‘Sarah tried.’
‘Then she should have known better. This London job: what’s it all about anyway?’
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘You’re right: this isn’t the place.’
‘No, I can’t talk about it at all, even though you are my new gaffer.’
Mario picked the last petit four from its paper casing. ‘I see,’ he murmured. ‘That, by itself, probably tells me all I need to know.’
Ten
For all his years in office, Sir James Proud still found a way to travel around his city relatively incognito. He was seen so often in uniform that when he discarded it in favour of grey trousers and a Daks sports jacket, with a grey fedora in place of his silver-braided cap, he could have been any middle-aged man on a Saturday shopping expedition.
In fact, he was: Lady Proud’s birthday was only a week away, with Christmas not long after that. He was pleased with the cashmere stole and leather handbag that he had found in Jenners, so pleased that he was still smiling as he walked towards the Balmoral Hotel, on the stroke of midday.
The doorman was one of the few who would recognise him in any guise, but he was also discreet and confined his greeting to a murmured ‘Good morning, sir,’ as he ushered him into the foyer.
The chief constable nodded acknowledgement and strode through the Victorian hallway to the Palm Court, which lay beyond. Not unexpectedly on a Saturday, it was full: equally predictably, almost all of the customers were ladies, many of them with Jenners bags like his own.
‘Mrs Friend’s table, please,’ he asked the young waitress, who approached him as he stood in the doorway.
‘Certainly, sir. She’s over there in the corner.’
As Proud followed her pointing finger, he saw that he had been spotted. Trudi Friend was on her feet, looking towards him, smiling, a little uncertainly. He judged her to be around fifty; she was tall, tanned and attractive, if a little busty, in her close-fitting jacket. He thanked the girl and made his way across between the busy tables, hardly drawing a glance.
‘Sir James?’
‘Yes, sit down, please, Mrs Friend.’ A lock of lustrous brown hair fell across her forehead as they shook hands. She smoothed it carefully back into place as she resumed her seat. As he looked at her, he realised that her skin tone was natural, rather than acquired on a Caribbean holiday or on a sunbed. The waitress had followed him over. ‘Have you ordered?’ he asked.
‘No, but I was only going to have coffee.’
He tried to pinpoint her accent, but failed. ‘That will be fine for me too,’ he told the server, ‘and some shortbread as well, I think.’
‘That’s automatic, sir,’ she replied, then turned and headed for the kitchen doorway, next to the bar.
‘It’s very good of you to see me,’ said Trudi Friend.
‘I’m intrigued,’ he told her. ‘You’ve pushed a curiosity button that I’d forgotten I had. People who phone me normally want me to approve things. They rarely ask me things, and they never bring me mysteries.’
She frowned. ‘It’s just that, I’m afraid . . . a bit of a mystery.’
‘You haven’t seen your mother for forty-one years, you told me.’
‘Longer than that, I’m afraid; I’ve never seen her, not that I could possibly remember, at any rate. I was a Barnardo’s baby, Sir James. My mother had me when she was nineteen, and she christened me Gertrude. She was unmarried, and my father’s name doesn’t appear on my birth certificate. The only thing I know about him is that he was Mauritian. That’s what she told the Barnardo’s people, when she gave me up for adoption.’
‘What do you know about her?’
‘I know that her name was Annabelle Gentle; she’ll be seventy years old now.’
‘If she’s still alive,’ said Proud, softly.
‘I believe that she is. I’ve done some genealogical research; that is I paid someone to do it for me. She was born in Inverurie. My grandfather, John Gentle, was a railwayman and my grandmother, Rosina Bell, was a seamstress. They’re both dead, as you’d probably expect.’
The chief constable waited while the fresh-faced young waitress placed their coffee and shortbread biscuits on the table. ‘When was this research done?’ he asked.
‘Within the last month.’
‘Then the obvious question is why have you waited so long to go searching for your mother?’
‘For a number of reasons. I’ve been away from Scotland for some time. When I was five years old, I was adopted by a couple from Peebles, George and Mary Strait. When I was little, I was darker than I am now, and, people being what they are, or rather, what they were in the 1950s, it took that length of time to place me. My mum and dad are saints, they really are. They’re still both hale and hearty: I’m staying at their place while I’m in Scotland. Dad was a librarian until he retired, and Mum worked for one of the local law practices. I had the loveliest upbringing any child could have been given, and during all that time, I never thought of my natural mother. I did well at school, and when I left, I went to teacher training college in Edinburgh. I qualified when I was twenty-two, and got a job back in Peeblesshire. It was round about that time that the law was changed, and adopted children were given the right to know who their natural parents were. I suppose I might have done something about it then: I thought about it, I admit, but somehow I felt that it would seem disloyal to Mum and Dad. Then I met a man.’ She smiled shyly, and sipped her coffee as if to cover her embarrassment.
‘His name was Felix Friend,’ she continued. ‘I was at an end-of-term night out in Peebles Hydro with the school staff, and he was there. We got talking. He told me that he was from Kuala Lumpur, that he worked for an oil company, that he was in Scotland for a conference, and that he was taking some holiday time once his business was over. I thought he was charming, so when he asked me out I accepted without a second thought. Two weeks later, when he asked me to marry him, I accepted just as quickly. That’s where I’ve been for the second half of my life, living in Malaysia.’
‘So what brought you back to Scotland?’
‘Felix died last year.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry to hear that. He couldn’t have been very old.’
‘He was twelve years older than me, but you’re right, it was most unexpected. He was a very neat, trim man; he was never overweight, played golf, and swam a lot, yet it didn’t stop him having an aneurism and dropping in his tracks.’ A look of pain came into her eyes, and stayed there. ‘But I’m sorry,’ she continued, ‘I’m distracting you. Now Felix isn’t . . . isn’t there any more, I can come back to Scotland for longer periods. Up till now, a month’s the longest I’ve managed. I’m here now because of Zandra, my daughter: she’s the reason I’m looking for my mother.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-two. I have two children, Zandra and Felix junior; they’re twins.’
‘And she’s decided that she needs to know who she is? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes, but it’s more than a whim. She’s just become engaged to an American she met at university in Utah, in the United States. He’s a Mormon, and they, apparently, are very big on ancestry.’
‘They’re also fairly big on polygamy, are they not?’
‘Hah! Not any more, I’m glad to say. But she is serious about her need to know who her natural grandparents are.’
‘That’s understandable, I suppose,’ said Proud. ‘What progress have you made? And where does Adolf Bothwell come into this?’
‘Adolf?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get to that. Go on, please.’ He picked up a biscuit. Full of butter and sugar, he thought. Bad for me, but what the hell?
‘Okay, I began by going to Barnardo’s and asking them what material they held on me. They told me that my file still existed, but that, believe it or not, the law required me to have counselling before they could let me see it. I know that Britain’s become a nanny state, but that’s ridiculous.’
> ‘There are reasons. It can be very traumatic for some people.’
‘Lowest common denominator, you mean?’
‘No, I mean for the natural parents. Your mother, for example, may believe that you have no means of tracing her, for that was the case when you were adopted. Many people in her situation still don’t appreciate that the law has been changed. Think of the shock for them when a middle-aged person arrives on their doorstep.’
‘And says, “Hello, Mum”? I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of it from that angle. How very self-centred I’ve become. In any case, I had the counselling, and I got to see my file, which included my birth certificate. That’s when I hired the genealogist.’
‘What did that turn up, apart from your grandparents?’
‘I found that I have an aunt: her name is Magdalene, and she’s three years older than my mother. She lives in Forres, she’s married to a man named Sandy Gates, and she has two sons, a granddaughter and two grandsons. There was a third grandson, but he was killed in Iraq a couple of years ago.’
‘Did your search reveal all this?’
‘Not all of it: my budget ran out before he got to the grandchildren, but what he gave me was enough. I checked the local telephone directory against the address shown on the report, and found that they still live there. So I phoned them: Sandy answered. I didn’t tell him who I was straight away. I asked if I could speak to his wife, and I asked whether she was in good health, as what I had to tell her would come as a big surprise. He laughed and said that she was out getting coal for the fire, and that she’d speak to me when she’d washed her hands. Now I’ve met her, I don’t think he was joking. She came on the line: I told her what my birth name was, and that I thought she was my aunt.’
‘How did she react?’ asked Proud, intrigued.
‘There was nothing for a second or two. At first I thought she’d hung up, until she said, “My, my; you’re Annabelle’s wee girl. I’ve always fretted about what happened to you.” I asked her if she knew where my mother was. She told me that as far as she knew she was dead, but that she couldn’t swear to it. Then she invited me to visit her. I wasn’t really expecting that; the fact is, I wasn’t sure she’d speak to me at all. I drove up next day, in my dad’s car. It was much further than I thought, away up in Morayshire. I left early, but didn’t get there until about four in the afternoon.’
‘You must have felt very strange, seeing her.’
‘Did I ever! It was like looking at a little old version of myself, paler-skinned, perhaps, although Aunt Magda is nut-brown from the sun. I was determined to be completely composed when I saw her, but I couldn’t manage it. I cried a little and so did she. Poor Sandy didn’t know where to look.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Proud murmured sincerely.
‘Once we’d composed ourselves, she sat me down and gave me a cup of tea. Then I told her my story, all about my life, and how it had turned out. Finally I told her why I needed to find my mother. “I see,” she said, and then she added what struck me at the time as the strangest thing. “Do you want to know about your birth, and why you were adopted?” I realised at that moment that such a thought had never entered my head. I had come to Scotland for my daughter’s sake, not for my own: I had long since stopped thinking about how I had come to be in Barnardo’s.’ Her hand shook slightly as she picked up her coffee. ‘But I said, “Yes,” all the same. It’s a sad story, but far from unique. Genes must mean something, for my mother, like me, was a teacher. She did her training in Aberdeen, but she had a different approach to the social side. Aunt Magda described her as “a bit of a girl”, with that knowing smile people of her age are so good at. She must have been indeed, for in the summer she completed her training course, she came back home to Fochabers looking, as my aunt put it, “rather out of shape”.’
‘Pregnant?’
‘About five months, to judge from the date on my birth certificate. Now remember, Sir James, this was back in the fifties, a few years before the permissive society. My grandparents went ballistic. They threw her out, and told her that if she ever wanted to set foot in their house again, it would be without me. Aunt Magda wasn’t long married herself, and she was pregnant too, but still she took her in. When I was born . . . in those days, with no job, and no money, my mother simply couldn’t afford to keep me. Poor Magda, she said that she and Sandy wanted to bring me up as their own, but they were young and they just couldn’t afford it. On top of that, there was the question of my colour. They weren’t worried for themselves, you understand, but for me. They were afraid I’d face a lifetime of sniggering and finger-pointing. It was bad enough being illegitimate in those days, even without . . .’
‘I imagine so.’
‘And that was that. The decision was made, and Sandy got in touch with Barnardo’s: when I was less than three months old I was taken in. I was looked after in a place in North Berwick, called Glasclune. I can still remember it, just little bits: it overlooked the sea, and we could see the ships go by from our dormitories, and the lighthouses, on the Bass Rock and all along the coast. The other kids were all right: we were really well taken care of, but we all knew we were different, and that made us all a bit sad.’
‘Your mother never came to see you?’ asked Proud.
‘No. I grew up thinking that my parents were dead. Mum and Dad knew differently: they were told my background when they adopted me, but they didn’t tell me until they thought I was old enough to handle it emotionally.’
‘How old was that?’
‘Eighteen. I handled it fine: I didn’t feel rejected, I felt lucky to have such a great mum and dad.’
‘And your natural mother?’
‘She seems to have handled it as well. She went south to find work.’ Trudi Friend smiled. ‘In those days “south” in Forres meant Aberdeen, but she went much further than that. She went to Edinburgh, where jobs were plentiful. She found one in the Academy, in the junior school.’
‘Ah,’ the chief constable exclaimed. ‘I thought we’d wind up there.’
‘Yes. My mother settled in well: she got herself a room in a house and she made friends. At least that’s what she told Aunt Magda, for although she went back to her and Sandy for holidays, they never visited her. It was on her last visit that she told them about her new man. His name was Claude Bothwell, and he was on the staff of the senior school. She said that he was very handsome, very eligible and that they were engaged. This was at Easter. The way it was left, she was going to bring him up to meet them during the summer holidays. Only they never turned up. They were expecting a letter or a postcard from my mother to say when they’d be arriving . . . they didn’t have a phone then . . . but nothing came. They waited until the holidays were over, but still nothing. Eventually, Aunt Magda wrote to the address they had for Mother: after a few weeks the letter was returned, marked “gone away”. That worried them enough for Sandy to go to the public phone box and call the school. The secretary told him that neither Mr Bothwell nor my mother had returned after the break, and that as far as the headmaster was concerned, they no longer worked there. From that time on, until I got in touch with them, they heard no more of my mother. When my grandparents died, they even put death notices in the Edinburgh papers in the hope that she would see them and get in touch, but she never did.’
Proud scratched his chin. ‘That’s what happened, was it? Very interesting.’
‘So you knew Claude Bothwell?’
‘Yes, but first, can you tell me how you came to contact me?’
‘I went to the school, and I looked up the record, back to the year of their disappearance. I assumed that most, if not all, the staff would be dead or retired by now, so I looked through the senior pupils. Yours was the only name I recognised.’
‘If you’d done a little digging you’d have found a few High Court judges, but they’re all called Lord Something-or-other now, so it’s understandable that you wouldn’t have known them.’
‘What can you t
ell me about Bothwell?’ she asked him.
‘Not very much, I’m afraid. He taught French and German, and was unwise enough to wear a small moustache, so inevitably we all called him Adolf. I don’t remember him being especially handsome, but we tended not to think of our teachers in that way . . . at least we didn’t in those days. As for being eligible,’ he hesitated, ‘I’m afraid the same applies. I’m sorry I don’t remember your mother at all, but I’d have been long gone from the junior school by the time she arrived.’
‘Do you remember anything about their disappearance, or his, at least?’
‘A little. I was head boy when it happened; I was also doing a crash course in German in my final year. Our first class was on the opening day of term and we were supposed to have Adolf, but one of the other teachers turned up instead. Afterwards, the rector called me in and told me, as a courtesy, that he wouldn’t be coming back. But that’s all he told me, I’m afraid.’
Trudi Friend could not keep the disappointment from her face, although he could see that she was trying. ‘Thank you, Sir James,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘I should have known that it was too much to expect any more than that, given all the time that’s passed.’
‘You have no other leads?’
‘None. I’m afraid I’ve hit the wall. My daughter will be disappointed, but that’s too bad. There’s no more I can do.’
‘Let’s not be so hasty,’ said Proud. ‘Now I know more about the situation, I may be able to do some digging. Most of my classmates are still around. Let me make a few enquiries and see how far I can get. I’m not proposing an official investigation, you understand, but I am a policeman, after all. Can you give me your date of birth, and your mother’s?’
‘Yes. I have a folder with all the information in it, including the genealogist’s report, and copies of my birth certificate and hers. I brought it with me today, just in case you wanted to see it.’
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