It was almost nine when Horton turned into the entrance of the six-storey flat-roofed apartment block in a suburb of Woking that had once been select but was now clearly in the advanced stages of terminal decline. The large Edwardian houses surrounding and opposite it across a busy road had once belonged to professional families, now they were divided into bedsits and let to tenants who cared little for their shabby and inferior homes and about the same amount for the streets around them, which were littered with takeaway cartons, broken glass and beer cans. The block of flats, which was listed as the last known address they had for Quentin Amos, looked to be in the same sad state of affairs, with overgrown grass verges, weeds sprouting through the concrete and the doors to the entrance scuffed and scratched. Horton hoped that his Harley would still be where he’d left it when he finished interviewing Amos, if he was still living here. He might have moved and if so Horton had had a wasted journey.
He located the intercom and pressed the buzzer for flat three. As he waited with an accelerated heartbeat for it to be answered he turned back to the street. There didn’t appear to be anyone watching him and there had been no sign of any dark four-wheel-drive vehicle following him intent on eliminating him, or indeed any vehicle. But then perhaps they (whoever they were) didn’t need to follow him. Madeley could have told whoever was after Horton that he’d given him the information about Amos. It didn’t take a genius to see that Horton wasn’t at the station or on his boat and conclude that he was following up that lead. Maybe they’d get him on the way home? Or perhaps Amos was long gone and Madeley had fed him a false trail, either deliberately or accidentally. Horton didn’t know, but he sensed one thing, and that was he didn’t trust Madeley as far as he could throw him.
There was no answer. Horton tried again while steeling himself against disappointment. Then came a crackle followed by a sharp voice. ‘What do you want?’
On the journey here Horton had had plenty of time to decide his tactics. He’d been delayed by two road traffic accidents. He’d tossed up whether to announce himself as a police officer and use officialdom to get himself admitted, or to tell the truth. Judging by Amos’s record though he thought saying he was a police officer was more likely to get him the closed-door treatment and the ‘you can’t come in without a warrant’ response.
‘Mr Amos?’
‘If you’re selling solar panels, double glazing, collecting for orphaned animals or you’re homeless, unemployed and selling dusters to rehabilitate yourself into a corrupt and greedy society then you can sod off. I’m broke, hate animals, and I stopped believing in the redemption of mankind a very long time ago.’
Horton couldn’t help smiling, then taking a breath he said, ‘My name is Andy Horton and I’d like to talk to you about my mother, Jennifer.’
There was silence. Horton heard the wailing of a police siren somewhere. Amos could say, ‘Who? Never heard of her.’ The silence seemed to stretch for ever but perhaps that was just his taut nerves making him think that. Horton was beginning to wonder if Amos had simply ignored him and returned to his television, but there was another crackle and the sound of laboured breathing, then the buzzer sounded to admit him. With a constricted chest and pounding heart, Horton took a deep breath and stepped inside the grubby and worn tiled lobby, hardly daring to believe he might get one small step closer to finding out something about his mother. He located flat three at the rear of the building and was about to knock on the door when it opened and bathed in the light from behind it Horton faced a very thin, balding elderly man, with a prominent, slightly hooked nose, hunched shoulders and yellowing skin. The eyes that studied Horton were sharp but sunk deep in dark-rimmed sockets. It was obvious to Horton that Amos was seriously ill but equally obvious that his mind was still razor sharp and by allowing him entry it was clear that he remembered Jennifer Horton.
Amos’s eyes travelled over Horton greedily, registering and assimilating every small detail without any reaction. He inhaled then stepped back, admitting Horton into a small and none too clean lobby. The flat smelt of urine, stale food and alcohol.
Horton waited while Amos shuffled past him and ahead into a wide lounge with large glass patio doors opening onto an expanse of darkness.
‘I back onto the cemetery, so they won’t have far to take me when I go, which won’t be long. Sit down.’
Horton removed two piles of books from a battered and threadbare chair, placing them on the floor. He sat. The room was crammed with books; they spilled out from the crowded shelves, onto the big oak table and chairs to the right of the patio doors and over the floor. There was a laptop computer squeezed in between the books on the table and paper strewn about it.
‘I’m writing my life story,’ Amos said, following his glance. ‘Though whether I’ll be allowed to finish it is a different matter. And I don’t mean the cancer will kill me, though there’ll be plenty who will be hoping it will. I’d offer you a drink but I can’t be bothered to make it, unless you’d like a whisky and that comes ready-made?’
‘No thanks. Can I get you one?’
‘Already got one.’ Amos indicated the amber liquid in a glass on the table beside him.
Horton suddenly found himself unable to speak. He was staring at a man who he knew would tell him about Jennifer and he was incredibly nervous. His heart was knocking against his ribs and his palms felt sweaty. What was he about to learn? Would it be so awful that it would scar him more than he’d already been scarred? But surely that wasn’t possible; he’d thought the worse for years. There was still time to cut loose, to decide he’d had enough of the past. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t. He knew that Amos sensed all this in him. The silence stretched on. Horton could hear a clock ticking and outside the squawking of a startled blackbird which seemed almost as loud as a jumbo jet flying overhead.
Amos lifted his glass and swallowed some whisky. After he had set it down carefully he said, ‘It took you a long time to find me.’
Horton’s stomach somersaulted. Was he looking at his father? He didn’t know what to say. Explaining why it had taken him years to discover what had happened to his mother would take too long, and he didn’t see why he should, not yet.
Amos continued. ‘You look like her about the eyes. Hers were as blue as yours.’
The breath caught in Horton’s throat. His chest tightened and he willed himself not to clench his fists, not in anger but in pain, and hurt, and emptiness.
‘She was a very attractive girl,’ Amos continued. ‘Full of life. Always laughing. Liked having fun.’
That fitted with what he’d been told by others – the fun bit especially, which those who had spoken about her had implied she liked having with men.
‘But then she was only seventeen and why shouldn’t she love life, and having a laugh? Christ, if you can’t do it then before life kicks the shit out of you and spits you in the eye, when can you?’
The stuffy, smelly room crackled with bitterness. There was enough hatred in the old man in front of him to poison the air. Quietly Horton said, ‘When did it start to go wrong?’
Amos eyed him shrewdly, ‘For me or for her?’
‘For both of you.’
‘I’m not your father. Jennifer was never my lover. Wrong gender, duckie, as you no doubt know if you’ve run me through your computers, which you must have done.’
Horton eyed him with surprise. ‘You know that I’m a policeman.’
‘A detective inspector, yes. I also know that Jennifer disappeared in 1978 and you were thrown on the mercies of social services, God help you, until one man discovered this and began to put things right, well as right as he could given the circumstances.’
Horton thought he’d stopped breathing. He could hardly believe it but here, in front of him, was someone who knew about him and his past. Rapidly he forced his mind away from emotional responses to reason, and forced his breathing to remain steady. His body was stiff with tension and emotion. ‘Was that man Edward Ballard?’
‘If that’s the name he gave you.’
Horton had already remembered that Ballard, or whatever his real name was, had given his foster father, Bernard Litchfield, a box containing his birth certificate and photograph of his mother, both of which had since been lost in a fire on his previous boat. But now it seemed that Amos was telling him that Ballard had also been responsible or instrumental in placing him with his final and loving foster parents, police officer Bernard and his wife Eileen. But how did Amos know? Horton doubted he’d tell him if he asked though.
‘He also gave me this.’ He reached into his pocket and handed across the photograph of the six men and watched Amos closely as those shrewd pain-racked eyes studied it. Amos turned it over.
‘The student riots. It got Jennifer the sack. She was a typist then at the London School of Economics but she didn’t like towing the line. Keeping silent and being a good little girl wasn’t her style. She was too radical, too involved with the students, not that it worried her. Jennifer liked living dangerously.’
Horton sat forward.
Amos continued. ‘She was very bright, but like a lot of girls from working-class backgrounds in those days she never got the chance to take any qualifications except secretarial ones, and as for going to university that would have been completely out of the question. I doubt her parents or her school teachers ever thought it remotely possible, even though the new so-called “red-brick” universities were set up in 1963 and for the first time students could get state support. It was too little too late for Jennifer. Besides, university would have bored her to death. She liked action, which was why she came to London, for the swinging sixties and all that drivel, although it was true to some extent. Jennifer was introduced to me by this chap.’ Amos stabbed a bony finger at the man on the far right with long hair touching the collar of his patterned shirt. ‘His name was Zachary Benham.’
‘Was?’ Horton sharply interjected.
‘Died in a fire in September 1968.’
Horton felt a stab of disappointment.
‘A fire in a mental hospital which killed twenty-four patients. If you check your files you’ll see that no cause was discovered. Could have been arson or carelessness?’
‘What was Benham doing there?’
‘Good question.’ But Amos said no more, leaving Horton to wonder if Benham had started the fire. Or had he been a patient? If he’d been a patient what illness had he been suffering from? And was Zachary Benham his father? But these were clearly questions for another time – if there was to be one, and that might not be so. No, Horton recognized this was his one and only chance.
‘What was the relationship between Zachary and Jennifer?’
‘Was he your father, you mean?’ Amos shook his head. ‘No. He was keen on her, but then everyone was, but although Jennifer liked to flirt she was never serious with any of them.’ He jerked his head at the men in the photograph.
Horton read between the lines. ‘Because there was someone else.’
‘Yes. I don’t know who he was, she never mentioned him and I never saw her with him, but there was definitely someone else. Not that we knew that at the time. Zach tried it on but she managed to hold him, and others in the Radical Student Alliance off, and at a time when everyone was sleeping around that was quite a remarkable feat. There was no easy access to contraception then, or abortion, which was only legalized in 1967, the same time as no doubt you know homosexuality was decriminalized for those over the age of twenty-one, in England and Wales but not in Scotland and Northern Ireland or in the armed forces. That came much later.’
Horton wondered who this other man had been. Ballard? Perhaps. He said, ‘So you were a lecturer at the LSE, and that was why she was introduced to you.’
‘I was a lecturer, yes, and although Jennifer worked in the same place I didn’t meet her in connection with our jobs. Jennifer worked in a voluntary capacity for the Radical Student Alliance, which I supported.’
‘What did she do?’ asked Horton keenly.
‘Everything short of making public speeches.’
Horton’s eyebrows shot up. He grappled with this new slant on the woman he’d remembered for so many years as being a tart who hadn’t cared about her child enough to raise him.
Amos swallowed his whisky and continued. ‘Apart from organizing the unruly and vociferous group of radical students and producing leaflets and posters, she did the same as the rest of us – she protested against war, apartheid, victimization, the establishment; you name it we rallied against it. This was the sixties and we had a lot to be angry about. We have a lot to be angry about now – greed, corruption, cruelty, an uncaring and dispassionate government and society – but do we get off our backsides and do anything about it? No, we write to The Times and put it on the Internet,’ he sneered. ‘Not back then. This was the time of the mass anti-Vietnam War rally in Grosvenor Square, which led to the Grosvenor Square riots; the Cold War and double-agent George Blake breaking out of jail masterminded by the Soviet Union; the disturbances in Northern Ireland; the civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King in America. God, there was plenty to occupy us and it was fun.’
Then Amos’s face clouded over. ‘Then Zach died in a fire in 1968, Timothy Wilson died in a motorbike accident in 1969 – he’s the man on the other end of the photograph; James Royston took a drugs overdose in the same year – he’s the middle one with the Beatle haircut – and I got arrested for criminal damage, assault and having sex with an under-age boy in 1971, a triple hat-trick that saw me serve five years in a not very pleasant place.’
Horton sat back, his mind racing. He and Jennifer had lived in London when he was small, so how old had he been when they’d moved from what he remembered as being a nice place overlooking the river to that smelly little overcrowded house? No more than about five. And then they’d moved to Portsmouth where he’d gone to school, so he must have been about six.
He pushed the thoughts aside and brought his mind back to the photograph. Sitting forward he said, ‘That leaves these three men.’ Horton indicated the two men sporting beards and untidy long hair wearing the patterned open-necked shirts, and another clean-shaven man with short fair hair.
‘The second from the right with a beard is Antony Dormand; next to him again with a beard is Rory Mortimer, and the fair man, I don’t know him. He must have come with one of the others. I don’t know what happened to them or where they are now but you’ll probably be able to find out only . . .’ He sat back, grimacing with pain and looking exhausted.
‘Can I get you anything?’ Horton asked, concerned.
Amos managed to shake his head.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve exhausted you and brought back painful memories.’
Amos opened his eyes. ‘They weren’t all painful. There were good times too and at least I was alive and so were those men and I don’t mean in the physical sense.’ He took a breath and Horton could see it was an effort for him to continue. He flapped a hand weakly as though to say ‘give me some time’. Horton did, fearful for him while trying to digest what he’d learnt. He knew there was more that Amos could tell him but whether he was too exhausted or didn’t want to Horton wasn’t sure, though he guessed it was a bit of both. He made to push the photograph back in his pocket when he stalled. Glancing down at it his attention was caught not by the two men Amos had just named but the fair stranger beside them, the man Amos claimed not to know. There was something familiar about him and it wasn’t because he’d stared at this picture countless times. No, he’d seen this man or someone very much like him before and recently but he couldn’t place where.
Amos recovered. His expression both sad and serious he said, ‘Ballard, or whatever his real name is, left you that photograph but he’s not the only one who knows about Jennifer and these men, and I don’t mean me. Who told you about me?’
‘Professor Thurstan Madeley,’ answered Horton putting away the photograph.
A shadow crossed Amos’s cavernous face.
‘Do you know him?’ Horton asked.
‘No.’
Horton frowned, puzzled. Clearly that was a lie. ‘He oversaw the student protest archive file and that’s how he knew of you.’ But Horton knew that wasn’t the truth, because Madeley had known a great deal more than that, such as Quentin Amos’s police record.
Amos gave a cynical and pained smile. ‘Maybe. But this photograph wasn’t in it.’
‘No.’
‘Have you wondered why?’
‘It was the only copy.’
‘And one that was given to you by a man you can’t trace.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve asked yourself why it was held back all these years and why it was kept and not destroyed?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your answer?’
‘Because it’s been on file somewhere or kept by someone who thought it might come in useful one day.’
‘And the reason for that?’
‘Because someone didn’t want one or more of these men to be identified as being either involved in the protests or at the protest on that day. He or they were supposed to be somewhere else.’
‘And some people are paid to sanitize the past.’
Horton knew he meant Madeley and equally that Madeley was more than just a consultant to the police. But Amos’s words also triggered thoughts of the investigation into the deaths of Spalding, Redsall and Meadows, along with something that Marcus Felspur had said to him about people wishing to bury or distort the truth. This was what had happened here and it was happening over the investigation into the deaths of Spalding, Redsall and Meadows.
‘But why was I given your name?’
‘Think it through,’ Amos said sharply, as though addressing one of his former students.
Horton did. ‘Because I already had the photograph and they’d know I’d trace you in the end.’
‘Yes, but look at me, man. By the time you found me unaided I could already have been dead.’
Horton swiftly reconsidered. ‘Then they needed me to find you soon. And they want me to find one or more of these men for them.’
‘Maybe.’
Was there something vital he was missing here? His head was thumping and he couldn’t think what it was. Then it came to him. They wanted him to find Ballard.
Amos’s voice broke through his swirling thoughts. ‘Secrets and lies,’ he said quietly. ‘Someone’s kept silent for a long time. They might want it to stay that way. You might think the days of spies and the Cold War are over and that I’m an old man seeing shadows across every ripple of the sea, but they’re not over, there is always evil below. Be careful, Andy Horton.’
A chill ran through him. He knew that the next time someone came after him he might be lucky to escape with his life.
Horton could see he’d get no more from Amos, and besides, he didn’t know that he had much more to give. He promised to return but Amos brushed it aside. ‘I’ll be dead by then.’
He left and rode home slowly and carefully in the dark sultry night, his mind only half on the thankfully quiet road, the other half on what Amos had told him trying to make sense of it. But when he reached the yacht he still didn’t have the answers. He was tired beyond belief and thought that if they came for him now he wouldn’t stand a chance.
He drank a long cold glass of water and, throwing off his clothes, showered to wash the smell of illness and deceit from him before lying on his bunk staring into the darkness. Ballard wanted the truth about what had happened to Jennifer to be discovered, by him at least, and perhaps he also wanted to find one of the surviving men in the photograph, but with his resources in intelligence, just like Madeley who also had to be involved with the intelligence services, then why didn’t they do it themselves? The simple answer was they didn’t want to get their hands dirty; they didn’t want to be implicated. He was a scapegoat. If he went around asking questions then one of these men, the one they were after, would be provoked into coming out into the open, making a move, and perhaps last night that had been the opening gambit. Then the intelligence services could claim it was nothing to do with them. He was being fed bits of information and they were using him to lead them to this man, whoever he was. He wouldn’t show up on any database, in fact Horton was betting neither of the two names he had from Amos would. And the third man?
Again Horton conjured up the lean youthful face. What would he look like now some forty years later? Why did he strike Horton as being familiar? Then he stiffened as another thought occurred to him. Slowly he shook his head with a sad smile. Quentin Amos had given him what he could, or rather what he’d been permitted to tell him, because the last thought Horton had before sleep overcame exhaustion was that Quentin Amos was also working under instructions from British Intelligence.