Several phone calls later, he had established that the Ventry Papers were held at the Staffordshire County Record Office. Not Derby, Nottingham or Leicester, then, but Stafford. With the weekend looming, he would have to wait until Monday to inspect them. That felt like a preposterously long time in his present state of mind, but Monday it would have to be.
It was late afternoon when he left Ilford, but he did not go straight to Hampstead. Guilt and anxiety were gnawing at him as sharply as ever. From Liverpool Street he took the Tube to Bond Street and walked down to Kingsley House. A damp dusk was descending on Mayfair. It was more than dark enough for the lights to be on in the Halls’ apartment. But none were. Umber risked a word with the porter manning the desk in the lobby.
‘Mr and Mrs Hall have gone away, sir.’
‘That must have been sudden. I told them I might drop by this evening. They didn’t say anything that suggested they mightn’t be here.’
The porter smiled tightly. ‘Perhaps they changed their plans.’
‘Have they gone to Jersey?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’
But Umber could. He knew exactly where they had gone. And why.
‘Do you want to leave a message in case they phone?’ the porter asked.
‘No.’ Umber turned towards the exit. ‘No message.’
TWENTY
DUSK HAD GIVEN way to night by the time Umber reached Hampstead. He walked up Willow Hill, steeling himself for the accusations Alice and Claire had every right to throw at him. He had no adequate response prepared, nor any course of action to suggest that might lead them out of their difficulties. George Sharp in prison, Bill Larter in hospital and Jeremy Hall dead: they were the bitter sum of his achievements to date.
‘Good of you to join us,’ was Alice’s sarcastic greeting. She had been hitting the gin, to judge by the half-empty tumbler of something with lemon clutched in her hand as she opened the door of number 22, not to mention the heaviness of her tread as she led him into the drawing room.
An aroma of fresh paint still lingered in the room. Redecoration was evidently complete. Some platitudinous enthusing over the colour scheme died on Umber’s lips. Claire, who was sitting by the fire with a mug of green tea, rolled her eyes at him as Alice pulled round a chair.
‘Would you like some tea, David?’ Claire asked.
‘I expect he’d prefer a beer,’ said Alice.
Umber shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
‘Either way, it’s in the kitchen. Help yourself.’
Umber shrugged again, this time for Claire’s benefit, and made his way to the kitchen. He found a bottle of Grölsch in the fridge. While he was hunting down a glass, he caught a drift of words from the drawing room, but could not make them out. Claire was speaking, in an undertone. Only Alice’s response was audible. ‘Why should I?’
‘It goes without saying that I’m sorry for dragging you both into this,’ Umber ventured as he rejoined them. ‘I never intended to cause you any trouble.’
‘What did you intend to do?’ Alice snapped.
‘Learn the truth.’ He sat down and countered her glare with a level gaze. ‘If I could.’
‘Find one more to your liking, you mean.’
‘There’s only one truth, Alice. And it’s not what we thought.’
‘I’m not going to start believing Sally was murdered just because you’ve stirred up a hornets’ nest.’
‘I think you may have to.’
‘I was here when it happened. You weren’t. Sally was alone when she died. There was no intruder. No murderer.’
‘You can’t be absolutely certain of that, Alice,’ put in Claire.
Alice tossed her head pettishly. ‘Not you too.’
‘We need to consider every possibility.’
‘OK, then. Consider this. How did the murderer get in?’
‘Perhaps Sally invited him in.’
‘Then promptly took a bath? Get real, for God’s sake.’
‘It was a summer’s evening. She’d have had the windows open, presumably.’
‘Yeah. But her windows happened to be on the second floor.’
‘He could have swung down from the roof and through the open top half of the sash,’ said Umber, reasoning as he went. ‘Then just let himself out of the flat and left by the front door.’
‘Who are we talking about here? The SAS?’
‘A professional of some kind. That’s who we’re talking about.’
‘I think David’s right,’ said Claire, calmly but firmly. ‘Recent events don’t really leave much room for doubt, to my mind. Sally was onto something. And somebody was determined to stop her bringing it into the open.’
‘That’s not what you said at the time.’
‘I had no reason to think it. Then. But this is now. David’s provoked a response. We may wish he hadn’t. But we can’t ignore it. Think about it, Alice. If Sally really was murdered …’
‘She wasn’t.’
‘But if she was … do you want to let her killers get away with it?’
‘Of course not.’
‘OK, then. We have two options as I see it. One, tell David to go back to Prague and let his policeman friend take his chances in court, then hope everything blows over, as it probably will, Jeremy Hall’s suicide notwithstanding. It’s the line of least resistance. It’s the safest and simplest thing to do.’
‘But it’s not the option you favour, is it?’ Alice’s tone was almost fatalistic.
‘No. It isn’t.’
‘Better give us number two, then.’
‘Do all we can to find out what Sally may have uncovered.’
‘If anything.’
‘Yes. If anything.’
Alice took a deep swallow of gin and looked sceptically at Claire and Umber in turn. ‘You’ve left it five years too late. If there were any clues, they’re long gone. Assuming there was something for there to be clues to.’
‘What happened to her possessions?’
‘Ask David.’
Umber winced. Alice had urged him to take whatever keepsakes he wanted when he had flown in from Turkey for the funeral. But guilt, grief and a secret, simmering anger at Sally for running away from life had deluded him into believing he wanted none. Alice had more or less forced him to take Sally’s wedding ring. Everything else he had left. ‘I don’t know what happened to them,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Her parents took some stuff,’ Alice stated matter-of-factly. ‘The rest – clothes and such – went to Oxfam.’
‘Were there any papers?’ Claire asked. ‘Notes? Diaries? Documents?’
‘It was hardly my place to sort through it,’ Alice replied. ‘And David declined to. So I can’t say. Whatever there was … her parents removed.’
‘We’d better contact them, then.’
‘They’ll probably have got rid of it all by now.’
‘Let’s hope not.’ Claire looked at Umber. ‘Do you know where they live, David?’
‘Unless they’ve moved, yes. They have a bungalow on the Hampshire coast. Near Christchurch.’
Umber had assumed till now that Reg and Peggy Wilkinson had left his life for good and all. He had few happy memories of his parents-in-law, as few as he suspected they had of him. Reg had never troubled to disguise his disapproval of Umber’s rootless and pensionless existence. And what Reg thought, Peggy always went along with. It had never been a harmonious relationship. Sally’s death had ended it as badly as could be imagined. But not, it seemed, as completely.
‘There’s something you should understand, Claire,’ he said hesitantly. ‘The Wilkinsons and I … er …’
‘What he means,’ put in Alice, ‘is that they hate his guts. They aren’t likely to give him the time of day, let alone the chance to root through whatever they have left of Sally’s.’
‘It’s not as bad as that,’ Umber protested. But, almost instantly, it struck him that pretence on the issue was pointless. ‘Well, maybe it is.’
‘Yes,’ said Claire dispassionately. ‘Bearing in mind what Sally told me about how things stood between you and her parents, I should imagine it might well be. Which is why Alice and I will go to see them without you.’
‘Excuse me?’ spluttered Alice.
‘Tomorrow,’ Claire breezed calmly on. ‘I think we can all agree there’s no time to be lost.’
Several hours and an awkward little supper party later, Alice took herself off to bed none too soberly, leaving Claire to load the dishwasher, while Umber sat at the kitchen table with a mug of black coffee.
‘She’ll be fine in the morning,’ said Claire, with a wry smile. ‘Stress affects people in different ways.’
‘You seem to be coping all right,’ said Umber, understating the case if anything, given her consistent sangfroid.
‘It’s just a technique. I break problems down into small, soluble portions. That way I can kid myself nothing’s beyond me, as long as I can take it one logical step at a time.’
‘Do you teach the technique to your patients? Sorry. I mean clients.’
‘Well remembered. And yes, I do. Or at any rate I try. But psychotherapy isn’t really that simple.’
‘I imagine not.’
‘It can be helpful, though.’ She pushed the dishwasher door shut and started the machine going, then turned to look at him. ‘It can resolve a lot of issues.’
‘Think I could benefit from a course?’
‘I’m sure you could.’ She sat down at the table opposite him. Her shoulder-bag was hanging from the back of the chair. She delved into it and plucked out a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter. ‘Just now I recommend something a bit more basic, though. You want one?’
Umber shook his head. ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘Only in emergencies.’ She lit up and piloted a spare saucer into the centre of the table to serve as an ashtray. ‘What about you?’
‘Never got the taste for it.’
‘Nor for resolving issues?’
‘I’ve taken that up late in life.’
‘With what results?’
‘Mixed. Decidedly mixed.’
‘Alice suggested something to me before you arrived this evening. And before the gin hit her bloodstream. She said the two of us ought to go away together. She had South America in mind. An adventure holiday. A couple of middle-aged girls on a spree.’
‘Sounds like fun.’
‘Think we should go?’
‘You could do worse.’
‘Like staying in London, you mean?’
‘The people we’re dealing with, Claire, whoever they are, whatever their motives—’
‘Aren’t kidding around?’ She held his gaze through a plume of cigarette smoke.
‘No. They’re not.’
‘So, if we succeed in finding out what Sally knew …’
‘You may wish you’d taken that trip to South America.’
TWENTY-ONE
THE BLOATED SATURDAY edition of the Guardian arrived in Alice’s hallway with a loud thump, though it was probably the higher-pitched rattle of the letterbox that roused Umber from an uneasy sleep in the rear drawing room. Alice’s sofa-bed was several comfort points up on Bill Larter’s, but that had hardly been sufficient to provide him with a good night’s rest. The stitches in his scalp were becoming more of an irritant the longer they stayed in. And the demons inside his head never paused for slumber.
He struggled into his clothes, collected the Guardian from the doormat, then headed for the kitchen – and the coffee jar.
The kettle had not even come to the boil when his idle leafing through the newspaper took him to a headline he had hoped against false hope not to see. TRAGEDY RETURNS TO MURDER FAMILY 23 YEARS ON. He anxiously scanned the paragraphs below, relieved at least not to find his own name – or George Sharp’s – staring back at him. But that was the full extent of his relief. Events at Avebury in July 1981 were back in the public eye. And its gaze was unblinking.
Less than two weeks after the murder in prison of Brian Radd, the serial child killer held responsible for the deaths of Miranda and Tamsin Hall in 1981, the girls’ brother, Jeremy Hall, has been found dead at his father’s house in Jersey.
A police spokesperson said Mr Hall, who was 33, had died as the result of a fall from the roof of the house. He had been alone at the time and the circumstances surrounding the incident were as yet unclear.
The dead man’s father, Oliver Hall, aged 66, said Jeremy’s loss had come as a great shock to him and to Jeremy’s mother. He appealed to the media to respect their privacy at ‘this terrible time’.
The original murder case has dogged many of those involved in it. Five years ago, the children’s nanny, Sally Wilkinson, died in what was officially ruled an accidental electrocution. She was among those who had cast doubts on Brian Radd’s confession, which he volunteered shortly before his trial on multiple murder charges in 1990. Jeremy Hall’s death will only fuel speculation that—
‘The press were bound to pick up on it,’ said Claire, causing Umber to jump with surprise as she leaned over his shoulder to examine the article. She was dressed in a navy-blue tracksuit and mud-spattered trainers. Her hair and face were damp with sweat. Umber had supposed himself to be awake before the rest of the house, but that was clearly not the case. ‘You must have seen this coming, David. Surely.’
‘I didn’t think they’d make such a splash of the story.’
‘Coming hard on the heels of Radd’s murder? They were never going to ignore it.’
‘They even mention Sally.’
‘But they use her maiden name, I see. Maybe you should be grateful for that.’
‘Will the Wilkinsons be grateful?’
‘Only one way to find out. Isn’t there?’
Claire and Alice set off for Hampshire in Claire’s TVR at 10.30. There was no guarantee the Wilkinsons would be at home, of course. But the risk of a wasted journey was preferable to the possibility that Reg would forbid them to come if they phoned ahead. Alice predicted he would not let them past the door even without Umber for company, but her pessimism was partly a symptom of her hangover. Claire seemed altogether more confident. ‘They’ll be happy to talk about Sally. Silence is never golden for bereaved parents.’ The professional had spoken.
As far as she and Alice were concerned, Umber was planning to spend the day at the British Library, boning up on Junius. He had, of course, already established that the Ventry Papers, which represented his only remaining lead to Junius’s identity – and hence Griffin’s – were lodged in the Staffordshire Record Office. It was therefore unnecessary for him to do any more research in London and, in fact, he had no such intention. Alan Wisby had given him the slip in Jersey, cunningly and clinically. That did not mean he could go on doing so. Monica would remain in the boatyard at Newbury, deserted by her owner. Umber had no doubt Wisby would stay well away from her. But the man had to stay somewhere. And that put another Monica in the frame.
Umber’s trip to Southwark was little more than a fishing expedition. He did not seriously expect to find anyone in the office at 171A Blackfriars Road on a Saturday morning. His ambitions were fixed no higher than extracting a home address or telephone number for Monica Wisby from the shoe-repair man in the ground-floor shop. He turned the handle of the door leading to the stairs up to the first floor fully expecting to find it locked.
But it was not.
A tall, broad-hipped, big-bosomed woman in tight jeans and a clinging sweater was fingering her way through a set of bulging folders in one of the middle drawers of a battered filing cabinet when Umber stepped into the room at the top of the stairs. She had a mane of bottle-blonde hair and a raw-boned face done no favours by cigarettes and a career of private inquiring.
‘Monica Wisby?’ he ventured, already certain it was her.
She started violently, scattering cigarette ash down her sweater as she turned. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘David Umber.�
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‘How did you get in?’
‘The door was open.’
‘Bloody well shouldn’t be. We’re not open for business.’ She hip-barged the drawer of the filing cabinet shut. ‘Come back Monday.’ Then recognition of his name kicked in. ‘Hold on. Did you say Umber?’
‘Yes. You know. The guy you were holding a letter for last week on your ex-husband’s behalf.’
‘Yeah. That’s right.’ She had absorbed the surprise of his arrival by now and Kleenexing the ash off her sweater gave her a few more moments for tactical thought before she looked him in the eye. ‘Well, what about it?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Alan?’
‘He and I need to meet. Urgently.’
‘He obviously doesn’t agree. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me. But you got it spot-on. Ex-husband. Ex as in gone, separated, finished – for good.’
‘I know you keep in touch with him.’
‘No. He keeps in touch with me. When he wants to. Which he currently doesn’t seem to. Tried the boat?’
‘You’re joking, of course. I’m sure he’s told you what happened when I “tried the boat”.’
‘I’ve heard nothing from Alan since he sent me the letter for you. And that was only a few words on a covering note.’
‘He didn’t get everything he wanted in Jersey, Mrs Wisby. Small matter of a missing inscription.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Maybe not. But he will. Tell him I’ve got the missing pages.’ A lie designed to smoke out Wisby counted as a white one in Umber’s book. ‘He can’t do anything without them.’
‘Tell him yourself. You’re more likely to get the chance than I am. And you can give him a message from me if you do. He’s supposed to be retired, for Christ’s sake. I’m fed up having to explain to his clients that his freelance activities have nothing to do with me. He seems to be doing more work now than when he was supposed to be in charge of the business. First there was that pensioned-off policeman. Then you. And then … what’s his name?’ She grabbed a scrap of paper from the nearest desk and squinted at it. ‘Nevinson.’
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