The Phoenix Series Box Set 2

by Ted Tayler

  For a very intelligent lady, it struck Phil as odd that she couldn’t recall the lyrics to one of her chart-toppers. He noticed it on a couple of occasions over the past weeks. If his mother hadn’t owned a copy of the original single and played it non-stop that summer, he wouldn’t have spotted the changes. Odd or not, Phil was not going to raise the matter with her. He wanted to keep HSS in business to bolster his pension, and he had the wages of three employees to satisfy.

  A rewarding future with Honey B would be right out of the window if he mentioned her little lapses in memory.

  *****

  Wednesday, October 2nd, to Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

  In the ice-house, the general intelligence-gathering still carried on in the background. Agents hacked and retrieved, logged and recorded. Any small grain of data that might aid Olympus in the next few hours or at an unknown point in the future was captured. While other agents were assigned to these tasks, Giles Burke and Artemis worked alone.

  After his meeting in the orangery with Phoenix, Giles had returned underground and taken Artemis to one side.

  “Henry has told you that you will be working with me on a special project I understand?”

  “Yes, Giles,” replied Artemis. “He’s told me to drop everything and what we’ll be doing is top secret.”

  “If there was a level higher than that; this qualifies,” said Giles.

  They had been allocated a secure room where they could work, isolated from the rest of the team. Henry had additional equipment delivered within the hour. As he looked around him Giles was happy everything they needed was at hand. The two agents set to work.

  The calendar flipped over from day to day. As potential leads were uncovered, Giles assessed them. If he thought they were worth following up, he contacted Henry Case. Henry had based himself in the Chiswick safe house so he could visit and interview people who had known their targets earlier in their lives. Four of the five concerned lived in London, while Troy Gardner lived only a two-hour drive away in Salisbury.

  Henry and Giles agreed once the London leads were exhausted, he would do a sweep of any interviewees within a one-hundred-mile radius. Anyone who fell outside the ring would be handed on to more local agents. Henry had set aside the weekend to sift through the dialogue these conversations produced.

  Artemis located school friends of the teenage Troy Gardner. She searched through social media sites. She found several of his male contemporaries, ex-girlfriends, ex-wives and his older children. Troy’s father had worked in a flower market a mile away from their home in Bethnal Green. His mother had stayed home looking after her six children. When Troy brought home a school report, which wasn’t very often, it showed he struggled with reading and writing.

  Troy was handy with his fists and enjoyed sports. He was bullied by older boys when he first got to secondary school, but they regretted tangling with him when he had grown. Only a few of his fellow students had left the wider area north of the Thames, so Henry located them quickly and interviewed them.

  The stories he heard from the ex-wives and girlfriends were similar. He was good-looking and fit; he made them feel special. He was a bastard because he had a roving eye. No, he never hit me. It appeared he paid his alimony dues on time, every month, where required. Henry wondered where this was going. He thought he saw a sign to ‘nowhere.’

  Giles tracked down two men from Bethnal Green who remembered Troy from a local youth club. He flagged their profiles up for Artemis to scrutinise.

  “This is something different, Artemis,” he said.

  Artemis read through the details and gave a low whistle.

  “Bingo; this explains why Troy guards his younger life so closely. His image could take a battering if it became public knowledge.”

  Henry Case was contacted and he visited a bar in Shoreditch that evening. The two men he was looking for sat at a corner table. Henry almost missed them at first. The more glamorous one in the sparkling red cocktail dress waved a black-gloved hand and patted the stool next to him.

  “You’re a big boy, aren’t you? What was it you wanted? Drinks are awfully expensive in this place.”

  Henry wedged two folded fifty-pound notes into the man’s cleavage.

  “You knew Troy Gardner back in the days before he became famous I hear?”

  Both men laughed.

  “We remember him alright. Troy was experimenting back then. We were fifteen when we met. We both already knew which way our bread was buttered, but Troy couldn’t decide, poor boy.”

  “What happened?” asked Henry.

  “We started leaving the youth club once we hit sixteen and going uptown. We’d hang around on street corners and wait for a car to stop. Troy came with us a few times and just waited until we came back. He didn’t get in a car with anyone. When he saw us with ten or fifteen quid each time, he joined us. We were making forty to sixty quid a night.”

  “How long did this go on for?” asked Henry.

  The other man spoke. “Troy got out of that game as soon as he found a boxing gym. We worked with him for nine months, a year maybe. We carried on into our twenties.”

  “We had started using crack,” the other man broke in, “we were a mess. We cleaned up and started working the clubs as a drag act.”

  “Did you ever see or hear from Troy again?”

  Henry spotted a glance shared between the two. He waited.

  “How much did he pay for your silence?” he asked.

  “Enough to buy this place, sweetheart,” came the reply.

  Henry drank up and left the bar. Troy Gardner had a secret. He relayed the result of his interview to the ice-house. They could decide what to do next. It was time to move on to a new location, but first, back to Chiswick for a good night’s sleep.

  Giles Burke had taken the file containing the life of Leopold Andrews and dissected it. Many of his former work colleagues and schoolmates were dead. Those that survived were scattered around the world. Giles found it difficult to trace anyone who remembered Leopold well enough to give them anything useful. It was his time at university that held the key. While at Trinity College, Cambridge he had been involved with or on the fringes of several extreme organisations. Leopold was anti-democracy, anti-monarchy, anti-blood sports, anti-vivisection.

  “I don’t think this chap was in favour of very much when he was a student,” exclaimed Giles.

  Artemis took a look over his shoulder at the data on the screen.

  “He’s never been married. Was there ever a woman in his life; apart from his mother? How does he spend his leisure time? Is he gay? Is he among the one per cent of the population that’s asexual? There has to be something that fires him up, surely? Whatever the elusive spark is, that has to be what links him to the others. Nothing we’ve uncovered so far gives us the slightest clue.”

  “Well, you’ve given us several new lines of enquiry. Let’s divide those between us and get searching.”

  At midnight on Thursday night, Artemis found something. Leopold Andrews had bought a poster on eBay three years ago, for a rock festival held in June 1981. It seemed so incongruous when held against the image of the rest of his life. The price he paid was so insignificant it would have been easy to overlook it.

  “Why did someone like Leopold Andrews buy an old poster? What memories did it hold for him?”

  Giles scooted his chair across to where she was working. He was getting nowhere and feeling weary.

  “Where was it?” he asked, stifling a yawn.

  “It was Summer In The City, Crystal Palace; it featured bands such as Ultravox and Madness.”

  “It’s odd, but how does it help?” asked Giles.

  “It doesn’t,” admitted Artemis, “but it will. Let’s take a break; come back at six, refreshed, and take another look at this Philomena Alexander, the singer.”

  On Friday morning, they skimmed over the singer’s early career. They noted the very brief marriage to her record producer. She had married her actor
in 1971 and ditched him in 1981. She was single for a period and then married her international footballer in 1985.

  “It’s starting to fall into place,” said Artemis, with more enthusiasm than Giles could justify.

  “Really?” he said, scratching his head.

  “Look at the synopsis that we have. After the divorce in 1981, she took a career break for several months in 1982. What does that suggest?”

  “She was drying out in a clinic for drink or drugs perhaps?” said Giles.

  “We’re both too young to remember how things were for pop stars from the Sixties; their publicity was manipulated to hide things from their adoring fans. John Lennon was married when The Beatles hit the big time, but that fact was kept from the public for as long as possible. Their management wanted them to appear to be the ‘boys next door’ and available to the ordinary fan. What if Honey B had a child during that career break? She wasn’t married. The dates don’t fit for it being her second husband. It’s unlikely they were sleeping together. Even though it was 1982, her publicity machine had been weaving its magic for fifteen years. They would have convinced her an illegitimate child could harm her career. We can see from all past evidence, just how closely she fights to protect that.”

  “Where was she in mid-June 1981?” asked Giles, starting to get interested in where this was heading.

  “Near the bottom of the bill at Summer In The City,” said Artemis, “look, her name’s mentioned in this festival report. The write-up in the Croydon Guardian reported her as being ‘a token establishment name among the rising stars of modern music’. Her twenty-minute performance was bugged by a poor sound system and various technical problems. Later in the evening while Madness ‘smashed it’, she was seen at the venue drinking champagne straight from a bottle.”

  “So, we have Leopold and Philomena potentially in the same place, at the same time,” said Giles. “She’s drunk; he’s available. Why he was there we may never know. Maybe Henry can find out for us. They have a one-night stand. A child is born; a child who would now be thirty-one. The same age as Dominic Perkins. That wasn’t the name of either of her husbands though was it?”

  Artemis thought how Giles had joined the dots. He could be right. Stranger things had happened. People had fallen into bed with the wrong people for all sorts of reasons. Then she had a brainwave.

  “We need to look at her third husband. His history has never been scrutinised. Why should we, or whoever put together this original file for Athena check him out? It hasn’t been the husbands who have been under the microscope. Let’s see what his record shows.”

  Giles pulled up the profile of Anthony Grant, international footballer. The clubs he played for were listed, the number of caps he won, goals scored. There were statistics and news items everywhere. Giles couldn’t find a birth certificate for him that matched the information available.

  Artemis pointed at the screen.

  “Scroll down the page; there he is, Anthony Grant Perkins born February 28th, 1965 in Peckham. When he signed on for Arsenal youth team, he dropped his surname. There wasn’t room for another player with the nickname ‘Psycho’ in the game.”

  “You’ve lost me there, Artemis,” said Giles, who wasn’t a great follower of football, “but I remember the film. You’ve cracked it, though; Dominic Perkins is Philomena’s child, quite possibly fathered by Leopold Andrews, and the third husband was happy enough for the boy to take his name. The mother always hid her surname, whatever her marital status, and has never been known in public as anything other than Honey B.”

  “Now we appreciate how devious Philomena Alexander is, it makes sense that she persuaded her husband to allow Dominic to take his name. It reduced the chances of anyone linking them together as mother and son. What time is it?” asked Artemis.

  “Half-past eight; brilliant, I can take this gem to Phoenix and Athena before their morning meeting. They need to see this. We’ve found our missing link for three of the photographs. Troy Gardner is the odd one out so far. I don’t believe he’s connected. That just leaves us with Lady Primrose Charmbury, with her paintings and her cats. I wonder how Henry’s getting on with the names I sent him from her university days?”

  Giles hurried over to the main house to pass on the news. Artemis continued to list questions for Henry Case. When she was satisfied she had exhausted the possibilities, she rang him.

  Henry was primed for action. He had been up since seven. As soon as he ended the call from Artemis, he left the safe house and drove towards his first contact. It was going to be a long day, but Henry could see the winning post. Only a few loose ends to tie up now and Olympus would be prepared to face whatever lay ahead.

  Henry was pleased with their progress; a little disappointed he wasn’t inviting any of his interviewees to Hotel California, but one didn’t always get things one wanted in life.

  As he drove back to Larcombe Manor late that evening he reflected on the answers he got. He didn’t understand how they fitted into the jigsaw, but he was convinced Phoenix and Athena were in for a surprise.

  Catherine Morris studied Russian at LMH, Oxford. She and Lady Primrose Charmbury had been fellow students. As ‘freshers’ the two girls attended various events together. They weren’t close friends, they were young, single girls, away from home for the first time.

  “She was so ‘posh’ I never understood why she latched on to me,” Catherine told him. They met in a tea shop in Notting Hill. She was plump, married with children and working as a translator. Her native Yorkshire voice had never softened over the years. Henry idly wondered how Russian sounded with a Bradford accent.

  Over two cups of tea and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits, he heard about the changes that the young Catherine observed in Primrose.

  “Our professor was Russian, the youngest don at Oxford. He was so handsome. When we were in his rooms he was a god to the girls among our group. He didn’t look twice at me, of course. A couple of the girls were pretty and he flirted with them. Prim was beautiful and had class. Professor Sokolov was smitten, I could tell. When Prim and I talked about him it was obvious he frightened her. We were nineteen years old. Neither of us had any experience of men. Not even our own age, let alone a sophisticated, intelligent foreigner such as Anton Sokolov. University life can bring you out of that innocence pretty quickly. I was soon finding male undergraduates who didn’t mind learning things outside the curriculum with a fat lass from Barnsley. This tended to keep me from seeing Prim so often as the years passed. When I saw her during our finals, she was pale, thin and withdrawn. I hardly recognised her. I grabbed her when we were leaving our final exam and dragged her off to my room. She was a mess. When she told me her story, I felt dreadful. If I had been a better friend, I could have saved her. I left her to fend for herself while I went off drinking and partying. I thought she would find friends from her own kind, the Hooray Henry’s and Henrietta’s who populated Oxford. It turned out that Sokolov started to see her in his room alone. He was an animal. Prim was raped repeatedly for two years. He subjected her to all manner of abuse. Prim was so shy and timid. She was scared and ashamed. You can guess the rest, a very attractive first year caught his eye and Prim got thrown aside. I told her she had to speak out; tell someone. We should both go and warn this girl. Prim wasn’t having any of it. She fled from my room and we never met again.”

  “What happened to Sokolov, do you know?” Henry had asked.

  “He left Oxford four years after I graduated. He moved to Winchester. No doubt he carried on abusing the young women he tutored. His car was found abandoned on the edge of the New Forest in 2004. Parts of a skeleton were eventually uncovered and identified as belonging to him a year or two later. Animals and insects had devoured everything to show how he died. It might have been natural causes or suicide; it was impossible to tell. The coroner recorded an open verdict.”

  Henry had waved goodbye to Catherine Morris as she waddled off to her Honda Jazz in the car park. He then drove to Esher
, in Surrey to talk to Paul Trevelyan. Now a successful restaurateur, Paul had been at school with Dominic Perkins. They studied together for two years from the age of fifteen. Paul knew how it was for Dominic, moving home and schools regularly, his father had been in the RAF.

  “We weren’t best mates or anything. Dominic wasn’t easy to get close to. Every now and then he’d let something slip about his parents fighting. He always thought he would be moving again soon. The only constant he had while in his teens was the Isle of Wight. As soon as we broke up for the holidays and went home to our families, Dominic was off to Lymington for the ferry across to the island. When we met up again in September he would be full of the sailing he had done. No doubt he was brilliant. Annoying isn’t it? Some people just seem to be able to turn their hands to anything. I can cook and I’m proficient at running a successful restaurant, but that’s my limit. Dominic was multi-talented. I laugh when I see his mobile phone adverts. I was surprised he didn’t pick a more difficult challenge. That line of business feels too easy for him.”

  It was mid-afternoon when Henry had left Paul Trevelyan’s place and headed back into London. Reading the menu and the specials board had made him peckish. When he reached Peckham for his last appointment, he decided to invite his contact to dine with him.

  Mick Reynolds looked as if he could do with a good square meal. He was in his early sixties, with a thin, unshaven face. The bags under his eyes gave him the look of a world-weary greyhound. Henry took one look at his scruffy clothes and uncombed hair. Fine dining was out, but there were plenty of pubs that served acceptable food. Henry fetched a pint of lager and a soft drink from the bar. They chatted while they waited for the food to arrive.

  Henry asked Mick to tell him what he remembered about the Anti-Royalist and anarchy groups active in the early Eighties. Mick Reynolds looked around the bar furtively as if expecting a hand to fall on his shoulder at any moment.