‘Was Meryl Landguard involved?’ asked Strathen.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Perhaps Timothy Landguard also knew what he was carrying. If not him then someone on the Mary Jo did, and maybe more than one person.’
‘The phoney crew.’
Marvik nodded. ‘The Mary Jo was engaged to rendezvous with the buyers, as we’d already speculated, not to collect drugs but to deliver a toxic chemical – one which could have wiped out that crew swiftly and silently, causing the Mary Jo to drift and disappear into the ice of the Arctic. Maybe the chemical package got damaged in transit, or one of the crew accidentally tampered with it before they could deliver it. Or perhaps they delivered one consignment successfully and didn’t realize there was another on board which killed them before they could head on to Newfoundland.’ Marvik sat forward. ‘Bradshaw and his accomplice, the killer, could have hoped they’d found a new way to smuggle chemicals to terrorists but perhaps the fact that it went wrong persuaded them to shut down that route and particular trade. Bradshaw stayed put and made his money out of the insurance and accounting fraud, along with Meryl Landguard, but the third man in this with them took off.’
‘Or never returned because he was on the Mary Jo.’
Marvik could see what Strathen was driving at. He said, ‘You could be right. The other man involved in this collected the money, then got off the Mary Jo and vanished into the sunset, leaving the boat to drift with the remaining crew dead on board. Could it be Timothy Landguard?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Did Gavin discover this and tell Bradshaw that Landguard was still alive and where he was, and Bradshaw thought he was owed a lot more than he’d got and demanded it?’
‘He was an idiot, then.’ Strathen swallowed his coffee and pushed down the lid of his computer.
Marvik frowned in thought. ‘Did Royden know who it was or did he discover it after our conversation on my boat? Maybe I jogged his memory enough to get him killed as a result. Did Jemma know the extent of what she was involved in?’
‘Bradshaw, or our killer, could have told her the chemicals were needed for a beneficial project, or perhaps she didn’t care about the war and the damage it would wreak on humans. The challenge to obtain them might have been enough for her not to bother asking too many questions.’
‘Or perhaps he spun her a line that she was working for British intelligence on a covert IT project to help flush out terrorists.’
‘That would fit,’ Strathen said, digesting this.
‘But why didn’t Gavin write to MI5?’
‘Because GCHQ monitor conversations and pick up intelligence via the Internet. Gavin would have considered them a natural home for his information. Or perhaps Jemma had sent Gavin a message to say she was testing IT intelligence on behalf of someone working for GCHQ. He thought nothing of it at the time, not until last year when he started to look into her death. Whoever hired her could have said he’d heard about her talents and that he needed someone with excellent computer hacking skills, and that if she proved her worth she’d be recommended for more projects with GCHQ.’
‘I wonder how Bradshaw, if it was him, or the killer, located her,’ Marvik mused.
‘I’ve managed to contact the secretary of the Polish Society, Mrs Monika Podanski. She says she remembers Jemma Duisky, or rather the manner of her death. She took responsibility for burying her.’
‘Did she dispose of her personal belongings, including her computer?’
‘We can ask her. I’ve arranged to meet her at Jemma’s grave at eleven o’clock.’
Marvik rose; Strathen followed suit. Outside, as they made for the car, Strathen said, ‘Our killer is clever, scheming, manipulative and probably has others working for him who will do as they’re told. If we’re right about the chemicals then he must have known something about them, which could indicate he has a military background or that he worked for the intelligence service.’
‘Perhaps he worked as a pharmacist, chemist or …’ Marvik paused as something Royden had said flashed into his mind. He rapidly put that with what Stapledon had told him. Eagerly, he continued, ‘Or he worked with chemicals, transporting them by sea or salvaging them from a marine casualty, which brings us back to Timothy Landguard or another member of the crew on the Mary Jo. Perhaps there was a chemical incident at sea that triggered the idea for smuggling.’
‘I can check out the marine casualties via the marine accident investigation reports, but it couldn’t have been a major disaster or chemical spill because I’d remember it.’
Marvik would also and nothing rang a bell with him.
Strathen started the car. ‘Let’s hope Mrs Podanski can tell us more about Jemma.’
Marvik didn’t hold out much hope of that. How could she when all she’d done was bury the poor girl?
For the second time in a week, Marvik found himself staring at the gravestone of a young woman, only this time it was one he had never met. The first had been Sarah’s grave in the cemetery in Southampton, on the same day he’d visited Nigel Bell and asked him about his parents’ belongings and papers. Jemma’s grave told them nothing about her save the year she was born and the year she died, but heading towards them was the squat figure of a woman in her late sixties with a bunch of white chrysanthemums in her hand, windblown silver-grey hair and a broad smile on her friendly, fair face. She threw Marvik a surprised glance as her eyes flicked over his scars and then took in Strathen.
‘You lads look as though you’ve been in the wars, literally,’ she said, concerned rather than fearful.
‘We’re not terrorists,’ Strathen replied with a smile, extending his hand and making the introductions.
‘Didn’t think you were.’ She returned the smile. ‘Army?’
‘Royal Marines.’
‘Why are the Marines interested in Jemma?’
‘They’re not – we are. We’re no longer in the armed forces. It’s rather complicated and confidential.’ But Strathen didn’t get the chance to elaborate, which Marvik thought was a good thing, because Monika Podanski was keen to talk – another plus factor, he thought.
‘Is it to do with Jemma’s mother, Elona Kadowski?’ she said slightly breathlessly. ‘Her being Russian?’
Marvik threw Strathen a look. ‘We’re not sure,’ he answered evasively and truthfully. ‘Perhaps you can tell us what you know.’
‘Of course.’ She placed her flowers on the grave and straightened up.
‘Shall we sit down?’ Strathen indicated the bench between two blossoming trees. They crossed to it.
When seated, Monika Podanski began. ‘Elona Kadowski was a very talented Russian artist. Famous in her early days and even more sought after following her death, but that’s often the way with the creative arts, isn’t it, sadly. She was commissioned to paint murals in public buildings and her work was also exhibited and bought by Russian officials. She was a futurist. Do you know what that is?’
Strathen answered, ‘It’s a twentieth-century art movement. Futurists loathed ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. They loved speed, noise, machines, pollution, cars, cities, the industrial town.’
‘Yes.’ She beamed at him as though he was a pupil who had just answered a difficult question. Marvik wondered if she had been a teacher – perhaps she was one still. He liked her enthusiasm. It reminded him of Sarah when she had spoken to him in that steamy café on Swanage seafront about her passion for marine archaeology. He pushed the thought from his mind and put his full attention on Mrs Podanski.
‘It was largely an Italian phenomenon,’ she was saying. ‘Although there were parallel movements in both Russia and England. Elona, at first, imitated to a certain degree the work of Natalia Goncharova who left Russia in 1915 and died in poverty in Paris in 1962. She was a major figure in early twentieth-century Russian art and is now one of the most highly priced Russian artists in history.’
‘You’ve done a lot of research,’ Marvik said.
‘I enjoyed it, or rather I would have done if the reason for it hadn’t been so tragic. If only Jemma had contacted us. We would have helped her not to feel so alone.’ Her face fell and, in the silence she left, a blackbird squawked and chirped noisily as someone invaded its territory. Marvik looked across in its direction to see a man in his seventies pause by a grave.
Mrs Podanski resumed. ‘Elona fell out of favour with the Soviet government in 1967 because her work became too futuristic. She began to portray Soviet Russia as it really was. Her paintings were seized and burned and her public murals were taken down and destroyed. She fled to Poland, which was then Soviet-backed, where she met Edward Duisky, Jemma’s father. He was a Polish Jew and a mathematics lecturer at Warsaw University. He was also a very talented musician, but in March 1968 events at Warsaw University – the banning of the performance of a play by Adam Mickiewicz at the Polish Theatre on the grounds that it contained anti-Soviet references – was used by the authorities to launch an anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic, or rather anti-Zionist campaign, and about twenty thousand Jews lost their jobs, including Edward. He and Elona were forced to flee Poland and came to England. Jemma, their only child, was born in 1983. By then Edward was sixty-eight and Elona forty-one, very old for first-time parents in those days, not quite so old nowadays. They never married. Edward died in 1987 and Elona thirteen years later in March 2000. I couldn’t trace any living relatives and I asked both the Polish and Russian embassies for assistance. Whether they tried to find any I don’t know, but no relative contacted me and nobody attended Jemma’s funeral, except myself and few other members of the Polish community here.’
‘Did you contact anyone in the art world?’ asked Strathen.
‘Yes. Sotheby’s put me in touch with the Tate gallery in London. They have one of Elona’s paintings, which they bought at an auction in Moscow in November 2000, only eight months after Elona had died. It was one of three paintings found in the basement of a government building in Moscow, which was being demolished. The person I spoke to said they had discovered that Elona had died in England but they weren’t aware of any child. Jemma’s birth was registered in her father’s name and, although Elona is named on Jemma’s birth certificate as the mother because there was no marriage certificate, they didn’t look for any offspring. Elona and Edward are buried in Hastings where they lived. I don’t know who attended their funerals. Of course, Jemma was only four when her father died and only seventeen when she lost her mother. Perhaps she handled her mother’s funeral alone or had friends and neighbours to help her but no one in the Hastings and District Polish Society knew of it, or of Elona and Jemma. I got the impression that Elona and her family kept a very low profile. Edward was a lecturer at Hastings College. If Elona continued to paint when she arrived in England then the pictures have either been destroyed or are lingering in people’s houses – the owners totally unaware of who she was. The person at the Tate seemed very surprised when I said there was a daughter.’
Did Jemma know of her mother’s fame, Marvik wondered, and want no part of it, or had she been completely ignorant of it? Surely someone like Jemma would have searched the Internet for background on her mother. But if her mother had never revealed her surname then Jemma had no reason to look for it; it wouldn’t have been until Elona died that Jemma would have discovered her name, but even then she might not have been curious, and her mother had kept the fact she was a painter from her. Something nagged at the back of his mind but he couldn’t pinpoint it.
He said, ‘Were the paintings dated?’
‘No, but the experts believe they were painted in the mid-sixties, sometime between 1964 and 1967.’
Again, something jarred with Marvik. Was it the date?
‘When I saw how Jemma had been living in that squalid, poky flat I felt very angry and upset. She should have had something from the sale of those paintings. That money might have prevented her from ending her life in so dreadful a way.’
Keenly, Marvik said, ‘You went to her flat?’
She nodded. ‘The police checked her family background and, discovering her father was Polish, contacted me. I said I would do all I could to help. They didn’t know her mother was a renowned artist – neither did I, not then. We also helped with the costs of burying her from our funds.’
‘Was there a computer among her belongings or a mobile phone?’
‘No. Nothing like that. Just a few clothes, shoes, a couple of photographs of her mother and father, which were buried with her, and that was it. So sad.’
Marvik couldn’t help his thoughts returning to Sarah. She’d had no living relatives and her funeral had been a depressing affair with a handful of former colleagues and a few friends, which was more than Jemma had had.
‘Was there any correspondence in Jemma’s flat?’
‘Nothing. And no personal papers. I’m sorry but I must be going.’ She rose and they followed suit. ‘I’m not sure I’ve helped you much,’ she said, turning towards the cemetery entrance.
Strathen answered, ‘You’ve helped a great deal.’
She beamed at him.
He said, ‘How much were those paintings in Moscow sold for?’
‘That’s the sad thing, when you think of how Jemma died. They fetched four million pounds.’
Marvik saw Strathen’s astonishment, which he knew must be mirrored on his own face. His mind whirled with thoughts and at last what had been eluding him crystallized into a conversation he’d had five days ago at the start of this mission on board his boat with Crowder. And with it came the realization that they’d been looking for explanations and motives in completely the wrong place.
TWENTY-ONE
‘Nice lady,’ Strathen said as they climbed into his car.
‘And a nice fortune Jemma’s mother would have left behind if she had died after those paintings had been found and auctioned and Jemma had been located. The authorities in Russia didn’t bother to search for any relatives, they just wanted the money from the sale, and the art galleries didn’t bother either, but I think someone looked very hard to find Jemma Duisky, or rather to see if there were any living dependents of Elona.’
Strathen eyed him curiously.
Marvik eagerly began to relay the thoughts that had rushed through his mind. ‘They might not have been the only paintings Elona left behind. Crowder said the Celeste started life as the MS Lyudmila, a small Russian cruise ship built in East Germany in 1961 for the Soviet Union’s Baltic Shipping Company and launched in 1964. When she was withdrawn from service in 1979 she sat in the Murmansk shipyard for six years with everything inside her intact, including ornamental structures and balustrades made of bronze and silver, and that’s not all. He said there were murals on board. When I mentioned that to Royden he looked surprised. I thought it was because I knew more about the Celeste than he’d anticipated but perhaps it was the fact that he hadn’t heard about any murals being on board. But whoever handled the dismantling of the Celeste had.’
‘This Marcus Kiln who doesn’t exist as far as I can find,’ Strathen said. ‘There is nothing on him, no register of birth or death.’
‘Another phoney, who nobody saw. I’ve nothing to say for certain that Elona painted those murals on the Celeste but I’m betting she did and that they survived the refit by the Norwegian owners. I wish we had pictures of the interior of the Celeste.’
‘I might be able to find some online and those paintings of Elona’s that were auctioned.’ Strathen started the car. ‘I can get a faster connection to the Internet on the seafront.’
Marvik’s mind was racing. As they headed there, he continued, ‘Royden told me that Bradshaw had served on cruise liners – maybe one of those was the Celeste. But if he’d known the true worth of the murals he wouldn’t have risked bringing the Celeste back to Britain to be scrapped. Here they might have been recognized. And as I said, I don’t think Royden knew about them, otherwise he could have retired on the money he got from the sale of
them.’
‘He could have it stashed away in an offshore account.’
‘Then why was he killed?’
‘Because he was in league with Kiln, who helped him to sell the murals from India. Much easier to offload them there on to private buyers from Hong Kong, Russia and Singapore than over here.’
‘Must have taken a lot of planning.’
‘And time to locate and build relationships with buyers who not only had the money and the desire to own such paintings but who were also as unscrupulous as the seller and didn’t care how they were acquired.’
‘And Royden only got the contract for the Celeste after the Mary Jo disappeared. He said he thought he was going to get it first time round and Kiln was counting on it, but Bradshaw did a private deal with someone to switch bringing the Celeste to Britain. And that meant the Mary Jo had to be taken out.’
‘Hence the purchase of the chemicals. Not to smuggle to terrorists but to wipe out the crew of the Mary Jo. Whoever is behind this could have told Jemma it was the only way she could get her hands on her inheritance.’
‘Yes, and the loss of the Mary Jo meant Duncan Helmslow wouldn’t be able to fulfil the contract so it was taken over by Royden.’
Strathen turned on to the seafront. He parked up and was soon engrossed on his computer interrogating the Internet. Marvik left him to it. He needed air and time to think. So much seemed to be happening and their enquiries were leading them into new and unexpected territory, but he felt instinctively that at last they were on the right track. He was only sorry that it had taken so long to get there and had incurred more deaths – Royden’s – not to mention Marvik’s concerns about Meryl and Stephen Landguard. Then there was Karen and the child. He hoped to God they were safe. Should he call Crowder and ask him to find them? But he couldn’t because that would involve alerting the police and scaring off the killer who, if he hadn’t already silenced them, wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Who else did he have on his slaughter list? Stapledon? Or was Stapledon their killer? If he was then he was damn good at hiding the proceeds from the sale of those murals and living as though he depended only on his salary from the charity. At least Helen was safe in Eastbourne police station.
Lost Voyage Page 21
