by Amy Myers
When she walked into the hotel after parking the car, she stiffened as she saw Peter chatting amiably with Trevor Bloomfield. Try as she might, she couldn’t reconcile her image of this man with the role of local lord of the manor. It was he, over the sale of the sports fields, who had set Wickenham by its ears, not Georgia with her enquiries into Ada Proctor. Now he was proposing to walk calmly out of the mess, clutching his millions, to set up wherever he chose in the world. True, the days of paternal feudalism had gone for good, and good riddance, but she resented Trevor Bloomfield on Wickenham’s behalf. His family owed something to its past, which should provide a bond with the village.
When had it been broken? she wondered. It seemed to be there in Ada’s day, judging by the doctor’s record books; and so had it during the war, according to Jim. She remembered his telling her about the way the village and Manor had drawn together over the blackout, rationing, call-up, and through the dark summer days of the Battle of Britain when the skies of Kent were full of Messerschmitts, Heinkels and RAF defenders. Had the break in the bond come when the Bloomfields first turned the Manor into a hotel, or had it happened earlier? Matthew Bloomfield died in 1943, and perhaps that had been the beginning of the decline. Perhaps the She-Wolf influenced her son Bertram, the new owner of Wickenham Manor, into her way of thinking, that the estate was just another business, with no commitment to the village save of employer to employee. An interesting thought, that the She-Wolf’s prophecy in the recording about the role of the Manor had been fulfilled. Wickenham was economically independent of its Manor, but its soul still had expectations of it.
‘I was glad to hear the sale of the Manor had gone smoothly,’ she managed to say to the She-Wolf’s grandson, noting that he hadn’t bothered to get up to greet her.
‘Amazing the way news gets around. Yes, that at least went through.’
‘But not the supermarket,’ she pressed. Be damned if she’d go easy on him.
‘No problem there. The deal fell through, as I’d expected. There’s no point throwing the fields in with the sale of the Manor – the new owners would hardly thank me for handing them that smoking gun – so I haven’t decided what to do yet.’ He grinned. ‘I have to admit, I haven’t tried very hard. I’m enjoying seeing Oliver Todd and George Elgin White both going around with long faces, wondering what’s going to happen.’
‘When will you put them out of their misery?’
‘They’ll have to wait a while longer. I might sell to the first bidder. I might keep the fields and be an absentee landlord. I might make them a charitable trust for this village, which is so fond of my family. Who knows? I assure you, I don’t.’
And you don’t care either, Georgia thought. No paternal interest here. ‘And meanwhile,’ she observed, ‘the Todds won’t do anything about the appeal because there’s no current direct threat and they wouldn’t want to spend good money on legal bills until there’s something to appeal against.’
‘You seem very involved, Georgia,’ he sniped back. ‘All those Todds getting to you, are they? They’ve put my family through the mill for long enough, now they can stew in their own juice. I wouldn’t get too mixed up with them, if I were you. Remember you are an outsider.’
‘And so was Terence Scraggs. Is that a threat, Trevor?’ Her simmering rage at this unexpected attack was only just kept at bay.
‘Good heavens no,’ he laughed. But the sneer was still present. ‘Nevertheless if you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you here at the moment.’
Peter stirred. ‘Fortunately,’ he rumbled, ‘she’s not your daughter. Georgia’s DNA has better stuff in her molecules than sterling, euros and dollars.’
Trevor stood up. The smile had vanished. ‘I do advise you not to meddle too far into Wickenham affairs. You are intending to write a book for your own profit, after all. It hasn’t gone unnoticed in the village.’
‘It seems to me,’ Georgia remarked, somewhat shaken, after Trevor had stalked off, ‘that the fingerprints on Time have suddenly become knuckle-dusters rather eager to get rid of us.’
‘Keep your path straight ahead,’ Peter replied. ‘We didn’t bring this about. The protest over the fields has nothing to do with Ada Proctor or Denehole Man. Remember that, and ask yourself why Wickenham – or parts of it – is getting so riled up about us. Although,’ he added honestly, ‘I can’t answer that myself.’
‘Scraggs’s death at least links with the protest, if Denehole Man turns out to be the missing Randolph.’
‘I don’t agree. It would only link if that were the reason he was killed.’
Georgia stared at him. ‘How on earth could it be that? It’s neat, but there’s not a shred of evidence or even a theory to back it up. Nice one, Peter, but let’s plod on along the slow but sure route. What time’s your Mrs Atwater arriving?’ She was driving over from East Sussex where she was staying with friends.
‘Elevenish.’
Georgia had formed a mental picture of Jean Atwater as a fluffy-haired rose-cheeked lady, and was not prepared for the determined lady who strode into the hotel bar lounge. She might be seventy-odd, but she was very definitely living in the present, not her mother’s past. She was trouser-suited, styled white hair, and very professional looking. As indeed she proved to be. She ran a local charity and owned and ran a chain of florist shops into the bargain.
‘It’s good of you to offer to show me round the land of my father, Peter.’ Jean firmly shook their hands, and first names were arrived at easily and quickly.
‘Didn’t your mother ever return here?’ Georgia asked.
‘I don’t believe so. It was associated with bad times for her and for my grandparents. Charmer or not, she told me, Guy was always causing ructions at home. My grandfather was of the old school and there were constant rows and clashes. When Guy died, I suspect my grandmother remained full of silent, and probably unjustified, guilt.’
‘Your mother too?’
‘She told me family life was a lot more peaceful without Guy but a light had gone out of it. That’s why she didn’t want to return here. She used to talk about the Manor and the parties they had there, especially when she was in her teens before the outbreak of war in 1914. There were Guy and herself, the three at the Manor, Matthew, Jack and Anne, and Ada Proctor. Ada’s the one you’re interested in, aren’t you? She was the sixth of our core group, though of course there were lots of others who came and went. Jack was a madcap like Guy so they got on well; Matthew fancied Ada, so Mum reckoned, and they were more disciplined, and Anne, who was most academically inclined, married young and went to live in the States after the war.’
‘And Guy was officially engaged to Ada?’
‘I don’t know about official. Mum always spoke of them as a couple, but Guy apparently chased everything in skirts. We were all young, of course. Guy was twenty-three when war broke out. I’ve brought some photos, if you’d like to see them.’
‘That’s very good of you.’ Peter dived forward eagerly, swinging his chair round to peer over the table, leaving Georgia to peer over him.
‘Not at all. It’s good to show them to someone who’s interested, for whatever reason. My children aren’t. They’re just names to them. I shall be dead and long gone by the time they get to the age to be interested in their family’s past.’
Jean produced sepia studio photos of a good-looking young man, one of a toddler in skirts on his mother’s knee, and a delightful one of a posed family group on the steps of what Georgia recognized as Hazelwood House, obviously taken in late Edwardian times judging by the clothes and the children’s ages. Guy must have been about eighteen or nineteen in this photo. A strong face? No, determined, but not strong. She could see this young man taking ill to farmwork. Don’t assume too much, Georgia, she warned herself. We don’t know this is Denehole Man, and we don’t know this is the Guy Randolph of Berthès farm. This case was a greyhound straining at the leash, waiting for the magic word. Perhaps Peter was feeling the same for he was
taking inordinate pains with the photographs, giving them very careful attention. There was another family group on the steps of Hazelwood House, in early 1920s dress, and this time Gwendolen looked to be in her mid-twenties, very glamorous, and aware of it. No Guy, of course.
‘Do you want to see the denehole?’ Peter asked Jean.
‘No, thanks very much,’ she replied briskly. ‘I never knew Guy, so the old house and village will mean more to me than where Guy might or might not have met his death. It’s sad to think he might have come back here after the war – if you’re right, that is – only to find us all gone. I suppose finding strangers in Hazelwood House he would have come to the Manor to find out where we’d gone, and fallen into the denehole, somehow.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Georgia agreed. A pretty unlikely one though, in her view.
‘Or was he pushed?’ Jean asked outright. ‘That’s what you’re after, aren’t you, otherwise you wouldn’t be interested?’
‘That too is a possibility.’
‘If I understand you both correctly, the landscape is swarming with Randolphs who might or might not be related to me. There’s this French family – who might be direct descendants of Guy, there’s this poor lad who’s recently been murdered, and a Randolph living in Beaconsfield who is related to the French family. Yet you can’t prove any of this for certain. How can you ever hope to?’
‘There is a way,’ Peter began, avoiding Georgia’s eye. Too soon, too soon, she was silently telegraphing through to him. He didn’t get the message, or didn’t want to. ‘And that’s for you to have a DNA test. A sample has been extracted from the skeleton.’
Jean frowned and took her time about replying. ‘I’m not sure about that. I’ll think about it. Suppose . . .’
‘There are always supposes,’ Georgia said gently to fill in the gap, as Jean broke off. She was taken aback at this reluctance, since she appeared such a down-to-earth woman.
‘It makes it too real,’ Jean explained. ‘It brings it into the here and now. And what for? So you can write your book. Sorry, if that sounds rude, but it is a factor.’
‘It is,’ Peter agreed. ‘Nevertheless, it’s also a step towards identifying a nameless skeleton for the coroner and giving a name to an eventual gravestone.’
‘There must be other ways to find out for sure whether it’s Guy.’ Jean stuck doggedly to her decision. ‘But I promise I’ll think about it.’
Peter wisely dropped the subject, and after lunch, Georgia offered to drive Jean round the village. She elected to walk, however, to Georgia’s approval. ‘If I’m going to see Wickenham, I need to see it properly,’ she pointed out.
Georgia did her best to describe the village as it would have been in Gwendolen’s day, as they strolled through, and became so wrapped up in recreating it that she had completely forgotten DNA when Jean later returned to it.
‘I feel a wimp for not agreeing to your father’s suggestion,’ she admitted. ‘I know it seems a small step to you, but your evidence about the skeleton is only circumstantial. You see, my mother had a tough time with Brother Guy, for all that they got on well. He was always coming back, she told me. Just when you had sorted out the disastrous effects of his last prank, he’d produce a new humdinger. Just as they thought he was all set to marry Ada, he’d up and away and fall for some other woman. Then back he’d come. I feel that’s what he’s doing to me now. I want to squash him, to say he can’t do that. Go away.’
It was a point of view. The dead could reach out from beyond the grave with a power that was denied the living. ‘An unfair fight for you,’ was all Georgia could reply.
‘Tell me about this Ada Proctor,’ Jean asked.
Georgia obliged so far as she was able, pointing out the Elgin house, which was later the teashop, and the grass lane to Crown Lea. ‘This was where The Firs stood, where Ada and her father lived, and over there –’ Georgia indicated the other side of the road – ‘was Hazelwood House.’
Jean stared at the 1960s housing estate for so long that Georgia began to share her disappointment. ‘It’s hard to imagine how it was eighty years ago.’
‘Perhaps not, if one looks and then sees.’ Jean frowned in concentration. ‘Some of those trees could have been here then. Not the ones in front of us, they’re too young, but over there.’
There was a large oak tree that Jean managed to identify as being the young sapling in the photographs. She gazed at it for some time, while Georgia stood silently at her side. ‘You said Hazelwood was pulled down in the 1950s?’ Jean asked at last.
‘It was damaged during the war when the flying bomb hit The Firs and it more or less fell down by itself after that.’
‘I think the house must have been here,’ Jean decided. ‘That porch, where the photo was taken, was at this angle to the road.’
More or less in the Todds’ driveway, Georgia realized.
‘This Randolph you mentioned, who came looking for us in the second war, and went to see the former maid at the Manor,’ Jean changed tack. ‘I’ve been wondering, why didn’t he go to the Manor, instead of to her?’
‘Perhaps he did.’ Georgia hadn’t thought about this, and Jean had a valid point. ‘Matthew, the then Squire, died in 1943 though, so perhaps Randolph came after that and no one else could give him any information.’
‘But you told me his wife survived him and she would have been at the Manor in 1929 too. Why send him off to the maid?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Georgia admitted. ‘The wife seems to have been a woman of strong mind, and not too agreeable, so perhaps she just couldn’t be bothered, or maybe she was out and someone else directed him to the maid. That’s the problem with these cases, there are always irritating details that one can never quite grasp. Are they significant or are they the hiccups of daily life that don’t fall neatly into place? If I don’t leave my milk bottles out for collection, does it mean that I’m lying injured inside or simply that I’ve forgotten? Easy enough to solve in cases set in the present day, but another matter when it comes to mysteries in the past.’
‘I understand that. Now, it seems to me that the French airman’s visit is good evidence of a link between us and this French family, so tell me, Georgia, when do you get to the point that you can be certain that you are right?’
Georgia considered this. ‘When the evidence satisfies us. It’s like a trial by judge, if not by jury.’
‘Do you think I was wrong not to agree to the DNA sample?’
‘There’s no right or wrong about this,’ Georgia declared firmly, as they walked back to the village. ‘My father is very keen to put a name to the skeleton that we buried but, as you say, there are other means, so you mustn’t be too influenced by our wishes.’
‘He could get DNA through the French family. Why me?’
‘Because you are the sure point in the evidence. You are without doubt descended from Guy Randolph’s family. The others probably are.’ She went on to explain the intricacies of mitochondrial DNA from the maternal line.
‘But why, Georgia, are you both so keen to name this skeleton? I can understand you’re being eager, and that there’s the book to write, but there seems something more personal than that.’
Georgia hesitated. She was beginning to feel hedged in. Did she remain the objective investigator, or should she delve deep into herself in the effort to answer her question? ‘Let’s go here for some tea.’ The Green Man was not Wickenham Manor, but it did serve tea (with some persuasion).
‘It’s the living with uncertainty,’ Georgia began, to ease herself in to the subject, reluctant to go further than necessary. ‘If we don’t get the French family to agree, or if they are not related to Guy, then like us, you will never know for sure whether the skeleton is your missing uncle. We want you to realize that, and what it might mean.’
‘But that’s not important to me,’ Jean objected.
‘It might become so. You might begin to wonder whether it was or wasn’t his skeleton, now th
at the idea has been planted in your mind. The image of a gravestone without a name is a powerful one.’
‘I can live with that. Why did you say, like us?’ Her eyes were studying Georgia keenly.
Georgia made a valiant effort, since she had no choice. ‘We,’ she began painfully, ‘had a similar tragedy. My brother Rick disappeared like Guy, not in war, just on holiday. We never heard any more but we have to believe he is dead. Your mother had to live through that, just as we did. Your grandparents couldn’t seriously have hoped that Guy would return from the slaughter of the trenches just as my parents can’t hope that Rick is alive somewhere, yet in dreams the not knowing, where and what and how is agonizing and for my father unbearable. Even if your family believed Guy died in battle they would never have known how, whether his death was instantaneous, whether he lay in agony, whether he died trying to save someone, or the opposite. His death leaves a question mark, and this skeleton provides at least a chance that you could complete the story for your family.’
‘You said it was Ada Proctor who was your main interest in Wickenham. What does this skeleton have to do with her?’
‘Because if the man in the denehole was Guy, and he appears to have died about the same time as her, there’s a chance that Ada was going to meet him and not the lad who was hung for her murder.’
‘Who was?’
‘A young man, a gardener called Davy Todd. His sweetheart, who swore in vain she was with him all that evening, is still alive.’
‘In the village?’
‘No, in a retirement home on the Downs.’
‘Could I meet her?’
