by Oliver Tidy
‘What did he study?’
‘Mechanical engineering. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even think he knew when he signed up for it.’
‘How long had he been back from university?’
‘Not even a year.’
He was slipping away from me. I was losing him in his misery pit.
‘What was he using the container in the yard for?’
‘No idea. The yard was his to do what he wanted with. He rented a few units for cash pocket money. I told him I wasn’t going to keep him. He had to earn.’
‘He must have been doing well out of it for a four-by-four like that.’
He shook his head quickly. ‘The units wouldn’t have paid for that and he wasn’t getting it from me. His money was coming from somewhere else. I don’t know where.’
‘And you don’t know who he was knocking about with at night?’
He shook his head again, more slowly. ‘If he had something to do with your uncle’s and your aunt’s deaths, I don’t know what to say. They were decent people, even if your uncle didn’t like me much.’
I didn’t correct him by letting him know that my uncle hated his guts.
‘Your aunt was a woman I wanted to marry once.’ And there it was again: that hint of nostalgic and melancholy regret for the way things had turned out. ‘To think my own flesh and blood might have had something to do with her death is a horrible thing for me to know.’
It sounded like the closest I was going to get to an apology.
He surprised me then. ‘I don’t like the police and I don’t trust Sprake. You’ll be looking for who’s responsible for your relatives’ deaths, won’t you?’
I don’t know what about me had given him that idea. But I think I had already, somewhere deep in my subconscious, decided I was going to get more proactive in the hunt for my relatives’ killers and my abductors. I just hadn’t fully known it till then. My close shave with death of two nights before; the thought that they’d be back to finish what they started – tie up their loose ends – made me anxious. And I didn’t want to live with that hanging over me, darkening my days and troubling my nights.
My discovery on the computer just before Flashman had turned up felt like something pivotal. I knew something. And that gave me an advantage. If I could unmask them before they got to me that would have to be to my advantage. Besides, they had to answer for what they’d done. And like the big man sitting opposite me, I had no confidence in the local law.
I nodded. ‘I already am. I think that if I want answers, I have to find them for myself. The woman cop’s all right. She seems professional and thorough, but Sprake has lost me.’
‘Didn’t meet her.’
He stood to leave. I stood too. I thought about the time I’d met his son in the yard: wired, fidgety, edgy, a bit manic. I had a dangerous alliterative question for the grieving alpha male in front of me.
‘Did Dennis do drugs?’
How he didn’t react told me more than how he did. He was patiently subdued. It told me he’d had his suspicions.
‘I don’t know. If I’d ever caught him with them he’d have been out on his ear after a good hiding. He’d have known that.’
I made a note to ask Jo whether the autopsy of Dennis Flashman found any evidence of drug use in his system.
He gave me a hard searching look. ‘If you find out who killed my son before the Old Bill, let me know. Give me a good head start on them and I’ll give you the yard I bought from under your uncle’s nose. Dennis might have been a black sheep, a bad son, but he was still my only child.’
It seemed impolite to tell him I had no interest in the yard; that I wasn’t looking for reward or to profit from anything to do with finding justice for the murderers of my only family.
‘If you need any help, ask. If you want to know anything, ask. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. You’ll keep in touch?’
I said I would. And I realised why he was being so open and agreeable with me. He wanted his revenge, his own form of justice for those who his son had been mixed up with, those who had found it necessary to kill him – and if I could help him to that end the maverick in him would take it.
I thought again of PLUTO. Someone with a university education in mechanical engineering might have been interested in that. ‘Which university did your son go to?’
‘Kent. Why?’
‘I can look for people who he knew on social websites, email contacts, look at his Internet browsing history,’ I said. ‘I take it Dennis had a computer?’ He nodded. ‘Would you let me see it? If I’m to have a chance of finding out anything, I need to do some homework. His computer would be the logical place to start, unless you or the police have already done that?’
‘Do you know something you’re not telling me?’
‘Not yet,’ I lied ‘but your son’s contacts might provide me with a way to find the people who he was hanging out with. Have the police asked for something similar?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet and I don’t do computers.’ Then he gave me a meaningful penetrating stare. ‘I’d rather find them first. You understand me, don’t you?’
‘I understand you. Don’t forget I have my own reasons for finding them too.’
‘You know my house?’
House was a contender for understatement of the week. It was a bloody great converted barn. A bigger version of the one I’d been trussed up in.
‘Yes.’
‘Come round between seven and eight tonight.’
He gave me a look that made me think he might have been about to add something, but he only pursed his lips, turned and walked away, letting himself out. I heard his size fourteens leaving small evenly spaced craters in the gravel, and went to lock the door after him.
***
34
I sat back down at the computer and got up the page on PLUTO. The Internet is a truly wonderful and incomparable resource. A well-phrased search term followed by a couple of clicks and you can find out just about anything about just about anywhere.
I believe that the man who invented it gave it away to the world in some fit of deranged altruism. Or maybe he was drunk. I wonder, when he examines his decision down the telescope of hindsight to understand it could have made him the richest man in the Earth’s history, whether he ever thinks of killing himself for his reckless act of philanthropy. I made a note to Google him sometime. See how he was coping.
The site provided extensive and comprehensive historical, technical and logistical details, as well as everything else one could possibly want to know about this thread of Operation Overlord. The researcher had also gone to the trouble of finding and including a few photographs that captured the period and something of the work involved.
Given the secrecy surrounding the project at the time, I would guess the photographs were not War Office commissioned or sanctioned. They looked amateurish and casually framed, like something one of those involved at the sharp end might have been moved to record for posterity with the box Brownie he got for Christmas. And now they had helpfully resurfaced here.
Naturally, I was most interested in the Dungeness shots. There were four. The first was of a large diameter supply pipe sticking out of a shingle bank, shirtless men in knee-length khaki shorts leaning on shovels and grinning on a splendid summer’s day. I thought of ‘Ice Cold in Alex’. Dungeness is a kind of desert. The second picture was of a big Mather and Platt pump in situ. The third showed a group of men lined up and smiling outside a building, looking like the cast of ‘It Aint Half Hot Mum’. The fourth provided a very clear image of three identical seaside bungalows built in the style of the time that had been used to house the operation and pumps. Some clever residential camouflage to confuse the Luftwaffe.
It was a long time, a very long time, since I had last been to Dungeness. I had only a scant recollection of the geography. Thankfully, scant was all that was needed. It wasn’t exactly a diverse landscape. One huge peninsula of shingle. If Dungen
ess were a dish it would be a bowl of porridge.
The small and unique community that traditionally inhabited this inhospitable backwater was connected to civilisation by a road that ran along the coast getting bleaker and bleaker until it got fed up with the view and elbowed at Dungeness to head for Lydd – the town that time forgot.
Oddly, to my mind, Dungeness was today renowned and somewhere to be seen – for about thirty minutes until the boredom set in. Long enough to pose for a photograph in front of one of the landmarks that had raised its profile: the charmingly-appointed battleship grey and rather Soviet looking nuclear power station; the lighthouses – the old one and the new one – and the little wooden dwelling that probably wouldn’t have cost as much to build as it cost to hang one of the gates that now sealed the approach road to the nuclear facility but was more famous than anything else out there.
Twenty years ago you couldn’t have given away one of the little wooden shacks that people born and interbred there called home. Then a bloke called Derek Jarman purchased one.
Jarman was fairly well known in the arty-farty world of film. However, it’s probably fair to say he is most notably and generally remembered for dying of AIDs – known at the time as the gay plague – certainly by the indigenous population of Dungeness, at least. It seems equally fair to suggest that none of the locals would have ever been to the kind of cinema that showed his films.
In the autumn of his life, Jarman moved out to, and made his home in, Dungeness – a sure sign that something was eating his brain. He got hold of one of those fisherman’s shacks and transformed it into a different kind of shack – a more upmarket shack. Some new windows, an artistic clash of black and yellow paintwork and some creatively arranged driftwood in the ‘garden’. From a certain distance it resembled a giant bee that’d lost its way to crash land into the shingle and die. It was still a Dungeness shack. You could’ve taken that shack out of Dungeness but you couldn’t have taken Dungeness out of that shack.
People being people, as a result of Jarman’s interest, Dungeness real estate values skyrocketed. Ancient abandoned sheds that looked like prototypes of B&Q’s early flat-pack range and surrounded by twenty square feet of stones hemmed in with old fishermen’s netting started fetching healthy five-figure sums. Before you could say a fool and his money are soon parted the headland was teeming with bohemians with more money than sense in search of something that didn’t exist and the ex-locals were laughing all the way to the ex-council estate in Lydd for a foot on the bottom rung of the bricks-and-mortar property ladder. I understand a goodly number didn’t survive their first winter – the bohemians that is, not the displaced Dungenessites. Like escapees from Siberian Gulags, they were never going back alive.
But I had to admit: in small doses I liked it out there. It could be stark, bleak, harsh, tough, samey, depressing, but the juxtaposition of the nuclear power station and the surrounding shanty buildings of the generations of fishermen’s families that it dwarfed lent the landscape a surreal quality.
Owing to the rapid and deep shelving of the shingle under the water the huge sea vessels that had to round the point on their way somewhere exotic would often get close enough to give a landlubber a truer idea of just how enormous they could be. And when a heavy sea mist rolled in to blanket it all you could almost understand why a man with a cinematic eye might have been fooled. Think contemporary interpretation of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
For one reason and another, other than the tarting-up of some of the dwellings, Dungeness had remained unchanged for decades. Forgotten structures weren’t so much demolished as disintegrated with time and neglect.
The three bungalows in the photograph looked stout and sturdy fifty years ago. With the British government footing the bill for construction of an important wartime installation, I doubted they’d have been jerry-built. I wondered if they’d still be around today and if they were what sort of secrets they kept.
I could think of three ways to find that out but none as quick as getting in the car and going for a look. Dungeness wasn’t exactly built up. And with fewer roads than main arteries in the average body, if the buildings had survived they shouldn’t be hard to find.
I printed off a copy of the black and white photograph, got a few things together and left.
I was well on my way before I sincerely began to question why I was driving out to the back of beyond. My answer wasn’t hard to admit: distraction, a change of scene, some fresh air and the very slight chance I might learn something about PLUTO.
At New Romney I turned left down what was known locally as The Avenue, although in all my life I’d never seen a sign to that effect. It took me past the secondary school that I, along with all the other dimwits of the Marsh who hadn’t passed the eleven plus exam to get into the local grammar school in Folkestone, ended up having to go to. It was unrecognisable as the institution of learning associated with my youth. The mobile classrooms where I’d failed to grasp anything of the sciences; the converted stable block in which I’d been unable to master either French or German; the sports field where we’d been encouraged to chase a football about like sheep without the first idea of a tactical thought; the playground I’d been bullied in; the canteen I’d got food poisoning from and the shed that my bike had been stolen from were all gone. Halcyon days. Bulldozed and replaced with contemporary architecture, facilities and opportunities that – based on my impression of contemporary youth – were as likely to be wasted today as what had existed before had been on us. Just history repeating itself.
The road abruptly bumped into the coast about a mile down. The unimaginatively named sub-districts of Littlestone and Greatstone flashed by, thankfully, with little to commend them other than the memory of the pub on the front that used to be a haven for under-age drinkers on a Wednesday night. Many a stomachful of weak lager I’d heaved up over the shingle in the car park carved out of the beach at the rear.
The coast road did little to improve my mood; dull and depressing, lined with dated and mismatched holiday bungalows interspersed with patches of coarse scrub – post-war seaside Britain with contemporary trimmings.
My phone rang. I looked at the display. It was Jo. Because she was police I pulled over to talk to her.
‘You didn’t ring me?’
I was surprised. ‘No, should I have?’
‘You tell me. How are you doing?’
‘Bearing up. Look, while you’re on, can I ask you to find out something for me?’
‘What? Why?’
‘Would you be able to tell me whether Dennis Flashman had evidence of drug use and abuse in his system?’
There was a delay during which I heard noises that led me to believe Jo was making a bit of privacy for herself.
In a quieter but insistent voice, she said, ‘What do you want to know that for? What are you up to?’
‘I’m not up to anything.’
‘Then why are you asking about Flashman? I warned you to leave this to the police. Don’t tell me you’re getting involved, David.’
I was pleased to hear we were back on first name terms. It made lying easier.
‘His father came around to see me.’
‘What for?’
‘Someone told him I’d been arrested for the murder of his son.’
She sighed down the line. I nudged her. ‘He’s OK now. We had a man-to-man. Seems the father had his suspicions of his son’s involvement with drugs.’ This was complete supposition bordering on fabrication on my part. ‘But for his own reasons he never did anything about finding out. When I spoke to the son in his yard the other day he seemed like he was high on something.’
‘Wait a moment.’ I heard paper being shuffled. ‘Yes. Traces of amphetamines. No needle marks. Nothing serious.’
I changed the subject. ‘Have you got confirmation on the slipper, yet?’
‘No. Not yet. Where are you?’
‘Out for a drive.’
‘Where?’
; ‘Mind your own business.’
‘Charming. How about I return the drink you bought me tonight?’
Another surprise and a pleasant one.
‘I bought you dinner.’
‘I might be able to stretch to a take-away.’
I remembered my appointment with Flashman. ‘I’ll have to check my diary.’
‘Don’t bother then.’
‘How about eight thirtyish? I can meet you somewhere, if you like?’
‘I’ll come to yours.’
‘Fine. See you later.’
‘Stay out of trouble, please.’ She terminated the call.
I realised I was grinning. And I felt guilty for it. I had no right to be. I started the car and accelerated hard away from the kerb.
***
35
The buildings were not hard to find. I followed the road, Coast Drive, until it bent at something like ninety degrees inland towards Lydd. A sign, knocked flat to lie in the shingle verge, told me I was now on the Dungeness Road.
A quarter of a mile along and off to the right a narrow concrete strip, discoloured with age, led across the shingle in a straight line to three identical detached bungalow-shaped properties. They had hardly changed at all, just more abandoned looking and with some of the ubiquitous graffiti.
They were set back from the road about a hundred yards, surrounded by only shingle and clumps of the hardy sea kale that sprouted randomly and unchecked. There wasn’t another building near them.
A perimeter fence had obviously been deemed unnecessary. A sturdy five bar gate with accompanying chain and padlock across the access road had not. The only way down would be on foot.
There were two signs fixed to the gate. One was large and rectangular, black lettering on a white background. It informed prospective trespassers that access was restricted to Ministry of Defence Personnel. No Admittance Without Permission. The second was newer and colourful: red lettering on a yellow background – Property Acquired for Development.