Almost Love (47 page)

Chapter Sixty-Eight

The corpse belonged to Edmund Baker. Forensic evidence taken from the secret room and the post-mortem results revealed that he had been injured, probably by crashing his car rather than as the result of an assault. Whether he had died from his injuries, become accidentally trapped in the room or been shut in deliberately would always be a matter for speculation. In Tim’s view, there was one overwhelming piece of evidence to prove that Edmund’s death was accidental. Under his coat he had been clutching a swastika of what appeared to be red-gold set with blue diamonds. Lab tests showed that the jewel had actually been fashioned from pinchbeck and set with stones made from paste. It was a well-made piece, dating perhaps from the 1850s. An antiquarian jeweller said that its historical value would cause it to be worth about a thousand pounds. Either Jacob Sparham had been guilty of perpetrating a fraud or, more probably, he was the victim of one. His reputation for being taken in by the traders who preyed on Victorian tourists was well-documented.

Some days after the discovery of the corpse, two women turned up unexpectedly at the police station and asked to speak to Tim. They gave their name as Brodowska. The desk sergeant rang to ask Tim if he would see them. They said that it was about Edmund Baker. Tim had been on the point of refusing – he had already fielded several lunatic calls about the swastika – when he remembered that Baker’s deceased wife had had a Polish-sounding name.

One of the women was elderly – he thought probably in her early eighties. She was accompanied by a middle-aged woman who reminded him of someone, even though he was sure that he’d never seen either of them before. They stood together just inside the door of his office. Neither accepted his gestured offer of a seat.

The middle-aged woman pointed at the elderly woman. She spoke in fluent English, though it was heavily accented.

“This is my mother, Jelena,” she said. “Her English is not good, but she has something to tell you.”

The elderly woman enunciated several sentences in a harsh, cracked voice. She spoke very haltingly. Although most of the time she was looking at the floor, she darted beseeching little looks at Tim every few words. She clearly thought that what she was saying was intelligible to him. She concluded with a kind of vehement crescendo, as if that had settled it.

“I’m sorry,” said Tim, appealing to the middle-aged woman for help. “I didn’t quite understand that. Could you repeat it for me?”

“She said that when she was a girl, she was taken to a children’s home in Norway. It was a home for orphans; her parents disappeared during the war. The home was burned down. It was burnt deliberately. My mother was one of the few children who escaped. Eventually, she married my father, who was Danish. As a family we lived first in Denmark, then in England. We moved to England when my brother and sister and I were still children. My sister, Krystyna, was the only one of us to marry. She married the man called Edmund Baker, the man whose body is talked about in the newspapers. We didn’t like him, but his marriage to Krystyna seemed all right until a few years ago he had an affair. She was bitterly upset. My mother wanted her to leave him, but she refused. They patched it up, but just recently Krystyna suspected that he’d been seeing the woman – the same woman – again. I don’t know whether it turned her brain, but she became convinced – I should have said, she knew the story of the fire – she became convinced that Edmund had somehow got mixed up with the people who had started it. We thought it was crazy. Krystyna was certainly very depressed. But then she died and there was a boy who said Edmund had pushed her. And now we are wondering, could it be true?”

Tim sighed. He hardly felt able to cope with this. He pressed a button on his phone.

“Juliet? Do you think you could come in please? And could you possibly bring some tea. For four. Yes, for four.”

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Tim and Juliet spent a good hour listening to the two ladies as they went over their story several times more. Their theories, although probably well-founded, could be of no use to the investigation, even if the two people with whom they were concerned had not been dead. However, he was well aware that what he and Juliet were actually doing was helping them to begin the grieving process as they tried to make sense of the extraordinary events that had befallen their family, some of them more than sixty years before.

Juliet was downstairs showing them out and Tim was just returning to his desk when Superintendent Thornton poked his head around the door.

“Ah, Yates. You must be pleased with the way the investigation has gone. Not many more loose ends to tie up now. The Edmund Baker problem has been nicely solved. If you can catch Grigoryen, I think we can consider you home and dry. I doubt if you’ll find Jane Halliwell, but we don’t know that she’s actually committed any crimes, do we? She’ll be far away now, in any case. I’ve always thought that she went to ground in Norway somewhere.”

“Really?” said Tim. Even Superintendent Thornton picked up the twang of sarcasm.

“Yes, well, if there’s nothing else . . .”

“There is one thing, sir.”

Superintendent Thornton immediately looked suspicious.

“Yes?” he said discouragingly.

“I should like to know why Superintendent Little was so keen for us to investigate Dame Claudia’s disappearance in the first place. Rather than his own force, I mean.”

“Yes. Well, Roy’s quite a sensitive man, as I’m sure you’ve discovered. You probably won’t know that he was adopted. Some years ago, he tried to trace his real parents, and came to the conclusion that he was related to Dame Claudia. Not her son – her nephew, I think. The son of her half-sister, or something? So he felt that he couldn’t take the case on. I’ve no idea what steps he took to find this out and I’m sure now that he must have been mistaken. We know who her nephew was, don’t we?”

Acknowledgements

I should like especially to thank Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery for their inspiration, advice and encouragement and their unfailing hard work on my behalf; and my husband, Jim, for being a wonderful co-editor. I’d also like to thank the many people who read
In the Family
, the first of the DI Yates novels, who sent kind and enthusiastic comments. And my sincere thanks to booksellers and librarians everywhere.

For further information about Christina James, see www.christinajamesblog.com; Christina may be contacted at [email protected] or https://twitter.com/cajameswriter