‘Was Mr Jamiestone like that?’
‘No. Ken was all right. I never thought he’d go that quickly. It was a bit of a shock.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Les Meade took a breath before continuing. ‘Ken was an ammunitions officer in the army, joined in 1963 and served twenty years. Ended up a Warrant Officer, saw service in the 1960s like me in the Indonesian-Malayan conflict and did several tours in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1970s. We both served in the Falklands War, and fortunately we both came out unscathed. Not like others we knew. He was seventy-five in January but his health was bad. Not only high blood pressure and arthritis but he had Parkinson’s which was why young Palmer came to talk to him.’
Angela Deacon hadn’t said that although she had mentioned Jamiestone had other pre-existing medical conditions. He remembered what Strathen had said about Ashley Palmer’s research, that he’d been developing an intelligence software programme that could help those suffering from Parkinson’s disease, something to do with using electrodes to record signals from the brain to the muscles and it was that software that had been registered by a German company. Perhaps Jamiestone had simply been part of Palmer’s research and nothing to do with any deviant medical device from 1997.
‘Or that was what Ashley said or rather Ken told me,’ Meade continued as though reading Marvik’s mind. Marvik studied the thin body hunched in the wheelchair and the lined and tired face and looked through the frailty of age and saw intelligence and alertness in the pale grey eyes.
‘Go on?’ He leaned forward.
‘Ken told me they spent most of the time talking about Ken’s career in the army.’
Marvik’s interested deepened.
‘Ashley was a very keen diver. Ken had been a diver in the army working on diffusing underwater explosive devices. Then in civvy street he worked as a commercial diver, first for the oil rigs and then for a dive operator, taking divers around the world on marine expeditions. Ken really enjoyed talking to Ashley. Said it was nice to have a young person who wasn’t condescending or thought you were gaga because you were old. They got on really well.’
‘Did you see Ashley write any of this down?’
‘He had a phone and a small computer that he used to make notes on.’
Which had vanished along with him.
Meade said, ‘Has this anything to do with him disappearing?’
Marvik thought it was time to be partially honest with the elderly man because Meade would know if he was bullshitting and then he’d clam up. ‘It could but I’m not sure how. How did Ashley find Ken? What made him come here and approach him specifically, aside from his research on Parkinson’s disease, which incidentally happens to be true?’
‘Ken was also an amputee. Didn’t Angela tell you? Obviously not judging by your expression. He lost his left leg in a diving accident. It was on a wreck somewhere off the Channel Islands. He got trapped on this wreck, something sliced through his leg and his oxygen was running low. They managed to bring him up but couldn’t save his leg. He told me that Ashley had been in touch with ALPS, the charity, and found him that way because he was working for a company that worked closely with the manufacturer of prosthetic limbs and his work could help those fitted with them, is that also true?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a clever lad.’
‘Very.’
So Ashley had wanted someone with a neurological illness and an amputee. Palmer had also needed a former serviceman and Ken Jamiestone fitted the bill. But was the diving connection significant? Maybe. He recalled what Louise Tournbury had said: one application can have implications for other things, there is always crossover, or so Ash said. His head is always buzzing with ideas, he’s a natural inventor. And Marvik also recalled Strathen’s words about how an application could be used in surveillance, defence and security. Had Ashley Palmer tracked down Jamiestone because he’d been involved in the trials of a faulty medical device or perhaps knew someone who had, or was it something completely different? He asked Meade the same question he’d put to Angela Deacon, hoping to elicit more information.
‘When did Ashley first visit Ken?’
Meade gave this some thought before answering. ‘The time goes so quickly and you lose track of it here, but it must have been April or May.’
And Palmer had been working for Chiron for at least a couple of months by then. ‘How often did he come?’ Marvik asked.
‘To begin with quite regularly, once a fortnight, then there was a gap, in the summer. Then he came back quite a few more times in late autumn and before Christmas. I did wonder why Ashley didn’t show up at Ken’s funeral but then I thought nobody probably knew where he lived. I asked the staff and they said there was nothing in Ken’s room to give Ashley’s address and they didn’t have a phone number for him and I thought the poor lad probably doesn’t even know that Ken’s passed away and it’ll be a shock when he turns up. But now you say he’s missing.’
‘Angela told me that Ken died last Wednesday, and that Ashley was here on the Sunday before his death.’
‘He was.’
‘Do you know what they talked about?’
‘The usual I guess. Ken’s job in the army, working on ammunitions and diffusing unexploded devices, his diving career.’
‘And did Ken have any other recent visitors?’
‘No.’
‘How did he seem when Ashley left?’
Meade’s face clouded over. ‘He was down, which wasn’t like him, especially after one of Ashley’s visits. Usually he was very upbeat and talkative but he stayed in his room. I guess he’d started to feel ill.’
That was possible but Marvik thought it far more likely that Ashley had told him something that had depressed him. But what?
‘When was Ken’s diving accident?’
‘In 1997.’
A shiver ran down Marvik’s spine. That was no coincidence. Ashley had been on Esther’s trail. ‘Did Ken say anything to you after Ashley’s last visit, anything at all? It might help me find him.’
Meade screwed up his face in thought. Marvik didn’t prompt him but stared out at the sea in the declining afternoon sunlight feeling that at last he was getting somewhere.
‘I don’t know if it means anything but he said, “You think you know someone but it shows just how wrong you can be.”’
‘Was he talking about Ashley Palmer?’
But Meade shook his head. ‘No, because I asked him if he and Ashley had fallen out. He said they hadn’t but he couldn’t help wishing he’d never come here.’
So Palmer had told Ken something about someone and by revealing that knowledge he had upset Jamiestone. With his heart knocking against his ribs, Marvik sat forward and said, ‘Did he mention a man called Terence Blackerman?’
Meade looked shocked, then confused. ‘How do you know Blackerman?’ he asked a little sharply.
‘How do you?’ Marvik rejoined, because clearly Meade did.
‘I knew him when I was in the navy and he was a navy chaplain. But he also used to visit here before Ken and I came here.’
Bingo! Another connection. Marvik hardly dared to hope that he was at last on the right trail.
‘And Ken couldn’t have been referring to him because we all knew what Blackerman did. I take it you also know?’
Marvik nodded.
‘Is he still in prison?’
‘Yes.’
‘Seems such a waste.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because the Blackerman I remember from my navy days was a genuinely kind and caring man. But he did sleep with the woman he killed. I forget her name.’
‘Esther Shannon.’
Meade nodded; clearly it meant nothing to him.
‘Do you think he killed her?’ Marvik was interested in getting the view of someone who had known Blackerman.
Meade shrugged. ‘We’re all capable of killing and we’ve all done it.’
‘But not
navy chaplains, they don’t carry arms.’
‘No, but he’d have seen a lot of death, perhaps it affected him.’
Marvik knew that wasn’t the truth. Once he might have agreed, and he had more or less thought the same last Wednesday when Charlotte had told him about it. But that had been before she had been abducted and before the events of the last few days.
There was something niggling in the back of his mind. Quickly and mentally he reassembled their conversation, searching for what was nagging at him. It was something Meade had said, or rather he hadn’t said. Then he had it.
‘You said that Terence Blackerman used to visit before you and Ken came to live here. How did you know that?’
‘I came to see a couple of my navy colleagues and Ken used to visit an army comrade of his, Patrick Rydall, a former ammunitions technician like Ken. They worked together. Blackerman also saw him.’
Marvik’s pulse quickened. ‘But Blackerman was navy, not army.’
‘Makes no difference: a chaplain is a chaplain and Blackerman wouldn’t pick and choose who to speak to and who not to because of their service background. Rydall had multiple sclerosis.’
‘Did Ken tell you what Blackerman and Patrick Rydall discussed?’
‘No.’ Meade looked thoughtful. ‘It’s strange though, what Ken said before he died, how you think you know someone only you never do. Because I thought of that when the chaplain today at Ken’s funeral mentioned things about Ken that I didn’t know and which he’d never spoken about. But then that’s the chaplain’s job, isn’t it, not only to hear your dying confession but to look into your background and tell the mourners about you.’
‘And what did you learn about him?’
‘How he was abandoned as a child, left in a shoe box outside the local hospital. How he survived the bombing when all the other kids in the shelter were killed. How he overcame childhood illnesses and God knows what to achieve what he did. He was a fighter was Ken. I’ll miss him.’
Marvik stretched out his hand. Meade took it firmly and smiled sadly. Marvik left him to his sorrow with a feeling of excitement and several thoughts racing around his head. He still didn’t have all the pieces and he certainly didn’t have enough to make sense of all that had happened but he was getting very close, and Meade had given him a big chunk of the puzzle, or at least he thought it was. Perhaps it was fraud on a huge scale that Palmer had uncovered, and Esther before him. Or perhaps it was a faulty medical device that had resulted in fatalities. Perhaps Grainger had been killed because he’d also unearthed this and Ross had been party to it. But as Marvik turned left out of Marine Parade and into Broad Street, past the place where Grainger had lost his life and then into St James’s Street, he knew that whatever it was diving had something to do with it and an accident that had occurred in 1997. He needed to know when in 1997 and who Jamiestone had been diving with. And he needed to know everything there was to know about Rydall and why Ken, the day before he had died, had been distressed about finding out the truth about his former buddy.
TWENTY-ONE
The library didn’t close until seven p.m. which meant Marvik had at least two hours to obtain the information he wanted. He’d called into a local shop and asked the way and had been given a free street map showing its location. As he hurried through the streets he began to wonder if Grainger had been coming from the library on the day he’d been killed.
Seated at a computer terminal Marvik called up the British Sub-Aqua Club website. It listed all the recreational diving related fatalities that had occurred in UK waters since 1964. Jamiestone’s diving accident might not have been recreational. He’d soon know.
He clicked on the Diving Incident Report for 1997 and was soon viewing on screen the incidents that had occurred that year. The report listed the fatalities, decompression incidents, boating and surface incidents, ascents, techniques, equipment and miscellaneous incidents, but Marvik quickly scrolled to the section on injury and illness. No names were given and neither was the location mentioned but there couldn’t be many incidents which had resulted in a man subsequently losing part of his leg. There was, however, nothing listed under that section. Undaunted he scrolled back to fatalities and found it.
It had occurred in September 1997 north-west of the Channel Islands at Hurd Deep. Marvik’s mind raced. It was an area he knew well, not because he’d dived there but because of its history. It was a deep underwater valley in the English Channel supposedly named after Captain Thomas Hurd RN by Admiral Martin White, born on Hayling Island in 1779. It harboured the wreck of HMS Affray which sank in 1951 but it held a darker purpose and one that connected with Ken Jamiestone and Patrick Rydall’s army careers.
Rapidly he read on. Three divers had been exploring the wreck of HMS Affray. Two were taking photographs. It was planned that the third diver would continue to fifty-seven metres, on his own. One of the divers taking the photographs began to experience problems. The other went to assist while the third diver continued his descent unaware of what was happening. The distressed diver’s regulator fell from his mouth. The other diver tried to replace it but it was rejected. He tried the distressed diver’s second regulator, this was also rejected. The distressed diver had become unconscious but the diver got him to the surface and the dive boat operator called the coastguard. Then, aware that the other diver hadn’t resurfaced, the diver went down again and found his buddy partially trapped by an obstruction. He managed to free him and escort him to the surface. Both divers were air lifted to Princess Elizabeth Hospital Guernsey, where the first diver who had been assisted to the surface died and the other diver suffered serious injury resulting in the amputation of the left lower limb.
With his brain racing Marvik consulted a few more websites, his photographic memory registering the most critical information. He then turned to the website on multiple sclerosis, not because Helen’s mother had died from it but because Patrick Rydall had contracted it. He read how MS affected the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, causing problems with muscle movement, balance and vision. The causes could be genetic but it was also linked to a lack of vitamin D and possibly a virus that attacked the auto-immune system.
Finally, just as the library was closing, he called up a website on Parkinson’s disease and read that it was caused by a loss of nerve cells in the part of the brain called the substantia nigra, responsible for producing a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine acted as a messenger between the brain and the nervous system, and helped to control and coordinate body movements. If these nerve cells became damaged or died, the amount of dopamine in the brain reduced, meaning that the part of the brain controlling movement couldn’t work so well. Movements became slow and abnormal. He scrolled to see what caused the loss of nerve cells associated with Parkinson’s disease and discovered that it could be genetic but could also be environmental caused by exposure to toxins such as pesticides and herbicides used in farming, those used in industrial plants and air pollution related to road traffic. There was no mention of exposure to toxins released in the sea, but as Marvik logged off he thought about Ashley’s passion for the marine environment, Jamiestone and Rydall being divers and responsible for ammunition, the location in which he’d been diving, his own service training and what he knew about Hurd Deep.
Heading towards the seafront he called Strathen. Before he could relay what he’d discovered though, Strathen said, ‘Wycombe’s boat’s been found in the English Channel. There’s no sign of him. The coastguard boarded it after it was reported drifting into the main shipping channel.’
‘So was he pushed or did he jump?’ It was a rhetorical question. They might not know until his body was found, if it was found.
‘Helen’s spoken to Amelia Snow. She says there were no notes in her mother’s diaries but she has kept a few books and CDs that were her brother’s. She says we’re welcome to look at them. Colin’s going to drive Helen over to collect them. It’s OK, I’m going with her.’
Swiftly Marvik r
elayed what he had learned. He asked Strathen if Palmer could have been working on an application that could be used in diving. The answer was yes. He’d been working on 3D object detection. Louise Tournbury had said the same.
‘I’m going back to the rest home to see if I can get anything more from Les Meade. See what you can get on Patrick Rydall and Ken Jamiestone.’
It was getting late. He was asked to wait while one of the carers went to enquire if Les Meade was willing to see him. He was and Marvik found himself being shown into Meade’s room on the first floor. It was spacious with an adjoining bathroom and Meade was sitting in his wheelchair at the wide bay window overlooking the sea. There was a television set but it was off and Meade asked him to turn off the lamp which the carer had switched on as she’d entered the room. The black suit jacket had been replaced by a beige cardigan but Meade was still wearing his white shirt and black tie.
‘I guess this must be urgent for you to visit me twice in one day,’ he said as Marvik drew up the chair and placed it next to the elderly man. Marvik apologized for the intrusion but Meade dismissed that with an impatient gesture of his left hand. ‘I’m glad you’ve returned. I’ve been thinking a lot about Ken and young Ashley since you left.’
‘I’m hoping you can give me more information about Ken and Patrick Rydall.’
‘What do you want to know?’
So much, thought Marvik, but he needed to get his thoughts in order. ‘Which regiment did they serve in?’
‘The Royal Army Ordnance Corps as it was then. It didn’t become the Royal Logistics Corps until it joined up with the Army Catering Corps, the Royal Pioneer Corps and some of the Royal Engineers in 1993. That’s how they became buddies. I told you they were both in the Falklands War like me.’
‘Ken’s accident was when he was diving in 1997, while Patrick Rydall was a resident here. Do you know who Ken dived with?’
Silent Running Page 24
