by Oliver Tidy
I could see that all the windows facing the road were sealed with metal sheeting cut to fit into the reveals. The entrances too. I didn’t stop the car. For one thing, the spot was exposed and isolated without another house within four hundred yards of it. For another, there was a white panel van parked to the side of the far building. I was unable to read the number plate.
I drove on along the road in a state of agitation as far as the lakes that formed part of the RSPB reserve about another half a mile on. The road was quiet. I U-turned and drove steadily back past. I didn’t learn anything new.
I found myself back at the joint of the elbow. On the opposite side of the road the well-known pub of the point beckoned. It looked open. I parked up, hidden behind a delivery lorry, and went in.
I ordered a sandwich and a pint and took a table by one of the big picture windows that gave out over the English Channel. The sea was grey, the sky was grey, the shingle looked grey. Either the windows needed cleaning or it was a very grey day.
Only a couple of tables were occupied. I’d brought the average age of the clientele down to about fifty. Maybe it was pensioners’ discount day. Judging by the prevailing silence either the fish and chips were exceptional or the people had run out of things to say to one another.
I didn’t know what I was doing there. I felt like I’d made a mistake. I should have kept driving and called Jo and let her know what I knew.
But I also knew that involving the police would deny me any opportunity for finding my own answers. If Jo investigated and found nothing then, if they were the people I was looking for, they’d be alerted and if they had any sense they’d disappear.
Besides, I didn’t know what was going on, yet, and I shouldn’t go making any rash decisions before I did. The van and its driver might have absolutely nothing to do with anything I was looking into. The Queen of England could be a man.
I think I’d stopped at the pub with the idea of asking for information, but what would I say? Who could I ask? There was no sign of the stereotypical weather-beaten local who propped up the bars in the clichéd detective novels just waiting for the day a stranger in town asked about the old secret pumping station.
The girl who brought my sandwich looked about fourteen and slightly retarded and the acned youth who’d pulled my pint was engrossed in a tabloid newspaper and had don’t bother me written all over his face. I doubted very much whether either of them had much knowledge of, or interest in, local history. In any case, once I’d mentioned it then someone else would know. If something bad happened to anyone out there and the police were called, I wouldn’t take much describing.
I drank half of my drink, ate the sandwich and left.
I took the road to Lydd to risk another drive by the bungalows. One final look to see if I’d missed anything.
The white van had gone. I slowed, toying with the idea of maybe parking up and investigating, but just because the van wasn’t there didn’t have to mean the places were empty and I’d seen too many films where the bad guys returned to surprise a snooper while I’d been shouting at the television for the hero to get his stupid arse out of there. Fools rush in and all that. Better to stay one step ahead. Besides, I still had the dead Flashman’s computer to check out.
*
It was late afternoon by the time I arrived back at the shop. Three hours before I was due at Flashman’s for a poke around his son’s virtual life. And after that I was entertaining. I thought the best thing I could do was to tidy up upstairs, have an hour’s lie down, get some wine in the fridge and smarten myself up a bit.
*
I pulled up in front of Flashman’s converted barn later than I’d meant to: it was half past seven. He answered the door himself and invited me in. I had to pass comment on the spectacular interior. It would have been rude not to and it demanded it. Flashman waved away my observations and I understood that, rightly, everything that had once provided a source of enjoyment for him would, temporarily at least, mean little while he dealt with his loss. Even Absalom’s father mourned his bad son’s death.
He wasn’t standing on ceremony. He led me through to a large open-plan arrangement at the back of the building. It was huge and incorporated everything I would expect to see in a spoiled young man’s space: big bed, big wardrobes, big television, big games console, big desk with a big computer on it, big hi-fi and big posters on the walls. No books. The only thing it wasn’t was messy. The Flashmans had a cleaner and it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me.
He motioned towards the desk and the computer. ‘There it is.’
‘There might not be anything on it. You haven’t looked yourself?’
‘I told you, I’m not a computer person and I’m not keen to go poking through my son’s life.’
‘I understand.’ And I thought I did. He couldn’t face nosing through his son’s life. He didn’t want to learn things that might twist the knife of his loss. But he didn’t mind me doing it, so long as I shared anything with him that could be pertinent to his son’s death. He was treating me like an unpaid investigator. Well, that was fine. I wasn’t doing this for money.
I stared at it. ‘Let’s hope it’s not password protected.’
‘Good luck. I don’t understand them. If I need work done on a computer I pay someone.’
I believed him. He’d be more at ease with a shovel than a laptop.
‘When you’re done come and find me. I’ll be in the lounge.’
He left me to it and I heard his heavy slippers slap away on the polished wooden floors. I got the impression there were just the two of us in the house and it made me wonder briefly about any Mrs Flashman.
The likelihood the device would be password protected was something I hadn’t thought of when I invited myself around. If it was it would be a quick visit. I’d be finished. Ethan Hunt, I wasn’t.
I opened the lid and had a bit of luck for a change. I’d been due some. It hadn’t been shut down. I was conscious of breathing out. The desktop glowed brightly and was filled with icons – short-cuts for this and that. I clicked on Internet Explorer. The home page was his email service provider. It didn’t need a password because it was set to remember me. All good.
He had unopened messages. I clicked on them. Nothing for me. I went back a page, running my finger down the names of senders. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I thought I’d go back a month with them and if anything jumped out at me from the titles and senders I’d start opening them. I checked the time. An hour before Jo was due and I didn’t want to be late.
I was snapped back to my present by reading a company name that had sent an email to Dennis Flashman two weeks previously: Mather and Platt. That, I remembered, was the name of the company that had made the pump at the PLUTO pumping station at Dungeness. The email had an attachment. I opened it.
***
36
The email was formal. It thanked Dennis for his enquiry. After reading it through I understood Dennis had contacted the firm enquiring after the availability of blueprints for the Mather and Platt pump that had been installed and used during operation PLUTO. There was a serial number.
Dennis was claiming he was part of a group of like-minded enthusiasts hoping to recondition the pump and have it cleaned up and back in working order as a museum piece in an Operation Overlord showcase. It wasn’t clear where this would be. But they needed the original plans. Probably not true, but enterprising. The company seemed only too happy to be part of such an initiative and apparently it would be their pleasure to supply, free of charge, the copies he sought. Please see attachment. I did. And there they were. Totally confusing and meaningless to an ignoramus like me.
I tapped the desk and tried thinking logically. I had a lot of it to do and quickly. There was a solid link between Dennis and something my uncle had jotted down in a diary and then followed up online. I didn’t think Dennis was serious with the reasons that he gave for his email enquiry. He hadn’t struck me as the type. No anorak.
I didn’t think historic fuel pump enthusiasts killed each other if they fell out, anyway.
Dennis was clearly involved with some bad people. They had killed him and almost certainly killed my relatives. If the white panel van I’d seen that afternoon had been the one I’d seen at the yard and then travelled in tied up and terrified then the bad people and Dennis had been involved with something to do with an old wartime installation. And it was something important. Important enough to murder thrice over. Therefore, it was probably very illegal and highly profitable.
They had a significant interest in the pump of the time. Again, if that was their van out there and they had this interest in the pump then the pump must still be there.
Would an old wartime pump be worth enough money to murder three people for? Unless it was made of solid gold, I doubted it. If not then it had to be something to do with what the pump could do, especially as they seemed to want it working. Then, I had to consider where it was. That must be what was making it special. Pumps, even big old powerful ones, aren’t so thin on the ground or expensive that someone would have to kill for them. So that made its location part of its attraction. But there was nothing important or valuable where it was. Just some abandoned old bungalows. And what use would a pump be? Pumps, pumped. That was all.
And then my logic went off at a tangent. It wasn’t a tangent my reason was confident or comfortable cuddling up to. It wasn’t a eureka moment, more of a don’t-be-a-fucking-idiot moment. And I was glad it wasn’t something I was explaining to someone else.
That pump was once attached to at least one pipeline that snaked across over twenty miles of English Channel seabed to France. Possibly more than one pipeline. There had been a total of seventeen lines stretching from Dungeness to France, I remembered. Could that be the key to this? I struggled to remember something I’d read on the very useful and educational site about PLUTO.
I opened the Internet and searched for it. The Internet was still making me appreciate its amazingness. A few clicks, less than half a minute, and history was once again laid bare before me. At the end of the war a salvage operation had reclaimed for scrap the hundreds of miles of pipe, primarily for the lead and steel it contained.
So that was it. My thinking had run itself into a cul-de-sac. I had a sixty-something-year-old pump that didn’t work hooked up to pipes that didn’t exist in a forgotten building. Maybe. The only thing I had ‘proved’ was a tenuous link between Dennis Flashman – dead – and my relatives – both dead. If I wanted answers I was going to have to find someone alive.
As if that wasn’t enough to be contemplating, I had to decide what to do with this information, or lack of it, depending on one’s perspective: whether to involve Flashman senior, whether to involve Jo or whether to pursue it further on my own for a fuller picture.
Having suffered a double loss myself, I felt I could empathise with Flashman. For the killing of my harmless, honest and elderly relatives, especially for what they had done to my uncle, those responsible deserved not just to die but to suffer on their way out. But could I be directly physically involved in that? Really? In theory, yes. No problem. But in practice? Could I be judge, jury, torturer and executioner? That was a whole new area of which I had no experience and I wasn’t sure I wanted any. And it wasn’t the morality aspect that brought me up short, it was getting caught for it and going to prison.
Perhaps if I had lost my only child I would have been more decisive, more murderous, less considering, less cowardly.
Perhaps I should have considered what would happen to me if my misguided path of retribution went wrong and I found myself once again facing a violent death.
I checked the time, forwarded the Mather and Platt email to myself, closed the computer and went in search of my host.
He was sitting in an expensive-looking white leather reclining chair staring at the wall and I instantly felt I was intruding on his thoughts, his grief. He heard my approach and turned to face me. I noticed a glass of something strong and amber nestling in his big paw.
‘Anything?’
I had been about to lie to him. But I couldn’t and it didn’t have anything to do with me being afraid of him. I was past that.
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
He motioned to a chair. ‘Sit down. Drink?’
I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I’ve got to be somewhere.’ I sat down though. Perched on the edge of the seat. ‘Did Dennis ever mention anything about a pump, a big heavy duty pump?’
‘What makes you ask about that?’
‘He did then?’ I was surprised.
‘Yes. He was working on one with a friend. Something old. What’s it got to do with anything?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know that it has. I didn’t find anything that makes me feel there was something to learn about all this.’
‘Why are you asking about the pump then?’
‘It was just something recent on his computer,’ I lied. ‘Did he say where it was?’
‘No. But he ordered some parts through one of my accounts.’ So he was trying to get it working. ‘And all that bloody water pipe.’
‘What water pipe?’
‘Mile and miles of three-quarter inch standard drinking water pipe. Christ knows what he wanted that lot for. I thought he’d made a mistake with the order quantity at first but he said it was right.’
‘Where is it now?’ But even as I was asking the question I realised I knew the answer. I’d been locked up with a lot of it for a night.
He seemed not to have heard me. ‘That’ll have to go back.’ Then to me, ‘What was he up to?’
I didn’t know and so I didn’t have to lie to his face. I told him I was going to try to find that out and when I did, he’d be the first to know. I don’t know what he thought of me then.
I made my excuses and left for my evening with Jo.
***
37
I beat Jo to my place by ten minutes. That was good; it saved me explaining my whereabouts and gave me time for a smoke.
Our greeting was naturally cool on both sides. I let her in and followed her up the stairs after locking up again.
She smelt as good as a field of freshly cut hay, but not like one. I think she’d made an effort in a casual-dress-down-kind-of-way: a zipped hooded top, snug-fitting jeans, T-shirt and trainers. She was very casual. Her hair looked brushed and clean.
I had to wonder at her motives for coming round. I wasn’t the ugliest man I’d ever seen but as well as me being married, which she knew, we were still on opposite sides of a murder investigation. At least as far as I was aware, I hadn’t been struck off the suspects list. I doubted her superiors would adopt anything other than a dim view of that sort of frivolous fraternising on a social level. Then again, maybe this was modern policing. Results at any cost.
Whatever her reasons, she was company. And I was glad of some. The fact she wasn’t the ugliest woman I’d ever seen didn’t hurt. Besides, I wanted to talk to her.
I’d made a decision on my way back from Flashman’s. I was going to tell her all I knew, everything I’d found out. Call it cowardice if you like, but the law is there for a reason and I’m basically a law abiding citizen, at least when we’re talking murder. If I’d gone pursuing my leads myself it could only have ended badly. I could have hurt someone, badly. More likely, I’d have been hurt, very badly. Either way, I’d have fouled it up.
I couldn’t see how I, an emotionally-involved amateur and working alone, could achieve any degree of success. And after some soul-searching, I figured that leaving Flashman senior out of things was doing him a favour in the long run, even though he probably wouldn’t thank me for it. If I involved him, encouraged him to break the law with my information and unproven theories, then I’d have been responsible in large part for whatever he would have chosen to make of it. If he’d gone looking for an eye for an eye and succeeded, I’d have been a party to it and if he’d failed then I’d have been culpable in wha
tever sort of mess he made of it. I tried to convince myself I was leaving him out and bringing the police in for the best of motives. It would be something I’d have to reconcile later. I didn’t want his lousy yard anyway.
Jo made herself at home. I liked that about her. She didn’t stand on ceremony, waiting to be invited to sit here, go there, have this. She accepted a glass of Chateau mini-market, sipped it and grimaced like a filling had come loose. I think she was being funny. I doubted whether she could have told a Riesling from a Piesporter.
She was hungry. I was hungry. We ordered a take-away from the Chinese. Wendy sounded awkward on the phone, which seemed understandable to me given the elephant on the line. She invited me to collect in twenty minutes. Jo and I killed that time standing in the kitchen.
‘I heard back from forensics. About the slipper. It was your uncle’s.’
My appetite packed its bags.
‘I knew it anyway.’
I could have passed further comment, but what good would it have done? I couldn’t unknow it and talking about it wasn’t going to help, wouldn’t change anything. Dwelling on horrors only serves to cloud judgement, sour outlooks and squeeze perspectives. And I had enough poisoning my mind. The confirmation did make me momentarily reconsider whether to keep my new-gained knowledge to myself and go for a style of rough justice. But, thankfully, it was fleeting.
It occurred to me that if I got what I knew off my chest to Jo then I would no longer have a decision to make regarding retribution. It would be out of my hands and that, I realised, would be the best thing all round.
‘I’ve found out something.’ She stared at me expectantly over the rim of her glass. ‘Aren’t you going to chastise me for sticking my nose in?’ It was meant playfully.
‘Would there be any point?’
‘I suppose not. It’s done now.’
‘So what is it?’
