* * *
Umber started walking along the lane in the direction the van had taken, reasoning fuzzily that a main road was likely to be closer ahead than behind. His throat was dry, his lips were sore from the tape, his eyes were aching from constriction by the blindfold and the wound on the back of his head was throbbing. One of his knees was also paining him, having taken some kind of knock while he was being bundled into the van in St Helier.
Unfortunately, none of these discomforts had the merit of taking his mind off the deal he had notionally struck. He was lost in the Jersey countryside and part of him would have been happy to stay lost. Within three days, he was required to betray Chantelle to her pursuers, something he had no intention of doing. But what was he to do instead? Who was he to betray in her place? He plucked the card he had been given out of his pocket and looked at the number printed on it. There was no clue to be found there, no message but the one already conveyed to him, calmly, clearly and implacably. An answer was required of him by Friday. And only one kind of answer would suffice.
TWENTY-NINE
A LIMPING FORTY-MINUTE hike through a maze of lanes took Umber to the village of Maufant, where he had to wait more than half an hour for a bus back to St Helier. It was gone one o’clock by the time he was delivered to Liberation Square. Limping now more heavily than ever, he hurried up Pier Road to the multi-storey, hoping on balance he would find the hire car gone – and Chantelle with it.
But the car was where he had parked it. As he caught sight of it in the bay ahead of him, he hardly knew what to expect to find inside. Surely Chantelle could not still be waiting for him, more than three hours beyond the deadline he had set for his return.
She was not. It was a relief in a way, though also a disappointment. He did not like to consider what thoughts would be going through her head. She would be frightened, alone and uncertain what to do. And she had good reason to be frightened. The reason was if anything better than she knew.
The car was unlocked, the key still in the ignition. She must have left on foot, which worried him, since driving straight to the Airport would have been her best bet for a swift departure. He opened the boot. Her bag had gone, along with the Juniuses. His bag – and his box of Junius-related papers – remained.
Where had she gone? What would she have decided to do once it had become clear he was not coming back? She might have gone to look for him at Le Templier & Burnouf. If so, she would have drawn a blank. What then? The absence of the Juniuses suggested she had paid at least some attention to what he had said. Logically, she must have resolved to leave Jersey. But why not take the car? Perhaps, it occurred to him, she simply could not drive. Stupidly, he had not bothered to check the point. Or perhaps, it also occurred to him, she had left by ferry. St Malo was only an hour and a bit away.
He drove down to the Harbour, frustrated by the slowness of the lunchtime traffic, parked in front of the ferry terminal and hurried inside. The girl at the Condor information desk told him a ferry had sailed for St Malo at noon; the next one sailed at six. His description of Chantelle rang no bells.
The timings proved nothing anyway. It was equally possible Chantelle had taken a bus to the Airport and flown out. Umber had to assume she would do as he had told her and make for London. If so, she would contact Claire. He decided to call Claire himself and forewarn her.
But all he got on her practice number was the answerphone. And her mobile was switched off. He got no response from Alice’s home number either. He left a message on none of them; there was no telling who might end up hearing it. Then he went back to the car and headed for the Airport.
He knew the BA flight times to Gatwick, having phoned an information line before leaving Grève de Lecq that morning. He was too late for the 1.30, though Chantelle of course would not have been. The next flight was at 5.30. There was no way he could be in London before early evening.
It was a quiet and orderly afternoon at the States Airport. Umber parked the car, heaved his bag and box of notes out of the boot and carried them into the terminal building. He dropped off the keys, then made for the BA desk.
There was no queue and the woman on duty was chatting with a female colleague as he approached. One of them had a newspaper open in her hands. The name ‘Jeremy Hall’ reached Umber’s ears an instant before they noticed him and he peeled off to inspect a rack of leaflets, remaining within earshot as their conversation continued.
‘The coffin was on the one-thirty flight. His mother was aboard. I saw her in the club lounge waiting for take-off. Like a ghost, she was. So pale.’
‘Was the father with her?’
‘Not sure. There was a man. But he didn’t look like this picture of Oliver Hall.’
‘The second husband, then.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It must be dreadful for all of them. Just dreadful.’
Umber had heard enough. He interrupted and booked himself onto the 5.30 flight. His eye strayed to the newspaper they had been reading. It was that afternoon’s Jersey Evening Post. He could see photographs of Jeremy and Oliver Hall beneath the headline MURDERED GIRLS’ BROTHER TO BE BURIED IN ENGLAND. It seemed that in one way at least he had had a narrow escape. But what about Chantelle? Was it possible she had been on the same flight as her mother – and her dead brother? He felt sick at the thought, unable to imagine what the consequences of such a coincidence might be.
After checking-in his box of notes as hold luggage, Umber headed back to the news stand and bought a copy of the paper. He sat down and read the article through.
An inquest was opened and adjourned yesterday into the death last week of Jeremy Hall, proprietor of Rollers Sail & Surf, St Aubin, and brother of the two girls slain in the infamous 1981 Avebury murder case. Jeremy was found dead at the Waterworks Valley home of his father, Oliver Hall, who told the Post after the hearing that he was very grateful for the many messages of sympathy he had received since the news broke. Mr Hall said Jeremy would be buried next to his sister Miranda in Marlborough, Wilts, in accordance with his mother’s wishes. Mr Hall also said he knew of no connection between his son’s death and the arrest in St Helier earlier last week on smuggling charges of a retired police officer said to have been prominently involved in the 1981 murder inquiry.
The article only heightened Umber’s fears, formless though many of them were. He made for the payphones and called Claire again. It was the same story: recorded messages at the practice and Alice’s house and no joy on Claire’s mobile. Nor did the story change at the second, third, fourth or fifth time of trying. Eventually, he gave up.
The flight, short as it was, felt agonizingly protracted to Umber. Several drinks failed to quell the whirl of his anxious thoughts. It was too late to expect an answer from Claire’s practice by the time he made it through baggage reclaim and Customs at Gatwick. But she or Alice really ought to be answering on the Hampstead number. Except that they were not. And the mobile was still switched off.
Umber’s only recourse now was to head for Hampstead and hope to find them in when he arrived. Even if he had not been in a hurry, he would have taken a taxi after the Gatwick Express had delivered him to Victoria; the box he was carrying seemed to weigh more every time he picked it up. Even so, the journey contrived to take longer than the flight from Jersey and it was gone 8.30 when the taxi pulled up outside 22 Willow Hill.
The hall light was on, but the ground and first-floor rooms were in darkness. Claire’s TVR was not parked nearby. The auguries were far from good. Umber had wheedled an undertaking out of Claire to dissuade Alice from going to Monte Carlo to grill Michel Tinaud. But it was beginning to look as if they had both overestimated her powers of dissuasion. Or perhaps she had simply tired of waiting to hear from him. He had asked for a few days’ grace and, technically, that is what he had already had.
The lights were on in the top-floor flat. It was occupied by an articled clerk called Piers. Alice had made several references to him, though Umber had n
ot actually met him. Telling the taxi driver to wait, Umber clambered out, hurried to the door and pressed the bell next to the neatly printed label PIERS BURTON.
There was no intercom system and consequently no way to tell whether Piers was going to respond or not, until, just as Umber was about to give the bell a second prod, the door opened. A sleepy-eyed, curly-haired young man in fogeyish casual wear regarded him through owlish, black-framed glasses and ventured a wary hello.
‘Piers, right?’
‘Yes. I—’
‘I’m David.’ Some instinct deterred Umber from volunteering his surname, sharing it as he did with a deceased former tenant of Piers’s flat. ‘I’m, er … a friend of Alice’s. I was staying here at the weekend.’
‘I was out of town.’
‘Well, we’d probably have bumped into each other if you’d been here.’
‘Probably.’
‘Look, the thing is—’
‘Alice isn’t here.’
‘So I see. Has she gone away?’
‘Yes. Last-minute decision, apparently. There was a note waiting for me when I got home this evening. She’s taken off with her friend Claire. She’s been staying here. I know that.’ There was a hint in his tone that Claire’s presence in the house was something he could vouch for, whereas Umber’s was altogether more debatable.
‘Did the note say where they’d gone?’
‘No. Maybe she didn’t want to make me feel envious.’
‘What about for how long?’
‘Open-ended, apparently. A few days. A week. She wasn’t sure.’
‘Right.’ Monte Carlo it had to be. Claire’s mobile had probably been switched off during the flight. If Chantelle had tried to contact her, she would not have succeeded. The fail-safe Umber had supplied her with had proved to be useless. ‘Well, thanks.’
‘No problem.’
No problem to Piers, perhaps. For Umber the situation was much more complicated. He went back to the cab and climbed in.
‘Where to now, guv’?’ the taxi driver prompted, when ten seconds or so had passed without a destination being supplied.
‘I …’ Umber thought of what Chantelle had done after fleeing Tinaud’s rented apartment in Wimbledon five years ago. It was possible – just – that she had done the same after trying to speak to Claire. ‘A hotel near Euston station.’
‘There are quite a few, guv”.
‘Near as in opposite.’
‘There’s a Travel Inn on the other side of Euston Road. That’d be more or less opposite.’
‘Then that’ll do.’
* * *
It was a long shot and Umber was disappointed but not surprised to be told there was nobody called Fontanet – or even Hedgecoe – staying at the Euston Travel Inn. Fast running out of options, he booked himself in for the night. He thought about trying Claire’s mobile again, then thought better of it for reasons that had only just begun to take shape in his mind.
He did some more thinking in the large and noisy pub a few doors along from the hotel. There was nothing Claire could do for Chantelle in Monte Carlo. If she and Alice were intent on confronting Tinaud, it might be better, in fact, if they knew as little as possible about his errant former girlfriend’s whereabouts.
But that conclusion left Umber alone and resource-less. If he was no better placed come Friday, the roof would fall in on all of them. He had to do something. He had to seize the initiative. But how? With what? There was nothing: no answer; no hope.
Then, quite suddenly, around the time a tsunami of cheers burst over him following a goal in the football match splashed across the pub’s widescreen TV, the glimmer of an answer came to him. And with it a sliver of hope.
Junius held the key. Chantelle had said as much and maybe she was right. Wisby believed Griffin had been done away with by Tamsin’s abductors. His special edition of Junius’s letters had ended up in the hands of Marilyn Hall. Did that make her one of the abductors? If so, it was a chink in the armour of whoever she had been acting for – the juicy-voiced man in the car for one. If Umber could pin Griffin’s murder on her, it would give him a bargaining chip, maybe a decisive one. It was a tall order. It required him to trace the previously untraceable Griffin. And that brought him back to the hunt for Junius himself, a hunt in which he had made only faltering progress. But something had changed now. Something had been returned to him. And it was time to remind himself what it contained.
THIRTY
OPENING THE JUNIUS box returned Umber for the duration of a sleepless night to a long unremembered past: his past, before Avebury, before the last Monday in July, 1981. His life had been so simple then, so unfettered. A sense of that freedom reached him from every eagerly scribbled note, every neatly labelled batch of papers. They were the work of a younger, keener-eyed, sharper-brained man, a man who believed academic zeal was the best and surest way to prise a secret from its history.
Separate bundles of notes and photocopied documents recalled to Umber the time and effort he had devoted to each. THE CHATHAM SPEECH. If, as Junius implied, he was in the House of Lords gallery when Lord Chatham made a speech attacking Lord Mansfield on 10 December 1770, who among the Junian candidates did that date and location eliminate? THE FITZPATRICK CONNECTION. A French spy reported to Louis XVI that Junius was actually Thady Fitzpatrick, smoothtongued man about town, an idea scotched by Fitzpatrick’s death several months before the letters stopped. But who among his boon companions might be a more plausible suspect? THE GILES LETTER. In December 1771, a Miss Giles of Bath received an amorous poem from an anonymous admirer, accompanied by a note of commendation in a hand now commonly agreed to be Junius’s, although the poem itself was in a different, less distinctive hand. With how many Junian candidates could Miss Giles and her family be linked? THE HIGHGATE SOURCE. Examination of postmarks revealed that a significant number of the Junius letters were despatched to the Public Advertiser by penny post from the Highgate Village post office. Which of the candidates lived in Highgate or had friends or relatives who lived there? THE JUNIA EXCHANGE. Goaded by a provocative letter from a woman calling herself Junia, printed in the Public Advertiser on 5 September 1769, Junius replied in flirtatious vein two days later, then almost immediately wrote to Woodfall asking him to print a denial that the reply was his work, blaming the lapse on ‘people about me’. Did this raise the serious possibility that the letters were collaborative compositions and, if so, could such collaborators be found among the Junian candidates? THE COURIER QUESTION. Junius began a letter to Woodfall on 18 January 1772 with the tantalizing statement ‘The gentleman who transacts the conveyancing part of our correspondence tells me there was much difficulty last night’. Woodfall’s letters to Junius were always left at one of several prearranged coffee-house drops around the Strand. So, did Junius always use the same courier for their collection? Was that person also responsible for posting Junius’s letters to Woodfall? And, if so, was there any evidence as to his identity? THE FRANCISCAN THEORY. Would an exhaustive analysis of the known movements and activities of the hot favourite among the candidates, War Office clerk Philip Francis, reveal any occasion on which he was quite simply in the wrong place and/or at the wrong time to be Junius? THE AMANUENSES. What were …
Ah yes. The amanuenses. They were the point Umber’s researches had arrived at towards the end of the Trinity term of 1981. And there was what he was looking for, in a clutch of papers labelled Christabella Dayrolles. He sifted eagerly through them, in search of the notes he knew he must have made during his inspection of the Ventry Papers, likely repository of any clue that Christabella Dayrolles had written the letters at Junius’s dictation.
But Umber had forgotten less than he thought. He had evidently examined everything there was to be examined on the uncelebrated doings of the wife of Lord Chesterfield’s friend, godson and confidant, Solomon Dayrolles. The truth was that this amounted to very little. Christabella Dayrolles had stubbornly refused to emerge from her husband’s shad
ow. If she was Junius’s amanuensis, he had clearly chosen wisely. Her discretion alone had survived her.
As for the Ventry Papers, there was the briefest of notes, written by Umber, it seemed to his older self, in a mood of some exasperation. Staffs Record Office, 16/7/81. Ventry Papers. Tedious screeds of estate correspondence. Family refs almost all to Ventry side. Prob a dead end, but worth checking Kew ref in sister’s letter to Mrs V of 19 Oct 1791.
What was the Kew reference? The note did not say. It had not needed to, of course. Umber had intended to follow it up long before there was any danger of forgetting it. But eleven days after his visit to the Staffordshire Record Office, something had happened to put such matters out of his mind. Which is where they had remained. Until now.
The choice had been made for him. He had to go to Stafford and nail down the reference. It might be a waste of precious time, but he could not know that without going. He had intended to go before now and been sidetracked. He was not about to let himself be sidetracked again. Waldron had probably glanced at the contents of the box and decided he could safely ignore them. It would be good to prove him wrong.
In attempting to do so, Umber was also trying to prove himself right. Junius was unfinished business in more ways than one. His instinct was to pursue the Ventry lead to the finish. Too often in the past he had failed to follow his instincts. This time would be different. It had to be.
He caught an early enough train from Euston next morning to be in Stafford by nine o’clock, booking a second night at the Travel Inn before he left. Lack of sleep caught up with him disastrously somewhere around Watford, however. He did not wake until the train was pulling into Crewe, the stop after Stafford, two hours later. He then had to wait another hour for a train back to Stafford and did not arrive at the County Records Office until gone eleven o’clock.
It was an infuriatingly bad start. But the staff at the Record Office were soothingly efficient. The Ventry Papers were in his hands within half an hour.
Sight Unseen Page 25
