Sight Unseen

by Robert Goddard

  He was woken by the telephone. Opening his eyes, he saw that it was light outside. According to his bedside clock, it was nearly ten. He had lain awake for what felt like hours before falling asleep, but sleeping this late in the morning was nonetheless a surprise.

  He grabbed the telephone, wondering if it would be Sharp badgering for an answer, then realized it could not be because he had not given him this number.

  ‘Haló?’

  ‘Dobré ráno.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Marek?’

  ‘Not for me, brother. For Ivana. She needs you to cover Tuesday.’

  ‘Ah … Tuesday?’

  ‘Jo. Day after Monday. Day before Wednesday. I can put you down for it?’

  ‘I’m not, er … too sure I …’

  ‘I need a decision, like, right now.’

  ‘Then it’s no.’ Sharp was right, of course, damn him. There never had been any doubt about what Umber was going to do. ‘Not Tuesday. Not any other day. For the foreseeable future.’

  FOUR

  TRAVELLING LIGHT AND at short notice was one luxury David Umber could well afford to indulge. When Sharp proposed a Sunday morning departure, he did not demur. Nor did he try to hold Sharp to his whisky-fuelled offer of paying for the journey. But the retired policeman seemed oddly determined to put his pension money where his mouth had been.

  ‘I’ll make all the arrangements.’

  ‘There’s no need. I can—’

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  ‘All right. I will.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up at eleven.’

  ‘What time’s the flight?’

  ‘Just be ready at eleven.’

  ‘I can make my own way to the airport. If you’re worried I’ll change my mind, I can—’

  ‘Be ready at eleven.’

  And so the telephone conversation had ended. It was a long way from being the last telephone conversation Umber had that day, however. When Ivana heard he was quitting Jolly Brolly, she rang to congratulate him on landing a full-time job, the only possible explanation for his conduct that had occurred to her. From her the news spread to his other friends that he was in fact going away for a while, prompting various farewell calls and good-luck messages. He assured one and all that he would be back before long. But nobody seemed quite to believe him.

  ‘You think because things have gone bad for you here they will go good for you in England?’ Ivana asked in her second call of the day. She had persuaded herself that the parting from Milena was what was driving him away and assurances from Umber to the contrary were futile.

  ‘I don’t think that.’

  ‘You remember. Dostat se z bláta do louže.’ It was an old Czech saying. Out of the mud into the puddle.

  ‘I’ll remember,’ said Umber.

  And so he would.

  Several loud blasts on a horn announced Sharp’s arrival at dead on eleven o’clock the following morning. Umber looked out of the window of his flat expecting to see a taxi waiting for him below and hoping for Sharp’s sake that he had agreed the fare beforehand.

  But the vehicle that had pulled up just past the tram stop was not a taxi.

  Sharp was waiting outside the entrance to the block when Umber emerged a couple of minutes later, bags in hand, and caught at once his wary glance towards the blue and white camper van.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Is this our transport?’

  Sharp nodded. ‘A 1977 Volkswagen T2 in tip-top running order. I bought her second-hand when I retired and did her up proud. Lovely, isn’t she?’

  ‘You drove to Prague?’

  ‘I did. And we’re driving back. I’ve booked us on the midnight ferry from Dunkirk to Dover.’

  ‘I thought we’d be flying.’

  ‘Wait till we hit the autobahn.’ Sharp winked. ‘It’ll feel as if we are.’

  ‘Tell me, George,’ said Umber, once they were clear of the city and heading west on the main road towards the German border, ‘what exactly are we going to do when we get to England?’ The van, which Sharp quite unselfconsciously addressed as Molly, had yet to show her alleged turn of speed, but Umber’s thoughts were already directed to journey’s end. It was one thing to talk about going after the truth, quite another to devise a way of doing so.

  ‘You mean do I have a plan?’ growled Sharp.

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘Oh yes. But that can wait. First I’d like a little background on you and the last twenty-three years.’

  ‘I’m not going to talk to you about me and Sally, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Force yourself. We need to know as much as each other in case there are gaps to fill in. I’m an open book. Policing in Wiltshire. Then retirement to Derbyshire. No family. No friends to speak of. What you see is what you get.’

  ‘Same here.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt that. I’ll hazard a guess about you and Sally and you can tell me whether I’m wide of the mark. The relationship began straight after the inquest.’

  Umber was glad Sharp had to concentrate on driving. Otherwise he would have been sure to notice Umber’s wince of dismay. The inquest was where it had begun for them. Devizes Magistrates’ Court, October 1981. The coroner’s summing-up had loaded an unfair amount of blame on Sally’s shoulders. She had looked so young and alone, so helpless in the face of criticism. The Hall family had made no move towards her. The press had been lying in wait outside. On impulse, Umber had said to her, ‘Come out the back way with me. We’ll drive somewhere.’ She had looked at him, her eyes full of gratitude. And she had simply nodded her acceptance. It was all she had been able to do.

  ‘The coroner was out of line,’ said Sharp. ‘I was going to tell Sally that, you know. But you whisked her away before I had the chance. Where did you go?’

  ‘The Kennet and Avon Canal. We walked along the towpath.’

  ‘Nice choice. And what about the decision to go abroad? Christmas, maybe? New Year?’

  ‘You’re not going to give up, are you?’

  ‘Not for the next few hundred miles or so.’

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you.’ Umber knew then that he would have to give Sharp some sort of account of his life with Sally. Better, he decided, an edited one of his own shaping than whatever result Sharp’s guessing game produced. ‘Sally needed to get away. So did I. She rapidly became more important to me than a Ph.D of questionable relevance to anything. She’d abandoned a teaching degree before working as a nanny, so teaching English abroad seemed the obvious answer for both of us. We took the qualifying course in Barcelona in the spring and summer of ‘eighty-two. We worked in Lisbon after that, then Athens, then … all over. The further from home the better.’

  ‘Good idea, I imagine.’

  ‘It seemed to be. We had a few happy years.’

  ‘Only a few?’

  ‘We were in Turkey – Izmir – when we heard about Radd. Sally was pregnant at the time. Miscarried shortly afterwards. I blamed her Turkish doctor. She blamed …’ Umber chuckled bitterly. ‘Herself.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘She got it into her head that she wasn’t allowed to have a child of her own … because she’d lost Tamsin.’

  ‘That’s—’

  ‘Crazy? Yes, George, you’re so right. Crazy is what it was. And it went on that way. I tried to keep her on an even keel. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Or maybe I tried too hard. Maybe we both did. We got married. But that didn’t help. In fact, it only made it worse. In the end, we felt tied to each other. Trapped. We were in Italy at the time. I accepted a job back in Turkey, knowing she wouldn’t go with me because of what had happened there. She stayed on in Bologna. She hadn’t actually been working in quite a while. Then she went back to England.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Autumn of ‘ninety-eight.’

  ‘You were together a long time.’

  ‘Nearly seventeen years. She lasted less than a year on her own.’

&
nbsp; They must have covered a mile or more in silence before Sharp said, ‘Maybe the coroner was right and it was just an accident.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But who trails a fan heater on an extension lead into a bathroom on a summer’s evening?’

  ‘Exactly. Who does?’

  ‘Blame yourself, do you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s handy in this case’ – Sharp cast Umber a sidelong smile – ‘that you’ve got someone to share the blame with.’

  Blame had hung heavy in the air at Sally’s funeral. Umber could remember the almost physical weight of it, pressing down on his shoulders. He had been tempted to plead pressure of work and stay away, but that would have been one desertion too many. So he had gone. And seen the accusations hovering in the eyes of the other mourners. And known that he could not rebut them. He should have saved her. He should have been capable of it. But in the end all he had managed to do was to save himself.

  ‘When love fails, self-preservation takes over,’ Alice Myers, Sally’s oldest friend, had said to him afterwards. She had not troubled to explain her remark. She had not needed to.

  Umber had returned to Turkey the following morning. In simple terms, he had fled. He had been home since, of course. But only now, on this long drive across half of Europe, did he feel that his flight might at last be over.

  It was after dark, in a service area near Aachen, over coffee and baguettes, that Sharp unveiled his plan.

  ‘There’s nothing very sophisticated about it. Checking facts and asking questions is what it amounts to. I want to know two things. One, who sent me the letter? Two, what really happened at Avebury on the twenty-seventh of July, 1981? Maybe that’s basically the same question. We’ll see. The great thing is to look on the passage of time as a blessing, not a curse.’

  ‘How can it be?’

  ‘Because it means we can forget all that forensic crap. I never really trusted the white-coated brigade anyway. Fingerprints. Bloodstains. Fibre samples. They don’t come into it. But time? That’s a different matter. It reveals a pattern. What the people touched by the abduction of Tamsin Hall and the murder of Miranda Hall have done in the years since is the evidence we’re going to sift.’

  ‘And what have they done?’

  ‘Well, you and Sally – sadly – we know about. That brings us to the Hall family. How much do you know about them?’

  ‘We heard the Halls had split up.’

  Sharp nodded. ‘It’s not uncommon in cases like this. The death of a child. The loss of another. The parents cling together at first, then drift apart. Their lives are shattered. In the end, it becomes easier to rebuild them separately. The Halls divorced while I was still in Wiltshire. Jane Hall married a local wine merchant. Name of Questred. He used to keep a shop in Marlborough. With any luck, he still does. They had a child of their own, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I did know.’

  ‘A daughter.’

  ‘Sally had an aunt in Hungerford who seemed to think she needed to be kept informed about that sort of thing.’

  ‘When you’d rather she’d been allowed to forget the Halls.’

  ‘What about Oliver Hall? He didn’t register on Aunt’s radar. Banker, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Not sure, technically. Stockbroker. Financial consultant. Something like that. A money man. Retired to Jersey, I gather. That must make him a mega-money man. None of which brings his daughters back to him, of course. Also remarried. But no more children.’

  ‘And the son?’

  ‘Went to live with his father after his mother remarried. That was before his father pulled the same trick. Then …’ Sharp shrugged. ‘I never had any cause to find out. Until now.’

  ‘None of these people are going to want to talk to us, George.’

  ‘I can be very persuasive. You’ll just have to follow my example.’

  ‘Who else do you intend to contact?’

  ‘The other witnesses. If they’re still in the land of the living. Collingwood was seventy-odd and shaky. I’ll check, but I’m not optimistic. Nevinson’s a better bet. Unless one of the stones has keeled over on top of him, I guess he’ll still be hanging around Avebury. He and his sister lived with their mother on the council estate at Avebury Trusloe – where they put the villagers whose houses were pulled down in the Fifties. Aside from nature taking its course where the mother’s concerned I can’t see much having changed there.’

  ‘But a nutter, by your reckoning.’

  ‘Sending me a letter made up of old Junius quotes could be right up his street.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a thought. Could Nevinson be Griffin?’

  ‘Nevinson?’

  The fellow had been there, at Avebury, with Umber, standing helplessly by the body of Miranda Hall, while they had waited for the emergency services to arrive. Customers from the Red Lion had joined them. Everyone, including those who had not seen the event itself, had been shocked, talking in soft, distracted undertones. The landlady had taken Sally and Jeremy into the pub, leaving Umber and Nevinson out on the road, watching the blood soak slowly through the blanket that someone had draped over poor dead little Miranda. They must have spoken to each other. They must have done. But Umber could remember nothing of what they had said.

  ‘He can’t be Griffin. I’d have recognized his voice.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Of course. I’d have been bound to. It was only two days since I’d spoken to Griffin.’

  ‘OK. Fine. But that leaves us with a problem.’

  ‘Who is Griffin?’ Umber mused, versifying the words in the style of Who is Sylvia? ‘What is he?’

  * * *

  Umber left Sharp dozing in the passengers’ lounge during the ferry crossing and went on deck to watch the patchy moonlight skittering across the Channel. It was a still, cold night. Dover glowed amber ahead, Dunkirk astern. He found himself remembering his one and only conversation with the mysterious Mr Griffin, replaying it in his mind, as close to word for word as he could manage, so close, indeed, that he could almost swear they were the words, exact and verbatim.

  Saturday afternoon, 25 July 1981. Umber was watching cricket on the television. He heard the telephone ring, but left his mother to answer it. Then she called to him, ‘It’s for you, David.’ He watched one more delivery before ambling out into the hall.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘David Umber?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t know me, Mr Umber.’ The voice sounded silken, muffled, faintly effete. ‘My name is Griffin.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m in Oxford.’ The phrasing somehow implied that Oxford was not Griffin’s normal stamping-ground. ‘I’ve heard about your … Junian researches.’ This phrase too seemed loaded. The use of the adjective Junian suggested close familiarity with the letters and the controversy over their authorship.

  ‘How did you—’

  ‘I have something that may interest you. Something germane to your research.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘It’s a rather unusual copy of the 1773 edition of the letters.’ That, as Umber was well aware, meant the second edition, incorporating an index and table of contents, for which Junius had told Woodfall he would wait before his bespoke copy was produced. ‘Vellum-bound and gilt-edged. Very handsome.’

  ‘Vellum-bound … and gilt-edged?’ Umber could not believe his ears.

  ‘Quite so. Complete with an illuminating and more than somewhat surprising inscription.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘No. I’m in earnest, I assure you.’

  ‘But … you can’t be.’

  ‘I understand your incredulity. But I speak the absolute truth. I have what I describe. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘What does the inscription say?’

  ‘I can’t discuss that over the telephone. If you’re interested, I think we should meet.’

  �
�Of course I’m interested.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I can come up to Oxford tomorrow.’

  ‘This is no business for the sabbath.’ Once again there came a hint of other-worldliness. It struck Umber that his caller sounded more like a man of the eighteenth century than the twentieth. ‘Would Monday suit?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But not Oxford. There are too many eyes and ears in this city. Do you know Avebury?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of.’

  ‘Let’s meet at the village inn. The Red Lion. I’ll be there at half past twelve.’

  ‘I can make that.’

  ‘Good. It won’t be a wasted journey. I think I can promise you that.’

  ‘Look, Mr Griffin, I—’

  ‘Until Monday.’

  With that the line went dead.

  And it had stayed dead for twenty-three years, subsumed and forgotten in the wake of the tragedy that had struck at Avebury two days later, engulfing all those who had been there to witness it. ‘It won’t be a wasted journey,’ Griffin had said. ‘I think I can promise you that.’

  Dover in the small hours of a chill March morning did not make for a gala homecoming. Sharp’s doze aboard the ferry had left him taciturn and liverish. Umber was tired and dispirited. Leaving Prague suddenly felt like a huge mistake. Little was said as they followed the signs for the motorway and headed towards London.

  Sharp stopped at a service area near Maidstone and announced he would be stretching out in the back of the van for the rest of the night. Umber retreated to the cafeteria.

  Come dawn Sharp was as bright as a lark, tucking into a full English breakfast after a wash and a shave in the service area toilets. Umber was bleary-eyed and mentally drained. He did not even ask where they were going next. Somewhere between Maidstone and the M25, he fell asleep.

  FIVE

  ‘WE’RE THERE,’ SHARP announced, turning off the engine and opening his window to admit a gust of cold air.

  Umber woke with a start. ‘What?’ he coughed and blinked around him. ‘Where?’

  ‘Avebury.’

  ‘Christ. You never said …’ Umber struggled to compose his thoughts. He had been to Avebury several times in the months following the tragedy and had driven through it, alone, maybe twice since. Sally’s horror of the place had ruled out any other return visits, even if Umber had wanted to undertake them. They were in the High Street car park, he realized. Looking out of his window, he could see the village post office on the other side of the road. Straight ahead, the tower of St James’s Church was visible beyond the trees fringing the churchyard. ‘You never said we were coming straight here.’