Prologue

Andy Horton sipped his coffee on the deck of his small yacht in the Portsmouth Marina and stared across Milton Lake at the lights of the houses opposite. The crisp April breeze, after blowing a gale all day, had finally run out of energy and now barely lifted the limp halyards, causing only the occasional and feeble protest as they slapped against the masts. It was cold for April, but Horton didn't mind that. In fact, he hoped the bracing night air would clear his head of the grime and bustle of London where he'd been banished on a course for the last two days.

Putting down his mug, he stretched his hand in his jacket pocket and took out his wallet to retrieve a creased black and white photograph from within. It was of six men and, written on the back in black ink, was a date, 13 March 1967. He had discovered the photograph in June, tucked under a cushion on his boat, left deliberately for him to find by a man named Edward Ballard, who had already departed the marina. Horton had been unable to find any trace of Ballard, but in December he learned that Ballard's real name was Andrew Ducale, and he was the twin brother of his last and loving foster mother, Eileen. Horton also believed it was Ducale who had taken him from care and placed him with his sister, Eileen, and her police officer husband, Bernard. With them Horton had found the stability and love that had been wrested from him at the age of ten when his mother disappeared on a foggy November day. They were dead now. If only they had told him what they knew about his mother, Jennifer. But they had remained silent and let him go on believing she had taken off with another man because she hadn't wanted the burden of a kid.

His gut tightened as he thought back to the November day when his life had changed. He'd come home from school to find their council flat in a tower block in Portsmouth empty. There hadn't been anything particularly unusual in that, his mother was often out shopping or at work. She worked as a night croupier at a local casino and sometimes did overtime. He'd made himself something to eat, watched some television, then got himself to bed. When she still hadn't returned the next morning, he was perplexed but thought there must be a simple explanation. He was ten and didn't think the worse of situations. There followed what seemed like endless days alone. As they drew on, he began to get more worried. Each day he hoped she would be there after school and, in the morning when he woke. But she wasn't. A teacher, noticing his dishevelled state and disturbed manner, reported it to the head teacher who called in social services.

For years Horton despised his mother, before deliberately blocking out all thoughts of her. Then, eighteen months ago, before Ducale left the picture on his boat, an investigation into the murder of a man found on a burnt out boat in Horsea Marina had led him to a vicar in Portsmouth who had kept a record of all press cuttings mentioning Horton. The vicar had written beside them, "Jennifer Horton's boy". He had died before Horton could ask him why the interest, but it had sparked his. He'd begun to make enquiries about Jennifer's disappearance. He'd got more questions than answers.

He took a breath. The sound of laughter from a boat on another pontoon drifted across to him as a car started up in the marina car park. His eyes returned to the picture of six men. He could recite their features from memory, he'd stared at them so many times.

His first port of call after finding the photograph had been the London School of Economics' archive files; the only significant event he could find that had happened on 13 March 1967 was the student sit-in protests there, and all the men in the picture looked to be students. He had hoped to find the identities of the six men and other references to them, but there had been nothing. Only the fact that Professor Thurstan Madeley had compiled an archive file on the 1967 sit-in protest.

Horton recalled the aloof man in his late-fifties with a domed head culminating in thinning grey hair, bright, shrewd and curious hazel eyes, and a wide mouth with lips a little too thin. He'd contacted Madeley in August and had arranged to meet him in the Castle Hill Yacht Club at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, six miles across the Solent from Portsmouth. He had shown Madeley the photograph and asked if he had recognized any of the men. Madeley had said he didn't and that the photograph must have come from a private collection, but he gave him a lead, Dr Quentin Amos, a former lecturer at the London School of Economics.

In Amos's urine smelling flat in Woking, Amos told Horton the names of five of the men in the picture, and that Jennifer had been involved with them and the Radical Student Alliance, helping to support and organize the protests. Amos had died before Horton could question him further, but Amos left a manila envelope with his solicitor to be given to Horton on his death. Disappointingly it had been empty but, written on the back, had been a set of numbers 01.07.05 and 5.11.09. Horton had interpreted these as being a grid location, which, with a bit of manipulation, could be nearby Gosport. Had Amos been trying to tell him that was where Jennifer had been heading on the day she vanished?

Gosport, just across the narrow entrance of Portsmouth Harbour, had been home to the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar where Horton's foster father, Bernard, a former Royal Air Force police officer, had been laid up after being wounded in Northern Ireland at RAF Aldergrove during the Troubles in 1978. Not far from the hospital was where MI5s communications training centre had been and was still based.

Over the last nine months Horton had discovered more about the men in the picture and some startling and disturbing facts about them and his mother, Jennifer.

Dormand, with a beard, second from the left, had his arm around the shoulders of the man on his right, Rory Mortimer, who also sported a beard. Dormand, Horton had located in October, masquerading as Brother Norman, a monk in the Benedictine Northwood Abbey on the Isle of Wight. The abbot had no idea of Brother Norman's true identity, and Horton hadn't enlightened him. Dormand was dead and had been since October when he'd taken off in the night on a small boat on a storm tossed Solent. His body hadn't been recovered and neither had the boat. Horton supposed it was possible he had put in somewhere, but he doubted it. Even if Dormand had survived, he had told Horton he was terminally ill. That could have been a lie, but the man had the gauntness of sickness and death about him.

Dormand had confessed to Horton that he had killed Mortimer under orders from British Intelligence who he had worked for. He said that Mortimer, like James Royston, next to him in the picture, and Timothy Wilson, the man on the far left, had been a traitor, selling the country's secrets to the Russians. Horton discovered that Royston had died of a heroin overdose in a sordid bedsit in 1970, and Wilson in a motorbike accident in 1969 on a deserted road on Salisbury Plain on a calm, clear April night. That left two of the six men.

Zachary Benham, on the far right of the photograph, had been killed in a fire at the Goldsmith Psychiatric Hospital in 1968, along with twenty-three other men who had been locked inside their ward.

Horton's mind ran over the conversation he'd had with Dr Gaye Clayton, the forensic pathologist, in March about that hospital fire. She knew all about it, not only from a professional view but also because her father, Dr Samuel Ryedon, an eminent Home Office Forensic Pathologist, had been fascinated by the fire. There were several factors that were suspicious to say the least. Gaye had told Horton that her father had been abroad at the time of the incident but, on his return to the UK from America in 1974, he'd asked questions about it only to be told the file was closed. Only one pathologist had been appointed, a Dr Jocelyn Jennings, who had been under extreme strain and suffering from depression following the death of his only child, a son, aged fourteen, found hanging from a tree in the garden. Jennings had been killed in a car accident in the Brecon Beacons in Wales three months after completing the examinations on the fire victims.

Horton had read the inquiry report, but Gaye had furnished him with more information, which her father had managed to ferret out before being warned off. Horton hadn't explained to Gaye the reason for his interest and she hadn't asked him for it, for which he was grateful.

The identity of the victims had been compiled from the list of patients in the ward, but they hadn't been matched with dental records. There were no personal items or ID on the bodies, or in their lockers, because they hadn't been allowed any, but cigarettes and matches had been stated as the cause of the fire. Neither were found at the scene, and the patients certainly wouldn't have been allowed them. It was considered that someone had given them to a patient, or he had stolen them from a nurse or visitor.

The patients had been locked in the ward, as was normal practice in psychiatric hospitals in the nineteen sixties. There had been no sealing off the crime scene, which again wasn't unusual in 1968, and the extent of the fire had made it difficult to amass evidence.

The scene had been contaminated from the start. Firemen, desperate to get the blaze under control, had doused the ward with water. Charred remains of some of the patients had been found against the door, frantic to escape the flames. The firemen had walked over them and some of the other remains, not realizing they were doing so, while some patients had perished in their beds. No toxicology tests had been carried out on the bones to determine if drugs had been used on the victims. Their remains were gathered and taken away by the undertakers without any note of where they'd been found. The room had been photographed after the event and after all the remains had been removed.

Had Zachary Benham really died in that fire? Dormand had said Benham had been killed, but was that the truth? Then there was the testimony from a former casino colleague of Jennifer's whom Horton had traced, Susan Nash, who told him that Jennifer had turned deathly pale, as though she'd seen a ghost enter the casino. Shortly after that she had disappeared.

Horton again studied the sixth man in the picture, second from the left. Amos hadn't known who he was, but Horton had recognized him when he'd met him in the Castle Hill Yacht Club in August. He'd been there with Professor Madeley. Lord Richard Eames hadn't denied it was him. In 1967, Eames had been down from Cambridge visiting his friend Timothy Wilson, but Eames had claimed to know nothing about Jennifer Horton or her disappearance. It was clearly a lie. And since January, Horton had wondered if he was mistaken. There was a chance the sixth man could have been Eames' wayward brother, Gordon; they had been very much alike, but Gordon, the black sheep of the family, had been found dead on a beach in Australia in 1973.

So where did that leave Horton? A question he'd posed so many times over the last few months. His enquiries regarding these men had got him no closer to the truth behind his mother's disappearance on that foggy November day in 1978. He firmly believed that Richard Eames, like Andrew Ducale and the late Antony Dormand, worked for the intelligence services. Dormand had also told him that Jennifer had worked for the intelligence services while in Portsmouth, providing information on the IRA. That being the case, Horton thought his chances of getting to the truth were practically nil.

He tucked the photograph back inside his wallet and withdrew a grubby business card. On it was a name only, Wyndham Lomas. He was another mystery, one Horton didn't think he was likely to solve. He didn't even know if Lomas was connected with Jennifer's disappearance, or if he was connected with Lord Eames, only that Horton had met him on Eames' private beach at his Isle of Wight property in October, the same time that he had unearthed Dormand at the monastery.

Neither Lord Eames nor any of the family or staff had been at home. The house had been shut up but with a remote security monitoring system in place. Lomas had materialized out of thin air and had vanished into it just as quickly. Horton hadn't been able to trace him since. There was no record of Lomas on any of the databases Horton had access to. Lomas had claimed to be a beachcomber artist looking for flotsam and jetsam to turn into art. Maybe he had been. But Horton had been curious about the sun-tanned man in his early sixties and had asked the fingerprint bureau to see if the prints on the card matched with anyone on criminal records. They hadn't. He'd tucked the card away along with the memory of that meeting.

Aside from learning that all those in the photograph were dead – unless the sixth man was Lord Eames – and that Jennifer had known them, been involved with the Radical Student Alliance, and that she must have taken the picture, he was no further forward. Perhaps he never would be. Perhaps it was time to forget the past and move on, to concentrate on securing greater access to his nine year old daughter, Emma, and live in the present. But fate has a funny way of working and, as he retired for the night and turned his thoughts to the crimes of Portsmouth that would be burdening his desk in CID, fate was about to throw the final pitch in the twisted tale of Jennifer's life.