CHAPTER SIX
Echo had set off for the sorting office by the time I surfaced the following morning. Over a cobbled-together breakfast, I computed that to be at the Hilton at ten I’d need to be on the bus by half nine. According to Echo, the post was sure to have been delivered to Hardrada Road by then, but her confidence on the point didn’t seem to square up to reality. Regular squints out of the window revealed no approaching postie as nine o’clock came and went. Eventually, just as I was about to make a move for the bus stop, along came Echo’s tardy colleague, the result being that I had to take Dad’s letter with me and start sifting through the contents on the top deck of the number 36 as it lumbered towards Hyde Park Corner.
Dad had done a thorough job with the cuttings, as I might have expected – a clutch of articles reporting sudden farm-related deaths and subsequent inquests along with a couple of feature pieces pondering the meaning of so many fatalities crammed into the summer and autumn of 1963.
The exact number had itself been a cause of dispute. Four or five, according to whether you included Reginald Gorton, owner of a peat-digging business near Shapwick, who’d died of a heart attack early in September. If you were looking for jinxes, I supposed you did. The sequence had started at the end of July, with Albert Crick falling off a barn roof. Then Peter Dalton, none other, had been found dead of gunshot wounds at Wilderness Farm, near Ashcott. The date: Monday 19 August. Within a fortnight of the Great Train Robbery on Thursday 8 August, just as Bill Prettyman had said.
The Central Somerset Gazette wasn’t to know of a connection – if there really was one – with big-time crime in Buckinghamshire, of course. They said Dalton had inherited Wilderness Farm from his father the year before and was thought by neighbouring farmers to be struggling to make a go of it. Shotgun suicide was lightly implied. The inquest a month later had gone along with that, despite what the coroner had called ‘minor inconsistencies in the disposition of the deceased and the weapon’. What did that mean? The Gazette wasn’t in the business of asking.
As to the discovery of Dalton’s body, there was Howard’s name in black and white. Howard Alder, 15, of Penfrith, Street, was cycling along a footpath that passes through the yard of Wilderness Farm when he noticed a figure lying in the doorway of the milking shed. There was nothing about just how grisly this discovery must have been. Nor any mention of Howard at the inquest. Just as there’d never been a whisper of the event in all the years I’d known Howard through Rupe. Very strange.
And it got stranger. Once you bought into Gorton being part of a sequence, that made three deaths within six weeks. This point only seemed to be seriously seized on after a fourth death, late in October. Andrew Moore, son of the owner of Mereleaze Farm, near Othery, had been knocked off his motorbike by a lorry and killed in an accident at the A39/A361 junction on the afternoon of Monday 28 October. It was the day after the clocks had gone back for winter. The early dusk was held partly to blame. But with Hallowe’en in the offing, some ghoulish theories had started doing the rounds. Dad had copied a few letters to the editor for me. There may be no basis to the wilder talk of a curse on our farming community, but it is difficult to see so many deaths as coincidental – that sort of thing.
The fifth and evidently final death was of George Alder himself, on Sunday 17 November. Mr Alder went out early in the morning, reported the Gazette later in the week. When he did not return by mid-afternoon, his family grew concerned. His 15-year-old son, Howard, cycled to Cow Bridge and began looking for him along the banks of the Brue, where Mr Alder had taken to walking of late. Howard eventually found his father’s body, tangled in reeds, a short distance west of the bridge. Mr Alder is believed to have drowned.
It was strange stuff to read. The Gazette had failed to point out that Howard now figured in two of the clutch of deaths. Perhaps they’d refrained out of sensitivity. Others must have commented on it. And why had George taken to walking by the Brue of late? No suggestions. Not even a hint. What about his wife’s pregnancy? There was enough tragedy without dwelling on that, apparently. It wasn’t mentioned. The inquest, just before Christmas, brought in a verdict of accidental death. The coroner emphasized that suggestions of a link with other deaths in the area were ‘as absurd as they are unfeeling’. Bet that put a stop to them.
Cow Bridge, on a November afternoon, Wearyall Hill and the Tor darkening to the north while the poplars along Street Drove stood sentinel to the south, made a spooky setting for a haunting discovery. There’d have been much less traffic on the Glastonbury to Butleigh road back then. It could have been well nigh silent as Howard picked his way along the bank, peering into the cold grey water until he saw . . .
I was born five days later, at Butleigh Cottage Hospital. And Rupe was born the following spring. We began just as all that ended. But what was it that ended? Forget a curse on the land. Howard was the connection the coroner reckoned it was absurd and unfeeling to try to make. Dalton and his own father. Plus Townley. Two dead bodies and a photograph. What did it mean? What did it amount to – then and now? I hadn’t a clue. Or rather I had several. But they were all far too cryptic for me.
Most cryptic of all was Howard himself. He’d never seemed the secretive type. In fact, he’d never struck me as capable of concealing anything. Now I knew better. He’d concealed plenty. OK, that could have been because it was all too traumatic to call to mind. But then nobody had ever mentioned that he’d been traumatized. Rupe had always told me Howard was weak-minded from birth. But how would Rupe know? For the first twenty years of Howard’s life the only surviving first-hand informants were Win and Mil. They were well aware of how and when his decline set in. Finding his father’s dead body floating in the Brue must have speeded him down the slope. But they’d never breathed a word about that. And how had the scene of that death somehow drifted five miles south to the Sedgemoor Drain?
It was a question that bothered Dad as well as me, as he admitted in a note attached to the cuttings.
I could swear we had that story about the Sedgemoor Drain from the Alders themselves. Why would they make something like that up, do you suppose? Howard certainly must have had a bad time of it that summer and autumn. But I checked with your mother and she is fairly certain Mavis Alder never mentioned those experiences as a reason for Howard’s feeble-mindedness. I do not recall it cropping up while he was at Clarks either. I suppose no one was likely to remember if no one reminded them. The jinx was a bit of a nine days’ wonder. I had forgotten it almost completely. Dalton’s death reads oddly to me. Does it to you? ‘Inconsistencies in the disposition of the deceased and the weapon’. What was the coroner getting at? Something other than suicide? The police officer mentioned in a couple of the reports – Inspector Forrester – is actually Don Forrester, who worked for Clarks for a few years after he retired from the force. (Howard had left by then.) I see Don quite often, pushing a trolley around Tesco. He must be eighty-odd now, but looks pretty spry. Do you want me to ask him about the deaths – Dalton in particular? It might lead nowhere, of course. Who can say? Let me know. I have nothing better to do. And it is interesting, I have to admit.
My mind was still turning all this over as I hurried through the subway under Hyde Park Corner and up Park Lane to the Hilton. I most certainly did want Dad to put a few questions to Don Forrester. Did he think Dalton had actually been murdered, for instance? If so, who by? The name of Stephen Townley had never made it into the columns of the Central Somerset Gazette. But perhaps it should have done. And perhaps it still might.
It was a few minutes to ten as I entered the hotel and headed across the marbled wastes of the lobby towards the reception desk. Technically, I was early. But not too early for Mr Hashimoto. A figure bobbed into my path – short, slimly built and grey-suited. I found myself looking into a calm, sad-eyed Japanese face beneath a schoolboyish mop of silver-shot black hair, gold-rimmed specs glinting in the Hilton spotlights. ‘Mr Bradley?’ he asked, with that slight but distinctive oriental vagueness around the Rs. ‘I am Kiyofumi Hashimoto.’
‘Er . . . Pleased to meet you.’ We shook hands. There was a hint of a bow on Hashimoto’s part. ‘How did you know who I was?’
‘It was obvious, Mr Bradley. Believe me.’
‘Right. Is that good news or bad, I wonder? Being obvious, I mean.’
‘It is a fact. That is all.’
‘Facts? Well, I could use a few of those.’
‘Me too.’ (Was he being ironic? I couldn’t tell. What’s more, with Kiyofumi Hashimoto, it was pretty obvious you’d never be able to tell.)
‘I’m a friend of Rupe Alder, Mr Hashimoto. If you can help me find him . . .’
‘That is what you are trying to do?’
‘Yeh. His family are worried about him. He’s, er . . .’
‘Disappeared.’ Hashimoto nodded. ‘I am looking for him also. Perhaps we can help each other.’
‘Maybe we can.’
‘Shall we take a stroll in the park? It will be . . . pleasanter . . . to talk there.’
The morning was too cool and damp by my reckoning for strolling, even if strolling in parks had been a habit of mine, which it wasn’t. Hashimoto didn’t exactly seem the outdoor type either, hoisting a vast Hilton golfing brolly against the drizzle and stepping carefully through the muddy drifts of leaves in his gleaming lounge-lizard shoes.
‘Are you in shipping, Mr Hashimoto?’ I asked, as we wandered vaguely west towards the Serpentine.
‘No. Microprocessors. My concern to find Rupe has nothing to do with business.’
‘It hasn’t?’
‘Nothing at all. The aluminium is . . . someone else’s problem.’
‘You know about the aluminium?’
‘I have found out about it since coming to London. But it is . . . ancillary . . . to my difficulties.’
‘Ancillary?’
‘Marginal. Almost irrelevant. You see . . .’ He glanced round at me, squinting slightly through his glasses. ‘You are a good friend of Rupe, Mr Bradley?’
‘Lifelong.’
‘Then we should not be so formal. I shall call you Lance. OK?’
‘Fine by me.’
‘And you should call me Kiyofumi.’
‘Right. Kiyofumi. You, er, met Rupe in Tokyo?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘My niece became his girlfriend. I met Rupe at my sister’s home two or three times last summer.’
‘Your niece . . .’
‘Haruko. A good girl.’
‘I’m sure she is. So, she and Rupe . . .’
‘A typhoon romance.’ Hashimoto smiled. ‘Her mother was very pleased.’
‘Were you?’
‘Certainly. Rupe seemed . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Kind. Charming. Easy to like.’ (That description fitted Rupe, all right. Typhoon romancer was a bit harder to get used to, though. Still, if he was going to fall for someone, I supposed it would be headlong.)
‘What did Haruko’s father think?’
‘Her father is not with us, Lance.’ (Did that mean dead? I hadn’t the nerve to ask.) ‘That is why I have to be . . . more than an uncle to her.’
‘How serious was this romance?’
‘For Haruko, very serious. She hoped to marry Rupe, I think. That is what her mother has told me.’
‘And for Rupe?’
Hashimoto sighed. ‘I am sorry to say this, Lance. You are his friend. You must think well of him. But the truth is . . . he strung her along. He did not want to marry her. He wanted something else. Once he had it . . . he was gone.’
‘What was it he wanted?’ (Somehow, I already knew it wasn’t anything obvious.)
‘Something that belongs to Haruko’s mother – my sister, Mayumi.’ Hashimoto stopped and looked at me. ‘Rupe stole it.’
‘Stole? I don’t believe it. Rupe’s no—’ I broke off. No thief? No con artist? No double dealer? Whatever I’d previously have said you couldn’t accuse Rupe of, his own actions seemed to tell a different story.
‘Rupe used Haruko to get close to Mayumi. He knew she had this thing that he wanted. Eventually, he persuaded Haruko to show him where it was hidden. Then he stole it. And ran away. Like, as you would say, the thief in the night.’
‘What did he steal?’
‘A letter. Let us call it . . . the Townley letter.’
‘Townley? You know about him?’
‘I know. And yet I do not know. Mayumi does not tell me more than she thinks it is safe for me to know. She is fifteen years older than me. Always she has thought she is a better judge of what is good for me than I am. But her judgement is not as acute as she believes. She should not have kept the letter. She should have destroyed it.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘I do not know.’ (Was he lying? It was a fifty-fifty guess. His expression gave nothing away.) ‘That is one of the things Mayumi does not think it is safe for me to know.’
‘But it’s a letter from Townley?’
‘No. About Townley.’
‘To Mayumi?’
‘Yes.’
‘From . . .’
‘I do not know.’
‘Written when?’
‘A long time ago. Many years.’
‘Thirty-seven, maybe?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Did Mayumi know Townley?’ (Hashimoto looked to be in his mid to late forties, which put his sister in her early sixties. The arithmetic, such as it was, seemed to stack up.)
‘Yes. When she was very young.’
‘In Tokyo?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was he doing there?’
‘He was a soldier. American. Based in Japan.’
‘And Mayumi was his girlfriend?’
‘Not . . . exactly.’
‘What then . . . exactly?’
‘It does not matter.’ (It did, of course. But seeping through Hashimoto’s inscrutability was the implication that he was genuinely unsure about quite a lot himself. His sister was holding out on him. But nothing like as much as Rupe had been holding out on all of us.) ‘What matters is that the letter is dangerous to Townley. It harms him. It can be used against him. That is why Rupe wanted it. So, can you tell me why Rupe is interested in harming Townley?’
‘Not really. Something to do with his brother, I think.’
‘Revenge?’
‘Sort of.’ (But what sort of? Even if Townley had murdered Dalton and made off with some of the Train money, why did that matter to Rupe? Why did he care?)
‘The letter is not just dangerous to Townley, Lance. It is dangerous to Mayumi. I have to get it back. This is more than honour. This is life and death.’
‘It can’t be as bad as that.’
‘It can. Rupe has strayed into a very dark place.’
‘Come off it.’ (But the dark was what I was whistling in now.)
‘We have to find him.’
‘That could be a problem . . . Kiyofumi. I haven’t the foggiest where he is. The consensus seems to be . . .’ I shrugged. ‘Find Townley and you find Rupe.’
‘I do not know where Townley is.’
‘What about your sister? Does she know?’
‘No. She has not seen him – has not heard from him – for more than forty years.’
‘I thought we settled on thirty-seven.’
‘You settled on thirty-seven.’
‘OK. We can agree on a bloody long time?’
‘Yes.’
‘During which Mayumi has had absolutely no contact with Townley?’
‘Correct.’
‘Then can you explain to me how Rupe knew they’d ever been acquainted?’
‘Ill fortune.’
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, merely gazing solemnly at me through the shadow cast by the brolly. ‘That’s supposed to be an explanation, is it? Because I—’
‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’
I don’t know if Hashimoto was as surprised as me by the interruption. He certainly couldn’t have been more surprised. A figure had materialized next to us, his approach screened perhaps by the brolly. He was a tall, faintly stooping bloke in a dark, neatly tailored raincoat. He had short grey hair and a narrow, lugubrious face. His voice was soft and precise, matching his gaze, which moved slowly but studiously from me to Hashimoto and back again.
‘My name is Jarvis. You don’t know me. But I know you. Mr Hashimoto. Mr Bradley.’ He nodded politely at us. ‘I also know Rupert Alder. He is, let’s say, an interest we have in common.’
‘Did you follow us here?’ Hashimoto’s question had a tetchy edge to it and I can’t say I blamed him.
‘Not just here. Speaking corporately, that is.’
‘What?’ The guy’s oblique style of speech was needling me as well.
‘Forgive me. Surprise was inevitable. Antagonism is unnecessary. My card.’
He plucked two business cards out of his pocket and handed us one each. Philip Jarvis evidently represented a company called Myerscough Udal, boasting an address in High Holborn and a clutch of telephone, fax and e-mail numbers. The nature of their business went unspecified.
‘We handle confidential enquiries,’ Jarvis continued, anticipating the question. ‘We’re one of the largest operations in the field worldwide. Pre-eminence in such a field is by its nature untrumpeted, of course. We rely very much on personal recommendation.’
‘And you have been enquiring into us?’ asked Hashimoto.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Then what . . . exactly?’ (The guy was definitely getting to me.)
‘Mr Rupert Alder is a client of ours. We, like you, are concerned about him.’
‘Owes you money, does he?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes. But I think he would pay us if he could. Even our fees would not gobble up the proceeds of his aluminium fraud.’ (Everyone, apparently, knew all about that.)
‘What did he hire you to do?’
‘Can’t you guess?’
‘Find Townley,’ said Hashimoto.
‘Precisely.’
‘And did you?’ I pressed.
‘No.’ Jarvis allowed himself half a smile. ‘You could say he found us, though. That indeed is why I’m here.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Let’s step down to the Serpentine. Rippling water calms the mind, I find. I’ll explain as we go.’
We started along the straightest path to the lake. And Jarvis, as he’d promised, started to explain. His soft voice forced us to stick close to him if we were to catch every word, as I for one was determined to do. I wondered if it was a deliberate anti-eavesdropping technique on his part. And then I wondered if thinking that was a symptom of paranoia on my part.
‘Strictly speaking, gentlemen, I ought not to be telling you any of this. Myerscough Udal’s reputation has not been built on sharing its secrets with third parties. But these are exceptional circumstances. Wholly exceptional in my experience, which is far from inconsiderable. I shall elaborate on that a little later. To begin at the beginning, Mr Alder engaged our services through our Tokyo office four months ago to locate one Stephen Townley, using such limited information as Mr Alder was able to give us.’
‘How limited was that?’ I asked.
‘Very, for our purposes. Mr Alder knew only that Townley was an American, probably in his sixties, who’d served in the US Army and been based at one point in Japan. He also supplied us with the names of two former acquaintances of Townley, one of them deceased.’
‘Peter Dalton.’
‘You have him. The other was—’
‘My sister,’ put in Hashimoto.
‘Quite so. I do not know how much Mr Hashimoto has told you about his sister, Mr Bradley, so forgive me if I bore you with information already in your possession. In seeking to trace Townley, we went back to his roots and worked forward: standard procedure in our line of work. US Army records and other obvious databases yielded certain simple facts. Stephen Anderson Townley was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May seventeenth, nineteen thirty-two. An only child of a single mother. She is long since dead, by the way. He enrolled in the Army straight from high school in the summer of nineteen forty-nine, aged seventeen, and served thirteen years in all, leaving with the rank of sergeant. He saw a good deal of action in Korea at the start of his military career. After that he was shuttled around like thousands of other soldiers. Particularly significant for our purposes, however, was the year and a bit he spent in West Berlin in the mid Fifties.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked, as Jarvis paused, either for breath or effect.
‘Because Peter Dalton, a farmer’s son from Somerset, was serving with the British Army in West Berlin at the same time. We must assume the two men became acquainted during that period. Also because Townley married a German girl while based there. Rosa Kleinfurst. Rosa went back to the United States with him when he was transferred home early in nineteen fifty-five. Later that year, their first child, Eric, was born. A daughter followed eighteen months later. By then, the marriage seems to have been on the rocks. The couple separated, Rosa keeping the children. Townley transferred to Military Intelligence, which means there’s very limited information on his activities from that point on. We believe he was based in Japan for the next two or three years, during which period he patronized a bar in Tokyo called the Golden Rickshaw, the proprietress of which was—’
‘My mother,’ said Hashimoto.
‘Indeed.’ Jarvis nodded. ‘Who knows, Mr Hashimoto? You may have glimpsed Townley sipping his beer at the counter on your way home from school some days.’
‘It is possible.’ The admission sounded painful.
‘Your sister entertained the customers?’
‘She was young and pretty. People liked her.’
‘Quite so. Innocently so, one might say. And her daughter has followed in her footsteps?’
‘Yes.’
‘I understand the Golden Rickshaw’s walls are decorated with photographs of former patrons, taken over the years.’
‘It is.’
‘I further understand Stephen Townley appears in one of those photographs.’
‘He does.’
‘Which is how Mr Alder knew your sister had been acquainted with him, possessed as he was of another photograph of Townley, taken a few years later.’
‘Yes.’
(So, an earlier question of mine was answered. Rupe had known Townley was an old customer of the Golden Rickshaw and hence likely to be known to Mayumi Hashimoto. There were plenty more questions where that one came from, though. Had Rupe gone to that particular bar by chance? Or had he already suspected a connection with Townley? And did Jarvis know what Rupe had stolen from Mayumi? Did he, in fact, know about the theft at all?)
‘We believe Townley left Japan in the spring of nineteen sixty,’ Jarvis continued. ‘Frankly, we haven’t a clue what duties he was assigned to for the remainder of his service. He left the Army two years later. All official trace of him ceases at that point.’ (We’d reached the Serpentine by now and begun a slow tramp towards the boathouse. The wind was raising quite a few ripples on the lake, but I was immune to their supposedly calming effect.) ‘Mr Alder presented us with a photograph of Townley, apparently taken by his brother at a railway station near Glastonbury in August nineteen sixty-three. The date was of Mr Alder’s own computing. He said Townley had been a friend of Peter Dalton and our investigations have certainly shown that to be possible. Dalton committed suicide on August nineteenth, nineteen sixty-three. Mr Alder suspected that Dalton was actually murdered by Townley to cover up his part in the, er . . .’
‘Great Train Robbery,’ I put in.
‘Quite so.’ Jarvis stifled a wince. ‘Since Mr Alder declined to share with us his reasons for harbouring such an apparently outlandish suspicion, it was difficult to know whether to take it seriously or not. He specifically forbade us to approach his brother, for instance.’
‘I doubt you’d have got much out of Howard.’
‘Perhaps so, perhaps not. Either way, all that can really be said is that it remains an open question. I know Mr Alder had some contact with a Sixties villain called Prettyman, but I have to tell you Prettyman is a highly unreliable character in his own right. It is unclear whether he was actually a participant in the robbery or not. What those who definitely were participants seem to agree on is that the original impetus for the crime came from an anonymous source who fed them vital information.’
‘Might that have been Townley?’
‘Frankly, Mr Bradley, your guess is as good as mine. The allegation takes us nowhere in the absence of a single hard fact about Townley’s life after he left the Army. The ‘sixty-three material is fragmentary and uncorroborated. It is also the end as far as Townley goes. When I say that we know nothing from then on, I mean literally that: nothing. Townley is a dead man without a death certificate. A blank. A void. If he’s still alive, it’s in another man’s skin. And we have absolutely no idea who that man might be.’
‘What about his wife? His children?’
‘Naturally, we pursued that avenue of enquiry, but it yielded nothing. Although the Townleys have never divorced, that appears to be because Mrs Townley has had no way of contacting her husband since he left the Army. He ceased to pay maintenance to her at that point. She has consistently told friends and acquaintances that she believes him to be dead. Their children take the same line. They may be right. They may be wrong.’
‘Or they may be lying.’
‘That too, of course.’ Jarvis smiled faintly. ‘There are . . . discrepancies . . . in the banking records of all three.’
‘What sort of discrepancies?’
‘The sort that imply financial assistance from an unidentified source.’
‘Townley,’ said Hashimoto.
‘It’s possible. Mr Alder took the view, indeed, that it was distinctly probable.’
‘What did he do about it?’ I asked, as Jarvis came to a halt and propped himself against the back of a lakeside bench.
‘I’m not sure. That’s where this whole matter becomes so confoundedly delicate.’
‘You’re going to have to tell us what that means.’
‘Have to? I think not. But I will tell you, none the less. I met Mr Alder on thirtieth August to review progress on the case.’ (Over breakfast, I’d studied Echo’s kitchen-wall calendar and worked out that Rupe had visited Tilbury Docks on 29 August. So, it was the very next day that he’d powwowed with Jarvis.) ‘Considering the little I had to report, he was surprisingly cheerful. He took it as certain that Mrs Townley and/or her children knew where Townley was and he gave me to understand that he had procured from your sister, Mr Hashimoto, the means to force them to disclose Townley’s whereabouts to him.’
‘He did not procure,’ said Hashimoto. ‘He stole.’
‘Really? I confess I am not greatly surprised. A letter, he said it was, the nature and contents of which he did not care to reveal.’
‘That is right,’ said Hashimoto. ‘I do not know what is in it myself.’
There was the slightest sceptical twitch of Jarvis’s right eyebrow, then he went serenely on. ‘Mr Alder left me in no doubt that he intended to use the letter to flush Townley out of his hiding-place. I have neither seen nor heard from Mr Alder since.’
Nobody said anything for a longish moment, so I asked the obvious question. ‘What do you think happened?’
‘I think he succeeded, either directly or indirectly, in contacting Townley. In fact, I’m sure of it.’
‘How can you be?’
‘Because, within a matter of weeks of that meeting, our offices were broken into and correspondence and computer disks relating to the Townley inquiry stolen. We invest a great deal of time and money in security, gentlemen. The break-in was highly professional. It had to be. It was also precisely targeted. More or less simultaneously, an anonymous message was passed to us at the very highest level, via a legal practice that often acts for us.’
‘What was the message?’
‘Drop the case.’
‘Simple as that?’
‘Not quite. Certain . . . penalties . . . were mentioned in the event of non-compliance. Financial penalties, I mean. It was all very . . . kid-gloved. But it was clear that the sender of the message wielded sufficient influence to ruin us if he needed to.’
‘Ruin the company?’
‘Quite so.’
‘How could he do that?’
‘Myerscough Udal is big and successful. But there’s always someone bigger and more successful. I believe our directors were firmly persuaded that our most valuable clients would be taken from us if we persisted. We did not persist.’
‘You caved in?’
‘We had no choice.’
‘And you think . . . Townley did this?’
‘Who else?’
‘But he’s just one man, for God’s sake.’
‘Of whom we know nothing. A state of affairs he’s clearly determined to maintain.’
‘If you . . . caved in,’ said Hashimoto slowly, ‘why are you here, talking to us?’
‘An astute question, Mr Hashimoto. Why indeed?’ Jarvis looked warily to right and left and lowered his voice still further. ‘Officially, this meeting is not taking place. If you visit or telephone me at our offices, I will decline to speak to you and deny that we have ever met. Myerscough Udal does not like to be pushed, apparent though it is that we can be pushed. We are seriously unhappy about it, gentlemen, yet unable to strike back in any way. We are fearful for the welfare of a client, yet in no position to aid him. We are hamstrung.’ He smiled. ‘But you are not.’
‘What are you getting at?’ I asked.
‘I tell you things, Mr Bradley. I give you information. What you do with it is up to you. And what I hope you do with it is probably irrelevant. Save to say that I sincerely hope you will . . . do something.’
‘Such as?’
‘That really must be up to you. What I can say is this. The Townleys had two children – Eric, born nineteen fifty-five; Barbara, born nineteen fifty-seven. Barbara lives in Houston, Texas. She’s married to an oil executive, Gordon Ledgister. They have one child – a son, Clyde, born nineteen eighty, currently a student at Stanford University. Eric meanwhile lives with his mother in Berlin. She went back there after the Wall came down. Eric now styles himself Erich. He’s gay, by the way. Rosa Townley is sixty-five. She and Erich share an apartment on Yorckstrasse. Number eighty-five. You may be interested to know that airline records show a Mr R. Alder flew from Heathrow to Berlin on third September. There’s no record of a return flight. And now’ – he pushed himself suddenly upright – ‘I must be going. Good morning to you both.’
With that he was off, spring-heeled and striding, back the way we’d come. I wanted to shout after him. But shout what? He’d said everything he had to say. And it was as clear as daylight that he’d say no more. Myerscough Udal had dropped the case. And Jarvis had washed his hands of us. He hurried on. But Hashimoto and I stayed exactly where we were.
It was eleven o’clock by the time we got back to the Hilton – good news for someone as badly in need of a drink as I felt. Hashimoto hadn’t said much since Jarvis had dumped us. I reckoned I could see a lot of not very productive thinking going on behind his placid face, though, so I prescribed a drink in his case too and piloted him round the corner to a cosy little boozer in Shepherd Market.
Halfway through my second Carlsberg Special and his first Glenfiddich, Hashimoto seemed to come to some kind of decision. He solemnly lit a Marlboro cigarette, stared into the first plume of its smoke and announced, ‘We must go to Berlin.’
‘Don’t I get a vote on that, Kiyo?’
He looked at me oddly. Maybe my Carlsberg-inspired invention of an abbreviated name for him hadn’t gone down well. But, if so, he didn’t dwell on it. ‘I must find the Townley letter. And you must find your friend.’
‘I’m not sure about that. You said yourself he’d strayed into a dark place. Could be a dangerous one too, if Townley’s as powerful as Jarvis seems to think.’
‘It is true. Mr Jarvis invites us to put our heads into the tiger’s mouth. To see if the tiger will bite.’
‘I’m sure my mother told me once never to put my head in a tiger’s mouth.’
Hashimoto nodded solemnly. ‘A mother would.’
‘Besides, I have to go home next week. A trip to Berlin’s not on.’
‘Why must you go home?’
‘Oh, this and that.’ (A fortnightly date with the dole office was the beginning and end of my commitments, but I wasn’t about to admit it.)
‘We may not need to be gone for long. And I will pay all your expenses.’
‘Would that include a funeral?’
‘Calm yourself, Lance. Subtlety is everything in such matters. What do you lose by accompanying me to Berlin?’
‘Depends what happens when we get there.’
‘Nothing will happen without your consent. You have my word on that. We will judge and agree each step before we take it.’
‘What if I don’t agree any steps?’
‘We will take none.’
‘I still can’t go.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve left my passport at home.’
‘How far is your home?’
‘A hundred and fifty miles or so.’
‘Then we will go and get it. I have the use of a car. It is in the Hilton garage.’
‘When did you plan to set off?’
‘For your passport? Now. For Berlin?’ He gave the question a moment’s thought, then shrugged. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘So soon?’
‘There has been enough delay. Why add to it?’
‘Well . . .’
I never did come up with much of an answer. Which is why, apprehension dulled by several more Carlsberg Specials, I found myself being high-speed chauffeured along the M4 and down the M5 in a courtesy BMW through the midday murk. I didn’t doubt Hashimoto’s declared motivation: he reckoned he could best protect his sister and niece by retrieving what Rupe had stolen from them. Nor did Hashimoto seem to question my desire to help a friend in distress. There was even some implication that he thought me honour-bound to undo the damage my friend had done. That didn’t slice any slush with me, of course. Yet I was, apparently, going to Berlin. The truth was that I was excited by the mystery Rupe had unwittingly dragged me into. And excitement was something my life had been distinctly short of for a long long time. I’d been well and truly suckered by the thrill of the chase.
We made it to Glastonbury in a shade over two hours. Hashimoto wasn’t a dawdler behind the wheel. I thought of suggesting a diversion to my parents’ so that I could ask Dad to tap Don Forrester for information. But I decided to phone Dad later instead, thereby dodging having to explain to him what I was up to. I even thought of proposing a visit to Penfrith. But I nixed that as well. Too much to tell; too much to ask. With luck, Rosa and Erich Townley would answer all our questions. There might still be an innocent explanation for everything.
(Who did I think I was kidding?)
We stopped at Heathrow on the way back and Hashimoto booked us aboard a Sunday lunchtime flight to Berlin. (Club class, no less.) Then he drove me to Kennington. It was agreed he’d pick me up at ten o’clock the following morning. We were all set.
We were also mad, according to Echo. ‘You have absolutely no idea what you’re getting into.’ (A fair point.) ‘I thought you said you were a natural quitter.’
‘I am.’
‘Then why aren’t you quitting?’
‘Because that’s the thing with quitting, Echo: you have to choose your moment.’
‘And this isn’t it?’
I had to think about that for several moments. In the end, all I could say was, ‘Apparently not.’