The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  Two days later, as rich as we ever would be again, Wilfred and I fled from London never to return. We thought it was the start of a bright new future for us.

  How horribly wrong we were! We couldn’t have known it then, but we had just sealed our doom.

  Chapter 21

  And so, we were on our way. The very last thing I did in London was to use some of my ill-gotten gains from the robbery to purchase a secondhand motorcycle combination, the cheapest form of transport we could avail ourselves of. With Wilfred in the saddle, myself wrapped up cosy and warm in the sidecar and our scant belongings strapped to the baggage rack we waved a final farewell to the city and set off on the long, long, rattly, shaky journey northwards.

  Our new home was a simple but cosy little stone cottage we had found for rent in Northumberland, far away from the troubles we were leaving behind. It had a small garden, which seemed like a vast estate to us, plenty of room to start a vegetable plot. We were alone at the end of a tiny, lonely road that wound through a moor a mile or so from the village. The countryside reminded me a little of where I had grown up, but somewhat wilder and much colder.

  On our first evening there, I cooked us a dinner of chicken and potatoes, and we opened a bottle of wine we had brought from London as a special luxury. As we finished our meal I said to him, ‘Wilf, I have a present for you. I wanted to keep it until we got here, as a surprise.’

  With that, I proudly presented Wilfred with the beautiful Anthony Trollope novel I had taken from the Park Lane apartment, thinking that he would be pleased. But to my dismay his reaction was anything but favourable, becoming very cross with me and refusing to accept the gift.

  ‘I won’t have it, Violet! Do you hear me, I won’t have it. How could you have thought otherwise?’

  ‘But you agreed that I should do that last job,’ I protested, deeply hurt and stung. ‘You knew what it involved. You knew I would be taking things that didn’t belong to me. One little book – what difference does it make?’

  ‘I agreed for you to do one last job, yes. But I didn’t consent to become your accomplice, and I want no part in it. This is stealing!’

  ‘Yes! Stealing!’ I shouted back at him. ‘Stealing, for us, for our future. You benefit from my crime as much as I do. It could not be helped, Wilfred. Please tell me, where else were we going to get this money from? How else were we going to get this place, you a poor schoolteacher with barely two farthings to rub together? Or the motorcycle? You had no objections there, as I recall.’

  But for all my attempts to reason with my beloved, he staunchly refused to accept the book. Close to tears and quite resenting his rejection of my loving gift, I thrust it in a bag and set off across the moonlit moor with the intention of tossing it in the nearest river, from the humped stone bridge quarter of a mile from the cottage. Deep down I think I knew I had done wrong in taking the book, however I might try to justify it to myself – had not seen it as theft at the time, or at least not in the same order of theft as the rest of the things I had taken – and it was dawning on me how foolish I had been for thinking he would be happy with it. Into the river with it, then, and good riddance!

  But then as I strode over the moor my pace slackened and I stopped, and took the book from my bag and looked at it again in the moonlight – and I thought how very beautiful it was, and what an awful shame it would be to destroy it. So, calming my emotions, I decided to keep the book hidden in some secret corner of our home, in the hope that one day Wilfred would change his mind.

  How, how, I wish I had acted on my first impulse and rid us of that damned book forever. That book was the ruination of everything.

  The next morning, our brief quarrel all but forgotten and its immediate cause now safely stowed away out of sight in the cottage’s dusty attic, we began our new life in earnest. Wilfred had already found a schoolmaster’s position at the village school, having written a letter of application while still in London. He embarked on his new job determined to impress and succeed, while I set about making our humble little cottage into a perfect home.

  We had been passing ourselves off as husband and wife during this time, for the sake of appearances, and using the name ‘Mrs Grey’ allowed me to erase the identity of Violet Littleton, my shadow-self, now a fugitive from much more dangerous people than the law. But after only two weeks we ended the pretence by getting married for real: the quietest and most private ceremony there ever was, a few miles away in Rothbury, nothing like the splendid white wedding all girls dream of, but for all that it was the happiest day of my life! At that point, it seemed impossible to believe that all our past troubles could ever return to haunt us.

  Ben skimmed over the next dozen or so pages of Violet’s memoir, which were an account of the basic but generally happy existence the newlywed Mr and Mrs Grey enjoyed together in rural Northumberland, a million miles from the world they’d known. Planting cabbages and potatoes; fetching eggs and milk from the local farm; pumping water from their own well; gathering firewood; helping Joe the shepherd rescue lambs from the snow; whitewashing the walls of the little cottage in springtime: all the trappings of simple country living a century ago. Within a year of their escape from the city, a child was born – a boy whom they named Charlie; then in late 1923, a second, this time a girl, called Glencora after a favourite Anthony Trollope character of Wilfred’s. Absorbed in motherhood, totally devoted to her little son and baby daughter, Violet was able to put her former life almost completely behind her, as though it had never happened. The nightmares in which Diamond Annie would appear at the foot of the bed, ringed fists clenched and grinning maniacally, faded and disappeared. Over time, too, the memory of the stolen book wrapped in a blanket up in the attic slipped from her mind. The one aspect of her time in London that continued to linger in her thoughts was her lost friendship with Kitty. Violet often reflected sadly on the happy days they’d spent together, as close as sisters. She’d have loved to write, perhaps start a correspondence, find out how Kitty was doing, learn if she’d ever progressed with her dream of opening up her own tea room and a thousand other questions she yearned to ask her old friend; but it was too dangerous, and possibly for Kitty, too.

  Meanwhile, Wilfred flourished in his teaching job and was as loved by his pupils as he was praised by his superiors. He was soon offered a better employment contract, with slightly more pay that enabled him to pursue his passion for photography. The bad old days were surely now far behind them.

  The way Violet wrote about that period of her life, lingering over the details with a sense of nostalgia so heavy you could almost taste her tears, Ben knew the next chapter of the story would be the darkest. His head was spinning with anticipation. Did Diamond Annie and the Forty Elephants have a wider role to play in this mystery? Was that what this was all about: some kind of gangland vendetta dating back nearly a hundred years? Had Emily Bowman hired Carter Duggan to unravel her dead grandmother’s connections to modern-day organised crime? And what was the significance of the book she’d taken from the apartment in Park Lane? The way it kept resurfacing in Violet’s narrative hinted it was somehow more important than it seemed. But how?

  Whatever he was about to learn, the core truth of the Bowman family secret now seemed tantalisingly close.

  And as Ben went on reading, he soon discovered that he’d been right. But at the same time, he’d been very, very wrong.

  I will never forget the day that everything suddenly changed, and the blissful life Wilfred and I had been leading came to an end as though the walls had come crashing down around us. The day was June fifteenth, 1924.

  It started innocently enough. Wilfred was at school that morning when the kitchen basin sprang a leak: the cause being a disconnected drain-pipe, threatening to flood the entire floor, and I with a great mound of dirty linen to wash. Living in the countryside had taught me some rudimentary home maintenance skills, and I resolved to fix the problem myself. Wilfred kept his tools in the sidecar and so had taken them to
work, but I recalled having seen a box of old spanners in the attic. Glencora was asleep in her cot. Little Charlie was quietly playing with the wooden train his father had made him. Leaving the children in peace, up I went to the attic to retrieve the box.

  How much more dusty and cobwebbed the place had become since I had last been up there. It was while I was searching around among the old crates, broken chairs and assorted junk that I came across the hidden book. So much time had passed, so many events had filled my life that I had managed to completely forget about it until now. Unwrapping the heavy package from its towel and looking at it once more in the dusty light of the attic window was like revisiting the past. Its beauty, its weightiness, the quality of its manufacture, struck me all over again.

  Only then did I realise that I had never even opened the book beyond its first couple of gold-edged pages. Doing so now, I began to find myself drawn into the prose of its esteemed author – my reading skills and appreciation of literature had continued to improve greatly over the years. But then as I leafed over from page nine to page ten, I discovered to my utter amazement that the book owed its substantial heft to more than just the magnificence of its binding. Instead of a printed page I found myself frowning in confusion at a grey metal plate with a recessed keyhole. It wasn’t a book, it was a safe!

  Speechless, I carried it back down from the attic to examine more closely in the light. The thin-walled but strong metal box had been fitted with great expertise inside the body of the book, which had clearly been selected for the purpose on the basis of its size and thickness. Every leaf from the tenth page to the last had had its centre cut away and been laboriously glued to its neighbour, to form a rectangular hollow several inches long and wide into which the secret compartment had been solidly mounted. As to what was inside, with the lid securely locked and no key I could have no idea. Nothing rattled within, when shaken; it could have been empty.

  By the time Wilfred returned home from school later that day, I was still so bewildered by my discovery that I could not bring myself to keep it from him. At first he seemed perplexed and irritated at me for having brought back up the subject of our old, forgotten argument – why would I do such a thing? But then, as I thrust the book into his unwilling hands and made him see for himself the surprise it contained, he was no less stunned than I had been.

  ‘What do you suppose is inside?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It may be nothing at all. Or it may be something of particular value that we should attempt to return anonymously to its true owner, which we can safely do now so much time has passed. And then, Violet, we will put this behind us and never, ever speak of it again. Do we agree?’

  Meekly, hanging my head, I consented. Whereupon, Wilfred tucked the book under his arm, grabbed his roll of tools from the sidecar and disappeared into the tiny room that doubled as his study and his darkroom, bolting the door after him. Soon afterwards I could hear the taps and scrapes as he set to work opening the lock. He was a mechanically-minded man and tenacious, despite his gentle nature. Once started on a challenge he found it difficult to let go of, even for the promise of a nice bowl of stew for dinner. He was in there for hours. It was his private domain, which I respected, but every so often I would come and knock at the door and ask how things were coming along. By now the sounds from inside had stopped, and I was sure he must have either succeeded in opening the safe or given up trying. But when he barely responded to me I went off to attend to the children, then some time later retired to bed.

  When I woke just after dawn, Wilf’s side of the bed was unslept in. He was no longer in his darkroom, where on his workbench I found the book safe prised open and empty; but he himself was nowhere to be seen. Long after he should have set out for work, his motorcycle combination was still parked outside. When he eventually appeared he was sullen, moody and virtually silent. I asked, ‘Darling, are you unwell? Tell me what I can do for you.’ But he ignored me and locked himself away.

  I knew beyond a doubt that something he had discovered inside the book’s hidden compartment had affected him deeply. What that something might be, was impossible for me to guess at. Later that morning I tried again. ‘Please, Wilf, why can’t you talk to me? I’m worried about you. Please come out.’ Leaning close to the door I could detect the pungent chemical smell of his developing chemicals. ‘Are you printing photographs? Can I see?’ He always loved to show me his latest pictures. But now all he said was ‘I’m busy.’

  At dinner that night, finally rejoining his family, he still would barely talk to me. I had never seen him look so grim. ‘Is it something I have done wrong?’ I asked, desperate for some kind of explanation for the sudden change that had come over him.

  ‘No. It has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Then won’t you tell me what’s upsetting you so much? Something you found inside the book, I know. And what pictures were you developing earlier? What’s the secret? I’m begging you. If something is hurting you, can’t you share it with me?’

  ‘Papers,’ he muttered, closing his eyes. Then he looked angry with himself, as though he had said too much.

  ‘Papers? What papers? Is that what you were photographing? Why?’

  Wilfred sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Please don’t ask, Violet. It’s better that you don’t know.’

  It went on like that for three days, Wilfred acting in the same way, withdrawn, silent and plainly terribly unhappy. Something seemed to be eating him from inside, and nothing I could say or do would get him to open up to me. He would disappear for long periods, sometimes on his motorcycle, sometimes on foot. I didn’t know if he had taken time off work; I later would discover that he had resigned from his job.

  Late on the evening of the third day, as a violent thunderstorm shook the cottage, Wilfred sat me down at the kitchen table and told me there was something he must do. ‘My plans are made. Don’t try to change my mind. I’ll be leaving in the morning.’

  ‘Leaving?’ I cried. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I daresay you’ll find out soon enough,’ he replied darkly.

  ‘Take me with you!’

  ‘No, Violet.’ Reaching out to grip my hand tightly, he looked into my eyes with the utmost intensity of emotion, as though he was bursting with pain. ‘And you will have to leave this place, too,’ he said. ‘After what must happen now, you and the children will no longer be safe here. Lie low. Take care of our babies.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I sobbed, melting into tears. ‘What must happen? Why must you go? What are you talking about?’

  But he just shook his head. ‘All the necessary arrangements are made. When I’m gone you will find an envelope. In it are some documents, along with some money. God knows I wish it were more. Make the best use of it that you can, my darling. And whatever happens, never, ever forget that I loved you with all my heart.’

  The next morning, Wilfred rode off and I never saw him again.

  Chapter 22

  This was a stunning twist in the tale, and it took Ben by surprise as he sat there glued to the narrative. Just as he’d been starting to think this was all about the Forty Elephants, now that idea was blown away. Suddenly, Violet’s story had shifted to centre on the Anthony Trollope novel she’d stolen from the London apartment – or, more correctly, what was inside it. Whatever Wilfred had found in there, these obscure ‘papers’ that he’d refused to tell her anything about had spelled disaster for them.

  Just how much of a disaster, Ben was about to find out.

  Streaming tears of sadness and confusion, a crying baby in my arms and a badly distraught little boy clutching at my skirt, I watched forlornly as Wilfred disappeared over the horizon. When he was gone I ran to his room where I found the promised envelope. Inside was a thin bundle of cash, a rental lease on a house in Whitby, a hundred miles away, a rail ticket and a letter, sealed in its own envelope. It was addressed to ‘My Darling Wife Violet’.

  I felt so s
ick with bewilderment that I could barely read, or hold the letter still in my trembling hands. My eyes took in the words but my mind couldn’t comprehend them.

  ‘I must do what I must do,’ he wrote. ‘And if my plan succeeds, I will become notorious. You will hear things about me, Violet. They will say I was a common burglar, a murderer and monster, the lowest kind of human being, that I cruelly took the life not just of an innocent soul but of a great and worthy patriot and a gentleman who supported our nation in the late war. Please don’t listen to their lies, Violet. And no matter what happens to me – whether I am killed in my attempt or whether I am taken, tried and hanged for my crime, as I surely must be according to our laws – you must try to believe that I acted with the noblest and least selfish of intentions.

  ‘It breaks my heart to leave you and our beautiful children, but in all conscience I have no choice. A murderer I may become, but my sins in comparison to that man’s will be like a candle glow next to a thousand suns. No more evil person ever walked this earth, nor is likely to again until the day the Devil rises from Hell to claim our world for his own.

  ‘I cannot tell you more, my dearest. Trust that my secrecy on this matter is purely for your protection, for this is a secret too dangerous to be shared with those whom I love. I know this is a great deal to ask of you, but I pray you will understand. And now, Violet, I must ask two more things of you: firstly that you destroy this letter the moment you have read it, lest its possession should implicate you in this affair.