“There are ways and means,” said Nevada with what I thought was altogether too much eagerness. But he shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
“Now I have a question for you,” I said. “Do you think the vicar at the time was in on it? The whole fake burial and decoy grave? Not to mention the real grave with a pseudonym on the head stone?”
“I don’t see why not,” said the Colonel. “The old man was good friends with our vicar. They were as thick as thieves. They used to tell each other lies about their heroic exploits in the war. The vicar parachuted into Antwerp, apparently. My father’s lies principally pertained to the war in North Africa. Anyway I don’t see any problem there, especially since you said he donated a large sum of money to the church.”
“For maintaining the grave,” I said.
“Yes, they probably did a bit of that in return for getting their hands on the money.” Not a big fan of the Church, evidently, the Colonel.
We were all silent for a while as the train swept along. The speeding view of the Kentish countryside had faded from the window as daylight fled, to be replaced by our own reflections. Finally the Colonel said, “The old man wasn’t so bad. You can’t imagine the abuse that was aimed at Valerie when she had a child out of wedlock—and didn’t even try to hide the fact. It was like she was the whore of Babylon.” He gave us a mirthless smile. “But when it turned out to be a little boy, our father was willing to let bygones be bygones. At least where Valerie and Cecilia were concerned. There wasn’t going to be any reconciliation with me.” He shook his head and peered fiercely at his reflection. “I guess he didn’t need me. There was going to be another male Drummond for him to pass the torch to.”
He suddenly looked at us. “That’s why I want to find him,” he said. “To find Tom. Because now it’s me who needs to pass the torch to him.”
I was surprised that this hard-headed man was letting himself open up to such a distant hope. There was virtually no chance we’d find out what became of the boy, and even less chance that he was still alive.
He must have sensed what I was thinking because he said, “At least I have to know what happened to him.”
26. CARD TABLE
The initial list of likely prospects I’d been given by the Colonel and Lucy had featured eleven names. Four of these had proved stubbornly untraceable, four of them had died—one, Jack Welland, suffocated under a pillow at his hospice just days before I’d managed to interview him—and three had proved both alive and traceable. Of this lucky trio I’d so far managed to speak to Nic Vardy and Erik Make Loud. The remaining name was Penny Sheridan, Valerian’s business manager. I’d never actually succeeded in getting a phone number for her but, after much persistence and hassle, I’d eventually elicited an email address.
I got hold of it just after our grave-robbing adventure and, following a rather guarded exchange of emails, at least guarded on her part, I’d finally managed to get her to agree to talk to us. I had mostly achieved this through the stratagem of buttering her up about her rare, possibly even unique, position as a female business manager of one of the leading rock bands of the 1960s. No doubt this gave her all sorts of unique—that word again—perspective and insights and so forth.
Nevada would reliably help me enlarge on this blarney when we met with the unique Mrs Sheridan this Friday, on her houseboat in Twickenham.
The night before, I sent an email confirming our meeting. On Friday morning, Nevada was feeding the cats and choosing her outfit—the fantasy of being a producer had led her to begin acquiring what amounted to a whole new wardrobe—when I got the reply. The subject line was just a repeat of the one I’d used—Confirming our meeting tomorrow—so the actual contents of the message came as quite a shock.
This is Penny’s husband using her computer. I am wrapping up her affairs. I’m afraid Penny has died. So as you can see there isn’t a great deal of point you coming to speak to us. I don’t think I can tell you any of the things you would want to know for your documentary and, as you can imagine, I have a great deal else on my mind.
I emailed back saying how terribly sorry I was to hear the news and asking him, quite legitimately and naturally I thought, what had so suddenly happened to her. I held my breath, waiting for a reply. It came in the form of six words.
Traffic accident. Hit-and-run driver.
I went into the bedroom to tell Nevada to forget about choosing her producer’s costume and I showed her the emails. She looked at them, then looked at me. She said, “I went to Paranoia Heights and all I got was this lousy suspicion and anxiety.”
“Very good,” I said.
“I managed to get ‘lousy’ in there this time.”
“So I noticed.”
* * *
The following day had been appointed by Tinkler for our visit to the Evil Elves to look through their collection of records, including the ones left behind by Valerian’s entourage. Tinkler himself had been looking forward to it with considerable excitement. This manifested itself in a number of exuberant phone calls, texts and tweets, the most recent and least obscene of which was We’re going to fleece those yokels for their vinyl! His only regret was that Clean Head was working on the weekend and wouldn’t be able to join us.
Then, late that evening, he called to say he couldn’t make it.
“What do you mean, you can’t make it? You set the whole thing in motion.”
“I know, I know, but Henry, my boss, wants me to go into the office tomorrow and look at something.”
“Not another emergency repair job?”
“Just as long as I go in tomorrow it won’t be an emergency. Anyway, there’s no way out of it.”
“So do you want us to postpone it?”
“Fleecing the Evil Elves of their rare vinyl? Don’t talk crazy. Strike while the iron is hot. They might suddenly realise they’re sitting on a treasure trove and jack the prices up. No, what I want you to do is go up there as my proxy, hoover up anything of any value and rob them blind. Is that quite clear?”
“I think I’ve got it.”
“In particular I want you to look for a copy of—”
“The original Decca pressing of the Artwoods,” I said. “Yes.”
“The one with the Mod cover.”
“Yes, yes, yes. You do realise that just talking about it doesn’t make it any more likely for us to find it.”
“It doesn’t make it any less likely, either,” he said, with irrefutable logic. I hung up as Nevada came into the room. “We’re going without Tinkler tomorrow,” I said.
“What? After he set it all up?”
“That’s what I said.”
Nevada shook her head. “Typical.”
“He’s going to lend us the car, though.”
“It’s the least he can do.”
Before we turned in that night I got in touch with Timothy Treverton, the more ambulatory of the Evil Elves. I didn’t have his phone number or email address so I contacted him the same way Tinkler had done, via his Facebook page. I felt a sick little lurch of anticipatory fear in my stomach when I sent him a message confirming our meeting the following day.
But I got a reply almost immediately, assuring me that everything was okay. He must have been online right then. It seemed like a serendipitous coincidence, but for all I knew he was a social networking obsessive and never away from the keyboard.
That being the case, I decided to send him another message. It was a question I had intended to ask him tomorrow, but since he seemed to be online now and downright chatty I didn’t see any point in delaying.
I mentioned how clever I thought it was, shifting Valerian’s tree the way they had. And I asked him whether they’d got the idea from Colonel Drummond.
The thing was, the decoy principle involved was virtually identical to that of the false grave in Canterbury. And it had been bothering me.
It just seemed like too much of a coincidence.
But his reply
was terse and perhaps even a little offended.
No, we thought of it ourselves.
I shrugged and decided to call it a day before I ruffled any more feathers. I was reaching out my hand to shut the laptop when a pinging noise told me another message had arrived. It was from Timothy Treverton. I had a second of worry that he was cancelling our visit. But instead, it read:
Actually Gordon says it was Colonel Drummond’s idea.
So that at least explained that. And it made the shrewd old man take on a further dimension of reality in my mind. I wondered if maybe he was the key to this whole thing. Could he have snatched the little boy? Why? Because he didn’t approve of the way his daughters were bringing the child up? It was a motive of sorts.
But if so, what had happened to the kid?
I went to bed more full of questions than ever, and I was barely awake when Nevada threw me a curveball. She did it very nicely over breakfast—I should have suspected something when she offered to prepare the coffee and croissants—but a curveball, nonetheless. “I was on the Internet yesterday,” she said.
“Always a bad thing,” I said.
“Don’t be so cynical. I was just doing some research, since we are driving off to hell and gone today.”
“If by ‘hell and gone’ you mean in the general direction of Cambridge…”
“I do. And as it happens I have found a vintage clothes shop nearby.”
“Nearby where?”
“Close to where the Evil Elves dwell. Very close. Well, quite close.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously.
“And it looks like it really is wonderful, this shop. Potentially wonderful. Full of great stuff. But, as you know with these intriguing bohemian-type places, it’s almost a legal requirement for them to keep irregular and inconvenient hours. To cut a long story short, it will be closed by the time we get there, if we stick to our original plan.” She leaned over and kissed me. “So I was thinking we could go to the Evil Elves early. Then we can do both.” She checked the clock. “But we need to set off soon.”
So we left some biscuits for the cats along with a road atlas of Great Britain open to the correct page, in case they wanted to see where we were going. We caught a bus to Putney and went around to Tinkler’s house. He had long since gone to work but as he had promised the car was parked outside.
And, also as promised, the keys were tucked behind the rear number plate, which hinged cunningly down to reveal the concealed cap of the fuel tank. This arrangement had given Tinkler conniptions when he’d taken the car in for the first time to fill it up. He had searched frantically for somewhere to stick the nozzle, wondering if somehow his sister had managed to buy him a car that you couldn’t put petrol into. “I wouldn’t put anything past Maggie,” he’d said.
We started the car and turned onto the Upper Richmond Road, heading for Kew and points north. I had sent a message by Facebook before we’d set off, telling Timothy Treverton to expect us a couple of hours earlier than previously arranged and hoping this wouldn’t be a problem. I couldn’t see that it would be, largely because I couldn’t see the Evil Elves having gone anywhere this morning, or indeed ever leaving their house. Although I supposed they must do from time to time, if only to buy new jigsaw puzzles.
I hadn’t received a reply, though, and when we were on the road Nevada tried to contact him again using her smartphone but the coverage was intermittent and we didn’t get a response. Finally we were so close to our destination I told her to give up trying.
Approaching the house and seeing that tree covered with memorials felt very different this time, knowing it to be a fraud. Strange—the way this utterly altered everything. I wondered how the thousands of adherents who had visited over the years and left their offerings to Valerian would feel if they knew the truth.
“I hope nobody fucking well calls me Snowball this time,” said Nevada, staring ahead at the house.
The flagstones of the driveway were covered ankle-deep with a rustling carpet of windblown leaves, but other than that the place looked much the same. The house itself appeared deserted, but it had last time as well so I didn’t necessarily let that worry me. We parked Tinkler’s little car and walked up to the green front door.
It was open.
We looked at each other. “Maybe they’re expecting us,” said Nevada.
“And they just want us to walk in? They just leave the door open?”
She shrugged. “Well, they certainly don’t have to worry about the heat escaping. The place was like a crypt last time, do you remember?” I did. I also remembered that the doorbell didn’t seem to work, so there was no point trying that. So we walked into the house. There were leaves on the floor inside, blown in by the autumn wind. The place was dark and might have been untenanted for years. We walked along the hall. Working from memory and, I suppose, precedent, we made our way towards the kitchen. Leaning against the wall by the doorway was the folding card table that I recognised as the one Gordon had used for his jigsaw puzzles. I wondered what it was doing down here.
“Hello,” we called as we stepped through the open door of the kitchen.
There was a flurry of movement from the shadowed recesses of the room, a strange high-pitched sound, and then something came flickering towards us, moving too fast for the eye to identify.
A sharp chunking sound registered an emphatic impact. I turned my head to look at what had made the sound and for one hallucinatory instant I thought some kind of living feathered creature had buried itself into the wall between us.
It was an arrow.
* * *
The thing about a bow and arrow is that, as an indoor weapon, it is virtually useless. Of course, it is equally true that if you turn your back on someone wielding such a weapon and proceed to flee you could end up in the embarrassing situation of having an arrow sticking in your back in a potentially lethal manner.
Which is why we did what we did, instead.
We picked up the card table and, holding it in front of us, walked rapidly into the kitchen, moving towards rather than away from our assailant. An abrupt rapping sound and the sudden appearance of a gleaming triangle of metal poking through the table announced the arrival of another arrow. It also confirmed we were heading in exactly the right direction. So we picked up speed and drove the table in front of us like a battering ram.
Its effectiveness was indicated by the thud of collision and the cry of pain that instantly followed. Nevada suddenly dropped her end of the table and reached down to scrabble on the floor for something. She stood up, grinning at me fiercely and clutching the bow, a long, wicked curve of dark wood with yellow tape in the middle to form a hand grip. Good girl. We’d neutralised our opponent.
Who turned out to be Timothy Treverton.
He was dressed in a tatty, yellow dressing gown with white trim. His bony legs were bare and he was wearing grubby tartan slippers. All of which made the leather quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder even more absurd—not so absurd that he hadn’t almost killed us, though. He stared at me wildly.
“It’s you,” he said.
“What the fuck were you doing shooting arrows at us?” I said. We might have walked in uninvited, but as far as I was concerned, nothing warranted his potentially murderous and vastly stupid behaviour. Now that I had got over being scared I was suddenly very angry.
Treverton’s voice dropped. “There’s someone in the house. Someone else. I heard them talking. They’re going to kill us. They’ve got guns.” His eyes weren’t any less wild, and I was on the point of deciding that he must be on something, or simply off his rocker, when Nevada called out sharply.
“Look!”
She was standing at the window staring out. I went to the window and then hurried past it to the back door, which I flung open. Outside, the big open back yard of the house stretched towards a grey stone wall. Running across the leaf-strewn lawn among the trees was a man. He was going hell for leather and very clearly wanted to get away
from us.
He was already at a considerable distance but I could see he was heavily built and had dark hair. When he glanced back over his shoulder I saw the heavy black-rimmed glasses he was wearing. Behind me Nevada said, “Does he look like the bloke from the house in Canterbury? The one with the petrol?”
I stared after him. He had almost reached the wall, but I’d got a pretty good look. “He does,” I said.
Close by my ear there was a sharp, not-quite-musical sound and—almost as if in response to the sound—the man suddenly fell onto the leaf-strewn lawn. It was only when he staggered to his feet that I saw the feathered shaft sticking out of his shoulder. I turned around to see Timothy Treverton staring in astonishment and Nevada holding the bow and nodding.
“I told you I was rather good,” she said with satisfaction. “Nice to know I haven’t lost my touch.”
At the far end of the garden, at the top of the stone wall, another man appeared. He was young and thin, dressed in what looked like blue overalls. As far as I could tell, he was no one I’d ever seen before. His wounded companion staggered towards him and, between them, they managed to drag him over the wall, despite the arrow in his shoulder.
We went out and approached the wall. Timothy Treverton had said something about guns, so we approached with great caution. But even before we got there we heard an engine start and speed away. It sounded like something bigger than a car. A van, maybe. I peered carefully over the wall, but all I could see was an empty country lane with a little ring of dried leaves dancing in the middle of it in the wake of a departed vehicle. I dropped back into the garden and looked at Nevada. We both shivered, in response to the cold wind and perhaps also in simple reaction to what had happened.
We went back inside to find Timothy, bizarrely, making a pot of tea. His hands were shaking, though, and so was his voice as he called out, “You can come out now, Gordie. They’re gone.” There was the rattling of a latch and then the pantry door sprang open and Gordon Treverton rolled out in his wheelchair. He glanced at me, and then at Nevada.
The Run-Out Groove Page 25