Forgotten Voices

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Now Matthew,’ Bethany chided. ‘No business at mealtimes and especially no murders. You have to wait until at least dessert is served and preferably until coffee.’

  Mac glanced across at Rina who smiled back at him and then settled to enjoy his meal among those who had become his extended family over the past couple of years. A little eccentric they might all be, but Mac had come to feel part of the Peverill Lodge household; to love being a part of it and a more loyal group of friends he doubted he would ever meet.

  Afterwards, over coffee, talk inevitably turned back to the murder. Bethany, it seemed, had known the Tailor family slightly. ‘I’ve been helping out at the airfield. You know that Lydia de Freitas is setting up that exhibition in the old reception area?’

  Mac nodded. ‘Well, it’s not really Eliza’s sort of thing, is it, dear, but I’ve always enjoyed history and when Lydia was asking for volunteers to help her sort and curate, well, I jumped at it. Well, Ellen Tailor brought us a whole load of stuff. They’d gone round the local villages, her and … oh I don’t know, some other woman. Someone from the church, I think … Vera, something or other … and asked people to lend or contribute anything from the war. Lydia is hoping to change the exhibition several times a year, sort of keep up with what was happening, you know?’

  Mac nodded. ‘So, did you get to chat to her at all?’

  ‘Oh yes. She came the first time to drop stuff off, then came back three or four times when I was there. She brought the children with her once and they played on the grass outside. Sweet little things they seemed. Especially the little girl.’

  ‘I felt a bit sorry for the boy.’ Eliza might not have been there, but she wasn’t going to be left out. ‘Who on earth calls their child Jebediah in this day and age?’

  ‘Apparently it’s a family tradition,’ Mac said.

  ‘Well, I’m all for traditions, but some of them are best forgotten about, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Bethany continued, ‘yes, I chatted to her on several occasions. I liked her very much. Who on earth would want to kill a nice young woman like that?’

  ‘Is it true she was shot?’ Matthew asked.

  Mac nodded. ‘Bethany, did you get the impression she was happy, or worried, or—’

  Bethany shook her head, the carefully arranged white hair bouncing a little as she moved her head. ‘No, dear, I didn’t. We spent a lot of our time chatting about the things we were sorting through. You’d be amazed at what’s come in. Be shocked at what some people are prepared to just donate. I mean, family photos and personal letters and all sorts.’

  ‘And did Ellen Tailor bring anything from her family?’ Not that it was likely to be relevant if she had, he thought. But he was curious about her and about her family. The family she had married into particularly. Some gut feeling niggled at him that the answers may lie there.

  ‘She brought old photographs and ration books and various bits and pieces from her husband’s family. Lydia could let you see, I’m sure. I don’t remember there being anything particularly unusual.’

  Mac nodded but it was clear Bethany had thought about something else. ‘She brought a man with her one day,’ she said. ‘Introduced him to Lydia and they all went off to that little back room Lydia uses as her office. I don’t know what they talked about, but Lydia seemed very pleased about something when they came out. Ellen didn’t stop that day, she left with the man. I think he was driving.’

  ‘Did you happen to catch his name?’ Mac asked.

  She closed her eyes as though picturing the scene, then opened them again and smiled happily at Mac. ‘Oh, yes, as it happens I did. Lydia said, “Goodbye Mr Trent,” and he said, “Oh, call me William.”’

  William Trent, again, Mac thought. Interesting. The man certainly deserved another visit.

  ‘Is that helpful?’ Bethany asked.

  Mac nodded. ‘I’ve met Mr Trent,’ he said. ‘I think he’s a historian of some kind. Thank you, Bethany. Well remembered.’

  Bethany preened herself and so, Mac noted, did Eliza. Mac had long since regarded the sisters as two parts of the same whole. It had probably taken him the best part of a year to remember consistently which one was which.

  ‘A historian,’ Rina said. ‘Tim, didn’t you tell me that Iconograph are working on a new series of games?’

  Tim nodded. ‘Edward wants to bring the first of them out next summer, I think. They’re not like all the Call of Duty stuff that’s around; these focus on some of the small stories he’s dug up. To be honest, Rina, I don’t know a lot. I’ve only been involved on the periphery. It’s all still a bit hush-hush, you know. He found some bits of research about the camouflage and misdirection that went on in World War Two and that there had been people from the magic circle involved, and I was able to point him in the direction of the research that had been done recently on that, but I’ve been so busy with the new Magician’s Quest that’s out next spring that I’ve not taken a lot of notice of what everyone else is doing.’ Tim, a skilled stage magician, had acted as consultant for the Iconograph series for about eighteen months now in addition to his performance career.

  Mac thanked them all again and the conversation drifted off elsewhere. He wasn’t really surprised that the Peverill Lodge crowd had crossed paths with Ellen or William Trent. It was only a few miles up the road to the murder scene and the occupants of Peverill Lodge, though more blow-ins as Frank would have put it, had been in Frantham for almost a decade now and made a real effort to become integral parts of the local community.

  But the William Trent link was interesting and he wondered if Lydia or Edward would be able to tell him anything useful about William Trent before he returned to poke the lion in his own den again.

  TEN

  Two days after Ellen’s death

  Vera Courtney was up early as always, watering the plants in her conservatory and feeding the cat almost before it was light. She found it hard to sleep. Ellen was there, whenever she closed her eyes. Point-blank range, the rumour was. She’d been unrecognizable. It was more than Vera could bear to think about. That pretty face blasted and the blonde hair stained and matted with blood. Vera knew the damage a shotgun could do and it wasn’t an image she wanted in her head but it was there regardless. She couldn’t stop thinking about Ellen.

  Vera had promised to go out to the airfield that morning and meet the rest of the flower committee. They had taken it upon themselves to assist Lydia de Freitas at the airfield. Vera had mixed feelings about it all, though she enjoyed the company and the sorting and collating was interesting – and she had a liking for Lydia too. She still felt uncomfortable about the public display of personal objects. It felt un-British, somehow and, more than that, it felt like a betrayal of secrets. Especially in the case of individuals like her father. Even the family weren’t supposed to know what he had been doing and she had heard that some of the operations that he and his colleagues had been involved in were still secret.

  William Trent had told her that and he should know, she supposed. Though that didn’t stop him from wanting her to tell him all the details she could recall. From him trying to persuade her to hand over her memories and those little bits and pieces that her mother had cherished.

  Nora, Vera’s mother had kept these scraps and scrats of souvenirs. The letters he had sent, the little journal he had kept. The will he had written for the time sure to come, when he never came back.

  ‘Yugoslavia, Crete, Mitilini,’ Vera whispered. Places she had never visited and only looked at on maps – or more lately on the Internet. Ellen had showed her how to access sites that showed her pictures and even video of the places where her father had been posted. She had looked on Google Earth and followed with her finger the paths he had taken. She had been barely five years old when her mother got the news she had been dreading and expecting. That her father was gone. But the sadness of it all, the real sadness, was that he had died not in distant Yugoslavia, as it had then been called, or a
Greek island or North Africa. No, it had been a scant five miles from where he had been born.

  Mac left Miriam still sleeping when he left the boathouse the following morning. She didn’t have to be at uni that day and had made a rather late night of it. When Mac had picked her up, she’d actually been a little drunk – and very giggly and more relaxed than he’d seen her in a good while and he’d felt a pang of jealousy that he’d not been the one responsible for that.

  ‘I love you. You know that, don’t you?’ he had told her as they had lain together in their bed and she had been drifting off to sleep.

  ‘You’d better,’ Miriam told him, snuggling her body closer to the curve of his. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  This morning there was no Rina waiting for him on the promenade and he didn’t make his usual stop for coffee. Instead, he walked on out of Frantham and towards the airfield, about a mile beyond the perimeter of the town. Lydia de Freitas had to drive to Oxford later that morning but she had promised to give him an hour first thing to sort through what Ellen Tailor had brought in for the exhibition and to talk about William Trent. He found her in the tiny office that she had made her own at the back of the main airport building. The restorers were already busy as he walked through the reception. The art deco building coming back to life after years of near dereliction was a fine thing to see, he thought, and the de Freitases had brought a fair number of jobs to Frantham too.

  Lydia greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. ‘Pull up a chair,’ she said. ‘I’ve sorted out the boxes of family stuff that she brought in. Think I’ve found everything but I will do another check when I get a minute. Won’t be today, I’m afraid, lord knows what time I’ll get back tonight. But I don’t see what—’

  ‘Truthfully, neither do I. But neither can anyone come up with a decent motive for anyone shooting her, so I’m quite prepared to look at anything just now.’

  Lydia nodded. ‘Ah, so it’s clutching at straws time, is it? Tough. You asked about William Trent?’

  ‘I understand from Bethany that Ellen introduced him to you?’

  ‘Um, yes. That’s right. You want some coffee?’ She had a large cafetière set up on the window sill.

  She set his coffee down on the desk between them and passed him sugar and milk in a little carton. ‘Next thing to get in here is a small fridge and a coffee machine,’ she said, ‘though I’m going to have to park them in reception. You couldn’t swing a squirrel in the space I have left here, never mind a cat.’

  ‘It’s all coming together, though isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, very well considering, though I don’t think we realized quite what a major job it was going to be. Let’s buy that old airfield, Edward said. Then it was, “let’s get that old airfield functioning again.”’ She shook her head, fondly. ‘Then it was “do you think you can project manage it for me.”’

  ‘And you’re enjoying every minute,’ Mac said.

  Lydia chuckled. ‘I am,’ she admitted. ‘Iconograph has needed me less and less this past year. We’ve built a good team and I’ve been easing out of a lot of the executive stuff. Looking for a new direction, I suppose. This really has become my baby.’

  Mac nodded and sipped his coffee. Lydia looked well. She had healed, he thought. It gave him hope for Miriam’s healing process. ‘William Trent?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah, William Trent. Hmm. Where to begin? I’d met Ellen a few times when she brought exhibits in and stopped to help out. We got chatting and she said she’d seen the call we put out for local stories, especially from nineteen forty and forty-one. Edward and the team wanted background to add depth to the storylines he’s using. The latest project is called Speculatrix. It’s apparently an Elizabethan word for a female spy and it’s an open world gaming experience. That means that in addition to following the main quest or mission lines, you can, if you want, just explore the world, make up your own missions, do what the hell you like, really. So we need additional material, as much as we can get, to make the experience as detailed as possible.’

  ‘And that’s where the local stories come in?’

  Lydia nodded. ‘It’s hoped that … well you know the Magician’s Quest games that Tim’s been advising on?’

  Mac nodded.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if you understand much about it, but there’s a facility for inserting your own magical character into the world, adding extra features, developing illusions, even building extra theatres and landscape and so on?’

  ‘Tim told me about that.’ Mac nodded. ‘Mods?’

  ‘That’s right. These days the proof you have a successful game is when the community takes it to their hearts and starts building modifications and add-ons to it. In the past, we’ve actually recruited from the pool of modders that we’ve found through the games – or who have found us, I suppose.’

  ‘And William Trent is a historian—’

  ‘Who is writing a book – a second book, actually – in a series called Hidden Histories. It focuses on capturing the little stories, makes use of a lot of primary sources that don’t usually surface. Letters, diaries, oral history—’

  ‘So a lot of overlap with what you’re doing here.’

  Lydia nodded. ‘Ellen realized that and thought we might have something to offer one another.’ She frowned. ‘It was an odd friendship,’ she said. ‘Between her and Bill Trent – sorry, I should call him William.’ She grinned mischievously at Mac.

  ‘I take it he doesn’t like “Bill”.’

  ‘No, not much. He’s a pompous man. That’s why it was so odd. William obviously thought a lot of Ellen and her kids for that matter. The kids called him Uncle Bill, but I think they are the only people who could get away with using the diminutive. Ellen clearly liked him and yet two more opposite people would be hard to imagine. Ellen was so relaxed, so laid back. Friendly … you know?’

  ‘Some people have a gift for friendship,’ Mac observed. ‘They draw others out of themselves, bring unexpected groups of people together.’

  She laughed. ‘You mean like our Rina? Well, yes, you do have a point.’ She set down her cup and smoothed the already smooth skirt. Then snagged her suit jacket from the back of her chair and slipped it on. ‘I must be off,’ she said. ‘Take the boxes if you like and I’ll have another check around for anything else.’

  ‘I walked here,’ Mac told her.

  ‘Ah, right. Look, I’ll have a word with Don, the foreman, on the way out. Get him to give you a lift back if you need it. Must go.’ She bent and kissed him on the cheek again. ‘I’m really sorry about Ellen,’ she added. ‘Violent death is an appalling thing to happen in any family.’

  And she should know, Mac thought as he heard her walk away.

  An hour later, having skimmed the contents of the boxes, he took Lydia up on her offer and got Don to drive him back to Frantham. Don helped him carry the boxes along the pedestrian promenade to the tiny police station and dump them on Mac’s desk.

  ‘DI Kendall’s here,’ PC Andy Nevins told him as they passed through the reception area. ‘He’s just gone for coffee, I told him you were heading back.’

  Don left and Frank Baker mooched through into Mac’s office. ‘What’s all this then?’

  ‘Probably nothing. Ellen Tailor took this lot to the airfield for their World War Two exhibition. I just thought I’d take a look and it seems that she introduced the de Freitases to William Trent about a month ago. They’re employing him as a technical adviser apparently. Kendall say what he wanted?’

  ‘He just wants to bring you up to speed on overnight developments.’ The man himself came into the already overcrowded office and Mac hastily moved a box so he could set the coffee down.

  ‘Developments?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Small developments.’

  Andy Nevins leaned against the door, the bright sunlight streaming into the reception area setting his red hair aflame. Frank and Kendall squeezed chairs into the tiny space. Mac explained about Ellen and William Trent and then w
aited for Kendall to give his information over.

  ‘It may be something, may be nothing,’ Kendall said. ‘At first glance, Ellen Tailor’s financials looked clean. Then the sister told us about a second bank account. They’d set it up between them after the sale of the farm. Started a bit of a trust fund off for the kids. Ellen had seeded it with a couple of thousand, presumably from the sale, then both women added regular amounts on a pretty regular basis. We’re not talking big amounts here. Ten pounds, twenty, occasionally a hundred, but it was in both their names and it was, Diane Emmet said, good to be doing something that was just their family. Nothing to do with the Tailor’s.’

  ‘Friction?’

  ‘She said not. She was quite emphatic about that. She said Ellen may not have totally liked her in-laws but she made a real effort to get along well with them. She said there were what she expected – the usual conflicts between close families.’

  ‘What she expected? That sounds a little vague.’

  ‘The sisters were orphaned when they were fifteen and seventeen, spent a couple of years shunted around relatives and then when Ellen went off to uni, she took her little sister with her. After that, they shifted for themselves. It can’t have been easy, but you can see how it would have made them very close. Diane finished school, also applied to university in York and got in. She stayed up there when Ellen moved south but when Ellen was widowed, it seems they wanted to do something to safeguard the kids’ future themselves, however small and symbolic.’

  ‘And now the kids are orphaned too. How did Ellen’s parents die?’

  ‘Well that’s pretty tragic too. Cancer took one, depression the other. The father committed suicide. Threw himself under a train. Nasty way to go. Nasty thing to make someone else responsible for.’

  Mac nodded. ‘So this bank account?’