Nothing left to lose
Page 20
We spent most of the day trying to find some sort of provable link between Sinclair senior and Miller, but with no success, it was difficult to even decide on a way that we could prove it. There would be no DNA or fingerprint reference samples for Miller and Sinclair to compare, even if they existed, we did not have the knowledge or skills to be able to interpret the evidence to prove our theory.
There was no real way to proceed further, without evidence. The more I thought about it, the more I questioned my conclusions. I was a historian; I should be basing my theories on evidence not conjecture in the absence of evidence. Was I jumping to unproven and unprovable conclusions?
My reverie was disturbed by the phone Lisa answered, it was Jack.
‘Jack has shown our article to his features editor, he’s so impressed, that he’s changed the paper for this Sunday to include it. Jack says we are deeply unpopular with the guys who thought they had the paper largely ready for print. The journos whose work was bumped to make space for us are also very unimpressed. The editor wants the second instalment as soon as possible; he doesn’t want to have such an impromptu state of affairs next week.’
‘That’s great. When can we expect the cheque? We could do with it, we’ve spent a fair amount in the pursuit of this story and I’d like to pay some back into the bank, before I start getting letters from my bank manager.’
‘Not until after the second instalment I’m afraid.’
‘Oh well, at least it’ll piss Jane off and gain me some petty revenge.’
I decided to give up going round in circles on the Miller/Sinclair issue and decided to clear my mind. I rang Graham Price, who was now on holiday.
‘Hi Graham, Look, I’m sorry to be asking favours again, but I’ve been doing some research that seems to have had some unfortunate repercussions. I think we could be getting into hot water here and I’d like you to be my insurance policy. I don’t want to drag you into this, but I can’t think of anyone else and as long as we keep it secret there’s no threat to you.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it Ian. What precisely do you want me to do?’
‘I just want you to hold a copy of what we’ve found, as a sort of insurance. I’m going to email you the story and our conclusions, if you would read it and check my conclusions, then just hold on to it until I tell you otherwise.’
‘Okay Ian, I must admit you’ve piqued my curiosity, I’d like to read your research. Send it now and I’ll read it through. If I think you’ve missed anything or made too much of it, I’ll let you know.’
‘Thanks Graham, I’ll send it now.’
‘How’re things going with Jane?’ I told him the unexpurgated version of my messy break-up.’
‘That’s rough Ian, drop in and we’ll have a few pints and see what we can do to cheer you up. The wife has some tasty friends who might be of interest to you; you know help you move on.’
‘Thanks Graham, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. I’ll get back to you.’
‘Okay mate, see you soon.’
I emailed Graham our story, played down our speculation about the Miller-Sinclair link. I wasn’t ready to share too much of that with anyone but Lisa just yet. Within an hour Graham had phoned me back.
‘Hi mate,’ he said, ‘I’ve read through the stuff you’ve sent me and I must admit I think your conclusions are perfectly valid, but there’s one thing I think you’ve missed, not being a linguist.’ He went on to tell me what he had found. Lisa raised an eyebrow as I hung up and looked puzzled when I broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter.
‘The cheeky bastard, I can’t believe the nerve of the man.’ I gasped.
‘What? What did Pricey have to say?’ I was breathless with laughter, almost unable to speak.
‘He told me what the word chabot means, as in Chabot UK Investments...’ I paused for effect.
‘Go on, stop teasing me.’
‘According to Graham Price, chabot is the French for a type of fish.’
‘And?’
‘In English, that fish is known as the Miller’s Thumb!’ We both dissolved into laughter. This was not evidence, but it showed a link between Miller and Sinclair that added to our circumstantial evidence.
‘He really did have the brass neck of the devil. It fits with him translating his name into other languages as he changed identities.’
‘Yep, it really does fit his modus operandi. It’s a pity we don’t have more tangible evidence to support our conclusions.’
Lisa opened the laptop and pulled up the picture of Sinclair Senior she had found the day before.
‘You cheeky bastard.’ She said looking at the picture. ‘I wonder….’ She tailed off and began to peer at the photograph. ‘Does it look to you as if there’s something wrong with his left hand?’ We zoomed in to look at the damaged hand in greater detail. There was certainly something wrong, but the picture pixelated before we could get enough detail to be sure. It certainly seemed that he appeared to be missing a little finger on his left hand, but yet again, there was an element of doubt, we lacked incontrovertible proof.
‘How can we be sure it’s him?’ I asked.
‘I saw a computer program at Uni that aged a photograph of you to show what you would look like when you got old. It was supposed to warn us off our life of excessive drinking and smoking. If we could find a program like that we could age that picture from Spain and compare it to this one.’ I kissed her on the forehead.
‘You are brilliant! If it is a reliable program, it would be a strong piece of evidence in our search.’
We spent an hour looking for the program on the net and eventually found a free but reputable one. We used Amy’s printer/scanner and entered a scanned copy of Miller’s face from the 1937 photograph; Lisa moved the slider to age the photograph by five years and printed the result. Next she aged the photograph by forty years and again printed the result.
I picked up the copies from the printer and compared the five year aged photograph with the face we had identified as Miller in the photograph from Auschwitz. This was the acid test, if it matched, then we could have greater confidence in the forty year aged photograph. It was a match. Hardly daring to breathe, I put the second print on the table, where we could both examine it. Lisa called up the photograph of Sinclair senior for comparison.
‘It’s not an exact match, but it’s close enough for us to say that Miller and Sinclair are one and the same.’ I said.
‘Yeah, there is quite a similarity, but there are some differences, look here and here.’ Lisa pointed to areas around the forehead and eyes of the aged picture.
‘Mmmm, but the area around the jaw and the mouth are almost identical.’
‘So that puts us back where we started, there is evidence that Miller was Sinclair, but it’s not conclusive. Are we ever going to prove it?’
‘I don’t know. There must be incontrovertible evidence, the question is where? I suppose we could go back to Marlow and try St Peter’s Church, there might be something in their records, but it’s a long shot.’
‘We’re running out of time Ian, I go to Prague in three days and then I won’t be able to put off Seneschal about Madrid; I’m going to have to go.’
‘I know; the only good thing is you’ll be safe, once you’re out of the country you’re less of a threat to Sinclair. You’re right though, it’s make or break, we’re running out of time. Not all historical mysteries can be conclusively solved. After all we’ll never know who killed Kennedy for sure. It’s a problem, it’s dangerous to go on, but equally dangerous not to.’
‘It’s so frustrating! We really need to get an answer to this. Now we’re clutching at straws in Marlow.’
‘Well I suggest we go to Marlow and clutch at straws tomorrow, it’ll be better to go on a Saturday, if we’re going to the church, they tend to be busy on Sundays.’
‘Okay then, it’s shit or bust tomorrow!’
Chapter 27
The light reflected off the Thames in
the morning sunshine, making it shine like a river of ice, as we drove across the nineteenth century suspension bridge into Marlow. I parked the Saab outside the Premier Inn that stood close to the All Saints Church. We got out and walked down the High Street together.
‘Where’s the church?’ Lisa asked.
‘I think it’s down here.’ I said turning into Station Road. ‘If the map I looked up before we started out is correct, St Peter Street is down here on the left, the Roman Catholic Church where Sinclair was buried is down there. We shouldn’t be able to miss it.’
‘Okay, lead on.’
‘We turned back towards the River to find some of the oldest buildings in the town. Towards the bottom of the road the small gothic revival church was built of flint with strange square steeple beside the west end of the nave.
‘The guide book says it was built by the elder Pugin.’ I told Lisa. She looked blankly at me. ‘The guy who designed the Houses of Parliament?’
‘Oh!’ She said without much interest. She frowned. ‘Look at all these graves, where do you think Sinclair is buried?’
‘Could be anywhere. The church looks all closed up, so we’ll get no help there. Maybe we’d better go and start looking for his grave.’
It was a beautiful day for searching grave yards, but it did not take long for us both to get bored and frustrated wandering through a seemingly random jumble of headstones.
‘Fancy a coffee?’ I asked Lisa.
‘Yeah! I could kill for a Frappuccino.’
We walked up the High Street and found a Starbucks. Twenty minutes and two refreshing iced coffees later, we felt fit and ready to resume our search. We were walking down the street back towards the church, when I spied a black dressed clergyman a few yards ahead of us. The biretta on his head told me he was a catholic priest and the chances were he was associated with St Peter’s church. I accelerated pulling a mystified Lisa along with me. We caught him just as he turned the corner towards the church.
‘Excuse me Father.’ He turned; he was about my age and build, with greying hair and friendly twinkling blue eyes behind horn rimmed spectacles. He smiled.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Are you the parish priest for St Peter’s?’
‘I am, Father Charlie Corrigan.’ He introduced himself in a broad Glaswegian accent and held out his hand. I introduced Lisa and myself.
‘We are looking for the grave of one of your former parishioners, Peter Sinclair, he died in 1988’
‘Not one mine, I’m afraid, I did not come here until 1992, shortly before my predecessor Father Nathan died.’
‘Can you help us locate the grave?’
‘Yes, if you come into the vestry, I’m sure the records will tell us where he was buried.’
He led us around the side of the church and unlocked the door into the vestry. The room was dark after the bright sunlight outside. Father Corrigan pulled a ledger from the shelf and began to leaf through it.
‘Here we are, he’s buried in the south-west corner of the graveyard, I’ll show you.’ He led us outside and across the graveyard. He stopped in front of a row of three graves with marble headstones.
‘There you go, Peter Sinclair.’ I looked at the graves. One was Sinclair himself; one was his wife, Alice who had predeceased him by three years. The third headstone read Lillian Morrison, who died in 1959, presumably Sinclair’s mother-in-law. I read Sinclair’s epitaph. “Peter Sinclair, 1912-1988, beloved husband and father. Finally at peace.”
‘Highly appropriate, considering his tumultuous life.’ I thought. Aloud I said ‘Thank you for your help Father Corrigan. Do you know anything else about him?’
It’s a pleasure to help and call me Father Charlie, everyone does. I hope you are not journalists; he has a famous, or rather notorious son. I could not be party to anything of that ilk.’
‘No Father, I’m actually a teacher. Lisa is a former student who’s assisting me with some historical research. Mr Sinclair here has turned up as a peripheral, but interesting figure in our narrative. We’re trying to put some flesh on the bones, if you’ll excuse the pun.’ I felt bad misleading Father Charlie, but needs must when the devil drives.
‘Well, I never actually met him myself, but I understand that Father Nathan knew him very well, especially in later life.’
‘Is there anything in terms of parish records that might throw any light on Mr Sinclair?’ Lisa asked sweetly. It was interesting to see her work her charm on a celibate man. I smiled knowingly at her; she gave me a glare and ignored me.
‘Yes, we have a full set of minutes for the parish community committee. I believe Mr Sinclair was an active member.’
He led the way inside the vestry again and pulled a series of volumes off a bookshelf. There were six of them and each was about two inches thick. I groaned inwardly, this could take forever, with little hope of us finding anything useful, we were really clutching at straws.
‘There you go!’ said Father Charlie. ’You can use the desk over there, if you want to go through them. Take your time; I’ve got a mountain of paperwork to get through.
I thanked him, handing a volume to Lisa and picking one up myself. The Catholic Church might no longer believe in it, but the next hour was purgatory. The minutes were dull in the extreme, the detailed minutiae of a committee of worthy parishioners, who were seeking to make life better for the fellow members of their congregation. I garnered little useful information about Miller, beyond the fact that he was a major donor to the church roof restoration fund. To all intent and purpose, Peter Sinclair was a pillar of the community, far from the William Miller we were convinced he was.
‘Will you excuse me a moment?’ Father Charlie asked ‘I have to go into the church and check we have enough hosts for mass tomorrow,’
‘This is so far from the man we’ve been investigating; it almost seems we’ve got the wrong man. All of our evidence is circumstantial after all.’ Lisa said what I was thinking.
‘Yeah, he does appear to be a respectable member of the community, a far cry from our man Miller. I suppose he could have got religion in later life and turned over a new leaf when he created his new identity.’
‘Now who’s clutching at straws? We’ll never manage to prove that. This is a bust. Can you think of any other avenues to follow, because this is a waste of time?’
‘Nope, I’m totally out of ideas. It’s a pity, but this is our final dead end. Probably just as well, we’re running out of time and we’ve still got to write the second episode of the Miller story for the paper and then hope that when nothing else follows it, Sinclair will think that we don’t know the rest of the story. If we keep our heads down, we might be lucky’
Lisa looked dejected.
‘Are you giving up?’
‘I don’t see there’s anything else to do, do you?’ She shook her head.
At that moment, Father Charlie bustled into the vestry, carrying a flask of holy water that he placed carefully on his desk.
‘Have you found enough, or do you find those records as boring as I do?’
‘They’re not exactly best seller material are they?’ I smiled.
‘Is there anything else pertaining to Mr Miller?’ Lisa asked the priest.
‘Nothing that would tell you about the man, but I have his library back at the rectory. He and father Nathan were very close and he bequeathed his library to his friend when he died. When Father Nathan passed away, the books stayed in the rectory, their still in my study today. Mind you, I’ve never really read them.’
Lisa and I exchanged glances, we each knew what the other was thinking; just when we thought we had reached the end, Lady Fortune threw us a bone of hope. Could Sinclair’s book collection help us? It did not seem too likely, but it was the last hope we had, albeit a faint one.
‘You can tell a lot about a man from the books he reads,’ I said ‘would it be possible for us to see them?’
‘I don’t see why not, you’ll want a cup of tea
after ploughing through all those dry tomes anyway. I’m parched, follow me and we’ll see what we can do about both those things.’
Father Charlie led the way through the graveyard avoiding patches of unmown nettles to the wall that encircled the south side of the churchyard. Set into the wall was a low wooden gate that led into an adjoining house. The path led through a well-tended garden to the rectory beyond. The rectory was a brick built Victorian pile with a browny-orange tiled roof that was covered with patches of lichen. Father Charlie pulled a key out of his trouser pocket and unlocked the green painted side door.
‘Come in.’ he said, ‘This place is rather a rambling heap, too big for one person, but it was built for the priest at the same time as the church, I suppose it was a matter of prestige and not being outdone by the Anglicans.’ He raised his voice, ‘Margaret! Margaret, it’s only me.’
A small middle aged woman appeared from what was clearly the kitchen.
‘Margaret is my housekeeper.’ He explained. ‘Could you bring us three cups of tea through to the study please Margaret.’
‘I’ll bring them in presently’
Father Charlie led the way through the hall and ushered us into his study. The large room was south-facing and bright, with a fine view down over the river. There was a Persian style rug covering the polished floorboards. One wall was lined floor to ceiling with mahogany bookcases, on which stood rows of books bound in fine brown leather. In the centre of the room was an antique desk and by the window stood a work desk. A smaller bookcase containing a number of well-worn texts stood against the wall opposite the shelves. Father Charlie followed my eyes.
‘Those are the books I brought with me. The shelves and books on that wall are the ones that Mr Sinclair bequeathed to Father Nathan. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never really read them. A simple parish priest does not have too much time for that type of heavy reading.’
‘Do you mind if we looked at the Sinclair books, Father?’ Lisa asked.
‘Please feel free.’
At that moment, Margaret appeared with a tray on which stood a teapot, three cups and saucers, a matching sugar bowl and milk jug.