by Kris Langman
“Ouch. Shit.” Hughie sucked on a bloodied index finger. “Damn padlock.”
“Are you okay?” asked Anne, not really caring all that much, but determined to keep Hughie cooperative.
“Yeah. Sure. Don’t worry about it luv. Just nicked my finger.” He smirked and held out the injured body part. “Want to kiss it and make it better?”
Anne folded her arms and didn’t reply. Hughie grinned at her and got back to work. Five minutes later they were inside. It was the records room. Decades and decades of school records of every description. Piles and piles of boxes. The cautious optimism which Anne had felt ever since her lunch in the pub with Kenneth deserted her. How would they ever find anything in this mountain of paper?
Hughie was watching her with a knowing grin on his face. “Looks like a dump doesn’t it? The place where old records go to die. No organization, no system, no index. Nothing except,” he paused dramatically, “old Hughie here. You’re damn lucky you came to me luv. I know where all the bodies are buried. Over in that corner,” he pointed to a sagging stack of faded blue accordion files, “we have every detention slip ever written. The teachers tally them up every semester when they fill out each kid’s progress report. I used to make a nice little killing back in my student days. Kids would pay me to steal the slips. Make ‘em disappear you know, so little Timmy or Bobby would have a spotless record to show Mum and Dad. Now let’s see.” Hughie slowly spun around, eyes grazing the cardboard towers surrounding him. “The doc didn’t leave much when he quit. He’s a careful one. Not much for leaving a trail. But anything he did leave will be over here.” He ducked behind a wooden filing cabinet. Anne waited while Hughie shoved boxes around, muttering to himself. Finally he re-emerged carrying a stack of tidy white boxes, all labeled ‘Counselor’s Office’ in block lettering. He pulled the top one off the stack, placed it in front of Anne, and then started nosing around in the others.
Anne knelt down and pulled the lid off her box. Neatly labeled stacks of mint green folders filled it to the brim. Each folder had a boy’s name on it. They were in alphabetical order, and she had the A to G box. She replaced its lid and pulled the next box off the stack. H to M. The next box held the S’s. Two folders were labeled ‘Soames’. One for Jimmy and one for Daniel. Daniel’s was slim and contained only three sheets of paper. She scanned them, but nothing of interest popped out. Brief, unconcerned accounts of Daniel’s adventures with drugs and alcohol. No solutions were offered. Apparently the doctor hadn’t thought rehabilitation was an option. Or more likely hadn’t cared.
Anne set Daniels’s folder aside. Jimmy’s was satisfyingly heavy, but as soon as she opened it she knew it had been sanitized. Like the Soames folder she’d looked through in Dr. Davidson’s London office, all the papers in this one had been typed. Probably by a secretary or assistant, which meant that the good stuff just wasn’t here. Still, there were a lot of session transcripts. Anne flipped through the pages. They covered a four-year period in the mid to late eighties, when Jimmy was a student at the school. She hefted the file in her hands and debated for a minute. “Do you think I could take this with me?” she asked. “I mean, would anyone miss it?”
Hughie was still rooting through the other boxes and didn’t even look up. “Nah, no one ever goes through this stuff. These are the inactive files. Old shit. The active files are kept in the offices. Take what you want.”
Anne nodded and closed up the box, setting Jimmy’s file aside. She stood and brushed the dust off her jeans. “What about. . .”
“Yes! Score.” Hughie’s head emerged from the box he’d been digging in. “Tapes. A whole shoebox full. Let’s see. 1999, 1995, nope. These are too recent. I guess Davidson wasn’t the only one who taped his counseling sessions. You said fifteen years ago, right? Hold on.” He dived into the storage box again. “Here’s another one.” He held up a shoebox and popped the lid. “This is more like it. 1991, 1988, all the way back to 1982. This should do it.” He handed the box to Anne.
She chose a tape at random. 1987. In addition to the year, the paper label on its front had a list of names, presumably boys who had been sent to see the doctor. Patterson, Wilmington-Bell, Johnston . . . Soames. Anne tucked the tape into her coat pocket and rifled through the rest of the box. She ended up with six tapes in all. Not many for four years of sessions, two hours a day. She handed the shoebox back to Hughie and thought about it. There had to be more tapes. They wouldn’t be in the doctor’s office in London. Too public and too accessible. He might have them stashed in a safe deposit box in a bank. If that was the case then she was out of luck. Or . . . Or they might be somewhere in his flat. Close at hand, where he could get at them quickly, destroy them if need be.
“Hey,” Hughie broke into her thoughts. “Are we going to stay here all night? You got what you came for, right?”
“Yes.”
“Great,” said Hughie. “Glad I could help. That’ll be two hundred quid.”
Anne folded her arms and raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, okay,” said Hughie. “Hundred and fifty.”
Anne just stared at him.
Hughie grinned. “You’re a tough one, you are.” He stuck out his hand and Anne placed the agreed-upon one hundred and ten pounds in it.
“Ya know,” Hughie drawled, giving her a calculating glance, “if it’s dirt on the Soames family you’re after, well, I might just be in a position to give you some prime gossip. The good stuff. Grade A.”
Anne looked at him skeptically. “What kind of gossip?”
“Only the best,” Hughie said importantly. “Me and Dec –- that’s my mate, Declan Flannery –- me and him work weekends at The Hunt Club, this posh country club a few miles down the road. Dec waits tables at this big clubhouse they have, and I have the valet parking gig. Anyway,” he hurried on as Anne’s foot started to tap, “Dec hears stuff. He’s just a waiter. To them posh types he’s invisible. So, a week or two ago, he’s working the Hastings Room. The inner sanctum. The holy of holies. You only get into the Hastings Room if your family’s been around since good old Willie the Conqueror. We’re talking the oldest families in England -– the Addingtons, the Finch-Bartons, the Soames.”
“And . . .” Anne prodded.
“And Dec is working the Hastings Room, when he hears this big crash. He rushes over and sees china and glass smashed all over the floor. He dodges out of the way just in time as Lady Soames charges past him. Turns out her Ladyship had yanked the tablecloth off the table – on purpose, mind you. Lord Soames and his cousin, that’d be Sir Harry Soames, were just sitting there staring at the mess. Dec started picking up the pieces, mopping up the spills, when he heard Sir Harry say something about how he could understand it. That Lady Soames had never liked him much, and how it was going to be hard for her, having to come to him for money.”
“Come to him for money?” asked Anne in confusion. “Why would Lady Soames have to ask a cousin for money?”
“Dunno. Dec says he’s heard that Lord Soames is monkeying around with the family finances, maybe even changing his will. The family money was going to Jimmy, at the first born, but now that he’s six feet under – who knows? It’s no secret around here that Daniel Soames and his mum are tighter than two peas in a pod. They stick together against his Lordship, and maybe his Lordship’s tired of fighting them. And, of course, there’s the problem of the Doc.”
“What Doc? Do you mean Dr. Davidson?”
Hughie looked at her with an expectant smirk. Apparently her free sample had run out. Anne sighed and crossed her arms against the chill seeping into her bones from the frigid basement. A mouse squealed in agony from a corner nearby, crushed in a trap by the sound of it.
“How much?” she asked, trying to remember how much cash she had left in her wallet.
“Fifty quid should do it. No sense being greedy,” said Hughie virtuously.
Anne dug into her wallet. She managed to cover it, just barely. The last five pounds were in coin, but Hughie
didn’t seem to mind.
“Right,” he resumed. “Well, everyone in these parts knows that Lord Soames just hates the Doc. Calls him Rus . . . Ras . . . what’s the name of that Russian chap? The one that did the Svengali thing on the Empress.”
“Tzarina,” said Anne. “It was the Tzarina Alexandra of Russia. The guy’s name was Rasputin.”
“That’s the one. Lord Soames thinks our Dr. D. is pulling the same con on Lady Soames. Always hanging around her, inviting himself down to the family estate for the weekend, catching rides in the Rolls. A nice gig if you can get it,” sighed Hughie enviously. “There’s even some talk that she gives him money. That between her Ladyship, the good Doc, and that little sniveler Daniel, they’re running through the Soames family fortune like a keg of Guinness on a hen night. Looks like his Lordship has finally wised up and is trying to protect the family assets by doing a deal with his cousin. If he transfers some of the loot to his cousin’s name then her Ladyship can’t get at it so easily.”
“Hmm,” said Anne. “How much of this is guesswork, speculation, and rumor?”
“Pretty much all of it,” replied Hughie, giving her a cheeky grin. “Fifty quid doesn’t buy what it used to.” He shut the file room door and headed for the stairs. “Let’s get back above ground before me privates turn to ice and drop off.”
Chapter Eighteen
Anne got up from the desk and stretched her arms over her head. It was late afternoon. She’d spent the day in her room at the White Horse Inn reading through Jimmy’s file. Most of it was Jimmy whining about his mother: Mummy liked Daniel better; Daniel always got the good toys. Blah, blah, blah.
She gave the file an irritated shove across the desk and picked at the cast which covered her left arm from wrist to elbow. It was starting to crumble at the edges. One of Nick’s doodles was disintegrating. He’d signed the cast and drawn a surfer riding a curl, but the surfer had faded and now his surfboard looked more like a giant tongue going places it shouldn’t.
She opened the box of session tapes Hughie Kildare had found in the basement of Wyndham Prep’s Administration building. Pushing the first tape into a portable tape recorder, she nudged up the volume. Dr. Davidson’s cold voice trickled across the room.
“Yes, Matthew, your mother is a bitch. However, sitting here whining about it to me is not very useful, now is it.”
Anne stopped the recorder and pulled out the tape. There were four names on the label, with Soames the second one from the last. She sighed. She’d have to do a lot of fast-forwarding and rewinding to hit Jimmy’s sessions.
“He just gets on my nerves, you know?” Jimmy talking.
“Jonathon?” Dr. Davidson.
“Who else? He’s just such a white-assed little weasel. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have hit him so hard, but he wouldn’t shut up.”
“And why did you want him to shut up Jimmy? Did you proposition the boy?”
Yikes. Anne stared wide-eyed down at the tape recorder. Well, now she had an idea why Jimmy might have strangled a ten-year-old boy. Apparently Jimmy had pedophile tendencies. She was amazed that the Kent police had managed to keep this quiet. Maybe the Soames family had ‘encouraged’ the police to leave Jimmy alone. A few large donations to the local police pension fund might have done the trick.
A sudden noise at her door startled her. She jumped, but it was only the day’s newspaper being delivered. Someone had slid it under the door. Anne picked it up and glanced at the front page. It was a local paper called The Kent Messenger. The articles were mostly rehashes of international events, but there was also a large color picture of Leeds Castle, which was nearby. The caption read: “Lord and Lady Soames hold gala today for RSPCA.”
The RSPCA was a large animal-rights organization. Anne had heard of it because Lindsey was a member and volunteered at one of their shelters in London a few nights a week after work. She scanned the article beneath the photo. The Soames were sponsoring a fair on the grounds of Leeds Castle, complete with food stalls, a petting zoo, and pony rides. The money raised was going to a shelter for abandoned dogs. At the end of the article were the names of people who were attending the gala as guests of the Soames family. Amid the ‘Sirs’, ‘Ladies’, and ‘Earls’, two names jumped out at her: ‘Dr. John Davidson, Esquire’ and ‘Miss Lindsey Maxwell’.
* * * *
Anne jumped down from the bus and squinted as the dust kicked up by its departure blew in her face. Across the road stretched a field of green vines. The leafy vines appeared to be floating in mid-air, but a closer looked revealed a support structure of strings descending from tall wooden poles. A hop field, she decided. This area of Kent was famous for hops, used in brewing beer. A gravel drive just past the hop field was marked as the entrance to Leeds Castle. In the distance she could make out a familiar-looking stone gateway. It was the entrance to the Soames estate, which bordered the grounds of the castle.
Dodging across the highway, Anne hurried past a flustered attendant who was trying to organize the stream of cars funneling into the parking area. She’d been to Leeds Castle once before. After moving to London she’d spent her weekends taking the train to various castles, cathedrals, and other tourist sites. Leeds Castle had been one of the most enjoyable outings. It had extensive grounds, with the obligatory maze, an aviary, a croquet lawn, and a thousand-year-old Keep situated on an island in the middle of the River Len. The castle had been in continuous use for its entire existence, so the keep and its various outbuildings were in good repair. The last private owner had been Lady Baillie, who had redecorated the interior in the 1920’s.
Anne left the parking area and cut across the wide parkland surrounding the castle. As she walked through the wet grass she kept a wary eye out for goose droppings. Huge numbers of Canadian geese were waddling randomly around the grounds or gliding on the river. The geese mostly ignored her, though honking commenced if she stepped too near a gosling. It was spring, and little broods of the fuzzy youngsters were following their parents in single-file or hiding under maternal tail feathers.
She stopped at the river’s edge, next to a clump of daffodils waving in the morning breeze. The castle was directly across from her, the sun warming its stone turrets. The oldest part, built in 1119, formed an island made of stone. It had small windows and thick walls, sure indicators that it had originally been used as a fortress and place of refuge in times of danger. This older building was connected to a large manor house by a double-arched stone bridge. The manor house was built of gold-colored stone, with large windows and fanciful turrets added as decoration rather than defense. In front of the manor house was a circular lawn where a cluster of colorful tents had been set up, their tops crowned with pennants fluttering in the breeze. A steady stream of people were issuing from the car park and heading toward the tents. Anne joined them.
She wove through the crowd, the hood of her parka pulled up to hide her face, trying to catch sight of Dr. Davidson or Lindsey without being spotted. Her plan, such as it was, involved trying to keep an eye on Lindsey while avoiding the doctor. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the doctor intended to use Lindsey as some kind of bargaining chip, a shield between himself and the consequences of Jimmy Soames’ murder.
After a full pass around all the stalls selling scones, handmade jams, knitwear, and other local crafts there was no sign of them. Anne stopped searching momentarily to grab a Cornish pasty from a food vendor. As she ducked behind the stall to get out of the way of the crowd, yelling suddenly erupted from within the neighboring tent. The loud, angry cries rose above the din of the crowd, causing those in the near vicinity to pause, trying to locate the source of the noise. Anne recognized the voice at once. It was Daniel Soames, broadcasting his usual alcoholic belligerence. The yelling stopped abruptly, and in the ensuing silence Anne could hear someone reasoning with Daniel. She cautiously approached the tent where the sound had come from and put her ear to the canvas wall.
“Manners, Daniel,” she heard a voice say
softly.
Anne held her breath. It was Dr. Davidson.
Daniel Soames grumbled something she couldn’t make out, then doctor spoke again, his voice calm and just above a whisper.
“Except for that marble paperweight, most of what they have is circumstantial. If your case goes to trial now it could go either way. They need more evidence . . . and I’d be only too happy to help.”
“What the hell does that mean?” asked Daniel. His voice was still angry, but he’d turned the volume down.
“It means I have things I could share with them. These, for instance.”
Anne heard paper rustling and then a sharp intake of breath from Daniel.
“How did you get these?” The belligerence had peeled away, leaving only shivering and exposed fear. “No one has access to my email account at work except me.”
“That’s not true actually,” said the doctor in a helpful tone. “All offices have an email administrator. Someone who sets passwords and creates user accounts. Your company really should look into hiring another administrator. The one you have now is pathetically easy to bribe.”
“You’ve got to understand,” pleaded Daniel. “I was just joking around. Teddy knew that. He told me he’d deleted these emails. He knew I was just blowing off steam. Jimmy had been getting on my nerves that week, always coming around to my flat, hanging around drinking my booze, whining about his problems. When I said I felt like offing him I didn’t mean it. Everybody says that kind of thing sometimes.”
“Maybe,” said the doctor complacently, “but most people have the sense not to say it in an email. I’m not suggesting you confess to murder. Just tell the police that you and Jimmy argued and it got out of hand. An accident which occurred in the heat of the moment. You could even throw in an element of self-defense. Your mother will buy you the best criminal defense barrister available, you’ll plead to manslaughter, and be out in two years. It’s possible you won’t serve any jail time at all.”
