The Strode Venturer (6 page)

“That’s where I met him.”

“If our information is correct it’s some years since he was in that area. Have you been in touch since?”

But I’d had enough of questions. “Suppose you tell me what this is all about?”

Henry Strode started to say something, but his brother stopped him. “Please, Henry.” He turned to me. “You don’t know where he is. But could you locate him for us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it shouldn’t be all that difficult.”

“Ah, well, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about.” He took my arm and walked me to the far end of the table out of hearing of the others. “This is my idea, so I’m handling it. Henry’s a more cautious bird.” He hesitated. Then he lifted his head, staring at me with those moist
eyes that looked at close quarters like tiny oysters. “I’ll be frank with you,” he said. “My brother and I—we never got on very well with Peter. Different generations, different upbringing, schooling, everything—different mother, that was the main reason. Like you, I think I could find him if I tried. But I’d still have to put the proposition to him and—well, I don’t know—I think he’d probably tell us to go to hell. He’s like that, no business sense. None at all.” He smiled at me. “Well now, you’re just out of the Navy. Shopping around for a job, eh? I’ll make you a proposition. You find Peter and persuade him to come back to England and join the board and there’ll be a job for you in Strode Orient. How’s that?”

I tried to pin him down, but he wouldn’t commit himself; all he said was, “We’ll find you something.” And whilst I was considering it I kept catching snatches of the conversation they had resumed at the other end of the room: “If he did, we’d be out—all of us.” And then Henry Strode’s voice was saying something about “nothing but bitter reproaches.” And later, Hinchcliffe I think: “Exactly. The fellow needs money. He’ll jump at it.”

“Well?” George Strode was getting impatient.

“I’ve still got to reach him,” I said. “And what I know of the man it means travelling to some distant part of the world.”

He took my point immediately. “My dear fellow, of course. Draw on the company for all necessary expenses. I’ll fix that with Elliot; and your salary, same as you were getting in the Navy, back-dated to today as soon as Peter is on the board. That satisfy you?”

I nodded. “Can I have it in writing?”

For a moment I thought he was going to refuse, but all he said was, “Fair enough. You’ll have it in the morning and also an official letter from my brother confirming Peter Strode’s appointment to the board.” He took my arm again. “Now, come and have another drink. And then I must be off.” He led me back to the others. “Well, it’s all settled. Bailey will act as our go-between.”

Henry Strode nodded as though the issue had never been in doubt. “I don’t think you’ll have any difficulty persuading him. Just remind him that a seat on the board means four thousand a year in his pocket. As Hinch says, he’ll jump at it, but it’s still better coming from a personal friend.”

George Strode nodded. “That’s what I think.” And he added, “I wonder what the devil he’s been living on since we stopped paying dividends?”

I had another drink with them and then I left. George Strode saw me to the head of the stairs. “When you write me that letter,” I said, “perhaps you’d give me the names and addresses of any possible contacts. There must be somebody in England who knows where he is.”

But he shook his head. “There’s his sister, Ida—Mrs. Roche; she lives in Dartmouth. And his bank, of course. We’ve tried them both. If he has friends in England, then we don’t know of them.” And he added, “Peter never mixed much with his own kind. Preferred bumming his way round the world. Somebody told me they’d met up with him once in the Pacific—Fiji, I think it was. He was skippering some sort of a native craft. Where was it you met him in the Persian Gulf?”

“An island called Abu Musa,” I said.

“Inhabited?”

“No.”

He laughed. “Well, there you are. That’s Peter. Desert islands, wide open spaces, lost settlements. He was in Peru at one time. Four years ago he was in San Francisco, just back from Easter Island. We haven’t had news of him since.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, I have a lunch date now. Call in and see Elliot to-morrow.”

I nodded to my father’s portrait as I went down the stairs. The chance of a foothold in the business he’d partly created, the prospect of meeting Peter Strode again, the drink, too, I suppose—I felt curiously elated. And in the entrance hall below I was waylaid by the man who had sat beside me at the meeting. “Didn’t imagine they’d give you lunch, so I waited.”

“Why?”

But all he said was, “I thought if you were free we might go to the City Club.” The sun was shining in the street outside. The world seemed suddenly bright and full of promise. Curious, I nodded my acceptance and as we walked through to Old Broad Street I didn’t notice the drabness of the buildings any more, only the window-boxes, gay with the first daffodils. Spring seemed in the air.

The City Club is the lunchtime rendezvous of those men of money who are not close enough to the Establishment to belong to West End clubs and not quite big enough to have private dining-suites of their own. In its stuffy atmosphere, over a game pie lunch, I was given a glimpse of a financial jungle in which the hunter stalked his prey along tracks paved with legal documents, his methods and his code of behaviour prescribed by custom and just as rigid as those in the animal kingdom. The man I was with, whose name was Slattery, gradually emerged as a sort of procurer for certain financial interests. His quarry was Peter Strode and the hundred thousand shares he owned. He didn’t put it as crudely as that, of course. It was all done very obliquely and he was so skilled at directing the conversation, so smooth in his approach, that by the end of lunch he knew my background and I was pretty certain had satisfied himself as to the role I had been asked to assume.

This was confirmed over coffee and port when he said, “I think I’m in a position to help you. We know where Strode is.” But when I asked him where, he smiled and sipped his drink. “You’d never guess. Nor would those two half-brothers of his. It took us weeks to ferret it out.” It was then that he put his proposition to me, but so guardedly, so indirectly that it was some time before I realized he was offering me quite a large sum of money if I could persuade Peter Strode to sell. “Under the terms of his father’s will he couldn’t dispose of his holding until he was thirty. His thirtieth birthday is less than a month away. That’s why they want to make him a director. They think four thousand a year will satisfy him. My guess is it won’t.” He then went on
to outline the deal his principals had in mind—twenty thousand down and the balance of the purchase price of ten shillings a share in instalments as soon as the parent company had been able to dispose of the Strode Orient assets.

“Why don’t you write to him if you know where he is?” I asked.

“We’ve done that. Five weeks ago we cabled him our offer, confirming it by letter and pointing out that he couldn’t possibly hope to get anything like that price for the shares if he tried to sell them on the open market.”

“And you haven’t had a reply?”

“An acknowledgment, nothing more. That’s why I went to the meeting to-day. I knew what Felden was going to say—in fact, I briefed him. I wanted to see what the Strodes were going to do to meet the situation.” And he added, “it was a lucky chance that put you next to me. I take it the inducement they offered you was a job in Strode Orient?”

“Yes.”

“I’m offering you cash and that’s a better proposition than a job in a dying company.”

“I’m afraid I’ve already accepted the job,” I said.

He laughed. “I shouldn’t let that worry you. You’ve got yourself and your family to consider.” He finished his drink and got to his feet. “You think it over.” Before we parted in Old Broad Street he gave me his card. “You’ll probably find you’ll need me anyway—to tell you where he is.”

He was very nearly right, but it was to take me over a week to discover it, for I was convinced that my own line of approach would yield results. A man as colourful and as widely travelled as Peter Strode could hardly have passed unnoticed and Whitehall has its own methods of keeping tabs on such people. It didn’t take me long to pick up the trail. Starting with friends in the Admiralty I was passed to the War Office and the Air Ministry, to the Foreign Office, to Commonwealth Relations, to Colonial Affairs, and at each of these Ministries I found men who knew him or at least had heard of him. Intelligence officers were particularly
helpful for some of his travels had taken him to areas that specially concerned them. I finished up with a list of over forty places where he was known to have been, places that ranged from the Hadhramaut to the Society Islands and as far south as Auckland, and for most of them I was able to get rough dates. None of the dates covered the last three years. I tried another line of approach then, contacting scientific and academic institutions in London, many of whom had field workers operating in out of the way places. In this way I established three more contacts, but again they were all prior to 1959. I did discover, however, that he was a member of the Royal Geographical Society and had written two papers for them—one on the dhow traffic between South-East Arabia and the East Indies, the other on “The Structure and Life of the Maldivian Atolls”. These were written in 1954 and 1956 respectively, but though I read them both they gave no indication of his future plans, and being complete in themselves, the by-product of voyages made, there was no suggestion that he intended to revisit either of the areas. And I could find no reference to any other work of his in the voluminous index in the reading room of the British Museum.

At the end of a week of persistent inquiries my notes showed that the most recent trace of him I had been able to discover was a young man in the Foreign Office who had met him at a cocktail party on board the C-in-C’s “yacht” in Malta. That was late in 1959, probably in November, but he couldn’t remember the exact date. Strode had borrowed a fiver from him. He was dead broke and trying to hitch a ride with the R.A.F., he thought to the Far East. I tried the Air Ministry and Transport Command, but there was of course no record of their having granted him transport facilities, and a cable to the Maltese immigration authorities yielded nothing. From Malta Peter Strode seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth and with Africa only a short boat voyage away I’d have thought the man was dead, lost in some desperate trek across the desert, if it hadn’t been for Slattery’s confident assertion that he knew where he was—
that and the fact that his sister was still getting letters from him.

I discovered this when finally and in desperation I visited her at her flat in Dartmouth overlooking the estuary I’d known as a kid. I found her as curious about his whereabouts as I was myself for he had taken trouble to conceal it even from her, the letters undated with no address and written on cheap typing paper. She showed me the last which she had received just over a month ago. “I don’t even get them direct,” she said. “The solicitors forward them to me.” That was the first I knew that he had solicitors, but when I asked her whether they would have his address, she laughed and said she’d tried that. “Old Mr. Turner has his instructions and if he does know he’s not revealing it.”

I suppose the unusual nature of my errand intrigued her or perhaps it was the fact that I’d met her brother—they’d obviously been very close; at any rate, she talked very freely to me over a drink, about him and about the atmosphere in which they had been brought up. She wasn’t in the least like her brother to look at. Hers was a square, wide-mouthed face, but she had the same vitality and alertness of mind, the same quick nervous energy. The high cheekbones, the dark hair, the large, almost luminous brown eyes; there was something almost Latin about her, which was hardly surprising since their mother had been half French.

They hadn’t had a very happy childhood. The mother had been a model in the days when models were much less respectable than chorus girls. She’d been almost twenty years younger than Henry Strode when he’d married her following a much-publicized divorce case. Peter had been born two months later. “Barely legitimate, you see.” And Ida Roche smiled at me over her drink. There was a gap of three years between her brother and herself and at the age of seven, when she was just old enough to understand, their father and mother had separated. “It had never really worked. My mother, bless her heart, was too feminine, my father too old, too much a business tycoon.” She was smoking, moving restlessly about the room which was full of antiques. She had
an antique shop below which absorbed some of her energies. “It was a hell of an atmosphere. I think Father hated us then. No man as big as he was likes being made a fool of, and Mummy blazed a trail right across the social world he’d worked his way up into. He’d no time for us after that. He got the children of his first marriage back—Henry, Emily, Jennifer and George, all four of them back in the big house in Hampstead. I remember Peter came home from school—he was twelve then—to find his room occupied by brother George and himself relegated to an attic bedroom. He walked out of the house in a silent rage and was missing for over a week before the police found him on an east coast barge.”

She ground out her cigarette and turned suddenly and faced me. “I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to have any false hopes. You’re wasting your time going to Peter with a proposition like that. He’d never accept a seat on the board—never. He’d never accept anything from either Henry or George. He hates their guts and everything they stand for.”

“Then why doesn’t he fight them?” I said. “What’s he running away from?”

She stared at me, her brown eyes suddenly wide. I thought for a moment she was angry. But then she shrugged her shoulders. “Pride, I suppose. There’s a lot of his father in Peter. He’s not very like him to look at, but it’s there all the same.” She shook her head, smiling suddenly. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe all his life he has been running away. I don’t know.” She lit another cigarette. “You tell him that and it’s just possible …” But again she shook her head. “He’d never sit on a board of directors run by those two. Never. There’s too much bad blood, and none of it his fault. They behaved—abominably. And so did Father.”