JT01 - In The Blood

by Steve Robinson

  “Glad to have been of service,” Gerald said, getting to his feet. “I have to get back,” he added. “I’ve a jewel box to look at this afternoon. Probably Fabergé. Should fetch a fortune.”

  Tayte stood up and shook Gerald’s hand. “You don’t know how helpful you’ve been.”

  “Not at all,” Gerald said. Then he turned to Kapowski. “See you later.”

  Tayte slipped the letter into his jacket and sat down, pulling the box closer. He slid the main compartment back inside and followed the reverse of what Gerald had just shown him, getting a good understanding of how it all worked so he could show Amy when he got back. She won’t believe it, he thought. He felt like a kid with a new toy.

  “So I guess this is it,” Kapowski said. “The coffee’s finished, the cheque’s paid. Now it’s back to reality?”

  Tayte looked up from the box, spinning the rose dial to reset it. He closed the lid, knowing he hadn’t been paying her enough attention since Gerald reappeared. “Sorry,” he said. “Miles away there. Look Julia, thanks for this, really. If there’s anything I can do for you. Well, you’ve got my number.”

  Kapowski’s eyes sparkled, like she was imagining several things right there and then.

  “I’ve got to ask,” Tayte said. “Looking for Larry?”

  Kapowski actually blushed. “I’m not sure I can tell you.”

  “Then I’m not sure I can call you and tell you what flight I’m catching back to Boston.” Tayte looked nonchalant. “It’s a shame,” he added. “I’m already getting the shakes just thinking about it. You might have helped distract me from my phobia.”

  “Larry Hagman,” Kapowski blurted.

  Tayte’s mouth twitched with amusement. “Dallas?”

  “That’s the one. He was my Mr Right when I left college. After three bad marriages, I’m still looking.”

  Tayte turned to the window for distraction.

  Kapowski laughed at him. “Don’t look so worried,” she added. “It’s only our first date!”

  Tayte laughed along with her, then he glanced at his watch and sighed. “I guess it is that time.” He put the box away. “Can I walk you back to your office?”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Jefferson Tayte passed through the ticket gate at Paddington train station and made his way along the platform, heading for the 17:03 to Truro amid a jostle of Friday commuters. Looking up, he admired Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s collaborative creation with architect, Matthew Digby Wyatt. The glowing central span arched like a decorative wrought iron rib-cage a hundred feet above him. It was supported on red-and-white steel columns and ran some 500 feet in length to a bright fan of light at the opening. He wondered how many of the people rushing around him spared any time to take a look; how many stopped to read about its history or knew anything about the place at all.

  After he’d left Kapowski, taking a cab from outside her office building not far from the park where they’d met, he’d updated his client then called Amy to share his news about the box. He’d been disappointed to get no reply but he figured good news keeps and a large part of him wanted to see her face when he revealed what the box specialist had discovered.

  He followed a grey suit into the vestibule area of the train carriage - another similarly attired man was at his heels. The carriage was already busy as he went through and the air immediately assaulted him with a mixture of new plastic and velour seat coverings fused with overheating bodies, sweaty from the office march and the London Underground. He hoped the air-conditioning worked.

  He hadn’t long found a seat when his cellphone rang. The train was still in the station, though the doors had closed, sealing everyone in ready for departure. He had his briefcase clamped between his feet and the rucksack on his lap. His phone’s simple ring tone amplified as he took it out of his pocket, drawing attention. The display gave him no clue as to the caller’s identity.

  “JT,” he announced. The woman in the seat opposite him looked up from her book, distracted by the obvious burst of something foreign. Beside her a young earphone clad office worker remained oblivious.

  “Mr Tayte?” the caller asked.

  Tayte thought it sounded like a man’s voice, but there was something odd about the tone and he couldn’t be certain. “Speaking,” he said.

  “I have something for you, Mr Tayte.”

  The voice sounded cartoon-like and unnatural, like whoever was speaking was breathing helium between sentences. “Who is this?” Tayte asked.

  “Who I am doesn’t matter. You’ll know soon enough.”

  Tayte was intrigued. “Did you leave that old newspaper copy under my wiper blade at Bodmin yesterday?” He was speaking louder than he meant to. The whole carriage seemed to quieten. He turned to the window and asked, “How did you get my number?”

  “Just listen, Mr Tayte. I didn’t call you to pass the time. We need to meet. I can help you.”

  Tayte felt the train jerk as it started to move. A late boarder wielding a laptop suddenly filled the empty seat beside him.

  The voice in Tayte’s cellphone continued. “I don’t have much time, Mr Tayte. When I’ve finished speaking this call will end.”

  The caller had Tayte’s full attention.

  “There is a place on the Lizard Peninsula,” the voice said. “Not far from the inlet to the Helford River on the south bank - Nare Point. I will be inside the observation hut there tonight at seven-thirty. I have a copy of James Fairborne’s last will and testament for you. It’s something you need to see.”

  Tayte was about to cut in and say he couldn’t make it - that he was on a train and it wasn’t due into Truro until after nine-thirty. He waited too long for a pause that never came and the sudden silence in his ear told him he’d missed the opportunity. The caller had cleared.

  Tayte sighed, heavily. He wanted to see that probate record all the more now. It was a missing document and there had to be a good reason. He wondered who was trying to help him and why they were in such a rush. The only obvious candidate was someone from the Cornwall Record Office. Penny Wilson had his number. Someone must have found the document, he thought. But he couldn’t make the train go any faster. It was due to arrive two hours too late and he’d be much later still by the time he’d found Nare Point.

  Peter Schofield… The name that couldn’t have been further from his thoughts all day just popped into his head. The solution was suddenly obvious. Schofield could go in his place. Tayte thought he’d probably welcome the chance after prowling around graveyards all day. He reached for his phone again, wondering for the first time how Schofield had got on.

  Peter Schofield answered the call with his usual business greeting. “You’ve called Peter Schofield. Don’t know where we’re going, but I sure know where we’ve been.”

  Tayte shook his head. “Schofield, it’s JT.”

  “I knew that,” Schofield said, laughing. “You won’t believe the trip I’ve had today.”

  Tayte could hear the unmistakable rasp of a V12 in the background, heightened by an intermittent rushing sound, like Schofield was driving a sporty roadster between narrow country lane hedgerows with the top down.

  “Turn anything up?” Tayte asked. He wouldn’t have put it past Schofield to turn a goose chase into a golden egg hunt.

  “I sure have, buddy. And you’re gonna love it.”

  The conversation paused briefly while Tayte waited to hear what Schofield had to say, but Schofield remained silent.

  “So let’s have it then,” Tayte said.

  “Well now that wouldn’t be right. You’re holding all your cards close to you chest until you get back. It’s only fair I do the same. We can exchange information later over a drink.”

  Tayte shuddered at the idea. He knew better than to expect anything straightforward from Peter Schofield.

  “Yours better be good though,” Schofield added. “It better be really good, ‘cos mines the Elliot Ness of news!”

  “Elliot Ness?”

&
nbsp; “It’s untouchable man!” Schofield hooted and whooped down the phone. “Tell me you’ve seen the movie.”

  Tayte just shook his head and moved right on. “Schofield,” he said. “I need you to meet someone tonight at seven-thirty. It’s important so don’t be late. They’ll be waiting inside an observation hut at a place called Nare Point. Should be on the map. It’s somewhere near the mouth of the Helford River. There’s a document they want to give me but I won’t be back in time.”

  “What is it?”

  “A probate record. It won’t mean much to you, and I’m not exactly sure yet what it’ll mean to me, but I’ll tell you what I know over that drink.”

  “No problem, big guy.”

  “And you’d better take a flashlight with you,” Tayte added. “It gets dark over here about then.”

  When the call ended, Tayte had something else to think about. What had Schofield turned up? What was he so wired about? As he relaxed into his seat, he knew the answer would have to wait. The writing box had raised new and more pressing questions. He felt its hard edges through the rucksack on his lap, wondering what dark discovery Lowenna had made, and why the box was so important to her.

  It was their security, he thought. But how could it protect them? Protect them from what? He shook his head and laughed to himself. One question gets answered - another replaces it.

  He began to chew over what he knew about the box. He now had a good idea of where and when it was made. The initials suggested it had been in the Fairborne family a long time, handed down from one generation to the next until it passed to Lowenna. Lowenna’s letter told him she’d planned to run away with her lover and their child, believing that something about the box would protect them. If that was true - if the box really did have that kind of power - then it was clear to Tayte that it had more to say. He cocked an eyebrow. Something dark, he supposed.

  Tayte scratched at his cheek, considering that Gerald had already found the secret compartment and there was nothing in there that Lowenna could have used against anyone in the way her letter suggested. He wanted to get the box out right there on the train and take another look, sure that Gerald must have overlooked something, but he resisted. He owed it to Amy to keep the box safe and for all he knew, whoever wanted it now might have followed him onto the train, just as someone had followed him to Bodmin. He looked around. There were no obvious candidates. Everyone seemed wrapped up in their books, their laptops or their dreams.

  Tayte pushed his head into the headrest and closed his eyes, pulling the rucksack protectively close, linking his arms around it like he was cradling a child. His thoughts wandered back inside the box, to Lowenna’s secret letter to Mawgan Hendry, pondering what it all meant. It was certainly conclusive proof that Mathew Parfitt was her son and that Mawgan Hendry was his father, raised by Lowenna’s aunt and uncle, Jane and Lavender Parfitt. But clearly Lowenna had made other plans for her child.

  Drifting to the rhythm of the train, he understood that the most promising thing about the box was that it must have come to England with Eleanor and her children when they left America. He opened an eye and fixed it on the rucksack, knowing that the answers he was looking for had to be right there in front of him.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  In 1803, two weeks before Mawgan Hendry was murdered; before James Fairborne knew that his daughter was in love with a farmer from Helford or that she carried his child, Lowenna chanced upon something that both confused and disturbed her so deeply that she refused to believe it, blocking it from her mind as best she could for several days. She’d convinced herself that it could not possibly be true. What she had discovered, however disturbing, made no sense. And yet her discovery left her with a recurring question that haunted her sleep.

  It concerned the box her father had given her on her fifth birthday and the revelation that it concealed not one, but two secret compartments. She remembered little of the day, but she recalled that her father had told her the box was very special. It followed then that he would be the best person to answer the question she knew she must ask - then her ghosts would be silenced. But she did not want to ask it, fearful that the answer might somehow confirm those dreadful words she’d read. Then her ghosts would become all too real.

  Lowenna had suffocated her question for eleven days, and she might have buried it forever had her father not come to hear of Mawgan Hendry from that wretched brute of a man who was always drifting about the estate. She supposed he was the one. When James Fairborne forbade his daughter to see Mawgan Hendry and subsequently learnt of her condition - when he made clear his plans to deny her the love of her own child - only then was she resolved to ask that question of him.

  They had been riding beneath a hazy sky all morning. Lowenna wore tan breeches and a green silk tunic, and she rode like a man as her father had taught her; side-saddle in a pretty dress was purely for show when riding in company. This was a daily ritual; time shared together, father and daughter. But this morning’s ride was no longer the same happy time for Lowenna. She saw her father now in a different light, and his plans to give her child away, even if it was to her aunt Jane, were as unthinkable to her as the dark discovery she’d made - more abhorrent even than those terrible words she had read.

  The seed of Lowenna’s plan to run away with Mawgan and have their child together had already begun to grow. Until she was fully ready, she would pretend to go along with her father’s wishes and today she would keep up appearances. They rode out seemingly in good company, talking idle talk about anything other than Mawgan Hendry or Lowenna’s condition. She could see from his usual bright demeanour that this was still a happy time for him regardless of what had passed between them.

  “See the buzzards,” her father said, pointing across the neighbouring farmland towards a small copse of trees. “They’ll have rabbit for lunch.”

  Lowenna simply nodded, willing the rabbits to make it safely back to the cover of their burrows.

  “Speaking of which,” her father added. “I’ve a hearty appetite myself.”

  The morning ride always ended in a race back to the stable block, and it always began with a look from her father to ask if she was ready for the off. And there it was, just as on any other day, like nothing so bitter had passed between them. James Fairborne dug his heels in and his horse reared up.

  “Come on!” he yelled.

  Lowenna seldom won the race, and not once before she had turned fourteen. In those two years since that first victory, she could count her triumphs on one hand. But today Lowenna’s resolve to beat her father could not have been stronger. Today she would not falter at the stream as she had so often in the past. She would jump it clean to spite him.

  The head start her father always gave himself was closing. Beneath her, Lowenna could hear her old friend, Gwinear, panting over the thud and rumble of his hooves, and by the time they reached the stream they were level. Lowenna was out of her seat like a derby racer going for the finish line and she did not falter. Gwinear’s front hooves thumped down first on the other side and now the stables were in sight. She pushed on, not looking back. Then as the stables grew in her vision her thoughts distracted her. She knew that when this race was over, she would ask her father the question that tormented her.

  Katherine’s name was suddenly spinning in her head. She grew uneasy and Gwinear must have sensed the change. The horse slowed not two hundred yards from the stables and her father passed her like an unstoppable locomotive, gaining ground with every stride, lashing his whip and yelping for more speed.

  When Lowenna reached the stables, she arrived to see her father handing his bridle to the stable boy. “Maybe tomorrow?” he called to her as she arrived.

  Tomorrow… Lowenna knew there would be no more races between them. As she approached, she did not dismount, but remained tall on her horse as her father took Gwinear’s reins and held her steady. Her unease must have been all too apparent. Win or lose, this was always a happy moment between them:
a cuddle and a kiss on his cheek by way of a prize for his win. But not today. She watched his head sink to the ground then slowly he looked up again, trying to make eye contact - failing.

  “I cannot expect you to understand my decision,” he said. “You are too young to know what is for the best. But one day you will thank me for seeming so hard on you now.”

  Lowenna did not want the argument over again. Where was the sense in arguing over something she knew she could not win? The question she had to ask dominated all else. “There is something I must ask you father,” she said. The words formed in her mind, but still she could not speak them.

  “Pray, what is it, child? You know you can ask anything of me. Anything at all.”

  Lowenna looked away, wondering how he could be the caring father she had loved so well, while inside him breathed the monster she had come to detest. When she turned back to him, her jaw had tightened, ready to force the question out, but she skirted. “I have found something, father.”

  “Yes…”

  “I am sure it is absurd. It really makes no sense.”

  “Go on…”

  Lowenna hesitated, dry-mouthed. She wanted to ride away even now, but she had to ask her question. She had to make sense of it all. She swallowed hard. “Do you know who Katherine is?”

  Her father stepped away, but he could not hide the dour expression that washed over him. “Why do you ask?”

  A column of silence rose between them. Knowing what she knew - what she had discovered - her father’s sudden mood swing warned her to be cautious.

  He came close to her again. “Where have you heard that name?” he insisted. “I must know.” His tone was sharp now. He gripped her boot until Lowenna could feel his fingers tight around her ankle, like her leather riding boots were made from nothing more than rice-paper.