JT02 - To The Grave

by Steve Robinson

  “Sure,” Tayte said. “No problem.”

  Tayte ended the call and arched a brow at Jonathan, wondering what DI Lundy had to show him.

  “I suppose that pub-lunch is off then?” Jonathan said.

  “I guess so. I’m sorry.” Tayte checked his watch: it was just after one p.m. “There isn’t really time to drop you home,” he added. “Will you be okay to wait?”

  “Of course,” Jonathan said. “I’ll get a bite to eat and take a look around the shops.”

  “Any idea where the local police station is?”

  “No, but I’m sure we can find someone to ask.”

  Chapter Forty

  Detective Inspector Lundy was a stocky, dark-haired man in his early fifties who walked with a slightly hunched gait as he led Tayte and his briefcase into an interview room at Market Harborough police station. Tayte thought he looked like a man who had seen as little sleep as he had over the past couple of days. His eyes were red and puffy and it seemed to take all his energy to drag his chair out from behind the desk.

  “Sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Tayte,” Lundy said. “Please take a seat.”

  The ground floor room was plainly decorated with minimal furnishings and three small windows set high up in the far wall for privacy. Tayte sat down and Lundy sat opposite, placing a manila folder on the table between them.

  “I’ll try not to keep you too long,” Lundy said as he opened the folder and sat back with it. “Firstly, I have some information that might be useful to you. You mentioned a suitcase that was sent to your client in America. Something that once belonged to a girl called Philomena Lasseter.”

  “That’s right.”

  Lundy slipped a piece of paper across the table. “Is this your client’s address?”

  Tayte sat forward to read it as the phone in his jacket pocket began to play its show tune. He reached in and silenced it without looking to see who it was, thinking that it must be Jonathan. “Sorry,” he said, turning back to the piece of paper. “Yes, that’s her address. Where did you find it?”

  “Edward Buckley kept an address book, as most people do,” Lundy said. “I think it’s safe to say that your suspicions as to who sent the suitcase were right.”

  Tayte thought that was good to know, but he was still trying to figure out why Buckley had sent it after all these years and whether it had anything to do with Grace Ingram’s recent death. The next piece of information Lundy imparted came as something of a surprise.

  “Edward Buckley was arrested in January, 1945,” he said. “It was for the abduction of Philomena from her home in Oadby, Leicestershire.”

  “Abduction?” That information didn’t tally with the story Tayte had heard.

  “Apparently so,” Lundy said. “Philomena’s mother -” He paused to check his notes. “Margaret Lasseter - she raised the charge against Mr Buckley and her daughter was later found at his home in Hampshire, which is what led to his arrest.”

  “Was he charged?”

  Lundy shook his head. “No, the case against him was dropped as soon as Philomena was returned to her mother’s care, but I can see how it could have been very damaging to the Buckley family’s reputation if she had chosen to proceed. Local scandal was already brewing at the mere mention of Buckley’s arrest by all accounts.”

  Tayte had been wondering why Edward Buckley would choose to help Mena leave home as he had, seeming only to forget about her afterwards. But then how could Buckley risk stirring Margaret Lasseter’s wrath for a second time, knowing that she would re-open the case against him and that his name would be dragged through the courts and all the major newspapers, accused of the abduction of a seventeen year old girl?

  “How do you know all this?” Tayte asked. “If Buckley wasn’t charged, I mean.”

  “There’s the original arrest sheet,” Lundy said. “And there are other resources I’m sure you’re familiar with.”

  “Newspaper archives?”

  Lundy nodded. Then he began to scratch at his eyes, making them water. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m trying to switch to contact lenses and the bloody things are irritating the life out of me.” He took a tissue from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “I’m beginning to wonder if they’re worth the bother,” he added as he put the tissue away again and turned his attention back to the manila folder.

  “We found something else at Edward Buckley’s home that I’m hoping you can help me with,” he said, sliding another piece of paper from the folder, this one large and folded. “This newspaper page was on his desk. It’s been torn out of The Times.”

  Tayte pulled it closer and unfolded it. It was from the foreign affairs column; dated three days ago on the Monday he had gone to see Edward Buckley. A quick glance revealed several articles from the previous week up to and including the weekend.

  “Look here,” Lundy said. He reached across the table and indicated one of the articles.

  “Priest murdered in Cape Town,” Tayte read aloud. The article was brief, presumably only having made the paper because of its widespread shock appeal; it wasn’t every day that a priest was gunned down assassination-style in his own chambers in the middle of the afternoon. Tayte read how the murder had taken place at St Mary’s cathedral in the middle of Cape Town last Saturday: the day he’d arrived in England.

  “See the pen marks beside it?” Lundy said.

  Tayte had. There were several ink dots like someone - presumably Edward Buckley - had been tapping the paper as they read it, indicating their interest.

  “I was hoping it might mean something to you,” Lundy said. “The MO in both cases is identical and the killer had enough time to get from South Africa to England to Kill Edward Buckley afterwards, although the ballistics don’t match. A different firearm was used.”

  Tayte was nodding his head. “It does mean something,” he said. “And I think it could come to mean a great deal.” He reached into his briefcase and brought the copy of Mel Winkelman’s photograph out. “I came across this during my research,” he added. He showed it to Lundy. “It was taken in Paris in 1944. The man in the middle here is called Danny Danielson. That’s Edward Buckley drinking alongside him.” He put his finger on the silhouette of the woman in the background. “I believe this is Mary Lasseter. She was engaged to Edward Buckley at the time, but soon after the photo was taken the marriage was called off. Then Mary moved to South Africa, married someone else and became Grace Ingram.”

  Tayte went on to tell Lundy about the Grace Ingram Foundation Trust, GIFT, and how he’d been to see its founder’s son, Christopher Ingram, recently. Then he told him what he knew about Danny and how the GI had been listed as missing-in-action in November 1944, around the time the photograph was taken.

  Despite his niggling suspicion that there was something sinister lurking behind the scene, he had to remind himself that it was still just a photograph of two or maybe three friends at a bar in wartime Paris. Although with Buckley’s murder and now the murder of a priest in Cape Town just the day before, it stacked up in Tayte’s mind as something too suspicious to ignore. He could see from the look on DI Lundy’s face that he thought the same.

  “I’d suggest you confirm where Grace Ingram attended Mass,” Tayte said. “And I’d have a word with her son. If someone’s trying to make sure that the past stays where it is, in light of what we have here I’d say that Christopher Ingram would be the best person to help with your investigation.”

  “What about motive? Any thoughts?”

  Tayte thought the motive was obvious after everything he’d said, but maybe he’d missed some salient point.

  “To protect the good name of the trust,” Tayte said. “If its founder was implicated in the disappearance of an American GI during the Second World War, the reputation of the Grace Ingram Foundation Trust would be damaged beyond repair.”

  Lundy began to nod.

  “Hang on a minute,” Tayte said as something else occurred to him. “When I went to see Christopher Ingram,
I heard that the trust was about to expand into America. If Grace Ingram did have something to do with Danny’s disappearance, given that he was an American GI, what American business - or any other business for that matter - would want to associate themselves with GIFT then?”

  Tayte hoped he was wrong about these things that now seemed so clear to him. He hoped the answer was simply that Danny had come looking for Mena and maybe he never went back to his unit because he never stopped looking for her. Perhaps it took him the rest of the year to get back to England travelling through unofficial channels and by the time he reached Oadby, Mena had gone. But something told Tayte that a different answer was waiting to be found and it made him even more determined to find out what it was.

  “I’d like to make a copy of this before you go,” Lundy said, indicating the photograph and stirring Tayte from his thoughts.

  “Keep it,” Tayte said. “It’s on my laptop.”

  Lundy’s eyes lit up. “In that case, I’d like a copy of the file if you don’t mind. Save me a trip to the scanner.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  It was just after six p.m. when Tayte arrived back at his hotel. He’d dropped Jonathan home in twilight and left again in darkness, having taken him up on his offer of coffee and biscuits, which was all he’d eaten since breakfast that morning. As he walked the quiet corridor to his room, he could hear his stomach groan beneath his jacket and he supposed it was fitting punishment for having eaten all those Hershey’s miniatures last night.

  He turned a corner and saw his room ahead, prompting him to reach into his pocket for the key card. He was thinking about his client, wondering whether she would get an overnight flight tomorrow or would wait until the next morning. It didn’t really matter. All he had to do now was wait for her call. They would take the next steps towards finding Mena together and the rest was in the hands of the police. He just had to switch off, have dinner, finish his book and get an early night.

  Thinking about phone calls reminded him that he’d missed one while he was with DI Lundy. He paused a few steps from his room and checked to see who had called, thinking it can’t have been Jonathan or he would have said. He checked the details. It was a local landline number he didn’t recognise, but he called back anyway as he continued towards his room. It rang several times and then went to a voice messaging service that told him he’d reached the voice mailbox of Alan Driscoll. Tayte ended the call, thinking he’d try again later.

  Alan Driscoll… What did he have to say?

  As he put his phone away he knew he hadn’t called to chat about rugby and that whatever it was he would find out soon enough. He was about to put his key card in the slot when he noticed the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the handle. He couldn’t remember leaving it there, but he’d been in such a hurry to get out that morning, head spinning with thoughts of finding Mena, that it didn’t surprise him.

  He entered his room, dropped his briefcase and hung his jacket in the wardrobe, half expecting to find his breakfast tray still on the desk where he’d left it; his bed covers still draped on the floor. But when he flicked the main lights on he saw that his room had been serviced and the reason for the sign on the door became clear.

  He was not alone.

  Sitting at the table by the window was a man in a navy pinstripe suit whom Tayte vaguely recognised. Maybe it was the frameless glasses he was wearing, or perhaps it was that suit. It didn’t matter. All Tayte could think about now was the gun in his hand as he raised it towards him.

  “Sit down, Mr Tayte.”

  The man flicked the muzzle of his gun at the vacant chair opposite him, but as Tayte tried to comply he wasn’t sure that he could. His legs suddenly felt so heavy he didn’t think he could move at all.

  “I said, sit down.”

  With the gun now levelled at Tayte’s head, he managed to do as he was told. Who is this man? Why is he in my room? Whose are those legs on the floor beside my bed?

  “You two have met, I believe.”

  Tayte sat down and stared at the body. “Driscoll?” he said, coughing the word out, his throat suddenly parched.

  “Don’t feel too bad about him,” the man said. “He was already on my list, although it might not have come to this. You’ve stirred things up here, Mr Tayte.”

  “Am I supposed to feel guilty about his and Edward Buckley’s death? The priest, too?”

  The man shifted on his chair. “No, not the priest,” he said. “Perhaps not Buckley, either, although I’d say you took a few days off his life.”

  Tayte didn’t know whether to look at the body or the gun, but the gun with that stubby silencer attached to it had an immediacy about it that was hard to ignore. “Driscoll had a son.”

  “Someone’s father dies every second of every day,” the man said. “You can’t afford to be sentimental in my line of work.”

  Tayte doubted the man had a sentimental bone in his body. “Why did you kill him?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You don’t think I brought him here, do you?”

  Tayte didn’t answer.

  “Clearly he came to tell you something and in doing so he made it clear to me that he had something of interest to tell.”

  Tayte thought it had to be about why his mother fell out with her mother, Grace Ingram, and why she broke away from the family. “And I guess I’m next?” he said.

  The thin line that passed for the man’s lips twitched slightly. “There’s no rush,” he said. “Tell me, did you finish Madame Bovary?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “That’s too bad. But I gave you fair warning.”

  Tayte began to feel light-headed - a little nauseous.

  “You see? Everyone assumes they will reach the end of their book when they start it, but you never know do you? How many unfinished books are out there, I wonder? How many people have died without knowing how the story ended?”

  Tayte had no idea and he really didn’t care. “Now I suppose you want me to tell you where Mena is before you kill me?” he said. He figured that was all there was between here and the grave, but he wasn’t going to give up the information easily.

  “No,” the man said, very calmly, chilling Tayte to his core. “I’ve been following you all day. I know about your visit to Logan House.”

  Tayte smiled to spite the man. “You won’t find Mena there.”

  “Mena? No. But Emma Danielson - I’ll find her. That’s the name you gave your client, isn’t it? That American voice of yours carries.”

  Tayte tried to think of something else he could say to stay his execution, but he couldn’t. When he stopped thinking he felt himself relax for the first time since he’d walked into the room, like everything that had ever concerned him no longer seemed to matter. “You don’t need anything from me, do you?” he said.

  The man shook his head.

  “So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you just do it?”

  “Okay.” The man was quick to reassert his grip on the gun, aiming it more precisely at Tayte’s chest. He paused. “Call it a professional courtesy,” he added, “but which would you prefer? Head or heart?”

  “What?”

  Tayte had heard the question but he had to ask to make sure he’d heard it right. The man didn’t say it again. He just moved the muzzle of his gun slowly from Tayte’s chest to his head and back again.

  “I guess I can’t talk you out of this, can I?”

  “No,” the man said.

  “And if I go for the door, you’ll shoot me in the back, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  The man shook his head only slightly. “You wouldn’t make it out of your seat.”

  Tayte tried to swallow, but he couldn’t. He knew he was going to die. A part of him had known it the minute he’d walked into the room and saw this man sitting there. They were both very calm about it and somehow Tayte wasn’t surprised by how he felt. He knew it was going to happen. They were resolved between them to kill and b
e killed. Head or heart? What kind of a choice was that?

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” the man said. “But if you choose heart, there’s a small chance the first bullet will miss. Your head on the other hand…”

  Tayte tried to imagine what a head shot would be like. Quicker perhaps. But what if the bullet went in through his eye? He winced. It didn’t bear thinking about. He really did not want to be having these thoughts.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that you won’t feel a thing, Mr Tayte. But this is not personal. I’m not here to hurt you. Either way, the pain won’t last long.”

  Tayte turned away and looked down through the window, thinking that this man was as cool as the January night that had settled an early frost on the cars below. He breathed deeply and wondered where the time had gone. His time. He thought how ironic it was that he should die a lonely man in some nondescript hotel room trying to connect another client with her birth parents while he still had no idea about his own. How could he die without knowing who he was? He scoffed, thinking that death would certainly spare him that pain.

  How had it come to this?

  “Head or heart?” the man opposite him repeated, and now that the moment had arrived, Tayte knew he would have endured any amount of pain to find his own answers. But he supposed it was too late for that now.

  “Before you pull that trigger,” he said, “will you tell me why you’re looking for Mena? I should at least like to know how her story ends, even if I can’t finish reading her library book.”

  The gunman’s expression did not waver. There was no emotion behind his eyes as he replied. “No,” he said.

  “You know you’re leaving quite a trail behind you. The police have already tied Buckley to the priest. That was Grace Ingram’s priest you killed wasn’t it?”

  “Who’s Grace Ingram?” the man said.

  “Alan Driscoll was her grandson. Don’t you think they’ll make that connection?”