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‘Just reflecting… on your change of style.’

  ‘Well, no one could accuse you of changing.’

  ‘Would it really be so hard for you to see Marty again?’

  ‘Yes. It would. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have you got your passport with you?’

  ‘What do you think? I wasn’t planning to leave the country today. I wasn’t planning to leave the office.’

  ‘I’m sorry for the short notice, all right?’ Gemma’s mouth tightened. ‘I hardly slept last night. I was still intending to go myself when I went to bed. Tossing and turning, I eventually realized… I couldn’t.’

  ‘You could have phoned me.’

  ‘I had to get on the road. Besides, I thought you’d react better… face to face.’ She sighed. ‘My mistake.’

  ‘I’ve agreed to go, Gemma. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘I suppose it’ll have to be.’ She drank some coffee, glanced at her watch, then drank some more. ‘We need to collect your passport before we meet Shadbolt. And the train’s at twelve forty. So, I suppose we should start moving.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘The flowers on the dress were forget-me-nots, by the way,’ she said as she stood up. ‘It went to Oxfam years ago. I don’t have any dresses now.’

  THREE

  The round trip to Chiswick to collect Eusden’s passport took the best part of an hour. It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time Gemma drew up in the yard of Shadbolt & Daughters Ltd, Car Repairs and Servicing, Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey. Trains into and out of London Bridge were rumbling overhead along a weed-pocked yellow-bricked viaduct, three arches of which, plus two aged Portakabins, constituted Bernie Shadbolt’s business premises. And business seemed to be brisk, to judge by the number of cars on view in various stages of dismantlement and the flashes of an arc welder that periodically floodlit the cavernous recesses of the archways.

  They headed for the Portakabin with a fluorescent striplight shining through its chicken-wired windows and entered a paraffin-heated fug of cigarette smoke. The smoking was being done by a preposterously busty blonde in a low-cut T-shirt and straining jeans, currently engaged in a telephone conversation. The space was shared by a younger, slimmer woman wearing jeans that were under much less stress and a capacious cardigan over a higher-necked T-shirt. She had dark, shoulder-length hair and a pale, anxious face. She looked up from a computer screen as they entered and smiled. There was a sisterly resemblance despite their many dissimilarities. Eusden took them to be the eponymous daughters.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’ve an appointment with Bernie Shadbolt,’ said Gemma. ‘My name’s Gemma Conway.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. He’s expecting you. Hold on.’ The daughter reached up to a wall-mounted telephone, took it off the hook and pressed a button.

  A bell started ringing somewhere in the vicinity. The response was swift. Eusden could hear the growled ‘Yeah?’ from where he was standing.

  ‘They’re here, Dad.’ Eusden did not catch the response to that, but the daughter supplied one as soon as she replaced the receiver. ‘He’ll be right with you.’

  It was odd, Eusden thought, that she had said ‘They’re here’ so naturally, almost as if his presence had been foreseen, an idea he found far from comforting. His gaze strayed to a noticeboard just inside the door. Amidst various flapping print-outs of health-and-safety regulations and fire precautions was a postcard, held by a single drawing-pin. The picture looked uncannily like an Amsterdam canal-side scene. He was about to prise it back for a sight of the handwriting, when the door opened behind him.

  ‘Mornin’,’ said Bernie Shadbolt. He was a tall, wiry man of sixty or so with crew-cut grey hair and a boxer’s face, sea-grey eyes regarding them cautiously over the flattened bridge of his nose. His clothes – Crombie, polo-neck, tailored trousers and stout-soled shoes – were in varying shades of black. He looked like a man who meant business even when he was not engaged in it.

  ‘I’m Gemma Conway,’ said Gemma.

  ‘Got any ID?’

  ‘Do I need any? I thought you were expecting me.’

  ‘I was. But you can’t be too careful.’

  To Eusden’s trained eye, Gemma was finding it difficult not to be riled. But she managed it. ‘My passport’s in the car.’

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  ‘All right.’

  As Gemma headed for the door and Shadbolt stepped back to make way for her, he turned his attention to Eusden. ‘Who are you?’ He was clearly not a man who wasted time on niceties.

  ‘My name’s Eusden. Richard Eusden.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘Heard of me?’

  ‘Yeah. Packing your passport too, are you?’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Shadbolt gave a taut little smile and waved him on ahead.

  Passport inspection was a cursory affair. Shadbolt did not seem seriously to suspect they were impostors. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said when he handed them back. ‘Just playing safe.’

  ‘Richard’s an old friend of Marty’s, Mr Shadbolt,’ said Gemma, who evidently felt some kind of explanation was called for.

  ‘Call me Bernie.’ Shadbolt grinned at her wolfishly, then looked at Eusden. ‘Marty told me all about you, Richard.’ His instant familiarity was disturbing. ‘He reckoned it was fifty-fifty you’d go along for the ride.’

  ‘You’ve got what we’re here to take?’ asked Gemma, who had clearly decided against mentioning that only Eusden would actually be going.

  ‘Yeah. It’s in the boot of my car. But look…’ Shadbolt glanced at his watch – a chunk of pseudo-Rolex. ‘Why don’t we hop round the corner for a drink? You’ve got time before your train.’ Marty had obviously briefed him well. ‘It’s only twenty minutes from here to Waterloo.’

  Gemma frowned. ‘I think we should probably-’

  ‘Great,’ Shadbolt declared. ‘Let’s go, then.’ He grinned. ‘My shout.’

  The pub round the corner was the kind of place Eusden was happier visiting on a Monday morning than a Friday night. Signs advertised karaoke and meat raffles. The island bar was reached through a sparse array of utilitarian tables and chairs. The only upholstery in sight had been ripped, the foam innards spilling out like a fungus. It was barely ten minutes past opening time, but they were not the first customers. A couple of elderly derelicts had already started on pints and cigarettes.

  The landlady’s wary face lifted marginally at the sight of Shadbolt, who ordered himself a Scotch and a packet of crisps. The crisps, it transpired, were for the pub dog, much the friendliest of its inhabitants. Gemma’s request for a Perrier and Eusden’s for a half of bitter elicited a frisson of disapproval.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Shadbolt, starting on his whisky. Eusden reciprocated half-heartedly. Gemma said nothing. ‘I couldn’t let the two most important people in Marty’s life come and go without at least standing them a drink.’

  ‘The two most…’

  ‘That’s right, Richard. You and Gemma. It’s what he called you when he filled me in on this little fetch-and-carry operation.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, now am I?’

  ‘I suppose…’

  ‘You’re with the FO, right?’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Any chance you could put me wise on that dodgy dossier, then? Only, I’ve got a nephew in Iraq. He’d be interested in exactly how you Whitehall wallahs managed to get it so wrong. If you did get it wrong. Know what I mean?’

  ‘It’s good of you to have done this for Marty,’ said Gemma, taking pity on Eusden.

  ‘Well, I owed him one.’

  ‘What exactly is the package?’ asked Eusden, feeling no keener to discuss the nature of Shadbolt’s debt to Marty than the calibre of government intelligence.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Shadbolt shot back at him.

  ‘No. How could I?’

  ‘Y
ou’re his childhood chum. I reckoned you’d know all about it.’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  ‘So, what is it… Bernie?’ asked Gemma, smiling tightly. ‘The package.’

  ‘Some old attaché case. I mean, really old. Locked. Marty’s got the key, natch. You could force it open easily enough. But that wouldn’t be playing the game, would it? Marty didn’t say what was in it. I guess he’s keeping us all on need-to-know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask his aunt?’ Eusden put in.

  ‘According to Vicky, she didn’t know either. Or, if she did, she wasn’t-’

  ‘Who’s Vicky?’ queried Gemma.

  ‘My daughter. You were just speaking to her.’

  ‘So, you didn’t go yourself?’

  ‘Nah. Too busy. Besides, I thought Vicky’d go down better with the old biddy. Plus it gave her a break from all that secondary smoking Jules inflicts on her.’

  ‘We ought to make a start for the station,’ said Gemma, polishing off her Perrier. ‘You’re supposed to check in half an hour before the train leaves.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Shadbolt, passing his glass to the landlady for a refill. ‘I’ll drive you. You can leave your car at the yard. Want the other half, Richard?’

  ‘No, thanks. I…’

  ‘I’m not going, Bernie,’ said Gemma, uncomfortably but emphatically. ‘It’s just Richard. So, I’ll drive him to Waterloo. Thanks all the same.’

  Shadbolt smirked at her. ‘I must have misunderstood.’

  ‘Like you, I’m rather busy at the moment,’ she said defensively.

  Eusden smiled grimly. ‘Whereas I have all the time in the world.’

  ‘Crying shame about Marty,’ said Shadbolt during the short walk back to the yard.

  ‘So it is,’ agreed Eusden.

  ‘Tell him from me if there’s some specialist he needs to see who could pull off a miracle cure, he doesn’t have to worry about the money.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ said Gemma.

  Shadbolt beamed at her. ‘That’s what friends are for.’

  He led the way across the yard to his car – a vintage Jag polished to a fine sheen. Eusden caught a glimpse of Vicky watching them through the window-mesh of the Portakabin as her father unlocked the boot and swung it open.

  ‘There it is,’ he announced.

  And there it was. A battered old leather attaché case. Very old, as Shadbolt had said. Probably Edwardian, Eusden judged. But he had an advantage in dating it. There were initials stencilled on the lid: CEH. And he knew what they stood for.

  ‘Seen it before, Richard?’ Shadbolt asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Funny. You look as if you have.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before.’ Eusden looked Shadbolt in the face. ‘But I recognize the initials.’

  ‘Reckoned you might.’ Shadbolt raised an index finger across his lips. ‘But don’t tell, hey? If Marty didn’t think I needed to know, we’d better keep it that way.’

  FOUR

  ‘I recognized the initials as well,’ said Gemma as they drove away from the yard.

  ‘I suppose you would.’

  ‘I guess they confirm what Marty told me. A family keepsake.’

  ‘Strange Aunt Lily doesn’t know what it is, then.’

  ‘Maybe she just pretended not to know.’

  ‘Yeah. And maybe she’s not the only one.’

  ‘You think Shadbolt was holding out on us?’

  ‘I’m certain he was.’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Marty can explain everything when I see him. He’s bound to tell me the truth, isn’t he?’

  ‘You’re getting this out of proportion, Richard.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘I am. Give me a call when you get back. You’ll see things differently then.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  Gemma’s return ticket was for the six o’clock train from Brussels, due into Waterloo, thanks to the time difference, at 7.30. If everything went according to plan, Eusden would be back home an hour later, his simple task accomplished. And he would have seen his old friend Marty Hewitson, probably for the last time.

  The attaché case passed unremarked through the X-ray machine at the Eurostar terminal. Eusden was momentarily tempted to ask the operative what he could make out of the contents. The weight, about equal to that of his own briefcase, suggested they might be documents of some kind.

  He waited in the departure lounge for boarding of the 12.40 to be called. It was a quiet day for Eurostar. Most business travellers would have caught an earlier train. And it was a slack time of year in the leisure market. He sat alone, flanked by his two items of luggage: his briefcase and the battered old attaché case.

  CEH was Clement Ernest Hewitson, Isle of Wight police officer, father of Denis and Lily Hewitson, grandfather of Marty. He had lived into his nineties and was more than twenty years dead. A long departed relic of a bygone age. But not forgotten by any who had known him. Which included his grandson’s childhood friend, Richard Eusden.

  Eusden had based a school project on the life and times of Clem Hewitson. He was, in a sense, the only biographer the man had ever had or was ever likely to have. Clem was already over eighty when young Richard first met him. A widower of long standing, he lived alone in a spotlessly clean terraced house in Cowes, just up the hill from the floating bridge. His grandson’s home was socially a world away – a mock Tudor residence set in half an acre of land at Wootton Bridge – but it was only a short bus ride from Cowes. Most Saturdays would see Richard and Marty meeting at the Fountain Arcade, where Richard’s bus from Newport arrived, for several hours of aimless wandering around the town that usually ended with tea at Clem’s.

  The old man was a natural storyteller, whose life had given him a seemingly inexhaustible fund of entertaining recollections. Born in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (as he never tired of pointing out), he followed his father into work at White’s shipyard, but rapidly tired of the physical toil and exploited a family connection with the Chief Constable (Clem’s uncle had served under him in the Army) to get himself taken on as a police constable. He rose through the ranks to become a detective chief inspector, in charge of the Island’s modest CID, and clocked up more than forty years in the force, inclusive of four in the Army, braving shot and shell on the Western Front during the Great War (as he always referred to it).

  Richard had plenty to choose from when it came to selecting incidents from Clem’s career for inclusion in his project: suffragettes, German spies, drifting mines, burning ricks, suicide attempts, escaped prisoners – Clem had tackled them all, along with a varied assortment of burglars, arsonists, fraudsters and the occasional murderer. Hard though it was to believe, in view of the almost total uneventfulness of life on the Island as experienced by the average schoolboy in the late 1960s, Clem could look back on excitements galore – and was happy to do so.

  Richard was not blind to the possibility put to him by his father, when he relayed some of Clem’s stories, that they were exaggerated, if not entirely invented. Reluctantly, he concluded that this might well apply to the old chap’s single most startling claim: that he had saved the two eldest daughters of Tsar Nicholas II from murder by an anarchist in Cowes in the summer of 1909. As Clem told it, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana went shopping in the town during a visit by the Russian imperial family to Cowes regatta that year. Clem stopped, disarmed and arrested a gun-wielding would-be assassin who was in the process of entering the rear of a millinery shop where the two girls were idly debating a hat purchase. This brave and timely intervention earned Clem the personal thanks of the Tsar. ‘Pleasant fellow,’ said Clem of Nicholas. ‘Probably too pleasant for his own good, though, considering how things turned out for him.’

  As it transpired, the story was too good to be true. Richard took himself off to the County Records Office in Newport after school one day and looked up the Isle
of Wight County Press for the relevant week. The Tsar and Tsarina and their children had indeed been in Cowes in August 1909, or, more accurately, off Cowes, in the moored imperial yacht. And the two eldest Grand Duchesses had definitely gone shopping in the town. But no assassination attempt thwarted by a PC Hewitson was mentioned. The four days of the imperial visit had passed without incident.

  Richard was too embarrassed to challenge Clem on the point, but Marty was not. And Clem had a ready answer. It took no great effort for Richard to retrieve a clear memory of the old man as he was that day: tall, bald, lean and stooping, eyes twinkling, mouth curling in a smile beneath his yellowy-white handlebar moustache, studying Richard across the tiny front parlour of his house, the room smelling of pipe smoke and stewed tea, sunlight streaming through the window on to the brightly patterned tiles flanking the fireplace and the framed photograph above it of Clem on his wedding day back in 1920, when his moustache was lustrously dark and his back was ramrod-straight.

  ‘You’ve been checking up on me, boy? Well, we’ll make a detective of you yet.’ The laugh merged with a cough. ‘It comes down to politics, see. They couldn’t have it said the Tsar’s daughters weren’t safe on the streets of England. So, it was hushed up. I should have had a formal commendation by rights. But that’s the way of the world. Might be best if you didn’t put it in your project, though. It could still be a state secret for all I know.’

  Richard did not believe him, much as he wanted to. But absolute veracity was hardly to be expected from such an inveterate yarn-spinner as Clem Hewitson, whose claims of secondment to Special Branch during the Second World War and missions abroad he was still not free to talk about were as tantalizing as they were dubious. Certainly his son, Marty’s father, Denis Hewitson, had no time for the old man’s ‘romances’, as he called them. Denis ran a ship-design business in Cowes which he took very seriously, as he did his golf and his garden. His outrage when pop festival-goers slept on his lawn one summer’s night in 1969 kept Richard and Marty – and Clem too – laughing for weeks. Richard’s father was equally strait-laced, as befitted a deputy county surveyor. At heart, Clem was younger than either of them. That plus the distant reach of his memory – he often recalled watching Queen Victoria’s funeral cortège, the mourners led by the new King Edward VII, and his cousin the Kaiser, when the grand old lady’s body was conveyed from Osborne House to the waiting royal yacht Alberta on a sparkling winter’s afternoon in 1901 – made him an object of fascination as well as fondness.