Pursuing the possibility that Ann Gashry knew who had stolen the ring was partly an evasion. Harding acknowledged as much to himself as the train pulled out of Penzance station and began its five-hour journey to London. It meant he could be said to have done his best by Barney, if scarcely by Carol. It spared him the need, at least for a while, to confront the consequences of his actions. When he eventually returned to the Côte d’Azur, he would not be going back to the life he had lately been leading there. That was over. What would take its place was unclear. He and Hayley would have to decide that between them. They would have to discover what they really meant to each other. And then…
He booked himself into the Great Western Hotel for the night when the train reached Paddington, knowing it was unrealistic to think of returning to Penzance until the following day. He phoned Hayley and left her a message reporting his arrival. She had said she would make herself scarce during the auction, so he was not surprised by her absence. He had been surprised, however, to discover she possessed no mobile, but it was only one of the many oddities that made her the bewitchingly elusive person she was. Comfortably on schedule for his appointment with Ann Gashry he headed down to the Tube.
A steely rain was falling in Dulwich, inducing a premature dusk. Harding made his way along Bedmore Road, a broad, straight thoroughfare of robust inter-war family homes, wondering which house the Foxtons had lived in, before arriving at Ann Gashry’s door.
The interior felt more Victorian than twentieth-century, with lots of heavy curtains and ponderously ticking clocks. He was admitted by a small, round rubber ball of a woman and led into a fustily decorated drawing room, accompanied along the way by a mildly curious King Charles spaniel. The woman called up the stairs for Ann, made him an offer of tea, which he accepted, then vanished, her status in the household-servant, companion, relative-left unclarified. The dog followed her at a leisurely pace.
Harding had only a minute or two in which to inspect various silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece before Ann Gashry arrived. She looked remarkably similar to a Flapper-era woman whose picture he had just been studying, though the similarity did not extend to dress. His hostess was kitted out in twinset, pearls and calf-length skirt. A Home Counties bob and librarian glasses completed the dowdy effect, but her piercing, damson-eyed gaze hinted that he should not judge her by her appearance.
“Mr. Harding.” They shook hands. “Did Dora offer you tea?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Good. Shall we sit down?”
“Thanks.” They settled either side of the fireplace. “And thanks for seeing me.”
“As I explained on the phone, Mr. Harding, you have Hayley to thank for that. The way my brother’s behaved towards her…” She shuddered. “I sometimes find it hard to believe Nathan and I are the same flesh and blood, but there it is. Our parents divorced and I stayed with Father while he went with Mother, so we’ve had… different upbringings. He’s a good deal younger than I am as well. But even so…”
“It can’t be easy for you. Holding out on him about Hayley.”
“I hardly ever see him, actually. It really isn’t that difficult.”
“The Foxtons lived nearby, I gather.”
“Just a few doors away. I miss them. Such nice people.”
“What happened to Kerry was… tragic.”
“Indeed. She had such… charisma. Her death was an irreparable loss to all who had the good fortune to know her. A tragedy, as you say. Also a mystery. And I believe it’s the mystery rather than the tragedy you’ve come to discuss.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “It is.”
“But I don’t quite understand your interest in the matter. Hayley said you were acting on Barney Tozer’s behalf.”
“I was.”
“And now?”
“I want to find out the truth. For everyone’s sake.”
“A noble but perilous ambition.”
“Why perilous?”
“I don’t know. But you have Kerry’s sad example to tell you that it is.”
“It might have been an accident.”
“I don’t think so. Nor does Hayley does she?”
“Not since the burglary no.”
“Ah, yes. The burglary.” She looked round, catching some noise from the hall. “Here’s Dora with the tea, I think.”
It was indeed Dora. Ann switched adroitly to a recommendation of the latest exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery while tea was delivered, lingering on the subject until Dora was long gone and they both had a cup in their hand. Then she swiftly reverted to the question of the ring.
“I’m both surprised and unsurprised by news of its theft. Surprised because such an act seems, on the face of it, inexplicable. Unsurprised because its history is riddled with similar incidents.” She sipped her tea and paused to order her thoughts, then said, “As you shall hear.”
SIXTEEN
My involvement in this-and hence Kerry’s-began with my researches into my most, indeed only eminent ancestor, Francis Gashry a Member of Parliament for twenty years in the mid-eighteenth century. He was born in London in 1702. His parents, original name Gascherie, were Huguenot refugees from La Rochelle. Most of my information about him came initially from the archives of the Huguenot Association. His political career had its roots in his appointment in 1728 as secretary to Admiral Sir Charles Wager, recently retired from the sea and a member of the Admiralty Board. Wager became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1733. That made Gashry a significant person in the Admiralty without being an official member of staff, though he was later to become one-Commissioner of the Navy, no less.
“But I digress. The crux of the matter is that as Wager’s right-hand man and a semi-detached civil servant, Gashry was the natural choice to tackle a sensitive problem that presented itself in February 1736.
“As you know, nearly thirty years previously, in October 1707, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s flagship, HMS Association, had gone down off the Scillies, with the loss of all hands, including Shovell. Shovell’s body had been washed up on the coast of St. Mary’s and, at some point prior to the arrival of a search party, a precious emerald-and-diamond ring had been stolen from his finger. Attempts to recover it had failed, despite a large reward offered for its return by Lady Shovell. She died in 1732, with the fate of the ring still unknown.
“In February 1736, however, that changed, with the arrival at the Admiralty of two letters passed on to Wager by Lord Godolphin, hereditary-and absentee-Governor of Scilly The first letter was from the Reverend Richard Symons, parish priest for the islands. It reported that one of his parishioners, an aged widow, had made a dying confession to the theft of the ring, which she had kept hidden ever since but now wished to be returned to the Shovell family. Symons explained that he was arranging this through a gentleman called Godfrey Shillingstone, who was in the Scillies at the time conducting antiquarian research, with Lord Godolphin’s blessing, and was due to leave shortly, bound for London, where he would deliver the ring to His Lordship, for onward transmission to the Shovells.
“This would have been excellent news, especially for Wager, who had served under Shovell as a junior officer, but for the contents of the second letter. It was from the Reverend Dr. Walter Borlase, Vicar of Madron, near Penzance, a living controlled, like most others in the area, by Lord Godolphin. Shillingstone had stayed with him for a few nights on his way to the Scillies and had done so again on his way back. Borlase was a magistrate and alderman as well as a priest. He must have been mortified to have to report to his patron, who had previously asked him to assist Shillingstone in any way he could, that the unfortunate antiquarian was dead and the ring missing once more.
“Borlase recounted that he and his wife had been dining out one evening shortly after Shillingstone’s arrival. Their guest had opted not to join them and had remained at their home, where a burglary had occurred prior to their return. The servants had heard nothing. Shillingstone had gone outside, for whatever
reason, and been knifed to death. And the ring had been stolen from a desk drawer in Borlase’s study, where Shillingstone had previously lodged it for safe keeping. The lock on the drawer had been forced. Nothing else had been taken. But the ring was gone.
“This would have been quite bad enough, but, to make matters worse, Lord Godolphin had already alerted Shovell’s eldest daughter, Lady Hyndford, to the recovery of the ring and was at a loss how to explain to her that it had been stolen yet again. To get himself off the hook, he argued that the whole problem was Admiralty business, which he was happy for them to deal with as they saw fit.
“Perhaps out of loyalty to his old commanding officer, Wager took the matter on and dispatched Gashry to Penzance with instructions to investigate the circumstances of Shilling-stone’s murder and, if possible, recover the ring. Gashry later wrote a full report of what he accomplished, which is how I know about his mission. The report mouldered in the archives until 1964, when the Admiralty was absorbed by the Ministry of Defence and there was a clear-out of old documents. A junior civil servant called Herbert Shelkin kept a lot of stuff that would otherwise have been destroyed, including the Gashry report, which he was particularly interested in because the Shelkins, original name Schulkin, also come from Huguenot stock. He wrote an article about Huguenot MPs, mentioning Gashry, in the Huguenot Association journal about ten years ago. That’s what put me on to him. He’s a rather eccentric individual, afraid officialdom might yet accuse him of stealing the documents he removed and cancel his pension. But I was able to persuade him to let me read the report. And a fascinating read it was too.
“Gashry spent several weeks at Castle Horneck, Borlase’s residence on the outskirts of Penzance. He questioned every member of the household and undertook extensive enquiries in the neighbourhood. He made himself a thorough nuisance. But I imagine he knew this was a task he had to take seriously. His career might have been badly compromised by failure.
“Complete success was nevertheless beyond him. He was suspicious of the servants, but could prove nothing against any of them. A pair of strangers had been seen in the area on the day of the murder who matched the description of two men seen in the nearby village of Ludgvan the day before that. This was significant, because Walter Borlase’s younger brother, William, was Rector of Ludgvan. There could easily have been confusion between the two. William Borlase was an antiquarian in his own right. Shillingstone had originally intended to stay with him, but building work at the rectory meant he was put up at Castle Horneck instead. Someone, Gashry reasoned, had been looking for Shillingstone-and the ring. The burglary had been carefully planned.
“Gashry tried to establish who knew where the ring was being kept. It appeared that the only person other than Borlase and Shillingstone who might have known-and he denied it-was Borlase’s steward, Jacob Tozer. Yes, the Tozers enter the story at this point. They enter, never to leave.
“Was there a connection between Tozer and the two strangers? If so, what was their joint motive for stealing the ring? It had to be a powerful one, given their willingness to murder Shillingstone in the process. Yet the example of the widow on St. Mary’s showed that the ring was too notorious to be easily sold for profit. Why did they want it, then?
“At some point, Gashry hit on a possible answer. Perhaps the theft of the ring was camouflage. Perhaps the murder of Shillingstone was the real object of the exercise. But, again, why? What had Shillingstone done? He had returned from the Scillies with several crates of geological specimens, which were still in an outhouse at Castle Horneck. He had been awaiting the next sailing of the tin-ship for London to transport them to the capital. Borlase had paid the specimens no heed before or after Shillingstone’s death, so his assertion that only the ring had been stolen was questionable, given his uncertainty over how many crates there had originally been, not to mention what they actually contained. Those remaining were opened and found to hold unremarkable mineral samples. Undaunted, Gashry formed the hypothesis that Shillingstone had been murdered after interrupting the theft from the outhouse of one or more of the crates in which something else altogether was being transported. The theft of the ring had then been staged to distract attention from the true purpose of the crime.
“Jacob Tozer became Gashry’s prime suspect. He knew when the Borlases would be out, he could be presumed to have discovered where the ring was being kept, and he also had a key to the outhouse where Shillingstone had stored his crates. But Borlase had complete confidence in his steward and Gashry could unearth nothing in the way of solid evidence against him, despite a snap search of the cottage adjoining Castle Horneck where Tozer lived with his wife and children. Tozer certainly didn’t crack under the pressure. Gashry described him as ‘infuriatingly imperturbable.’
“However tireless his investigations may have been, Gashry was no closer to recovering the ring. He decided to travel to the Scillies in order to find out more about the aged widow and Shillingstone’s antiquarian researches.
“His first objective, after what seems to have been a nightmarish crossing, was soon accomplished. The Reverend Symons informed him that the woman’s name was Mary Mumford. She was a native of St. Mary’s and had lived all her life in a cottage close to the bay where Admiral Shovell’s body had been washed up.
“Gashry’s achievements in respect of his second objective are, sadly, a mystery. According to Shelkin, several pages were missing from the report when he came across it and he was never able to find them. The report resumes with Gashry back in Penzance, the search for the ring abandoned and preparations for his masterstroke under way. Based on descriptions of the ring provided by Symons and Borlase, he proposed to have a replica made and presented to Lady Hyndford as the real thing. She’d only been a child at the time of her father’s death and had no reason to challenge its authenticity. A line would be drawn under an affair Gashry described as ‘toilsome and intractable.’
“So you see, the ring stolen from Heartsease almost certainly is the genuine article, kept hidden by Jacob Tozer after his theft of it from Castle Horneck and passed on as an heirloom in his family, to be squabbled over by later generations.
“As for who stole it from Heartsease, only one name springs to mind. After I’d told Kerry all this, she asked me to arrange for her to meet Herbert Shelkin. In his retirement, he runs a dubious kind of genealogical research agency, in Lincoln. I accompanied her when she went up there to speak to him. What soon became obvious under Kerry’s gentle grilling was what I should have guessed at the outset. He had the missing pages from the Gashry report all along. He didn’t want anyone to know what they contained. He was keeping one secret back for his very own.
“Eerily, in view of what was to happen later, he warned Kerry not to enquire into the matter further. He said it was dangerous ground-his exact words: dangerous ground. He declined to explain. Indeed, he declined to say very much at all, at least of substance. The man’s happy enough to blather irrelevantly for hours at a stretch. What’s beyond dispute is that he knows the true history of Tozer’s ring, as very few others do. As soon as Hayley told me about the burglary, I thought of Shelkin. Why he should have stolen it I don’t know. But there’ll have been a reason. And he’ll have thought it a good one.”
SEVENTEEN
I suppose you’ll go to Lincoln now and see what you can learn from Herbert Shelkin,” said Ann Gashry eyeing Harding over the rim of her teacup. “If you’re set on finding out what’s behind all this, it’s the obvious thing to do.”
“Yes,” said Harding thoughtfully. “It is.”
“But I must warn you that extracting information from that man-information you want, at any rate, as opposed to whatever double-talk he’s in the mood to serve up-is no easy matter.”
“Think it’d be a waste of time to try?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Kerry and I agreed after our meeting with him that it was clear he had the missing pages. She swore she’d find a way to get a look at them and maybe she suc
ceeded. Our trip to Lincoln was actually the last time I saw her. It’s possible she had another crack at Shelkin before going to the Scillies. Probable, I’d have to say, given how determined she always was to accomplish whatever she set her sights on. I knew her from childhood as a very strong-willed person.”
“Was she born here in Dulwich?”
“Yes. Her father worked for British Telecom. He and his wife were a very sedate couple. Kerry was anything but, of course. It was always a pleasure to see her when she whirled back, from wherever her glamorous career had taken her, to visit them.”
“And to visit you, no doubt.”
“Well, the connection with Nathan meant we kept in touch, I’m glad to say. Of course…” Ann set her cup in its saucer and drew herself up, as if in preparation for some important announcement. “Nothing good came of Kerry’s interest in Shelkin’s secrets, Mr. Harding. It destroyed her and, indirectly, her parents. It turned Nathan into… what he became. And it caused Hayley a lot of suffering. Admiral Shovell’s ring is, in the final analysis, just an unremarkable piece of Georgian jewellery Bearing that in mind, my advice to you is to go home and forget all this.” She smiled. “But you won’t, of course.”
When Harding left, he had in his pocket not merely a note of the address and phone number of the Herbert Shelkin Genealogical Research and Advice Service, but the one-man band’s actual business card. “I won’t be needing it,” Ann Gashry had coolly remarked. The readiness with which she had handed it over encouraged Harding to chance his arm in another direction, though he instantly regretted it.
“Does your brother live far from here, Miss Gashry?”
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