The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Secondly, though I know you will find it hard to accept, I ask that you leave home as fast as you can. Whatever happens, I have no doubt that the police will come to interrogate you, and it would be in your interests to avoid them. Even if I succeed in my quest, there will be more evil men seeking revenge for my actions, and they are likely to trace me to my address. Furthermore, news of my crime will travel fast and the press will be in an uproar over the affair. It makes no odds for my name and face to be displayed in every newspaper in the land, but the efforts of some over-zealous reporter could all too easily compromise your anonymity and place you at risk from the villainous characters you left behind in London, who may also come looking for you.

  ‘I would sooner have gouged out my own eyes than put you in danger, my darling, if I had had any choice in the matter. I did not; and for that reason it is urgently important that you waste no time in following my instructions. Abandon the cottage (the lease is soon up for renewal in any case) and take the train to Whitby. You will find the address of the house enclosed herein, along with a note of introduction to the landlord, Mr Cruickshank, a fine gentleman who comes highly recommended and I believe will treat you well. He will know you as Mrs Halsted, and that is the name you must use to protect your identity. The money I have provided will last a while, at least, and I know that you will soon be back on your feet again. The bright, resourceful girl I first met has grown into the most remarkable woman I have ever known. You will have a great life without me, Violet. I wish, wish, wish that I could have been a more worthy husband to you. I hope you will forgive me.

  ‘Go, Violet, I implore you. Kiss the children for me and remember I will always be with you in my heart.’

  I could not believe it. I would not believe it. And I could not bring myself to abandon our home so lightly. When I had wept out every last tear that my body had to give I resolved to wait for Wilfred’s return. But he did not return either that day nor the next, nor the next after that. Still I waited, and waited. I waited too long.

  My first visitors arrived on the afternoon of the second day. I was outside with the children gathering wild strawberries for our pudding when I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle in the distance. At first I thought it was Wilfred and my heart leapt into my mouth. But before I was foolish enough to go running to meet him I realised the sound was of a Tin Lizzie motor truck, and my excitement turned to dread – all the more so when, watching from the bushes, I saw that the truck was carrying two constables in their black coats and tall helmets. Were they coming to tell me that something terrible had happened to my husband? I was terrified that was so, but I still refused to believe it. Or perhaps they were coming to arrest me for my part in whatever he had done! Remembering his advice to avoid them, I kept the children quiet and we remained in hiding. The constables walked up to the cottage, knocked and waited, knocked and waited, then shrugged their shoulders and climbed back into their truck and left.

  I should have taken the police’s visit as my cue to leave the cottage that same day, but I was paralysed by indecision. It was the worst mistake I have ever made in my life. Because that evening, my second visitors appeared.

  I was in the kitchen when I saw the headlights of a pair of motor cars approaching on the moor road, still in the distance. The police returning, or worse? Gripped by a rising panic I rushed upstairs to grab Glencora from her cot and rouse little Charlie from his bed. With my infant daughter in my arms and holding my son’s hand, urging him to keep quiet and praying the baby would do the same, I hurried from the cottage before the motor cars could arrive, and the three of us hid in a rocky dip some distance away. The night was still and cool. Charlie was sobbing and I clasped him tight to comfort him as we watched the cars pull up outside the cottage garden wall. My heart was beating so hard that I could hear it thumping like a drum.

  It was very clear that they were not the police. Six plainly-dressed men armed with revolvers emerged from the motor cars and broke into two groups of three. One group disappeared around the rear of the cottage while the other briskly entered the front door without knocking. They looked very severe and set in their purpose.

  ‘Mummy, I’m frightened,’ Charlie whispered in my ear.

  He could not have been any more frightened than I was, but I had to act strong for him. ‘Shush, my darling. We’re perfectly safe here.’

  ‘Where’s Minnow?’ Minnow was his pet kitten, a present from Joe the shepherd. Charlie was much devoted to the little creature.

  ‘Minnow’s fine,’ I assured him in a tense whisper. ‘Quiet, now.’

  All six men had now entered the cottage. I could see lights and movement inside. I heard the crash of something breaking; then a moment later my heart began to beat even faster and I gasped at the sight of flickering flames in the kitchen window. Lord help us, they were setting fire to the place!

  The blaze spread very fast, as if the men had set it going with petrol. Its roar filled the air and flames were soon gushing from every window. The men had left as quickly as they arrived, returning to their cars and driving away. But I was terrified they would come back and find us.

  That was when I ran, tears flooding down my face, clutching the bouncing, howling weight of baby Glencora to my shoulder and still clasping Charlie’s hand. Wilfred’s envelope was in my pocket. It was everything I had in the world except for my children.

  ‘Minnow!’ Charlie’s shout burst from his lips at the same moment that he tore his hand from mine and began running back towards the burning cottage. ‘Minnow!’

  ‘Charlie! Stop!’ I cried out, but he kept on running. I had Glencora; I couldn’t catch him.

  And as I watched in unutterable horror, my child ran inside the burning cottage in search of his pet kitten. I screamed his name, over and over, until I thought I would scream my throat out. The heat of the flames was intense and the smoke stung my eyes. Then, with a terrible cracking sound followed by a rending crash, the cottage roof collapsed inside the shell of the walls.

  ‘Charlie!’

  But my little boy was gone.

  It was hard to read Violet’s account of the days that followed. Though she stuck mainly to the facts as they had occurred, the pervasive sense of tragedy seeped through her writing like blood through a bandage. How long she sat staring at the burnt-out cottage before her neighbours from the farm found her, she didn’t say. Wanting to avoid any police involvement she made no mention of the arsonists, and told her neighbours that little Charlie was with his father. Exactly what she said to them wasn’t clear, but she persuaded them to take her to Rothbury, the nearby town where she and Wilfred had been married, with some story of meeting him there. Ben could only wonder at the incredible self-control she must have had, while inside she was crumbling into an emotional wreck.

  Television was still in the future, and in 1924 public radio broadcasting was in its infancy. Few residents of rural Northumberland would have had their own set, Violet’s farming neighbours included, and so it wasn’t until she reached the town that she saw the newspaper headline screaming from every paper stand: Wilfred Grey, a local schoolmaster and war veteran, had been killed while attempting to murder a respectable citizen in his home in Staffordshire.

  To Ben’s frustration, Violet seemed to gloss over the facts of the incident, as though she’d been afraid to give too much away even in a private memoir. All she revealed in her account was that Wilfred’s would-be victim had got the better of him, shot him dead on the spot and called the police. Back in those distant days when the British government still trusted its citizens to defend their life and property with armed force, private handgun ownership had been commonplace. Wilfred must have known the risk, going in. Even if he’d succeeded, he’d have faced the death penalty for cold-blooded murder.

  But what was Wilfred doing there in the first place? What could have possessed a mild-mannered schoolteacher, an ordinary man with a stable career and a young family, still less a man who had witnessed at first han
d the horrors of war and renounced violence, to travel hundreds of miles southwards to break into a person’s home and try to kill them? If Violet had any answers to those questions, she was keeping them to herself, leaving Ben with only one logical conclusion to draw: that it had to do with the enigmatic papers or documents he’d found inside the hollow book.

  Whatever the case, in the space of two days Violet had now lost nearly everything in her world, first her little boy, now her beloved husband. Waving goodbye to her life in Northumberland she rode the train to Whitby on the Yorkshire coast and took up residence in the house that Wilfred had rented. Following his instructions she used the name Halsted, and for the next month tried to pick up what little pieces of her life she could, while focusing her energy on taking care of her infant daughter Glencora.

  Violet’s story of that time seemed to be told as if through a veil, strangely detached. It was clear that she’d fallen into a state of depression, even suffered a mental breakdown. How she’d managed to hold it together, Ben had no idea. The pressure on her must have been tremendous, combined with the racking sense of guilt she felt, believing that she’d brought this whole thing down on her family. If she hadn’t got involved in criminal activities, if she hadn’t taken the book, her husband and child would still have been alive.

  Violet hadn’t settled for long in Whitby, and spent the next two and a half years moving aimlessly from town to town, county to county, working through a succession of short-term jobs. Eventually, in January 1927, she’d landed employment as a typist at a solicitor’s practice in York. That was where she’d met Eric Bowman, a young clerk working in the same office. Her description of him portrayed a kind, decent man, plodding and unexciting but steady and dependable. In April 1929, they were married. Violet changed Glencora’s surname to Bowman, partly for the sake of propriety but mainly to place another layer over her real identity.

  Years went by. Violet and Eric’s marriage produced no children, but Glencora’s stepfather doted on her and happily regarded her as his own daughter. The family lived comfortably until the outbreak of a new war in 1939, when Eric joined the RAF. On 17 October 1942, the Lancaster bomber in which he was serving as a crewman was shot down during a raid on the Schneider Kreuznach industrial works at Le Creusot in eastern France.

  It wasn’t until nearly four years after Eric’s death that Violet, now a widow twice over, finally put pen to paper and set down her long and sad story, with no intention of ever allowing anyone else to read it.

  Chapter 23

  Ben closed the book and looked around him, realising he must have lost track of time as he’d sat there absorbed in Violet Bowman’s story. The day had worn on; the sunlight on the river was softer, and the swans were long gone. He stood and stretched his muscles, aching now from the fight earlier, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten a bite since leaving McAllister’s early that morning.

  Ben slipped the book into his pocket and paced the riverbank, lighting up another Gauloise to help him think. What had he gained? The events of Violet Littleton-Grey-Bowman’s life were stunning, but the secret at their core remained mostly intact, like the gold bars inside a bank vault that resisted the most determined efforts to blast it open. Nothing in the memoir explained what Wilfred Grey had found inside the hollow book, or what had made him take that fateful decision knowing it would destroy him and his family.

  Had the London townhouse where Violet had carried out her last job for the Forty Elephants belonged to the same man Wilfred would later attempt to kill? Who was he? What had he done to make Wilfred believe he was so evil? Who were the arsonists who had come to burn down the cottage, and caused the death of the little boy? Did they work for Wilfred’s would-be victim and was this the act of reprisal that Wilfred had predicted? What secret could have been so terrible that Violet was too afraid ever to breathe a word of it to anyone, even after it claimed the lives of her husband and child?

  And on, and on. The more questions filled Ben’s head, the fewer answers he could find. This was why Emily Bowman had also needed to take the steps she had, to help her understand the fate of the grandfather and uncle she’d never known.

  Ben’s first piece of evidence had taken him so far, but not far enough. Now he needed to turn to the second.

  Carter Duggan’s beer mat was still clasped between the pages of the memoir, like a bookmark. Ben examined it again, trying to make sense of the clues that Duggan had scribbled on it. More than ever, he was certain that these two items fitted together somehow, and that if he could decipher the code he could unlock the missing details from the memoir. That was what Duggan had been trying to do, and what he’d learned had been enough to get him killed.

  ACHILLES-14 / Galliard. What could it mean? Was it some kind of weird riddle? Or a code? Ben hated codes and wasn’t so keen on riddles, either. Or maybe it was neither of those things.

  ‘Think, Hope, think,’ he muttered to himself. The name Achilles was a no-brainer, in and of itself. You didn’t have to have studied history to have heard of the greatest and most ferocious warrior of ancient Greek legend, the hero of Homer’s Iliad, blessed with almost immortal power after being dipped by the heel in the river Styx as a baby. Son of a king and a water nymph goddess, slayer of the Trojan prince Hector and the driving force behind the fall of the city of Troy.

  Okay, fine, but it was perfectly meaningless to Ben in this context. As for the number fourteen suffix, it made the name look like a code or a formula, or even a military designation. But signifying what? Without further information, he couldn’t even guess.

  Moving on to the word ‘Galliard’, that one had even less meaning to Ben. Taking out his phone to look it up online, he found that Galliard was a musical term for a kind of dance that had been popular in the Renaissance. A couple of companies had appropriated the name as a brand, one a large property development firm and the other a big pharmaceutical company. Another blank.

  If you couldn’t think your way through a problem, sometimes it paid to try to think your way around it. Ben reflected on Duggan scribbling those words on a pub beer mat, and what circumstances might have led him to do that. In a world of flashy digital tech it seemed like an old-school thing to do, but then the investigator had been an old-school, low-technology kind of guy, according to his employer. This was a traditional street cop who belonged to the era when detectives and their informants met in smoky bars like spies of old, hunched secretively over strong drinks and passed information scribbled on cigarette packets and matchboxes. Gone were those days – or maybe not quite.

  The location of the Man O’War pub in Norfolk was another potential clue. Had Duggan travelled to the east coast to meet someone there – someone with information critical to his investigation? The scribbles could have been his way of making notes during the conversation if, say, his informant had refused to be recorded. It might be a long shot. But if it wasn’t, then the identity of the person Duggan had gone there to meet was of particular interest to Ben.

  And short of raising Carter Duggan from the dead to ask him, there seemed only one way of finding that out.

  Now, in the late afternoon, Ben hacked further westwards from the city and headed back towards Tom McAllister’s place. He felt bad about what he was about to do, but a plan was forming in his head. Arriving at the cottage sometime before six, he saw that the Plymouth wasn’t there. That suited him just fine. As he stepped out of the Alpina there was a furious barking, and Radar came tearing out from behind the outbuildings, tail high, hackles bristling and ready to repel intruders in German shepherd style. McAllister hadn’t taken the dog to work with him that day, which could have been a problem – but when Radar recognised Ben his threatening behaviour instantly softened and he trotted over to lick his hand and let himself be petted, as docile as a puppy.

  ‘Tell him I’m sorry about this,’ Ben said. His regret was genuine, but he had no choice. The lock on the cottage door took him seconds to defeat with his bump key, and he was in.
Radar trotted at his heel and followed him into the kitchen. Ben opened a cupboard and found a box of dog biscuits.

  ‘Hungry?’ He tossed one and Radar snatched it out of the air. Ben was hungry too, and felt a pang of temptation to check out whatever goodies might be in McAllister’s fridge. But he hadn’t come here to raid the guy’s food supplies. There was something else he wanted to steal instead.

  The expired police warrant card was still pinned to the cork notice board on the wall where Ben had seen it last. He plucked out the drawing pin and took it down, examining the ID photo of the younger Detective Sergeant McAllister more closely. Liam Neeson it was not; it didn’t look too much like Ben either, but it had the Thames Valley force logo nicely emblazoned on it and the words POLICE OFFICER in bold red, and would do just fine for what he had in mind.

  Ben delicately repositioned the photo on the notice board that had been half-hiding the card, so that McAllister was less likely to spot the empty space right away. Then he slipped the card into his wallet and left, the dog still trotting along after him wagging his tail. ‘See you around, buddy,’ Ben told Radar as he climbed back in the car.

  He’d been inside the cottage less than four minutes, and now the time was just gone six p.m. His plan was coming together.

  Ben fired up the Alpina. Next stop: the Norfolk coast.

  Chapter 24

  Jude had figured that if he could just manage to avoid Mickey Lowman, the ferrety-featured, one-eared bundle of charm he’d encountered on his first day in HMP Bullingdon, then he could at least reckon on a reasonably quiet life here behind bars. That was, for the short time he’d be detained in this place. He still had no idea how he’d do it, but his desire to escape burned more strongly with every passing hour.

  Yeah, you and the other thousand guys in this shithole, he thought dejectedly as he made his way back to his cell from the prison library that afternoon. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that escape was the top-rated fantasy on the mind of every man in here.