“I understand,” said I mendaciously, and after various hand-shakes and assurances of mutual esteem Pugh departed and I sat back, put my feet on the desk and lit a cigarette. Then I rang Charlie Franks at West End Central, gave him the facts and figures concerning the theft and wondered if he was available for lunch.
And so I began work on what I had little doubt was the cover-up of some sordid misdemeanour or stupid blunder which the Government would find damaging if revealed.
I was surprised to find that the three – Floyd, Carter and Whitcombe – were not claiming DSS payments at that time. Though not too surprised, because they came from a world where false names aren’t uncommon. So they could have been registered under other names.
I checked their police records and found that Floyd and Carter had been done eighteen months earlier for dealing drugs out of a place in North London and got suspended sentences, while the girl, Vanessa, had been caught shoplifting a year before that and got another suspended sentence.
There were three addresses on the file: Dominic Floyd’s was a farm in County Mayo, Joe Carter’s was a children’s home in north-west London and Vanessa Whitcombe’s was what looked like a council estate not too far from the children’s home.
I drove to the estate which had been Vanessa Whitcombe’s last known address and rang the doorbell of a neatly curtained flat on the sixth floor of a tower block. No one answered. I stood there a bit until an old lady appeared from behind a heavily chained and locked front door, gave me a suspicious look and asked me if I was anything to do with the delivery of a new couch.
Being sofa-less there was no point in claiming to be a delivery man. I said, “No. I’m looking for Vanessa Whitcombe.”
“You won’t find her here,” said the old bird, eyeing me beadily.
“Does her family still live here?” I asked.
“Who are you?” she responded.
“Probation Services,” I lied.
She looked me up and down and priced my leather jacket. “Let’s have a look at your ID,” she demanded.
“It’s in the car,” I told her. “If she’s not here, can I get in touch with her mother?”
She looked at me hard, then said a phone number, which I wrote down.
When I rang the number a voice said, “Social Services.” I asked for Ms Whitcombe and heard she was interviewing a client. Did I want to leave a message? Definitely not. I’d told the old girl I was from the Probation Services, and the girl’s mother was a social worker.
I rang George Hopkins, an unfrocked copper who sometimes worked for me, and asked him to take on a five-day job watching the flat on the estate – the Yarborough in Cray Hill – to see if the missing Vanessa Whitcombe or any of the others were around, and report on anything else of interest.
Then I went back to the office and, later, home to the lovely Fiona. About ten words were usually spoken on either side during the course of an evening, unless she wanted money, or there was something to do with the kids. And so another evening passed in the happy home.
Next day Charlie Franks and I sat down in an atmosphere of hearty good grub. As soon as we’d ordered I asked him what he knew about the robbery in Gordon Mews. He told me – nothing. There was nothing to know. The owner of the flat, David Hamilton, self-described as company director, had called the police on October fifteenth of the previous year and requested that officers go round to check out a burglary and get a list of purloined items from his housekeeper. He’d rung from the airport, being just about to depart on a business trip. He’d left, he said, as well as the list of items, a written description of the thieves, three of them, who he’d discovered the previous night in his sitting-room. Interrupted by him, he said, they’d fled through the front door.
The agency housekeeper that Mr Hamilton had hired when he’d bought the flat a year earlier hadn’t been there when the robbery took place. When she’d arrived the following day, Mr Hamilton had explained to her what had happened. He’d supplied her with the list of stolen property and a sheet of paper giving an account of the affair and rough description of the robbers. A young girl with long dark hair and two fellows in their early twenties, one tall and dark, the other average height with fair hair. Jeans and jackets.
The housekeeper showed the officers a broken sitting-room window, which was at that point shielded by a latticed metal shutter. Hamilton’s account stated he’d gone to bed that night and forgotten to pull the shutters and lock them. He’d also forgotten to set the burglar alarm.
I looked at Hamilton’s neatly typed account and said, “Seems a bit odd to interrupt three burglars in your house at eleven at night, sit and type a full account, plus details of the theft, and only get around to calling the cops from the airport the next day.”
Charlie had checked out the matter with the sergeant who’d gone to the scene. Apparently Hamilton had later called him from the USA asking what was being done about finding the “homeless people” who’d robbed him. That made him think – how could Hamilton know for sure the perpetrators were homeless? By his own account he’d only interrupted them at their work, whereupon they’d legged it.
The sergeant drew the obvious conclusion that he’d picked up the girl and while they were at it the others had come in through the window. Or she’d let them in and Hamilton had broken the window afterwards to make it look like a burglary, for insurance purposes. He thought, considering the fairly unimportant nature of the theft, that he might have decided not to claim, but there’s no accounting for people’s meanness.
Then, in November, came the call from on high. Charlie was rung by his superintendent, who asked him how he was getting on with finding the suspects in the Gordon Mews robbery. When he asked casually why this one was attracting special attention in this crime-ridden metropolis, his Super said, “Ask no questions. Just try to find the thieves.” There were photofits of the three burglars now, he informed Charlie, because Mr Hamilton had come in and worked with the unit.
Charlie took the photofits and duly circulated them. Working on the assumption that Hamilton had correctly described the perpetrators of the crime as homeless, he sent blokes round the West End, figuring it had been an opportunistic crime committed by local pavement residents. Three names surfaced more regularly than any others, and those were Floyd, Carter and Whitcombe. But they were gone, or so it seemed. Charlie got them, along with the other look-alikes, checked on the computer. Most of the other names turned up, claiming DSS and the like. Floyd, Carter and Whitcombe did not.
“That’s it, Sam,” Charlie said, regretfully putting down his knife and fork and looking glumly at his scraped-clean plate. “A slightly funny burglary, three missing persons who might or might not have been responsible. Someone with influence eager to find them. And another unclosed file in the city of unfinished business.”
“The stuff never turned up?”
He shook his head. “And now you’re here,” he stated.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “I don’t know, anyway.”
He shook his head again. “Not a good idea,” he told me, “not to know.”
“Needs must, sometimes.”
After Charlie and I parted I went down to the address in County Mayo, Floyd’s home in earlier days.
The place was a fifty-acre farm lying on the edge of a little one-horse village. I put up at the local pub and spoke to the landlady there. She was reticent – she guessed I was up to something with my story of being an exhausted British businessman in search of rural calm.
What I found out was that she was in fact Floyd’s aunt, the youngest of a big family, and that her older sister had had Dominic without letting on who his father was. In spite of the scandal her brother, who had inherited the farm about the time Dominic was born, had taken in his sister and the baby until the young Dominic was about ten. At that point he got married. The farm wasn’t big enough for both wife and sister, so Dominic’s mother had taken the boy to Liverpool where, it seemed, she hadn’t prospere
d. Dominic had written to them up until he was sixteen, at which point he’d left home. After that, they lost him.
I packed up at the pub and went to Liverpool. I tried the hostels, the shelters and the main DSS office, but there was no record of Floyd, Carter or Whitcombe. If they were leading the floating lives of the homeless this didn’t mean they weren’t in Liverpool, but they were no more likely to be there than anywhere else.
The pub landlady had given me the impression that Dominic had been a bright and likeable lad, so unless he’d blasted all the brain cells out of his skull with drink and drugs as he started growing up, he’d have heard that the police had been asking about the trio in London in November. That world has the usual complement of people prepared to shop a friend for fifty quid – the higher you go the more it costs, of course – but it also has its own kind of friendships and solidarity. If they’d thought the police were looking for them, whatever they’d done or not done – and in that world it’s hard to survive without doing something – they’d have taken to their heels and not come back. They could be halfway round the EEC by now, and I didn’t think it worthwhile to plod round Europe after them. Dominic Floyd, Joe Carter and Vanessa Whitcombe were moving lightly and quietly through life and it would have taken more time and money than I had at my disposal to find them.
I made an appointment to see Pugh. He didn’t want me at the Home Office, so we met at the pub for a sandwich and a beer. I had the beer. Pugh drank orange juice. He was the careful sort.
I told him where we were Carter-Floyd-Whitcombe-wise, i.e. nowhere, and suggested I should submit my account.
“Well, if that’s all you can do, I suppose you’d better,” he told me.
We parted without cordiality. Underneath, I had begun to note, Pugh was uneasy, not just because of his lack of success in finding the three, but, I guessed, because he knew he had too little information about what he was doing and was therefore scared of it. It meant he couldn’t calculate his possible exposure if things went wrong. He was right to be afraid, as it happened.
So far so good, William. That was five years ago. At that point I’d done my duty, broken no laws and I thought that was the end of it.
Ten
Fleur saw a tall man of about thirty, clean-shaven, in an apparently expensive suit, shirt and dark tie. With the stairs leading up to her flat just ahead of her she pulled up, calculating she’d do better to run back into the street, across to the pub if necessary, rather than upstairs, where he might corner her on the balcony. She couldn’t be sure Dominic would answer his door if she banged on it in a panic and the other residents might be reluctant to open up after dark. The man who had accosted her, spruce and speaking in a calm educated tone, didn’t look like a mugger, but she still felt nervous of this individual who had been hanging about in the shadows waiting for her. He might be an angry creditor of Verity’s. So, poised to run and watching to see that the distance between them didn’t narrow, she said, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“My name’s Valentine Keith,” he told her. “As a matter of fact I’m a kind of cousin, your father’s uncle’s son. Dickie’s been looking for you. Dickie Jethro.”
As she went from alarm to utter astonishment, Fleur’s knees gave. She held on to the bottom of the iron railing beside the stairs and said, “What?”
When her mother and Robin Carew-Stockley had been married for six years, and she had been, as Grace informed her, officially adopted by her stepfather, Grace told her who her father was. She had vague memories of being told something about this before, when she’d been very small and still living in Yorkshire with her grandmother. Grace had told Fleur she’d been a dancer – she had been in the corps de ballet of the Royal Ballet, Fleur found out later – and had fallen in love with a man who in the end did not want to marry her. So, she’d told the young Fleur, she’d come to live with Grandma and had her baby – Fleur.
This story had seemed to Fleur at the time rather like a fairytale, though it left her feeling hollow and rather sad. She had barely understood what Grace was telling her and more or less forgotten about it. Grace and Robin had married. Later, they had moved to Kent. She had missed her grandmother and the old house, but adapted to the new life and from then on had taken it for granted that Grace was her mother and Robin her father.
One day they sat her down to fill in the gaps. There might have been a reason why they picked this particular moment, but if there was, she had forgotten what it was. That was when Grace told her about her dancing career, which Fleur already knew something about from the mounted photographs of a slim young woman in white tulle hanging on the wall of the landing upstairs. She told Fleur that at nineteen she had met Fleur’s father and how, when she announced herself to be pregnant, he had insisted she have an abortion. When she’d refused, he’d become very angry and told her that if she went ahead and had the baby he would never see her again. A promise, Grace told her, that he’d kept.
“I’m sorry, Fleur,” Robin had gently told her. “But remember. You are our daughter, Grace’s and mine, and that’s what counts.”
Fleur had then asked the obvious question. “Who is he? What’s his name?”
Grace had flinched, then answered, “His name was Richard Jethro. He was a banker.”
Naïvely, Fleur had asked, “Is he dead?” and Grace had replied, “Not as far as I know.” This answer, Fleur later realised, had not been a lie, but couldn’t have been described as absolutely true.
At that moment she’d imagined her real father to be like Mr Thorne, the balding middle-aged manager of the local bank used by Grace and Robin. She tried to imagine Grace – young, slim, in her tutu in some graceful balletic position as in the photographs – falling in love with Mr Thorne, and felt confused. However, the conversation seemed to have ended. Robin said briskly, “Come on – you’ll be late for your piano lesson,” and she stood up, picked up her music case and followed him out of the room. Later she regretted this obedience, thinking she ought to have stood still and refused to go without more details, some answers to the questions that began to enter her mind even as she stumbled through her piece at the piano in Miss Middleton’s cottage. But Grace and Robin, as if colluding, consciously or unconsciously, hadn’t given her enough time and she understood then, as children do, that they did not want the subject referred to again.
Fleur went away to school and it was there, when she was fourteen, one dull Sunday afternoon in winter, that she had come across a picture of her father and his family in the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper. Photographed with a pretty, upper-class wife, Lady Pansy – daughter, the article said, of Lord Fox – on a sofa in a well-appointed drawing-room, Richard Jethro was a stocky man with a shock of black hair, direct hazel eyes, a square face and a long firm mouth. Fleur, sitting in a chair by her window overlooking the playing fields, where enthusiasts were playing hockey in the biting wind, was startled to notice that although in most respects she did not at all resemble the man said to be her father, her large hazel eyes and clearly marked, arched eyebrows were exactly like Richard Jethro’s.
On either side of the couple on the couch were two children, the boy about ten, the girl a little younger. Her father had his arm round the boy. Feeling quite weak and strange, she read the accompanying article.
Her father, the Chief Executive Officer of the investments department of a City of London merchant bank, had, she read, recently become a partner at another, that of Fox, Strauss and Smith. It would henceforth be known as Strauss Jethro Smith, although the Fox family tradition, which dated back to the early nineteenth century, would not be broken, as Jethro hoped that his son, Lord Fox’s grandson, would take over from him eventually.
His children, Fleur noted, were called Robert and Hazel. She gazed at the two faces, both seeming a little bemused, and thought, Those are my half-brother and -sister. Once upon a time she’d appealed to Grace and Robin for a brother or sister. It looked now as if for the last ten years of her life, wi
thout knowing it, she’d had them. She read on – there’d been a divorce from an Italian actress, apparently, before he’d married his present wife.
Fleur gazed at the picture. There they were, her father and her brother and sister, all completely unknown to her, sitting there as if she didn’t exist. Did he ever think about her, she wondered? Would it be all right to find out where he lived and go and see him?
When Jess, with whom she shared her room, came in, she told her in confidence and Jess, like best friends everywhere, went and told everybody else. Fleur had an uncomfortable few weeks with the others coming up to her and saying, “Guess what? I’ve just found out my father’s Prince Charles” – or Arthur Scargill or Elvis. There was a scheme for building a marble pigsty for the school’s two pigs in which her father would invest. Elaborate plans after the style of Pugin were drawn. Fleur pretended to take this well, but felt bad inside. Mercifully the holidays came along and next term the matter was forgotten. Fleur never told her parents she had seen the article but thereafter kept an eye out for Jethro’s name in the papers. There was a knighthood, another divorce, another marriage.
Jess, after the initial betrayal, very seldom mentioned Dickie Jethro again until Ben disappeared and Verity was collapsing. Then she said, “Your father – your real father – could get you out of this easily.” Fleur had told her sourly, “Funny – before he left Ben started hinting about recapitalising the firm with Richard Jethro’s help and advice. I said I’d never met the man in my life – he’d never even sent me a birthday card. I didn’t want to see him, especially to ask for money, and anyway, I thought it was unlikely he’d help. Ben told me he understood, but I don’t think he did – well, by that time he was more desperate than I knew.”
“So that’s that,” Jess had said, discouraged.
Much of all this went very quickly through Fleur’s head as she clung to the metal handrail. Her impulse was to flee. She said to Valentine Keith, “Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Excuse me – I’ve got to go.” She started rapidly up the stairs towards her flat.
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