“And I should think his position there helped him no end with all this,” Bastion said, throwing an arm towards the chart. “What does it all mean, Mr Tayte? What’s he up to?”
Tayte studied the wall again. “He’s clearly made a connection to someone in the past he thought he was related to. Someone very wealthy. Tayte pointed to the name at the top of the chart. “That would be James Fairborne,” he added. “Then he’s set out to prove his lineage, which is where our paths crossed.”
Tayte paced the room towards the chart. “I was looking into Mathew Parfitt here,” he said, pointing at the corresponding box on the wall. “A letter turned up proving that Mathew Parfitt was Lowenna and Mawgan’s son.” He raised his arm to indicate them on the chart. “It gave Simon all the proof he could want. That’s what I gave him this morning when I was trying to get Amy back.”
“But why try and kill you over it?” Bastion said. “What does it matter who knows? Surely he wants everyone to know he’s part of such a family. Sir Richard Fairborne’s a baronet after all and very well connected.”
“I’m sure he wanted the world to know about it in time,” Tayte said. “But not just yet.”
Hayne interjected. “So there’s more to it?”
Tayte spun around to face them. “There is,” he said. “Simon had to kill me because I was getting too close. There was a risk that I would discover the same thing he’s looking for. Maybe even beat him to it.”
“And he’s kidnapped Amy Fallon for insurance?” Hayne said.
Tayte nodded. “And all because of the box she found. Simon must have known she had it. He just needed to be sure.” He thought about the clue that had been left under his wiper blade at Bodmin and how it had led him straight to Amy. “I helped draw the box into the open where Simon could see it,” he added. “When I left Amy that night he must have gone in after it.” He knew well enough that Simon was at Ferryman Cottage the night Amy disappeared, and it didn’t sit well on his conscience that he’d paid the kid to take him there.
“Only Amy no longer had the box,” Hayne said.
“That’s right. I was taking it to London next morning.”
“So the killer revealed himself to Amy,” Hayne said. “He couldn’t have just apologised and left again. He had to take her with him. Then he came up with a plan to get the box from you at Nare Point.”
Bastion winced. “It’s a good thing for Amy that she didn’t have the box,” he said. “Or that might have been her body we found at Treath.”
The truth of that hit Tayte hard. Life or death, it seemed, balanced by a fine silk thread wherever the box was concerned. “The writing box is the key,” he said. “It holds the secret to a truth we’re both searching for.”
“Something to do with the Fairbornes?” Hayne said.
“I’m sure of it.”
Bastion threw Hayne a puzzled look and Hayne returned a self-conscious smile. “Why else would Simon Phillips want to hide James Fairborne’s will? Hayne said. “It has to be related.”
Tayte turned his attention back to the probate record in his hand. He read the date, noting that James Fairborne’s will was proven in 1829, being the year it was made official in the Probate Registry of the High Court, but not necessarily the year James Fairborne died. It was a short will for one of such magnitude and the reason promptly manifested itself. Tayte read, ‘sole beneficiary’ then skipped the wordy formalities to the part that revealed the fortunate recipient and heir.
‘… That is to say, I give and bequeath unto my brother William Fairborne of Rosemullion in the Parish of St Mawnan …’
“Everything!” Tayte said. “Nothing to any servants or children? It all went to his brother, William.”
The significance of what he’d just read took a while to register. When it did he had to sit down. He lowered himself into the nearest armchair. His eyes remained on the words, ‘William Fairborne’. “This can’t be,” he said.
Bastion and Hayne came closer, like a pair of aroused sniffer dogs that had just picked up a new scent.
“I’m working for the descendants of William Fairborne’s family now,” Tayte said. “I know he never came to England. My research suggests that James and William didn’t even get along. Whoever benefited from James Fairborne’s will sure wasn’t his brother.”
“So this family weren’t the legal heirs?” Hayne said, running a hand down the chart to Warwick Fairborne.
Bastion glared at Hayne. “Steady Sergeant. That’s dangerous talk without the evidence to back it up.” He took the probate record from Tayte and read the name of the beneficiary for himself. The name at least was clear. “Are you sure?” he said.
Tayte looked Bastion in the eyes and nodded like he was never so sure of anything in his life. “I’ve got a copy of William Fairborne’s death record,” he said. “He was buried alongside his wife in America and I can tell you that his wife was not the lady on the wall here.”
Bastion sat down himself. “Then who’s the fella this James Fairborne left his fortune to?”
“I don’t know,” Tayte said. “But he must have had some hold over James Fairborne.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Gazing up at the family tree in Simon’s flat, Tayte was curious again to know why Mathew Parfitt had dropped his claim against James Fairborne’s will. It seemed all the more unusual now Tayte knew that Mathew had a valid reason to contest it. Mathew was blood, related to James Fairborne; the man his grandfather left everything to in his will was not. Tayte supposed Mathew must have known that, or he at least suspected James’s decision had been influenced.
A thought crossed Tayte’s mind that had been there before. It concerned someone he’d given little thought to on this assignment, purely through a lack of information about him. Lowenna had died young; that much he knew from Emily Forbes, from that fateful story she’d told him. But her brother, Allun Fairborne - what had become of him? He would have been a relatively young man at the time of his father’s death. Why hadn’t he contested the will? The most likely reason was that he’d died before his father and Tayte began to wonder at the circumstances that surrounded Allun’s death.
He looked down at the stacks of paper on the sideboard - the photocopies of Simon’s family history records. Then he looked back to the wall and across the top of the chart. There were entries for as yet unexplored family lines. To the right of Lowenna was an entry for her brother, Allun. No further names appeared beside it or below it, but he realised there could be information on those record copies that might tell him more about Allun Fairborne.
He turned to Bastion and Hayne who were right behind him, watching him think. “Grab a pile,” he said, reaching for one of the stacks. “I need to find anything in here relating to a guy called Allun Fairborne.”
Bastion and Hayne each took up a handful of papers. They were ordered and Tayte soon knew where he was relative to the wallchart. Allun’s records, if there were any, would be close to Lowenna’s and their father’s, towards the bottom of one of the piles. He riffled through the papers, finding nothing that dated that far back. Then Bastion interrupted his flow.
“Here you go.”
Tayte leaned in over Bastion’s shoulder. He’d seen the record before; he had a copy in his briefcase. It was Allun Fairborne’s birth record. “Anything else there?” Tayte said.
Bastion shook his head. “Just this.”
“So, Simon couldn’t find the old records either,” Tayte mused, concluding that the missing death record information must have been removed way back, when they were still maintained by the church, not stolen by Simon Phillips. Even if Simon had access to the original records, Tayte knew he couldn’t get to all the indexes. References to the documents would have existed in too many places. From a local church registry however, before the records were centralised and catalogued… They would have been easy enough to get at then.
“What about James’s wife?” Bastion said. “Wouldn’t Mrs Fairborne have had someth
ing to say about all this?”
“Susan?” Tayte said. The suggestion had merit. “Let’s take a look.” He went to the stack of records where Bastion had found the copy of Allun Fairborne’s birth record. Behind that he found the records for James and Susan Fairborne. He pulled out Susan’s death record copy and glanced over it. “According to this, she died a couple of years before James.” He checked the cause of death. “Decay of nature,” he read aloud. “She wasn’t around to contest the will herself.”
Hayne still had his head buried in the stack of records he was checking. He was smiling. “Lavender Parfitt,” he said with obvious amusement. He held up a copy of Lavender’s record of marriage to Jane Forbes. “I bet he got picked on at school,” he added. Then his eyes wandered to Lavender’s death record.
Tayte’s eyes fell on Hayne just as his amusement died. His smile dropped below a furrowing brow that expressed sudden consternation at what he was reading.
“Asphyxiation due to strangulation,” Hayne said. “Murder by person or persons unknown.”
He got Tayte’s full attention. The cause of death reminded him of another murder case he’d been looking into recently. Tayte practically snatched the death record copy from Hayne’s hands. “Just like Mawgan Hendry,” he said. The record was dated, Monday, June 22nd, 1829. He reached into his jacket and took out his notebook. Several of the pages were stuck together from their earlier soaking at Gillan Harbour. He flicked through, looking for the pages he’d used to write down the information he’d found in The Times articles. When he found the date he was looking for the mystery surrounding Mathew’s contest of James Fairborne’s will dissipated like midday fog. “That was two days before Mathew Parfitt dropped his claim,” he said.
Bastion and Hayne looked a little lost.
Tayte had the picture clear in his head now. “Don’t you see,” he said. “The man claiming to be William Fairborne got to him. He got to Mathew here.” Tayte flicked a hand up to Mathew’s name on the chart. “He’s warned him off by killing his father.”
“That’s pure conjecture,” Bastion said.
“Maybe so, but the coincidence is too big to ignore.”
“He’s got a point, sir,” Hayne said. “Looks fishy.”
Bastion scratched at the hair above his left ear, causing it to spring out. “Why not just kill this Mathew fella,” Bastion said. “That would have made him drop his claim soon enough.”
“It was a high profile will contest,” Tayte said. “There was a fortune at stake and it would have drawn plenty of attention at the time.” Tayte shook his head. “No,” he added. “Killing Mathew would have been too risky a play.”
DS Hayne knew exactly what Tayte meant. “The finger would have pointed straight at the man who stood to gain the most from Mathew’s death,” he said. “Killing Mathew’s father and maybe even threatening to do the same thing to his mother on the other hand… That would have shut him up tight as a coffin.”
Tayte quickly found Jane Parfitt’s death record from the records Hayne had been checking. “She lived to a ripe old age,” Tayte said a moment later.
Bastion drew a long breath and paced to the window where he looked out through a stretched film of net curtain over the creek below. “This is all very interesting,” he said. “But where is it taking us? You’ve given us Simon’s motive and confirmed the means by which he lured Peter Schofield to his death. Everything we need to get a conviction is right here.” Bastion turned back into the room. “All we need now is Simon Phillips.”
“There’s still a kidnap victim to find,” Tayte said, thinking about Amy and where these latest clues fitted into the puzzle he had to solve before high tide.
“We’ll find Amy once we’ve brought Simon in,” Bastion said.
Tayte wished he could believe that. Part of him wanted to tell them exactly where and when they could pick Simon up. It would be so easy. And if he thought there was any chance that Simon was bluffing about letting Amy die at the hands of the tide then he would have. But Tayte knew Simon was deadly serious. He’d seen it branded in his eyes. He had to remind himself to watch what he said. If he let it slip that he needed to solve the riddle of the box in order to find Amy, Bastion and Hayne would question why, and with Tayte’s track record he knew they wouldn’t need Sherlock Holmes to tell them that he had his own plan to save Amy again.
With all that Tayte had discovered at Simon’s flat, a terrible image was beginning to form in his mind, like a sliding picture puzzle whose jumbled pieces were right under his nose and were at last coming together. Only there was still a piece of the puzzle missing and without it he couldn’t quite get what he was looking at. He made for the door, certain that he knew where to find that missing piece. He just had to get onto the Fairborne estate at Rosemullion Head.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Tayte said. “I don’t think I can add anything more to this.” He excused himself with a polite smile and wished them good luck.
“Thanks for your help,” Bastion said. “I’ll have you dropped back to your car.”
My car… Tayte’s mind tripped over the words. He knew he couldn’t let them drop him back there; they would know he’d taken the ferry; know he’d seen Simon. “Great,” he said. He checked his watch and knew he was running out of time. The afternoon was already spent and now in just over two hours he had to meet the man who held Amy’s life in the balance with answers he had yet to find. On top of that he now faced being stranded at Helford Passage with no car and no ferry to take him across the river to pick it up.
Tayte passed through the doorway knowing only that he needed to get to Rosemullion Head, and fast. He had to know if Eleanor and her children were buried there and he had to know when they died. As he hit the first step on his way out of the flat, he realised he still didn’t have a sure-fire angle that would get him onto the Fairborne estate; even if he could talk the driver of the police car into dropping him at the door.
That gave Tayte an idea.
He stopped halfway down the stairs and spun around to Bastion who was right behind him. “How long would it take to get a search warrant to go over the grounds on the Fairborne Estate?”
Bastion looked wary. “We’d only need one if we were refused access,” he said. His questioning eyes tightened to a squint. “Why?”
Tayte suddenly saw his way in. “Gravestones,” he said, giving nothing away.
“And how would it help the case?” Bastion asked. “Despite the implications of that will, the Fairbornes still pull a lot of strings around here. If we go disturbing them without a bloody good reason…” He looked over his shoulder to DS Hayne and scoffed. “Heads will roll,” he added.
“Anything to do with those churchyard photos we found in Peter Schofield’s bags?” Hayne said.
Tayte nodded. His angle had arrived.
Chapter Fifty-Five
The light was beginning to fade as Rosemullion Hall came into view. Tayte was riding up front with DS Hayne in an unmarked silver BMW 3-series. The mention of unsolved past crimes relating to the case had appealed to Bastion’s ego enough to send Hayne along with Tayte while Bastion orchestrated the hunt for Simon Phillips. Tayte had made it seem like they were scratching each others backs: Bastion wanted results and Tayte wanted to finish his assignment and go home. That’s how it seemed, but saving Amy was his only priority.
The car turned onto the headland along a private road towards Rosemullion Hall, and across a settling field laid to pasture the grand Elizabethan manor house came into view. It was already lit up for the night and what remained of the early evening sun splashed a burnt orange glow across the stone, lending it a fiery sense of drama.
“Looks like they’re having some sort of party,” Hayne said as they approached.
Ahead, the main gates were fixed open. They passed between them and along the smooth slate driveway towards what looked like a prestige car show. There were about twenty cars in all, the majority in varying shades of silver or black, with
the occasional shock of Ferrari red or Lamborghini yellow. Hayne pulled up beside a Bentley Continental Flying Spur and both men got out.
Tayte had trouble keeping up with Hayne’s authoritative march as they made their way towards the house. He thought it looked odd seeing Hayne without Bastion; they seemed so interdependent, like a double-act. He watched Hayne push the knot up on his tie as he stepped between the pillars that framed the gilt dressed doors. One half was already open, spilling soft light and the delicate plink of a harp from within.
By the time Hayne reached the entrance, his identity badge was out, ready to announce himself. Then a man Tayte recognised appeared in the door frame and studied them both curiously. It was Manning. Tayte caught the recognition in the man’s eyes as Hayne began the introductions.
“Could I see Mr Richard Fairborne?” Hayne said, offering out his badge.
Manning scrutinised Hayne’s ID with raised brows for several seconds then snootily said, “I’m afraid Lord Fairborne is otherwise detained.” His forced smile served only to patronise. “Perhaps you could call back another time?”
“What about the lady of house?” Hayne said.
Manning stepped forward and pulled the door to behind him. “As you can see,” he said. “Lady Fairborne is entertaining this evening. I really don’t think your presence here tonight will be welcome whatever your business.”
Tayte thought the man more than a little presumptuous for a butler. He took a step closer. “How about you go get her and let her decide eh, buddy?” He locked eyes with Manning longer than he cared to. “Or do you want to be responsible for the scene that’s about to follow if you don’t?”
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