FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (13 page)

And that was that. George Lee left the garden centre shaken and more than a little confused. That wasn’t the work of petty vandals. Someone obviously had taken an intense dislike to Adam Tredwin and didn’t want him around.

It made George all the more determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Sylvia Tredwin. Its effects and implications, he was certain, were stretching all the way from 1974 to the present. And the first place to start, he thought, was by locating D. B. Forde – the ufologist who wrote the book on alien abduction. He was the one who had had significant access to Sylvia. Failing that he’d try and find Sylvia Tredwin and speak to her himself. One way or another, like a dog locked onto a scent, he was going to follow it to its logical conclusion, the thrill of the chase filling his body with a fizz of excitement.

When he arrived home George Lee thought he was imagining the smell of smoke, as if the reek came from the image of the burning van that remained lodged at the forefront of his mind. Caught in the last of the evening sunshine he saw his mother and sister in the garden, busy loading paper onto a small but fiercely burning bonfire. He immediately recognised the boxes by the women’s sides as those from the loft. It looked like his mother could not get the contents onto the fire quick enough.

He didn’t make his presence known. He retreate
d back into the house, pondering their actions. For a man she reckoned to love so much it seemed a little too soon to be destroying snippets of his life, albeit boring snippets. There were many papers covered in his scrawl, a direct link to him, to his hand, a hand that transcribed thoughts and feelings.

But I guess we all deal with grief differently, he thought. Take old man Mollett; a regular pilgrimage to place flowers at the site of his father’s death. He’d seen many a withered bunch of flowers by many a roadside over the years, sites of fatal accid
ents, and wondered why people would want to visit or commemorate the site of such tragedy. Did they imagine it happening, or in an alternative past try to place themselves there so they could step in to avert the accident. Was it guilt for not being there to help or what?

George Lee went up into his father’s loft, stood there in the light from the bare bulb and looked at the stacks of boxes and
bags. Strange, but up here he felt closer to his father than anywhere else in the house, if close was the word. He was more aware of his presence, because this tiny room had been his. Some men have sheds; his father had his loft. Everything that appeared to matter to his father was stacked here. He’d hung onto it for a reason, even the mundane stuff. Even the secrets.

So what other secrets were stored in here, hidden away like the bank statements?

He spent a while sorting through masses of paperwork, none of it pretty exciting, eventually landing on a box marked ‘car stuff’. Idly, boredom beginning to eat away at him, he opened the box and sifted through the neatly-stacked papers within: old MOT certificates, bills for work done – all at Cowpers, naturally – services, tyre changes, car insurance policies going back donkey’s years.

Then he came across the bill of sale for his father’s car – a
then four-year-old Ford Fiesta bought from his uncles’ Garage, his Uncle Gary’s primitive signature at the bottom. He thought nothing about it until he found a receipt for work to replace a badly corroded offside wing for the same car, carried out a year later, also signed by Gary. Something nagged at him as he stared at the innocuous-looking document.

He
set aside the receipt and sat down at his father’s desk, taking the paper with D. B. Forde’s contact number out of his pocket and staring at it. It was a long time ago. He must surely have moved house since he gave the card to Mollett.

He picked up the phone and stabbed in the numbers, listening to the ringing-tone.
His eye caught a slim box on a shelf above the desk marked ‘school reports’, and he frowned. Jamming the phone between shoulder and ear, he reached across and eased the box from its place in the pile and set it on the desk before him. As he lifted the lid a man’s voice buzzed in his ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, hello,’ said George, pushing the box aside. ‘I know this is a long shot, but are you Mr Forde by any chance?’

‘That depends on what you’re selling,’ he replied cautiously. ‘Are you selling something, because I’ve got everything I need?’

George could tell he was about to hang up. ‘Are you Mr D. B. Forde, author of
Hands from the Sky
?’

A crack
ling silence. ‘How did you get my home number?’

‘I thought you might have moved house since…’

‘How did you get my number?’ he asked again, firmer.

‘Sorry, Mr Forde. Please forgive me. My name is…’ He thought about it. ‘My name is Cameron Slade. I’m a writer. I was given your number by a man in the
village of Petheram, in Somerset. He said…’

‘Sylvia Tredwin,’ Forde interrupted.

‘You remember,’ George said.

‘Yes I remember. What about it?’

‘I was born in Petheram, I was friends with Sylvia’s son. I knew the family quite intimately,’ he lied. ‘It’s only recently I came across aspects of Sylvia’s life story that has bothered me – and I was given a copy of your book…’

‘So?’

Definitely on the defensive, thought George. ‘So I wanted to find out more about what happened to Sylvia Tredwin. You spent some time with her, I understand.’

‘Are you from the
newspapers?’ he fired bluntly. ‘Some kind of hack reporter?’

‘No, absolutely not.’

‘I’ve never heard of Cameron Slade.’

‘I’m not that well known, in all honesty.’

‘That makes two of us,’ he said, chuckling unexpectedly.

‘Can I meet with you
personally?’ said George.

‘We can speak over the phone, if at all. I don’t meet with people anymore,’ he said. It had an ominous rin
g to it. ‘What I mean to say is I don’t trust people anymore.’

‘I’m not like other people,’ said George. ‘
It wouldn’t take long and I’m not that far away from Plymouth. It would be great to meet with you to talk about your books and in particular the Sylvia Tredwin case. I’m a great admirer of your work,’ he said hopefully. He quoted the names of a few books authored by Forde which he’d looked up on the internet. ‘I have them in first editions,’ he lied again.

The silence crackled again. ‘I can spare half an hour or so, no more.’

‘Great!’ George said. ‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘So soon?’

‘Get it over and done with,’ he said stiffly, though George could tell he’d made an impression with his improvised feigning of admiration. All writers were the same, he thought. Shallow seekers of the affirmation and love of complete strangers. And he should know.

They agreed a time and place and George set the phone into its cradle with smug satisfaction. His hand had lifted the lid off the box before he’d even had time to think about it. His school reports were all there, the earlier ones in book form, the latter on single sheets of A4 stuffed into envelopes. Neatly stacked in date order, earliest to the bottom. The mummification of his hated school days.

He was drawn to one of the earliest, to his time at the primary school that used to be in the village but which had closed down long ago due to falling numbers. His age
, written in blue biro by his class teacher at the top of the page, was given as six years old. Reading age, below average; mathematics, below average; written work quite interesting and imaginative at times. And then the comment that got him a beating at home.

George still finds it difficult to make real friends or become involved in any class discussion or activity. George continues to believe he has an invisible friend called Cameron, which is no great worry as many children create imaginary friends to make up for real ones and is something they quickly grow out of. But George’s attachment to Cameron is, if anything, becoming stronger and more invasive, and it is something we will keep an eye on. Perhaps you may find ways to remind George that Cameron isn’t real, as continued belief in this character may hinder his personal and academic development.

He slammed the report back inside the box and thumped the lid back on. Bitch, he thought. What did she know about the creative mind? He remembered his father reading the report and getting all heated up over this thing with Cameron. So much so he gave him a beating on the backside and sent him up to bed, threatening that if he ever heard about that bloody Cameron ever again he’d send the boy away to a school for crazy children, because he had to be crazy to believe such a thing. And he couldn’t have a crazy kid in the house.

It didn’t work though, did it?
Cameron said.

‘You ain’t real,’ said George under his breath. ‘It says so here in this report.’

What do they know?

God, I am
really fucked up, George thought, resting his head in both hands and staring hard at the dusty, scuffed cardboard lid of the box of reports. So is that why you’re drawn to Sylvia Tredwin, because she was fucked up too?

He guessed it was, deep down. Because
, let’s face it, we’re all fucked up in one way or another. Then he frowned thoughtfully, returning to the receipt for work done to his father’s car, the replacement of the corroded wing.

Surely a four-year-old car couldn’t have had that much corrosion, even a British-made car. He checked the MOTs for the
Fiesta. There was a warning about a wiper on its way out, but nothing about corrosion. Uncle Gary wouldn’t have let his brother-in-law buy a naff car from him, nor fail to register any corrosion during its MOT a year later.

The image of Bruce Tredwin being knocked down in the lane by a hit-and-run driver flashed in his mind.

He shook his head. No, surely that’s impossible. But the wing replacement followed the accident almost immediately. Was it such a big leap of the imagination? Hang on, George; are you seriously thinking your father might have been the driver of the hit-and-run car?

He shook his head. His father had been
many things, but he had never been one not to report such a serious accident.

That’s if it was
an accident…

He caught a taxi from
Plymouth railway station. It had been years since he’d been to the city. It had changed dramatically. He didn’t recognise the place, with its modern thoroughfares and shops, its many new buildings, a city bombed to hell during the Second World War and having to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Still, in relation to its city counterparts in other areas of the country, it appeared to him to be a large town trying to be a city. Stuck at the arse-end of the country, too far away from London and the Centre of the World, and hindered by the fact it was in the South West anyway (a part of the country nobody else seemed to take very seriously and one of the reasons George Lee got away from it just as soon as he could) Plymouth reminded George of a prime minister trying to battle with MPs at Prime Minister’s Question Time using a broad South West accent. But those opinions belonged largely to Cameron Slade, he knew that. As the taxi skirted the city and into the suburbs he wondered whether he should adopt a new pseudonym. Cameron Slade had become too negative and bitter over the years. Too dominant. Maybe that’s what was hindering his sales…

Forde’s house was your regular semi, built in the 1930s. Now quite desirable, as most of the new stuff they threw up was never going to last as long or be as sturdy. It even had its original 1930s door, with its yellow oval glass and brass door knocker and letterbox.

‘Mr Slade,’ said D. B. Forde, standing in the doorway. He was a sturdy man, built like his sturdy 1930s house, in his seventies, George surmised; an easy-living paunch pushing at his shirt and trousers, his sleeves rolled up, silvery hairs on his arms, a pair of checked slippers on his feet. He didn’t look like George’s image of a man who wrote about alien abduction; he looked like he wrote books on how to plant carrots and pickle onions.

He invited George inside, directed him to the living room. It was a large sunlit room, with a full bookcase taking up most of one wall, and so crammed with books they had, by necessity, spilled onto the floor and were formi
ng a couple of neat piles on the room’s gaudy red carpet.

‘I’d offer you a drink, but you’re not staying,’ said Forde as George sat down. ‘I’m painting the spare bedroom, so we’re going to be quick.’

‘Fine,’ said George. ‘I’m pleased you agreed to see me.’

Forde sat heavily opposite George, his podgy fingers interlaced awkwardly. ‘I got a lot of stick from people,’ he said suddenly. ‘Over the years. Lots of negative press for my beliefs. For my theories. In the end I gave it all up. I’ve not written anything in ten years. I had hoped people would have forgotten about me.’

‘Was it really that bad?’

‘People in our business
get called all manner of things, Mr Slade. From cranks to loonies, to New Age dreamers, forever being laughed at, scorned, dismissed and marginalised, forced to inhabit the scientific sidelines. I never wanted my books to be sold alongside those lurid tales of the curse of Tutankhamen, or the government-sanctioned assassinations of Princess Diana, President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. My works are serious attempts to understand something that is quite bizarre and as yet unexplained. I am first and foremost a scientist. A scientist who happened to believe in the existence of aliens. Those other people, those Tutankhamen and conspiracy people, frankly, they’re all mad.’

‘Who
happened
to believe in the existence of aliens? You used the past tense.’

‘A slip of the tongue. I now find I want to lead a quiet life, see my retirement out with a little dignity. My skin is not as hard as it used to be; I find I cannot take the criticism as easily as I used to. I bruise quite readily, Mr Slade. Hence my reluctance to see you. But, being out of my head, I find I am here speaking with you when I should rea
lly have told you to shove off. So, you write thrillers, eh?’