by Amy Myers
Susan was sitting in a chair behind the door, only contributing the odd word. She looked up at Georgia and managed a nod of welcome.
‘It’s good of you to let me come,’ Georgia said quietly.
‘The more the better,’ Susan replied wearily. ‘It takes away the need to think. This is PC Jane Diver. She’s been a brick.’
The brick greeted Georgia cautiously, to her amusement but not surprise.
‘Just tell me if I get in your way,’ Georgia said.
The answering look said that there was no doubt about that, but Jane warmed a little when Georgia offered to make coffee for all of them if Susan so wished. It proved an ice-breaker and when she returned with a tray the atmosphere was considerably warmer.
‘You’ll think I’m weird sitting here, taking part in all this,’ Susan said gratefully as she drank the coffee. ‘But it puts off the . . .’ She hesitated.
‘Telling people,’ Georgia supplied. She could remember only too well the agonizing she and Peter had been through over whether and what to tell friends and relatives about firstly Rick’s disappearance and then Elena’s departure a year later.
‘You’ve no idea. The phone at my son’s house where I’ve been staying is ringing non-stop. The mobiles are jammed with messages. And the funeral – well, there’s no funeral in sight, but that has to be thought about. He has – had – relatives in Australia. Do I phone . . .?’
‘Take time,’ Georgia advised her. ‘You can’t do it all at once. Cope with what you can.’
‘I want them to find who did this.’ Susan’s face was set hard. ‘That’s why I thought I’d come home. And that’s why I don’t mind seeing you, just in case you had any ideas.’
Georgia gratefully took the opportunity. ‘Is it possible it could have had anything to do with his work?’
She hesitated. ‘Jack was his work. Our friends came from that world, fellow historians, that sort of thing. Why would any of his relatives want to kill him? Or mine?’ She looked hopelessly at Georgia with this rhetorical question.
‘The police mentioned a neighbour.’
‘Simon Pollock’s a pain in the – well, you can guess what Jack used to say.’ The memory of the joke obviously nearly finished Susan, but she made another effort. ‘When I spoke to Jack on the phone on Friday he said that Simon was coming round to sort things out.’
‘Did he mean that evening or Saturday?’
‘He didn’t say. And I didn’t speak to Jack on the Saturday. We were out all day and didn’t get back till ten o’clock. I thought I’d ring early in the morning instead. There wasn’t a reply, of course.’
Jane Diver glanced at Georgia as Susan choked, and Georgia interpreted the message. ‘Do you want me to help you put these files back, Susan?’ Action, she reasoned, would help Susan, and there was plenty needed. Many of the files lay on the floor and had burst open, spreading their contents over a wide area. Photographs lay scattered everywhere where one box had emptied itself. It would be impossible to tell what the murderer or the police had removed. Where to start was the question.
‘It looks to me,’ Georgia observed to Jane, ‘that this isn’t the result of trashing the place. It would have been worse if that were the motive.’
‘We took a lot of stuff with us,’ was the non-committal reply.
Georgia pressed on. ‘Whoever did this,’ she said to Susan, ‘could have been hunting for something in particular, such as the 362 files.’
‘Good luck to him,’ Susan said bitterly, then winced at her own words. ‘Jack could never find anything he wanted himself, so no one else would stand a chance.’ She glanced at the shelves. ‘They were up there. They’ve gone.’
Georgia could see that, and resigned herself to sorting through the pile on the floor. Susan began to help, picking up stray photos and documents. Georgia lifted one heap at a time, dumping it on the desk to examine. She began with the complete files, which didn’t take long. There was none marked with anything she registered as relevant to 362, and a swift peep inside revealed nothing. If Jack’s death had nothing to do with 362 the files should still be here, unless the police had taken them after Mike’s call. But she found nothing, save a few photographs that looked familiar.
Her heart sank. If the files had disappeared into evidence, not even Mike would be able to get at them without pulling out every stop in the book. She squatted down to pick up some of the loose photographs, and it was only then she realized what was so obviously missing from the room. ‘Was his computer taken?’ she asked Susan.
‘We took it,’ PC Diver announced flatly. Georgia loved the universal ‘we’. If Lord Lucan were found at long last, she was sure that ‘we’ would have made the breakthrough. ‘It had been used.’
‘Did anyone other than Jack regularly use the computer?’ she asked Susan, who was regaining some colour in her drawn face.
‘My son did. I did occasionally, and there’s a computer guru who comes in from time to time.’
Not helpful. Georgia tried Jane again without much hope. ‘Do you know what was on the screen when it was found, apart from a screen saver?’
PC Diver looked as though her integrity had been attacked. ‘Of course. The screen manager.’ She hesitated, then obviously couldn’t resist displaying her knowledge. ‘The recycle bin was empty.’
‘But all the files were still there?’
Well, it had been a stupid question, she realized, as Jane smirked and gave the obvious answer. ‘How would we know if it was all?’
‘Stupid of me,’ Georgia said brightly to Miss Brain of the Year.
‘I could probably tell you,’ Susan said hesitantly, as Georgia spun round in surprise. ‘I took the laptop with me. We both used that, you see. I used it for household stuff and Jack used it both for back-up and note-taking,’ she explained. ‘There’s some sort of data transfer cable somewhere.’
Could there possibly be a glimmer of hope, Georgia wondered. If Jack used it for back-up, he would have exported files from the desk computer to the laptop as well as importing them. ‘Do you have it here?’
‘I brought it back. To send emails . . . Shall I fetch it?’
‘Oh yes, please,’ Georgia said fervently. Then she remembered the all-seeing eye, Jane, as Susan went to fetch it. ‘There wouldn’t be any prints of interest if the laptop wasn’t here.’
‘But—’
Georgia cut her off. She could see the way out of this. ‘I’ll open it here, and Susan or I could send anything I needed to my home computer by email attachment. Then you could take the computer if you need to. You might, for instance, want to check the contents against any that don’t appear on the main computer now. The murderer might possibly, only possibly, have deleted them there.’ She hoped this was enough to suggest to Jane that she might receive quite a few brownie points if this proved to be the case.
There was silence, then: ‘We’ll open it together.’
A deal had been struck. Never had Georgia felt so pleased to see Microsoft Word. With her heart in her mouth, she clicked on Jack’s user name, with Jane breathing heavily over her shoulder and Susan sitting some way away. Open Sesame, she breathed to herself, and lo, the magic cave opened. There were the yellow folders including several for 362 Squadron, differentiated by years.
‘Do you mind if I look?’ she asked Susan.
‘No.’ Susan obviously did, but was doing her best to be brave.
She opened the folder for 1940, and then the document for the list of squadron personnel. That looked promising. Next she tried Patrick Fairfax, and was disappointed. This was clinical technical stuff – what each pilot did each day, addresses, dates interviewed, interview notes. There was nothing here that would help Marsh & Daughter with his death in 1975, because when Jack was interviewing them that had not been the main focus of the interview. Mindful of Peter’s instruction, she tried Alan Purcell and was rewarded by an instant sight of his contact details, which for double safety she wrote down under Jane Diver’s s
uspicious eye. Then she had to ask for Susan’s co-operation over emailing the material. It was willingly given – on her part anyway.
‘Anything you discover . . .’ Jane began warningly.
‘There’ll be nothing that you won’t have access to if you need it.’
Susan was looking worried. ‘Do you really think Jack’s death had anything to do with 362 Squadron?’ she asked.
‘Probably not,’ Georgia answered. ‘Jack had finished all his work on that squadron. He told me he didn’t want anything to do with Martin’s new edition of Fairfax’s book.’
‘No. He was very firm about that. He told Martin Heywood that he had a clear field and never mentioned anything more about it.’
‘Susan, what took Jack to Tangmere that day? He told me it was work, so was it another book?’ A straw to clutch at. If 362 had nothing to do with Jack’s death, then this responsibility might lift a little.
‘He had a commission for writing another book on the Battle of Britain itself. Eddie Stubbs was helping him with it.’
So 362 was involved in a way. ‘Would Alan Purcell come into that?’ Georgia asked, trying to make it sound a casual question. She didn’t want to upset Susan or set Jane’s nose twitching. ‘He lives in France now.’
‘I don’t know the name, but Jack did go to France recently.’
*
‘You may be barking up the wrong tree again.’ Peter was irritable. He had pounced on Georgia’s immediate deduction about Alan Purcell and read Jack’s computer file on him, now safely saved in both their own computers. ‘There are only the details of his wartime career in this file, and no interview dates. Lots of ex-pats live in France. It could have been someone else Jack went to see. You’re jumping to conclusions – as usual.’
That was unfair – which, she grudgingly conceded, was unusual for Peter, and so did her best to work out whether or not he had a point. ‘I still think it’s worth following up.’
‘Alan Purcell wasn’t at the 1975 reunion,’ Peter howled.
‘Nor was Sylvia Lee, and it was you who insisted I saw her for background material and to ask her about Purcell.’
Peter glared at her. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Let’s try his number.’ She checked the contact details. ‘Ste Marie de Faux . . .’ She broke off, deflated. ‘My French isn’t particularly good, but doesn’t faux mean false?’
‘It does,’ Peter rejoined grimly. ‘Which suggests this is a deliberately false address. I’ll try the phone.’
By the time he had put the receiver down, the question was answered. ‘That,’ he informed her, ‘is the residence of a truffle farmer in the Auvergne. He has no connection whatsoever with any former RAF pilot.’
‘Why do that?’ she exploded. Their every move seemed to be checkmated.
‘Don’t despair,’ he said kindly. ‘This helps your case, because it suggests Alan Purcell is a person of some interest, and it helps our case because it indicates that Jack was very wary of someone – so wary that he couldn’t even put information on a computer. Which raises the question of—’
‘Where he put it.’ Georgia felt better.
‘It was either elsewhere in the room, or more probably . . .’ He looked at her. ‘It wouldn’t be Susan. Trusted friend?’
She answered simultaneously with his next offering: ‘The computer guru?’
‘And one more thing,’ Peter added. ‘Our truffle farmer was not pleased to be called. This was the second time he’d been asked about Monsieur Purcell.’
‘Jack?’
‘More likely his murderer.’
*
Would this be another Grande Dame of the theatre, Georgia wondered as she spoke into the entry phone of the South Kensington house on Friday afternoon. At last she’d be meeting Sylvia Lee. She was glad now that Peter had insisted this visit was necessary. If by any chance Jack’s death had been connected to Fairfax’s, she owed it to him to explore every avenue. It was a high, terraced, white-painted building, which looked a world away from the Fairfax home, and she pushed the entrance door open with a pleasant sense of anticipation. A woman in her sixties opened the first-floor door with a friendly grin.
‘Come in, my mother’s waiting. I’m Helen Vane.’
This tall slender woman had obviously inherited her mother’s grace, and was no Mary Fairfax. Nor did Sylvia Lee prove to be anything like Jean Fairfax. The fragility of the woman who rose to meet her in the living room did not stem just from her age. It came from a vulnerability that displayed itself in her roles and which had probably contributed to her acting abilities. Georgia had seen her in several small roles recently on TV and at least two of her films from the 1940s and ’50s. Her favourite was Blue Moon which had joined the ranks of the romantic musical classics such as Maytime in Mayfair and had the charm and whimsicality of Salad Days. With her figure and fair hair Sylvia had something of the screen star Ann Todd’s faun-like appeal, but this, Georgia decided, was a woman who could laugh at life too. Did vulnerability go with laughter? Perhaps in this woman it did, Georgia thought. It was easy to respond to the warmth put over by Sylvia Lee.
‘I’m not sure I can help you,’ the actress began doubtfully. ‘I knew Patrick Fairfax so very long ago, and only occasionally bumped into him after the war. It was my husband who saw him regularly for a time at the aviation club.’ Her eyes grew sad. There were plenty of photographs of Richard Vane in this room, and an oil portrait of Sylvia painted in her heyday. Georgia picked one of the photos to comment on.
‘Is this you and your husband with Helen, Lady Vane?’ she asked. Helen, unlike Mary, showed no signs of wishing to be present and had disappeared after showing her into the room.
‘No, that’s my son Harvey. This is Helen with her twin Hilary.’ She pointed to a snapshot of herself with two babies. ‘I was married twice. A brief wartime marriage to their father and then I married Richard in 1945. Harvey was born the following year. But I won’t bore you with that; you’re here to ask me about Patrick.’
‘I realize it’s a long way back.’
‘My memory is good, even if it can’t help you a great deal. At the beginning of the war in 1939 I was only nineteen and very much intent on making my way on the stage. I’d already had one or two minor roles in British films and plays. Unfortunately I thought my talent lay in the Lady Macbeths of the drama world and it took a year or two to realize I was better suited to comedy, and musical comedy in particular. At the time of the Battle of Britain, I’d been appearing in a local theatre in Tonbridge and went to stay with my uncle and aunt who ran the Plough pub in South Malling. Their daughter Jenny was working at the Rose and Crown in Town Malling, where the pilots used to gather. As a result we were often invited out, and one night went to a station dance at the Manor House.’
‘Woodring Manor?’
‘No. The other one. I knew it just as the Manor House. That’s where I met Patrick, although met is hardly the word. I suppose it is more truthful to say that he pursued me, and my head was not unnaturally turned. Indeed why not? He was a glamorous pilot, symbolic of those whose exploits were in the press daily. He continued to turn my head for a couple of weeks until I went back to London.’
Georgia felt she could hardly leap in with: ‘Why did you split up?’ and was preparing a roundabout route when Sylvia pre-empted her.
‘You’ll want to know what happened.’ Sylvia frowned. ‘It’s hard to explain. Those weren’t ordinary times – though I expect you’re tired of hearing that. But it was true enough. One lived so much faster that relationships kaleidoscoped. They came, they were enjoyed, they finished. One could never be sure if the man one kissed one evening would be shot down by the next. It was as hard as that. Anyway, he was so . . . gentle, so loving.’ She paused, then said hurriedly, ‘Patrick was an interesting person, but we both knew it wouldn’t last. We were just fascinated by each other. Perhaps it would have gone on longer, but I was offered a part on the London stage that I couldn’t refuse.
I went back, met Norman Lake, my first husband, and we married that Christmas, a rushed wartime marriage.’
‘Was he an actor or in the services?’
‘Both. He was on stage when I met him in the same show, and then he was called up. He was killed in 1944.’
Bang went Georgia’s airy-fairy conjecture that the twins could have been Patrick Fairfax’s children. Not entirely ruled out, but unlikely.
‘So you see,’ the famous Lee smile shone out, ‘Patrick receded somewhat to the back of my mind. I’d forgotten all about him until my husband mentioned his name in connection with the aviation club he’d joined. I’m afraid I was busy on the stage and didn’t share his hobbies.’
‘What was his work?’
‘He was in the City. Look.’ Sylvia walked gracefully to the piano top, where only one photo stood. ‘This is Richard on his eightieth birthday, He never made ninety, I’m afraid. He was so looking forward to it.’
Georgia saw her hand tremble as she put the photograph back. Richard Vane too had a kind face, she thought. An intelligent one and shot through with humanity as well.
‘This is Richard in his beloved Cessna at the club.’ Georgia came to stand at her side as Sylvia held out another photo. Richard was much younger in this, clad in overalls, and it was easy to see why Sylvia Lee had fallen for him.
‘Is that Patrick Fairfax with him?’
‘No. Paul Stock. It’s written on the back.’
‘You knew him?’
‘I met him at Patrick’s funeral and I suppose on a few other occasions.’
‘Do – did – you know Jack Hardcastle too?’
‘Yes.’ The briefness of her reply suggested she didn’t like him and Georgia had to discipline herself not to come to Jack’s defence.
‘I’m afraid he’s been found dead – murdered,’ she added.
Sylvia looked up sharply. ‘Murdered? Why?’ She looked surprisingly shaken. ‘That’s horrible.’