Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “I was, and I’m very grateful.”

  “Why didn’t you want me to tell Gordon?” Pat persisted.

  “There are things I need to do, things I need to learn and understand.”

  Pat didn’t press her to explain further and they drove in silence for some time.

  Diane was weighing up whether she could safely tell Pat that she knew of the relationship between Guy Cliffe and Warwick Eden, and how both Guy and Ryan were crew on Warwick’s yacht Beausale and how Guy was the one who had kidnapped her because she had told him she knew who he was.

  She would not have been able to explain the responsibility she felt for Guy. It wasn’t just that he was Barford’s son, and she had liked Barford very much. She wondered if, in some small way, she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, that allegiance a victim of kidnapping sometimes feels with their captor.

  As she drove, Pat was deciding whether she could admit to having a connection with the second victim’s father. That admission, she knew, could lead to the opening of a big can of worms which she would prefer to remain tight shut.

  She would tell Diane something of what she knew about the murders, but she would not admit to having learned, through channels which should not have been open to her, that Diane had looked after Barford Eden, that Barford was Guy Cliffe’s father and that it was Guy who had been with her on the yacht in Cartagena.

  Although, when conversation resumed, they talked of practical things such as money and clothes, neither stopped thinking of how much they could admit to the other of what they knew.

  It was nearly midnight when Pat stopped in front of her house and pulled on the handbrake but made no sign of undoing her seatbelt.

  She turned to Pat. “How long do you think it will take for you to understand?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said you wanted to learn things, and understand them, before contacting Gordon. I was asking how long you thought that might take.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s just—”

  “I can always go on to a hotel. I wouldn’t want to impose on you.”

  “No, you must stay with me. I have plenty of room and you will be company.”

  Pat wanted to keep Diane in her sights for as long as possible.

  “I really don’t know how long it will take. Not long, I hope. I just need to see what’s been said, learn more details about events, both what has been published and what hasn’t.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I will let you know if there is anything. But first I really must have a shower.”

  Chapter 22: Skye and Fergal Research

  “That was interesting.” Skye dumped her overnight bag on the kitchen floor.

  “Worth the effort, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely. I wouldn’t normally say I enjoyed funerals, and I’m not sure ‘enjoy’ is the right word for this one, but I have to say it was rather interesting.”

  “Interesting and helpful. Pieces of this jigsaw are beginning to come together.” Fergal put his bag down and headed for the fridge and the wine box. He was tired, and he needed time to sort out all the ideas he had in his head. “Wine?” he asked, but he knew he didn’t need an answer.

  “What do you make of the sudden revelation that Warwick was Jenna Freece’s father? We thought it was John O’Donnell, didn’t we? If Wave was going out with John how come Warwick is the father of her daughter? I’d love to know the story behind that one.”

  “We’ve only got this Billy Watkins’ word for it.”

  “He seemed pretty sure of himself.”

  “I think that Billy Watkins would be pretty sure of himself as he lied through his teeth.”

  “So where we thought Ryan O’Donnell and Jenna were half-brother and sister they are actually cousins?”

  “If we believe what Billy said is true.”

  “Do we?”

  “Probably. And that makes a big difference. When Warwick had no children Guy was the heir but now, with Jenna, he isn’t.”

  “In the photos she does look quite like Warwick, doesn’t she? Blondish, palish eyes, plumpish. She’s especially like those pictures of him as a young man before he went completely to seed after years of wine, women and song.”

  “I know what you’re saying but appearances can be deceptive and haven’t you heard of Photoshop?”

  “Of course I have. And I really wouldn’t trust that Billy chap.”

  “Ah, Billy. While you were driving back I had a good look into him. I’m not sure I would trust him as far as I could throw him.”

  “I thought he seemed rather too keen on the money,” Skye agreed. “Do you think he could be behind Warwick’s demise? If he found out Warwick was his stepdaughter’s natural father he might have… you know… brought matters forward a few years?” Her voice petered out as she realised how far-fetched her suggestion sounded.

  “I shouldn’t think so for a moment. He’s quite active in that England Force movement. I should think he idolised Warwick so I can’t imagine he’d murder him.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “What I find more interesting than who was at the funeral is who wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean? Who do you mean?” she asked.

  “Warwick was Barford’s brother, right?”

  “Right, that much we really do know.”

  “And Brian Cliffe is Barford Eden?”

  “So we believe, though you know we have no proof and I can’t imagine Gordon would tell us even if we had the nerve to ask him.”

  “But we’re pretty sure he is, aren’t we? And he wasn’t at the funeral.”

  “Do we know he wasn’t? We haven’t got any decent photos of him.”

  “Decent or recent,” Fergal agreed.

  “He wouldn’t have wanted to make himself known, would he? Not when he’s supposed to have been dead for thirty-odd years. He could hardly turn up at his younger brother’s funeral and say ‘sorry, reports of my death were exaggerated’, could he?”

  “I should have followed up that Diane googled Brian Cliffe. We’ve been too focused on other things. Anyway, do you want me to search for him now?”

  Skye nodded and she hardly had time to take a sip of her wine before Fergal answered their question. “Brian Cliffe wasn’t at his brother’s funeral because he’s dead. He died a couple of weeks ago, his funeral was last week.”

  “Ah. Did you see who went to that funeral? Some funeral directors post that information.”

  Fergal turned back to his screen and spent some minutes interrogating it.

  “Shit.”

  “Shit?” Skye asked.

  “One of the mourners, if you can call him that, was Gordon Hamilton.”

  “Wow!” Skye cried out before realising she should control herself a little more. “As you say, shit. But doesn’t that prove what we’ve thought all along? Brian was Barford.”

  “It proves nothing of the kind.”

  “What about the son, Guy? Was he at his father’s funeral?”

  “There’s no mention of a son. There’s the widow, Elspeth, but no son.”

  “Where did we last see him?” Skye asked.

  “We last firmly placed him on Beausale.”

  “At the time Diane disappeared,” Skye said pointedly.

  “And when Warwick was murdered,” Fergal added.

  “And we last loosely placed him on Peabody Three.”

  “We don’t really know he’s the second man on board along with Arjun Patel. We’ve only got what the engineer reported, that Guy left Dartmouth on Beausale. We think he’s on Peabody, we want him to be on Peabody, but that doesn’t mean to say he is on Peabody.”

  Skye frowned. “It has to be him.”

  “It’s entirely possible, but we
have absolutely no way of knowing he was ever on that second yacht. We’re also guessing that the person Pat said she saw on board wearing yellow was Diane.”

  Skye sat back. She realised that Fergal was trying to stop her making unreasonable assumptions, and she accepted that, but she felt her assumptions were perfectly justifiable ones. She decided to change the subject. “Where is Peabody by the way?”

  Fergal checked the ship location website. “In a marina in Spain near a place called Almuñécar. Either he doesn’t mind whether he’s found or not or—”

  “Or he’s not on it anymore.”

  “If we can see where the yacht is then so can all those people Gordon’s got tracking it down.”

  “They might already have checked her out. He wouldn’t necessarily tell us since we don’t have anything to do with the investigation anymore.”

  “I would like to think he or Anne would have told us if they’d found Diane.”

  “Even though we’ve nothing to do with it?”

  “Not now, no, but we did have. And…”

  “And?” Skye prompted when Fergal stopped in mid-sentence.

  “They know us, don’t they?” Skye thought he sounded like a naughty schoolboy. “Even though they’ve taken over finding Diane they’ll know we won’t have dropped trying to work out why she was abducted and even if she was abducted. They’ll know we’re trying to work out what her connection is to all of this.”

  “If there is one.”

  Fergal grimaced. “There is one but I have no idea what it might be. Anyway, they’ll know we’re working on finding out who actually killed Warwick Eden, because Ryan certainly didn’t.”

  “And who killed Ryan, because he certainly didn’t commit suicide,” Skye added, smiling.

  “They know we’ll keep digging. And there’s another thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Knowing about Peabody and where it is hasn’t got anyone anywhere if they haven’t found Diane. Whoever was on it could have been completely innocent and have nothing at all to do with Beausale or Dartmouth or any of this.”

  “Or they could have been guilty but have abandoned the yacht,” Skye pointed out smugly.

  “If it was Diane on board we can assume she’s not now, so where is she?” Fergal ignored Skye, following his own train of thought. “Either she’s involved up to her neck and complicit in the assassination and the murder.”

  “Which we think is possible but unlikely.”

  “Or…”

  They looked at each other. There could be only one answer.

  “We can only hope Pat was mistaken—” Fergal broke the uneasy silence.

  “Or lying.”

  “And that it wasn’t Diane at all.”

  “We were so certain the answer was on that yacht.”

  “It did all seem to fit.”

  Skye shrugged. “Perhaps we’ve fallen into the trap of trying to fit the answers to what we know rather than keeping an open mind.”

  Fergal smiled grimly. “Easily done, especially when nothing really hung on what we did. Look, we’re off the case. We’ve only been spending time on it because it was interesting. And we’ve made far too many assumptions.”

  “But it did all seem to fit,” Skye argued. “The timing, everything, it did all seem to fit.”

  “The one weak, or I should say missing, link in the chain of our investigation is that we have never found any connection at all between Guy and Peabody Three.”

  “So we should have been looking for that link rather than indulging ourselves in learning about the history of the Civil War. And it was an indulgence, wasn’t it? We have nothing, really, to connect Spain or the Spanish Civil War to any of this. It was just that we were interested.”

  Fergal frowned; he knew Skye was right.

  “If we’re serious about helping to find Diane and tie Guy into it,” Skye continued deliberately ignoring Fergal’s expression, “we have to get our focus back on answering specific questions.”

  “Such as?” he asked.

  “Where’s Guy Cliffe? And once we know where he is, and if it ties in with timing and everything, then we have to find what, if any, connection he has or had with Peabody Three.”

  “That might be difficult.”

  “Let’s start with the funeral. We know he wasn’t at his father’s—”

  “At least he wasn’t specifically mentioned,” Fergal pointed out.

  “Which as the deceased son he would have been, so what about Warwick’s?”

  “Good point,” Fergal agreed. “There will have been a raft of photographs in the press.”

  “And there will have been loads more posted on social media.”

  “And on the England Force website.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Skye smiled.

  “First of all, a fairly obvious problem: we have no idea what he looks like.”

  “Facebook. His school photos. I’ll start there.”

  “We’re right.”

  “What about?”

  “Look.”

  Skye turned her computer so Fergal could see the images.

  “Look,” she repeated. “I couldn’t find any photos of Brian Cliffe, but this is Barford at his posh school in Somerset. He’s fifteen or sixteen then. Now this is Guy. Look, there’s the same dark eyes, dark hair, narrow nose.”

  “I have to admit there’s a likeness.”

  “A family likeness,” Skye said firmly. “And look, this is a shot of the crowd coming out of the church at Warwick’s funeral. Couldn’t that be Guy?”

  Fergal looked at the image of a slightly built young man with dark hair. “Could be.”

  “It has to be!” Skye was more certain.

  “We have to call Gordon. We have to make him confirm that Barford Eden and Brian Cliffe are one and the same person. Surely it can’t do anyone any harm now he’s dead. And while I’m at it I’m going to ask him if Barford stayed with Diane when he was transitioning from one identity to the other.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think he might have?”

  “It would begin to explain how she got involved.”

  Skye didn’t object when Fergal took his phone and left the kitchen. He wanted to make the call on his own terms without her listening, she understood that. She also knew he would tell her exactly what had gone on in the call.

  “Summary?” Fergal asked when, after ten minutes, he returned to the kitchen and his, apparently patient, wife.

  “Summary with detail,” she replied.

  “Point one, Barford Eden did not drown in Cornwall in 1990. Point two, he did stay with Diane in Dartmouth while he recovered from his horrific injuries. Point three, when he left Diane he did become Brian Cliffe. Apparently he didn’t want to have any special privileges or special arrangements. He had liked the people he lived with before he became a police informer and he hated the life his father’s wealth had provided. As Brian Cliffe he was a lorry driver; a ‘normal person’. He married and had a family.”

  “A son.”

  “Yes, a son, Guy,” Fergal confirmed.

  “So we have been right all along.”

  “On that, yes, Gordon confirmed it all.”

  “Did he say anything else? About the Peabody connection?”

  “He said it was a dead end. The yacht had been found but there were no people. The yacht was pristine. Apparently the owner had left money with a bar to have the yacht completely cleaned; he said to prepare it for charter.”

  “So someone saw the owner?”

  “Yes but the description was vague: a dark-skinned, dark-haired Englishman.”

  “But the marina must have had paperwork?”

  “Everything was signed Arjun Patel.”

  “So not Guy.”

 
“I just wonder about the description. ‘Dark-skinned, dark-haired’ could be Arjun, of Indian heritage, or it could be someone who had been at sea in the tropics for a couple of years and was very tanned and weather beaten.”

  “So could be Guy.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Is that all from Gordon?”

  “That was all. He thanked us for our help up to now but repeated that nothing more was expected of us.”

  “So he wants us to drop it?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “But, Fergal, when has Gordon ever said what he means?”

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes. We should carry on. Now where were we?”

  Skye indicated that Fergal should begin a summary of where they had got to in their investigations. He was happy to comply. “We have Guy on Beausale. We suspect Diane may have seen him, recognised him, and drawn her own conclusions as to why he was on Warwick Eden’s yacht. Then, for some reason, possibly not unconnected with Warwick’s murder, Guy got her on board and spirited her away from Dartmouth. That’s where the trail ends.”

  “Not if he transferred her onto Peabody Three before Beausale headed for Poole where she was checked and nobody was found.”

  “We haven’t tied Guy to Peabody,” Fergal said bluntly.

  “That’s true.”

  “There has to be something, somewhere on the internet, something that ties Guy Cliffe to Arjun Patel or to Peabody Three. There just has to be. There is really no other explanation.”

  Both were quiet for a few moments, weighing up how to progress.

  “Did you find out if Guy was at the funeral?” Skye asked.

  “Yes, and he was,” Fergal answered, absent-mindedly, his thoughts concentrating on Arjun.

  “So he wasn’t on a yacht somewhere?” Skye continued.

  “Obviously not.”

  “Could he have been the man on the yacht in Almuñécar and still got to the funeral?”

  “Possibly, there’s an airport not far away and frequent flights at this time of year.”

  “You’ve already checked!”

  “Of course I have.”

  “So all we have to do is prove the link.”