After Clare (21 page)

After that letter he'd written on Anthony's behalf, telling Emily that Clare had vanished, he had continued to hear from her at regular though infrequent intervals – firstly, that she and that husband of hers had left India – it wouldn't do, things had not worked out for him there, his father had died, the tea plantation had been a failure before they got there, the troubled Indians he intended to write about were offended at the idea of a Britisher – even an Irishman – thinking he could sort out their problems, feeling against British rule was still too strong. There had followed Egypt, and the exporting of antiquities, then selling Jaffa oranges from Palestine, ostrich farming in South Africa and some God-forsaken scheme in Armenia, where the Turks from across the border were intent on genocide. From all of these places came occasional newspaper articles written by Paddy which Hugh came across from time to time. He supposed they were well-intentioned, but he knew them to be lightweight, written from the fringes of whatever conflict interested him at the time, innocuous in comparison with those written by bona-fide foreign correspondents. He could not have made any profit from it – but that, Hugh thought with a touch of cynicism reserved only for Paddy Fitzallan, would not have mattered, considering the money he had married.

By now, he had reached the stile that led to the road, with Sholto's cottage fifty yards away. It was still warm, but this exceptional summer was nearly over; the hedgerows foaming with cow parsley and wild roses were giving way to the dying flame colours of autumn. He took off his panama and mopped his brow, flipped away the flies, and as old Alice flopped down, panting, indicating it was time for a rest, he settled himself on his shooting stick and allowed himself to remember.

Paris. Notre Dame. A table outside a pavement café near the Pont Neuf on a sunny day. The
bouquinistes
lining the quays doing their usual leisurely trade, where he had just picked up a translation of the vagabond poet Francois Villon's ‘Ballade' and opened at random.
Where are the snows of yesteryear?
he read, as waiters balancing a row of plates along their arms rushed past him, and the
flâneurs
sauntered along the pavements, in the nonchalant yet acutely aware manner only Parisians could assume.

He had been on a walking holiday in the Dolomites, reliving, as he did every year, the time he'd once spent there with two friends just after graduation, this time revelling in being alone for three weeks of long, solitary tramps over the mountains in tweed plus fours, with bread, cheese and a book in his pocket, staying at small, welcoming hotels, sleeping and eating well. Now he was back in civilization, having stopped off for a long overdue meeting with a business associate. The business concluded, he was now sipping coffee and a
digestif
after lunch and thinking rather half-heartedly of his return to England later that day, once more in a conventional suit and stiff collar, his mind still full of lakes and mountains.

Lavinia had never shared his enthusiasm for that sort of holiday, saying it was a man's recreation, but that if he insisted on going, she could always spend a few weeks with her sister in Tunbridge Wells. He was a little ashamed of the relief he'd felt at being able to satisfy his need to be alone for a while, and it had tinged his holidays with a feeling of guilt. But Lavinia had died two years ago and this time he had been unencumbered by any such emotion. He was tanned and fit and for once reluctant to get back to family, work and publishing. As the bells of Notre Dame sounded the hour he realized he would need to move soon to catch his travel connections, but the sun shone, the air smelled of French cigarettes and good food, and from one of the cafés further along came the jaunty, wheezy lilt of accordion music. The heads of several appreciative Frenchmen turned towards a woman walking gracefully towards the river. He debated whether or not to have another
pastis.

The woman had paused to lean on the stone parapet by the river, a small, slim figure in dark blue. He looked at the back of her, the lustrous dark hair, the fashionable hat, then hurriedly threw money onto the table and walked towards the railings. For a moment he, too, stood there and stared across the Seine, then as the woman turned to go he faced her.

‘Emily.'

‘Hugh!'

She had been too far away to get home in time for her father's funeral. So many years since they had last met, but she was just the same, the carnation flush to her cheeks, the wide brown eyes, and this time the smile was only for him.

He had sent a cable home to say that he was unavoidably detained and let them make of it what they would. She had three weeks earmarked for shopping, sightseeing, amusing herself, while Paddy, refusing to allow his worrying state of health to stop him, had gone off on some hare-brained escapade she was not quite clear about. Of those weeks he remembered only the joy, not the details. Presumably they had eaten and drunk; he knew they had walked the city, visited museums and art galleries, all the things one did in Paris, only he could scarcely remember anything they saw, except for the Monets. He had known, half an hour ago, that she too had remembered them. During those three weeks they hadn't talked much – really talked, or discussed their future – how could they? They both knew she was not going to leave her husband. His health was deteriorating – and besides, duty, loyalty, promises were not so easily broken in those days, a tenet he upheld then, and still did.

They parted – something else he had erased from his memory – and afterwards they had continued to write to each other, but still infrequently. Not love letters, but innocuous missives which anyone could have read. And now, when he had ceased to expect it, here was the prospect of being together. His heart began to beat wildly, like a young man's. Or an old man's about to have a stroke. Calm down, he told himself as he eased himself off the shooting stick.

Nothing was without its complications. For now, here was this other damnable business.

‘Don't think I'm unsympathetic, Novak.' Superintendent Brownlow sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers and looking sorrowful. ‘You're playing on a sticky wicket and I understand the difficulties. But we're not getting on very fast, are we?'

In the beginning, it had been understood that no one had expected results in this case immediately, or even at all. An unidentified skeleton, lying there for years – the circumstances hadn't left much room for optimism. Brownlow's attitude now was irritating, though Novak could understand his anxieties. The man was highly ambitious and it wasn't all that long since he had stood in Novak's shoes, a mere inspector, and he was still having to justify to his superiors his elevation to superintendent, acting puffed up yet jittery about his association with the great and the good. Both he and Novak knew that this investigation had to come together soon, or be abandoned, but Novak couldn't see the latter going down well with Brownlow, much less the powers that be he was so eager to impress, who had yielded to the string-pulling in the first place to bring Scotland Yard to the investigation.

‘We've had very little to work on, sir.' Brownlow's mouth pursed. ‘But I think we can say we've moved a few steps forward.' Briefly, he recounted the details about the money found in Sholto's workshop, which at least elicited a grunt of interest.

‘They're matters that require careful consideration,' Brownlow conceded.

‘And we've also managed to make contact with one of the men Sholto served with.'

Willard, doggedly working his way through the army demobilization records to which they had eventually been given access, had traced Sean Hennessy, an Irishman now living in Peckham and married to an English girl, and together they had gone to see him. Hennessy remembered Peter Sholto well. In fact, they had been pals, had gone side by side through some of the bloodiest battles of the war, and were together right until the time Peter had disappeared.

Hennessy had good reason to recall the last conversation he'd had with Sholto, since it was one he'd had to repeat more than once to the military police who had chased up his apparent desertion. Mainly because it had happened on the seventeenth of March, St Patrick's Day, the first one after the armistice, and the Irish contingent in the regiment had been all set to make a night of it. Sholto had promised to return in time to join in the high jinks and had asked Hennessy to cover for him in the meantime. He'd left camp in the afternoon, hitching a lift to the nearest town in a lorry that delivered supplies to the cookhouse. You could have knocked Hennessy down with a feather when he didn't return. He was sure the lad had never intended to go AWOL, though like everyone else he had been sick with resentment and impatience for his release from the army.

Hennessy, however, also told them that Sholto had had a letter that day, which he'd said made it necessary for him to make an immediate sortie over to Netherley, on the other side of the county. It wasn't anything that would justify asking for leave on compassionate grounds, but it couldn't wait. What was the urgency? Hennessy had asked – he would be home for good, sooner or later, wouldn't he? But no, he had to go there and then. There was something he had to do, something he had to retrieve, straight away. Retrieve? Yes. Hennessy had laughed. Sholto had used words like that – he'd had an education, and his dad had been a schoolmaster, hadn't he? – though he'd refused to give any further explanation. Well, young Peter had never been one for giving away too much about himself.

‘I'll tell you this for the truth, though. If I was a betting class of man, I'd wager it was something to do with a girl, maybe someone he'd left in the lurch, or something after that manner. He had a photo he always kept with him, like we all had these lucky mascots. I'd me half-crown that saved me from a bullet, still keep it with me.' He had pulled a battered piece of silver from his pocket to demonstrate. ‘This girl now. Maybe Peter had wakened up to his responsibilities, grown up while he was in the army. I saw it happen. War makes men out of boys, God help us all.'

Hennessy wouldn't go further than that. He'd been sick to hear Sholto had been murdered, and he wasn't prepared to dish any dirt on him. In Willard's estimation it had been an odd sort of friendship between the young chap and the older Hennessy, but Willard hadn't been in the war. Novak had seen odder friendships, comradeship forged through having spent terrible years of their lives together. When you'd lived, slept, eaten and fought alongside each other, in the unspeakable conditions of the late war, when you'd stood shoulder to shoulder, up to your waist in mud and blood, facing the enemy, your guts churning, then a bond of loyalty was formed that no one but those with similar experiences could ever understand. In this case, mistaken loyalty might have kept Hennessy's lips buttoned, but both he and Willard had been inclined to think that he knew no more than he had told them.

‘At least we now know why he went missing,' Novak said to Brownlow. ‘Something in that letter he got made it necessary for him to risk defying the authorities in order to make a quick visit to Netherley.'

He wasn't entirely happy with what he surmised must have happened: Sholto leaving camp on the supply lorry to the nearby town – a train to Luton, more accessible than Kingsworth Halt – and then what? Too far to walk to Netherley in the time available. All the same, he had got there by some means.

Brownlow listened to everything, but with a thinly veiled impatience. He nodded, while his eyes slid to the big clock on the wall as it neared eleven – though Novak knew from past experience that he had not missed a thing, and would have facts and figures at his fingertips, ready to throw back at him, verbatim, if and when necessary. He straightened his tie. A meeting with the top brass, he'd said. The Assistant Commissioner, no doubt. His Majesty even, Novak shouldn't wonder. Finally he pushed his chair back as a signal for dismissal. ‘Well, play your cards right with this one, and you'll do yourself a bit of good. I've had my eye on you for some time, Adam, and I'll be keeping it there. Best of luck then, but get a move on, there's a good scout.'

When Brownlow used Christian names it was time to be wary. ‘Thank you, sir. We'll do our best.'

So it had been Brownlow who'd got him into this, Novak thought, as he shut the door behind him. Had his eye on him, had he? He took this with a pinch of salt. It was what spurred you on, being told that, but promotion, my eye! In his experience, promotion came by stepping into dead men's shoes.

The trouble was, however, that Brownlow was right, in one sense. Progress still wasn't quick enough.

At the moment, it came down to who had sent Peter that last letter, the contents of which had apparently made it necessary for him to take the risk of absenting himself without permission. Who was it from? That girl in the photograph, causing Sholto to wake up to his responsibilities, as Hennessy had suggested? Unless he'd suddenly begun to worry over that cache of banknotes left in the box. But since it had been sitting there all the time he was in the army, that didn't square with any sudden need to return home. And in any case, it was to Leysmorton he had gone, not to his old home where the money was hidden.

Back in his office, Novak twirled a pencil between his fingers and leaned back until his chair was on its two back legs, a habit that drove even the unflappable Willard mad. It helped him to think, however. And now he found his mind going over and over the conversation he'd had with Edmund Sholto until finally, something clicked. He let the chair fall forward and reached for his notes, and yes, there it was, that mention of the notebooks Peter used to scribble in. It hadn't seemed important at the time, and probably it wasn't important now. Nothing but doodles, he'd told his father, sketches and notes of the old furniture at Leysmorton House he so admired, yet he'd been secretive about showing it. He couldn't have blackmailed Stronglove – or Stella Markham – without some form of tangible proof . . . was it conceivable he'd kept something of the sort in one of those notebooks? If so, he would not have destroyed them as Edmund Sholto had surmised. Novak paused, pencil in mid-air – was it possible there had been something incriminating to himself in them? And that he'd hidden them, not at home but in one of the dozens of hidey-holes likely in a rabbit warren of a house like Leysmorton? He puffed out his lips. Possible, but a long shot. Maybe worth a try.