Bitter Pastoral_A DCI Caleb Cade Crime Thriller of rural Ancaster County.

by John R Goddard

  Tom’s regret at what he does not yet have and deeply desires, a partner or family, lingers long in my mind after I drive away.

  ***

  Sam holds his hands out in shame and surrender. Neither of us speak as we hug for over a minute. Breaking apart in the kitchen of my mother’s house, I softly ask if we might talk about my Aunt Penny, my father and my mother’s life of pain and heartache. I want to cry out. ‘Why did you, nobody ever tell me or even give me a clue in all these years?’ But I do not. The gaunt lines on his weathered face is sufficient to tell me of the agony he has undergone in keeping the secret, not agreeing with doing so and now not knowing what it will mean between us. No words are necessary as his eyes are tearful, and we merely nod to leave any discussion to another day.

  I change the subject, reassure him the burglary is not his fault as he wipes his eyes with a huge red handkerchief.

  His eyes are dull as he tells what happened. Soon after midnight the phone woke him. Ena from next door says he has burglars. He rises, switches various lights on, makes a noise and watches from the back-bedroom window as two figures - one small and graceful, one tall and stocky - flit away around the edge of the field and into the far darkness. Could it be young Rudd and Stephenson? It could but he is not sure, it was very dark.

  We go next door. Ena tells the same tale. Unable to sleep she was going to the toilet when she saw two figures at my mother’s side door. She rang Sam, switched on her own lights and rang the police even as the two burglars ‘hight tailed it, I cen tell ya.’

  I do not need to inform my mother. The grapevine had done that, Sam says. She is moving back home this afternoon.

  Seeing me to my car Sam explains nervously, “I am staying a few more days, lad, just for security if that is ok with you?”

  Then quickly as he leaves me, “Separate rooms of course.”

  47

  The squad room is empty, but surprisingly warm with the four propane gas fires spluttering manfully against the chill. The stone plinth above the door to Merian nick declares it was opened in 1893 by some glorious Alderman, long since forgotten and departed. Sky and building were perhaps as cold and grey in those days as now. The drip of water tells of the snow relenting its icy grip.

  My DCs are off investigating the burglaries and farm thefts, but have clearly been in early as mounds of files lay strewn on their desks. Violas, cellos and basses lay down a quiet reverberation like a hurdy-gurdy as violins venture a country dance melody in Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony which echoes softly from the small speaker attached to the iPod laid on DC Whittle’s desk. A trusting girl, she has also revealingly left a note to herself to listen to Vivaldi, Elgar, Britten and other titles that explore the rural life.

  I turn it off, put the machine safely in her drawer and settle in my office to gather my thoughts on the cases so far and this afternoon’s interview with the Hakluyt couple at Albion House, an event which instinct says is crucial. Without thinking I flick down the music list on my own phone, find ‘Pastoral’ and set it playing while I work. Lively rhythms score folk music to life, and I actually sit back, eyes closed, as long-held musical notes give the whole movement a sense of freedom and space. If only I could slip back and away to there.

  Amy has personally delivered two files on the Hakluyts, both marked ‘Ultra-Confidential, DCI and Above Only’ and left beneath my desk so there is no paper trail of my having them.

  One is details of their Special Protectee status, response procedures and personnel from all emergency services, plus the army, to keep them safe.

  The other file I researched some years ago myself with Amy contributing. Born of a feeling that we needed to know about the half dozen ultra-rich individuals who live in our county. Oddly, real information had been sparse beyond the headlines. Charles Hakluyt is the son of an east London market trader, a whizz at mathematics who had become an investment phenomenon with a British bank by the time he was thirty and married a fellow high flyer, an American woman of rich family from the deep South. Even that young he merited attendance with other movers and shakers at the luxurious World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland, each January.

  Set to be one of the supreme ‘masters of the universe’ in London and Europe for decades, inexplicably Hakluyt faltered for some reason no one knew, or would say. He disappeared to enjoy his wealth. Only to return a year on as the Vice President of a Chinese bank. He took the Asian world by storm, becoming the public face of his bank in carefully selected interviews with esteemed media outlets like the Economist, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. His wife Rebecca turned away from banking, becoming a novelist, full time mother and house restorer.

  I am online ordering two of her works from the local library when Fenwick is the first to call in. He clearly does not enjoy mixing with farmers, even ones who have had crimes committed against them involving thefts amounting to over half a million pounds in value. His distaste is likely a class thing. He comes from the other side of the tracks to them. I can tell by his voice. I like him for it, I am the same.

  “Arrogant buggers, farmers and big companies who own these farms, but I did my best,” he says.

  As briefed, he has got a full list of anyone and everyone who works at the farms in question, lives nearby or visits regularly whether milkman, postman, food delivery driver, plumber or contract worker, Vet or policeman. He had jibbed at the last one but I had insisted. A local company installed and serviced the alarm systems at all three farms, with the list of technicians who attended every six months but not including James Rudd.

  “Buggers did not want to do any work to help, just moan about how we should protect them.”

  The three farmers or their managers had all given Fenwick grief about why the investigation team consisted only of a DC and the young female PC I had asked be assigned to accompany him.

  Fenwick will come in now and cross check to see if any names are on every list, if any have criminal links or money problems and sudden wealth. He has already followed up uniform visits to local pubs, shops, post offices, about any strangers. We agree it will be a local supplying the information, and non-Ancaster ‘furriners’ or ‘blow-ins’ doing the dirty deeds.

  Work your own sources too, I tell him, confident he will have local connections. Someone will know something, have seen something even if they do not recognise it themselves. The farms all have the same security provider but James Rudd is not the technician who has visited.

  ***

  Water drips outside, the fires splutter as my music eases into a tranquil summer scene by a brook, two muted cellos tinkling the stream gently onwards. The flute lilts as a nightingale, the oboe is a quail and clarinet a cuckoo. I remember Bess telling me that Beethoven joked he had hidden the song of a yellowhammer in this movement too. She so loved this piece, country places as brought to life almost like an Impressionist painting in sound. I am not dizzy or stumbling. Simply lost as I stare at the picture on my desk of Bess and Grace taken during our last summer. I trace their tiny outlines. Perhaps I should embrace memory, be grateful for what I had. Perhaps.

  I force myself back to the exotic world of high finance and the uber-rich. Drilling down myself into more recent specialist financial tomes on the world-wide web I find Charles Hakluyt is renowned for his investment skills, especially in spotting and taking large stakes in one ‘Decacorn.’ And several ‘Unicorns,’ when even the most successful backers count themselves lucky to invest in just one such in a lifetime. I scramble to research the modern use of the word for such mythic beasts.

  DC Whittle interrupts as I have six research screens open. She is revisiting the burglary at the Merian Standard newspaper seedy shop and office, a simple break-in and far from Major Crime’s remit. Parsons is right that we are being demeaned with such routine jobs allotted by Creel.

  And yet, when Whittle phones me she reports that the thing is far from routine. The alarm, at the small office in Merian’s quaint market square, is old fa
shioned but still functional, yet it had been swiftly disabled while the burglars were inside and then switched on again as they left so as not to arouse suspicion when people came to work after the weekend. Nothing of value had been taken with a high-end computer and printer, two iPads, an iPhone and £500 in cash ignored.

  Instead the burglars had made their way directly to the basement, quietly searched and stolen files containing clippings and photographs from the archive relating to subjects with the letters C to G, for the years 1960 to 1980. They had also taken three large boxes of old photographs about a local primary school, donated or lent by the public for its two-hundredth exhibition after an appeal by the paper.

  First odd thing, the CCTV cameras covering the square had been covered with black tape, from Saturday evening until Monday morning. They are not watched unless needed and so nobody noticed.

  “Second, the editor and the woman on the front desk only twigged they had been burgled at all when he needed an old file and she found two cabinets of old cuttings and photographs had just been emptied, and the boxes of memorabilia lifted too.”

  Whittle rushes on then, almost indignant, “No digital archive man, pre-historic. Sorry. They have only been digitising modern stuff for five years. Then we checked the alarm record and found it had been disabled for four hours early Sunday. Big up. Sorry, you have to give the burglars respect, very efficient.”

  In her haste to cover all the details at speed, Whittle has dropped into a broad Leeds accent with traces of Jamaican patois laced therein. I wonder what the locals make of her. Yorkshire is another country, Jamaica another planet to many. A strikingly beautiful coffee coloured young woman, her father was a white local vicar who died when the girl was only two. Mrs Whittle came from Jamaica when a child, knew hardship and that you had to get on with things. She knuckled down, did three jobs and worked at night school to become an accountant and put her daughter through University to Masters level. Who knows what mother thought of her pride and joy joining the police, and not even in Yorkshire but rural Ancaster County?

  The editor, receptionist and two advertising people are the only ones who know the code, Whittle says, breaking through my reverie. I tell her to do a search for any missed clues, to get forensics to do a fingerprint check though more for show than anything else, and look at the police files from Intelligence for people with similar modus operandi. From memory, I give Whittle four names to look at though this seems something far beyond a local petty burglar, who would at least want to steal something worthwhile. I ask her to check who put the alarm in and who services it now, including the name of the actual technicians. She has the information. It is not Rudd’s company.

  At the last Whittle is hesitant,

  “The editor, managing editor, news editor, chief and only reporter, seems this guy does it all, asked why you were not here yourself and would you do an interview, let him follow you around for a few days - human interest, you being back as a detective and that kind of stuff?”

  48

  I lose myself in a headlong Beethoven scherzo, played with gusto as though by a village band at a fete as I return to two articles on Charles Hakluyt and his career. Opinion is divided. Yes, he made large investments very early in not one but three ‘Decacorn,’ a financial label that means a start-up corporation that is now worth over $10 billion, and a score of financial ‘Unicorns,’ new operations that have grown to over one billion in value each. He is also on course to have been instrumental with, the spawning of not one but two companies that are approaching $250 billion in market value and expected to go far higher. All quite a feat, even for a bank that is part owned and backed by the Chinese government, and specialises in the ever-burgeoning areas of IT, telecommunications, entertainment and energy. But the nay sayers, especially in the West, pour scorn on things. After all, each company imitates what has previously exploded in the West and merely applies a similar model and service for China with its protected market and huge population or to India with its vast potential.

  Hakluyt rides rough shod over the criticism when it is put to him in two recent interviews, one in the China Daily, the other the prestigious China Business News. His aim is a string of ‘Hectocorns,’ start-ups that are eventually worth $100 billion plus, he says, along with D’Eynscourte continuing to be one of Asia’s premier trading and currency banks, serving the Chinese nation and global commerce.

  His new-found success in Asia has propelled Hakluyt back to the annual Davos gathering, where I find images of him with various world famous names from politics and business. He is also now part of the Bilderberg Group, an annual forum for informal discussion between a hundred and fifty political leaders and top experts from European and North American industry, finance, academia and the media who are specially selected to discuss megatrends and major issues facing the world. No notes are taken, no policy statements issued. No photographs this time.

  Amy sends me a link to the Ancaster County Magazine, which carries an interview with the Hakluyts, published this month. It carries brief biographies; no new revelations save that they are generous to Ancaster County’s arts and charities. The article abounds with images of Albion House, a stereotypical Jane Austen country home, which Mrs Hakluyt has renovated, decorated and furnished in the grand style of its original period, underpinned by all modern conveniences.

  They are a striking couple in their early fifties, pictured with their two children, the boy inevitably at Oxford, the girl at Graduate School in America. I know she will be at Harvard, where else, even as I find myself looking forward to seeing the house and grounds which once were a mystical playground when I was little.

  Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ is on a loop to keep repeating and I hear the shepherd’s call on clarinet and then the horn, moving leisurely to open out with key changes to a new and more beautiful sound vista each time. It stays my mind, becomes hymn-like with sotto voice as strings whisper and wind instruments answer as though in prayer and response. I love this part, regretting the final muted call of the horn then as the symphony winds off into the blue distance.

  I turn off the music. Studying the materials and especially the photographs of the Hakluyts both together and apart, a strategy is taking shape in my head. Still images tell us much – the way Hakluyt and his wife stand together and yet distanced somehow, the prominent way he somehow foregrounds his wrist watch, the background of sculptures, a display of fine porcelain and a grand piano. I do not imagine they allowed a jobbing photographer from Ancaster County way to dictate how they were portrayed, rather their own PR man or woman would ensure it was done exactly how they dictated by their own professional.

  ***

  Gadd rings, instantly beginning a long winding tale that I cannot fathom. He desperately needs to work with an experienced partner beyond the young uniformed male PC from the original search group whom I had asked be assigned to accompany Gadd. I had liked the look of the boy and it is never too early to look for future talent. My DCs all strictly need a C.I.D. partner in a perfect world, but we are short-handed and need to cover the basics of the cases as rapidly as possible. The difficulty being Gadd apparently cannot summarise. Instead he has to tell me the story from beginning to end so as not to miss anything. I long to ask for the PC to come on the phone but know this will diminish my DC.

  While my eyes are skimming over the fifty pages of material in the Hakluyts’ Special Protectees file, and protection procedures as signed off by Special Branch and Creel, I listen to the story of Gadd’s morning at D'Eynscourte Village Academy Primary School. Memories of my days there with Bess, Valentine and Henry Aystrup crowd in with Ms Loam first as my teacher and then the Head, and my first skirmishes with the school bullies Smith and Marshall.

  I conjure up the series of single-storey Victorian buildings, forming a porticoed square of a quadrangle around a large lawn, all set in expansive grounds, surrounded by farmland on two sides, the pretty village on a third. On the other D'Eynscourte Manor House grandly regal at
the head of the sweeping valley two miles away even today no doubt through the layers of snow and mist.

  Gadd is put out. The Principal was all fuss and bother, spouting jargon about ‘the disruption of schedule’ and ‘effects on the school’s image and ethos” which the police should respect and protect. He will naturally be reporting this to his Chairman of Governors, Lord D'Eynscourte and the estate manager, Mr Bull. I can hardly wait.

  The alarm is sophisticated, but had been disabled at midnight on Sunday evening for four hours, before being reactivated as the visitors left. A pattern is emerging. As with Whittle’s case, the burglars - and Gadd is convinced it would need more than one - had gone directly to their target area, easily opening a series of locked inner doors in the process. A dozen large boxes of old photographs and newspaper clippings had been dragged from a storeroom to the nearby boiler room and carefully burnt in a space with no windows and no fire alarm, while ensuring that the blaze was controlled and did not get out of hand.

  Nothing else had been touched. Classrooms had been individually locked and alarmed, but that would surely be little problem to seemingly accomplished burglars such as these. Various rooms each contained decent IT equipment and projectors, while the Head’s office had a very expensive computer and printer, a large screen television, and a desk, conference table and chairs, that must have cost over £10,000 between them, Gadd says. Good old Academies, private enterprise comes to education and the money is clearly spent on the kids as the first priority. Or so it is told.

  I send Gadd back in to ask the Principal, or more usefully Brian the old caretaker if he still works there, who installed the alarm system and now services it, including the name of the technician.