Almost Love

by Christina James

  Several of the men from the drugs ring, including the Jared Tim had once glimpsed when he had visited Guy Maichment’s cottage, had been cornered and arrested by the police, but a man called Endrit, whose name Alex Tarrant had heard and mentioned to Juliet (enabling her to identify him as an Albanian wanted by the police forces of several countries), and probably others had gone to ground. It was unlikely that their less fortunate cronies, now in captivity, would give them away; the temporary protection offered by custody notwithstanding, to betray Endrit was probably literally more than their lives were worth. Unless DNA could be found that definitively linked the rest of the gang to the crimes, Tim doubted that any of them would be apprehended.

  The casualties had multiplied. The man found in the makeshift grave at Maichment’s cottage might, in fact, have been the first of those relating to the case. Dame Claudia McRae was almost certainly dead, although the painstaking dredging operation now under way at the gravel pits had so far yielded no body. Krystyna Baker was dead. Oliver Sparham was dead. Lyle had been the most recent victim.

  Edmund Baker and Jane Halliwell had disappeared. Superintendent Thornton thought that they had slipped through the police net together and were keeping each other company in a cosy hideaway somewhere; for some reason, he favoured Scotland. Tim knew that Juliet did not subscribe to this theory, which to his knowledge was not founded on fact. She believed that Baker was probably dead and was equally convinced that Halliwell had indeed managed to escape. She would put her money on the woman’s having been whisked to the safety of a bolt-hole in Norway; she guessed that The Ymir would have welcomed Jane into the safety of their underground network. Her mission might have failed, but she was now one of their own, in deed as well as thought. Tim was inclined to agree with Juliet’s assessment. Edmund Baker had never subscribed to the right-wing theories that Oliver Sparham had so unthinkingly embraced in his youth. He had agreed to work with them because they had had some kind of hold over him. He had both outlived his usefulness and become an embarrassment. Tim thought it likely that he had suffered the same fate as the corpse they had found in the park at Ayscoughfee shortly before Claudia McRae’s disappearance.

  Tim dismissed as worthless the warped logic with which The Ymir tried to rationalise their ideas. He would not waste time trying to understand their point of view, but he knew that they, like other extremist political groups, were probably adept at dazzling impressionable recruits, as they had the young Oliver Sparham, with their false glamour. What was more puzzling was how they had managed to interest a hard-nosed bunch of Albanian thugs in their activities, even to the extent of securing funds from them. Why the same thugs had agreed to risk not only their freedom but also their lives in embarking upon the insane and tragic enterprise of firing a children’s home was even more difficult to fathom.

  Over the past two days, Ricky MacFadyen and Andy Carstairs had been interviewing Jared. Juliet had meanwhile joined forces with Katrin to pool all of the information that together they had collected in order to try to make it tell an accurate and logical story. Tim noted that Katrin appeared to be much happier now. Their old intimacy would need re-learning, but her tears and scolding for exposing himself to danger at Herrick Old House had been a promising start. He had yet to pluck up the courage to engage her in the heart-to-heart that he had planned before the McRae case had completely taken over his life. He was determined not to shrink from it now by convincing himself that the problem had dissolved with her recovery. She might have regained some of her old equanimity and sparkle, but he had to find out if she was truly happy again. The period in which she had shut him out had been too profoundly disturbing for him to be able to risk allowing an unknown grievance to continue to fester beneath a veneer of calm.

  Juliet had twice interviewed Alex Tarrant. Alex had been a pliant and co-operative witness, almost abject in her apologies for not having told the whole truth about her relationship with Edmund when the police had interviewed her after the break-in. Juliet was beginning to like her; all the same, she wondered if Alex would have been so frank if Tom Tarrant had not been tucked out of the way in hospital. She seemed fiercely determined to defend her marriage against further damage. She confided that, although she had at first thought otherwise, she was satisfied that Tom did not believe that she had been unfaithful to him. Juliet wondered if this could really be true; an alternative explanation might be that Tom Tarrant was a wiser man than first acquaintance might suggest. He might have divined that healing the hurt would be easier if they did not confront the details of her infidelity head-on. Nevertheless, Juliet sympathised with Alex, who had suffered a great deal because of her ill-judged peccadillo with Edmund; and in part, Juliet believed, unfairly. She had certainly been groomed by him so that he could win her co-operation; Juliet doubted if Alex herself would have made the first move. And Tom probably had not been a perfect husband.

  Many tasks remained to be accomplished. The police would have to continue to try to locate Edmund Baker and Jane Halliwell, round up more of the drugs gang and establish the exact crimes that each of the perpetrators could be charged with. In order to crack on with this work, Tim had asked Juliet to prepare as complete and accurate account as she could of the likely sequence of events since Dame Claudia’s disappearance, giving background information where this might be relevant.

  This was why the team had now all crammed itself into the largest of the evidence rooms. Most clutched plastic cups of coffee; the windows had already misted over. Juliet hovered apprehensively in front of the jumble of desks. Tim had invited her to fill in the gaps with conjecture if she felt that this could be done without making too many wild assumptions. He realised he was taking a risk here. Most of his direct reports were deeply sceptical about making deductions that couldn’t be absolutely proved; he congratulated himself that this was mainly because he had trained them well. Whilst he had every respect for Juliet’s hypotheses, he also knew that self-confidence was not her strongest trait; if ridiculed, she would back down or simply be unable to continue. Individually, he had therefore warned the others not to pour too much scorn on what she said if they disagreed with her. As he had explained, obtaining as coherent an interpretation as possible of an apparently disjointed, sometimes bizarre series of events would be more likely to promote a break-through than if they were merely to internalise each of these events individually.

  Tim had always to tread a delicate path when encouraging Juliet. If he was too overtly critical, she shrivelled; if he praised her too fulsomely, she became embarrassed. Having thus quietly worked in private to ensure that she wouldn’t be squashed during the meeting, he therefore decided that now he would adopt a matter-of-fact approach.

  “Good morning, everyone. As you know, I’ve asked Juliet to provide us with a rather unusual kind of briefing and it may prove to be a long one. Juliet’s researched a lot behind the scenes as well as following all the work that we’ve done in the field and I’d like us all to hear her overall perspective on what has been happening from the perpetrators’ point of view. I’ve told her to make educated guesses when she can’t supply all the answers from fact. Juliet, we’re all ears.”

  With her usual meticulousness, Juliet had already posted photographs on the glass screens in the meeting-room and written under each one with white, blue and red marker pens. She had drawn a timeline across the top of the central screen. Tim was amused to see that it began with the year 1937.

  Juliet stationed herself alongside the screens.

  “Good morning,” she said. She didn’t sound as nervous as he’d feared. She indicated the time-line briefly. “I’m not going to talk you through this all at once,” she said. “It’ll make more sense if I refer to it in stages as we go along.”

  She touched the first photograph.

  “As you all know, this is a picture of Dame Claudia McRae. She is the famous archaeologist who disappeared four weeks ago. Her disappearance was reported by
this man,” – she indicated a photograph of Guy Maichment – “her nephew, who works as a landscape gardener and has recently been commissioned to carry out extensive work on the Herrick Estate. He has a long-standing relationship with this woman,” – she pointed to a photograph of Jane Halliwell – “who is employed as Dame Claudia’s companion and secretary. Jane Halliwell was cruising in the Baltic and some of the Norwegian fjords at the time of Dame Claudia’s disappearance. She claims to have been accompanied by a friend, whom we have assumed to be male. She gave no further details, but we have established that she occupied a single cabin. The cruise ship’s passenger records have yielded no information that could enable us to deduce which of her fellow travellers might have been the friend. However, during the middle part of the cruise the passengers disembarked at Oslo for the afternoon. I think that she may have met this man there.” Juliet briefly touched a rather blurred picture of a tall, balding man standing in front of a lectern. It was a still taken from the podcast that she had watched early in the investigation. “I have examined the ship’s CCTV; there is a picture of someone resembling him standing on the quay beside Jane before she re-embarked.”

  “Why did she say that she was accompanied by a friend if it wasn’t true?” asked Andy Carstairs.

  “I can’t say for certain, but possibly to suggest that her reason for taking the cruise was to pursue a liaison. She wanted to cover up her real reason. Ironically, it was her mention of the friend that led me to dig further; the cruise ship company helpfully provided the CCTV footage.”

  “Do we know the identity of the man?”

  “Various tests have yet to be carried out, but if I’m correct I think that he was this man.” Juliet turned to another screen on which were affixed photographs taken from several angles of the corpse that had been dug up at Guy Maichment’s cottage.

  “Wow,” said Andy. “Perhaps he should have gone on the cruise after all. He looks like he could have used a holiday.” He was gratified to raise a few titters from his colleagues. “Who is he?”

  “If I’m right – the tests still have to confirm it, remember – his name is Andreas Jensen. He is one of the leaders of an extremist right wing group that has existed in Norway since the 1930s. It calls itself The Ymir. The original Ymir was a primeval god. In old Norse mythology, its body parts were supposed to have been used to fashion the whole world. The group chose this name to indicate its commitment to monolithic racial purity; the founder’s raison d’être was to preserve the Norwegian race intact, unsullied by any immigrant blood. There are indications that The Ymir has extended its activities to other countries. There are now ‘chapters’ here and in some of the European countries more strongly committed to opposing the introduction of immigrant communities.”

  “Did the swathe of blood we found on the hall wall of Claudia McRae’s cottage come from this man?”

  “Yes. That is one of the tests for which we already have a result.”

  “So if you are correct about his identity, he died two or three days after he met Jane Halliwell?”

  “Yes. Rather cleverly, Halliwell made sure that she herself was nowhere near the scene of the two crimes – Claudia McRae’s abduction and this man’s murder – at the time they were committed. But I think that she instigated both of them.”

  “Who do you think killed the man? Was it Guy Maichment?”

  “I think that that’s unlikely. Guy claims to be very squeamish, especially about the sight of blood. The murder victim’s throat was cut from ear to ear in a single slashing movement that required considerable strength, as well as a brutal disposition. I think that he was probably killed by a drug-dealer called Endrit Grigoryen, or by one of his henchmen, called Jared, one of the gang members we managed to apprehend. He’s not co-operating, of course, and I’d say that he’s borderline psychotic. I’ll come back to him and Alex Tarrant’s abduction later.”

  “We’ve believed all along that when she first disappeared, Claudia McRae had been abducted rather than murdered and, as you know, there was a sighting of her some time afterwards, which suggests that she wasn’t killed straight away. But you think that she’s dead now, don’t you?” It was Tim speaking. Juliet noticed that his reference to the sighting sounded a little forced and uneasy.

  “I need to give you some background about Dame Claudia. When she started work as an archaeologist in the 1930s she won a considerable amount of popular acclaim as a young woman who had broken into a man’s world. However, she had little formal education or grounding in the scientific archaeological methods that were beginning to be developed. Although she wasn’t just a treasure-hunter, she favoured the approach of the gentlemen archaeologists of the generation that preceded hers, such as Howard Carter. Briefly, this involved clawing their way willy-nilly through earthworks and architecture to reach the artefacts that lay beyond. They weren’t interested in the construction of the monuments and buildings that they destroyed in the process. All archaeological digs are destructive, but the modern ones keep painstaking records of each stage of the dig and try to destroy as little as possible.

  “Claudia’s family was wealthy. She could have attended university to gain the right academic credentials or apprenticed herself to one of the younger archaeologists of the time. However, she was temperamentally unsuited to sustained study and very proud of the fame that she had already acquired as a young woman who had broken through the magic male monopoly.”

  “Very mellifluous!” said Ricky. “See if you can surprise us with a few more poetic turns.”

  Juliet flushed and faltered.

  “Can we try to get through this uninterrupted?” said Tim. “We appreciate your wit, but this is all quite complicated. We need to concentrate.”

  Juliet gave him an uncertain smile.

  “She wanted full recognition for her work and therefore began to write for archaeological publications, at least the ones that would accept her articles. Perhaps because she experienced some difficulty in getting the articles accepted, she wrote at least two full-length books about the digs that she had organised in the Middle East in the late 1930s. The first of these was published in 1937. Her theory, based on a limited amount of fact, was that in ancient societies women carried as much weight as men; that although the division of work between the sexes was already developing, women still fought and hunted alongside their menfolk. As well as this, she claimed that the traditional female tasks, such as child-rearing, were more valued than in later, historical times. As I’ve said, the theory was based on a very selective interpretation of some of the artefacts and wall paintings that she’d uncovered. Her writing was treated with scepticism by many of the male establishment, but Claudia struck a chord with women just as forerunners of what became the feminist movement began to gain momentum.

  “Claudia was determined to overcome male prejudice. Her opportunity came in 1938. She’d been planning a dig in the Middle East and had obtained the funding for it – she was adept at touching her late father’s influential friends for money – when the Foreign Office stepped in and warned her that the situation in Europe was such that it would be too risky for her to carry on with the dig. I don’t think that Claudia would have taken a blind bit of notice of this, but, because of the fuss made about it, much of the funding was also withdrawn. She was asked by Lord McLachlan, who was also her publisher, to carry out some excavations in the Orkneys instead, as a kind of consolation prize. At first she was reluctant to take the job on, but she finally accepted the offer, if with a bad grace. By this time, war had been announced in Europe and she had few other options if she wanted to carry on as an archaeologist in the field.

  “To give her due credit, she carried out the two Orkney excavations diligently, with little help except from local labourers who were paid to do some of the soil carting, etcetera. Her efforts were repaid with the most fantastic stroke of luck – a once-in-a-lifetime find.”

  “Th
e McRae Stone?” said Tim.

  “Yes. That’s what it became known as. It’s also been called the ‘Rosetta of the North’. Like the Rosetta Stone, it was inscribed with the same text in three different ancient languages. Even though war had been declared, its discovery generated a huge amount of interest, both in this country and abroad.

  “As we’ve seen, Claudia was already good at making her finds fit her theories. She had previously used her work to embrace the cause of feminism. She now set about claiming that her analysis of one of these three languages demonstrated that the people who had developed it were of superior intelligence to those who spoke the other two. I don’t know whether she thought of it first herself or whether someone suggested it to her, but what she was proposing was that the sophistication of this language indicated the existence of an early master-race.”

  “And the language was an early form of Norwegian?”

  “Yes. And of course the master race concept was as topical then as feminism had been earlier. Claudia wrote one article in support of her theory that reads just like her earlier stuff. She sets out her ideas enthusiastically, almost with bombast. She’d done some nifty work on the semantics, but she offers little other evidence to support it.

  “The next article was published a year or so later. It is remarkable how much her style had changed in the interim . . .”

  “This was after the war had started properly?”

  “Yes. The article was published early in 1941. The second article and all the subsequent ones about the MacRae Stone that Katrin and I have found and read are less floridly written and much more closely argued. They are almost self-consciously erudite, with footnotes citing other work that show an impressive knowledge of semantics and early Norse history. And they are phenomenally well-versed in post-First-World-War politics. I suspect that Claudia herself introduced the master race idea to make a bit of a splash, but whoever wrote those articles was in deadly earnest. They were fascinated by her theory and they definitely wanted to make it stick.”