Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “He was Spanish?” she interrupted.

  Fergal nodded. “I’m pretty sure he was but first let me explain something that complicates the issue, something that makes tracing a person’s family lines incredibly difficult.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I think the boy who became Stratford Eden was born Federico Jiménez Rodriguez.”

  “That’s a bit of a mouthful for a baby,” Skye tried to joke but was silenced by Fergal’s frown.

  “In Spain, then anyway, most people had two surnames. For Federico his first surname, Jiménez, was his father’s first surname and his second surname, Rodriguez, was his mother’s first surname.”

  “So children have different surnames from their parents?”

  “Yes. And their parents have different surnames from each other.”

  “I can see that could be confusing,” Skye said drily.

  “Exactly. Though I have found cases where the surnames are the same. Whether this is a mistake or whether it is because people marry cousins or unrelated people who just happen to have the same surname I have no idea.”

  “I can see that could make things a tad difficult.”

  “But I’ve managed quite a bit.”

  “Well? Are you going to tell me?”

  Fergal smiled and Skye recognised it as the smile that showed Fergal was very pleased with himself.

  He turned to his notes on his screen. “The boy that became Stratford Eden was born Federico Jiménez Rodriguez in 1930—”

  “I thought Stratford was born in 1935,” Skye interrupted.

  “He wasn’t. He was born in 1930 in the village of Illora, near Granada, in southern Spain,” Fergal said firmly, before continuing. “His father, Luis Jiménez Martinez, married Maria Rodriguez Garcia in 1929 and Federico was born the following year. Luis was something of a black sheep in his family which was otherwise comfortably rich, right-wing, Falangist, Catholic and heavily on the Nationalist side of the country’s history.”

  “One of the bad guys?” Skye asked when Fergal paused for breath.

  “I don’t think it was quite that simple, but I suppose, yes, I think of the Nationalists as the bad guys and Republicans as the good guys though there was good and bad on both sides.”

  “Anyway, carry on. Federico’s family supported Franco?”

  “Yes. Luis’s father, Federico’s grandfather, was in cahoots with the civil governor, a nasty-minded man who controlled a semi-military group of thugs known as the Black Squad. By all accounts, and quite a few have survived, Luis was not trusted by his father or his father’s friends, not least because of his association with a left-wing poet called Federico Garcia Lorca.”

  “I’ve heard of Federico Lorca.”

  “So you should have done.”

  “We did The House of Bernarda Alba at school.”

  “Anyway, Luis and Federico were friends from their school days before the First World War. It’s possible he named his son after his friend. I found a letter to Lorca which seems to be from Luis saying how he could not justify his family’s wealth when their finca, their farm, was maintained by workers who suffered so much poverty and hardship.”

  “Wasn’t he assassinated? Lorca? Just after the beginning of the war.”

  “That’s right, and his body was never found.”

  “Did Luis die at the same time?”

  “Apparently not. In July 1936 Luis took his wife and five-year-old Federico away from Granada just as martial law was being declared. Reports say that had he stayed a few days longer he would have been arrested, thrown into the provincial jail and, no doubt, would have been killed after a period of torture. The thugs who ran those jails were more than happy to inflict pain, especially on the privileged son of a rich man.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I don’t think either of us can.”

  “You’re probably right. So what happened then?”

  “I have no idea when the family was split up and no idea how Maria got her son Federico to the north coast, to Bilbao but she did. They were both on the SS Habana—”

  “I read about that too.”

  “So you know that some of the children on that ship stayed in England?”

  “You think Federico was one of them?” Skye guessed.

  “I do. But I don’t just think, I know. I found an organisation that has been researching the Basque Children far more than I ever could. They started up about fifteen years ago and have pulled together an enormous amount of material – photographs, first person accounts, that sort of thing. It’s a mine of information. When I asked about Federico Jiménez Rodriguez they were very helpful. They said a boy of that name was on the Habana but we shouldn’t assume it’s our Federico as it wasn’t an uncommon combination of names.”

  “Did they have the ages of the children?”

  “They did and this Federico was said to be six years and nine months which would be the same age as our Federico.”

  “And the mother? Maria?”

  “She was on the Habana too, but it appears she died of dysentery in the field just outside Southampton where they were camped on their arrival in England.”

  “So if their Federico was ours, what happened to him? Did he go back to Spain?”

  “When he left Southampton he went to what was called ‘a colony’, really a hostel where a small group of the children were looked after. The one Federico went to was in London run by the Salvation Army and it seems he stayed there until the outbreak of the war in September 1939 when children were being evacuated from London.”

  “Where did he go? Warwickshire by any chance?”

  Fergal nodded. “Yup. Coventry actually. He was given a home by a childless couple and that was when he became Stratford Eden.”

  “Why the odd name?”

  “I can only imagine they called him Stratford to tie him in to English culture, Shakespeare and all that, and Eden perhaps because of the local MP? Their surname was Wright.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have given him the name Wright?”

  “In 1940 they applied to adopt him but he was too old, at nine, for that and they never pretended to be his real parents. They seem to have been a very ordinary couple who did an extraordinary thing by effectively adopting the Spanish refugee. It couldn’t have been easy for any of them.”

  “So there he grew up an English boy in the Midlands, going to an English school and forgetting his Spanish roots?”

  “No. The family first moved in 1941 to Oxford and then two years later the Wrights moved to Deal in Kent and Federico, now Stratford, was sent to boarding school but I don’t think he ever forgot his roots. He would have been six or seven when he left Spain. He would remember. He certainly remembered eight years later when he entered that competition in his local paper.”

  “Have you discovered what happened to his father, to Luis?”

  “I tried, but there is absolutely no way of knowing his fate. I have no doubt he was one of the hundreds of thousands of men and women buried in makeshift graves all over the country whose bones are still being discovered, eighty years later. His must have been just one of the millions of undocumented deaths in that most uncivil of wars.”

  “Sad.”

  “More than just sad. Tragic.”

  Chapter 19: Guy’s Plans Change

  As he steered the motor boat back towards Peabody Three Arjun hoped against hope that there was some good in Guy.

  “Did she take long to go under?” Guy asked as he took the rope from Arjun’s hand.

  “Not long.”

  “Did she wake up?”

  “No. It was just as if she was asleep.”

  “So she didn’t say anything? Didn’t try to talk you out of it?”

  “No, I told you. She was asleep.”

  “You’re lying.�
�

  “No, I’m not.”

  Arjun looked around. They were just in sight of land, which was probably seven miles away. There were no boats in sight, not even the small fishing boats that they had frequently seen working this part of the coast.

  “You didn’t do what I told you to do, did you? You didn’t kill her, did you?”

  “I did. I killed her. I pushed her overboard. She sank. She’s dead.”

  “I don’t believe you have it in you.”

  “I helped you kill that man, didn’t I? My hand was on the knife as we slit his throat. If I could do that I could push a silly old woman into the water and watch her sink.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “To stop me doing this.”

  Arjun didn’t see what hit him but he felt the pain on the side of his head and he felt himself overbalancing, twisting, falling towards the water, his leg caught for a few long, agonised moments in some rope. He felt the bone snap and, although he could hear nothing, he knew he must have screamed in agony.

  He tried to move, to swim, to keep afloat, but the pain was too much and the world too inconsequential.

  He gave up. He could not fight the inevitable.

  His last thoughts were of his parents and of Raima and his sisters. They would never know what had happened to him.

  And of Guy.

  He had used him. He had never loved him.

  And of walking with Raj through the park on a spring day and trying to count the crocuses and the daffodils and those other yellow flowers whose name he couldn’t remember.

  But then it didn’t matter anymore.

  Guy had studied the charts and decided on a small marina just south of Estepona. He had to spend some time on land, to check the news and work out what to do next.

  In the three weeks since Warwick Eden had died and the two since he had killed Ryan he had followed the progress of the investigations in what news broadcasts he had been able to pick up. He had known that the second body had been discovered and the broadcast had briefly indicated that it was suicide and that the man had confessed to being the assassin of the ‘notorious politician’ Warwick Eden. But there had been very little after that. The news cycle, Guy recognised, had moved on. More important things were happening in the world.

  But Guy could not believe the police, and other authorities, would have accepted everything that had happened at face value. Someone, somewhere would be looking at Beausale; they may even have found that Beausale had rendezvoused with Peabody. They may have traced Peabody to the Mediterranean even though he had had his transponder turned off for days now.

  He had to find out if anyone had connected Peabody or him to the events in Dartmouth and that meant he had to access British newspapers and reliable internet.

  Within hours he was sitting at a table outside the first bar on the quay that advertised free Wi-Fi. He ordered a beer and began to search for any references to Dartmouth murders, Warwick Eden, Ryan O’Donnell and Diane Hammill.

  ‘Warwick Eden’ threw up a large number of results but the most recent informed Guy that the politician’s body had been released by the police. The funeral, arranged by his political party, England Force, as there were no known surviving family members, was to be held the following Monday.

  ‘Ryan O’Donnell’ elicited far fewer results. After scanning several news reports Guy understood that the police had stated, although investigations continue it appears to be a straightforward case of assassin kills himself. There had yet to be an inquest but the online tabloids speculated that there could be no other verdict than suicide.

  His search for ‘Diane Hammill’ displayed no news reports, no mentions, not even in local newspapers, that she, or anyone else from Dartmouth, was missing.

  He then searched for any reference to bodies being washed up on beaches or found floating off the south-east coast of Spain by fishermen. He found none. Diane, if indeed she was drowned, and Arjun were now food for the fishes.

  It seemed that he was in the clear.

  He judged that it was safe to return to England.

  He wanted to attend his uncle’s funeral, to see if there were any grieving women or children who would argue his father’s claim to be the heir to Warwick’s billions.

  Almost as an afterthought he searched for himself.

  The most prominent results in the search engine for ‘Guy Cliffe’ were articles referring to the village in Warwickshire and the ruined building his father had admitted he had been named after but then he saw the words Brian Cliffe, husband of Elspeth, father of Guy. He clicked on the link and learned that his father had been dead for ten days. He wondered if his mother had been trying to contact him or whether she had given up on him long ago as a bad loss.

  He ordered another beer and sat staring down into the clear waters of the harbour at the shoals of silver fish darting in and out of yachts’ hulls as he remembered that last argument.

  He had not known of his father’s head injury when he had punched him and made him fall against the sideboard but even if he had known he doubted he could have resisted the temptation. His father had done nothing but lie to him all his life.

  Brian Cliffe was dead and, according to the notice, already cremated. He raised a glass in the direction of the fish and smiled.

  He had even more reason to go to Warwick Eden’s funeral now it was he, not his father, who was the heir to those billions.

  He paid his bill and walked quickly back to Peabody Three where he packed some clothes in a bag and emptied his secret locker of the cash, thousands of US dollars, he had stashed there over the three years the yacht had been his home before returning to the bar.

  “Taxi?” he asked the man behind the bar. “I have to get to the nearest airport.”

  “Your yacht?” the man asked.

  “I’ve paid for two weeks’ mooring,” Guy replied cheerily. “I’ll be back by the end of the month.”

  But he wasn’t.

  There was a crowd outside the church in a suburb of Birmingham. Guy avoided the television cameras with the reporters holding out microphones to ask anyone who would talk to them what their feelings were about the violent death of such a prominent politician. It surprised him that there were representatives of foreign press there too; he had not realised his uncle was an international figure.

  At the church door he slipped past the four ushers who looked to him more like nightclub bouncers, and found a chair at the end of an uneven row laid out behind the rearmost pew.

  From his position he could see most members of the congregation. There were some well-known politicians, some reporters from the mainstream press as well as the more extreme ends of what was becoming known as the ‘alt press’ and various celebrities who had attached themselves to the England Force brand.

  Through the service, which seemed to Guy to be overlong with notably nationalistic hymns and readings, he scanned the congregation carefully. Knowing that Warwick had no friends he decided most were loyal constituents or party members. He saw no one from the crew of Beausale though he recognised several men and women who had been guests on board. He wasn’t afraid that he would be recognised; he had long ago realised that people of that ilk never noticed those they considered ‘staff’.

  And there was a young couple that didn’t fit into any of Guy’s categories of mourners. They seemed to be looking around them, just as he was, and he came to the conclusion they were police observers.

  The leading party members looked, Guy thought, smug rather than sad. He thought perhaps they had put on such a show expecting to benefit from their leader’s will and could not help smiling at the thought of the shock they would have when they discovered there was a close relative, a nephew, who would contest any will and leave them with nothing.

  “Thank you so much for coming.�
� The middle-aged lady held out her hand as he left the church. “Are you with England Force? The press?”

  Guy simply smiled and, rather than answering, said what was expected of him. “It was a fitting service.”

  “He was a great man.”

  “Indeed,” he answered non-committedly.

  “Are you coming back to the wake?”

  Guy nodded. “I’d love to. We need to pay our respects to the great man, don’t we?”

  “There’ll be such a crowd. One of our members has raised a marquee in his garden; it’s just around the corner. We aim to mark his departure in fitting manner, if you know what I mean, so you’ll have no difficulty finding it.”

  Again Guy nodded before extricating his hand from her grasp and turning to follow the crowd to the wake.

  As he passed the television crew he could see they were not live to air as the cameraman was sitting down, smoking a roll-up and the reporter was deep in conversation with a skin-headed and much tattooed man.

  “So you’re saying this girl is his daughter?” Guy overheard the reporter saying as he pointed to a photograph.

  “Yes. I just told you that. You thick or what?”

  “And you’ll go on camera and say that?”

  “Bloody right I will.”

  “Go over again what you want to say.”

  “The girl I brought up as my own – her name is Jenna – wasn’t mine. My partner, Wave, had her before we met.”

  Guy almost stopped listening when he heard that name. Wave. Instantly he imagined himself back, arguing with his father, hearing how he had been involved with a girl called Wave. It was not a common name. It had to be the same person.

  “I brought her up as if she was my own when her father had nothing to do with her. She never wanted for anything though she should have had a lot more, what with her dad being who he was.”

  “And that is?” Guy heard the reporter asking.

  “Warwick Eden.”

  The reporter appeared to suddenly be very interested in the man she had been trying to shrug away. “You’re absolutely certain about that?”