JT01 - In The Blood

by Steve Robinson

  Tayte seriously doubted it. No immediate way out presented itself. He handed the rucksack over, trying to glimpse his attacker in the rear view mirror as he did so. But it was too dark back there and his movements were restricted by the blade at his neck and the hand tugging at his hair.

  “Now what?” Tayte said.

  “Now drive! Go right.”

  Helford, Tayte thought as he pulled out and turned the car down the hill. He went as slow as he dared. He needed time. It was too quiet here. No other cars around. No people. A canopy of trees shrouded the road.

  “Where’s Amy?” he said, but he got no reply.

  A moment later he heard a line spoken softly as though in self-gratification. “I knew they’d bring you here.”

  Tayte felt the pressure on his scalp ease off a little. “Why are you doing this?” he said.

  The man continued to ignore him. “At the bottom of the hill take a right into the car park.”

  Tayte didn’t like the sound of that. In his headlights he could already see the parking sign. It looked so dark down there with all those trees. The car arrived too soon at the turn off.

  “Here,” the voice said.

  Tayte turned in. To his right a small fire caught his eye. It was a good two hundred metres away on the other side of an otherwise empty car park that was essentially a grass field in the woods.

  “Take it down there on the left. Then shut off the engine.”

  A dusty track circled the car park like a speedway circuit. Tayte took the clockwise route, crunching loose stones beneath the tyres. It led the car down towards the perimeter of trees. Through them he could just see the Helford River’s dull highlights, shifting with the current beneath a hiding moon. He sensed he had little time to act now. If he was going to do anything it had to be soon. A small voice in his head tried to tell him it would be okay; that the man with the knife to his throat had what he’d come for. As Tayte killed the engine, a far bigger voice in the sudden darkness told him otherwise.

  “That note I pinned to your chest… You should have taken my warning more seriously, Mr Tayte. Before it became necessary for me to kill you!”

  Before the man’s words had faded, Tayte’s head was back against the headrest, chin proud, like he was waiting for a shave. He winced as the man’s hand knotted through his hair, straining his scalp as he brought the knife into position further around his neck, ready to slice it back again.

  At that moment Jefferson Tayte knew his life was over. He was unprepared and constrained by his assailant’s grip and a tight seat-belt. He’d had no time to react, and although agnostic as far as religion was concerned, the only thing on his mind right now was the Lord’s Prayer. He pictured the Gideon bible he’d found in the bedside drawer back in his room at St Maunanus House: the bright cross emblazoned on the cover. Then he remembered the broken display cases at Bodmin Jail.

  “Why d’you steal that crucifix?” he blurted. He swallowed hard. His throat felt like blotting paper. “And the verse book? Why did you steal them?”

  Tayte felt an arm tighten around his shoulder as the man’s muscles contracted. The knife pressed closer to his skin but it was steady and Tayte knew that his questions had struck home.

  The man scoffed in Tayte’s ear. “I didn’t steal them,” he said. His voice rose then for the first time. “They were mine to take!”

  “They belonged to a man called Mawgan Hendry,” Tayte said, as assertively as he could manage. “That was two hundred years ago, so unless you’ve returned from the dead, I’d say you stole them!” Tayte knew he was playing a dangerous game, but what did he have to lose? He’d bought himself some time, that’s all, and he had no idea how much. If he had any chance of getting out of this alive, he had to keep the man talking; keep him worked up until some opportunity presented itself. His eyes were all over the car, looking for something he could use.

  “They should have been given to me,” the man said.

  “But they weren’t, were they? So you stole them.”

  “They were stolen from Mawgan.”

  “Stolen after he was murdered?” Tayte said. “And you think the box will tell you who really killed him?”

  “I already know who killed him.”

  Tayte could feel the man’s breath, hot on his sore neck. “But you want to know why, right?” Tayte wanted to know why, and who, but now was not the time to ask. After ruling out trying to burn the man with the cigarette lighter because it needed to warm up first, he considered trying to stab him in the eye with the car key.

  “And I suppose you already know why, do you, Mr Tayte?”

  Tayte shook his head. It was a mistake.

  “Then it’s as I thought. You’re no further use to me.”

  Tayte felt the skin on his neck break and knew he was bleeding. It was like he was sitting next to himself watching a slow motion re-run that he was helpless to stop. He saw his own hands reaching for the knife in defence, but the man’s hold on him was too strong, the knife, too close. Then a face at his window startled him. It was surreal.

  A long-haired man in need of a wash and a good meal was staring at him through the window. Then behind him he heard a metallic, tapping sound. By the time he fully registered what was going on, the knife had suddenly pulled away, not across his throat, but away, catching his left hand as it went. Then he heard one of the rear doors open.

  He unclipped his seat belt and spun around, aware now that he was losing a significant amount of blood from both his neck and his hand. The rear seats were empty. The man who’d come close to killing him - close to finishing what he’d set out to do at Nare Point - had fled, taking the rucksack and the box with him.

  The tapping at the window drew Tayte’s attention. Then he saw why he was still alive. Another man, not unlike the first, had his face pressed to the rear window, staring in. The metallic, tapping sound was coming from a can of Carlsberg Special Brew that he was clanking against the glass. Tayte realised then that the fire he’d seen when he’d first entered the car park had to be their camp fire. They were unlikely saviours, but saviours nonetheless.

  Tayte leapt from the car and the strangers backed away, observing Tayte as he looked frantically about. His right hand clutched the wound on his neck to stem the blood-flow and his left hand hung loose, dripping. His suit was a complete mess. In the darkness there was little to see; no sign of his attacker. Then away beyond the trees, lost to the night, he heard a distinctive engine note and a screech of tyres - a V12. He recalled hearing a similar sound recently, altered through his cellphone speaker, but the sound was unmistakable to him. The last engine like that he’d heard was when he’d called Schofield on the train back from London. It was playing over Schofield’s voice in background.

  It forced him to recall the last conversation he’d had with Peter Schofield. He heard himself asking him to go to Nare Point in his place - to his death. He remembered how excited Schofield had been. How energized. Schofield had spent his last hours prowling graveyards at Tayte’s behest and he’d come up with something big. Now he’d taken it with him to his grave.

  The man with the beer-can staggered closer, studying Tayte. “You should see a doctor,” he said, slurring every word.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Four hours after Jefferson Tayte almost died, he was sitting in the passenger seat of a strange car, parked somewhere equally unfamiliar to him. He had no idea where he was and the only light he allowed himself came from the glow of his laptop screen. Bastion and Hayne had been shocked to see him again in such a state, but the staff of the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro soon had him patched up. After he’d given a statement and was allowed to go, having refused the offer of any direct police protection beyond the usual point-of-contact phone number, he just got in the courtesy car that was waiting for him and drove, heading anywhere just to lose himself; as much as he needed a change of clothes he knew he couldn’t risk returning to St Maunanus House.

  Tayte was sitting somewher
e off a single lane track by a galvanized farm gate, punching names into database fields as fast as his bandaged hand would allow. He was glad he had a power supply he could run off the car; he knew it was going to be a long night.

  Almost Saturday, he thought, knowing that he should have been close to wrapping this assignment up by now and heading home. But it had led him into a past that would not let go, and now he had Schofield’s killer and Amy to add to the list of people he needed to find. People connected by one thread or another to the writing box Amy had entrusted to him. The box he no longer had.

  And yet he knew that was not the last of it.

  He stopped typing. The tangled thoughts spinning in his subconscious suddenly popped a clear fact into his head. He’d lost the box, but he had not lost everything. He patted his jacket pocket and heard paper crumple. Lowenna’s letter… He hadn’t put it back. He smiled to himself, knowing that he still had a hand to play in this game. He also knew that he had a good chance of finding out who this man was. When he stole the crucifix and the verse book from the museum at Bodmin Jail he’d made a big mistake - he’d made it personal.

  Tayte had suspected as much and tonight he’d confirmed it. The man was related to Mawgan Hendry. Those few words exchanged at the edge of the killer’s knife had left Tayte in no doubt. Now he figured that if he could find the names of Mawgan Hendry’s living male descendants, he would have a strong list of suspects.

  The idea was simple enough. He had the root name from which all other family members descended: Mathew Parfitt. Take that name and find out who his children were then repeat the process for each child and their children until he came to those who were still alive. A quick-fire, run-through, following each dependent to their children, ruling out as many as possible by gender and age until he was left with just a few names - a few suspects.

  In practice the process was not so simple. He knew he would have to cut corners, make guesses and follow lines on unconfirmed data; not his style at all. It carried a high risk of error, but there was a chance that some of the names he reached were correct, and a chance that one of them would be the man he was looking for. He had access to the family history of more than four billion names worldwide. Tonight, he just needed one.

  Tayte had been absorbed by the information coming off his screen for over an hour now, dragging names and dates into a separate notes window to keep track. The 1911 census had made the first part relatively easy, but there was no access to census information for the last hundred years. He was using all the online resources at his disposal and more than once he’d paused to think about Peter Schofield. This was right up his street - genealogy, Schofield-style. In spite of everything, he wished the kid was in the car with him now.

  Somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century, Tayte pulled away from his laptop and pinched his eyes. He turned away from the screen and looked into the black night, thoughtfully stroking at the butterfly stitches on his neck. The stars were like he’d seldom seen them; there was no light pollution here. Whole galaxies presented themselves to him, like silver dust, flicked from a brush across a black canvas.

  The hunt was going well. Two world wars had expedited the search, significantly reducing the number of dependents who’d lived long enough to have children of their own who were not taken prematurely by one war or the other. Yet the line continued along multiple branches of possibility, changing surnames where no male heir had been born to carry it. Mathew’s branch of the Parfitt name had died out by the end of the 1800s, replaced by Miller through one daughter and Bakersfield through another. He still had a few hours until daybreak and somehow he wasn’t tired. He was too wrapped up in the chase; too mindful that he’d narrowly escaped death tonight and that Amy, if she was still alive, was somewhere in great need.

  Before another hour passed, Tayte knew he was close. The dependents he was looking at now could still be alive, yet were too old to be considered. It was from their children that Tayte was sure he would get his man: the final layer.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Saturday.

  Tayte missed the crimson sunrise. By the time he knew it was even light the sun was already too bright in his sensitive eyes as they peeled open. His head was against the car window, his neck was sore and his stitches itched. Two cows stared at him from beyond the galvanised gate; a third had its rump to him. He felt like that last cow looked.

  The sound that woke him buzzed again in his trouser pocket with a ring-tone he was fast growing to hate. He glanced bleary-eyed at the clock in the unfamiliar dashboard; it was a quarter past eight. His laptop lay open on the driver’s seat, discarded at the end of his research, still sleeping after a good nights work. Tayte wished he was too. His cellphone buzzed again, denying him the chance.

  “JT,” he said.

  “I do hope I didn’t wake you.”

  Tayte was about to say that he needed a wake-up call anyway, but the caller continued.

  “But then how could you sleep?” the caller said. “I’d be grabbing all the life I could if I’d nearly lost mine last night.”

  Tayte was suddenly wide awake.

  “Why is everything so complicated, Mr Tayte?”

  Tayte just listened.

  “I’ve been looking for this box since I knew it existed. Now I have it, and yet I don’t, do I? Don’t have what I’ve been looking for.” There was a pause. Then the voice said, “It’s what is inside that counts… That’s what the note I found in the box tells me. So what else was inside the box, Mr Tayte?”

  Tayte played his card. “If you want what was inside that box,” he said, “let Amy go!” He heard mocking laughter. “It’s the only way you’ll get what you’re looking for.”

  The laughter stopped. “A stalemate then,” the caller said. “I don’t play chess, Mr Tayte. How about you let me have what was in the box or by this afternoon the police will be investigating another dead body!”

  “No dice.” Tayte’s response was sharp - stuff the chess, this called for hardball. If he just handed everything over he knew Amy would never make it through the day. “It’s an exchange or nothing,” he added. “Amy for the contents of the box, or you can go to hell!”

  The line went silent. Tayte hoped his caller was giving it some serious thought. After the silence turned uncomfortable he hoped he hadn’t overcooked it. Then he knew he had. He heard a faint click, and then static. He checked for the caller’s number, but as he expected, it had been withheld.

  “Shit!”

  Tayte had to know who this man was and he had to know fast. He woke up his laptop and the results of his hurried research glared back at him; five names that meant nothing to him; five possible suspects, all male descendants of Mawgan Hendry and Lowenna Fairborne, through their illegitimate son, Mathew Parfitt. He had the age and place of birth for each, which was sure to help.

  But where are they now?

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the calling card DCI Bastion had given him. Further investigation into the names he’d come up with would need police resources. He was halfway through punching in the number when the digits cleared and the screen changed, displaying ‘Incoming call’ - no number. He picked it up at the first buzz and pressed the phone to his ear.

  “An exchange then,” the caller said.

  Tayte drew a deep breath and let it slowly out again. “Where?”

  “There are strict rules to the game, Mr Tayte. Like all good games, it will be played in two halves. First, you will go back to Amy’s house - to Treath. Board the motor launch there and wait. I will call you again in precisely one hour.”

  Tayte glanced at his watch; it was 08:30.

  “If you are not in that boat in exactly one hour,” the caller said, “then Amy dies. If you call the police or I suspect you have brought anyone with you - Amy dies. I’m giving you this one chance to save her. If you do not play by the rules then you will learn just how strong my resolve can be. I will not be screwed with, Mr Tayte. Are w
e clear?”

  Tayte’s heart was already racing. “Crystal,” he said, looking out the car windows at the single lane track and the tall hedgerows to either side of him. He wished he knew where the hell he was. An hour didn’t seem long under the circumstances.

  As the call ended, Tayte was already sliding across into the driver’s seat, fighting his way across the gear shift and the power cable feeding his laptop. The key was already in the ignition. He turned it, thinking his call to DCI Bastion would have to wait. The rhythmic grating that came from the engine compartment froze his heart. It was a painful sound to hear at the best of times, but now…

  Come on. This isn’t happening!

  The engine churned more than it turned, slowing and groaning more and more with every cycle. He unplugged the laptop power cable and tried again. This time the engine barely turned over at all. One last moan, then it died.

  The car waiting on the drive outside Rosemullion Hall looked like it was going to a wedding. The 1937 black-and-cream Rolls Royce Phantom III just needed the ribbons. It was a special car for a special occasion: the official investiture of Sir Richard Fairborne’s Life Peerage. Sir Richard and Lady Fairborne were already seated in the back of the car, trying to relax on the bisque leather seats while they waited. A grey liveried chauffeur stood outside, ready to open the door for the last of his charges before conveying them all to the VIP air taxi that was waiting at Penzance Heliport.

  “Well what’s keeping him?” Sir Richard said. “Another minute and we’re leaving.”

  Celia was trying to remain calm, but she knew Warwick was cutting it fine. “There’s plenty of time,” she said. “Stop fussing. He had a late night, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know why you insisted he came.”

  “He’s coming because we’re a family, Richard. And I want to remember what that feels like.”

  Sir Richard scoffed, checking his watch again.

  “Here he is.” Celia said.