I scrambled up. ‘Why did she want to know about the Gulf War?’
‘Not that one. The Second World War,’ Steven snapped.
Of course. My brain quickly reassembled the facts as Steven continued:
‘She and Dad became good friends. She’d spend ages with him talking about the old days, not many people bothered. I got to know her because of it. Poor Dad. The doctor has given him some pills. I loved her, not like some people who used her and thought nothing of it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He turned away and began walking back to the hangar. ‘I’ll see what I can find out about that plane buzzing you,’ he called over his shoulder.
I hurried back to the houseboat, taking the footpath behind the village at the back of my mother’s house and coming out by the Pilot Boat Inn. Even then I couldn’t avoid the small huddled groups of villagers and dog walkers. I caught snatches of conversation about Deeta’s death.
Someone said that the police had set up an incident room in the village hall. I was worried that if the police questioned Steven he’d tell them about Deeta and me. I couldn’t afford to lose any time sitting in a police interview room.
Where the hell was Rowde? Why didn’t he get in touch? Perhaps he’d be waiting for me back at the houseboat. He wasn’t, Scarlett was.
‘Where have you been?’ she declared. ‘I’ve got some news for you about that blonde woman.
You’ll have to come with me though. I can’t leave Mum alone.’
Ruby was staring at the television, her hands clasping her straw handbag.
Scarlett glanced at her mother and then at me.
She spoke in hushed tones. ‘I was cleaning Deeta’s room in the hotel the day before she was killed. I had to take Mum with me. I can’t leave her here, can I?’
She glared at me as if I was going to chastise her. I wondered where all this was leading.
‘Usually Mum’s pretty good. She just sits there muttering to herself or singing. I was called away to another room; a guest wanted his breakfast brought up and there was no one else to do it so I had to leave Mum, only for a few minutes. I didn’t realise she’d taken it until yesterday, after I heard that Deeta had been killed.’
‘Taken what?’
‘This.’ And she stretched across me to the bread bin which she flipped open. She pulled out a photograph in a silver frame. As she straightened up she looked at me and I felt something jump between us that startled her as much as it did me. She frowned and thrust the photograph into my hands.
I gazed down at it. I wasn’t sure what I expected but it wasn’t the photograph of a young man in his early twenties, handsome with a square jaw and broad smile, tall and slender. He was dressed in a lounge suit, shirt and tie. In the background was a chalk cliff and sea. It looked remarkably like Whitecliff Bay to me. Judging by the type of photograph and the clothes I would have said it had been taken in the 1930s.
‘Who is it?’ And what, more to the point, was this to do with me?
Scarlett rolled her eyes. ‘How the devil should I know? Mum thinks it’s someone called Max.
I’ve only just managed to get it away from her.
They’ll think I’ve stolen it. I can’t tell the police, you know how their minds work. I’ll lose my job. I don’t know what to do.’ She thrust a hand through her hair, which was now copper with black streaks.
I was flattered that she had confided in me.
Her trust warmed my aching heart.
‘Let’s see who it is.’
I prised open the back and extracted the photograph whilst Scarlett kept an eye on her mother.
‘It is Max.’
Scarlett looked shocked. I didn’t blame her.
We’d both dismissed everything Ruby said as nonsense. If Ruby was right about this could she possibly be right about someone pushing my mother down the stairs?
I read aloud the writing on the back of the photograph. ‘Maximilian Weber, Whitecliff Bay 1938.’
‘Weber, that was Deeta’s surname,’ Scarlett said. ‘This must be her grandfather. She was too young for it to be her father, and, besides, he’s arrived at the hotel. I saw him check in last night.
Did you know she was German?’
It explained her accent and maybe her conversations with Percy. ‘She said something about her grandfather being here at the beginning of the war. Perhaps that’s when Ruby knew him.
Steven Trentham told me Deeta used to talk about the war endlessly with Percy.’
Scarlett scowled. ‘You’ve spoken to Steven?’
‘Yes.’ I could see she looked uncomfortable and wondered why.
She turned round and began to fill the kettle.
‘Steven followed her from your houseboat. I saw him.’
‘He’s just told me.’
‘Did he also tell you that we were once married?’ She spun round. ‘I can see not, judging by your shocked expression and your gaping mouth. I suppose it surprises you that someone wanted to marry me.’
‘I never said –’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Why are you always so defensive?’ I cried, exasperated.
‘Takes years to perfect and with a father like mine I got plenty of chance to practise.’
Her tone was light but I could hear the pain behind the words. I saw a life of pretending she didn’t care what they said about her father. Her hostility was a shield to prevent her from being hurt. I wondered if her eccentric hair colour and style of dress were also used as a kind of barrier to stop people from getting too close.
‘Do you think Steven killed her?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ And that, I could see, was eating her up. ‘He was always so jealous, so possessive.
It suffocated me. He was even worse after the Gulf War. It wasn’t his fault. He started to drink.’
‘Scarlett, Scarlett,’ came a plaintive wailing.
‘Where are you? Why has everyone left me?
Where’s Teddy.’
Scarlett brushed against me as she went to Ruby. I felt something stir inside me that was more than sexual attraction.
‘The bombs they frighten me. Do they frighten you?’ Ruby said.
‘Sometimes.’ Scarlett turned to me. ‘These days she lives so much in the past that she hardly knows who I am. Sometimes she asks me when her real daughter is coming back.’
‘Can’t you get help?’
‘You mean put her in a home,’ she rounded on me again, her eyes blazing.
‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ I said wearily. ‘Look, I think it’s best if you say nothing about the photograph. They might not even know that it’s missing.’
Scarlett said, ‘There’s something else I think you should know. Deeta was on your houseboat before you came back.’
‘I know. She found the door open and discovered the place had been ransacked.’
‘I mean she was inside for a long time before you showed up.’
‘How long?’ I asked, suddenly suspicious.
‘About half an hour, forty minutes.’
‘Are you sure?’ I was struck by the thought that maybe she had ransacked the place. But why would she do that? What could she have been looking for? Had someone told her I could possibly have three million pounds? Was that why she had been so willing? Had she been after my money, rather than my body? Deeta had made a play for me from the start. Deeta had been in Brading church when the aeroplane had buzzed me. Did she have any connection with what had happened to me?
Scarlett said, ‘I thought you might also like to know that her hotel room was trashed.’
Was it indeed! Had her killer thought she’d discovered something on my houseboat and had taken it back to her hotel? What though? Did this have anything to do with Andover? Was I wasting time thinking this? It didn’t feel like it.
If Gus wasn’t the link between Andover’s three victims then who and what was? Deeta was a link between me and Steven Trentham, and Steven with my past. Steven could fly an aero
plane and Scarlett said he was possessive and possibly even unbalanced. I had seen that and could still feel his punch on my chin. I had ruled Steven out, but could I? I thought it was about time I had a word with Percy.
CHAPTER 13
I found Percy on the beach. His forlorn little figure was staring out to sea. We were alone except for a woman walking her West Highland terrier the other side of the long thin pier that stretched out to sea, on the end of which was the lifeboat station.
‘Do you want a tea or coffee?’ I asked, jerking my head in the direction of the café to my right.
‘No thanks. Let’s sit up the top there.’
We climbed the slope up to the small car park by the toilets and Royal National Lifeboat Institution shop. On the bank of grass to the left of it were a handful of seats. We took the second one of the benches facing seaward. Percy had lost some of his sparkle and his breathing was a little laboured. He looked off-colour, a dejected figure now rather than a comical one. I suddenly realised he was an old man.
It was mid morning and low tide. The sea washed gently onto the sand, and across the Solent in a distance haze I could just make out the shores of Hayling Island. It looked like summer but there was a fresh wind that reminded me it was still only April. A small fishing boat was chugging steadily towards Sandown Bay. I thought of Westnam and the person who might discover his sea-worn body.
The crabs and sea life would have made a meal of him and it wouldn’t be a pretty sight.
‘It’s a sad world,’ the old man said quietly and wearily, echoing my thoughts. ‘And the more I see of it the sadder it gets. She was such a lovely girl.’
‘It must have been terrible for you to find her.’
‘It was, though I’ve seen worse in the war.’ He glanced at me. ‘I’ve seen things that would make your stomach heave and your legs turn to jelly and I weren’t nothing but a boy then. Seeing her lying in a heap on the beach brought it all back to me. I thought I’d forgotten it, but I hadn’t. I suppose you just push it away and get on with life, well leastways that was what we used to do in them days. Now it’s all counselling. Don’t do no good if you ask me. It hasn’t helped our Steven much. Poor Scarlett had a terrible time of it; no wonder she couldn’t stick it. I don’t blame her for wanting shot of him. But he seems to be getting himself together now. He’s been back with me for ten years and buying that plane a few years ago has given him something else to think about. Doesn’t do to brood on things.’
‘He told me that he and Deeta were very close.’
The old man eyed me sadly. ‘Wishful thinking on Steven’s part. She were no more interested in him than she were in me. Oh, I liked to fool meself just like our Steven did, I mean a pretty girl like her hanging on your every word, looking at you with those big blue eyes, bound to go to your heart and loins. Though the loins bit is beyond me now, more’s the pity.’ He smiled and I saw something of the old Percy bouncing back.
I was glad.
‘She was writing a book about the war, I believe.’
Percy nodded. ‘Yes. She wanted to know what part I played in it. Told her I was a boy runner.
She was very interested in the radar station at Ventnor. Did you know it was the only radar station to be destroyed in the war?’
I did. I’d heard the story so many times I could recite it backwards. I needed to get Percy talking about Steven but I could see there would be no hurrying him.
Percy continued, ‘I saw the pylons go up in 1938, you know. It must have been about the same time your granddad built that folly of his.’
I remembered seeing a diary for 1938 amongst my mother’s possessions. Is that what Deeta wanted if she had been the person to have searched my houseboat. But what significance could it have? I recalled her gentle questioning of me in between our lovemaking. She had asked me about my mother’s childhood during the war and I had thought nothing of it. In fact, I couldn’t tell her much, my mother had rarely spoken of it. Was that diary from 1938 still on the houseboat? Though what connection it might have had with Andover, or Steven come to that, I couldn’t even guess.
Percy continued, ‘Your granddad knew a war was coming. Most of us thought he was a bit eccentric. Chamberlain said there was peace. But Edward Hardley was right in the end. Of course we didn’t know the reason for the pylons then, it was all hush hush. By 1939 there were these great big tall steel masts and wooden towers on the Downs. The radar station was bombed in 1940, along with Portsmouth Dockyard. The Spitfires went up. You should have seen them.’
Percy’s eyes were shining at the excitement of the memory. ‘They shot the hell out of them Germans, but the bombs still got through. I was running for the firemen, taking buckets of water up there, but it were like pissing on an inferno.
Bloody useless.’
His eyes swivelled to his right. He couldn’t see St Boniface Down above Ventnor from here, not physically but in his mind I knew he could.
Time to bring him back on track.
‘About Steven, has he –’
‘It was completely destroyed, you know. We were lucky though. Only one soldier got hurt.
Deeta was really interested in the radar station and curious about your grandfather. She wanted to look inside the folly. She asked Steven about that many a time. She was disappointed you’d sold the house. I often wondered why she was so interested.’
Now, come to think of it, I was curious too.
Suddenly I had the strange sensation that someone was watching us. I glanced behind; there was only a woman in one of the bungalows pottering about in her front garden. I felt uneasy.
‘Perhaps it was because her grandfather was here at the start of the war. Now about –’
‘Was he? She never said,’ Percy said surprised.
‘Maybe she didn’t like to. Not to you, Percy.
She was German and her –’
‘She were German?’ Percy cried.
His rheumy eyes were wide and I felt sure he had lost even more of his colour. His hands began to tremble in his lap.
‘You didn’t know?’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘She never said she was a Jerry.’
‘It’s all right, Percy, you didn’t tell her any secrets,’ I said, smiling, ‘The war was a long time ago.’
‘Not to me it isn’t. It’s yesterday. And it was to your mum too and poor old Ruby.’
He looked as if he was about to cry. Hastily, I said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think. Of course there must be painful memories for you. It’s just that Deeta is… was young.’ I was about to add that she was also a historian, only I was beginning to doubt whether that were true. I said, ‘The war is history to a lot of people.’
‘More’s the pity,’ he replied sharply. ‘As you get older, young man, you tend to live in the past because there’s more of it than the future. Are you sure she was German?’
‘Yes. I think her grandfather must have been too: Maximilian…’
I didn’t think Percy could go any paler but at the mention of that name his skin was almost transparent. Now I was very curious.
‘What is it, Percy?’
He removed his grubby white baseball cap and ran a hand over his silver hair. His eyes shifted from right to left. It would have been comical if it weren’t for the fact that I could see he was genuinely upset.
‘I’d never have told her if I’d known she was German.’ His voice was barely above a whisper.
‘She was so good at listening. Bugger her.’
He startled me. I didn’t think I had ever heard him swear before. He fiddled with his cap in his lap.
‘Don’t upset yourself, Percy. You didn’t do anything wrong.’ I tried to reassure him, but he wasn’t having it.
I reeled back at the intensity of the look he turned on me. Only then did it click that there was more going on here than I had realised.
Despite all my problems I found myself interested, and deep down somewhere inside me a sixth sense was telling me th
at there was something I should know about. Why and what I could do with the information I had no idea.
‘Percy,’ I began slowly and steadily. ‘Did you know Maximilian Weber?’
‘Weber?’
A loud explosion filled the air and sent the Canada geese and seagulls squawking. Percy clutched his chest and almost jumped out of his seat whilst I didn’t do much better. I put my hand on his arm, ‘It’s only the call for the lifeboat.’
Percy knew this but I hoped my touch was reassuring. He took a deep breath and swivelled to look at me.
‘Who was he, Percy?’ I asked quietly. ‘Ruby knew him.’
‘Reckon we should walk for a bit.’
‘OK.’ I rose, curbing my impatience. Before we had gone far I could hear cars screeching into the car park and turned to see men race down to the lifeboat station.
We stood for a moment watching the lifeboat launch, its orange bow thrusting through the blue green sea heading towards the Cardinal Buoy and a container ship, above which hovered a helicopter. Slowly we began walking towards Whitecliff Bay. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hurry Percy. I guessed this tale had been a long time coming.
‘There were three of them, only he weren’t called Weber then. Maximilian Webb was his name, but I guess it was the same man.’
I could see from Percy’s manner that he knew it was.
Percy continued, ‘Max, Hugo and your grandfather, Edward.’
Ruby had been right. Nevertheless I wondered why she had mistaken me for Hugo instead of my grandfather.
‘I looked up to them. Thought the sun shone out of their backsides,’ Percy added. ‘I was only a boy, just a bit older than your mother, Olivia, or Livvy as me and Ruby called her. She and Ruby were about thirteen when the war broke out. I was fifteen. We used to lark around on the beach in the summer or in your grandfather’s gardens at Bembridge House. It was a lovely place and me and Ruby thought we were in heaven being special friends of them up at the big house, like.
But Livvy was never stuck up and neither was your grandmother.’ He paused and gazed around fearful.
‘What is it, Percy?’
‘One evening I was behind those rocks over there and the three men were walking along the beach. I weren’t following them or anything, just larking about.’ He hesitated. I could see that wasn’t the truth. He continued. ‘They came round the bend and I ducked out of sight. They stopped about where we are now.’
In for the Kill Page 13
