The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

On the edge of panic now. Fighting as hard as he’d ever fought in his life. Driving the guy against the submerged tractor chassis, striking with everything he had: knees, feet, fists, head. Suddenly realising that the enemy wasn’t fighting back any longer. His body going limp.

  Ben grasped him by the collar of his jacket and used the last of his energy reserve to kick and struggle back up to the surface. He gasped for air as his head burst from the water and swam for the edge, dragging the limp form behind him. The guy barely seemed to be breathing.

  Both of them were covered in green-black pond weeds and lilies. As Ben hauled the unresponsive body up onto the bank, he suddenly saw why he’d stopped fighting. In their frenzied rolling tumble down the slope the knife intended for Ben had ended up stuck deep in the killer’s own chest. Which seemed like a suitable end for him, if he was the man who’d murdered Carter Duggan. He was fading fast. But Ben didn’t want him to die, not just yet. He grabbed the man by the collar and shook him. ‘Who are you? Who are you working for?’

  No reply. The guy spat up a load of pink foamy pond water. He muttered something unintelligible; then his eyes rolled over white and the last remnant of life in him slipped away, along with anything Ben might have got out of him.

  Ben frisked the body for any kind of identification, but wasn’t surprised to find nothing. Professional assassins don’t show up for work with their wallet and driving licence in their pocket. This man wasn’t even carrying a phone. Ben took out his own phone and used it to take a mugshot of the dead man’s pallid, battered features. Leaving the body lying there on the sodden, muddied grass, he wiped the worst of the pond vegetation from his clothes and walked squelching over to where the dead man’s backpack had fallen. Its contents were Ben’s only possible clue why the killers had attacked Emily Bowman’s house. He picked it up, unzipped it open and found what was inside.

  It was a book. An old, slim journal bound in tatty, faded red leather. There was no inscription on the cover but its yellowed and dusty pages were filled with cursive handwriting of a style that instantly dated it back a good number of decades, maybe to the 1940s or older. The things Emily Bowman had told him came flooding back into his mind.

  ‘Our family has a secret. A horrible secret that people have died for. And I’m terrified that more will die because of it.’

  The journal in his hands had belonged to Emily’s grandmother, found hidden among her daughter Glencora’s possessions after her death. He recalled the things Emily had said about the disturbing revelations that had impelled her to hire Carter Duggan to help her discover more about her family history.

  Ben wanted to know more, too, because his gut told him that here was the key to the whole thing. He now had two pieces of evidence: the book and the Man O’War beer mat he’d lifted from Duggan’s jacket back at the vicarage.

  Ben took the beer mat from his pocket and gazed at it and the memoir in turn. Somehow, these two items were connected, and he was determined to find out how and why. But this was neither the time nor the place to start trying to figure out the mystery. He slipped the beer mat into the pages of the book and replaced it inside the backpack, zipped it and slung it over his shoulder.

  Nearby lay the empty pistol that the dead guy had tried to brain him with. A SIG forty-calibre auto, well oiled and nearly brand new. Not a piece of equipment that the average common thug could get hold of too easily in free Britain. Ben slipped it into his pocket. Next on his checklist was the crushed shotgun, still lying among the wreckage of the half-ruined wooden barn. He wiped it down for prints. He had no desire to be traced to the events here today, when the police eventually arrived on the scene. Which could be a long time away. Worried about the horses, he jogged over to the paddock to check there was enough water in their drinking trough to last them.

  There was nothing he could do for the bodies of the killers’ three victims. Returning upstairs he examined the corpse near the foot of the spiral staircase. Like his associate’s, the man’s pockets were devoid of ID, but Ben did find a spare loaded magazine for his identical SIG pistol, which suddenly made the captured weapon much more useful. Ben used his phone to take another mugshot.

  The two men had been coming down the spiral staircase when Ben had encountered them. He climbed the iron steps to the second floor and emerged onto an upper galleried landing with more rooms radiating off it. Emily Bowman had made her office up here, from which she had run her considerable and growing business empire. The office had been recently searched. Desk drawers ripped out, files dumped on the floor, papers everywhere. In the midst of the mess, Ben found the card he’d given her earlier that day lying on a desk next to a computer that was whirring softly in dormant mode. He nudged the mouse and the screen flashed into life.

  As she’d admitted to him on the phone earlier, Emily Bowman had been checking out his profile on the Le Val website. It gave scant information about his military background, but enough to convey an impression of his experience to a prospective client in need of help. And more than enough to raise plenty of unwanted questions about his possible connection to a murdered woman, when the police searched the house.

  Ben used a knuckle to tap keys, closing the webpage and then deleting the record of her visit there from the computer’s search history. He pocketed the business card, then left the study. Next door was a comfortable library with three walls covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and some tastefully-worn leather armchairs with reading lamps. It was immediately clear that this was where the killers had focused their search, telling Ben that they must have known in advance they were hunting for a book – a very particular sort of book, the one that he now had in his possession. The shelves had been roughly ransacked, dozens of books, files and periodicals dumped all over the floor. But they hadn’t needed to take the whole room apart: wherever Emily had been hiding her grandmother’s memoir, she obviously hadn’t done a great job of concealing it.

  Touching nothing else, Ben headed back downstairs, passed by the dead bodies of the housekeeper and the old guy, and returned to his car. Thirty seconds later, he was gone without a trace of his ever having been there. From Boars Hill he cut eastwards along Foxcombe Road and Hinksey Hill until he hit the A34 bypass northbound and put his foot down, creating as much distance between himself and the crime scene as he could before the incident was reported.

  It takes a while for the mind and body to climb down from a combat situation. Ben was on edge and couldn’t concentrate simultaneously on driving and the thousand thoughts whirling through his mind. He needed somewhere to sit alone in peace and take stock of the new situation, so turning off the dual carriageway at Botley he headed a few miles further along the Eynsham road to a spot near the river that he knew well, near Pinkhill Lock.

  Leaving the car he wandered down to the water’s edge carrying the backpack he’d taken from Emily Bowman’s place, and drank in the stillness: just the soft lapping of the river at its banks, the cawing of crows circling above the trees and a muted rumble of traffic in the distance. Ben sat by the slow-moving river and lit a cigarette. The landscape of sun-parched fields was yellow and flat; behind the trees to the east was Farmoor Reservoir, with the sailing club on its far shore. A small bevy of swans sailed past downstream like a convoy of galleons. He used to come out here with Michaela, once upon a time. Michaela loved the swans.

  Closing his eyes, he drew in the acrid but somehow soothing cigarette smoke and let the dust settle on his turbulent thoughts. Things were happening at a pace now. For reasons still unclear, the death count had just multiplied and this time there was no way the police could pin the blame on Jude. Maybe being kept out of mischief in a prison cell was the best place he could be at this moment. But would the fresh killings be enough to exonerate him from Carter Duggan’s murder? The evidence against him wasn’t any the weaker for it, and the cops didn’t generally go around dropping charges for no good reason. No, Ben sensed that Jude wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  He opened the ba
ckpack and took out the slim leather-bound book. On the inside cover, in faded handwriting, was the name Violet Bowman and beneath it the date April, 1946. Emily Bowman had called the book her grandmother’s confession. It was a strange word to use. A confession of what?

  Ben was about to find out. He began to read, and an incredible story slowly unfolded before his eyes.

  Chapter 19

  Violet Bowman’s memoir was composed in the plain, simple hand and straightforward prose of someone who was perfectly literate but lacked the benefits of a formal education. It opened with a line that sounded exactly like the confession that Emily Bowman had described it as.

  My name is Violet Bowman, but it wasn’t always. It sometimes seems to me as though I’ve lived several different lives, and parts of my past seem to me like a dream now, like some story that I once read. Perhaps that’s why I put pen to paper now, all these years later, as a reminder to myself that it was real, and that I can never be forgiven for my part in the pain and suffering of those I loved so dearly.

  Ben read on.

  I was born Violet Littleton in 1905, the only child of a poor but respectable Christian family in Cornwall. My father had been a miner, but he fell sickly when I was very young and I can barely remember a time when he was not bedridden for much of the day, seldom appearing at mealtimes and almost never venturing outdoors. My poor mother worked as a seamstress and did the best she could to raise me more or less alone. Times were often hard and I knew hunger from an early age. I cannot say I ever really attended school, or at any rate not so as to have anything much to show for it. I was a simple girl, attended to my duties and tried to be good and love God, as I was taught.

  In the early spring of 1922, at the age of seventeen, with great sadness and reluctance I left my parents’ home for the very first time and travelled to London in search of work. The Great War had caused terrible economic harm to our community in Cornwall and we were struggling like never before. I was a resourceful girl, not afraid of working hard. It was time for me to be brave and grown-up and support my family, though I had never seen London before and was very afraid and lonely in such a strange, bewildering new environment. With the small amount of money my mother had given me I took a room in a boarding house, a very austere place.

  Within just a few days I found a job at the Osram Hammersmith Lamp and Valve Works, on a production line making tungsten lamps, or what we would call light bulbs now. It was a huge building dating back to the last century, with a great dome that had been added in 1920, and a big golden sign that said ‘Osram Lamps’ that you could see for miles. Over two thousand people worked at the plant, a lot of them women.

  The war had brought big changes for us, creating jobs that had once been seen as men’s work. Women made munitions, worked in coal mines, drove lorries. Some people called it a social revolution, but when the soldiers came back from the war a lot of those women were sacked from their jobs or had to go on working for less pay than the men. There was always talk that we were exploited, but what else was a poor girl to do in those times? I felt lucky to have a job at all.

  I was one of a large crowd of women of all ages who sat at benches all day, operating machines. Sometimes I would be clamping the lamp filament tails, or working the lamp capping machine, but most of the time I was at the final inspection and testing station, sorting out the bulbs that worked from those that didn’t. The testing machines were temperamental and sometimes you’d get an electric shock. The bulbs that passed inspection were hung on a rack, and the rest were put in a bin. Men would come and collect the bulbs into crates and take them away. Hundreds and thousands of them all day long, clink clink clink. It was soulless work. The noise inside that great big building would make your ears bleed, the hours were terrible long and the pay was small, but I stuck at it and sent as much money home as I could, to support my parents. I lived in cold-water lodgings near the railway, a damp attic room that was little better than a slum. I had been taught to read and write by a kind old lady named Beatrice Powell back in Cornwall, for whom I used to sew, and in what little spare time I had I tried to educate myself by reading books. But I was often too exhausted by the long hours of hard work.

  The one thing that made life at the factory more bearable was my friendship with a co-worker there, a red-haired Irish girl a year older than me. Her name was Kitty Kelly and her family was from Limerick, though she was an orphan. Kitty and I got on like sisters. On a Sunday we would sometimes take a tram to Hyde Park, or visit a cheap tea room that was the only place where we could afford to treat ourselves, apart from our occasional outing to the pictures to see one of our favourites like Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. She lived in even worse lodgings than mine, above a butcher’s shop in North End Road, and we sometimes talked about getting a place together.

  One day Kitty didn’t appear at work, and nobody seemed to know where she was. I was worried, and that evening I went over to her lodgings, only to be told by her landlady that she had left without giving any forwarding address. I was terribly sad and upset, and I felt abandoned and hurt that my best friend had gone off without telling me. It didn’t seem like her.

  For the next six months I continued to labour hard at the factory, but it was an unhappy time with no real friends to soften the hardship and few people to talk to. A new foreman had started there, a coarse brute of a man by the name of Herbert Slacker who paid me too much attention and was always staring at me. I was quite afraid of him, and did my best to avoid his company.

  Then one day, as the factory whistle blew and all the workers were swarming out of the gates, I heard a familiar voice calling my name, and I looked around to see a well dressed young woman standing in the street and smiling at me. To begin with I didn’t recognise her, and all I could do was stare in confusion.

  ‘Sure, don’t you know me, Violet?’

  It was Kitty!

  ‘Aye, it’s me all right,’ she laughed. ‘Stop looking at me as if you’d seen a ghost. Come on, I’ll treat you to a high tea.’

  I was already so amazed that I could hardly manage to say a word. But then, to my even greater astonishment, Kitty called a cab and the two of us rode across London to an expensive tea room in Regent’s Street. I had never been anywhere like it, all those people in their fancy clothes, and there was me, a factory girl in my old coat and worn-out shoes. I could still hardly believe that the fine lady sitting beside me was my old friend from the Lamp and Valve Works. She no longer looked like a malnourished working-class girl. Her curly red hair had a shine to it, and her green eyes were bright, her skin clear. She was beautiful! I couldn’t help but notice the way all the men in the tea room were looking at her and how the waiters fawned over her.

  At last I was able to ask all the questions that had been tying up my tongue until now. ‘Kitty, what happened to you? Where did you go?’

  And that was when, leaning across the table and speaking in a hushed voice, Kitty told me the most incredible thing I’d ever heard in my life. Kitty had found a new job, as a member of a group whose existence was new to me. They were called the Forty Elephants.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked, filled with excitement. It was a very peculiar name, and in my mind I was imagining all kinds of strange and wonderful things. Was it a theatre? A circus?

  ‘Bless you, no,’ Kitty said, laughing. Then she lowered her voice again and looked around to make sure nobody was listening. ‘We’re crooks.’

  I was so shocked I couldn’t speak as Kitty told me all about it. The Forty Elephants were one of London’s biggest crime gangs, all made up of young women, who would go into expensive shops and steal everything from perfumes to jewellery to luxury clothes. Nobody knew quite how they had got their name, but Kitty said it might be because their headquarters was the Elephant and Castle pub in Lambeth, where they were mixed up with the all-male mob of the same name. Other people said that it was because they were so huge with their loot when leaving the stores they robbed that they looked like e
lephants. In those days, women wore bustles and heavy clothing, useful for hiding stolen goods.

  ‘We work for a girl called Annie Diamond, though most people call her Diamond Annie,’ Kitty explained. ‘She grew up in the same workhouse as Charlie Chaplin! And has been leader of the gang since the age of only nineteen. They call her “Queen of the Forty Thieves”. She’s still barely twenty-six, but look out if you cross her.’

  The gang was so big and well-organised, Kitty said, that it had spread out of London and operated in cities as far away as Liverpool. Their method was tried and tested and very effective. A group of young girls would go into a fancy store, all dressed up, often wearing fur coats and muffs even when the weather was warm. Diamond Annie liked to recruit prettier girls, because they were less likely to be questioned or challenged by male shop staff, and one or two of them could use their charms to distract the sales assistants while the rest of them were filling up their muffs and stuffing their pockets with anything they could snatch – wrist watches, gold necklaces, whatever could bring a good price on the black market. A great deal of practice had made them excellent thieves. Then they would hurry out of the store, jump into a waiting cab and vanish.

  Other Elephants got work as maids working in the homes of wealthy families. They would spend a week or two making an inventory of all the valuables in the house, then wait until the family were out before they would call in their accomplices and the place would be stripped bare.

  ‘But Kitty,’ I said, so aghast that I could barely keep my voice down, ‘this is stealing! It’s wrong!’

  Kitty just shrugged her shoulders, with a smile. ‘Aye, to be sure, there’s no other word for it. But we’re stealing from folks who can afford it. They’ve already got more money than they can spend.’ She glanced around the tea room and pointed out a group of wealthy-looking ladies at a nearby table. ‘Look at them, Violet. Covered in gold and pearls and fox-fur stoles. How many of them would even miss a trinket or two? And here’s another thing,’ she added quite vehemently, losing her smile. ‘If the shoe was on the other foot and you was the one with the money and the jewels, you think there’s one of these fine upstanding people who wouldn’t rob you four ways to Sunday, give them half a chance?’