by Peter Hey
‘Don’t start that again, Jane. Don’t start that again. Don’t start seeing him everywhere.’
She took a deep breath and opened the boot to retrieve her tennis bag. She unzipped it and fumbled around to find her house keys, still mumbling to herself.
‘That couldn’t have been him anyway. You could see that.’
Fifteen minutes later, Jane was in bed with her laptop and a glass of wine. It had been a long day, but it wasn’t physical exhaustion that made her seek the refuge of her duvet. She was tired of being haunted by the ghosts of her childhood and tired of facing them on her own. She swallowed a large mouthful of sauvignon blanc and began to type.
The meeting
Hi Tommy
Just a quick email to update you on the meeting today. I thought I’d type it up quickly while it was fresh in my mind, and I know you’ll probably look at it tonight as you never sleep(!)
I told you I was contacted by a prospective client, Alan Fidel Shaw. More about that middle name later. He wanted me, well us, to trace his mother’s family tree. Unfortunately, it turns out he’s got virtually nothing to go on. His maternal grandparents are long dead, and he doesn’t know their full names or where they were born, except that it might have been somewhere on the south coast. And he has literally no family: no siblings, aunts or uncles. There’s no-one to talk to who might know more. He cleared out all his mother’s stuff when she died, and all he’s got left are a few photos. And a gun – again, I’ll come back to that.
So, I’m thinking the first step is to order his mother’s birth certificate. I’ll do that tomorrow morning and that’ll give us her parents’ names. Hopefully, they won’t be too commonplace and away we’ll go. The good news is that Alan seems a very nice guy and he doesn’t have unrealistic expectations. He knows he’s not giving us much to start from, and I think he’ll be grateful for anything we can find. He’s also going to be on holiday in the Far East for a month, so there are no great time pressures. As always, I’ll get as far as I can on my own and only cry for your help if I get stuck.
I suspect you have at least three questions at this point: Fidel? Gun? What about his paternal side? That’s where it gets intriguing. Alan doesn’t know who his father was. His mother would never say, but she was in Cuba at the time of his conception, just after Fidel Castro took power. There’s a suggestion she slept with Che Guevara, but it probably needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Having said that, Alan is in possession of a 1950s-era automatic pistol that Che apparently gave to his mother. It’s not a military calibre, so I’m not sure what a hardcore guerrilla like Che would be doing with it. Obviously, a DNA test is going to the best way forward. It may throw up nothing other than an idea of ethnicity, but Alan’s keen to give it a go. That’s something else for me to order tomorrow morning.
There’s one other thing Alan’s asked us to look at. I think he was a bit embarrassed because it’s near impossible. I sense he’s going through the motions as he gave his mother a death-bed promise that he’d try. There’s a photo of her and a friend taken sometime in the late 1960s. All Alan knows is that the friend was called Cynthia. And he wants us to find her! Assuming she’s still alive… I’ll see if I can get anywhere, but I don’t think I should waste too much time on it. I’d feel as if I was taking Alan’s money on false pretences if I did.
Other than that, I’ve still got a bit of work to do writing up the current project. Thanks again for your help with that.
I’m hoping you’re still okay for next week? As I said, I’ll meet you in the usual place, and maybe we can chat this new case through. Sarah will say hello, but she won’t join us for lunch as she’s given up eating and wants to do some serious shopping in stores where the prices would make me faint!
But, seriously, it will be nice to have you on my own. I’ve missed you.
Love
Jane xx
PS You’re still my hero for being there when I was grabbed by that prat who my father had spying on me. My dad hasn’t made an appearance, by the way, though I thought I saw him in a car when I came home this evening. It was just some bloke about to drive off. I guess I’m getting jumpy again. I sometimes wish you weren’t so far away, Tommy. Because of what we’ve both been through, I’m not sure anyone understands me like you do.
First steps
Jane was sitting at her dining table, looking out through her new French windows. The glossy white UPVC frames weren’t as attractive as the old wooden ones they replaced, but they were much more sturdy and secure. An idiot with a big screwdriver wouldn’t be forcing them quite so easily. They also opened much wider, and on warm days seemed to bring the small enclosed garden inside. Sadly, the Indian summer had been short-lived, and fallen leaves were starting to obscure the wet grass in a mosaic of gold over lush, shiny green. In the cold morning sun, the mottling of colour helped disguise the fact that the lawn should have been mown one last time before the weather turned. Did it need raking yet? Probably. But not today. Today she needed to work.
Her first task was to order an ancestral DNA test. It would be tight, but with any luck it would be delivered to Alan before he set off on holiday. It involved no more than spitting a sample of saliva into a tube, but the results would take a good month to come through and waiting until he returned from Thailand would incur a significant delay. Jane had meant to order the test the previous evening; tennis, Xander and the silly incident with the man in the car had got in the way. Hopefully, a few hours wouldn’t make much difference.
That done, she brought up the copy of Alan Fidel Shaw’s birth certificate she had snapped with her phone. Her new client had been born in a Solihull maternity hospital in 1961, and his mother was named as Patricia Elizabeth Shaw. The father’s details were left conspicuously blank, and the informant was Patricia herself, giving her address as the house Jane had visited the previous day. The registrar would have taken note of the father’s occupation but was unconcerned with what the mother might or might not do. In normal circumstances, a maiden name would also be recorded and would be the next step back in the maternal chain, but here it was unnecessary.
Having gleaned no more than official confirmation of her full name, Jane turned to Patricia’s own birth. Alan had said that was in Solihull on December 2 1935, and Jane quickly found it in the online index. Patricia E Shaw’s arrival in the world was registered in the last quarter of the year and, most usefully, the entry listed her mother’s original surname as Oakley. To get further details, Jane would need to order a copy of the certificate itself. For the time being, she pressed on with what she had.
According to Alan, his mother’s parents were called John and Birdie, which was somehow short for Elizabeth. Jane searched for Shaw/Oakley marriages in the decade before Patricia was born and the combination proved helpfully unusual, with only two coming up. John F Shaw had married Elizabeth R Oakley in Portsmouth towards the end of 1930 and John A Shaw had married Bertha E Oakley in Southend in the first months of 1934.
At first sight, the earlier record seemed by far the most promising as both forenames were right and Alan had suggested his grandparents came from somewhere on the south coast, a criterion which Portsmouth met. But Alan had also explicitly mentioned Southend. Was it possible the Essex seaside town was sufficiently south of Solihull to confuse a young boy talking to his grandparents about their origins? And then there was Bertha’s middle initial. Did the E stand for Elizabeth? Or was it Edna, Ethel or Ellen? To modern ears, Bertha was perhaps not the most attractive of names. It was one of those that sounded like it would only be heard in an old people’s home and not at a christening. When did the transition from fashionable to near extinction occur?
Choosing the commonest of English surnames, Jane searched for all the Bertha Smiths registered since 1837 and saw a peak before the First World War, after which they tailed away. Big Bertha had, of course, been the name given to the enormous German guns that had bombarded Paris and the trenches. That alliteration still echoed
across the generations and clashed with most images of delicate femininity. When the Tommies came home, maybe a young Bertha would have preferred the nickname of Birdie. The connection seemed much closer than with Elizabeth. Perhaps Alan’s grandmother had later given her middle name to her daughter, not wanting to burden her with the bulky, buxom connotations of her first.
Jane realised she could be overthinking things, but there was clearly a chance that the later marriage was that of Alan’s grandparents. Its date was also closer to the arrival of their first and only child. Patricia’s birth certificate would clarify the matter. Jane ordered it and, after a slight hesitation, ordered both marriage certificates. They would take a few days to come through, but Alan was in no hurry and she had other work to be getting on with. Her curiosity would be answered soon enough.
Next on her to-do list was to look at the album Alan had lent her and the black-and-white photograph of his mother with her friend Cyn. Two young women, in coats, taken at an oblique angle in front of a building façade, probably in 1960s London, maybe in the Euston area: Jane stared at the image and wondered where to begin. Skimming through the rest of the pages, she found much of it focused on Pat’s life as a political activist and a Labour councillor. There she was protesting against the Vietnam War and later American nuclear weapons at Greenham Common. She seemed to have been an early champion of Gay Pride, and in 1984 she was marching under a banner in support of the miners’ strike. The odd photo had been removed, and most of the others were either unlabelled or little more specific than ‘Sisters Standing in Solidarity’. Oddly perhaps, there were relatively few images of Alan growing up. Those there were depicted a good-looking boy with a thick head of dark, almost black hair, evidence perhaps of his Cuban paternity.
Cyn’s one other appearance in the album showed her standing out amongst a small group of women in a decidedly dated office environment. The setting looked almost Edwardian, but the clothes screamed Swinging Sixties. Cyn was certainly a very beautiful girl, fashionably skinny with bobbed blonde hair and a face that was part Twiggy, part Brigitte Bardot. For once, there was a slightly more helpful annotation. Cyn and her presumed workmates were all listed by their first names apart from an older, bespectacled lady who was identified as ‘Miss Brown’. Pat wasn’t included, perhaps because she was the one behind the camera. Jane shook her head at the absence of other clues and returned to the first picture. The building in the background appeared substantial, with a rusticated stone facing that was reminiscent of countless post offices or high street banks of the early to mid 20th century. The roofline wasn’t in shot, but some elements of the architecture stood out, especially the exaggerated keystones crowning the round arches of the ground floor windows. Then Jane noticed a partly obscured brass plaque by the door, with some lettering just about discernible behind Cyn’s left shoulder. Jane hunted through her sideboard drawers until she found her grandmother’s old magnifying glass. Under the lens, the ends of two words could be made out: ‘ON’ and directly beneath, ‘SE’. Disappointed and none the wiser, Jane turned her attention to the traffic that crept into one side of the picture, seemingly running along a major thoroughfare. There was the edge of a double-decker bus, in a shade of grey that could easily be the red of London Transport, but its route number wasn’t visible. Jane returned to her laptop and decided to take a virtual drive down the Euston Road, now a wide double carriageway and one of the clogged city’s busiest conduits. The online map’s street-level images confirmed the congestion, but Jane was able to float above the jams like an electronic ghost. She looked left and right but couldn’t see any building that bore a resemblance to the one in the photograph. She considered moving onto other streets in the area, but quickly abandoned the idea. It could take hours. Alan hadn’t been definite that his mother had worked in Euston, and she and Cyn could easily have been photographed somewhere else entirely. Jane decided to give up, at least for the time being. With luck, something more tangible would be revealed when, and if, she unearthed more of Patricia Elizabeth Shaw’s life story.
Jane looked at the clock on her laptop’s taskbar. She had made a good start, but she still needed to complete the report from her previous commission. She was about to switch across when another thought occurred to her. She typed a single word into Google: Fangio.
Alan had not been exaggerating. There seemed little debate that Juan Manuel Fangio was one of the greatest and most revered drivers in history. Jane skimmed a discussion of his merits against those of Stirling Moss, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Born in 1911, ‘El Maestro’ was described as supremely skilled, brave, debonair and charismatic, a true gentleman and sportsman. He seemed to have charmed everyone, including the ladies, despite being physically a little short, stocky and bald, with another less flattering nickname, 'El Chueco', the bandy-legged one. His career had started late, and he was old enough to be the father of many of the men he competed against. They looked up to him but always struggled to beat him. He retired at 47, having watched too many of his contemporaries die. He spent his later life selling for Mercedes-Benz, being president of the company in his homeland of Argentina. He was invited to events and circuits all over the world and would often drive demonstration laps in cars he had once raced in earnest, if seldom in anger. He died in 1995 at the age of 84, never having married. There was one relatively recent news article from 2015 describing his exhumation in response to two separate paternity suits. It was an untidy postscript to a man who seemed to have been universally loved and respected by those who knew him.
Jane found one photograph which portrayed the great man looking tired but happy after winning a grand prix. On his head was a primitive crash helmet that appeared to be a peaked dome of glossy, hardened leather. His face was blackened with oil and grime apart from a white outline around his eyes. It was a look Jane had seen before on tanned, panda-eyed skiers back home from the slopes. The explanation was similar. Raised onto Fangio’s helmet was a pair of racing goggles. The style was slightly different, but there was a clear kinship with those proudly displayed on Alan’s bookcase. Jane felt a twinge of jealousy. She had always moaned when Dave had insisted on watching Formula One on TV; now she found herself unexpectedly seduced by the legend of a man whose heroics took place decades before she was born.
She was starting to read a fuller biography when she caught sight of the time again. She decided she had been sidetracked long enough. She needed to get stuck into that report. Maybe if, and when, she saw Dave again they could compare notes on El Maestro.
Snapshots
It was 4:00 am and Jane was awake. For once, she wasn’t trying to clear her head of nagging thoughts that prodded and goaded her from sleep. This night, she was actively chasing memories, seeking to flesh out elusive shadows from her recent past. But no matter how much she probed, her mind was like a hard drive encrypted by some unfathomable key. It refused to surrender what surely had to be there.
It was only a few short years since she and Dave had gone to Cuba. She had been ill, and two weeks of sun and relaxation had been prescribed to lift her mood and heal the strained relationship between husband and wife. But the doctors were also plying her with insidious drugs, calming her anxieties and rage, but making her a floppy, smiling puppet only passingly aware of events around her. She was left with a foggy blur of speculation and nothingness from which a mere handful of images emerged, some strikingly sharp and colourful by contrast.
Perhaps most vivid was the stubby-bodied, long-beaked, wide-winged brown pelican skimming down the shoreline, inches above bathers in a gentle turquoise sea. Hot white sand stretched interminably in both directions behind a green wall of mangrove and palms. This, Jane knew, was the northern resort of Varadero. She and Dave were not beach people. They both struggled to sit still and do nothing except relax and age their skin under the sun. But Dave had forced himself, and Jane was too doped to care. Of the five-star hotel itself, she had a vague recollection of a large balcony with a view over gardens an
d pools, but the vast lobby had created the strongest impression. A central atrium rose to some 15 floors and was hanging with a fringe of impossibly long, ivy-like vines that dangled to just above head height. They framed an ornate, canopied central bar that mixed mojitos, daiquiris and Cuba libres from morning to night; all included in the very reasonable price. But Jane could not indulge, and so Dave had restricted himself to the occasional beer. He had tried hard, bless him. Had he already been seeking comfort from Bridget by that stage back home? They were working together, of course. Perhaps she was still just a shoulder to cry on. He got little consolation from his wife.
They had stayed for a whole week in Varadero, and yet that was all Jane could now remember. They must have eaten, but any recollection of the food and restaurant was confused with other hotels and other holidays. They left in a taxi, it might have been yellow, and she could see it parked in a road-side café, a sort of service station, with outside tables patrolled by a noisy, strutting, black-tailed cockerel. Among the other cars lined up outside were several American relics, patched up and battered beneath newish paint. Dave had said most of their gas-guzzling engines had been replaced by scrapyard diesels. Why on earth would she remember that?
The next image was of an annexe at the bottom of a high-walled garden. An iridescent-emerald hummingbird hovered at an orange, tube-like flower hanging from a leafy tree. They had moved to the town of Trinidad near the island’s southern coast. They were staying in a casa particular, essentially a room in a private home, and Jane vaguely recalled having to go through the family’s living area to get to the front door. She and Dave then walked hand in hand to the central square. The streets became cobbled and the architecture older and more brightly coloured. A man in a wide-brimmed hat sat astride a bay horse. It looked like something from a Zorro film, Spanish colonialism preserved, and it was busy with tourists. There was a long, wide flight of steps, covered in café tables with waiters darting in and out. A band played Guantanamera, and the guitar seemed to have only three strings. And there was a tall bell tower, presumably the building had once been a church, and she followed Dave up a rickety wooden staircase – she could see the banisters clearly – for arch-framed views of the sea in one direction and the mountains in the other. At the base of the tower was some kind of sombre museum of the revolution, with uniforms and guns and pictures, labelled exclusively in verbose, mostly impenetrable Spanish. There was one cabinet with gruesome instruments of torture and photographs of the men on which they had been used. Jane could see a teenage face and a wooden club wrapped in rusty barbed wire. And then she was crying and Dave was leading her away.
