‘Was there no better information as to what had actually taken place?’ said Richard, choosing his words carefully. What he really meant was whether any bodies had been recovered from the fire and Dumas understood and appreciated his delicacy.
‘You will appreciate that this was a time of political turmoil, with violent anti-colonial unrest and a hostile, uncooperative population. One other body was found in the ashes, but it was an adult male. The regiment scoured the countryside for miles around, sometimes brutalizing the locals in their anger at the revolt and the loss of French lives, but of the amah and our child, there was no sign. I spent two months contacting every organization I could — embassies, military and the Red Cross, all without avail. There was no news nor sighting of either Maurice or Sukhon. Then I was sent home and although I never ceased to seek information, nothing was ever forthcoming.’
Both Richard and Angela were beginning to wonder where this tragic story was leading and how it could possibly involve them, when Monsieur Dumas continued his story.
‘I was posted to a staff position in the War Ministry, probably out of sympathy for our loss in the line of duty. Emily and I lived in Paris and slowly she recovered, though the catastrophe undoubtedly put a strain on our marriage for some time. Eventually in 1934, our second son, Victor, was born and after what had happened, he was cherished perhaps even more than was good for him. Gradually our lives returned to what passed for normality, until the war came and in 1940 we had to flee to London. The rest I think I have mentioned to you before, that I fell ill and was pensioned off on medical grounds. Somehow, when peace came, France had lost its attraction for us, as both my parents had been killed during the war. Eventually I became the beneficiary of their estate and became financially independent.’
Richard thought that this was a considerable understatement, but it was none of his concern.
‘So you came to Wales and went back to your traditional family roots — making wine?’ he said, to lighten the rather sombre atmosphere.
Louis Dumas nodded. ‘Yes, and we have settled into a quiet, peaceful mode of life for the past ten years. Now Victor is twenty-one and, thankfully, is very interested in the vineyard. He is keen to take over the management as I get older and he has ambitious plans for its extension.’
Angela began to wonder what their problems could be, as it sounded as if they were living an idyllic life, being well off, with a pleasant house, a satisfying occupation and what sounded like a devoted son. However, Richard was beginning to guess the direction in which the story was leading, but he made no attempt to anticipate Louis’s narrative.
‘We heard no more for many years, until about four weeks ago, when I had a telephone call from London. It was a man calling himself Pierre Fouret and claiming to be my long-lost son Maurice!’
There was a strained silence for a moment, broken only by a stifled sob from Madame Dumas.
‘You must have been shocked!’ exclaimed Angela, with spontaneous sympathy. ‘What did you say?’
Louis ran a hand slowly over his brushed-back hair. ‘I was not so much shocked as a little angry — and curious as to how he had obtained my address. Though for years I had desperately sought out information about Maurice, this was the first time that anyone had approached me on the matter.’
‘Did he explain himself?’ asked Richard.
‘He was very polite and restrained, apologizing for springing such a momentous matter on me without warning, but said he could explain all the circumstances, if I would be willing to meet him.’
‘Did he not give you at least an idea of his story?’ asked Angela. ‘It sounds very much like some kind of confidence trick.’
Louis shook his head. ‘He said it was too complicated to explain on the telephone, but he was sure that he could satisfy any doubts I may have. He asked if we could meet at any location that I cared to suggest.’
‘What did he sound like?’ asked Angela, fascinated by the strange story. ‘And what language were you using?’
‘He had excellent French, but with a strange accent that had a North American twang, but I was sure it also had an Asian element in it — which was partly why I didn’t dismiss him as an obvious impostor and slam the phone down.’
Monsieur Dumas looked across at his wife, who was sitting bolt upright on the settee, agitatedly twisting a small handkerchief between her fingers.
‘I told the man that I would consider meeting him after discussing the matter with my wife and asked him to call back later that day. I was almost afraid to tell Emily, in case it aroused false hopes which would almost certainly come to nothing.’
The French woman spoke for the first time since the story began unfolding. ‘I’m now sure that he is genuinely my son Maurice, but Louis is still very cautious,’ she said very quietly, before he continued.
‘On that first day, both of us were naturally extremely dubious, suspecting that we were dealing with some form of scam, as I think the Americans call it. But after a long talk, we felt we could not risk rejecting any further contact with the caller in case he had some genuine information, so when he phoned later that day, I arranged to meet him on neutral ground, so to speak.’
Louis Dumas went on to relate the rest of this remarkable story, which Richard felt was highly ingenious and detailed, even if it eventually proved to be a tissue of lies. He arranged to meet the alleged Maurice in the lounge bar of the Angel Hotel in Cardiff, an easy place for both to rendezvous, the stranger coming by train from Paddington and Louis driving the dozen miles from his vineyard.
‘It was obviously going to be a fraught meeting, but the young man handled it impeccably. He did not throw his arms about me and cry “Father”, but offered a polite handshake and an invitation to take lunch after a drink.’
‘Did his physical appearance offer any help?’ asked Angela, now completely hooked by the drama.
‘Not really. He was a pleasant, but ordinary-looking young man, of an apparent age that matched what Maurice would have been now, just twenty-six years old. He was quite well dressed, though not ostentatiously so.’
‘Did you recognize any family resemblance at all?’ asked Richard.
Louis replied that there seemed to be no features that resembled either his wife or himself, but equally nothing to suggest any exclusion. ‘You’ve seen Victor, our other son, Doctor Pryor. He also has no marked resemblance to either Emily or me.’
He continued his account of the strange meeting in the Angel Hotel. The young man said that he was a French-Canadian, living in Montreal under the name Pierre Fouret. He said that he would explain the different name shortly and that actually he had grown up thinking that his name was Annan Thongchai!’
A tortuous story emerged, which Louis said made it almost believable, for how else could such a fantasy be constructed without a basis of truth?
‘Pierre’ was less than a year old when he vanished from Yen Bai and his first memories were of living in a remote village with his ‘mother’, Sukhon Thongchai. Later it emerged that this was in eastern Siam, a region flooded with refugees from the war across the frontier in French Indo-China. Though he had jet-black hair, it was obvious that he was European, but he was accepted by the village community and was brought up in infancy as a Siamese, the only language he knew apart from a smattering of French that Sukhon had picked up in Yen Bai. She eked out a living as a seamstress and with the charity of her extensive family, as this was her home village before she went away to work. Pierre Fouret did not know how his appearance was explained, but later assumed that the village accepted that some virile French soldier had ‘put her in the family way’, in spite of his lack of any Asian features. He accepted Sukhon as his mother and only in later childhood did he become curious as to his different appearance, about which his mother was always evasive. In retrospect, it was apparent that the barren woman had always been yearning for a child of her own and the flight from the rebellion had given her an opportunity to abduct Maurice and make her way
home to her village in Siam.
Louis broke off his long explanation to ask for more tea and Angela took the opportunity to fill up all around.
‘But how did this Pierre get to know all this detail?’ asked Richard, as fascinated as his partner with the story.
‘Be patient with me, doctor,’ replied Louis with a wan smile. ‘I will be coming to that very soon.’
When he resumed, he explained how this potentially unstable situation was again thrown into chaos in 1940, when the Japanese occupied Indo-China, now administered by Vichy-France. Sukhon and her family knew that it was only a matter of time before the Japanese invaded Thailand, as Siam was called after the 1934 revolution. Realizing that such an obviously European boy might become a target for the invaders, she reluctantly took her adopted son to a Catholic orphanage near Bangkok, persuading the Thai sisters to shelter him.
‘They were unwilling at first,’ declared Louis, ‘but Sukhon claimed that he was the child of a French soldier and his wife, who were killed in the insurrections of a decade earlier. She was deliberately vague as to how she had saved the child, but said she had found him abandoned during the turmoil, and escaped with him to her village over the border.’
Being French, and hence a Catholic, the sisters were persuaded and they kept him in the convent for several months, until they managed to place him with an expatriate French-Canadian couple who were patrons of the orphanage. Lucas Fouret and his wife, Angelique, had lived in Bangkok for several years, as he was the senior representative of a Canadian farm machinery company. Childless, they agreed to unofficially adopt Annan Thongchai and as this was patently not his birth name, they decided to call him Pierre. But yet again, total disruption descended upon them, as soon after being taken into the Fouret household in a suburb of Bangkok, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and immediately demanded that Thailand allowed their armies to cross the country to invade British Malaya and Burma. The Thai government capitulated after only eight hours’ armed resistance and the Fourets lost no time in catching a train from Bangkok down to Penang and then on to Singapore.
‘Thankfully, they kept ahead of the invading Japanese,’ said Louis Dumas. ‘They were lucky enough to get a ship to Australia and then another onward to the United States, from where they reached their home city of Montreal. From then on, Pierre led the life of a normal French-Canadian youth, soon becoming fluent in French.
‘He now looked on the Fourets as his parents and, when he left school, his adopted father found him a job in the tractor company, where he flourished so that now he is one of the European sales team.’
Monsieur Dumas seemed to come to a turning point in his narrative and, putting his cup and saucer back on the low table, he continued more briskly, as if he was determined to put sadness aside and get to the point of this meeting.
‘You might be wondering how Pierre tracked us down after all these years. He explained that when he became a teenager, the Fourets gradually told him what they knew of his past, having learned all there was from the nuns in Thailand, who in turn had been given a sketchy version by the amah, Sukhon. She had never divulged where she ‘found’ the child nor who the true parents were and Pierre suspected that she had hoped to reclaim him from the orphanage, if no problems had arisen from the Japanese occupation. He happily accepted his new life in Canada and it was only when he began working that the urge to seek his past roots developed. He began making enquiries, hoping to trace Sukhon, but the orphanage had closed down during the war and the nuns were dispersed.
Then he was sent for several months to Paris as a sales representative for his company and took the opportunity to seek information from the relevant newspapers of the time and the archives of the Ministry of Defence. Many of the army records had been lost during the various wars, but eventually he tracked down the siege of Yen Bai, which would have been when he was a small infant.
Then his researches at last came upon the tragedy of the missing child of Captain and Madame Louis Dumas. Convinced that he must be the missing boy, he then had to trace them and further problems arose from the reluctance of the military authorities to divulge personal information. However, with the help of the Red Cross, they were tracked first to London and then, through Louis’s pension payments, to the address in South Wales.
He managed to get a temporary transfer to the British sales office in Slough and made his first contact by telephone.
‘And that is where our bittersweet problems began!’ said Louis Dumas, pensively.
SIXTEEN
On the first day of Christmas week, there was a development in the efforts of the Birmingham police to move forward their investigation into the Winson Green murder, as it had become known. A period of frustrating stagnation had occurred since the head had been matched to the bog body. Attempts to find Mickey Doyle’s former gangsters and winkle information out of them had proved futile. A couple of minor thugs had been unearthed who had once been associated with his felonies, but they steadfastly denied knowing anything about the bizarre corpse, other than that, years ago, the head had occasionally been exhibited during drunken revels at the Barley Mow.
Then on that Monday, a letter addressed ‘To Whom it May Concern’ arrived at the police headquarters and rapidly filtered down to the detective chief superintendent. After reading the short message, he hurried to the ACC’s office and within an hour, a conference was being held in his room, to which DI Trevor Hartnell had hastened up from Winson Green.
Several other senior CID men were present and their chief lost no time in passing around copies of the letter that had arrived in the morning’s post. Eyebrows were raised as they scanned the brief note and a DCI muttered, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ as his comment on the news.
‘May be a red herring, of course,’ cautioned the chief. ‘There may have been more than one Batman tattoo in Britain at that time!’
He cleared his throat and read the letter aloud, to impress it on his listeners. ‘He says, “I am an antiques dealer in Ludlow, having been in business there for many years. Yesterday, I happened to see in a copy of the Birmingham Post, which was wrapped around a delivery, a request for any information about a man with a Batman tattoo, of which there was a sketch in the article. I recall seeing a man in late 1944, who had an identical tattoo on his upper arm. I could give some further details if they were of interest to you… Yours sincerely, Bertram Tomlinson.”’
He looked around at his audience for a response.
‘Seems that the Chief Constable’s idea about publicity paid off,’ offered a DCI from the Division adjacent to Hartnell’s.
‘But why the hell didn’t he give us the details he mentioned?’
Lively speculation followed, but the chief super cut it short with a decisive order. ‘Hartnell, you’re still the prime investigating officer, so get yourself down to Ludlow straight away to see this chap. I’ll fix it with the Shropshire force, to tell them you are on their territory. Squeeze what you can from this fellow and let me know what you find.’
Inside another hour, Trevor Hartnell was in a plain black Ford Consul with Sergeant Rickman driving him south-west towards Kidderminster and onward to Ludlow, which was almost on the Welsh border. Hartnell had never been there before and was impressed by the medieval feel of the little town, perched on a hill alongside a huge castle, its narrow streets abounding with half-timbered buildings. Tom Rickman manoeuvred the Ford through the congested lanes to find Broad Street, which was the address on the copy of the letter which Hartnell held on his knee.
‘Tomlinson’s Antiques… there’s the place,’ he pointed out. Broad Street lived up to its name as there were some empty parking spaces and, moments later, the bell inside the double-fronted shop tinkled as they went in. A gloomy cavern, half-filled with furniture and scattered remnants of past years, led back to an area partitioned off by frosted glass panels. As they approached, a figure came out warned by the bell. It was a cadaverous old man, stooped and slow-moving. Fancifully, Trevor felt he ha
d been transported back into a Dickens novel — the shopkeeper was not actually wearing woollen mittens and round spectacles, but he did have a long, shapeless brown cardigan over a waistcoat.
The policemen displayed their identifying warrant cards and Hartnell explained that they had come in response to his letter, thanking him for his public-spiritedness. Bertram Tomlinson seemed amazed at the rapid reaction and invited them into his glassed-in den, which was awash with papers and documents overflowing from a large desk. He found two hard chairs for them and sat behind the desk, after they had politely refused his offer to make them a cup of tea.
‘We were most interested in your statement that you recall seeing a man with that unique tattoo, sir.’
Tomlinson’s scraggy head bobbed, his thin grey hair becoming even more dishevelled. ‘I had no idea it was something called “Batman” until I read that newspaper on Friday,’ he said.
‘It’s from an American cartoon character, sir. But tell me, in what circumstances did you see this device?’
The old man explained that towards the end of the war, he was visiting the weekly market in Castle Square in the centre of the town, always on the lookout for articles for his shop.
‘Most of the stalls were for produce and used clothing, but there were some bric-a-brac dealers who sometimes had items of interest to me. This day, I saw a nice Georgian card table and, rather to my surprise, the stallholder accepted a low offer that I made without too much haggling.’
‘Was he the man with the tattoo?’ asked Rickman.
‘No, he was a heavily built man with a strong foreign accent. I paid cash for it — twenty pounds, I recall — but as it was too awkward for me to carry away, the man offered to drop it from his van when they closed up for the day.’
He went on to describe how the purchase was delivered to Broad Street just after five o’clock. ‘It was a very hot day and when the van arrived outside, the driver got out and carried the table into the shop. After exerting himself, he took off his shirt to cool down and as I gave him a half-crown tip for the delivery, I noticed this very odd tattoo on his arm.’
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