‘Um. Right. There might not be anything more on the laptop, you know,’ Naomi pointed out. ‘He might just have used it for his writing.’
‘Perhaps so, but it would be nice to be certain. So far there’s nothing that remotely links Uncle Rupert to Samuel Kinnear, or anyone else of his ilk.’
He paused. ‘I have a very vague memory that Rupe lived in London for a short time but …’
‘Your dad would remember?’
‘Probably. Naomi, I’m going to have to leave for a couple of days. Will you be all right?’
‘Leave? For where?’
‘London. Follow up on some of the information Fine gave me.’
‘You’re not fit enough for that. Can’t you call?’
‘No, I can’t do this over the phone. I’ll be OK. Harry and Patrick are here or I’d insist you went home.’
‘Like to see you try.’
‘Who are you looking for?’ Patrick wanted to know.
‘I have a few contacts there but I also want to go to Colindale.’
‘Colindale?’
‘Newspaper archive. Sometimes it helps to look beyond the official records. Fine’s given me some directions to look and a couple of names.’
‘It all sounds a bit vague,’ Naomi objected, not happy about Alec going anywhere, especially while he was still so obviously in pain. She couldn’t see him wince when he stretched or pulled the damaged ribs, but she had slept in the same bed last night. Or rather, lain awake while he tried to find a position in which he could comfortably sleep.
‘It’s all vague,’ Alec confirmed irritably, but nothing they could say could dissuade him from leaving the next morning.
Later, Patrick and Naomi wandered into the garden and through the gate in the back wall that led to what Alec had called the meadow.
‘What’s it like?’ she asked.
‘Um, I don’t know. Rough grass, little trees and a hedge with bigger trees growing in it.’ He turned, scanning the boundary. ‘It’s big,’ he said. ‘Big for a garden, looks more like a field.’
‘Any way anyone could get through the hedge?’
He left her side, Napoleon bounding after him. Naomi stood, listening to his commentary. Patrick was very good at remembering to tell her what was going on.
‘The hedge is taller than me,’ he said. ‘It’s mixed, which means it’s old. There’s thorn and elderberry and what I think might be wild roses. There’s rose hips. Nettles like you wouldn’t believe and a couple of ash trees.’
‘So, quite a barrier.’
‘Yes, that is. Ah, maybe not.’
‘Oh, what do you see?’
‘Hang on a minute, I’m trying to find a way past the blasted nettles.’
‘Be careful.’
‘OK. There’s … well, it’s not exactly a gap. There’s a fence just here. A bit rotten looking but low and climbable.’
‘Look as if anyone’s climbed it lately?’
‘Hard to say. No obvious scuff marks or mud on the rails, but, Naomi, it’s pretty low. Easy.’
‘What can you see over the fence?’
‘I’m getting to that. It’s a field with cows. No, bullocks, not cows. After that there’s a farm. House, barn, couple of other buildings. Hedge all round the field, but I can see a gate across the other side and a car’s just gone by so that must be the road. It sort of loops round. But if someone did come across here they’d have to come all the way across the field and then over the wall.’
‘No, the gate wasn’t locked, remember. Just latched. I’ll get Harry to put a bolt on it, I think.’
She sighed, glad she’d not known before about the unlocked gate. Relieved in the same breath that the men who’d come to the house probably didn’t know about it either or they’d probably have come through that way. Patrick had been certain that there was no sign of anyone entering the garden that way, he’d had to clear long grass from the foot of the gate before they had been able to pass through.
Patrick was back with her now. ‘It’s getting dark, isn’t it?’ Naomi asked.
‘You can tell that?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve just noticed that the air round here feels damp in the early evening once it starts to get dark. I remember it used to get that way when I stayed on the coast. Where’s Napoleon?’
Patrick called to him. ‘He’s over there. Your left. He seems to be rolling in something.’
‘Oh great. That’ll mean a bath.’
They wandered over to where the black dog wriggled happily. The damp grass released the heat of the day, fragrant beneath their feet and Naomi caught the warm scent of wild thyme and chamomile beneath her feet. It reminded her of the day they had gone to the Peatlands.
‘Looks like he’s been digging,’ Patrick commented.
‘Digging? Sure it’s not moles?’ Napoleon, in her experience, was not a digger. He caught frisbees and rolled in unspeakable things and occasionally poked his nose into something that made him sneeze, but he didn’t normally dig.
‘Not moles,’ Patrick said. ‘There are molehills, but not just here and they don’t look like this. No, someone’s been digging. With a spade, that kind of digging. Shift over, Dog.’ Unceremoniously, he moved Napoleon out of the way. ‘The earth’s soft and still loose, so not long ago, I’d say. I can get my fingers right down. Call Napoleon will you, Naomi, he’s trying to help.’
She called the now disappointed black dog back to her side. ‘Any idea how deep it might be?’
‘Hard to say. Deeper than I can easily scoop out anyway. We should get some lights out here and a spade. You OK here for a minute while I run back to the house?’
Naomi thought about it. Was she fine about that? ‘Sure,’ she told him, still not totally convinced. She heard his feet on grass then on brick as he went back through the gate and on to the garden path. Then she listened to the silence. There was a soft wind breathing through the trees but little in the way of birdsong, only a lone blackbird defining his territory before he retired for the night, and then the faint lowing of cows in the neighbouring field. Funny, she’d only ever thought of cows mooing, not the male animal. Cars. Two or three of them passing on the narrow road. Two or three together almost amounted to gridlock round here, Naomi thought.
Then the less defined sounds, rustles in the hedgerow, and the faint whirring and clicking as something insect-like but mysterious to her ears buzzed close by.
As always when she focussed on what she could hear, her sense of smell seemed to increase. Overlaying the scent of thyme and chamomile, crushed now beneath her feet and releasing its almost apple fragrance, was the damp air that she had mentioned to Patrick. It carried its own earthy smells, faint must and moist soil, newly turned now by Patrick’s digging. Drawn by the scent, she moved cautiously forward, Napoleon at her side. She knelt down where she guessed Patrick might have done, reached out, felt grass and a stray, sneaking bramble runner; drew her hand back from the pain of grasped thorns. She reached out again a little more towards her left. Her fingers sank this time into soft earth that had been churned by the boy’s fingers, granular and friable beneath her fingers. A tremor of excitement ran though her belly, though she could not have explained exactly why. Maybe it was all that talk of buried treasure that chimed so readily with her childhood fantasies when she and her sister had dug up half the beach searching for pirate hoards.
She wormed her fingers deeper into the hole, then drew back, almost in alarm.
There was something there. There really was.
‘Naomi?’ she heard Alec calling to her. ‘Where the devil are you?’
He couldn’t see her? Of course, it must be fully dark by now and the overgrown garden was shadowed by the thick hedge. It was funny to think of him at such a disadvantage.
‘Over here. Don’t you have a torch?’
‘Torch but no batteries. Patrick’s gone upstairs to find his. Reckons he’s got a little Maglite packed away somewhere.’
She heard him swear as
he stumbled over something in the dark. ‘Watch yourself, there are nettles that think they’re Triffids and brambles sneaking about in the grass.’
‘Thanks. I know that. Now.’
She stood up and a moment later he had his hand on her arm. ‘I can see you now,’ Alec said. ‘Eyes getting used to the dark. Not often I’m in a place with so little light pollution. You can’t even see the house from here. You said you found something?’
‘Yes.’ She squatted down again, taking Alec’s hand and drawing him down beside her. ‘Here, dig your fingers down into the mud.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Don’t be a baby. Here, let me show you.’ She found the place again, feeling for the scooped earth and then guided Alec’s fingers into the hole she had made.
‘You’re right. Something hard, like the edge of a box. Hey, Patrick, bring that light over here.’
Naomi could hear Patrick running across the grass, Harry following behind.
‘Shine it there. You’ve got something to dig with?’
‘Didn’t know where to find a spade or anything, but I’ve got a paint scraper from the kitchen drawer and a couple of large spoons.’
‘That will do, it isn’t very deep, whatever it is.’
‘There’s really something there? Here, Naomi, can you shine the torch while we dig?’
Before she could voice any objection she might have had, he had placed the torch in her hand and positioned her arm so that the light shone down upon their little excavation. Harry joined them, accepting his spoon. Alec had taken possession of the scraper.
‘Er, you realize this is a silver spoon,’ Harry stated.
‘Well, I guess it’ll wash. You take that side and Patrick, you start there. I’ll go down where Naomi found whatever it was.’
She listened as they set about their task; the occasional scrape of metal on stone or a shuffle of feet and knees as someone changed position the only sounds that told her anything about their progress. Even Patrick had forgotten to commentate.
‘Do you see anything?’ she asked at last.
‘I’ve got an edge,’ Alec told her. ‘Something plastic, wrapped in a supermarket bag and …’
‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ Naomi could hear the excitement in Patrick’s voice. ‘It’s Rupert’s laptop. That’s why no one could find it. He’s buried it out here.’
Eighteen
It seemed such a bizarre thing to do; bury a laptop and, it turned out, it wasn’t just a laptop Rupert had sunk into the ground.
They carried the bags back to the house and laid the contents out on black bin bags spread across the kitchen table.
‘This has to be what they were looking for.’ Patrick’s excitement was obvious.
‘We don’t know that …’ Harry, cautious as always.
‘No, we don’t but it’s a definite possibility,’ Naomi agreed with Patrick. ‘But why bury it? That’s the sort of action that indicates a real and immediate threat.’
‘Marcus said Rupert was frightened.’
‘Then … I don’t know … why not remove the hard drive and mail it to a friend?’ Naomi wondered
‘Um, two possible reasons I can think of.’ Harry was the surprise respondent this time. ‘He’d have had to explain to the friend and that might have led to all sorts of questions Rupert didn’t want to answer. And it’s a laptop. It isn’t like an ordinary PC. I’ve got a little caddy thing for mine so I can take the hard drive out any time I need to.’
He sounded quite proud of his grip on technology, Naomi thought.
‘Which you’ve never used,’ Patrick pointed out.
‘Well, no, but I could, but my point is that to take the hard drive out of a laptop you have to dismantle the thing. I certainly wouldn’t like to try.’
‘Why not just wipe the drive?’ Alec said.
‘Because wiping it doesn’t get rid of the information. You can recover it with the right software,’ Patrick pointed out.
‘Specialist stuff,’ Alec argued.
‘Possible to get hold of though,’ Patrick told him. ‘There are sites that specialize in hacking software and there’s usually recovery stuff on them.’
‘Patrick, I’m not sure I want to know and I definitely don’t want to know how you know. Anyway, from what I’ve seen of Kinnear, that’s way too subtle,’ Alec argued again.
‘I think we may be missing the point here,’ Harry said. ‘We don’t actually know if there’s anything on the laptop.’
‘If there’s nothing, why bury it?’
‘Um, good point, I suppose. What about the other stuff?’ They had not yet examined the other contents of the protective plastic bags.
‘Time to take a look,’ Alec agreed. ‘Patrick, would you run upstairs and grab my laptop. I think the leads will fit this one. Harry, would you mind popping the kettle on. Now, what do we have here?’
Naomi heard the crinkle of plastic as Alec explored the contents of the bags.
‘They’re a bit damp,’ he said. ‘Rupe didn’t wrap the books quite as well as the laptop, but I think they’ll dry out OK.’
‘Books?’ Naomi asked.
‘Yes. Three small hardback … journals from the look of it and … Harry, this is more in your line, I think. It looks like a ledger of some kind.’
Patrick returned with Alec’s laptop and Alec gave him the job of firing up the one they had found in the hole.
‘Make sure everything is dry,’ Harry warned. ‘I don’t want you starting a fire or anything.’
Naomi, impatient now, realized that she was the only one not doing anything. ‘So? What do they say? Why did he hide all this stuff?’
‘I think it’s going to take more than a two-minute peek to answer that one,’ Alec told her. ‘OK, journals was probably too grand a name. He didn’t keep a daily diary or anything. The first entry is from 2001, March 2nd. The next isn’t until the following week. You know, I think I remember seeing a book like this in the study.’
‘But these?’
‘Naomi, hold on there. I don’t know yet. The first entry is something about a trip to the theatre in Doncaster and in the second entry he’s rather pleased with himself for picking up an arts and crafts coal scuttle for bugger all at a sale.’ He flicked a few pages on. ‘More sales, a walking holiday in Yorkshire, an argument with someone over the price of a piece of Meissen. He won, by the way. Naomi, if there’s anything important here we’re going to have to go through the lot.’
‘What are the more recent entries?’ Patrick asked.
‘I was about to get to that. OK, last entry was made about ten days before he died. He and Marcus had lunch together and he says: “I told Marcus I would not be in for a few days. I need some time to think things through and get away from it all, though I know, if I’m honest with myself, there is no getting away. I could run away, of course, but that would be cowardly and it would leave those I care for in the firing line. I have no illusions. If they could not find me, they would take their spite out on someone other than me, and that I cannot, in all conscience, allow. So, I have done what I can, made my preparations and it is a comfort to know that all of my affairs are ordered, so far as they can be, and now I must allow events to run their course.”’
They sat for a moment in silence, the finality of Rupert’s words reaching them, casting a despairing miasma across their little company.
‘He knew he was going to die,’ Naomi said at last.
Nineteen
Alec left early the following morning. No one had slept for more than a few hours. Reading the journals and examining the laptop had taken the rest of the evening and run on into the early hours. It had been after two when Alec finally gave in and shooed everyone off to bed. He had been up again at six and gone just after seven.
Naomi, sitting in the kitchen and finishing the pot of tea, felt far from happy. She had been in two minds about insisting she go with Alec, but had finally decided that she would be more use at this end
. She had woken with a plan of action in mind.
Patrick took her by surprise by padding into the kitchen only a half hour after Alec had gone. Harry wasn’t far behind.
‘I thought Patrick at least would have slept in,’ she said.
‘Brain was buzzing,’ he told her. ‘I thought I may as well buzz down here.’
‘And I just can’t sleep past seven on a weekday,’ Harry added. ‘I’m too much a creature of habit.’
‘Is it OK with your work? I feel so bad about dragging you all the way up here.’
‘Don’t. I called them on Friday and told them I’d be gone a few days. I’ve holiday owing and extra hours built up on flexitime, so it’s fine.’
‘Thanks. So, what was the brain buzzing about?’ she asked Patrick.
‘Oh, just the stuff he wrote. I was trying to put it together. I can’t get why he hid the earlier journals. I mean, the last one talks about Kinnear and all that stuff …’
‘Except it says very little in real terms.’
‘True, but reading between the lines, he felt threatened and it was something from way back that he was scared about. Something Kinnear knew about him.’
‘It certainly sounded like blackmail,’ Naomi agreed. ‘But how did Kinnear find out whatever it was? Harry, did the ledger tell you anything?’
Harry filled the kettle and set it to boil before responding. ‘It’s hard to say. The ledger seemed incomplete. There were references to sales and purchases not actually entered into the ledger, as though he cross-referenced the figures elsewhere. What I suspect is that Rupert was keeping a second set of accounts and that the ledger was part of that. I’d need a lot more information and I’ve still not collated all we have here, but I suspect that Rupert was not as honest and straightforward as either Marcus or Alec gave him credit for. Some of the entries concern antiques, so far as I can tell. It’s possible that he was either trading for himself behind Marcus’s back or he was lying about the price received for certain items.’
Legacy of Lies Page 10
