Kingston smiled. “I know. It seems far-fetched. So let me explain it a different way.” For a moment, he stroked his chin, looking pensive. “Try to picture life on Alcatraz. Grim, bleak, hopeless day after day, on that rock of an island, in those cold stone cells . . .”
“Grim, for sure,” Emma agreed. “Prisons do tend to be that way.”
Kingston nodded. “Yes. Which is why Matthews was so thankful and at peace to be working in the gardens. It gave him the freedom to be outdoors for long periods of time—something to look forward to every day, something to live for. Any prisoner would give an arm and a leg to get garden privileges.”
Kingston paused, glancing aside for a moment. “I think Butler saw the deal that Matthews had and decided he wanted it, too. He figured if he could get his hands on something that could persuade the warden or others to consider granting him special privileges—”
Emma was nodding. “Makes sense. Even to me, a brown thumb. What better gift for a warden, or the secretary, for that matter, whose personal interests were in gardening, beautifying the place? Can you imagine—the most sought after rose in the world on Alcatraz?”
“I think that was the case,” Kingston said. “And once Butler told Matthews of his scheme, he would have been more than mildly enthusiastic about it, too. In fact Matthews would have had better motivation than any of them to acquire the rose. My guess is that he already had Graham Thomas’s book in his possession. Old Shrub Roses was, and still is, required reading for gardeners.”
Emma and Andrew were silent for a moment.
“All right,” Andrew said, shaking his head, “I’m outvoted. It looks like you may have solved the mystery of the Alcatraz rose, after all.”
“Well . . .” Kingston tried—with limited success—not to look smug. “A lot of it is supposition, but we do know that Butler’s plan was to flee the country and go to America. It’s reasonable to speculate that he succeeded and, once there, got mixed up with the wrong people—organized crime, possibly—then committed a serious felony and ended up if not in Alcatraz, then in another federal prison and was ultimately transferred to the island.”
“I have a question,” Emma said. “Where does Letty fit in to this? If at all.”
“What happened to her mother, you mean?”
Emma nodded.
“I have some thoughts on that as well—again, not what one would call conclusive, I’m afraid,” he said, picking up his notes and studying them.
After the pause, he looked up. “We know Fiona was born in 1956. But the one thing missing in all this—what we don’t know—is if her mother, Caitlin, ever told her about her father, Butler. I’m proposing that she grew up as a Doyle and that she never learned about him and what he’d done. She believed what her mother had told her: that he’d died. Why wouldn’t she? And, by the way, this is what the Collinses would have believed, all along. Anyway—for the record—Caitlin dies in 1968, and then, in 1991, thereabouts, Fiona meets Terry McGuire, a driver for a car parts company. A year later, they marry, and six years after that, Letty is born. A year after that, her father is killed in the accident, and six years after that, Fiona goes missing.”
“Right,” Emma said. “And at some point in that time, the book that Butler sent Jennings ends up in Fiona’s possession.”
“The question is how?” Kingston said, taking a last sip of coffee. “Now, when I talked to Grace—”
“Do you know if she had met Fiona?” Andrew asked.
Kingston shook his head. “I don’t think so, but I did ask her if Brian had had any relationships, lady friends, during the years he’d been a fugitive. She did recall one instance. The two were having coffee one morning when she saw a mug—a china one, not one of those thick transport café ones—with dried lipstick on it. Jennings hastily replaced it with another. When she jokingly asked him about it, he mumbled what was obviously a cobbled-up excuse: It was from a woman who’d stopped by asking if she could use the phone. Her car had broken down and she wanted to call—”
“If you’re trying to establish some kind of relationship between Jennings and Fiona, that’s really reaching, if you ask me,” Andrew said.
“Grace also mentioned finding a hairpin on the bathroom counter on another visit,” Kingston added. “So whoever the woman was, it looks as though she visited more than once.”
Emma shook her head slowly. “There may have been a woman. But as for her being Fiona, that’s hardly what one would call hard evidence, Lawrence. In any case, there’s a big age difference between them—twenty-plus years?”
Kingston nodded. “That’s true. But I’m not implying they were having some kind of affair. All I’m suggesting is that if they knew each other, we not only have an explanation for how the book ended up where it did, we may also have an explanation for what happened to Fiona McGuire.”
“What?” Andrew asked.
“All right, you two, let’s back up here a little. If they met, we have only two choices: Either Fiona tracked down Jennings, or vice versa. If it were the former, she would have had to have known not only who he was but also, most likely, what her father had done.”
“So what are you suggesting? I’m getting confused again,” Andrew chipped in.
Emma was shaking her head. “To think that Fiona somehow found Jennings—one of the two Great Highway robbers still at large—when all of England’s police force was unable to? That’s hard to swallow.”
“I agree,” Kingston said. “That’s why I proposed that Fiona was never aware of her father’s crimes. I think Jennings found her. He was an old man, maybe wondering what had become of his best friend’s daughter. Remember, it’s highly likely that Butler had died by this time—and perhaps, even more important, Jennings was curious about what had become of Butler’s share of the diamonds. That’s more plausible, if you ask me. Remember, according to Grace, he was broke.”
“It’s still a reach,” Emma said.
Kingston raised a hand. “All right. Let’s just agree that they made contact, though. They would have so much in common. And if Fiona became a regular visitor to Beechwood—”
“That could explain how the book ended up with her,” Andrew said.
“Precisely.”
“We still have no proof that Fiona ever actually possessed the book or was ever at Beechwood,” Emma said.
“Why not? We’ve agreed that the rose book was in Jennings’s possession and we know it was on the bookshelf of Fiona’s house. We’ve ruled out her husband Terry and her mother as having owned it—which leaves Fiona. What other explanation do we have?”
Emma frowned. Andrew was shaking his head now, too.
“Look,” Kingston said, “we know that Jennings loved roses and had a magnificent garden. Say Fiona visited it—she could have easily fallen in love with the place, and it’s reasonable to assume that he could have given her the book to educate or encourage her to learn more about the joys of gardening. For that matter, she might have asked if she could borrow it.” He shrugged. “All I’m saying is that we’re pretty sure he had the rose book, likely kept it for many years, and it ended up with Fiona. Can we at least agree on that?”
“Fine,” Emma said, “we can agree on that. So tell me your theory, then—what happened to Fiona? Surely you’re not suggesting that Jennings killed her?”
“No. That would be totally out of character. I believe her death must have been an accident. Something—I don’t know what—must have happened, and she died before Jennings could get her to a hospital.”
“C’mon, this is sheer speculation, Lawrence,” Andrew interjected. “It’s too convenient.”
“If you remember, Andrew, I did qualify earlier that certain of these conclusions must depend on supposition and presumption.”
“An accident at Beechwood, you mean?” Emma asked. “I see where you’re going with this. He would have a body on his hands—”
“Exactly. Taking her injured but alive to a hospital is one thing. Calling the
police and reporting that a friend has died accidentally on your property is another entirely. Jennings might never survive the ensuing investigation. I think he chose what he thought to be the lesser of two horrifying choices: disposing of the body himself.”
Neither Emma nor Andrew seemed prepared to break the conspicuous silence that followed. As if on cue, the hallway tall clock chose that moment to strike the half hour.
“That’s what I think is the most plausible explanation for her disappearance,” Kingston said somberly. “That’s why Missing Persons has no record, why it remained an unsolved mystery.”
Andrew looked disconcerted. “Is that what you’re proposing to tell Letty?”
“I think that the three of us should make that decision,” Emma said.
“Of course.” Kingston nodded. “Maybe another visit to Beechwood is in order. Not that I think we’ll find anything.”
Emma smiled. “Not unless the rose had decided to bloom again.”
Andrew yawned. “Let’s call it a night. My head’s spinning. We can talk more about it in the morning.”
It was agreed, promptly and without further discussion.
35
KINGSTON AND EMMA arrived at Beechwood two days later. Andrew had begged off to attend the last day of a vintage car show at Hampton Court, which had worked out well for all three of them. Kingston had been hoping to spend time alone with Emma.
At the front door they were greeted by a woman of ample girth with gray hair resembling fine-grade steel wool. She turned out to be none other than Thomas the gardener’s wife. She announced with a sprinkling of authority that she was both housekeeper and custodian of the house in Grace’s absence. Their having called ahead, she was aware that they had come to visit the garden to undertake a second search for a certain rose. It was obviously of no importance to her, so they’d been given free rein of the property, four acres in all, which, they assured her, shouldn’t take too long.
Not that she seemed to care.
Under a blue sky furrowed with wispy cirrus, Kingston and Emma started their second tour of Brian Jennings’s exceptional garden. To Kingston, this alone was worth the trip. Roses were less abundant, but still none vaguely resembling the size and color of the Belmaris climbing rose. After forty minutes, they had covered every inch of the garden, arriving at the farthest point from the house that now looked diminutive in the distance. Here, the garden ended at a low, twiggy hedge mostly of brambles, holly, and honeysuckle. Set in the hedge was a wooden stile beyond which stretched a grassy swath of land that ended about forty feet away at a line of beech trees.
Kingston walked up to the stile and glanced indifferently around the area. The only visible plant life were tufts of dandelions, thistle, cow parsley, and clumps of cheerful white-and-yellow ox-eye daisies. He was about to return to Emma when he glimpsed something white, the size of a book, on the grass close to the line of trees. He hopped over the stile expecting to find a scrap of cardboard or perhaps sun-bleached wood. Instead it was a small grayish slab with the name PEPPER crudely etched on it. Glancing left, he saw another twenty feet away. He walked over to it and found a similar slab, which upon inspection looked to have been made of concrete and bore the name SALT. Underneath was the date 1996.
It was Jennings’s pet cemetery! Of course he would have had pets, Kingston realized. During the many years he’d lived alone, at Beechwood, he must have had many. This was borne out as he wandered the line of trees. He counted nine graves in all, randomly placed, presumably both dogs and cats. There was something irresistibly poignant about the scene. He had a mental image of a bereaved Jennings, a hardened criminal, carrying his dead pets to this quiet, out-of-the-way spot, to give them a proper resting place.
He was about to leave when he caught sight of another, slightly larger grave, a distance from the rest, under the dappled shade of one of the beeches. Maybe it was his imagination. His first thought was to ignore it, but his insatiable—and, to Andrew, exasperating—curiosity drew him to it. In a few seconds he was standing at the foot of another marker. Unlike the others, a small square had been chiseled off each of the four corners, to form a ragged cross.
Underneath the date 2003, separated by a scratched image of a rose, were the initials FAB.
“Emma!”
She glanced up.
“Something here you should see.”
36
“I’VE GOT TO hand it to you, Lawrence,” Emma said, buckling her seat belt. “Your theory couldn’t have been closer to the truth. The only question remaining is whether it really is Fiona’s burial place.”
One hand resting on the gearshift, Kingston glanced at her before driving off. “There weren’t many other explanations, really. You’re right, though. She might have been buried elsewhere on the property and the marker may just be a memorial. That’s for the police to determine, now, though.” He sat for a moment, the motor idling, staring through the windscreen, his mind elsewhere.
“Sixpence for your thoughts,” she said, breaking the long silence.
“I was thinking about the date.”
“The date? It was 2003, why? That’s the year she went missing. It all fits.”
“Something else happened in England that year: the worst natural disaster in three centuries.”
Emma was frowning. “You’ve lost me.”
“The Great Storm.”
“Of course. Sorry, it didn’t register. A lot of people were killed, it was catastrophic.”
Kingston nodded. “Over a million trees were destroyed. I know that the National Trust properties alone lost more than three hundred and fifty thousand.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “The accident we were talking about—you’re thinking Fiona could’ve lost her life in the storm? All those huge beech trees where we were standing—my God.”
“It’s just a guess,” he said, shifting into first gear. “Though I have an idea how we might be able to learn more.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I won’t go into it now, but we’ll know soon enough.”
Emma smiled. “You know something, Lawrence? You sound more like Morse every day.”
When they arrived in Middle Cheverell at one thirty, at least two dozen cars remained in the Rose & Thistle parking lot. Entering through the pub’s open front door, past colorful, floral baskets, Kingston glanced around the bustling room and quickly spotted Clare Davenport at the bar going over papers with a young man who Kingston guessed to be a salesman. As Kingston and Emma approached, she looked up and beckoned them over, excusing herself to the salesman, who departed with a hasty farewell.
“Welcome back, Doctor,” she said with a sunny smile.
“Glad to be here,” Kingston said, turning to Emma. “Let me introduce you to Clare Davenport, proprietor. My friend, Emma Dixon.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Emma,” she said.
“You, too,” Emma replied, nodding. “Your pub is charming.”
“Thank you. Your table’s ready, but don’t let me hurry you if you’d like a drink first in the lounge.”
“No, that’s fine,” Kingston said. “We’ll have drinks at the table.”
She explained that she had to attend a meeting and would join them in an hour or so, insisting they not leave before she returned. She waved over a waiter, who escorted Kingston and Emma to their table in the adjacent dining room.
The next hour was one of the most pleasant that Kingston had experienced in many months. A white-clothed table with a wildflower centerpiece, excellent pub cuisine, a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet, and spirited conversation created an irresistible confection that suspended all sense of time.
The conversation opened with their speculating about the initials FAB on the stone marker. Emma had insisted that to conclude it was meant for Fiona, with only the first letter significant, was a leap too far. Kingston disagreed, pointing out politely that it could be argued that Fiona’s true name—the one on her birth certificate—was Fiona Butler, not D
oyle—hence the B. Furthermore, he reasoned that Jennings, Butler’s close friend, would more likely have chosen the name Butler than McGuire. As to the middle initial, he also had some theories—perhaps Jennings had wanted the stone to appear as that of another pet, hence the name Fab—or the most logical, that Fiona’s middle name was Anne or Audrey, or whatever. That they could verify later. Or maybe, he granted, Emma was right, and the grave was not Fiona’s at all.
They finally agreed that—unpleasant as it was—it was moot, since it would only ever be proved so with the discovery of human remains.
The waiter arrived with coffee and cleared the table.
Emma took a sip and looked at Kingston over the rim of her cup. “So what are you going to do now, Lawrence, now that this is all over?”
“I hadn’t thought too much about it,” he fibbed. “Resume my life of semiretirement, I suppose. How about you?”
She sighed. “Pretty much the same, I guess. Forced, in my case. We make quite a pair, don’t we?”
“You miss police work, don’t you?”
Her smile was wistful. “To be truthful, until I started collaborating with you, I didn’t realize just how much. I’m really going to miss you—miss working with you.” She paused for an instant. “I know I’ve been cynical at times, questioning your judgment, trying to rein you in, but I want you to know that I greatly admire your talents as a criminal investigator—let’s face it, that’s what you really are—and I have deep respect for you as a kind, thoughtful person, courageous, too—even taking into account a tendency to be stubborn and impetuous at times.” She took another sip of coffee and smiled. “I know what you’re thinking: I’m beginning to sound like Andrew. I mean what I said, though, even if it wasn’t particularly well phrased. I’m not as talented in that department as you.”
6.The Alcatraz Rose Page 23
