Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Really, I need to share information on the father before you tell me about the son.”

  “Okay, I suppose that makes sense,” Skye accepted reluctantly.

  “Right. If you’re sitting comfortably I’ll begin.” His attempt to lighten Skye’s mood was rewarded with a tight grin. “You know we thought Stratford made his money in the money markets of the 1960s?”

  “That’s what his biography on the internet said.”

  “He actually started out in the late fifties investing in property and disposable packaging and then package holidays—”

  “Disposable packaging to packaging disposables?” Skye smiled at her joke.

  Fergal smiled back, relieved she seemed to have accepted his taking precedence over her. “Well put. Anyway, his business was largely in the Western Mediterranean, the Costas in Spain and the south-east coast of France around Perpignan. He did really well and sold up that business in 1964. When he started FP Transactions later that year he was already a millionaire.”

  “A millionaire then was worth what in today’s money?”

  “At least eighteen million.”

  “Not poor then,” Skye observed drily.

  “No, not poor.”

  “What about his private life?”

  Fergal turned back to his screen. “He married Della Lloyd, aged twenty-seven, in 1960 in Birmingham. They had two sons, Barford and Warwick—”

  “We know that.”

  “I know we know that. Anyway, Della divorced Stratford in 1975—”

  “We know that too. And we also know that she pissed off to South America soon after leaving the boys with Stratford.”

  “Barford was six or seven and Warwick was four.”

  “Tough on them.” Skye was sympathetic. “I can’t imagine they were spared a succession of nannies and au pairs.”

  “I’m afraid it was boarding school.”

  “So Daddy could continue making his millions?”

  “Absolutely. Now back to FP Transactions. He was extremely successful and, apparently, well respected and well liked which was pretty unusual for the times. He seemed to specialise in what would now be called ‘ethical investments’. He put money in technology companies and didn’t deal with countries like South Africa.”

  “You make him sound like a nice man.”

  “A lot of the reports about him give the impression people thought he was. Especially as he gave a great deal of his money away. Through the eighties he donated to all sorts of charities, including the coal miners’ relief funds and refugee relief. He was, from all accounts, an all-round good guy. His charmed life seems to have ended, though, when his eldest boy, Barford, drowned—”

  “I’ve been looking into that.”

  “Leaving his younger son, who he didn’t seem to like very much, as heir to his businesses and his fortune. After Barford drowned he went downhill pretty quickly. His health suffered and he died a little more than a year later.”

  “What did he die of?” Skye asked.

  “A massive cerebral haemorrhage.”

  “No chance of foul play then?”

  “What are you saying? Warwick killed his father to inherit?”

  “It was only a thought.”

  “Not a very clever one. Anyway, Warwick had no business brain—”

  “How old was he?”

  “Stratford? Sixty. And I do wish you would stop interrupting.”

  “No, Warwick, when he inherited?”

  “Twenty-four. Far too young for the responsibilities heaped on his shoulders. Mind you, even if he had been twenty years older he probably still wouldn’t have been up to the job.”

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “Not one tiny bit.”

  “And as soon as he inherited didn’t he sell everything?”

  “An American bank paid him millions for FP but what was more than interesting was he sold everything else, including his father’s house and everything in it.”

  “How does a house sale become ‘more than interesting’?”

  Fergal did not answer immediately. He was still not sure of the implications of what he had found and he didn’t want Skye to indulge in one of her habitual wild speculations. But then, he told himself, sometimes those wild speculations turned out to be completely accurate.

  “I found the sale catalogue.”

  “And?”

  “By far the largest section was Stratford’s incredibly extensive collection of books and artefacts related to the Spanish Civil War. He had a number of first editions by the writers of the time, such as Federico Garcia Lorca and art works by Lorca’s friend Salvador Dali and handwritten erotic poems by a chap called Juan Ramón Jiménez who was later a Nobel Laureate.”

  “Valuable?”

  “Just a bit. The final figure from that sale was well over five million.”

  “Pounds?”

  “Well not ruddy pesetas! There’s even more to this Spanish connection. You remember his company’s logo? The clenched fist? You noticed that that relates back to the Spanish Civil War when we were first looking at Ferrum Pugnus.”

  Skye smiled, pleased that Fergal had remembered it was she who had made the connection. “I remember asking if Stratford had a Spanish connection and you said no.”

  “That’s what I thought then but now, well, perhaps there is. This catalogue shows far more than just a casual interest in that war.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “The whole collection was bought by an anonymous buyer in Spain, in all likelihood an agent for one of the regional governments or even for the Royal Family.”

  “That would make sense.”

  “There’s one important thing I have to work through.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When Stratford died in 1995 his age was given as sixty, his birth date in 1935, but in another obituary, in a Spanish paper, his age is given as sixty-five with a birth date in 1930.”

  “How come a different date?”

  “It could just be a simple error or it could mean more.”

  “Such as?” Skye prompted when it looked to her as though Fergal didn’t want to go into further detail.

  “It could simply be that his records were destroyed in the war and he wanted to be considered younger than he was. Coventry was badly damaged and it’s possible he was born there.”

  “Have you found his birth records?” Skye knew he would have looked.

  “Not yet. But that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve only been looking in England and he could have been born anywhere.”

  “Even Spain?”

  Fergal was not surprised by Skye’s question. It was something he had been asking himself but knew there would be no chance of finding proof of a birth in Spain in the years leading up to the Civil War. He didn’t answer in words, simply slowly moving his head from side to side.

  “If he wasn’t Spanish why would he get obits in Spanish papers?”

  “Don’t forget he must have spent a lot of time there with his package holiday businesses—”

  “Over thirty years before he died,” she pointed out.

  “And then perhaps he had made more contacts when he was acquiring his collection and digging into the Civil War. He must have spent a lot of time over there one way or another.”

  “Any idea where?”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re wondering if this is the connection with Cartagena.”

  “I might be.”

  “He certainly spent time there, but no more than in Granada or Seville or smaller places like Almuñécar and Estepona. Talking of Cartagena did Pat say who was on the yacht?”

  “Just some Indian-looking chappie.”

  “That would be
Arjun Patel, remember he’s the beneficiary of the trust in whose name the yacht is registered. Did she mention any crew?”

  “No, though I had asked her to check.”

  “Maybe when she calls tomorrow we’ll know for sure?”

  “What do you mean ‘for sure’? Do you think you know who the crew is?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Who?”

  “Guess.”

  “Oh shut up!” Skye threw a cushion at her husband. “Guy!”

  “Of course Guy. He left Beausale in Dartmouth, didn’t he? Anne Hill said he joined another yacht. He must have joined Peabody Three! We must find a link between this Arjun Patel and Guy Cliffe; there has to be one.”

  “Okay smartypants, you’ve made some of those connections but then so have I. Don’t you want to know what I found out about Barford?”

  Fergal pushed his computer away and made a show of turning his undivided attention to his wife. “Of course I do.”

  Chapter 16: Barford Eden

  Fergal watched as Skye opened her laptop.

  “Check your emails,” she instructed after a couple of minutes of silence.

  He did as he was told. There was one, just sent, from her and he opened it. He was intrigued to see a series of links to various websites.

  He said nothing, waiting for her to begin to tell him what she had learned about Stratford Eden’s first son. He could tell from her slight smile that she was longing to show him how clever she had been.

  “This is getting really interesting,” she began.

  “Yes?”

  “First, some of the things we already know. Barford was the eldest child of Stratford and Della, real name Delia but apparently she was never known as that. Barford was six when his mother left the family home. He went with her when she first left Stratford but then, as you said, she disappeared with a young Argentinian gigolo leaving the boys with their father. Very soon after that, 1976, he went to board at an exclusive and, I should say, very expensive, prep school in Surrey. He did not, apparently, do very well and unlike many of his classmates he did not make it into a first rate public school. The one he attended, in Somerset, had no more success with him than the prep school and he was expelled in 1985. He was seventeen, and, according to the Old Boys’ newsletter, very popular but completely undisciplined. At home, with a father who did not seem to have a great deal of interest in his son, and with a mother living thousands of miles away, it is no wonder he went off the rails.”

  “Off the rails?”

  “He joined a group of New Age travellers.”

  “Really?”

  “If there was a demonstration it seems he was on it, and he came to the attention of the police a number of times. His father had to bail him out more than once.”

  “Didn’t his fellow travellers think it odd that he had a really rich father?”

  “Probably. But I think having had such a privileged upbringing made him go one step further than anyone else all the time. He seems to not just be at these sit-ins and demonstrations against the building of roads through woodlands and in support of the miners; he didn’t just join marches against nuclear weapons and the ending of student grants and gay rights, he was always at the front, always pushing the police just that little bit too much. Once I realised what he was up to I checked out photographs of protests and riots in the years after 1984 and there is Fordy, as he was known, at the front, apparently egging people on.”

  “You know what he looks like?”

  “Here, he’s the good-looking one on the left.” Skye handed over her laptop.

  “He does look just like his father, doesn’t he? Look, here’s Stratford when he was in his thirties, slim, dark haired and dark eyed.”

  “Nothing like his fairer, curlier haired and chubbier brother who, according to the photos, took after his mother.”

  “It was an odd time all round. The establishment was pretty frightened. They were imagining revolution and Irish terrorism around every corner,” Fergal said as he leafed through the images.

  Skye agreed. “That was pretty real, they weren’t imagining that, were they?”

  “No, granted, but they were particularly paranoid about what they called ‘the youth of today’.”

  “I’ve found out something about a unit of Special Branch, the Special Demonstration Squad, whose job was to infiltrate what they called ‘direct action groups’.”

  “I’ve come across them before,” Fergal nodded. “It seems they routinely used false identities, often with the names of children who had died at birth or soon after. That got them into a lot of trouble.”

  “Anyway, these SDS officers weren’t allowed to incite anyone to commit a crime that they wouldn’t otherwise have committed but they were allowed to recruit others to do that for them. And in the summer of 1988 Fordy became one of those inciters in the pay of an SDS officer.”

  “So he was an informer and an agitator?”

  “So the report says.”

  “What report?”

  “In November 1988 there was a demonstration in London.”

  Fergal could see where Skye’s narrative was leading but he said nothing, allowing her to make her dramatic revelation.

  “Apparently it got out of hand and pretty much turned into a riot. A policeman was badly injured, hit on the head with a fire extinguisher or something, so obviously there was an investigation. Fordy was interviewed and the investigating officer appears to have been convinced it was him who had attacked the officer but he could prove nothing as Fordy, completely convincingly, put the blame on another person, someone he knew from having been in his same group of travellers for a while. The man Fordy accused was called John O’Donnell!”

  When Fergal didn’t react as enthusiastically as she had hoped she continued. “O’Donnell. John O’Donnell,” she repeated. “Whose body have they just found?” she eventually asked, exasperated at Fergal’s lack of reaction. “Whose father was a New Age traveller? Whose father went to jail for causing actual bodily harm to a policeman? Oh come on!”

  “Do we know this is the same John O’Donnell? It’s hardly a rare name.” Fergal was being deliberately provocative, teasing Skye.

  “Of course it’s the same man!” Skye almost shouted her frustration with Fergal.

  “It would be interesting if it was,” Fergal said seriously, deliberately showing measured curiosity but little enthusiasm to wind up his wife.

  “Oh shut up!” Skye threw another cushion at Fergal when she realised he was putting on an act.

  “I’m sorry. No really, that’s great. You have found a real connection between the brother of one victim and the father of the other. It means Ryan possibly did have a motive to kill Warwick and he may well have done, but who then killed Ryan? We know he didn’t commit suicide so someone put that note next to him after he’d slit his throat.”

  “Someone, a third person, with links to them both?” Skye suggested and from her tone of voice Fergal knew she had found that someone.

  “Diane?” he asked tentatively, hoping that was not the case.

  “Oh no, not Diane, there’s nothing to suggest she knew either or both of them.”

  “So who?”

  “Fordy was a marked man after John O’Donnell’s conviction. Even though Barford gave evidence at the trial from behind a screen it must have seemed obvious to a fair number of people who he was. John had been a popular man; according to newspaper reports at the time he had a girlfriend who went by the unlikely name of Wave, Wave Freece, and she was very well liked too.”

  “With a name like that she should be pretty easy to track down.”

  “Yes, and I have. Wave Freece, now forty-four years old, lives in Northampton with a chap called William Watkins. She had a daughter, Jenna, born in 1989.”

  “1989?” Fergal asked, being alerted
by Skye’s voice to the significance of the year.

  “March 1989,” Skye added the detail.

  “So she would have conceived in June 1988?”

  “So I’m thinking John O’Donnell could have been her father and what if she had only recently learned who her father really was?”

  “So, let me see where you’re going with this. John O’Donnell’s possible daughter—”

  “Jenna,” Skye clarified unnecessarily.

  “Yes, Jenna,” Fergal agreed frowning, before continuing. “Jenna learns that she has a half-brother—”

  “Ryan.”

  “Yes, Ryan. But no, I don’t see it. Why would she have any reason to hurt him? I can just about understand why she might want to get rid of Warwick, since his brother stitched her father up and sent him to jail, but why murder Ryan and frame him for the assassination?”

  “I’ve absolutely no idea, though the poor O’Donnell family does seem to have a habit of being framed.”

  “No, it can’t be Jenna whatever her surname is.” Fergal shook his head.

  “Freece, she has her mother’s surname. She is a librarian and lives in Tiverton in Devon.”

  “We need to know whether John really was her father. Just because he and Wave were together around the right time doesn’t mean…”

  Skye didn’t need Fergal to finish his sentence. “Probably not. There’s no father named on her birth certificate and I’m not about to contact her or her mother to ask.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know anyway. I can imagine relationships were fairly fluid for those New Age travellers or whatever they called themselves. No, I think we can discount Jenna and Wave. There has to be someone else. Anyway, carry on about Barford stroke Fordy.”

  “Where was I? Oh yes. He was a marked man and a lot of people wanted him to pay for what they thought of as his treachery. There are pages of addenda on the SDS file on Fordy. Apparently he was first beaten up in May 1989, just after the trial, and that was when he said he couldn’t have anything more to do with the police.”

  “First beaten up?” Fergal asked pointedly.

  “He had a few bruises but nothing major; the police thought it was nothing more than a warning. The real attack came two months later, in July. He was beaten up really badly then. His head was kicked in, his skull fractured, his legs and back were broken, there were lots of internal injuries. He very nearly died. He was very quickly moved to a private hospital so I reckon we can assume his father got involved.”