Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  John ignored the implied question. Now he had started to tell Ryan about his past he was going to tell him everything. “It was the end of May—”

  “Which year?”

  “1985.”

  “We were heading for a festival at Stonehenge, there were thousands of us. I suppose the authorities felt intimidated because they put up a roadblock. We were a mixed group, there were women and young children, even some babies, but the police started a fight and someone, an informer, told them we had petrol bombs. It was a lie. We didn’t. We wouldn’t have done. Perhaps, if anyone did have a weapon of any sort, they were police stooges, planted in our groups to make trouble. Anyway, whatever or whoever started it the police hit out at everyone. The press called it the Battle of the Beanfield but if it was a battle it was a very one-sided one. Google it. I got away with a few bumps and bruises but others were really badly hurt. Hundreds were arrested but I got away that time.”

  “That time?”

  “I’ll come to that.” Now he had begun he found the details flooding back. He spoke enthusiastically, smiling as he remembered people and places from that time. “I spent four years in that old VW van. We went to music festivals and raves and if there was a demonstration anywhere we joined it as long as it looked like it would be peaceful. We weren’t violent.”

  “We?”

  “There were five vans in the convoy I joined. The numbers varied and sometimes ‘we’ were twenty men, women and children, sometimes more, sometimes less. We all lived together, travelled together, demonstrated together, stuck up for each other, helped each other. We were family.”

  “What happened?” Ryan prompted after his father had been silent for some seconds, sitting back, his eyes closed against the bright sun, remembering.

  “In the beginning we were just peaceful protesters, living an alternative and perhaps unconventional life, but as Thatcher’s policies deepened divisions we were joined by people who were not as nice. Some tended to resort to violence, especially those who joined us after the miners’ strike. They had a different view of things.”

  “Didn’t you try to stop them?”

  John shook his head. “No, I was a wimp even then.” John tried a smile and was rewarded with Ryan shaking his head. “I didn’t do anything violent. Illegal? Probably. Obstruction, trespass, that sort of thing, but I could never be violent. I have never been a violent man.”

  “You say you spent four years like that?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you hook up with anyone? Mum?”

  John glanced at the kitchen window to see if Chris was still listening in to the conversation and was pleased to see she had gone.

  “Yes and no. I spent most of the time on my own but towards the end I did ‘hook up’ with someone. Her name was Wave. I know, it’s an odd name, but her parents were hippies and had been since forever. Wave was very young, sixteen—”

  “How old were you then?”

  “I’d have been twenty. She had been with another man in our convoy, a man we knew as Fordy, but she fell out with him big time and she fell in with me after he left.”

  “You didn’t like Fordy?” Ryan had picked up on his father’s tone of voice.

  “I did not. I never did. I didn’t want the others to let him join us. I never trusted him. And I was right not to.”

  “What happened?” Ryan really wanted to know.

  “Wave and I had been together a while when we decided to go to London to support the students. They were protesting against student grants being replaced by loans. It was ironic, I suppose. Anyway, it all got out of hand though I kept out of the main bit of trouble at Westminster Bridge. Wave was pregnant and I had to get her away when it looked like it would get nasty. Which of course it did. Very.”

  “Wave was pregnant?”

  “The baby wasn’t mine, at least she told me it wasn’t, but I wanted to look after them both whoever the father was.”

  “Should I Google that Westminster Bridge thing as well as the Beanfield thing?” Ryan said quickly, more to stop his dad thinking about Wave and the baby than to satisfy any real curiosity.

  John nodded.

  “Thatcher’s government went into overdrive. They said revolution was about to break out, the Queen Mother had been stuck in traffic because of us for God’s sake! She forced the hands of the police. The next day I was arrested. The police came mob-handed to my van, I was parked in a street near Covent Garden so I hadn’t exactly made a run for it. They hustled me to the police station where they charged me with seriously injuring a police officer with a fire extinguisher. I hadn’t done anything remotely like that but they had photographs. The man wasn’t me, he didn’t look remotely like me, but they said it was me. Someone, a police informer, had given evidence that firstly I had said I wanted to kill a policeman to make a point about something, and secondly had boasted about it in a pub the previous evening. It was all lies but—”

  “But they found you guilty.”

  “Of course they did. It was Thatcher. She told them to set examples of the Trotskyists who she said were trying to bring down her government. It wasn’t Trotskyists who were against her, just about every sane adult in the country wanted her to go.”

  “What happened?”

  “They didn’t allow me bail, the court case was a farce and I got three years in jail. Three years. I lost Wave. I lost the daughter she had just after I was arrested. I lost my faith in just about everything and everyone. It made me who I have been. I couldn’t get a decent job because I had a record. I couldn’t go back on the road when I couldn’t trust anyone as I saw everyone as a police informer. I couldn’t go back to Mum and Dad; they’d told me they were ashamed of me especially as Patrick had just been heroically injured in Iraq.”

  “But you met Mum, and had me?”

  “I don’t know why, but she saw something she liked in me. I don’t think she’s ever regretted taking me under her wing.”

  “Did you ever find out who informed on you?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you ever do anything about it?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Why not? If anyone had done something like that to me I’d have found him and made him pay.”

  “The man was Fordy, Wave’s old boyfriend and probably the father of her little girl. In jail I realised he had always stood out like a sore thumb. His shoes and clothes were just a little too good, his accent just a little too forced. There was another traveller in jail who knew Fordy and confirmed he was the police spy. He also told me who Fordy really was.”

  “Who was he?” Ryan had to ask when his father stopped talking and stared down at his feet.

  “His real name was Barford Eden—”

  “Bloody stupid name.”

  John nodded. “Son of another man with a bloody stupid name, Stratford Eden.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “There’s no reason you should have heard about him though he’s another one to Google. He was a very rich man. A really very rich man. There was no way I could get back at Fordy. He would be completely bombproof. You have to admit if I’d tried anything lawyers would have descended on me from a very great height. It was hopeless.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I wasn’t the only one who had reason to dislike him. No, it wasn’t just dislike, it was hate. I was not alone in hating Barford Eden. I’m sure there were many, many people, stronger than I was, who would have liked to give him a good beating if he showed his face anywhere near a traveller again.”

  “So what happened to him?”

  “He disappeared in 1990. There was stuff in the papers about him drowning in a surfing accident near Looe in Cornwall but I’ve never believed that. I think too many people had too much against him and he went into a programme of some sort, you know, a change of
name and identity.”

  “Witness Protection?”

  “That sort of thing. Anyway, wherever he is and whatever he’s been doing I hope he remembers what he did to other people and is ashamed.”

  “Do you think he ever understood the harm he did?”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “What do you think your life would have been like without him?”

  “Different. Very different, I suppose. But then I wouldn’t have met your mum and you wouldn’t have been born.”

  “Would that have been so bad? It isn’t as if I was hanging around in the ether somewhere for millions of years waiting to be born, is it?”

  John stared at his son and shook his head slowly.

  “Ryan, you are far too clever to give everything up. Give it three years. Just three years.”

  “I don’t know, Dad,” Ryan replied. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

  His softer, less belligerent, tone of voice allowed John to be hopeful that he had at least made his son think.

  “I threw away my opportunity to make something of myself and I won’t let you do the same.”

  John had told Ryan more than he had meant to and he could say no more. He was relieved to hear Chris calling him.

  “Now, here’s your mum. Be a good boy and say nothing about this to her?”

  “Okay, Dad. It wouldn’t help for her to know, would it?”

  John leant forward, put his head in his hands, and wondered what he had achieved by his confession.

  He had stopped their argument, and perhaps Ryan would now think more carefully about his future, but he was afraid that he had said something which, in some way, would come back to haunt him.

  Chapter 2: Ryan Leaves Home

  Through those early days of his summer holiday Ryan kept out of his father’s way. What time he didn’t spend away from his home he spent sitting hunched over his computer. He Googled the names he remembered his father mentioning: the Battle of the Beanfield and the Battle of Westminster Bridge. The more he learned the more he came to like the man his father had been.

  The battles the police fought in the eighties, against the people who Ryan thought seemed to have perfectly valid complaints, were violent affairs. He read every blog he could find of eyewitness accounts of the battles around Stonehenge and against the introduction of student loans. And he read everything he could find about the retribution the establishment brought down on the heads of those they prosecuted, whether innocent or guilty.

  The more he read, the more he came to believe that his father had had no chance of getting justice and the angrier he became with the man who had betrayed him. Fordy. Barford Eden.

  That feeling grew when he began searching for information on the Eden family. He learned that Barford, and his younger brother Warwick, had had every advantage it was possible to have yet he had betrayed people who thought of him as a friend. Although he never wanted to wish ill on anyone, Ryan thought it some kind of poetic justice that Barford had died.

  He spent many hours searching for information about Barford, and apart from what he considered to be normal conspiracy theories that Barford lived on and had been given a new identity, he could find nothing. When he read pages of information on Warwick inheriting his father’s vast fortune without any other claimants coming forward Ryan judged that Barford was, indeed, dead.

  Focusing his attention on Warwick Eden, Ryan read through a great many articles on the internet which reported how he had inherited his father’s business empire, and all his money and property, in 1995. Since then he had sold most of his father’s business interests and lived the life of an international playboy. He had well-publicised affairs with aspiring Hollywood actresses and reality television personalities. Photographs were published online and in some of the less serious newspapers of him with bevies of young women. His purchases of superyachts were documented fully in gossip magazines. It was a life Ryan could not understand, but still he despised it. He became obsessed with the unearned privilege of the rich and famous and what he perceived to be their sense of entitlement.

  “Fuck!”

  “Language,” Chris admonished as she cleared the last of the breakfast things from the table.

  “Sorry Mum.”

  “You don’t sound it. Anyway, I’m off shopping now. If you can put down that thing for long enough to do the washing up I’d be very grateful,” she said with weary sarcasm.

  “Will do.”

  “I’ve heard that before. You always have your nose in some screen or other. If it’s not your laptop it’s that ruddy tablet or your phone…”

  “Okay. I’ll do the washing up.”

  “And the drying and putting away?”

  “Okay okay.”

  “Anyway, I’m off.”

  As soon as he heard the front door close John looked up from his paper.

  “What was that all about? Swearing like that in front of your mother?”

  “It was this.”

  Ryan handed over his tablet and John read the headline in an online news site: Barford Eden (Fordy) lives.

  “Dad?”

  John said nothing.

  “Well?” Ryan pressed him.

  “It’s a good thing your mum’s out. We shouldn’t talk about this when she’s around.”

  “Well?” Ryan repeated.

  “It seems I may not be the only person who thinks he got away with everything he did.”

  “You think he’s got another identity, another name? There are lots of conspiracy theories online, lots of people say his family bought him a new identity and that he didn’t die in some stupid surfing accident.”

  “I suppose I always thought that was a little too convenient,” John said thoughtfully, still looking at the article. “I wonder who would have written this.”

  “It’s just got initials, RD.”

  John shook his head. “That doesn’t mean much, does it?”

  “Do you think his brother knows where he is?”

  “Warwick?”

  “Warwick.”

  “I have absolutely no idea but if anyone does it will be him.”

  “What about that woman? You know, on your convoy, the one whose daughter you were with.”

  “You remembered?”

  “Of course I did. Wave, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Wave. Even if I thought it a good idea to get in touch with her I have absolutely no idea where to find her.”

  “I looked. You know, on the internet you can track most people down one way or another, but I couldn’t get it to find a Wave anywhere.”

  “It was such a daft name, perhaps she changed it to something more sensible, like Anne.”

  “How old would she be now?”

  “I don’t know, fortyish? She was sixteen when I knew her and that was before… well, before everything turned to shit.”

  Ryan looked sharply at his father; it was very rare for him to use language like that, but John had pointedly returned to his newspaper.

  Ryan began the washing up, wanting to stay, to get his father to tell him more about Wave, but the only sound in the kitchen, as he washed, dried and put away as his mother had told him, was the radio.

  ‘Warwick Eden,’ they both were startled into listening as they heard the name, ‘has announced that he intends to go into politics. He has been the main donor to the England Force movement but will, in the future, be more active. He intends to stand for Parliament in next year’s General Election.’

  Nothing was said until the news broadcast was finished and the music was playing.

  “That’s Barford’s brother,” Ryan said.

  “I know.”

  “He’s a fascist shit.”

  “Probably.”

  “This just confirms something.”

  “Conf
irms something?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Ryan began but stopped, aware that he was about to stray onto dangerous ground. He had said nothing about the plans he had made for his future in the weeks since that conversation with his father.

  “I won’t make any sarcastic remark about that being a first.”

  “No, listen for a moment. I’ve decided I’m not going to university, whatever my results are.” He paused, waiting for his father’s harsh response, but none came. Perhaps, he thought, his mother had worked her magic in persuading his dad to back down. “I’ve decided what I’m going to do.”

  “And that is?”

  Ryan did not reply directly. “You know that talk we had at the beginning of the summer?”

  John nodded slowly, unsure where the conversation was going.

  “I did Google all those things you suggested.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve decided to see if there is anything I can do.”

  “Anything you can do? About what exactly?”

  “About exposing the family for what it is. Barford was a shit. There has to be something I can find out about them to expose the Eden family and make them pay for what they did to you, and Warwick is a shit and cannot be allowed to get away with the life he’s stolen, and now! Politics! How many people will he convince, or buy? He has to be stopped and I’m going to stop him.”

  “The idealism of youth.”

  “No, Dad, don’t write me off. I’m going to find something that would scupper any political career and make him grovel. This isn’t really news to me, there’s been loads of stuff in social media about it and what with everything else that’s going on in politics today people reckon it doesn’t matter whether or not he gets into Parliament, it just matters that he gets his disgusting beliefs out as widely as possible.”

  “Since when were you interested in politics?”

  “Since you told me what you did back in the eighties and made me read up all about what was going on then.”

  “Ah.”

  “Anyway, I’ve worked out how to do this.”

  “Really?” John sounded doubtful.

  “I’m going to learn about being a bar steward.”