A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why is a London psychiatrist sitting about in an Armenian rug shop in Brighton?’

  ‘You went to Wick Hall School, I believe.’

  The Armenian nodded. ‘Guilty as charged, Doctor. Worst seven years of my life. My father wanted me to be an English gentleman. He was also a bit of a nose-tweaker, my dad. Liked nothing better than putting the cat among the pigeons.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I was a wog,’ Pastermagent explained without a trace of anger. ‘Touch of the tar brush and all that. Drove the head quite mad but he couldn’t do anything about it. My father kept on endowing the place with all sorts of things – cricket balls, books for the library, two or three scholarships, that sort of rot. The trustees loved him,but The Owl couldn’t stand the sight of him, or me for that matter.’

  ‘The Owl?’

  ‘Freeman, the head. Spectacles thick as the bottom of a bottle. They gave him a gong not long before he handed in his lunch pail. Sir Oswald Freeman, OBE. I hope he’s in his grave, spinning like a gyroscope. Sadistic old bugger.’

  ‘You knew a young boy, I believe. Bernard Exner,’ said Tennant slowly, watching the man’s reaction to the name. Pastermagent’s eyes widened. ‘Good Lord, I haven’t thought about him in ages. “X-marks-the-spot” Exner.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor little sod.’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And they never found the man who did it.’

  ‘No.’ Pastermagent shook his head again. ‘Must be twenty-five years now.’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘Right.’ Pastermagent nodded. ‘I’m thirty-nine now so I would’ve been…’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘That sounds about right. I was in upper school that year, fifth form. Exner was lower third, I think. We were on the school chess team. Went to the National Tournament the term before he was killed.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘He had a wizard end game,’ said Pastermagent, remembering. ‘Alphabet used to call him the Thinking Machine after that detective in the Jacques Futrelle stories.’

  Tennant blinked. He couldn’t understand a word the man was saying. ‘Alphabet?’

  The Armenian laughed. ‘Sorry. You’ve taken me back through the mists of time, I’m afraid. Alphabet was Crawley. Alfred Benjamin Crawley. We made his initials into a nickname: A.B.C. – Alphabet. We had names for everyone. Mine was Beater, as in carpet beater.’ He sighed and took another sip of coffee. ‘This certainly does take me back, Doctor.’

  ‘Did you ever wonder who might have killed him?’

  ‘Not for years.’

  ‘But at the time?’

  Pastermagent frowned and set his cup aside on a flat area on the pile of rugs. ‘I had some theories, yes,’ he said finally. ‘A few of us did.’

  ‘Did you come to any conclusions?’

  ‘Can I ask what your interest in this is?’ asked the dark-haired man. ‘I really don’t like the idea of telling tales out of school.’

  ‘It has to do with another investigation.’

  ‘You work for the police?’

  ‘From time to time.’ Not quite a lie.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s all right then.’ Pastermagent thought for a moment. ‘None of us really thought it was a stranger, I remember that. Exner was young but he wasn’t stupid. We were fairly sure no one lured him off with a liquorice whip and a stick of Brighton Rock.’

  ‘A teacher?’

  ‘Good Lord no!’ Pastermagent said, laughing loudly. ‘Milquetoasts, the lot of them. Most were trying to avoid conscription, if you ask me. They wouldn’t have dared.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There was also the matter of the bow and arrow.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t in the newspapers as I recall.’ Pastermagent paused again. ‘When they found Exner, it was discovered that he’d been shot.’

  ‘With a bow and arrow, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right. Grey goose feather and all that. We all made them. The boys, I mean. Straight out of Sir Walter Scott.’ Pastermagent smiled. ‘These days I suppose it would be Errol Flynn. At any rate, some of us stole yew branches from the tree outside the rectory but mostly we used ash from the end of the drive. You didn’t have to waste time letting it cure. We used them to knock chestnuts out of the trees. A few of us actually made proper arrowheads from tins.’

  Tennant nodded to himself. The weapon used by Queer Jack supposedly resembled a sophisticated arrowhead. ‘Young Exner was wounded by one of them?’

  ‘Umm. In the thigh. Enough to have brought him up short if he’d been trying to run away. Not a lot of gypsies and transients wandering about fixed up like Red Indians.’

  ‘So you think it was another boy then?’

  Pastermagent hesitated for a moment. ‘Perhaps,’ he said finally.

  ‘Likely suspects?’

  ‘Loudermilk,’ said the rug dealer flatly. There was no hesitation in his voice now. He hadn’t even paused to think about it.

  ‘Raymond Loudermilk? Chess team and maths club?’

  Pastermagent’s expression darkened. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘You seem very sure.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ said the rug dealer, scratching the dark line of his jaw. He stood and made his way to the desk. Opening a drawer, he brought out a flat, white-labelled tin and a small tinplate ashtray. He returned to the pile of rugs and sat down again, offering the box to Tennant. They were Abdullah’s. ‘Bit of an affectation. I’d just as soon smoke Player’s but people have their expectations.’ Pastermagent snorted. ‘My father used to smoke Senior Service through a hookah. Customers thought it was terribly exotic.’ He grinned broadly. ‘Crafty bugger, my old dad. Had a thousand little tricks.’

  Tennant took a cigarette from the box and Pastermagent joined him. The Armenian looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Raymond Loudermilk,’ the psychiatrist said, prompting gently.

  ‘Umm. Just thinking.’

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘No. I doubt anyone did.’

  ‘He was a member of the school chess club. The maths club as well. Sounds sociable enough.’

  ‘Not really. If you were good at something, The Owl insisted you join the appropriate club. My friend Crawley was an absolute layabout but he could run like the wind so he was on the track-and-field team. Hated it, as I recall.’

  ‘Loudermilk was good at maths?’

  ‘Close to brilliant, I’d say. Especially when it came to the practical end of things. Trigonometry, mechanical applications. Made wonderful things in shops. Not terribly imaginative, though. The same with chess.’

  ‘A good player?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say good. It was something more than that. Mechanical but incredibly accurate. I think they have a name for people like that.’

  ‘A savant?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Pastermagent nodded. ‘He could remember every move made in a masters tournament but he could never think for himself, make up his own moves. Not like Exner.’

  ‘Did they get along?’

  ‘I never noticed.’

  ‘What else do you remember about Loudermilk?’

  ‘Lonely. Never said much. Brooded a lot. I think his father was in the Army. A chaplain?’ Pastermagent shrugged. ‘I have some vague memory of his having been in India.’ The rug merchant puffed on his cigarette. ‘It’s just that he was so… different. Not like the rest of us. Alphabet Crawley was the son of a lord and my father sold Persian carpets but we were the best of friends. I suspect it was because we had a common enemy.’

  ‘The Owl?’

  ‘All the masters. The school, our parents. Us against them.’

  ‘And Loudermilk?’

  ‘He didn’t seem to have friends or enemies. As though he lived in a different world. Do you understand?’

/>   ‘I think so.’ Tennant paused. ‘Do you have any idea what happened to him?’

  ‘Not the foggiest. He wasn’t there the following year. I remember some rumour about his father being killed in France or Belgium. Probably couldn’t afford the place after that.’ Pastermagent sighed again. ‘He wasn’t the only one. Same thing happened to Fanny.’ He grinned. ‘George Gurney. Riches to rags overnight. He was taken out in the middle of term. Sad. The whole world changed during the war. I suppose it’s about to change again.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘Already has as far as the rug trade is concerned.’

  ‘I’m still not quite sure why you were so quick to mention Loudermilk.’

  ‘You went to a public school, presumably?’

  ‘Eton.’

  ‘Well, then, you know, don’t you? A public school is nothing more than a jungle for well-groomed savages.’

  ‘A fair enough assessment.’ Tennant smiled.

  ‘One learns to live by instinct in a place like Eton or Wick Hall, not intellect. Some things you simply feel. Survival of the fittest. I can remember that about Loudermilk.’

  ‘Remember what?’

  Pastermagent’s voice was soft and a distant look was in his eyes. ‘It really only occurred to me after he was gone. Perhaps it had something to do with poor Exner as well. Crawley felt it too.’

  ‘Felt what?’

  ‘That we’d been invaded. I can remember being terribly relieved when we found out that he wasn’t coming back. We’d been an innocent flock of sheep with a wolf in our midst and we’d never known.’

  ‘Loudermilk being the wolf?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Pastermagent firmly. ‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or worse.’

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Umm.’ Pastermagent paused, frowning, lost in the past. Suddenly he nodded. ‘I’ve just remembered,’ he said quietly. ‘About the nicknames.’

  ‘Loudermilk’s?’

  ‘Well, that’s just the point, you see… he was the only boy at Wick Hall who didn’t have one.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tuesday, December 24, 1940

  11:30 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  Dr Charles Tennant sat in one of the gloomy cubicles at the Somerset House Births and Deaths Registry working his way through a pile of dusty ledgers covering deaths under LO to LU from 1914 to 1925. He’d been at it for the better part of two hours and had only just discovered the entry he’d been after. There were two Loudermilks listed during the period: William Cornwallis Loudermilk, forty-nine, captain, Royal Army Chaplains Corps, who died on September 15,1914; and Emily Marguerite Loudermilk, née Bambridge, forty-one, who died October 17, 1923.

  There was a Ministry of War notation beside the entry for William Loudermilk and given the date he’d probably been killed during the Battle of the Marne. The entry for Emily stated that she’d died accidentally as the result of a fall. There was no place-of-burial entry for the captain but Mrs Loudermilk had been interred at St John’s Cemetery, Church Row, Hampstead. A ray of hope there; the parish records might have some information Tennant could use. With the correct dates now in hand it took him almost no time at all to find Raymond Loudermilk’s birth record.

  Tennant discovered his quarry in the listings for September 1901. Capt. William Loudermilk and his wife, Emily, were indeed Raymond Loudermilk’s parents. By a macabre and ironic twist, it appeared that the child had been born on September 15 – the date of his father’s death thirteen years later. The place of birth was listed as Chitradurga, Karnataka Province, India.

  As interesting as the birth date was the prior notation of the parents’ marriage: April 21 of the same year at Jamnagar in the Rann of Kutch. By all indications, the thirty-six-year-old Scots Presbyterian chaplain William Loudermilk and the nineteen-year-old Miss Emily Bambridge had sinned grievously: Raymond Loudermilk had been conceived out of wedlock.

  Tennant looked up from the ledger entry and stared thoughtfully into space. A young Calvinist minister gives in to temptation and impregnates a nineteen-year-old girl. Guilt-ridden and facing disgrace or even worse, he marries the girl to legitimise the birth.

  What kind of relationship would he have with his near-bastard? Not a good one, certainly. Then and forever, Raymond Loudermilk would be nothing but a glaring, constant symbol of his fall from grace, the ever-present incarnation of his lust. During the child’s early years he’d probably done everything possible to stay as far as he could from the object of his sin, eventually placing the child in a Brighton boarding school. The ultimate abandonment had come just as Raymond entered adolescence, in fact, on the boy’s thirteenth birthday. A week later, Bernard Timothy Exner vanished from the grounds of Wick Hall.

  Smiling, Tennant closed the ledger. Weeks ago the search for the mysterious Queer Jack had been a matter of intelligence gathering for Heydrich, a way to hasten the inevitable invasion and an end to war, consequently ensuring Tennant’s position in the new order. Now it was something else and sitting there, alone, surrounded by the stacks and cabinets full of mouldering files and records, he knew what Morris Black must have felt so often in the past. The hunt was coming to a close. He had his man; all he had to do now was find him.

  * * *

  ‘I’m not sure this is such a good idea,’ said Katherine Copeland, seated behind the wheel of the hired car. ‘These are the golden boys. Ruffle their feathers and it’s sure to get back to Liddell. He’ll have to report it.’

  ‘I don’t intend to ruffle any feathers,’ answered Morris Black. ‘I just have to ask a few questions.’

  ‘But why Bletchley? Can’t you find out some other way?’

  ‘No. There is no other way. And Bletchley fits.’

  Katherine slowed as they reached a sharp turn on the almost deserted road, fumbling the gear lever and swearing under her breath, still unfamiliar with driving on what she considered to be the wrong side of the road. They were twenty miles out of London, heading north towards Bedford on the A5 through low, undulating countryside still dusted with a light coating of snow from the day before. The sky above them was overcast and dark, heavy with the promise of another storm.

  ‘Explain it to me again,’ said Katherine, straightening the wheel and relaxing slightly. ‘According to you, chess is the key to this whole thing, is that right?’

  ‘It’s the one thread that seems to run through it all. The single factor connecting the murders.’ The detective paused for a moment, looking out through the windscreen, marshalling the facts that had kept sleep at bay until the small hours of the morning. ‘When I first examined Rudelski’s things, I noticed that he had a game board in his storage chest. I assumed it was draughts, checkers you call it. I was wrong. I looked again. It was a chessboard.

  ‘We also know that young David Talbot was an avid chess player. He was a member of the Chess Society at Caius and a member of the Correspondence Chess Association, which is how Queer Jack found him in the first place. He even played chess with that fellow running the garage – Gurney. Eddings, the man killed in Portsmouth, was also a member of the Association and so was Dranie in Southampton. Trench as well.’ Black frowned at his own mention of the name.

  ‘And from that you arrive at Bletchley? I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘It was something Garlinski said. The old man in Coventry. He mentioned the name of the man who’d been the captain of the British chess team at the championship in Buenos Aires last year, just before war broke out. Stuart Milner-Barry. Milner-Barry is on the list Liddell gave me. He works for GC and CS at Bletchley Park. So does Hugh Alexander and he was on the British team as well. Another man, Alan Turing, also works at Bletchley. He was a team alternate. Milner-Barry and Alexander were both British boy champions in their day and they all went to Cambridge, just like Talbot.’

  ‘So did a lot of other people, Morris.’

  ‘I spoke with David Talbot’s tutor. Talbot worked as an assistant at the Cambridge Engineering Laboratory and the Cavendish Laboratory last summer. T
he man he worked for was Alan Turing.’

  ‘Okay, I’m almost convinced.’

  ‘Jane Luffington,’ Black murmured. ‘Fleming’s friend. A motorcycle courier who went back and forth between London and Bletchley Park every single day. Believe me, we’ll find the answer there, or at least part of it.’

  At Morris Black’s direction they turned off onto a narrower road that veered slightly to the west. In keeping with the invasion orders of a few months before, there were no road signs to indicate where they were going.

  ‘Where exactly are we supposed to meet them?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘A little place called Fenny Stratford. It’s not far from Bletchley.’

  The Buckinghamshire village turned out to be one street on a rising hill just across the River Lofeld. It had once been a coach stop on the road to Holyhead. Katherine drove the car across the narrow stone bridge and they began to climb the hill. They went past a pseudo-Gothic red-brick church with a stubby little clocktower and then they were in the village, little more than a widening in the road lined with old, whitewashed cottages and a few shops.

  ‘Stop here,’ said Black, watching through the windscreen. Katherine did as she was told, halting beside a building slightly larger than its neighbours, an ancient inn sign swinging over the front door.

  ‘The Cock,’ said Katherine, peering out. The sign showed a large, wide-eyed rooster, sharp-looking spurs fitted to its aggressively raised foot.

  They crossed the road and entered the inn.

  It was a comfortable enough place, low ceilinged, with dark, rough-hewn beams low enough to cause a tall man trouble, plaster walls and a wood floor gone dark as pitch over three or four centuries of constant use. Tables ran along the left wall and a bar ran along the right.

  The room was empty except for two men seated at the farthest table. They were both dressed in tweeds, the taller of the two dressed in a suit that seemed several sizes too large. The shorter man was drinking from a glass pint mug while his companion was working his way enthusiastically through a large meat pie. Both appeared to be in their early thirties.