There is another uncomfortable silence. The last thing I want is some little slut’s death on my conscience. Much more importantly, nothing must hinder me now from taking Archie away from here. But Sentance, a murderer? A dishonest and avaricious little crook, certainly. But I’d never have thought him capable of murder. I doubt he’d have the guts, for one thing.
“Kevan, I think you should tell DI Yates about Archie now.”
Jean’s voice breaks in on my thoughts. I am incredulous when I take in what she is saying.
“What are you trying to say, Jean? Everything that you know about my family and my business is confidential. Besides, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jean looks at me with stricken eyes. For an instant, I think I see real devotion there, before she brings down the shutters.
“For God’s sake, Kevan, stop incriminating yourself unnecessarily by sticking to a few stupid lies. All you’re succeeding in doing is convincing the police you’re mixed up in whatever it is that Tony Sentance has been up to. DI Yates has already been checking up on Archie. He’s failed to find any proper record of his birth. Now, do you want to tell him the truth? Because if you’ll take my advice, it will be your best option if you really care about Archie’s future.”
I suddenly feel quite weak. I sit down on the sofa.
“Are you all right, sir? Would you like me to fetch you some water?”
“No, thank you. I’ll tell you about Archie. Just give me a minute.”
“Please, take your time.”
I draw a few deep breaths. Will this nightmare never end? Surely they can’t take Archie away from me now. I start at the beginning, or as close to it as I think they need to know.
“Joanna and I married young. She was bright, but she chose to marry me rather than go to university. From the financial point of view, she didn’t need to develop a career, though I think she always rather regretted not doing. Like my mother, she got involved in working for quite a few charities. She was particularly interested in helping childless women. At first, it had nothing to do with the fact that she was childless herself. She was very young and we had no idea that she would be unable to conceive, although we never practised any kind of birth control.
“Eventually, when we’d been married for several years, she went to see a doctor. He carried out some tests and discovered that she had leukaemia. As you can imagine, we were horrified. Of course, I was able to pay for the best specialists and the disease then seemed to stabilise. It isn’t the death sentence that it used to be – not always, anyway.
“Her illness was, however, responsible for her infertility. I was desperate to have an heir to carry on the businesses and she craved a child just as badly. IVF was out of the question – no legitimate provider would have helped a woman with Joanna’s medical problems and even if they had it would have been irresponsible to try. So we agreed we would adopt a child, though I have to admit that for me it always seemed a second-best option. Joanna disagreed; she said she knew right from the start that she could love an adopted child as much as if it had been her own.
“We were both surprised to find that no UK adoption society would help us. We were still only in our early thirties. We obviously had the means to support a child. And Joanna’s medication was working. She’d been stable for several years by this time. But we were told that the societies wouldn’t allow a child to be adopted unless they believed that both parents would live to see it reach adulthood. We believed we could fulfil this requirement; they disagreed. We tried every argument we could think of, but it was of no use. We were devastated – Joanna, particularly. I was worried that the disappointment might have a detrimental effect on her health.
“During the same period, de Vries Industries was expanding rapidly. As well as enlarging the existing food-packing and canning plants, we’d opened a new canning plant and one for chilled and frozen foods. There was always a glut of seasonal work in the main harvesting periods – from May to September – and we were beginning to exhaust the supply of regular local workers. There was some student labour available during the summer, but not enough, and most students didn’t want to work for the whole of their vacation. We employed some gangs of land-women, but they were notoriously unreliable and could be disruptive: there were sometimes fights in the plants between rival gangs.
“We already had an arrangement with the Maltese government by which we employed about fifty women on a seasonal basis. We paid their fares and provided them with Portakabin accommodation close to the Spalding packing plant. We also paid some of our own employees to take Irish students as lodgers for three months in the summer. Both of these schemes proved to be quite successful. Sentance suggested that he should build on them by trying to recruit seasonal staff from Eastern Europe. He mentioned Romania and Albania particularly. I should have smelt a rat then, because I’ve always operated on my grandfather’s principle that a fair day’s work is worth a fair day’s pay, so if I’d thought about it I’d have realised that we’d have been as likely to attract staff from within the EU as from outside it. Anyway, I can only conclude that I didn’t pay enough attention. I was probably distracted by the whole adoption thing. I gave Sentance permission to go and suss it out.
“When he came back, he asked if he could visit us at Laurieston. He didn’t come to the house as much then as in recent years, even though I got on much better with him at that time. I was a bit surprised, particularly as he made it clear that he wanted to see Joanna as well, but we agreed to see him.
“He told us he’d been to an orphanage in Romania. There would be quite a lot of red tape involved, but he thought he might be able to come to an arrangement with the authorities to take girls who’d reached the age of sixteen who had grown up in orphanages there. There might be some boys as well, but from what he’d seen the girls were more tractable and more likely to make good workers.
“I was dubious about this. We’ve always employed school leavers, but to put whole groups of young teenagers on the payroll, especially if they couldn’t speak English and were from a deprived background, struck me as rash and probably unworkable. What would happen if they proved not to be suitable employee material? Who would be responsible for them while they were still officially minors?
“Sentance danced around the point quite a bit in that ingratiating way he has. He was wringing his hands nervously. I could see he was directing his comments much more at Joanna than at me, even though she had little to do with the day-to-day running of the businesses. He finally blurted out that he had been appalled by the conditions he’d seen in the orphanages; that there were little babies lying in cots all day, some of them in filthy conditions, all of them underfed and under-stimulated. He was watching Joanna’s face all the time. Once he’d mentioned the babies, he had her rapt attention.
“He said, knowing that we were interested in adoption, that he’d made enquiries, but he’d been advised it would be extremely difficult. There was a lot of red tape involved. It could take three years, possibly more, to get a child out of a place like that legally; even if it happened, which it might not, by then the damage would have been done. He said he’d made some ‘reliable contacts’, who had offered to help. He asked us if we’d like him to use these contacts to ‘spirit a child away’, as he put it. Of course, these contacts would have to be paid. They’d be taking a big risk for us, and they’d have to put in some painstaking work in order to succeed.
“I was very angry. I told him I was furious he’d come to our home in order to suggest that we should commit a crime and even more incensed that he’d dared to raise Joanna’s hopes in this way. I suppose it was inevitable that Joanna took a different view. She asked me quite abruptly to stop shouting at Sentance, pointing out that he was only trying to help, while he cast down his eyes and grovelled and muttered that no offence had been taken. He said that he quite understood my concerns, but that he would ‘leave it w
ith us’. If we should change our minds, the ‘door was still open’. You may have noticed that Sentance loves trotting out these platitudes. They make my blood boil.
“As soon as he’d gone, Joanna began to work on me. She said Sentance had our best interests at heart: we should be grateful that he was prepared to run such a risk for us and that we should take his offer seriously. It might be our only chance ever to have the child we longed for and it would save at least one orphan from an appalling childhood.
“It took a long time, but, to cut a long story short, eventually I gave in. Archie was the result. He was a beautiful baby and we had a few happy years with him before he began to display symptoms of being unwell. He was diagnosed as severely autistic. At about the same time, Joanna’s condition de-stabilised again and has been volatile ever since, though it was only during the last year that we were told her case was hopeless. When Archie was five, it became obvious that he would not be able to attend an ordinary school. Until we went to St Lucia, he was a weekly boarder at a special school in Sleaford. He’s now been a full boarder for the past two weeks, but I’ve just removed him from the school. I intend to obtain specialist support to help look after him myself.”
To my surprise, as I finish my story and look DI Yates full in the face, I see that his eyes are moist with compassion. It is a dangerous moment. It won’t take much to make me break down. He swallows.
“Thank you, sir,” he says. “I realise that it took a huge effort for you to tell me all of that, and I appreciate it. Of course I have questions, but most of them will keep. There’s just one thing I’d like to know now.”
“Yes?”
“What kind of relationship does – did – Tony Sentance have with Mrs de Vries?”
“You mean, after he brought Archie to us? Joanna was always prepared to overlook Sentance’s faults. I don’t think that she liked him, any more than I do, but she tended to show him respect. I always wondered . . .”
I hesitate. I know that I shall loathe myself forever if I sully Joanna’s name, whether justly or unjustly.
“Please go on, sir. It might help us to apprehend Sentance.”
“I always wondered if she enlisted his help to get babies for some of the other women involved in that charity.”
“How much did you pay Sentance and his ‘contacts’ for Archie?”
“£50,000, initially. But Sentance has had free access to an account that was specially set up to provide Archie with regular papers. Although he’s nine now, we still haven’t managed to do this. Sentance keeps on saying that there are hitches. Every time one of these ‘hitches’ cropped up, Joanna was terrified that we would lose Archie. Sentance was always told that we would pay whatever it took. Sentance is a signatory to most of the business accounts, too. Those are the ones that Jean has just barred him from.”
Jean nods. “And from the special one, too. I thought you would want me to do that.”
DI Yates cuts in. “Romania is now an EU member.”
“I know that – and now that people from Romania and Bulgaria have the freedom to work where they like in Europe, we have plans to develop a small capsule workforce from there and see how it goes.”
“So nothing came of the idea of employing teenage girls from the orphanages?”
“No. It was too risky.”
“The forged passports couldn’t have been intended to help such girls get into the country?”
Jean doesn’t give me time to answer.
“You can’t expect Kevan to comment on that, DI Yates. He’s already told you he knows nothing about the passports.”
“Quite. Just one last question. Do you have any idea at all where Tony Sentance might be at the moment?”
“No. But if I were him, I’d be heading for Hull, for the ferry. If he is in serious trouble with the law, I’d say his best chance would be to head as far East as possible, quite possibly using our own transport on a regular route of ours.”
Forty-Nine
Sitting up in bed, Juliet pondered all that she knew about Frederick Jacobs and tried to surmise what had happened to him. Frederick had assumed the veneer of a gentleman – Juliet guessed he was the first of his family to aspire to that condition – but all the evidence suggested that he was a weak, base man. She imagined him sniggering like a schoolboy during his smutty-minded exchanges with Rhodes. She suspected that his proclivities predisposed him to fawn on certain members of his own sex, not only because he found them attractive, but because he was drawn towards the power they could command: true power, not just the passive deference that he was able to require of an unsophisticated agricultural community because of his social position. Cecil Rhodes exuded power. He was an important figure on the international stage: a colossus, a man who bestrode the last unconquered continent, a man whose talents even Queen Victoria herself had acknowledged, and at whose flattery and fine compliments she had smiled and allowed herself to unbend.
Although Frederick was evidently indifferent to women, he did not appear to find them repulsive. His wishy-washy character probably wasn’t capable of any strong feelings of repugnance. He had not, therefore, put up much of a protest when his mother had pushed him into marriage; in fact, he might have recognised that a marriage to a woman who was not his social equal could offer him some very positive benefits. Ostensibly, he had accepted his mother’s argument that it was his duty to marry and produce a son who could then inherit his considerable fortune. Privately, he had colluded with her when she’d chosen his future bride. There was a tacit understanding between them that Florence was too uneducated and too stupid to realise where Frederick’s sexual orientation lay and that, if she had her suspicions, she’d be so bowled over by her great good luck in having been liberated from a servant’s life of drudgery that she wouldn’t dare to protest about or draw attention to his prolonged absences and close male friendships. Correction, Juliet told herself: single close male friendship.
They had mostly been correct in their surmises: Florence was never anything other than dutiful and cheerful; she always supported him demurely when they were together; always made herself look pretty and neat. Nevertheless, he had known that attempting to plan out Florence’s life for her was risky, but, if he’d thought that he might get his comeuppance, he had never imagined that it would proceed from such an unexpected quarter. He could never have predicted the intensity of the love that his mother had grown to feel for Florence. She might herself have been caught unawares by it. From pressing him to marry in order to continue his line and, probably (though of course she would not say so), to avert scandal, Lucinda had gradually moved to treating Florence as if she were indeed her own daughter. She had come to resent fiercely any perceived slights to or neglect of Florence on his part.
Frederick had found his formidable mother difficult to deal with even when she had been on his side. When she had ceased to put him first, his life became both complicated and uncomfortable. It might have been to alleviate this discomfort, or it might have been something he could not help, but over time he, too, had developed a fondness for Florence. It would never be a grand passion: he did not thrill to the sound of her voice or shiver when she touched him, but he came to admire her resilience and her unfaltering but not undignified wish to please.
Fifty
Andy Carstairs had been holed up in a lay-by near the de Vries plant at Sutton Bridge for almost half an hour when he received the call from Tim Yates.
“Andy? I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call. Sentance didn’t show up. Apparently he’s now vanished. Are you at the plant now?”
“Yes. Does that mean you don’t want me to go in?”
“No, I do want you to. But I think you should wait for police back-up. I’ll get Spalding to send a car straight away. I can’t tell you all I’ve just found out at the moment, but I’m pretty certain Sentance has been running some kind of racket that involves young girls
and I think some of the staff at de Vries are mixed up in it, too. You remember how tense you said that meeting with the supervisors was? Willingly or not, I think they’re in on whatever it is Sentance is up to.”
“Do you think he killed the girl who was found at Sandringham?”
“Probably not personally, but I think he may have been behind it. That’s why I want you to take care. Don’t put yourself or those who come to support you at risk if you can help it. And play it all by the book, even if it’s frustrating. I’d better get a search warrant organised, in case you need it.”
“You don’t want me to wait for a warrant?”
“No, see how far you can get without it. I’ll make sure it’s there as soon as possible. But do wait for the uniforms to arrive.”
Andy continued to sit forward in his driver’s seat, drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering-wheel. He found it impossible to relax. He had the sense that valuable minutes were slipping past because of the DI’s strictures about prudence. He glanced across the road as a green Mondeo passed the lay-by and turned into the entrance to the packing plant; there was absolutely no doubt in his mind as to the identity of the driver – he’d seen enough of Miss Nugent to recognise her anywhere. Was it just coincidence that when Sentance had disappeared she found it suddenly important to be at Sutton Bridge?
He’d been waiting for a further ten minutes when one of the distinctive blue de Vries vans drove past him. Nothing unusual about that – in fact, on reflection he was surprised that he hadn’t seen more of them since he’d been sitting there – but something made him look at the driver’s face as he flashed by. The driver stared back at him and looked quickly away. Andy thought that he speeded up deliberately at the same moment, but he could have been mistaken: after a series of twisting bends, the road opened out into a long, straight stretch just beyond the lay-by. He thought that the driver’s face was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.
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