Forty-Five

Jean Rook had not succeeded in reaching Tony Sentance by telephone, so she’d rung Tim to say that she’d left messages for him to meet them at Laurieston House. She’d suggested to Tim that if Kevan de Vries and Archie came home in the meantime, the police might take Sentance to the shoe-box-sized police station which was all that Sutterton could boast and talk to him there. She was being super-helpful now, a development that Tim mistrusted. Ms Rook was not renowned for co-operating with the police.

Tim had not been able to reach Sentance, either. He reasoned that the man was more likely to obey a summons that came indirectly from ‘Mr Kevan’ than directly from a policeman. It was strange that even de Vries could not raise him. Tim called Ricky to tell him that the coast was clear if de Vries wanted to bring his son home. He thought he might leave it up to de Vries himself to choose whether Sentance was interviewed at his house or not when he finally showed up.

Jean Rook had said that she’d asked Sentance to come to Laurieston at around 1 p.m. She’d left messages for him at the various de Vries factories and offices and, since it was his habit to call them all at around 11 a.m. each day, he would have received her message by mid-morning at the latest, which would give him plenty of time to reach Sutterton by lunchtime as long as he hadn’t travelled further afield than the Norfolk plant.

Tim still had almost two hours to kill, therefore. He debated whether it was worth returning to Spalding to see Thornton and decided that it wasn’t. Nevertheless, the Superintendent had been uncharacteristically quiet since he’d been informed of Joanna de Vries’ death, which made Tim a little uneasy. He’d decided to go out to his car so that he could call his boss in privacy when the crunching of the gravel outside announced another arrival. Tim noted that the noise it made was quite loud. Such a sound could possibly have woken Kevan de Vries in the early hours, especially if he was a light sleeper.

 

The door opened slowly. Kevan de Vries entered, holding tightly the hand of a young boy. Tim could just glimpse Ricky MacFadyen standing behind them in the driveway at a respectful distance. De Vries was visibly annoyed.

“DI Yates. I saw your car in the drive. I didn’t expect you still to be here.”

“I’m sorry, Mr de Vries. I thought that you knew that DC MacFadyen had received a call from me; about ten minutes ago, I think it was.”

Ricky was hovering in the doorway now, wearing an uncomfortable expression.

“Indeed. But I thought that the purpose of the call was to indicate that you were about to leave.”

“No, sir, it was to let you know that . . . it was safe for you to come home.” Tim glanced at the child, who was staring up at him impassively. He had a pinched, sallow little face and a peculiarly remote look in his eye. Tim supposed that he must be very distressed, although his state of mind was unreadable. “But forgive me,” he went on. “It was not originally my intention to disturb you further – though I’m afraid I shall have to leave a PC on guard for the time being. I’m still here myself because Ms Rook has been trying to get hold of Mr Sentance. I understand that she’s asked him to come to your house at around lunchtime.”

“Oh, God, Sentance. I’d forgotten that I’d asked Jean to call him. But I hadn’t expected to share the meeting with you, DI Yates.”

“I won’t intrude on your meeting, sir. If you wish, I’ll take Mr Sentance somewhere else to talk to him.”

There was a small, sharp cry. It reminded Tim of the mewling of a hawk he’d seen at a country fair. It had been caged and shackled prior to taking part in a falconry display. He glanced at the child and saw that his face had turned white and was horribly contorted into a grimace of . . . what? It would be the most natural thing in the world for the boy to show sorrow, even uncontrollable grief. Instead what he was conveying, and most powerfully, was a mixture of disgust and anger.

Tim hated the ‘Does he take sugar?’ approach to communicating with children, so he decided to risk talking to the boy directly.

“Are you all right? Archie, isn’t it? I’m sorry . . .”

“I don’t think that Archie’s in a fit state to talk now, DI Yates. I’ll take him to Mrs Briggs and come back to you when he’s settled.”

“Of course.”

As they brushed past him, Tim thought that he saw the child try to pull away from de Vries and that the father responded by tightening his grip on the boy’s hand. He was rather surprised to see de Vries knocking on the kitchen door before he opened it – and, now he thought of it, Jackie Briggs had not come running out to see Archie when they had arrived. He supposed that some kind of master-servant etiquette must be at work.

Now that they were alone in the hallway, he turned to Ricky, who had just closed the front door.

“Strange kid,” said Tim.

“You can say that again. I know that anger’s supposed to be a part of grief, but he seems to be eaten up with it. I haven’t heard him say a word yet, either.”

“Does anything else strike you as odd about him?” said Tim, lowering his voice. Ricky twigged at once and followed suit.

“Just about everything about him strikes me as odd. What were you thinking of in particular?”

“Do you know how old he is?”

“I think he’s nine. Small for his age, isn’t he?”

“Yes, there’s that, for a start. And then there are his parents.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. Joanna de Vries was tall and blonde and probably, from the photographs here, on the plump side before she got ill. De Vries himself is shorter, granted, but very stocky and also very blond. How did they manage to have a child like him?”

Ricky shrugged.

“Stranger things have happened. I’ve read about white women who’ve unexpectedly given birth to black babies and traced it back to a black ancestor that they didn’t know about from four or five generations before.”

“Yeah, right,” said Tim. “And I can think of a simpler explanation for that, too. But I’d take your point about Archie if I hadn’t found out something else about him as well.”

“What’s that?”

“Officially speaking, he doesn’t exist.”

“Come again?”

“No British birth certificate has been issued to a boy named Archie or Archibald de Vries during the past twenty years. I’ve had the records at Somerset House checked.”

“Perhaps he’s adopted?”

Tim shook his head.

“There’s no record of that, either, or that the de Vries are registered as foster parents.”

“Maybe they did adopt, but just didn’t change the boy’s name? They call him Archie de Vries, but his real name is still the one on his birth certificate?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. A man like Kevan de Vries would want to make sure that his son took his name and he’d carry out all the correct legal processes necessary, if only to ensure that there would be no arguments when it came to inheriting his wealth.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“Joanna de Vries was diagnosed with leukaemia a long time ago, just a few years after her marriage, in fact . . .”

“You’re right, Detective Inspector, she was. May I ask what bearing that can possibly have on your investigation into her death?” Kevan de Vries had reappeared silently while they were talking. He’d snapped right back into the cautious urbanity that he’d displayed on his first meeting with Tim. Tim detected an undercurrent of menace in his tone, nevertheless.