Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Until you just told me I had no idea my father had been in Dartmouth, why would I?”

  “Unless he’d said anything I don’t suppose you would.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything about it.”

  “I can understand why he wouldn’t have done. He was going through a very difficult time. As I said, he was a lovely man, facing up to what he had done wrong, trying to start a new life for himself. All I did was try to help.”

  “That makes me even sorrier that I’ve got to do this.”

  “Get rid of me?” Diane was surprised at how easily she said the words.

  Guy nodded.

  “Here. Take these pills. No. They aren’t poison. They’ll just make you drowsy. Arjun will take you off this boat—”

  “What’s it called? Just out of interest, you know, I won’t be able to do anything with that information, will I?”

  “Peabody Three.”

  “What happened to Peabodies One and Two?” she asked, gaining a few moments’ time to think.

  “I have no idea.”

  “So I will be taken from here and dropped in the ocean where I will gently float in the sun until I drown?”

  It was not a question that required an answer.

  She took the pills from him and put them in her mouth.

  She had no intention of swallowing them and Guy did not check that she had.

  She pretended to be drowsy and was almost a dead weight as Guy manhandled her off the yacht and positioned her on the seat facing Arjun.

  “Take her out as far as you can. Drop her off and get back as soon as you can. We need to be on our way.”

  As Arjun started the engine and steered away from Peabody Three Diane kept her eyes closed, giving every appearance of being drugged and incapable of knowing what was going on. She waited for a few minutes, hoping they were travelling far enough from Peabody Three for Guy, who would no doubt be watching, not to be able to see them.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Arjun?” she asked; her voice shocked him.

  “Tell me, why do you let him bully you like this? You say he put the knife in your hand as young Ryan was killed, and you’re about to kill me too. Why do you do it?”

  “I loved him.”

  She noticed the past tense.

  “What else have you done with him, other than murder? Smuggling? You said you were in the Caribbean. Were those good times? Just you and him on Peabody Three? It must have been idyllic. Young, free, in love and innocent of any crime more serious than smuggling.”

  “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “I know you don’t.”

  “But he will kill me if I don’t.”

  “Why would he kill you? Doesn’t he love you? Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I don’t think so,” Arjun admitted sadly.

  “Did he ever?”

  “Perhaps not. In fact, I’m beginning to think he never did.”

  “So why?”

  Arjun did not answer Diane’s implied question. That if there was no longer any hope of love why did Arjun continue to do as Guy told him. “I think he’s been using me ever since Barbados,” he said quietly.

  “Barbados?” she prompted.

  “That’s where I hired him as crew.”

  “Peabody Three is yours?”

  “Yes. She is.”

  “Then why the hell don’t you just tell him to piss off and go?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You don’t love him anymore, do you, Arjun. Do you? And sure as hell he doesn’t love you. If he did he wouldn’t make you do all his dirty work for him.”

  “He said he did. He said we’d get married.” Arjun knew he was clutching at straws.

  “That would be one way for him to get his hands on your money, wouldn’t it? You have got money, haven’t you, Arjun? You couldn’t own such a beautiful yacht and not have any money.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “You don’t have to push me overboard, Arjun. At least not out here, miles from land; go around that headland, out of sight of Peabody and Guy, drop me off there. I’ll swim to shore. He doesn’t have to know, does he? You go back to your yacht and sail away.”

  “What if he finds out you’re not dead? He’ll know I didn’t do what he told me to do.”

  “He’ll never know, Arjun. Not unless you come to realise that he has only ever been using you and you develop the balls to tell him.”

  Chapter 18: Stratford and Federico

  Fergal had never liked coincidences. His old friend and tutor, Carl Witherby, had taught him that they were an intellectually lazy explanation and did not exist. All that was required to obtain the correct explanation was to delve deeper into the subject to find the links.

  Since Spain seemed to crop up in relation to both Diane’s abduction and the Eden family history he decided to look more deeply into the Spanish connections.

  That Peabody Three had gone to Cartagena was only one part of his conviction that the answer to the linked mysteries – and he was certain the murders and Diane’s disappearance were linked – lay in Spain.

  Because Skye seemed certain that Pat, who had lived in the country for many years, was not telling the truth when she said she did not recognise any of the names of the crew of Beausale, he decided to ask her himself when she phoned after her second trip to Cartagena.

  “I know Skye asked you about this but are you certain you don’t recognise any of the names of the crew of Eden’s yacht?”

  “I don’t know why you think I should,” Pat replied.

  “It’s just that we believe Diane may have known one of them.”

  “And just because she might why do you think I would?”

  “We just want to make sure and we couldn’t ask—”

  “You couldn’t ask anyone else because even if they did know they couldn’t tell you. Why do you think I’d break a confidentiality, as that is what you would be asking me to do. That is if I did recognise any of the names. And, as I told your wife, I do not.”

  “Let me read them to you again. Just in case.”

  “If you have to, but my answer will be the same.”

  “Somerset, Rutherford, Bahadur, Collins, O’Donnell, Mack, Thompson, Dodd, Santa Maria, Scott, Williams and Cliffe.” He deliberately left Guy till last.

  “Some of them are really quite common surnames, you know.”

  “I do appreciate that, but do any of them ring any bells?”

  “I can honestly say, no, they don’t. And don’t ask me if I am sure. Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t say I’m sure if I wasn’t. Anyway, do you want to know what I found in Cartagena or not? The yacht has gone. There was no sign of it.”

  After she had ended the call Fergal shook his head. The repeated denials had convinced him only of the fact that Skye was right; for some reason Pat was lying.

  “Why is she lying?”

  “Which one did she recognise? Was it Guy?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.” Fergal shook his head to clear his concerns about Pat and turn his attention to the immediate matter in hand. “Anyway, Peabody is on the move again. See if you can find out where she’s heading, and email Anne to tell her—”

  “If she doesn’t already know.”

  “We’re at a bit of a dead end, aren’t we? We still don’t know for certain whether Diane is on that yacht voluntarily or not, and we have no idea where it’s going. I thought I’d look into Stratford Eden and see if I can understand his obsession with the Spanish Civil War.”

  “Obsession?”

  “That collection… It was nothing more nor less than a lifetime’s work. It won’t be easy since it’s more than twenty years since he died, but I must learn more about Stratford. I’m not sure I believe all those things written in th
e obits.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Learn everything you can about the Spanish Civil War. Read everything you can about it. And not just on Wikipedia.”

  “Okay.”

  “And not just Ernest Hemingway or Laurie Lee.”

  “Okay!”

  Fergal became even more intrigued with Stratford Eden when he could find nothing about his life before 1947. There seemed to be only one Stratford Eden and his first official record was on a list of boys achieving their Cambridge Higher School Certificate.

  Fergal recognised the anomaly immediately.

  Stratford’s year of birth was always quoted as 1935 but this indicated he had to have been born no later than 1930. No one achieved their Higher School Certificate at the age of twelve.

  In researching the school Fergal had reason to be grateful to the current archivist of the Old Boys’ Association who had scanned and posted on the internet the complete set of the school’s magazine in which there were several references to Eden, S.

  The first reference, in the autumn term of 1943, was in the Salvete section where it listed Eden, S. as joining School House. Fergal followed ‘Eden, S.’ through his career: his achievement of house colours for cricket, his membership of the school Air Training Corps, his membership and subsequent chairmanship of the School Debating Society, and his being awarded the School Prize for History. To Fergal’s surprise, his entry in the Valete section, which gave a full list of his achievements through his four years at the school, ended with an address in Deal, Kent.

  Fergal could not believe his luck as a trawl through the archives of the local papers there led him to an essay entitled My Earliest Memories that Stratford Eden had entered a competition held by a local businessman. The essay did not win but was published in full as it was awarded second place.

  The essay was not the story of a fairly privileged middle class boy growing up during the war Fergal had expected. It began,

  I was a stranger in my family. My parents, or the man and woman I had believed to be my parents, were fair haired, fair skinned and blue eyed whereas I had dark hair, brown eyes and, unlike them, did not burn in the hot summer sun.

  Fergal read on, intrigued. Stratford described being seasick on a crowded ship, of sleeping in a crowded tent in a muddy field, of a woman dying in the dirt. He wrote about how he had no idea how long he spent in that field; it could have been a week or it could have been a year before he slept in a proper bed and used a proper lavatory.

  Fergal recognised it to be the half-detailed, half-vague memory of a young refugee. Though there was no specific mention of Spain the timing would have been right for Stratford to have been escaping the Civil War. He knew the evidence was only circumstantial, but he allowed himself to work on that assumption.

  It took him only a very short time to find references to the SS Habana, an ageing steamship that left the Spanish port of Santurtzi, near Bilbao, in May 1937 overcrowded with children of families sympathetic to the losing Republicans. These children were given shelter in a makeshift camp in a field just outside Southampton. Expecting only a few hundred children the camp was inundated when nearly four thousand arrived. Conditions were grim for the children, known as the niños de la Guerra, who spent a summer in a camp before being either repatriated or billeted in private homes.

  Fergal recognised how closely the description of the plight of los niños fitted Stratford’s essay and thought it entirely possible that Stratford, then possibly six or seven years old, would not be able to forget those experiences.

  “What are you up to?” Skye asked more than once as Fergal spent the best part of a day on his computer and making phone calls out of her hearing.

  “I’m not sure. Probably working my way into a dead end.”

  “Looking for a Spanish connection?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Finding one?”

  “Possibly. How are you getting on with the general history?”

  “I’m learning fast. You should too. I can’t believe some of the stuff I’m finding out. It’s fascinating but do you think it’s going to be useful?”

  “I’m beginning to think so, though how, I have no idea.”

  “Funnily enough Pat mentioned it when I called the other day.”

  “She mentioned the Spanish Civil War? Why?”

  “She said when she was in Cartagena she could do something she’s been meaning to do for ages but never got around to.”

  “What was that?”

  “Visiting the Civil War Museum there. Apparently Cartagena was a Republican stronghold.”

  “That could be interesting. We need to know more. I’ll get back to Stratford while you carry on looking at the generalities of the war. Have you found any eyewitness accounts, that sort of thing?”

  “Not yet, but I’ll get onto it as soon as you stop telling me what to do.”

  Fergal knew it would be almost impossible to obtain a list of all los niños and discover what happened to every one of them, but he found many people who were interested in the group that had been labelled ‘the Basque Children’.

  Several email conversations led him to a list of the 250 children who, at the end of 1945, were given the choice of remaining in Britain or returning to Spain.

  “At least that’s better than four thousand,” he said, more or less to himself.

  “What’s that?” Skye looked up from the page she was reading.

  “I’ve narrowed it down. In fact, I think I may almost be able to find him.” He turned quickly back to his screen and Skye knew better than to press him for an explanation.

  It was late when they finally decided to call it a day and Fergal asked Skye how she had got on.

  “Come on, let’s have a drink and talk.”

  “Good idea,” Skye agreed. She had been more affected than she could have imagined at what she had learned.

  When they had packed away their computers Fergal opened a bottle of wine, poured two large glasses and waited for Skye to begin. He could see from her expression that what she had learned had affected her strongly.

  “I had no idea, no idea at all,” Skye began, shaking her head. “We’ve both learned… we both know… so much about Spain a couple of hundred years ago but I knew next to nothing about what happened there so recently, less than a lifetime ago really. The Red Terror… the White Terror… Franco’s Repression… Tens, no hundreds of thousands… no millions, executed without trial… And now we go there on holiday, we drive along roads where babies and old women were mown down by machine guns, we sit on beaches where women, fed castor oil so they could not stop themselves from shitting, were paraded naked. Every old person we pass in the street or sit next to in a bar will have all that in their memories. A ‘civil’ war? Civil? There was nothing ‘civil’ about those years and it didn’t end with the war in 1939. Franco carried it on through into the 1960s. Human remains are still being found in fields, there are still untold unmarked graves. I had no idea. No idea at all.”

  Fergal took his wife’s hand in his and squeezed it reassuringly. He could see her blinking back the tears in her eyes.

  “We will know,” he said firmly. “Next time we’re in Spain we will know.”

  “But we can’t say anything, can we? We can’t ask questions that would bring back memories, can we?”

  Fergal shook his head and there was a long pause before either of them spoke.

  It was Fergal who broke the silence when he saw Skye had regained control of herself. “I’ve been finding out about the refugees, some of them anyway. The British government in all its stupidity and cowardice refused to get involved. They wouldn’t help the Republicans. MI5 kept records of anyone who looked like they wanted to join the International Brigade and other volunteers who wanted to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Fascists. The government turned a bl
ind eye to what the Fascists were doing. Even the indiscriminate bombing of towns like Guernica—”

  “And Cartagena.”

  Fergal nodded. “Even that didn’t soften their blind adherence to a non-interventionist policy. I think they actually thought the leftist threat of Bolshevism was far greater than the rightist threat of Fascism and they allowed themselves to be completely hood-winked by the Germans and the Italians.”

  “Yet two years later they were joining forces with the Russians.”

  Fergal nodded agreement. “And while we looked on, no doubt with a superior attitude, women and children were being humiliated, raped and massacred.” Fergal put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “It’s not easy, is it? Somehow wars that are centuries ago are far easier to deal with.”

  “But if everything that’s happened to Diane, and to Warwick Eden and Ryan, if everything we’re trying to learn about goes back to that time, then we have to try to understand it, don’t we?”

  Fergal slowly nodded again. “In all its horror.”

  As they finished breakfast the next morning Fergal’s phone rang. “That was Anne,” he reported when the call ended. “They’ve not managed to trace Peabody. There’s been no sign of her since she left Cartagena. They’ve got people looking so there really is nothing more we can do. Although we don’t know why at least we do know she’s on that yacht. It’s just a matter of time before it shows up somewhere.”

  “And in the meantime we’re concentrating on Stratford and the history, or trying to anyway,” Skye said pointedly. “Yesterday, before we got all depressed about everything, you said you thought you’d almost found him?”

  “It was harder than I thought in some ways and easier in others but I think I’m beginning to see the real Stratford Eden.”

  “The ‘real’ one?”

  “And nothing much corresponds with his obituaries.”

  “Are you going to tell me how far you’ve got?”

  Fergal did not immediately answer Skye because he wanted her to know some of the difficulties he had had to overcome. “Nothing is simple about tracing Spanish families—”