The Deep Secret

by David Robinson

  Her face fell. “I know.”

  ***

  Leaving Durbridge’s office, Millie called into the CID room on the first floor, where a detective constable brought her up to date.

  “Ten minutes after he drove away from Sentinel Street, he shot and killed a woman at a house a mile away, abandoned the Nissan and took her Vauxhall Corsa. We’ve put out an APB on the registration.”

  “Good practice, but probably pointless,” Millie said with a yawn. “Excuse me. Tired. Haven’t slept properly since Sunday night. He hit an autospares shop in Northwich, our end of the country, on Monday, and as far as we’re aware, he made himself some number plates, which he has stuck onto every other vehicle he’s stolen.”

  “And we don’t know what the number is?”

  “Best we have is FY. Anything else?”

  “This came from your boss, ma’am.” The detective handed over a fax.

  Fireworks supplier, Worcester. Man murdered, woman raped and murdered yesterday, third man escaped and raised the alarm. Stolen Peugeot from Wolverhampton found parked outside, silver-grey Nissan Micra confirmed missing, presumed stolen. He made a mistake, though. Didn’t use a condom. Worcester are tracking his DNA to see if there’s any record of him. Will keep you informed. Ernie.

  “Shit.” Millie smiled at the young officer. “Excuse my vernacular. What does he want with fireworks?”

  The other shrugged. “Dunno, ma’am, but we also had this from your boss just a few minutes ago.”

  Millie took the second fax and her eyes widened as she read it. “Where’s Mr Croft?”

  “He looked a bit mad, ma’am, when he came out of the Chief Super’s office. I saw him storming downstairs.”

  “Your boss upset him, Constable, and I know from personal experience, it’s not a wise move. Well, thanks for your help. We’re at the Quantock on Berkeley Square if you need us, and I’d appreciate a call if anything else comes in.”

  “No problem, ma’am.”

  ***

  Croft was leaning on a windowsill on the ground floor corridor, staring out at the hot, sunny day, when Millie found him.

  She handed him back his mobile phone. “Won’t do any good losing it with men like Durbridge, Felix.”

  “Bulletproof,” Croft grumbled.

  “Huh?”

  He tucked the phone in his pocket. “When we were at Hattersley, yesterday, I was thinking just how good a scapegoat Governor Inskip will make.” He sighed. “You know, Millie, my family can trace itself back almost to William Garrow. It’s a dynasty which has helped shaped UK Law for the last two hundred and fifty years. When it comes to the judiciary, Sir James Croft and his antecedents can take a huge amount of credit for the system as it is. But when things go wrong, Sir James Croft and his ilk never feel the bite of recrimination. There is always someone else to blame, be it a solicitor’s clerk, a court administrator, or some minion at the Crown Prosecution Service. We are beyond reproach. The system looks after the Crofts.” He nodded at the staircase Millie had just descended. “Durbridge may not have been born into that class, but somewhere along the line the door opened to admit him, and once it closed and locked behind him, he, too, became bulletproof. When the arguments are over, he may be asked to resign, but his pension and reputation will be intact, and some other poor blighter, perhaps Ernie Shannon, or one of the administrators in this building will lose his or her job, accused of inefficiency.”

  Millie shook her head. “Sorry, Felix, I disagree. He will get his knuckles rapped.”

  “But only in private,” Croft argued. “He gets on my nerves. Him and all those like him. And that includes my father and brother. I worked for multinationals before I turned to the academic life, and in those kinds of organisations, a bumptious, nitpicking excuse-monger like him would be fired in no short order.”

  Experience had taught her there was no point arguing with Croft in this mood, so Millie consciously changed the subject. “Yes, well, we have to decide what we do next. He told me to check with his people, get a list of the firework suppliers in this area. I did ask, but we’re too late. Prather hit one in Worcester yesterday afternoon. Man and woman murdered. Woman was also raped before she was killed.”

  “Another two killings.”

  “There was more,” Millie told him and handed over the second fax. “You called it dead right. William Prather. He served several sentences in this country. Minor stuff. Driving and taking away, robbery. That sort of thing. His prints were in the system and they’ve been matched to partials taken from Northwich, Nantwich and Wolverhampton. We’re waiting to see if he matches Worcester.”

  “DNA?” Croft asked.

  “Not a chance. After his last release from an English nick, instead of going home to Bristol, he made his way to France. The feeling is someone inside put him onto a big drug deal. In 1985, he got into a fight in Marseilles, and killed the other man, who just happened to be an undercover cop. He was charged with murder, and drug trafficking. Sentenced to twenty years, he served the full term, and came out sometime after the millennium. The last entry we have on him or any of his family is the death of his mother, Stella, in 2007.”

  A light lit in Croft’s eyes. “What price his mother told him the truth of his father’s fate? And what price he got so mad he thought he would seek out Gerry Burke.”

  “Quite possible,” Millie agreed. “But by then, of course, Burke was living the quiet life in Scarbeck. He moved up there in 2005, if you remember.”

  “It all fits,” Croft declared. “He was Julius Reiniger’s son, he must have known the legend of The Deep Secret. When Stella told him that Gerry Burke had murdered his father in an effort to get The Deep Secret, he decided he wanted it instead. Reparation for his father’s killing, even if it was only something he could sell on. But he couldn’t do anything for years because he couldn’t find Burke. Then The Handshaker killings hit the headlines, Gerry Burke was sentenced, and Billy knew where to find him.”

  “Only to learn that Gerry Burke had The Deep Secret, but had never cracked the code.”

  “So they came up with this elaborate plan to crack that code, and who better than me?” Croft’s features darkened again. “Burke would have been happy to go along with it, especially if it set him free to have another shot at me. But he never realised the depth of Billy’s hatred.” He shrugged. “There’s some sort of cosmic justice in that. Gerry Burke, one of the most vicious murderers in British history, shot by a man who loathed him and was skilled enough to hide that loathing. Just the same as Burke, when he was known as Humphries, hid his hatred for me.”

  “All history,” Millie agreed tentatively. “But it still leaves us with the problem of Billy Prather. Where is he now?”

  Croft held up the caravan key. “I can’t tell you where, but it’ll be at the seaside and it will be somewhere in this area or south of here.” He shrugged off his moodiness. “Come on. We’d better get back to the hotel and look into the manuscript again.”

  35

  No one was more surprised than I was when the police arrested and then interrogated me on a range of offences of extortion and technical rape (sex without the woman’s consent).

  Naturally, I denied everything. If I had learned anything from my time in the army, it was that you did not volunteer. That applied to information as well as physical volunteering.

  Then they began to produce names, dates, events, amounts. I could not imagine where they had come by the information… until they brought out one of my diaries.

  My suspicions fell on Gerald, but he denied it.

  “I don’t like you, father, but I would never do that to you. Never. Perhaps it was mother. Since Julius died, she’s been without a lover.”

  I knew he was lying when the police asked about Julius. If he had really been Georgina’s lover, she would never have dragged his name into the investigation. It followed logically, that she did not tell the police about me; Gerald did.

  I couldn’t tell them what h
ad become of Julius, so they contacted the West German Embassy in an effort to track him down. Lot of good it would do them.

  Despite my felonies, I had always had a high regard for the British judiciary. We produced some of the finest legal brains in the world; none more so than James Croft, QC. I asked for him to defend me, but the crown had already appointed him as my prosecutor, and, from the moment I learned that, I knew I was doomed.

  We tried. Emerson, for the defence, did his damnedest to destroy the credibility of the witnesses, and to bolster the erroneous assumptions that rape and robbery under hypnosis were impossible, but Croft was superb. No melodrama, no emotion, just astute questions, often lacking finite answers, but which were enough to cast doubt on my innocence and lead the collective mind of the jury to the correct verdict.

  After a four-day hearing, I was found guilty and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Much though it pains me to say it, the decision was right.

  Gerald’s demeanour throughout the trial was interesting. During the hearing he sat in the public gallery smiling down upon me, but it was not a smile of support; more one of superiority. As if he were telegraphing his satisfaction with the course of action he had instigated.

  But when the verdict was delivered and sentence passed, he was white with shock. Perhaps it was the severity of the sentence, perhaps it was that he had set out simply to teach me a lesson and anticipated a ‘not guilty’ verdict. The verdict and/or sentence were obviously the last thing he expected.

  Later, when he drove his mother to Liverpool to see me, he finally confessed to handing the diary over to the police. He did it anonymously, simply dropping it through the letterbox at Haymarket Police Station in the early hours of the morning.

  “I’m sorry, Father. I wanted to get even with you for the thrashing you gave me after our, er, argument.” He looked askance at his mother when he delivered the final words, and it signalled to me that Georgina knew nothing of that exchange.

  “Croft,” he said with some bitterness. “He’s to blame for this. Well, don’t worry. I’ll get even with him. If it takes the rest of my life, I’ll do it.”

  “No, Gerald,” I told him. “James Croft is not to blame. I am. I should never have allowed it to happen. None of it. I was an honest man for most of my life, but I allowed Julius Reiniger to lead me into criminal territory. And now I must pay the price.”

  It seemed that nothing I could say would assuage Gerald’s fury at the efficiency with which the prosecution had proved their case. In the end, I made the only appeal I could.

  “Gerald,” I said, “you are aware of The Deep Secret. Julius told you of it. I know he did. I am now the guardian of that secret. You are not ready for it. Your mind isn’t yet calm enough. I’ve decided that while I’m in here, I will write everything down. Unlike my biography, I will have to write by hand, and it will take a long time. It will also be vetted by the prison officers. I will include The Deep Secret, but it will take some finding because it will be in code. Even when I am released, the manuscript will not go for publication. It will be yours when I die. Look in that manuscript, Gerald. Search it, find the code and you will have The Deep Secret. But be careful, my boy. Some secrets are not worth knowing, and you know what they say about wishing for something. You may end up having your wish granted.”

  36

  With the time coming up to three in the afternoon, Croft swallowed two paracetamol with a half glass of water, and turned away from the TV news which had been full of the latest killings.

  “They say twenty,” he muttered. “Twenty people dead, and thanks to Durbridge, Prather is still on the run and we can’t do a thing until he shows his hand again.”

  A tired Millie agreed, and looked up from her reading of Zepelli’s manuscript. “And no clue in here, either.” Millie yawned again. “I’m sick of this bumph. Is there anything in his official biography that might give us a hint?”

  Croft reached to his briefcase, took out the book and passed it to her. “I’ve read it scores of time. He makes many references to the Heidelberg Case, but doesn’t say how much he really knew. He makes only one or two references to his son, and a couple to Julius Reiniger, but he doesn’t say how close he and his son were to Reiniger, and he never mentions Julius’s illegitimate son, Prather. That’s all in the handwritten pages.”

  Millie picked up the hardback book and flicked through it. She paused at the centre pages adorned with photographs. “Good looking bloke,” she commented. “Strapping, too. I bet he could pull without any Deep Secret.”

  Croft chuckled. “His wife wasn’t half bad looking either.”

  “Good legs,” Millie agreed. She smiled at Croft. “The kind you like wrapped round your back.” She paused. “I wonder who took this.”

  Croft dropped the handwritten pages he was reading and raised his eyebrows. Millie came around the table and leant alongside him, her perfume filling his nostrils. She showed him a monochrome photograph of Zepelli, Georgina and two boys, one of them the young Gerald, on a beach, with towering cliffs in the background.

  “Gibbet Point,” he said. “Somewhere in Devon. According to the text, they used to holiday a lot in Devon. I never thought about who took the picture. I suppose he collared some passer-by on the beach to…” He trailed off. “Hang on. How old would you say those boys are there?”

  Millie shrugged. “Nine, ten, maybe a little older.”

  “Exactly. That would put this picture somewhere in the mid sixties. At that time, Graham and Reiniger were all but inseparable. I wonder if Julius took that picture, and if so, is that his son, Billy?”

  “Possible. Not really a strong lead on anything, though, is it?”

  “Isn’t it? We’re looking for a caravan. Suppose it’s on a park somewhere in North Devon?”

  “Felix, this picture was taken in the sixties. It’ll be a shed by now, and the park management will have shifted it off site.”

  “That doesn’t mean that Burke, or more likely his mother, didn’t purchase a replacement and, if she did, Georgina would have insisted it was on the same park where they had such happy memories of past holidays.”

  “All right, so I go along with that, but like Durbridge pointed out, there are thousands of holiday parks in Devon.” She studied the picture again. “Do you know where this Gibbet Point is?”

  Croft shook his head. “I ran an internet search a few years ago, and the nearest I could come was Gibbet Moor, not far from Tiverton.”

  “Well maybe that’s it,” she urged.

  Croft shook his head. “It’s miles inland, south of the Exmoor national Park. This photograph is taken at the seaside.”

  “Yes, but if they holidayed in Devon on a regular basis…” She stared as Croft began to search through his pockets. “What? What are you looking for?”

  “The note. When I was on the plane, on my way here. Remember? You dictated the note he left at Ted’s place. How did it go? ‘It starts in Warrington and where does it end’… something like that.” He fished out the notebook, snapped the elastic away, and flipped through it. “Ah. Here we are. ‘It begins with grin or want.’ Well, we know that’s Warrington. Then he goes on, ‘How does it end?’ He’s trying to fool us by using the word, ‘how’, when what he means is where, and the where is an anagram of the last line, ‘beech mole’.”

  “How do you know?” Millie asked.

  “Because the first line indicates a place, not an object or an event. Burke worked this out, and he wasn’t bad with anagrams. It wouldn’t be logical for him to indicate a place in the first line and something different in the last. It would make the puzzle almost impossible to solve. It has to be a place.” He flipped up the lid of his netbook, and opened the internet browser. Calling up Google Maps, he homed in on Devon. “We’re looking for somewhere on the North Devon coast that is an anagram of beech mole.”

  “Why North Devon?” she demanded.

  “The cliffs.” He gestured at the photograph. “There are cliffs in Sou
th Devon, but they tend not to be as steep as those. Look at them. They’re almost sheer. Reminds me of Minehead which is in…”

  “Somerset,” she cut in with a smile.

  “All right. I know it’s Somerset, but it’s on the North Devon border.”

  She leaned even closer, studying the map on screen. “Woolacombe, Combe Martin, Widecombe. Hell of a lot of combes.”

  “It originally meant valley, or hollow,” Croft told her, “and look what’s there.” He pointed to the upper left corner of the map. “Helecombe.” His smile broadened. “An anagram of beech mole.”

  ***

  When Millie rang him, Shannon agreed but he was far from enthusiastic. “I’ve ordered the helicopter. It’ll pick you up at Filton airport in about an hour. You’ll be down there an hour after that. The nearest helipad they could find belongs to a country club outside Braunton. It’s about ten or twelve miles from Helecombe, but the local boys will be there to meet you. I hope you’ve got this right.”

  Millie opened Zepelli’s biography at the page she had bookmarked, and read aloud over the phone. “Over the years we enjoyed many travels all over the world, but we were always happiest when taking our annual family holiday in Devon.” She closed the book. “When Gerry Burke was a child, he went to Devon every year, sir, and we believe Prather joined them sometimes. If Prather really is Reiniger’s son, and I don’t think there’s much doubt, then that’s where he’s headed, and he has been moving consistently south, hasn’t he?”

  “All right, all right. But remember, Millie, you take no chances. Local boys will be armed, and so are you. If he won’t come quietly, shoot the bastard. Good luck and keep me posted.”

  37

  Interior cladding muted the chatter of the Bell Jet Ranger’s rotors as they sped towards the nuclear powers station at Hinkley Point, the land below whipping past them at over 130 mph.

  In the rear seats of the helicopter, Croft and Millie continued to work on the handwritten manuscript, he passing pages to her after he had read them. When the aircraft banked to the left, soon after takeoff, he paused his reading, and looked out.