The Case of the Missing Letter

by Alison Golden

  “So when do you think it was written?”

  “My guess is that the paper, and this is only a guess mind, is probably around fifty years old. It is well preserved, and I suspect was only handled fairly infrequently.”

  “That would fit with what you were saying about the compartment, wouldn’t it, David?” Tomlinson suggested.

  Graham looked at him, his lips pursed. The pathologist continued. “Once we get the results back, we’ll know where the paper came from. Almost down to the individual forest.”

  “Extraordinary,” Graham breathed. “But how will that help us?”

  “We can home in on the location where the letter was written,” Simon Oxley said.

  “And how many of us,” Tomlinson suggested, “would use an expression like, ‘long have endured,’ as the author does here?”

  “Sophisticated grammatical structure,” Oxley explained, “is a hallmark both of high-class education and social standing. This was almost certainly written by someone in a position of power.”

  “There’s something else,” Oxley told him. “Do you see these tiny cursive features on the letters ‘s’ and ‘p’?” Graham looked more closely. There were curious, almost affected little swirls.

  “What do they signify?” Graham said.

  “Well, here I’m beginning to speculate,” Oxley admitted, “but I would say there’s a better-than-even chance that our author was raised in a Spanish-speaking country.”

  “Could Felipe have written it himself?” Graham asked.

  Oxley shrugged his thin shoulders. “I doubt it. Felipe was entirely too young to have been educated using this kind of language and script. Plus, given that he secreted the letter on his person, it’s much more likely that it was written by someone who was important to him in some way.”

  “Tell me about the photograph you found.” Graham said.

  “I’ll go get it from the freezer,” Tomlinson offered. “You can take this with you,” he said when he came back. “Looks like it’s from the seventies to me. It is less compromised and has absorbed less of the blood than the letter.” He gave Graham a bag inside which a monochromatic photo clearly showed a beach scene with two men and a woman squinting toward the camera. One man shielded his eyes, his face half in shadow. The woman was fair, her shoulder length hair lying in shiny waves. She was wearing white starfish earrings and a matching necklace.

  Graham stared at the photo, staying absolutely still. He was silent for so long that the two scientists exchanged a curious glance. Tomlinson let the silence reign, aware that the longer DI David Graham considered a problem, the better his answer tended to be.

  Finally, Graham brought out his phone. “Excuse me a moment.” He speed-dialed a number. “Ah, Constable Roach. Would you make your way over to the forensics lab?”

  Tomlinson’s face cracked into a grin. He was very fond of the obvious bond between Graham and his young protégé, and he shared the DI’s high hopes for the keen young constable.

  “That’s right,” Graham was confirming. “I’ve got a task for you. There’s a chap here called Simon Oxley. Tomorrow morning, get over to the lab and do everything he tells you. Right. Good lad.” Graham ended the call.

  “More manpower?” Tomlinson asked, his smile still in place.

  “Something like that. Simon, I’m sending you an assistant. Teach him, put him to work, and get him to help you. You’re going to figure out who wrote this and what it says,” Graham said, turning to leave. “Most importantly, you’re going to discover why we found it on the body of a dead man.”

  The man reached into his duffel bag and brought out one of the six ‘burner’ phones he’d brought to Jersey. He had hoped only to use one of them for the purpose of announcing the successful completion of his assignment, but three had already been used, shattered and discarded. Far from the quick, easy solution his employers sought, his time on the island had become unexpectedly complicated. Not to mention increasingly frustrating.

  “What the hell do you mean?” the voice rasped on the other end.

  The man had expected this anger and was relieved to be a couple of hundred miles away, rather than having to face this particular wrath in person. “Things got messed up by that old security guard dying on the job,” he said. “There are cops all over the place.”

  “That was at the museum, if I recall,” the voice continued, no less furious. “And your business is at the library, is it not?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “But there’s been another complication. A murder.”

  “So?” came the exasperated voice.

  The man sighed. “People are jumpy. Keeping their eyes open, you know? Some old bag across the road from the library called the cops three nights in a row.”

  The voice cut him off. “You know what I’m hearing? I’m hearing excuses. You have one job and one job only, and I don’t want to hear from you again until it’s done.”

  “No problem,” the man replied instantly. “I got it covered, boss.”

  “Twenty-four hours. I want good news in less than twenty-four hours. Got it?”

  “Leave it with me, boss,” the man assured the voice on the end of the line. “I know exactly what to do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “WHERE THERE IS one,” Graham noted, “there’s the other.” He regarded the two of them, Janice and Jack, working side by side behind the reception desk. “Sounds like a law firm, or something, doesn’t it? Or maybe,” he continued, “a firm of private detectives.”

  The younger pair looked up. “Huh?”

  Graham mimed the sign across their imaginary storefront. ‘“Harding and Wentworth.’ It’s got a nice ring to it.”

  The couple blushed in tandem, a reaction Graham found endearing. “How was the forensics lab yesterday?” Harding asked. “Roach excited to be called down there at short notice?”

  “I’m sure he was,” Graham smiled, hanging up his jacket on the coat stand behind his office door and re-emerging in the reception area. “He’s moving on from furniture analysis to graphology. What are you two finding?”

  Jack shrugged. “I know it’s my stock-in-trade to remind everyone that criminals can be unbelievably stupid, but this particular criminal has not yet fallen into that trap.”

  “Blast,” Graham groaned. “I was hoping for just that kind of ineptitude. No sign of the medal, then?”

  Wentworth shook his head. “Not yet, sir.” Despite being an operative who stood outside the police chain of command, the fact that everyone else called DI Graham ‘sir’ had rubbed off on Jack. “He might be trying to sell it privately, of course. Probably more secure than flogging it online, especially if he has a buyer who doesn’t care where it came from. Or he might have passed it on to a fence. But if he’s after an anonymous quick return, the Internet auction houses are the place to go. I’m trawling all possible outlets.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, Jack. I need a cup of tea. Let me know if you find anything. Janice, come help me would you? It’s making my head spin.”

  “The tea, sir?”

  “This case, Sergeant.”

  Graham found his teapot and opened a tightly sealed metal container of Chinese jasmine. His ritual was comforting.

  Janice sat down in his office, noticing the unusually large pile of documents laid out on his desk. “Research, sir?”

  “Yes,” Graham replied, sighing at the mess. “That blessed Satterthwaite Desk, among other things. The incidents involving Nobby Norris and Felipe Barrios have to be related, but how? We’ve got a guard who has a heart attack and dies, damaging a valuable desk on his way down, probably during a robbery. And a furniture restorer who is bludgeoned to death a few hours after receiving a phone call from an unidentified caller while working on said desk, and which we later find out had a hidden compartment that no one seemed to know about.”

  “Was anything in it?” Janice asked. “The compartment, I mean? I can’t imagine having a hiding place as perfect as that and then
not using it.”

  “Nothing in there when we opened it. But Tomlinson found a paper secreted in Barrios’ jacket that they’re attempting to decipher now. I sent Roach to help them. Tomlinson also found this photograph.” He showed her the evidence bag with the curled up, faded Polaroid.

  “Any idea who this might be, sir? In the photo? Or where it was taken?”

  “None. You?”

  Janice shook her head.

  Graham seemed to drift off, lost in thought, until a loud cheer broke out in the reception area. He was there in three seconds flat. “News?”

  Jack was sitting back in his chair, triumphant. “I’ve got a hit on that medal.”

  Janice dashed around the side of the reception desk and read the screen. “Silly bugger thought we wouldn’t notice. Does that make him brave or stupid?”

  “Told you, didn’t I?” Wentworth said, printing out the webpage. “Eight times out of ten, we catch them because they’re impatient, greedy, or plain idiotic. This guy,” he said, pointing to the screen, “takes detailed photos of a medal known to be missing following a burglary, and offers it for a pretty reasonable reserve price. He’s looking for a quick sale, aiming at buyers who know what they’re looking at and who understand its significance. Got his IP address and everything.”

  “Well, who is it?” Graham blurted out.

  “Adam Harris-Watts,” Harding said, looking up from searching the police database on her laptop.

  Graham blinked. “Eh? You’re kidding me.”

  “And,” Wentworth added, “if you can believe this, he goes by the handle, ‘Jersey Boy.’ Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  Graham went around the desk to look at Janice’ laptop, both relieved to have a suspect, and frustrated that he hadn’t seen the connection earlier. “The little blighter burgled his own museum?”

  “He’s not breaking new ground, sir,” Harding pointed out. “It’s often staff who turn out to be light-fingered.”

  Graham growled under his breath. “Alright. Pick him up. Send Barnwell. That should give him a scare.”

  “Righto, boss,” Harding said.

  “Should make for an interesting conversation. And for you,” Graham said to Wentworth, “dinner for two at the Bangkok Palace, on me.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” Wentworth smiled.

  “Right. There’s one little mystery solved. I’m going to check in with noted graphologist Constable Roach and see if he’s close to giving us an answer about the rest of this maddening case.”

  Janice Harding bit into a much-needed egg and cress sandwich and watched Jack Wentworth pacing around the lobby of the police station as though waiting for news of his first born. “Does he usually take this long?” Jack asked.

  “Barnwell? It depends. Most people come quietly once they realize the game is up. But there are always those who try to do a runner.”

  Jack stopped and imagined the scene. “And would he be able to… you know… “

  Janice did smile this time. Quite enough jokes had already been made at the expense of her more rotund colleague, and Wentworth was too new to know the extraordinary and creditable journey Barnwell had already undertaken. “I would back him in a foot race against most any common criminal,” she replied. “And he’s a mean swimmer, if you remember. Brave, too.”

  Jack gave her an apologetic look. “I’m just impatient.”

  The Sergeant set down her sandwich and settled further into the swivel chair behind the desk. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  Just as Jack was nodding, Barnwell appeared at the door, towering over the diminutive figure of Adam Harris-Watts. “Sergeant Harding, I have some paperwork for you to do.”

  Janice began typing up the arrest record. “Ah, yes. I have to say, Mr. Harris-Watts, I’m sorry to see you like this.”

  Harris-Watts had very obviously been crying. He said nothing except to confirm his name and address, and that he understood his rights.

  “Turn out your pockets, please,” Janice told him. Harris-Watts emptied all the contents on to the desk as Janice catalogued them, noting that in addition to the usual wallet, phone, loose change, and used tissues, there were three plastic containers of green, white, and orange mints. “You need to go easy on those,” she said. “Rot your teeth, they will.”

  Slumped and depressed, Harris-Watts was taken to a cell where he would await what Barnwell, Harding, and Wentworth all knew would be an intense grilling by their Detective Inspector.

  Graham came out of his office. A paper on Barnwell’s desk caught his eye as he passed. He twisted his head to look at it. “Is he here?” he mumbled.

  “Barnwell just took him to the cells, sir. Do you want to interview him right away?”

  “No, let’s sweat him a bit first. What’s this?” Graham waved the sheet of paper that had attracted his attention.

  “No idea, sir.”

  A banging of doors and heavy footsteps indicated Barnwell’s arrival back in the office. Graham looked up, “Where did you get this?”

  “That? Oh, some bloke dropped it in the coffee shop on the front. In a rush, he was. Thought I might see him as I biked around.”

  Graham looked down at it, reading. “What did he look like? Did you recognize him?

  “No, sir. Tourist, I reckon. Heavyset guy. Late forties, early fifties. Why, sir? Something to do with a case?”

  “Maybe, Constable. Keep an eye out for him. Ask around. If you see him again, bring him in.”

  Charlotte put down her cup of tea. She was watching the local lunchtime news on the television in her hotel room. Felipe Barrios was dead. Murdered. Charlotte’s mind cast back to her conversation with Adam Harris-Watts, then to Don. Her eyes narrowed. She picked up her phone and dialed Don’s number. “Don? It’s me, Charlotte.” This time there was no friendly banter. “Meet me at the Castle at 3 PM.” She paused. “No, buts. Just be there.” Click.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  DON TOOK THE steps quite slowly, hoping to avoid arriving on the castle’s battlements out of breath. It had been another warm day. Once again, he found that he had arrived a few minutes in advance of Charlotte, and he enjoyed the colors cast by the sun over the Channel. He took in cleansing breaths of sea air, and paced along the ramparts to their far end, trying to relax.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” came a voice. “Beautiful view, isn’t it?” Stephen Jeffries, Orgueil Castle’s events manager strolled along the battlement’s stone walkway toward Don.

  “It is,” Don said. The sea was taking on a yellow-green hue, the surface sparkling like stars in a spiritual universe. The two men met and stood side by side for a moment, admiring the view over the water.

  “I work here almost every day but don’t often stop to appreciate the simply gorgeous vista on my very doorstep,” Jeffries explained. “I do apologize if I’ve interrupted your solitude,” he said formally.

  Don gave him a shrug. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  Jeffries beamed at him. “A romantic liaison? A proposal?” he speculated. “We do the most beautiful weddings, you know.”

  Don let out a short laugh. “No, most definitely not. Just some family business.”

  “Well,” Jeffries said, straightening his official Castle uniform waistcoat and tidying his hair, “I’ll leave you to it. A nice spot for a quiet meeting, of whichever kind.” He headed past Don with a nod and made his way down the spiral staircase back into the castle’s interior, leaving Don alone in the sunshine. It was glorious, but no ethereal beauty could have calmed Don’s nervous, racing pulse.

  “I’m starting to like it here,” came a familiar, slightly haughty voice. Charlotte joined him on the battlements. “Not too windy, not too cold. A nice place for a picnic, maybe.”

  Don decided on a gruff, impatient demeanor. “Cut the chit-chat, Charlotte. I’m busy. What did you want me here for?”

  She wore a no-nonsense trouser suit and heels that must have made the steps something of a challenge. She walked toward him, her
heels clacking on the stones beneath her. “Busy? That’s good, Don. Keeping your mind occupied.”

  Don looked at her sideways. The memories of a whole decade of Charlotte’s maddening, high-handed condescension when he was a teen welled up in Don’s memory, but he bit down an angry rejoinder and simply waited for her to make her play.

  “I asked you here because I think it important that we both know what the other is doing, don’t you?” Charlotte said as she drew up close to him. “So, how is your investigation into the desk going?” she asked.

  “That again! What are you on about? I don’t have an investigation. I’m here for a break. I told you,” Don answered.

  Charlotte shook her head. “Really? No more trips down memory lane, following Mummy’s tales of sorrow and strife? Come now, Don. Don’t take me for a fool. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you are here merely on some kind of jolly? You’re here to look for the letter, aren’t you?”

  He spotted the tell straight away. “So you do know about it.”

  Undeterred, Charlotte carried on. “And so, clearly, do you. How did you find out about it, hmm? Did mother dearest tell you? I’ve known about it for years. We used to look for it as kids but never found it. I’d prefer that it stay that way.”

  Don stared at her. His nostrils flared.

  Charlotte continued. “You want to find it so you can humiliate me and my family, don’t you? You want your revenge for all those years your mother spent in the asylum. You want to destroy my career. Punishment for my father’s ‘misdeeds.’” Charlotte’s eyes alternately flashed and narrowed as she cast out her accusations.

  Don was shaking his head. “Perhaps, but I’ll bet you want it even more. You’re so desperate to make sure that you’re the next Member of Parliament for Market Ellestry that you’ll do anything to remove a potential threat.”

  “I’m a practical woman, it’s true,” she countered.

  “And you know full well,” Don continued, “that your father’s reputation is already a bit… muddy, shall we say?”