Almost Love

by Christina James

  The police at Peterborough kept their word. They began searching for the motorbike as soon as it was light the next morning. By 10.00 a.m. they had called Tim to say that they had found it, propped out of sight of the road against the river-facing fence of a small electricity substation on the river bank. There was a bridge nearby and evidence that someone had been sleeping rough underneath it, but from the state of the heap of rags they’d left it didn’t look as if they’d been there recently. The policeman who’d found it e-mailed Tim a couple of photographs of the spot.

  Alex Tarrant arrived shortly afterwards. Tim showed her the photographs.

  “I’m not sure about the bridge,” she said. “It was dark and raining when I was there. But the power-station looks familiar. And there were signs that a tramp had been sleeping under the bridge. Though I suppose that isn’t unusual.”

  “No,” Tim agreed, “but it looks as if this might be the place. Are you still up for coming with us?”

  She seemed to shrink inside herself.

  “I’m . . . not sure. If the motorbike has been abandoned, where do you think Edmund is?”

  “I don’t know, but I think that it’s likely that he’s left the area. We just want you to show us where this hiding-place is to see if he’s left anything there, or traces of having been there himself.”

  “All right. But when I’ve pointed it out to you, I’d like to wait in the car.”

  “Of course.”

  Tim decided not to take the BMW. Instead, they all travelled together in a police car. Tim was in the front passenger seat and Alex sat with Juliet in the back. He chatted to the driver, but Alex and Juliet were silent.

  Even before they had arrived, Alex knew that it was the right place. She recognised the back streets through which Edmund had driven that evening. Their police car drew in behind another already parked against the bank. There was a large object lying beside it. Two policemen were standing there. One of them was fumbling with a tarpaulin that he was trying to spread over the object.

  “Is that the motorbike?”

  “Yes, sir. There’s a breakdown lorry coming to pick it up.”

  “This is Mrs Tarrant. She’s going to show us a place under the bridge that Edmund Baker brought her to once. When she’s pointed it out, I’d like one of you to bring her back here before we take a closer look.”

  “I’ll come back with you,” said Juliet quickly, speaking directly to Alex, who shot her a quick look of gratitude.

  They proceeded along the muddy path in single file. Tim led the way, with Alex following. Juliet came too and one of the policemen. The other waited with the motorbike. At the foot of the path, Alex paused and screwed up her eyes so that she could see into the shadowy area under the bridge. She could almost visualise the chip paper blowing along the towpath, almost smell the cigarettes of the man who had frightened them by patrolling up and down.

  “Are you OK?” asked Juliet.

  “Yes,” said Alex, with a shiver. Tim had gone on a few paces and she now followed, stepping over the sodden mass of old blankets and sleeping bag as she had on her previous visit.

  Once they were standing under the bridge Alex looked up at the ledge that had been built high in the support wall. The ledge seemed higher, and the wall steeper, than she had remembered. She could see the grille clearly, about three quarters of the way along. It appeared to be tightly shut. It was flush with the surrounding masonry.

  “That is the entrance,” she said, pointing to it. “It looks more inaccessible than I remember, but I’m sure you’ll be able to cope.” She looked at Juliet. “I’d like to go back to the car now.”

  She turned and picked her way back across the wet rags until she reached the path. Juliet followed silently.

  They’d been sitting in the back of the car without speaking for some minutes when Juliet said quietly, “Alex? Are you sure you don’t know anything more about what happened to Edmund Baker? You seem very jumpy.”

  Alex met her gaze unflinchingly, her eyes clear and candid.

  “No, I don’t know any more. I’ve no idea what he did or had planned after the last time I saw him at the Archaeological Society. The day that he returned the metal box, when DI Yates helped to carry it in. The day I was taken . . .” She looked down at her hands. “I know it sounds corny, and perhaps you won’t believe me, especially if you do find something hidden up there. But I’ve just got a horrible feeling about this place. It’s not entirely owing to imagination. Someone followed us the night that Edmund brought me here. Someone he was afraid of.”

  Tim twisted his head round and squinted up at the grille. The ledge looked damp and was plastered with bird-droppings. He turned to the Peterborough policeman.

  “Fancy scrambling up there?” he said.

  “Not really, sir, but I will if you want me to. I’m better shod for it than you are.” He shot Tim’s brown leather half-brogues an amused look. Tim looked down self-consciously. He was aware that his footwear betrayed the dandy in him.

  “Be careful. I’ll come up if you need me. Try not to fall on me, though!”

  The policeman grinned. He was a tall, heftily-built man who had appeared quite clumsy when he was fixing the tarpaulin around the motorbike. However, he shinned up the wall quite nimbly now and had reached the ledge in a few seconds. He edged along it towards the grille. Establishing that its hinge was on the left, he seized hold of the vertical bar opposite and gave it a pull.

  “It looks as if this is going to be tough to open, sir. It’s been well rammed into the wall.”

  He pulled out a penknife and worked it round the edges of the metal. He pulled hard again.

  “You need something to lever it with,” said Tim. “Are there tools in the panda car?”

  The policeman shrugged. “Just the normal breakdown tools.”

  “Throw me the keys; I’ll go and see what I can find.”

  Tim returned from the car with a tyre lever.

  “Can you catch this?”

  The policeman held out his hand in response. Tim tossed the lever into the air and he caught it. He set to work on the grille again.

  “I can feel some give in it now,” he said, after several minutes’ hard work. Tim couldn’t see him sweating, but he could sense it.

  “Careful!” he said again.

  The policeman gave the grille a final yank and pulled it open. He shone his torch into the aperture he had just revealed.

  “Fuck!”

  “What is it?” said Tim quickly.

  “There’s a body in here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m definitely sure. I’m surprised you can’t smell it; it stinks!”

  “Push the grille to without shutting it completely and come down as quick as you can. There may have been a build-up of toxic gases in there.”

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  The corpse belonged to Edmund Baker. Forensic evidence taken from the secret room and the post-mortem results revealed that he had been injured, probably by crashing his car rather than as the result of an assault. Whether he had died from his injuries, become accidentally trapped in the room or been shut in deliberately would always be a matter for speculation. In Tim’s view, there was one overwhelming piece of evidence to prove that Edmund’s death was accidental. Under his coat he had been clutching a swastika of what appeared to be red-gold set with blue diamonds. Lab tests showed that the jewel had actually been fashioned from pinchbeck and set with stones made from paste. It was a well-made piece, dating perhaps from the 1850s. An antiquarian jeweller said that its historical value would cause it to be worth about a thousand pounds. Either Jacob Sparham had been guilty of perpetrating a fraud or, more probably, he was the victim of one. His reputation for being taken in by the traders who preyed on Victorian tourists was well-documented.

  Some days after the discovery o
f the corpse, two women turned up unexpectedly at the police station and asked to speak to Tim. They gave their name as Brodowska. The desk sergeant rang to ask Tim if he would see them. They said that it was about Edmund Baker. Tim had been on the point of refusing – he had already fielded several lunatic calls about the swastika – when he remembered that Baker’s deceased wife had had a Polish-sounding name.

  One of the women was elderly – he thought probably in her early eighties. She was accompanied by a middle-aged woman who reminded him of someone, even though he was sure that he’d never seen either of them before. They stood together just inside the door of his office. Neither accepted his gestured offer of a seat.

  The middle-aged woman pointed at the elderly woman. She spoke in fluent English, though it was heavily accented.

  “This is my mother, Jelena,” she said. “Her English is not good, but she has something to tell you.”

  The elderly woman enunciated several sentences in a harsh, cracked voice. She spoke very haltingly. Although most of the time she was looking at the floor, she darted beseeching little looks at Tim every few words. She clearly thought that what she was saying was intelligible to him. She concluded with a kind of vehement crescendo, as if that had settled it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tim, appealing to the middle-aged woman for help. “I didn’t quite understand that. Could you repeat it for me?”

  “She said that when she was a girl, she was taken to a children’s home in Norway. It was a home for orphans; her parents disappeared during the war. The home was burned down. It was burnt deliberately. My mother was one of the few children who escaped. Eventually, she married my father, who was Danish. As a family we lived first in Denmark, then in England. We moved to England when my brother and sister and I were still children. My sister, Krystyna, was the only one of us to marry. She married the man called Edmund Baker, the man whose body is talked about in the newspapers. We didn’t like him, but his marriage to Krystyna seemed all right until a few years ago he had an affair. She was bitterly upset. My mother wanted her to leave him, but she refused. They patched it up, but just recently Krystyna suspected that he’d been seeing the woman – the same woman – again. I don’t know whether it turned her brain, but she became convinced – I should have said, she knew the story of the fire – she became convinced that Edmund had somehow got mixed up with the people who had started it. We thought it was crazy. Krystyna was certainly very depressed. But then she died and there was a boy who said Edmund had pushed her. And now we are wondering, could it be true?”

  Tim sighed. He hardly felt able to cope with this. He pressed a button on his phone.

  “Juliet? Do you think you could come in please? And could you possibly bring some tea. For four. Yes, for four.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Tim and Juliet spent a good hour listening to the two ladies as they went over their story several times more. Their theories, although probably well-founded, could be of no use to the investigation, even if the two people with whom they were concerned had not been dead. However, he was well aware that what he and Juliet were actually doing was helping them to begin the grieving process as they tried to make sense of the extraordinary events that had befallen their family, some of them more than sixty years before.

  Juliet was downstairs showing them out and Tim was just returning to his desk when Superintendent Thornton poked his head around the door.

  “Ah, Yates. You must be pleased with the way the investigation has gone. Not many more loose ends to tie up now. The Edmund Baker problem has been nicely solved. If you can catch Grigoryen, I think we can consider you home and dry. I doubt if you’ll find Jane Halliwell, but we don’t know that she’s actually committed any crimes, do we? She’ll be far away now, in any case. I’ve always thought that she went to ground in Norway somewhere.”

  “Really?” said Tim. Even Superintendent Thornton picked up the twang of sarcasm.

  “Yes, well, if there’s nothing else . . .”

  “There is one thing, sir.”

  Superintendent Thornton immediately looked suspicious.

  “Yes?” he said discouragingly.

  “I should like to know why Superintendent Little was so keen for us to investigate Dame Claudia’s disappearance in the first place. Rather than his own force, I mean.”

  “Yes. Well, Roy’s quite a sensitive man, as I’m sure you’ve discovered. You probably won’t know that he was adopted. Some years ago, he tried to trace his real parents, and came to the conclusion that he was related to Dame Claudia. Not her son – her nephew, I think. The son of her half-sister, or something? So he felt that he couldn’t take the case on. I’ve no idea what steps he took to find this out and I’m sure now that he must have been mistaken. We know who her nephew was, don’t we?”

  Acknowledgements

  I should like especially to thank Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery for their inspiration, advice and encouragement and their unfailing hard work on my behalf; and my husband, Jim, for being a wonderful co-editor. I’d also like to thank the many people who read In the Family, the first of the DI Yates novels, who sent kind and enthusiastic comments. And my sincere thanks to booksellers and librarians everywhere.

  For further information about Christina James, see www.christinajamesblog.com; Christina may be contacted at christina.james.writer@gmail.com or https://twitter.com/cajameswriter