.”
“Then they disappeared, just like that.” Sally clicked her fingers, as if to indicate magic.
“Vanished,” Timmy clicked his.
“Some illness, we all thought. If they need help, they know where we are. We all said.”
“Mental illness, perhaps?” Marsha couldn’t resist the opportunity to capitalise on the mental deficiency of country folk.
“More likely a stroke,” Timmy suggested. “We didn’t like to pry. He worked in the city.”
“All that stress,” Sally added.
“Dead before your time,” Timmy tut-tutted
“Would you like some more tea m’dear?”
Just as Sally lifted the tea pot, the china cups began to tinkle, and I sensed a distant rumble. Next, the ground below my feet began to vibrate.
Timmy leapt to his feet. “Hold on,” he shouted, as he reached to steady a standard lamp and then stretch across to catch china figures slipping from the oak fire surround. Sally threw herself over the tea tray as the whole house began to vibrate, a deafening whirring noise erupting over head.
“Don’t fret. Will soon be gone. It’s the chinook helicopters from Odiham. RAF.” Timmy bellowed above the noise, as he moved to steady pictures that threatened to come crashing down.
“Regular Vietnam,” Sally shouted above the din. “We have complained.”
The whirring subsided as quickly as it erupted. Sally straightened the tea cups and began to pour, as though nothing had happened. Timmy resumed his place opposite her.
“A nice cup of tea,” she said, handing me the pretty china. “Then, perhaps you would like to see the garden before you go?”
I didn’t look at Marsha; couldn’t face a rolling of her eyes.
“Do you know this area?” Timmy asked, as I handed him back my empty cup.
“Indeed I do, I grew up in Winchester.”
“Marvellous. And you, Marsha? Where are your family?”
“Bethnal Green.”
“Marvellous,” Timmy repeated, without a flicker of the eye.
I think Marsh liked that, because she followed me into the garden and joined in as I oohed and ahhhed over the winter pansies, the robin playing on the patio and the stark leafless silver birch swaying in the breeze. They waved us off down the road, with a farewell message to “come again any time”.
I suggested, in her own vernacular, that she “shut it” when Marsha opened her mouth to comment on the encounter. But she couldn’t resist a wry aside, as we walked towards Upton Grey House.
“Ain’t it peaceful in the country.” I ignored her.
Upton Grey House was one of the most prestigious properties in this upmarket village. Not a majestic manor house, more the Bennetts than D’arcy. But a modern manor by any measure.
We crunched noisily up the gravel horse-shoe drive.
“Look,” Marsha nudged me, pointing to a young boy peeing in a small lake out front. “Vulgar, ain’t it?”
“It’s called art.” Everywhere looked deserted, just as we had been warned it would. Our feet clattered as we leapt up the stone steps onto the porch and rang the bell.
The door was opened, by a scruffy middle-aged figure.
“Mrs Patterson?” I began.
“Who wants her?”
“Not Mrs Patterson?”
“Correct. The lord spared me there. Hilda Harris.”
Marsha and I exchanged glances.
“In fact, it’s not Mrs Patterson we have come to see at all. Is Mr Patterson home?” I began again.
“Is he ever home?” she replied, quizzically.
Marsha sighed. “Listen, dearie. Could we stop chewing the bone, and get to the point?” She had spotted a fellow cockney abroad. “Is he home now?”
“And if he was?”
“Could we see him?” adding as afterthought, “please.”
“He ain’t fit for visitors, mostly,” she eyed us suspiciously. I was wondering how to reassure her enough to get us past the door step, when Marsha took my breath away with a blatant lie.
“We’re old friends,” she said.
“Then, you’ll know all about it? His sickness, like…”
“Corse,” I was beginning to think Marsha had chosen the wrong profession in social work.
“Well...don’t suppose there’s any harm. He’s a poor lonely soul that’s for sure.”
She waved us into a dingy hall. Cracked paint and dirty, frayed carpet transformed what should have been a colour-supplement home into a sad mausoleum.
“Can’t keep on top of it, any more, meself.”
There was something touching about Hilda Harris’s embarrassed apology. “Her ladyship don’t visit often. Spends her time between her daughter in Sonning and their villa in Catalonia. Won’t spend the money on this.”
“But she’s well,” I kept up the pretence of family acquaintance, while cursing Marsha for blowing any story we might pick up by breaching the privacy, not to say entrapment laws.
“I should say. That’s why she can’t stand it here. He’s through in his st
udy.”
I don’t know what I had expected but it wasn’t this. Study she had called it; it was the size of a large drawing room. Two walls were covered with countless newspaper cuttings, flapping in a cool breeze from an open window. The stories were years out of date. The other side was plastered with equations. Pages and pages of elaborate sums. The deranged work of a disturbed mind. Everything in the room was shabby and worn, and covered with thick layers of dust. The floor was carpeted in waste paper.
“Mr Patterson? You’ve got visitors,” Hilda Harris announced us.
A tall thin man, wearing a dark pin-stripe suit and red bow tie, looked up from his desk. He didn’t show any signs of a stroke. Indeed, he seemed the picture of health. He was not even very old. He broke into a warm smile when he saw us.
“Mr Patterson, we met when you were President at the professional body,” I greet him, hand out-stretched. It was an easy lie. Journalists all look the same to the public.
“Splendid, splendid, jolly good show,” he replied, but his gaze kept drifting from us and onto the wall dripping with equations. They looked like advanced actuarial formulae, but they meant nothing to me.
sjRx=∑″{(vj) x+u+½• S x+u∑ t(1+j)x+1+½
Or
P[t]= ∑ (-1)r (t r+ r)S1+rO
Or
ux=uo+x(1) ∆uo+x2∆2u-1+(x+1)(3) ∆3 u-1+(x+1) (4) ∆4u-2+….
Other examples, followed similar patterns, but letters were replaced by numbers. I looked at Marsha, whose deadpan stare said it all.
“I’m a journalist,” I tried again. “I write about financial affairs and always admired your writings.” A daddy-longlegs flew into my face. I brushed it away, as a shiver went down my spine.
“Writings, yes, my writings,” he shook my hand and stretched to greet Marsha.
“Won’t you sit down,” he pointed to two threat-bare chairs, before turning to his housekeeper. “That will be all Mrs Harris.”
“Terrible dragon,” he confided, when she left the room. “Treats me like an invalid.”
“And you’re not, are you?” I conspired with him.
“Goodness me no. Just very busy.”
“Busy?”
“With the problem.”
“The problem?”
“The calculation, I should say.”
He pointed to the wall covered in scrawled numbers and letters. An swarm of daddy-longlegs bashed against the loose papers. It was that time of year, you couldn’t keep them out.
“All my life with Cameron and I never solved the problem.”
“It was about Cameron I wanted to speak to you.”
“Ask away, my dear. You do have a pretty face. Maybe I do remember you. I remember so little these days.”
“I wanted to ask you about your dealings with the Kelly Brewery.”
If I had expected a reaction, I was disappointed.
“1997 will be the year to solve the problem I do believe. That gives me another 18 months.”
Marsha and I exchanged glances.
“Kelly Brewery Mr Patterson. You advised its pension fund.”
“Not me, m’dear. You are quite mistaken. It’ll be the surplus you are worrying about, I suppose. That enormous cash mountain. All these arguments about who owns the surplus. Quite overlooks the fact that Britain’s pensions are the envy of the world.”
As he spoke, I examined the headlines on the opposite wall. None was dated later than 1995. Many covered pension scheme funding, always talking of the huge treasure chests of riches these funds had accumulated.
“You are sure you never dealt with Kelly’s?” I tried one last time.
“Absolutely. Come back in eighteen months, when I’ve solve the problem. I might be able to help you then.”
He turned back to his desk and we were dismissed. “I’ll get to the bottom of it. If I multiply this by the square root of...”
A solitary daddy-longlegs rested on his hand. He didn’t flinch.
“They always add up in the end,” he muttered. “The numbers. Always add up. Never let you down.”
We watched a few moments more as he scribbled and crossed-out and threw page after page onto the floor. Here was a man chased by demons.
“Envy of the world, our pensions, so proud of my life’s work. So proud. Just one little problem. But I’ll solve it yet.”
Hilda Harris was waiting for us on the other side of the door.
“Terrible,” Marsha said as we closed the door on Patterson.
Hilda Harris nodded. “He’s stuck in time, pour soul. Tragedy really. Brilliant brain, got overcooked somewhere. His clock stopped ticking years ago.”
“Like he’s scared to face the years after... what 1995?” I said, mostly to myself.
“Who knows, luv? He don’t that’s for sure.”
“Poor old sod, eh?” Marsha said, when we got back to the car. She was a sucker for anyone down on their luck.
She repeated the phrase later to Omar, when we met up for an early drink in the Axe & Cleaver.
“Poor old sod eh? One of my uncles suffered from premature Alzheimer’s. Didn’t know who he was most of the time, after he reached 40. Terrible to go nuts at a very young age. All that money too.”
“Poor old sod nothing.” I remained to be convinced.
“Are you suggesting he deserved to be struck down by psychotic illness?” Omar sounded mildly surprised
“No, no, not exactly.”
“Blimey Omar. It weren’t half creepy. Nothing later than 1995. All those newspaper clippings.”
“Like he’s imprisoned in a lost world,” Omar said thoughtfully.
“All rather convenient, don’t you think?” I looked challengingly from Marsha to Omar
“You think it’s an act?” Omar asked.
“No, no not exactly,” I repeated. “But it is very convenient.”
At that moment, my mobile phone rang. It was the police. A Detective Chief Inspector Pitcher, wanted to interview me at my office the following morning.
“What for?” Marsha asked, reaching for her glass.
“They said I was one of the last people to see Ken alive.”
Marsha gave a ghoulish laugh. “Find the last person to see the body and you find the killer.”
“It’s not funny Marsha,” I snapped.
“What killer?” Omar raised his voice in exasperation. “Who is saying anything about...” he stopped himself, shaking his head bewildered. “Anyway, it was ages before.”
“What will you say to the old bill, doll.”
“What can I say? As far as investigations go, this one hasn’t got off the ground.”
Omar shook his head in disagreement. “No. There’s quite a lot we do know. We know the Kelly Brewery pension scheme collapsed owing pensions worth….” he hesitated.
“£1 billion to £2 billion, most likely,” I supplied
“It’s the Strachan’s deaths, not the money that’s needling the old bill, ain’t it?” Marsha interrupted.
“I guess. Ken could never get them to buy the fraud/theft/conspiracy theory.”
“Any luck with the independent trustee?” Omar asked.
“No, I keep trying. I think he’s avoiding me.”
“Well, try again now,” Marsha picked my phone up off the table. “They should still be there.”
It was not yet six so I dialled the number.
“I am so sorry. You've just missed him. He's off for a week's holiday. Shall I tell him you called, when he gets back?”
“You have to be joking.” I exploded at the voice down the other end of the line. “I've been trying to get hold of him for days. Couldn't he have had the courtesy to at least...”
“I have explained to you, before Mr Ross is a very busy ...”
I didn't wait to hear more, but clicked the line dead.
“He's left the country,” I grimaced at my companions.
“Great,” said Marsha.
“Great? A vital sources has left the country, the cr
ucial lawyer is one of the family, a key actuarial adviser is missing and the other’s gone mad.”
“It’s not looking good, doll.”
“Bit of an understatement that.”
“What about the diary.” Omar changed tack.
I shook my head.
“What there's nothing in it?”
“I don’t know,” I flared.
“Are you going to tell the police about the diary?” Marsha asked.
Omar put up his hand.
“Not in my presence please.”
“Well, let’s pretend you ain’t here. Well dolly?”
I pulled the book out of my bag. I don’t know why, but I carried it everywhere for safe-keeping.
“I don't know… I mean, Ken seems to have gone to great lengths to leave me this diary. Why go to all that trouble unless …”
“Withholding information from the police….”
“Is a criminal offence, I know Marsha,” I paused. “But that’s rich coming from you. Omar, you should have seen her today. She broke both the privacy and entrapment laws.”
“She. don’t you mean... we. Anyway, what’s entrapment laws?”
“It’s when you pretend to be someone you’re not, to trap them into saying things they otherwise wouldn’t. You can go to jail for it.”
“I really don't want to hear this,” Omar put both his hands over his ears. Then he removed them and stood, picking up the purple book.
“I don't think it should be on your person or premises when the police interview you. Dreadfully short of something to read right now. Do you mind?” He winked and left Marsha and me to finish our drinks.
Chapter 12
6.30am Tuesday, October 16,
Southwark
Omar rang at 6.30 the following morning. I was awake, had been since 3.15am. I’d stopped sleeping through the night a while back.
“I’m in court all day today, but I read the diary last night. I think we need to talk,” I could hear him slurping coffee at the other end.
“Did you spot anything?”
“No, you’re right. Only this R business,” he paused, crunching into a slice of toast. “It’s the only trail you have. How are you fixed?”
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