Almost Love (45 page)

“At some point during that summer Oliver told Claudia and Edmund, and probably also some of the other people working with them, about one of his ancestors, Jacob Sparham, a wealthy clergyman who lived in the mid-nineteenth century and travelled extensively. Apparently he fancied himself as an antiquarian, and brought back from his travels a large number of artefacts, which he donated to the Archaeological Society in his will. However, he had no eye for what was a genuine ‘antiquity’ and what had been faked. In short, the locals at most of the places that he visited saw him coming and palmed him off with a lot of tourist tat, no doubt also charging him handsomely for it. He was, incidentally, very right wing; he was one of the first pedants to misinterpret Charles Darwin’s theories by drawing a link between them and the concept of a master race. The Archaeological Society boxed up most of Jacob Sparham’s stuff and stored it in an old chapel which it uses as an archive. Various archaeologists have asked permission to open the boxes in the intervening century and a bit and they’ve all said the same thing: that they contain nothing of interest. However, the records that Jacob himself kept describe a precious artefact that was not included in the donation. It’s not clear how he acquired this artefact; although he was a clergyman, I think that it’s likely that he stole it. Perhaps because he was travelling in Albania at the time, he felt that it was fair game. His writings often refer to the people that he encounters as ‘backward’ and even ‘savage’.”

“Well, tell us what it was,” said Tim.

Juliet rolled her eyes. All the faces in front of her appeared to be spellbound. She was enjoying this unexpected burst of power.

“It was a swastika made of gold, studded with blue diamonds,” she said. “It was quite large – Jacob Sparham said that it did not fit comfortably into his hand. No one knows how old it was. Sparham obtained it from a monastery that belonged to the Albanian Orthodox church. The monastery was founded in the tenth century, but the swastika was probably much older. It almost certainly came from India and could have been made several thousand years ago.”

“How much would it be worth?”

“Blue diamonds are among the most valuable, because they’re extremely rare. It’s not possible to say how much the individual stones would be worth – it would depend on whether they were large or small, almost perfect or very flawed. But together they’d be worth a lot – millions, certainly. If the swastika was indeed an ancient jewel, it would be priceless.”

“Are you saying that you think that the promise of the swastika was used as collateral? That Endrit Grigoryen said he would bankroll the chapter of the Ymir set up by Jane Halliwell and Guy Maichment because he wanted to retrieve the swastika for this monastery? Or did he just pretend this and intend to sell it when he got his hands on it?”

“I don’t know. But maybe one of those things, or a mixture of them. As I’ve said, he’d made things more complicated than they needed to be by involving children from Herrick Old House as couriers. Some of the same children were also apprenticed to the Herrick Estate, which confused matters even further, but Grigoryen and Guy might not have known about this.”

“I’m beginning to lose track of this now,” said Tim. “Some of those kids are from eastern Europe. Why would Grigoryen agree to try to kill them?”

“I don’t think he’d have had any compunction about that,” said Juliet. “He’s a pretty ruthless character. He’s wanted in several countries for drug smuggling and exploiting children. I think that he was determined to get his hands on the swastika , whatever his reason for wanting it, and that he agreed to go along with Guy’s lunatic plan to burn down Herrick Old House and its occupants as part of the deal.”

“There seems to be no proof at all that this swastika exists or that if it does it’s still here in Spalding. If it wasn’t among the stuff included in Jacob Sparham’s legacy to the Archaeological Society, he might have given it privately to someone who subsequently sold it, or to some other organisation.”

“That seems to have been Oliver Sparham’s view, at least until recently; as I’ve said, his family hunted for the swastika on various occasions and concluded that it wasn’t among their possessions. But if it is as rare and valuable as I think that it is, it couldn’t have been donated to a society or museum without there being some record of it. It would probably be famous, in fact.”

“So what has managed to convince a hard-boiled desperado like Grigoryen that he’s really on to a winner here?”

“You’ll remember that Edmund Baker was a member of the dig when Oliver told the story about the swastika. Edmund was never one of Dame Claudia’s inner circle, probably in part because he didn’t subscribe to her political views. But he was fascinated by the tale itself and never forgot it. After he took the post of County Heritage Officer he became an avid collector of local history papers and other memorabilia, particularly ones relating to the Kirton area, where he was born. To anyone except an enthusiast, collections like this can seem quite tedious. They tend to be a mixture of old wills and property deeds and the published and unpublished musings of clergymen of varying degrees of talent. Edmund Baker’s collection was probably no exception. But then he struck gold. Missing from his collection were the papers of a nineteenth-century clergyman called the Reverend Victor Lockhart. Edmund read an announcement in one of the smaller, more gossipy sections of
Fenland Notes and Queries
for the year 1868 that this clergyman’s daughter, Charlotte Lockhart, had become engaged to Jacob Sparham. It was not the usual sort of announcement made in this journal; it may have been included because both Sparham and Lockhart were amateur antiquaries. The event itself was of little interest to Baker, but the final section of the article held him spellbound; it mentioned that, instead of giving his fiancée a conventional engagement ring, Sparham had presented her with a ‘rare jewel’ acquired on his travels. The engagement was subsequently broken off. There was no record of the nature of the rare jewel or what happened to it, but Baker clearly thought that it was the diamond swastika. He was convinced that the information would be contained within the Reverend Lockhart’s papers. He searched for them for years, without success. Quite recently they turned up as a donation to the Peterborough Museum. Baker borrowed the money to buy them from the museum’s trustees. Alex Tarrant was at the meeting when this was agreed.”

“If Baker didn’t get on particularly well with Dame Claudia and would have no truck with The Ymir, how did they find out that he had new information that might lead to the swastika?”

“Again this is conjecture, but I’ve been helped by Alex Tarrant, who has begun to think about Baker’s erratic behaviour and how it might be explained. One of the things that he told her during their brief romance was that he’d had a fling with another woman a few years before and had promised his wife that such a thing wouldn’t happen again. Alex thinks that this woman could have been Jane Halliwell.”

“Why would Halliwell target Baker? Or are you telling me that she really fancied the guy?”

“I think that she set out to get him. He’d been so enthusiastic about the swastika on the dig – possibly even said that he intended to track it down – that Claudia McRae probably remembered and told Halliwell the story when they were working on their book. Halliwell will have been just as keen to get her hands on it as he was, either to present the thing as a sort of trophy to The Ymir, or to break it up for funds to support them; but she’d have quickly found out that at that time he had no proper information about it.”

“So she used him in the same way that he subsequently used Alex Tarrant?”

“That’s what I’m guessing.”

“What did he hope to get from Alex?”

“I don’t know. Neither does she. My guess is that when he worked through the Lockhart Papers, the trail led him to the archive at the Archaeological Society. Either he thought he could find more information there, or the swastika itself. He needed Alex to help him to get access to the archive, and he needed it quickly.”

“Why the hurry?”

“Because, I conjecture, on the strength of his hunch he’d borrowed the money for the Lockhart papers from Jane Halliwell, who’d perhaps got it from Endrit Grigoryen, and time was running out for him. He didn’t have the funds to pay Endrit back.”

“I still don’t get it. How much did he have to pay for this country vicar’s papers? It can’t have been a huge amount.”

“He paid the Peterborough Museum the sum of £5,000.”

“Hmm, too much, almost certainly, though you can see why he’d be prepared to do it. But even though it’s a hefty amount, you’d expect someone at his stage of life to have been able to cover it.”

“He couldn’t cover that or many more bills and bank loans that were outstanding. It’s likely that soon he would have had to sell his house. Edmund Baker is a compulsive gambler.”

Someone knocked and entered the room. It was the desk sergeant.

“Excuse me, sir. I’ve just taken a call from Rampton. Apparently one of the other inmates attacked Guy Maichment about an hour ago?”

“Is he seriously hurt?”

“Apparently he’s half-dead. He’s been rushed to Retford Hospital. It’s touch and go whether they’ll be able to save him.”

“Juliet, we’re going to have to postpone this. Andy, you need to get in touch with the Nottinghamshire police. Maichment’s going to need round-the-clock protection. I’ll ask Dennis Bertolasso if someone can be posted beside his bed to take down anything that he might say.”

Chapter Sixty-Three

Guy Maichment died that night, without regaining consciousness. Juliet’s version of the McRae case was respected by her colleagues as having provided them with the sanest interpretation of events that they were ever likely to receive, although, as Giash Chakrabati pointed out, they weren’t dealing with very sane criminals. She didn’t get the opportunity to complete it. Tim had been counting on their being able to prise some information from Guy.

On the following day the divers at the gravel pit retrieved the remains of a very aged woman. They were identified from dental records and from an old healed fracture in one arm as having belonged to Dame Claudia McRae. On the same day, the results of DNA tests carried out on the corpse that had been buried in Guy Maichment’s garden showed conclusively that it was that of Andreas Jensen. The police made further progress during the next fortnight; they succeeded in rounding up several more members of Endrit Grigoryen’s gang. Poorly educated and unable to speak much English, these men had been at a loss to know how to survive once Endrit summarily cut them loose. They almost seemed glad to have been caught.

Although it would probably never be possible to piece together all of the events that had led up to the intended firing of Herrick Old House, the new arrests and other information gathered from Oliver Sparham’s and Edmund Baker’s houses seemed to corroborate Juliet’s hypotheses. When, after news of Jensen’s death was circulated by the media, it was announced that the Norwegian government had stripped the political arm of The Ymir of its right to be recognised as a bona fide organisation and therefore to raise funds legally, Tim Yates concluded that she had probably been right about him, too.

The development helped to provide an explanation for his murder. Although no doubt he had steered close to the law, for the past twenty years Jensen had tried to legitimise the The Ymir by presenting it to the world as a political group that was entitled to hold opinions, like any other. Guy’s mad plan to restore it to its ‘roots’ by precipitating it headlong into acts of terrorism and mass murder had almost certainly been opposed by Jensen, who had paid for this resistance with his life. Tim guessed that his visit to Dame Claudia’s cottage had been to ask her to persuade her nephew to abandon his crazy activism. It might have been then that she realised belatedly that Guy and Jane Halliwell were manipulating her and that her nearly completed ‘great work’ would be published not to celebrate her, but to support The Ymir’s ideology. She might have been distressed by Jensen’s account of Guy’s intentions and promised to help him. This alone would have been enough to seal her fate, but, once Jensen had been killed in her house, presumably by Grigoryen or one of his thugs, if Guy could not get her to be complicit in the murder, he would have been obliged to make her disappear. Although he was not especially fond of her, he would probably have baulked at agreeing to allow her own murder and arranged to have her held somewhere instead. Sadly, it might have been Katrin’s sighting of her that finally precipitated her death. Tim was anxious that Katrin should not understand this, though he suspected that it was a futile hope.

Why Guy had not cleared up the mess after Jensen’s death was a bit of a puzzle; perhaps it had genuinely been because he was too squeamish. Whether or not Oliver Sparham had been directly involved in Dame Claudia’s disappearance was impossible to say. Tim persisted in his original reading of Oliver as an essentially honest and honourable man. He therefore chose to continue to believe Oliver’s account of his last meeting with Claudia. Juliet was inclined to agree with him, but for the less visceral reason that what Oliver had said fitted in with the forensic evidence. The wall had been spattered with Jensen’s blood much later than 4.30 p.m. in the afternoon before Claudia’s disappearance. Oliver had had a watertight alibi from the time of his arrival at the conference at 5 p.m. until the early hours of the following morning, by which time Jensen had almost certainly been murdered.

Superintendent Thornton was reasonably happy with the progress made by Tim and his team, even though there had been a certain number of deaths that he would have liked to be able to transform into arrests. He was still exercised by police failure to locate either Edmund Baker or Jane Halliwell, and persisted in his fanciful notion that they had eloped to Scotland together. Although Alex Tarrant’s statement included details of the conversation with Oliver in which he had said that he believed that Jane might have been the mystery woman with whom Edmund had first committed adultery, Tim could not see why a woman like Jane would impede her flight and run a greater risk of capture by yoking herself to a man for whom she probably had little regard. He did not dissuade Thornton from enlisting the help of the Scottish police, but at the same time he was pursuing a different line of enquiry. Police officers who had been randomly stopping vehicles on the night of the Herrick Old House incident had seen a car approach at speed, then suddenly slow down and reverse. It had turned precipitately and roared back into the darkness towards Star Fen, which was not far from Sleaford. Two of them had seen the car quite clearly. Although they could not say what colour it had been, they had both agreed that it was an elderly Saab.

If the car had indeed been Edmund’s, it was possible that when he saw that he might be stopped, he decided instead to join Maichment and Grigoryen’s men at Herrick Old House. Tim thought that this was unlikely, however. All the other evidence suggested that Edmund would be running away from the Albanians. He probably didn’t know of their plans to fire the children’s home, in any case. He had always been an outsider and now became a fugitive from everyone, even his own family. His sons had showed little but contempt for him. After their mother’s funeral, they had each returned to their jobs in distant places, seemingly careless of whether Edmund was found or not.

Tim was intrigued by the sighting, though, and convinced that it held the key to Edmund’s whereabouts. A few days after the fire he drove to the place where the officers had been, turned round, as had the driver of the Saab, and took the road to Star Fen. It was a tiny hamlet. He remembered vaguely that he had visited it once before, searching for someone accused of embezzling money who had been seen at a rented cottage there.

Star Fen consisted of a single street with half a dozen houses and a few farm buildings. Three vehicles were parked in the street. None of them was a dark red Saab. Tim got out of the BMW and walked along the road for some distance beyond the houses, and back again. It was a place of familiar fenland scenery: neatly-tilled fields bounded by deep dykes, no trees, few shrubs or bushes. Not promising territory for concealing a strange vehicle.

He sauntered back to his car again. At first he had thought that the hamlet was deserted. Then he saw a man standing at the side of one of the houses, watching him intently. He was a well-built man in his twenties, with a lot of untidy dark hair and a swarthy face. He was wearing navy-blue overalls and gigantic green gumboots. He carried a grease-gun in one hand. As Tim drew closer, he saw that he had evidently been tinkering with the engine of an aged tractor that was jammed up against the side of the house wall. Tim decided that he would speak to him. As he crossed the road, the man came walking towards him with rapid steps.

“Have you come about the bike?” he said.

“No,” said Tim. “What made you think I had?”

The man snorted. “Got copper written all over you. No-one’s come about it yet. I thought that they might have sent you.”

“No,” said Tim. “But you’re right, I am a copper.” He produced the photograph of Edmund Baker that Gary Cooper had acquired from one of Baker’s sons. “Have you seen this man hanging around here at all?”

The man held the photograph gingerly between greasy thumb and forefinger.

“Can’t say I have. People don’t hang around here, in any case. That’s what’s so odd about the bike. Thought that bastard next door might have taken it.” He jerked his head back in the direction of the tractor. “But I’d have seen him with it by now. It’s too close to home for him, anyway. Wouldn’t be able to use it here, would he?”

“Are you telling me that you’ve had a bicycle stolen and you’ve reported it?”

“Not a ‘bicycle’.” The man pronounced the word mincingly. “A motorbike. A Triumph. My pride and joy, it was. And the only way I had of spending a bit of time away from here. It’s all right, like. But it gets lonely.”

Tim was suddenly very alert.

“When was your motorbike stolen, Mr . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name . . .”

“It’s Sentance. Richard Sentance. Four days ago.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. Cops all over the place that night, weren’t there? Even come here once. I didn’t know it had gone then, mind. Otherwise I’d have put them on to it.”

“You’re definitely talking about four days ago?”

“That’s the one. When will someone come about it, do you think?”

Tim dredged up one of the many details of Alex Tarrant’s statement. She’d said that Edmund had been keen on motorbikes; that he’d told her that he’d had one in his youth and intended to buy another. He certainly knew how to ride one.

“I’ll make sure that someone comes to take a statement today. In the meantime, would you mind describing it to me as accurately as you possibly can?”

“I don’t need to do that. I’ve got photos of it: dozens of them. You can take your pick.”