Some by Fire (8 page)

It was brief and to the point. Somebody was clearing up, doing their housework, after an untimely death in the family. You can excuse a surplus apostrophe in a situation like that.

‘There was a cheque for twenty pounds with it,’ Crosby informed me.

‘So who was Duncan Roberts?’ I asked, laying the photocopy on the table. I was growing tired of riddles.

‘Four weeks earlier,’ he explained, ‘I was on holiday in Ireland. When I returned the Friends informed me that a man had been trying to contact me. He phoned three times, sounding desperate, but would not talk to anyone else. The calls were traced to a phone box in south London. In the third and final call he said:
“Tell him I did it. I started the fire, and I’m sorry.” Then he hung up and there were no more calls. A few weeks later this letter arrives. It must be the same person, Mr Priest. Duncan Roberts started the fire and it’s been troubling his conscience all these years. I feel sure that it will be possible to link him to JJ Fox.’

He certainly knew how to string me along, and he hadn’t finished yet. My thoughts were a jumble of confusion. I wanted to help him, but what good could it do? Fox was an old man. We could hound him to his grave, but would we feel any better for it? Sometimes hatred keeps you going. Remove the object of the hatred and you’ve nothing left. Crosby had spent a lifetime pursuing JJ Fox, for what? Because he bent the rules? Because, perhaps, some unknown people had died? It wasn’t worth eating your heart and soul out for. Not even that.

Crosby read my mind and went for the jugular. He said: ‘I adopted the name Keith Crosby when I came to this country, Mr Priest. Keith was an English pilot I met when I was hiding in France. Crosby was borrowed from Bing Crosby. I thought the name had a nice ring to it. My real name, the one I used for the first twelve years of my life, was Johannes Josef Fuchs. I was that small boy on the train, attacked by the Hitler Youth. 1940 was the worst winter in living memory. I should have died, they expected me
to die, but I didn’t. I don’t know what happened to my parents. I went into Parliament to fight people like JJ Fox, Mr Priest. Fox, whoever he was then, stole my clothes, my papers and my money, but most of all, Mr Priest, he stole my identity. Will you help me get it back, please?’

I watched his eyes blinking back the tears, unable to comprehend what they had seen when they were in the head of a child. All we can do is try. His beer was untouched and a ladybird was mounting an unsupported expedition across the tabletop. ‘What else have you there?’ I asked, reaching for the bundle of papers.

I walked across the car park with him to his battered Volvo – made in Sweden, the Land of Eternal Sidelights – and agreed to read his notes and have a think about what he’d told me. He shook my hand as if I’d promised to buy the vehicle from him and I said I’d be in touch.

I didn’t mow the lawn. Closer inspection showed it would last another week, and it’s not good to cut grass during a dry spell. Well, that’s what my father taught me. I opened a can of lager, spread myself out on the garden seat and listened to the world turning on its axis.

I don’t see much of Jacquie at weekends. She stays in on Saturday nights, doing her books, her hair and everything else that beautiful ladies do that we men know nothing about. Sundays, when possible, I like to go walking. Once, I’d suggested she come with me
and you’d have thought I’d asked her to pose naked for the
Police Review
. ‘Walking?’ she’d queried. ‘You mean…up hills? For fun?’

So I went on my own. This particular Sunday dawned blue-skied and filled with promise, and I watched a golden sunrise through my rearview mirrors as I headed towards the Lake District. I beat the crowds and found a parking place in the little park just outside Braithwaite. The Coledale Round is a tough walk and you’re straight into it. You put the car keys in a safe pocket, hitch up your shorts, step over the stile and start climbing. The path stretches straight and true before you, to the summit of Grisedale Pike two miles away and 2,000 feet higher.

It’s good thinking time. You stare down at the path six feet ahead of your boots and let your mind wander. Anything will do, as long as it takes it off the burning sensation in your chest and the wobbles in your legs. After twenty minutes I stopped and turned around to see how far I’d come. The village was like Toytown down below and beyond it the classically proportioned Skiddaw was bathed in sunlight. I took a few deep breaths, eased the straps on my shoulders and told my feet to get moving.

The whole Round was a bit too much for me on such a hot day. One of the pieces of knowledge that comes with the passing of the years is when to say: ‘Enough!’ I ate my sandwiches on a flat rock under
Hopegill Head, sunbathed for an hour then dropped into the valley and followed the miners’ road back to the car. It was a good day out. I didn’t come to any conclusions about Crosby and Fox, but my legs were definitely a shade browner. Perhaps I’d go to work in my shorts tomorrow.

In the cold light of a Heckley Monday it didn’t seem such a good idea, so it was back to the grown-up trousers. We’d had a fracas in the town centre after evensong, so all the cells were filled with rebellious D and Ds demanding their rights prior to appearing before the beak. It’s the communion wine that does it. Nothing to do with CID, thank goodness, except that it had taken a big chunk out of the overtime budget. Maggie and Nigel went to circulate the list of property stolen from the McLellands while Jeff and Sparky went to talk to the travel agency managers and collect the names of any customers who’d been booking holidays when the raids took place. I spread the papers Keith Crosby had given me across my desk and started to read.

Everything was on a diskette, but he’d told me he used AppleMac, while I was strictly Microsoft. It didn’t matter, as he’d provided hard copies of the important stuff and there wasn’t much of it. Nigel was an AppleMac man, so I’d ask him to run off the full story. The main item was a list of about fifty companies
that had fallen on difficult times and crashed in value. Fox had stepped in and bought low, which ain’t a crime, and soon afterwards, miraculously, they all appeared to be doing quite nicely. Crosby had listed them in date order, with share price or company value fluctuations over the relevant period and number of shares bought by Fox. Other information was patchy. Against some he’d typed details of the troubles they’d been beset by, and occasionally there was a name. The first on the list was a small chain of betting shops that had suffered a couple of fires and a disastrous loss on the 1970 Grand National when the telephone lines went dead and they couldn’t lay off some large bets. Gay Trip had cost them a fortune. Last on it was the Tipley Valley Water Company. It made interesting reading, very interesting, but I couldn’t put it much stronger than that. Accidents happen, and anybody could have bought shares in the companies, though when Fox did it was usually enough to take control. I made a few notes, read the letter from Andrew Roberts again and extracted my road atlas from the bottom drawer. It was eight years old; I really ought to bring a new one in. Welwyn Garden City is nearer to London than I thought. I looked in my diary for a number and wrote it on my pad. Directory Enquiries gave me Andrew Roberts’s, no problem. Just for the hell of it I did a person check on him and discovered he’d never come to our attention. There must be
millions out there like that. I opened my diary at the week ahead and rang Gilbert on the internal.

‘Are you likely to need me tomorrow?’ I asked him.

‘Umm, no, I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘Anything special?’

‘I want to nip down to see Commander Fearnside.’

‘Your friend at N-CIS?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Not going to accept that job he keeps offering you, I hope.’

‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Gilbert. How could I possibly leave after that? No, I’ve a load of stuff I want to talk to him about. It might be something big, but it’s more likely to be a waste of time. He sees the big picture, though. He’ll give it a fair hearing.’

‘OK. I’ll be in most of the week. Arrange it to suit yourself and let me know what he says about it.’

‘Cheers, boss.’ I clicked the cradle and dialled again.

‘Charlie!’ Fearnside boomed after I’d manipulated my way past several flunkies. ‘Long time no see. How are you, old boy?’

‘Fine, Mr Fearnside. And you?’

‘Counting the days, Charlie. Counting the days.’

‘Aren’t we all. I want an hour of your time, if you
don’t mind, soon as possible, about a long-running saga that’s not going to go away. It’s too big for me to handle without some authority from on high, but its source is an ex-MP, so I’ve got to take it seriously.’

‘Right, Charlie. The wife’s got tickets for the ballet tonight, but I could always tell her that something’s…’

‘Er, not that soon,’ I interrupted. ‘How about tomorrow?’

He sounded disappointed, but agreed to meet me at the Happy Burger on the M25, near Waltham Cross. He has a thing about their pancakes and likes to escape from the office whenever possible. Clandestine meetings at motorway services made him feel important, but we’d worked on a couple of big jobs together and I trusted him to know if Crosby was being paranoid or if there really was a case. I placed the phone back and wandered into the
open-plan,
feeling suddenly restless. The wheels were in motion. There was nobody to talk to, so I filled the kettle and switched it on. Somebody’s tabloid was lying there. I looked at the ladies’ bosoms, the front page and the sport, in that order. Rebecca, on page three, was studying law. A barrister’s wig was perched on her head, improving her posture wonderfully, and the caption read:
All stand for the judge
. She was beautiful, as they always are. Humiliating the plain ones isn’t any fun. Silly
girl, I thought. Thumbing through the rest I came across the horoscopes and scanned the dates. July 23 to August 23, that was me. Leo, would you believe it. It said that I was drifting aimlessly, and ought to try harder to create an impression. I knew I should have come in my shorts.

‘How much is on it?’ Nigel asked much later after he’d listened to the story, turning the diskette in his fingers as if he’d never seen one before.

‘Not sure,’ I replied. ‘Just do one copy to start with, please, for me to give to Fearnside. Then, if there’s not too much of it, do another couple. Put something on your FIN33 to cover it.’

Sparky was sitting on the edge of my desk, perusing the list Crosby had given me. ‘Bloody hell,’ he concluded, offering it back to me.

‘Is that your considered opinion?’ I asked.

‘I knew there was more to that fire than everybody thought,’ he replied.

‘Are you sure he’s not a nutter?’ Nigel asked. ‘When we lived in Virginia Water we had a neighbour who claimed to be the last descendant of Walter Raleigh. Spent the family fortune trying to prove it and finished up in a mental hospital.’

‘No, I’m not sure at all,’ I replied.

‘You mean…’ Sparky began, ‘…there really is a place called Virginia Water?’

‘Of course there is,’ I told him. ‘And very nice, too. It’s close to Blackbush airport.’

‘Blackbush airport,’ Nigel echoed. ‘How do you know about Blackbush airport?’

‘I saw Dylan there in ‘79. Me and quarter of a million others.’

‘You were there!’ he exclaimed. ‘With all the hippies! We couldn’t get out of the avenue for two days.’

‘Cultural event of the century,’ I declared. ‘Now here’s what we do. We keep this under our hats. We three and Mr Wood are the only ones to know about it. Nigel, you and Jeff will have to run the everyday show, while I work on this when I can. I’ll borrow Dave when I need another pair of eyes and ears. OK?’

‘No problem, boss.’

‘If anything goes off I want to be there,’ Dave insisted, his tone as hard as millstone grit.

‘I know you do, old son,’ I assured him. ‘And you will be.’

Tuesday morning someone hijacked the postman’s van and ram-raided the Sylvan Fields newsagent with it. They escaped with four boxes of cheese and onion crisps and ten copies of the
Guardian
. We’re looking for a liberal with a savoury tooth. I escaped by a nifty piece of delegation and headed south on the Ml.

A lorry with a puncture in the middle of the roadworks near Northampton ate up the extra hour I’d allowed, so I arrived at the Happy Burger just about dead on time. Fearnside was sitting in his big Rover. He got out as I parked and we walked into the café together, without ceremony.

‘It’s good to see you, Charlie,’ he said when we were seated in the smoking section, where it was quieter.

‘And you, Mr Fearnside,’ I replied. ‘I just hope I’m not wasting your time.’

‘Well, first of all, let’s cut out this Mr Fearnside nonsense, eh? It’s Roland. And secondly, you got me out of an accountability meeting, so you’re definitely not wasting my time. So what’s it all about, eh?’

They did pancakes with cherries, maple syrup or caramel sauce, and Fearnside ordered one of each. The little girl who took the order looked flustered. She might be an ace at French irregular verbs, but this hadn’t been in her crash course on waitressing. ‘You mean, all on one plate?’ she improvised.

‘Yes please,’ Fearnside told her, beaming. I ordered a cheeseburger.

When she’d gone I said: ‘In July 1975 we had an MP called Keith Crosby in Heckley. You may remember him.’ Fearnside gave a hesitant nod. ‘He fell from grace when an old terraced house he’d been bequeathed by an aunt burnt down and eight people – women and children – were burnt to death. He’d
allowed the house to be used as a shelter for battered women and it was breaking the fire regulations. He resigned as an MP shortly afterwards.’

Our waitress was hovering. I stopped speaking and looked up at her. ‘We don’t do three pancakes together,’ she told Fearnside, ‘but you could have them on separate plates, if that’s all right?’

‘That will be fine, my dear,’ he replied with a warm smile. He was growing benevolent in his old age. I decided he must be nearer to retiring than I’d thought. ‘Go on, Charlie,’ he prompted as she turned to leave.

‘Keith Crosby is convinced that JJ Fox was behind the fire, to deliberately discredit him. Apparently he’d been investigating Fox’s background and business methods. Asking questions in the House.’

‘JJ Fox!’ Fearnside mouthed, almost silently. ‘
The
JJ Fox?’

‘Of the Reynard Organisation,’ I confirmed.

‘Pardon me asking this, Charlie, but does he have any…you know…
evidence
?’

I pushed a manila envelope across the table. ‘I’d hardly call it evidence, but it’s all in there.’

‘Bloody hell, Charlie,’ he said. ‘When I was with the SFO we had a file on Fox thicker than prep school porridge, but we never pinned anything on him. Not that that meant a lot; we had files on nearly everyone who earned more than the commissioner
did.’ He patted the envelope. ‘I’ll have to talk to a few people. You realise that, don’t you?’

What he meant was that Fox would have friends in the force, and they might have fraternal contacts in Yorkshire. ‘No problem,’ I said.

The girl brought the food and Fearnside slid his pancakes, each complete with a blob of vanilla ice cream, on to one plate. ‘There you go, my dear,’ he said, handing her the two redundant plates. I cut my cheeseburger in half and wished I’d ordered it with fries.

We ate in silence and I continued the story over coffee. Fearnside dabbed his chin with his napkin and nodded at my words. At the far end of the restaurant a couple and their two children were eating. The older child, a teenage boy, was brain-damaged. He kept jerking his head around and waving his arms. His father fed him spoonfuls of food and wiped his mouth. Both of them were smiling, as if it were a game they played. I half-remembered a line from a poem; G. K. Chesterton, I believe:
To love is to love the unlovable, or it is no virtue at all
, and for a moment or two everything I was trying to do seemed second rate.

‘Hell’s teeth, Charlie,’ Fearnside said. ‘If you can land something on Fox the SFO’ll put your statue up in Elm Street.’

‘So you think it’s worth pursuing?’

‘From what you’ve told me, most certainly, old boy.’

‘Good. I’m just glad I haven’t wasted your time.’

‘Not at all. Not at all.’

I decided to have a little celebration and have cream in my coffee. As I fumbled with a plastic thimble of what passed for it I said: ‘So how long have you got to go, then, Roland?’ His reply took the wind out of my spinnaker.

‘Um, allowing for leave, I’ll be away a week on Friday.’