Forgotten Voices

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘I saw Mac the other week,’ Andrew said.

  ‘At the funeral? That was a sad business. I get the impression he’s not making much progress.’

  Andrew smiled at her. ‘And?’

  Rina laughed. ‘And, he asked me to have a quiet word about your friend Dan Marsden next time I saw you.’

  Andrew laughed softly. ‘Dan turned up at the funeral, of course. I thought Mac seemed a bit too interested. Rina, what can I tell you? He and his family are well off, have a philanthropic bent and a hell of a lot of business acumen. They found a way of combining the two, I suppose.’

  Rina nodded. ‘I’ve already done some background research,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s Dan that he’s interested in.’

  ‘Dan. Right. But what does he want to know? Dan’s never got on the wrong side of the law as far as I know. He went off to university and then joined the family business. I think he studied business and law, but it might have been accountancy or something. I don’t remember. He’s married with two kids. I’ve met them a few times. Her name’s Holly but can’t say I know her.’

  ‘He’d been engaged before,’ Rina said.

  Andrew thought for a moment. ‘I’d forgotten about her. Not that I really knew her either. He was away at university, I think. So was I. Before that, when we were both at school, he’d dated a girl called Yvonne Castle. Lucky beggar.’ Andrew laughed at the memory. ‘Blonde hair, legs up to … well, you get the picture. I think they broke up just after he’d gone away, then something happened. Car crash, accident. I don’t remember what.’

  ‘And the first engagement?’

  Andrew shrugged. ‘Sorry, Rina. We weren’t close friends at school, moved into very different circles. He was one of the popular kids. I sat in the corner and read books. My Saturday nights were spent watching videos or maybe meeting mates in the pub. I expect his were spent in nightclubs and posh hotels or whatever else young kids with money do, especially when mummy and daddy trot them out on every possible occasion and make sure they meet all the right people. I think he went out with Carrie Butler for a while.’

  ‘Heiress to the Breed Estate?’

  ‘Heiress is pushing it. Anyway, I suppose she’s more like the owner now. I think she inherited more debt than cash, it’s taken her the past five years and a lot of slimming down to get it back on track. She’s a nice woman, is Carrie Butler.’

  ‘And Dan Marsden is not a nice man?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Rina.’ He grinned at her. ‘Look, like I said, Dan and I knew one another but we were never friends. I interview him on a regular basis, like I told Mac, and we run into one another at the same events. He’s usually a guest and I’m usually one of the hacks filling space in the local rag.’

  ‘But your impression is?’

  ‘My impression is … what’s Mac’s interest anyway?’

  ‘He knew Ellen Tailor, apparently. I think he’s just spreading the net.’

  ‘Rina?’

  She raised her hands in mock surrender. ‘I know nothing,’ she protested. ‘Really, Andrew, I think he’s just at a loss and looking at everything.’

  ‘I think it’s one of the family,’ Andrew said. ‘Daphne isn’t a nice woman.’

  ‘But a murderer?’

  Andrew shrugged. ‘Anyone can kill, I suppose.’

  Simeon turned his attention back to the table and drained his coffee, a sure sign that he was ready to head for home.

  ‘Look, I’ll put a pack together for you. Interviews I’ve done and that sort of thing. You might find something interesting, I suppose?’

  Simeon stood up. ‘Bye, Rina. Are we going now?’

  ‘Bye, Simeon. I’ll see you next week.’

  Simeon smiled and again the blue grey eyes were full of life and Rina fancied she caught a glimpse of the young man he might have become if the accident hadn’t taken that chance away.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The curtains at Stone End cottage were closed. CSI had finished with the place, he had been told, and they had left the cottage as they had found it; as William Trent had left it, prepared for his return late, after the dance at the airfield.

  This time, Mac had brought Andy with him.

  No one had been left on duty but the front and back doors had been sealed with blue and white tape. Officially, this was only a secondary crime scene. No one had died here – at least not recently and violently. He’d been told that Carrie Butler had promised to keep an eye on the place, but he guessed that would just mean a quick check maybe once a day.

  Mac unlocked the door and then broke the tape. He reached in and switched on the hall light before entering.

  ‘Let’s get the curtains open,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll start upstairs. CSI have taken the computer but everything else is in place.’

  ‘Right,’ Andy said. ‘Are we expecting any help or is it just us?’

  Mac laughed. ‘Actually, I told Kendall we could manage. I want to get a feel for the man. I can’t do that with too many bodies around.’

  ‘Right.’ Andy sounded dubious.

  ‘Frank says you’ve got a good eye for detail,’ Mac said. ‘So let’s put it to the test, shall we?’

  Upstairs was a single bedroom, a tiny boxroom used for storage and a neat bathroom with a very small corner bath.

  ‘They probably split the second bedroom in half,’ Andy commented. ‘I can see why the estate sold this one off instead of making it into a holiday let. It’s way off the road, going to be impossible to get to in winter and you could only really let to couples. Or maybe a couple with a baby. And there’s no central heating.’

  Mac nodded. It was chilly upstairs and he guessed it would soon be damp if the cottage was left unoccupied for long. An electric heater combined with a light kept the bathroom warm and another electric heater had been plugged into a wall socket in the bedroom. There had once been a fireplace. The surround and hearth remained but the grate had been blocked off.

  ‘Start over there,’ Mac said, pointing to the chest of drawers. ‘I’ll take the wardrobe and the bedside table.’

  For a while, they worked in silence. Andy examining the socks and underwear and shirts. Beneath the newspaper liners and beneath the drawers themselves. Nothing concealed under the mattress. Trousers and jackets and a long winter coat in the wardrobe. Shoes and boots. Nothing inside. Andy helped Mac to ease it from the wall but apart from a coat hanger and a pile of fluff there was nothing to see.

  No dressing table. The room was too small for that and William’s hair brush and clothes brush were set on the chest of drawers alongside two candle sticks and a pack of household candles and a box of matches. He’d lived there long enough to be prepared for power cuts, Mac thought.

  He checked the bedside drawers. Found a hip flask, half full of brandy, more candles and a little candle stand. A paperback book on the Spanish Civil War, an illustration of Guernica on the cover. Mac frowned; he’d thought that picture was done to commemorate something in World War Two but acknowledged he may well have been wrong. He flicked through the pages and checked the flysheet but there was no inscription.

  A quick look beneath the bedside rug and a check of the floorboards and that was the bedroom done.

  ‘You look at the bathroom and then join me in the boxroom,’ Mac told Andy. ‘Then we’ll move downstairs.’

  The boxroom had been given over purely to storage. There was not even a curtain at the window. Three – empty – suitcases had been stacked against the wall and most of the remaining space had been filled by boxes of books and, from the look of the dust, none of them had been looked at in a while.

  Andy joined him with nothing to report from the bathroom and together they brushed off the dust and flicked through the books. Apart from the odd bookmark or the occasional sliver of paper serving the same purpose, there was nothing. Mac paused to look at the pages that had been marked, but could see nothing that identified the pages as important to anyone other that William Trent.


  ‘Downstairs?’

  Andy nodded. ‘Cup of coffee? I’ve got a flask and Mum did me a pack up for us to share.’

  ‘I always did like your mum.’

  Andy went back to the car to collect refreshments and Mac went through to the kitchen. The units were old and basic but everything was very clean and very neat. A single mug had been washed and then inverted on the draining board.

  Mac started on his perusal of the cupboards but found nothing out of place. He was checking behind the fridge when Andy returned.

  ‘Thought you’d got lost.’

  ‘Just talking to a farmer called Jenkins. He saw the curtains open and came to see who was here. Apparently he saw Trent regularly on the path to the Tailor farm and they talked sometimes.’

  ‘And did they talk about anything relevant?’

  ‘Probably not. Jenkins has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this place, though. Says it’s always been unlucky.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Apparently someone was murdered here. A couple. With a shotgun. But don’t get excited, it was years ago, during the Second World War.’

  ‘Right. And did this Jenkins enjoy watching your reaction when he told you that?’

  ‘I think you could say that. Find anything yet?’

  ‘Not so far, but I’m not even sure what we’re looking for.’

  Andy poured coffee and handed a mug to Mac. ‘There’s sandwiches and cake and a couple of packs of crisps,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to start with?’

  ‘Pick a corner. Lots of books to look through. Manuscripts too, from the look of things. I’ll take the desk; you start in the book room.’

  They took a break to eat and then fell quiet again as Andy started on the books and Mac skimmed through papers in the desk. One drawer contained bills and receipts. Another, a folder labelled tax which seemed to be a collection of expenses and bank statements. Mac examined the statements and set them aside for further perusal. Letters and contracts from his publisher, printouts of emails, also dealing with business or expenses. Stacks of research notes filled another drawer. Mac flicked through the pages but there seemed nothing untoward. He wondered if he’d even recognize something wrong if he saw it.

  In the final drawer he found something a little different. In plastic wallets, were letters, ration books, notebooks, much like those he had seen in the boxes at the airfield.

  Mac took everything out of the drawer and spread it out on the desk. So, it seemed that Trent had borrowed more than those artefacts from Ellen. In one of the packs was a reel of tape. Most of the wallets were labelled, in Ellen’s neat script, the owner and contents described. But the tape had no such marker, no clue to the owner or what might be on the reel.

  ‘You see anything that looks like a reel to reel tape player round here?’

  ‘What, you mean like one of those old tape recorder things?’

  ‘I think that’s what I said.’

  ‘No. Nothing like that.’ Andy came over to the desk and looked at the folders Mac had laid there. ‘It’s like the stuff from the airfield,’ he said. ‘Look, all labelled up the same way.’

  Mac nodded. ‘I suppose they were for his research, but I wonder if the families knew about it or if he just helped himself. Lydia would probably not have noticed. I wonder if Ellen did.’

  ‘I’ll get a box from the car,’ Andy said.

  Mac stood up and stretched. Not much more to look through, he thought, apart from the rest of the books in the little side room. Though it looked as though Andy had made a good start. He checked up on the coal scuttle and the wood box, but they contained only what their names suggested and for good measure, he took a poker and rattled it up the chimney, gaining only a fall of soot for his trouble.

  Andy returned with a box and they packed the folders inside, together with the bank statements and letters and a cheque book that had been filed alongside the tax folder.

  ‘Books?’ Andy said. ‘I could do with a hand. I got to the middle shelf.’

  Between them the last job was completed quickly. ‘Who the hell would want to kill a historian, anyway?’ Andy said. ‘You think it could be linked to Ellen Tailor?’

  Mac shook his head. ‘I don’t see how, but you never know, do you? Two deaths in the same vicinity.’

  ‘Trent wasn’t killed here.’

  ‘No, but the same circle of people. What are the odds? But …’ Mac shrugged. ‘I think we’re done here,’ he said. ‘Now we just need to find a way of playing that tape and try to figure out why Trent was so interested in it.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  Rina found an envelope on her mat when she came down in the morning. It was from Andrew Barnes and filled with copies of clippings about Dan Marsden. Happily, Rina dropped the envelope on her office desk in her little front sitting room – a private space; strictly invitation only – and then went through to the kitchen for her early cup of tea. She took her tablet computer with her and scrolled through a search while sipping her first cup of tea. The tablet had been a present to herself bought in celebration of the new series and she’d become very attached to it.

  The Marsden family were easy to find, and Rina spent a half-hour bringing herself up to date on the family and their charity work. Three generations of Marsdens had, as their website put it, tried to ‘give something back to their community’. Rina found herself agreeing with most of their assertions. That prison without the hope of rehabilitation was meaningless. That releasing people back into a community that didn’t welcome them and with no skills to offer or to sell was just an invitation for them to reoffend.

  That society should be judged on how it protected the weak and vulnerable and that often included ex-offenders or those that circumstance made likely to offend.

  She read about the youth programme Ellen had volunteered for and about the work placement schemes the Marsdens supported. There were pictures of fund-raising events and charity balls. Smiling faces, well-dressed men and women, grateful recipients of cheques and donations of equipment. Success stories from those they had employed and got back into work.

  On the face of it, impressive, Rina thought. She enlarged an image of Dan Marsden and his family, taken at a seaside event that summer. Dan Marsden smiled at the camera. The wife, holding one child in her arms and another by the hand, smiled at them. Rina studied the young man’s face and thought about what Andrew had told her; what he had said.

  Surface charm, she thought. But what about what was going on beneath?

  On another page there were pictures of the youth project that Ellen had worked on and a tribute to ‘Ellen Tailor, sadly missed’ and Ellen’s dates. She had been thirty-three years old, Rina noted. Ellen looked happy, surrounded by kids and teens who were obviously having fun. In a couple of the pictures Dan also featured. In one, he was looking at Ellen. Rina enlarged the image and studied both of them closely. Ellen, absorbed in painting with some of the younger children, seemed utterly unaware of Dan. Dan Marsden, on the other had, was gazing intently at her. Hungrily, Rina thought, and still she wondered what was going on behind his eyes.

  ‘Do you know the Marsden family?’ Rina asked Lydia de Freitas.

  ‘Oh, socially, yes. Not well though. Edward made a donation to one of their projects last year. Why?’

  ‘Oh, just curious. The name was mentioned.’

  Lydia looked at her and raised an eyebrow. ‘Rina Martin, don’t you lie to me. You never just get curious.’

  Rina laughed. ‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘so it’s more than just idle curiosity but, Lydia, I don’t want to—’

  ‘Give anything away. All right. So what can I tell you?’

  ‘Anything you know. I understand he was engaged once before.’

  ‘Sorry, wouldn’t know. I’ve met his wife. She seems nice but like I say, we meet them socially. We’re not friends.’

  ‘Is there any reason for that? Or just circumstances,’ Rina asked.

  Lydia laughed. ‘Oh, Rina, honestly. L
ook, Edward and I have never chosen our friends on the basis of, well, anything but the fact that we like them, really. We meet a lot of people at fund-raisers and business events and corporate bashes but very few of those people make it on to our invited to the house list. And the Marsdens, well—’

  ‘You don’t like them?’

  ‘No, it isn’t that. I like Celia Marsden a lot. She’s funny and clever and very caring, and her husband from what I’ve seen is equally pleasant to be around. But the conversations we’ve had have always just been about whatever we happen to have got together for. I might like them if I met them elsewhere but … I really don’t know.’

  ‘And Dan Marsden?’

  Lydia grimaced. ‘Not my cup of tea,’ she said shortly. ‘One of those people – and I include a fair few women in this number – that can’t keep their hands to themselves.’

  Rina was thoughtful for a moment. ‘I’ve been thinking about Vera Courtney,’ she said. ‘How much she disliked William Trent. How resentful she was.’

  Lydia’s mouth fell open and then she laughed. ‘Rina, for heaven’s sake. You can’t think?’

  ‘I’m not thinking anything,’ Rina said.

  ‘Oh, really? Well, so far as I’m aware they hardly know one another. But, of course, they had Ellen in common, I suppose.’

  Rina nodded. Of course they had, she thought. Of course they had.

  FORTY

  Rina used her main computer this time. Everyone was home and so it was easier to hide away in her office with the door closed and no one to ask questions. Her search was more random this time and guided by the press clippings Andrew had posted through her door. There had been a brief report of the car crash that had killed his girlfriend from his school days. She had been driving alone in bad weather and lost control on a bend. On the face of it, a tragic accident and an inexperienced driver who had not long passed her test. Dan Marsden had made a statement for the report. He said that Yvonne Castle had been a lovely girl, but that they had decided it was better to go their separate ways when he went off to university.