‘Yes, they’re with the production team. She’s helping with the costumes, and he apparently knows something about the nuts and bolts of lighting rigs. Besides, they have a van – it’ll be very helpful come show time.’
‘I’m surprised they’ve started taking an interest in local affairs,’ said Freya.
‘Who are we talking about?’ Gus asked.
Freya pointed them out. ‘The couple from Nightingale Cottage. Not their actual name, that’s Pierce or Pearson or something. They’re freethinkers, and folklorists. Always wandering around asking farmers for old stories and the like. There’s something of a competition among the locals to see who can make them believe the most outrageous thing.’
Gus, scholar to his fingertips, frowned. Some of his colleagues had done excellent work teasing out ancient stories in Greece and the Balkans. ‘That’s not sporting of them.’
‘I suppose not. Only they do seem to swallow anything they’re told.’
Watching the couple come towards them, Gus found that quite hard to credit. They had the look of a pair accustomed to watching carefully and fitting in. He could see them coping with life among South Sea Islanders, for example. But where did anyone in England get the money to spend their life collecting old country stories? Everything seemed to be rationed here, except gossip.
‘You must be Lord Selchester,’ said the woman, extending a hand. ‘Miranda Pearson. This is Jeremy, he doesn’t talk much.’
‘Glad to meet you,’ said Gus, rather bemused by this un-English introduction. Jeremy was a big man, bearded and inscrutable, his greeting more conventional. Not a happy soul, Freya thought. He had a weary look in his eyes.
‘I don’t approve of the peerage at all,’ Miranda declared. ‘It’s a thoroughly outdated institution, but if we’re to be stuck with it, I’m glad to see new blood. I hear you’re a classical scholar.’
‘I am indeed. Although I doubt I shall have as much time for it as before.’
‘Jeremy and I are students of folklore,’ Miranda went on. ‘Old stories are full of radical notions, much more so than people give them credit for. We’re giving a talk on Friday – I hope you’ll come to hear it.’
‘I shall,’ said Gus, intrigued.
The noise died down. In the silence, Vivian clicked her fingers. ‘We’ll start at the entrance of the knights. Toby, you’ll read in for Sir Desmond again. This table will be the high altar . . .’
As the actors took their places, the first raindrops fell outside.
Monday
Scene 1
The last of the rain was still drumming on the windows when Georgia’s alarm clock went for school.
‘Beastly weather,’ she said to Polly over the breakfast table, thinking of the long, wet drive and the climb to school on the other side.
‘At home we had ice storms,’ Polly said. ‘When we lived in the boondocks, the power went out for days and we had to sleep around the fire. I’ve never been so cold.’ Gus had spent the freezing winter of 1947 teaching at a small Catholic college out in the wilds of New Hampshire, far from the city lights of Boston. His daughters had never quite forgiven him.
‘Bet they’d cancel school for that. We just get everything more sodden and grey than usual.’
‘We couldn’t even go to school once.’
‘If only,’ said Georgia wistfully.
‘School would have been warmer. Besides, I rather like it.’
‘More fool you. Do you want the dusty bits at the bottom of the cereal packet, or can I have them?’
The rain had stopped by the time they climbed on their bikes.
‘Take care on the drive, young ladies,’ said Ben, tramping past in dripping overalls. ‘There’s a nasty slip by that bend, where you can’t so much as see the road ahead.’
The sky was full of angry grey clouds still, and the drive covered with puddles. They’d been bundled out of the door on schedule, but they were nonetheless running late by the time they turned out of the drive on to the main road. The vegetable van, on its way up to the Castle, flashed its lights at them. Georgia gave a cheery wave and nearly fell into a puddle.
They stopped at the bridge to let a lorry full of sheep through.
‘Isn’t the river high?’ Polly said, peering over the stone parapet. The water was twice as high as it had been on Saturday, swirling around the ancient arches.
‘Branches everywhere,’ said Georgia with satisfaction, watching half a tree come through the centre span. ‘Maybe it’ll flood and we won’t be able to go in.’
‘Georgia,’ said Polly in quite a different voice, just as the van crested the hump, ‘what’s that?’
She pointed at something dark, snagged on the end of the branch. Something long and log-like, but which didn’t look like wood, and had pale bits.
Polly hadn’t lived through the Blitz and the doodlebugs. Georgia had, and she was just old enough to remember it.
‘Oh,’ she said, feeling very queer indeed. She jumped off her bike and waved the driver down.
Scene 2
‘It’s Dr Rothesay all right,’ said MacLeod, coming back into the office where Hugo and Jarrett were waiting. The Selchester police station was like every other in England – square and imposing on the outside, shabby and institutional on the inside. ‘Right down to the scar on his left cheek. He was at Heidelberg for a while. I’m told it’s a scar from one of the duelling clubs they have there.’
‘I want a second identification,’ said Jarrett at once. ‘There must be no doubt.’
As if there were likely to be multiple bodies in the Sel with German fencing scars on their cheeks.
‘My men are bringing one of his colleagues down from the Atomic,’ said MacLeod.
Jarrett frowned. ‘Its name is the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Foxley, Superintendent, and I shall trouble you and your constables to refer to it as Foxley. We have professional standards to maintain.’
MacLeod and Hugo exchanged a weary glance as Jarrett paced over to the window.
‘Do you have a confirmed cause of death?’ Hugo asked, leaning back in the uncomfortable police chair. His mind kept flickering back to Georgia. She and Polly had been packed straight off to school after giving brief statements; there was nothing they’d seen that two farmers and four other witnesses hadn’t spotted seconds later. What bothered him was that she should be involved at all. She’d seen too much death for a girl of her age.
MacLeod opened his folder, as put out by the interloper from Special Branch as Hugo was. Jarrett had all but taken charge of the recovery operation, directing constables this way and that as they struggled to recover the body safely from the swollen Sel. He’d been ready to leap in and do the job himself, although every local knew they’d not have seen him again if he’d been so foolish. The Sel had a vicious way with it.
‘One gunshot wound to the back of the neck. Our surgeon is retrieving the bullet for analysis. Condition of the body consistent with several days in the water. Marks on the neck and legs suggest it may have been weighted down. Some mud and grass stains on the collar and trouser legs. We’ll get what we can from those, but we’re lucky to have a body at all. The valley looks pretty on railway postcards, but it’s a quagmire. Sand and clay – bad mixture. Doesn’t let go easily.’
‘So if yesterday’s storm hadn’t pulled him loose, we’d never have found him,’ said Jarrett.
‘Indeed.’
In which case, Hugo thought, Dr Rothesay would have been tarred for life as a traitor to his country, instead of being seen as the victim of a cold-blooded murder. The real sleeper agent at Foxley would have been free to continue his work.
‘This is a priority for Special Branch,’ said Jarrett. ‘I’ll bring some more people down from London. MacLeod, I’ll need your men to do the legwork in Selchester. Questioning his neighbours, movements in his last days, that sort of thing. Hawksworth, you’ll go through all the background material on Rothesay’s colleagues and connections, see what
you can turn up. You can come up to Foxley with me now, put some faces to the names.’
In other words, MacLeod and his men would do everything Jarrett thought beneath his personal notice. MacLeod said only, ‘I’ll see to it.’
‘Come along, Hawksworth,’ said Jarrett. ‘No time to lose.’
He was out of the door before Hugo had stood up, barking at his men in the corridor.
‘Sooner you than me,’ said MacLeod. He and Hugo hadn’t seen eye to eye much, but on this they were united. Until Jarrett found a convenient scapegoat, at which point MacLeod might well endorse his suspicions simply to get rid of him.
‘Will your men need to speak to my sister again?’ Hugo asked. ‘I don’t like her being involved.’
‘I shouldn’t think so. If she’d been walking along the river path and found it, we’d have had a good many more questions, but she did the right thing, and we’ve plenty of witnesses who saw it floating along. None from further upriver, mind you, where we need them.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hugo.
‘I should warn you,’ MacLeod said, ‘a couple of those journalists were poking around. They’ll have seen my men taking statements.’
Hugo grimaced.
‘Nasty characters, some of them,’ MacLeod went on. ‘Real gutter press, here to dig up whatever dirt they can throw at the Government for the sake of a headline. They can say what they please now, not like in the war. You might want to tell her not to speak to them.’
Scene 3
Foxley lay in a valley of the Selchester Downs, east of the city. It was seven miles away, miles spent with gritted teeth in the front seat of Jarrett’s powerful car, Hugo trying his best not to hang on to the dashboard while his leg protested at the bitter cold. The car was already freezing, and Jarrett wound the windows down. He didn’t like condensation, apparently.
It had, at least, been a quick journey and a silent one. Jarrett drove the way he talked: with intent, single-minded concentration, and a total disregard for the comfort and well-being of others. At the first corner on the London Road, he nearly pushed a small van into a ditch. Hugo caught a glimpse of the driver as he shuddered white-faced to a halt on the verge. Jamie, proprietor of the Daffodil Tearooms. He’d be all a-fluster about that for a week.
Jarrett’s only response was to shift up a gear, roaring away on the long, straight road up to Hammick Down. The fields either side were huge, stony, and empty. Over to the right sat the big lonely bump of Pagan Hill, its crown of trees hiding an old stone circle. Selchester superstition held that the place was haunted. With that odd folklorist couple in Nightingale Cottage busy asking daft questions about it, all the old stories were having a fresh run.
Foxley was on the wrong side of Hammick Down, an old and rather ugly Victorian stately home surrounded by an array of prefabs, Nissen huts and one or two small hangars. Thrown together during the war, of course, for weapons research. Repurposed afterwards, as the Government frantically tried to make up ground on the Americans’ Bomb.
A barbed-wire fence ringed the perimeter. The guard at the barrier made a show of checking their papers, only to be barked at when he didn’t do it quickly enough. Another guard, more attentive, directed them to the office of the Administrator, Brigadier Caundle, in a dark-green prefab.
Caundle was a small, fussy man with ginger hair and a permanently screwed-up face. He’d been a senior quartermaster in the war, and had kept the Eighth Army in provisions right through from Sicily to Naples before the powers that be had decided to park him in an obscure research institute to shuffle scientists around. He’d been here ever since. Easy to underestimate, Hugo thought, but he’d faced Jarrett down over the weekend interviews and won.
Caundle greeted his two guests without pleasure. He knew Hugo from previous visits, gave a brief nod.
‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard,’ he said, before Jarrett could launch into his spiel. ‘Terrible thing to happen. Saw him myself last Tuesday, day before he disappeared. Leaves you cold to think of it. Lying at the bottom of the river all that time. I was expecting MacLeod, with news like this. I thought bodies weren’t your thing.’
‘One of your researchers is dead, Brigadier, shot in the back of the head and dumped where he’d normally never be found. This is still a national security matter.’
‘You think one of my people might have done it?’
‘We don’t have a defector,’ Hugo put in, ‘but we still have a leak.’
Caundle frowned. ‘I suppose you’ll still be wanting to haul everyone over the coals, then, as if any of them could be involved in a thing like this.’
‘I’ll speak to his immediate colleagues and superiors first,’ said Jarrett. ‘Then anyone who had dealings with him in the last two weeks. My sergeant will be here shortly to go over your security procedures. Can’t have any repeats of this. I trust I’ll have your full cooperation.’
‘Of course,’ said Caundle briskly. ‘I’ll take you to Dr Oldcastle first. He’s the head of reactor physics – that’s Dr Rothesay’s division.’
As Caundle led them along a maze of concrete paths, Jarrett interrogated him as to this Dr Oldcastle’s character. Hugo listened attentively, his eyes roaming the camp. An uninspiring place to spend your days, but then he’d thought that about Selchester, before he came. He’d always lived in London, amid the bright lights and the bustling goings-on. Valerie, whom he’d barely seen since coming down to Selchester, was still quite appalled that he’d lingered there so long.
‘Darling, Thorn Hall is death even in the Service,’ she’d said on the phone, a note of more than usual impatience in her voice. ‘Graveyard of ambition.’
‘How would you know that?’
‘I keep my ears open,’ she said. ‘I had lunch with Philip and Una Frome – you must remember them. Philip sends his regards, he’s doing very well. Says there’d be a place for you at Mowbray & Cavendish any time you liked. They like men who can keep their mouths shut, although I honestly don’t know why they bother, it’s all so very arcane.’
Hugo remembered Philip Frome, had served beside him in Italy and the Balkans. A handy man in a tight spot, good company, the outfit’s practical joker. He’d resigned his commission in 1946, as soon as the Nuremberg tribunals were over, and gone into one of those immensely discreet firms which looked after old money. They’d met up for lunch at Philip’s club last spring, and Philip had spent two hours straight boring for England. When Valerie had asked about it afterwards, Hugo hadn’t been able to remember a single thing he’d said.
Was that what awaited Hugo if he left the Service? A lifetime of solid respectability, shuffling figures around and watching former comrades vegetate in wood-panelled rooms?
‘I can hear what you’re thinking,’ Valerie had said. ‘I can tell you don’t like what you’re doing down there. You can’t go back into the field, so why keep at it? Digging up old bones, finding skeletons in everyone’s closets, living in a draughty castle in a provincial nowhere. Why in God’s name are you still doing it?’
Hugo had asked himself that question more than once.
She had sighed. ‘Got to go. Swan Lake at Covent Garden. Simply divine, I hear. You’re missing it all. Talk soon!’ Hugo hadn’t rung her since.
Another row of prefabs, then around the side of a hangar to Oldcastle’s office, a temporary building bolted on to the hangar’s side. Foxley had been an airfield for a while, during the Battle of Britain, but a marginal one at best, closed and converted to other purposes as soon as the immediate danger of invasion was over.
Oldcastle’s secretary, Miss Fitzgibbon, ushered them into his office at once. Oldcastle was tall, spare, a little stooped. His office, large and well furnished, would have been more at home in Whitehall than in this maze of temporary buildings. The door had a glazed opening, the secretary’s desk positioned so Oldcastle could catch her eye without stirring from his seat. A man who valued creature comforts. Or perhaps he simply found the whole place as dismal as Hugo did.
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br /> ‘You’ll be here about Dr Rothesay,’ Oldcastle said, shaking hands with them one by one.
Jarrett had spent much of the walk insisting that he and Hugo would conduct the interviews alone, without Caundle present. Caundle had stood his ground, but Jarrett had police procedure on his side.
‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to your work,’ Caundle said, with somewhat ill grace. ‘Miss Fitzgibbon can call me when you’re done here.’
He stumped out. Oldcastle offered them chairs, had his secretary bring them tea. Fortnum & Mason, Hugo noticed, in a proper tea set.
‘An indulgence,’ Oldcastle said, noticing his attention. ‘Proper tea was very hard to come by at Los Alamos. I try not to repeat the experience.’
It wasn’t his only indulgence, Hugo noticed. There was a little wooden rack with four fountain pens. Good ones, too, with Osmiroid nibs and several bottles of ink.
Jarrett didn’t waste time complimenting Oldcastle on his taste. He fixed the scientist with a cold eye and ran through the opening questions: what was Oldcastle researching, how many people did he have under him, how long had he been there? All things both Jarrett and Hugo knew. Dr Oldcastle was courteous, apparently quite unfazed by Jarrett.
‘Who did Dr Rothesay usually work with?’ Jarrett demanded.
Oldcastle folded his hands in front of him. ‘He was the division’s best theoretician, a first-class mind, so he worked with almost everyone over the years.’
‘Your division is fairly new, isn’t it?’ Hugo asked.
‘Yes, it was only established last winter, when my staff and I moved here from Ulfsgill in Westmorland. Given the problems we’ve had with our plutonium, and the key role of reactor design, it was felt appropriate to hive off the relevant experts into their own department, for better cross-fertilisation.’
Jarrett spoke before Hugo could say anything more. ‘Who was Dr Rothesay working with at the time of his death?’
‘His immediate superior was Dr Edward Vane. He’s my right-hand man, as it were, and responsible for keeping an eye on Dr Rothesay day by day. Rothesay was a rather temperamental character, you understand. A Scots-Italian from Edinburgh, went to Oxford on a scholarship. There was a certain touchiness to his brilliance, so he needed careful handling.’
A Matter of Loyalty Page 3