A Going Concern (11 page)

‘I believe, Inspector – that is, as far as I can make out – the boffins at the War Office were interested in the development of a skin dye with which they could identify prisoners-of-war on a semi-permanent basis.'

‘A tattoo that faded over time?' supplied Sloan cogently.

‘Exactly. I have found records which indicate that checks were made to see that such an application did not contravene the Geneva Convention.'

‘Hence the combination of a chemist and a biochemist?' said Sloan. Surely it was only the British who thought that war should be fought according to the Queensbury Rules?

Scrupulously.

Even if the other side played dirty.

‘Very probably, Inspector. However, I understand that the project – it was codenamed Operation Tell-tale – came to nothing and it was abandoned after the works were bombed.'

‘Chernwoods' Dyestuffs wanted her papers as of last week,' said Sloan flatly. ‘You said so on Saturday when you rang the Grange …'

‘Yes …'

‘And from the state of the Grange at Great Primer it looks as if someone else wanted her papers pretty badly, too,' said Sloan, ‘and not, unless I'm very much mistaken, just for old times' sake.'

‘So it would seem.' A thin trickle of perspiration had appeared just below Gregory Rosart's hair-line.

‘Therefore,' Sloan continued logically, ‘it would also seem that Mrs Garamond's papers can't have been deposited with you here or even left behind at any time …'

‘They haven't,' said Rosart quickly.

Too quickly.

That meant that Gregory Rosart had already checked. And had had a reason for checking.

‘What is it, then,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘that you here at Chernwoods' wanted from Mrs Garamond's effects?' He addressed both men but Claude Miller made no move to answer him.

Gregory Rosart stumbled. ‘I … that is, we … don't know.'

‘But there is something …'

‘Yes … no … that is, we think there might have been,' said the information officer.

‘But you don't know what?' For some reason best known to himself, Detective Constable Crosby suddenly started to take an interest in the proceedings.

Rosart turned in the constable's direction. ‘No, not exactly.'

‘But,' said Sloan silkily, ‘something happened that made you think that there might be … er … something?'

‘I suppose you could put it like that.'

‘And that Mrs Garamond's papers might be able to tell you what it was?'

This time it was chairman Claude Miller who fielded the question. ‘Yes, Inspector.'

‘Why did you wait until she was dead?' asked Sloan.

‘We didn't.' Miller pointed ingenuously to Rosart. ‘Greg here made several approaches by letter and in person.'

‘Too right, I did,' said Rosart feelingly.

‘And Mrs Garamond wouldn't see him. That's right, Greg, isn't it?' appealed Claude Miller.

The information officer nodded. ‘For starters I couldn't get past the dragon at the gate.'

Sloan did a rapid search of his memory. ‘Ellen? Her old maid?'

‘More like a sentry on guard duty,' riposted Rosart.

‘The letters?'

‘Not answered. Any more than the telephone calls were responded to,' said Rosart. ‘No joy in any direction.'

‘I see.' Sloan settled himself more comfortably in his chair. ‘And are you going to tell me what it was that suddenly provoked your interest?'

After a quick glance at his chairman, Rosart said: ‘About six months ago we suddenly started to get a number of requests for information – which we turned down – about the work done here in the old days. They came from someone who described himself as a historian doing research for a thesis.'

‘We had his story checked out, Inspector,' supplemented the chairman, ‘and it didn't stand up.'

‘I see.' Sloan maintained his leisurely posture. ‘And then?'

‘The next thing was an offer from a business history specialist willing to write us up for our hundred and fiftieth anniversary.'

‘Which, I take it, would have involved giving the writer access to all your records?' asked Sloan.

‘Exactly,' said Miller.

Sloan waited. ‘Well?'

Claude Miller said, ‘So Greg here started digging around for himself just in case and …'

‘And?' prompted Sloan.

Rosart said slowly: ‘There was nothing that I could put my finger on except what might have been a codename, Inspector. Nothing more than that …'

‘A codename?'

‘OZ.'

Detective Constable Crosby sat up. ‘The Wonderful Wizard of?'

Rosart said, ‘Your guess is as good as mine. But Operation something is more likely.'

‘This codename,' said Sloan. ‘Where did it crop up?'

‘In an expenses claim for Hut Eleven towards the end of 1943. For an additional supply of microscope slides.'

‘That all?' said Sloan. Not even an intolerable deal of sack to go with the half-pennyworth of bread? Sir John Falstaff would have done better than that.

‘It was only because there seems to have been something of a legend attached to Hut Eleven that we looked at it twice …'

‘The legend of Hut Eleven?' mused Sloan. Superintendent Leeyes wouldn't like that for sure. If there was any melodrama about the superintendent himself liked to be its ‘onlie begetter'.

‘I don't know much about it myself,' the information officer hastened on, ‘just this rumour which still persists that they'd stumbled on something, but there was nothing in any records that we could find.'

‘But surely, gentlemen,' said Sloan, who knew next to nothing about chemicals but a great deal about theft, ‘any work done here by an employee remains the property of the company?'

‘Indeed, yes, Inspector.' Miller was emphatic. ‘We have a whole department here which deals with patents, copyright, intellectual property, and so forth.' He waved a long thin arm in the direction of the information officer. ‘And one of Greg's jobs here is to – er – monitor before-hand' –
Censor
, translated Sloan; but not aloud – ‘what we publish on – er – our findings' –
Discoveries
, thought Sloan to himself – ‘that are – which might be – commercially sensitive.'

‘And what, might I ask, was Hut Eleven?' asked Sloan, who knew exactly what the chairman of Chernwoods' Dyestuffs meant by the words ‘commercially sensitive'.

Valuable.

Rosart answered that one. ‘In the war. Inspector, the people here at Chernwoods' worked in small huts out in the fields in case of air raids. There was a company rule that there were never to be more than ten workers in each hut at any one time.'

Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. Nowadays firms made much the same rule about those employees from any one department joining the same football pools' syndicate. The reasoning was the same in both instances: the employer didn't want to risk losing all the specialist workers in any one area of expertise at the same time.

‘Would I be right,' Sloan said, ‘in hazarding that Mr and Mrs Garamond worked in Hut Eleven?'

‘You would.' Gregory Rosart gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Both of them.'

‘And who else?'

‘Ah, Inspector, there we have had a little difficulty …' said Rosart. ‘It was all so long ago, you see.'

‘There are people we can't trace,' put in Claude Miller, ‘although we'd like to.'

‘Dead or alive?' Detective Constable Crosby made one of his rare interjections.

‘Either,' said Claude Miller tersely.

‘Both,' said Gregory Rosart in the same breath.

TWELVE

Shallow his grave and the dogs get him out

Amelia sat at the kitchen table for a long time after she had talked to the Bursar of Boleyn College trying to think of what she should do next.

She would have liked to go back to the Grange at Great Primer but the police had asked her not to do that yet. She had thought that if she just stood in the house she might pick up some feeling of what her great-aunt's death really meant. But there was little chance, anyway, she decided realistically, of her sensing any atmosphere at the Grange if the police were still going over it …

She would have liked to study much more carefully the old photograph of the wayside cross which James Puckle had handed over to her but Phoebe had taken that back with her to her medical consulting rooms where there was a really substantial magnifying glass that outdid any domestic one.

She would have liked to know who Kate was – she who had been left a candle – and to go over again the list of newspapers that Great-Aunt Octavia had asked to be notified of her death in order to see what she could glean from that but the details were still wtih Tod Morton and she didn't want to bother him again.

That left her with only the birth certificate.

The birth certificate at least, thought Amelia, was tangible and evidence that she hadn't dreamed the whole improbable affair. She took it up from the table and studied it once more. The birth certificate of an unknown woman about whom she knew nothing … well, not quite nothing. At least she knew the names her natural mother had bestowed on her – Erica Hester Goudy – even if they weren't the names used by her in after life.

And she knew, surely, that if she had been born in 1940 she must be middle-aged now. What she did not know, of course, was whether she was dead or alive. Looking for a nameless woman was going to be difficult: looking for an anonymous dead one would be pretty nearly impossible.

She continued to regard the piece of official paper in her hand. As she did so something that the History Man at her college had often quoted came unbidden into her mind.

‘Documents,' he'd insisted time and time again to his students, ‘don't speak to strangers …'

It was true, Amelia decided. This particular document was saying hardly anything at all to her. Perhaps she should try to remedy that. She wandered through the house into her father's study. At least she could learn something about 1940.

She looked at the shelves – there were bound to be books about the twentieth century there, to say nothing of books about war, since war and anthropology must surely be inseparable; or was that thought too cynical? Her father wasn't here to argue the point with her and so she applied herself instead to finding a book that would tell her what had been happening in England in 1940. That had been in what she always thought of as the last of the black and white wars. The Great War had been where the film was of men walking jerkily. In films of the Second World War men moved smoothly – but still in black and white.

There would be a scheme to her father's library shelves if only she could work it out. Her father had never minded her reading any of his books and had been willing to explain most – only balking once that she remembered. That had been when she had picked out when very young Sir James Frazer's
The Golden Bough
, taken by the title and thinking it a children's story.

His only request ever was that she put any book back from where she'd got it. He'd say, ‘These are my tools, Amelia, and I need to be able to find them just like the mechanic in the garage does.'

Now she ran her fingers along the shelves, looking for some books to tell her about 1940 and, sure enough, she soon found a small row of them. She tried E. S. Turner's
The Phoney War
first as sound background; Margery Allingham's
The Oaken Heart
she put aside for a good read later. Evelyn Waugh's
Put Out More Flags
she left on the shelf. She was either too young or too old for the works of Evelyn Waugh – she didn't know which – and then she found Winston Churchill's history of the war. That would do to start with.

The section entitled ‘The Twilight War: A Dark New Year' gave her somewhere to begin. The early months of 1940 seemed to have been devoted to sending British Army divisions to France: and, by the Germans, to preparing to attack Norway. By the middle of March Russia had crushed Finland and on the 18th of that month Hitler met Mussolini on the Brenner Pass.

And, it would seem, by then Octavia Harquil-Grasset had conceived a daughter.

Amelia went back to Winston Churchill's stirring narrative. He had become Prime Minister on 10th May 1940, offering nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat', the day when Hitler's armies had marched into the Low Countries. Something Amelia had never heard of called the British Expeditionary Force, flanked by Belgian and French divisions, was moving against the enemy forces when the front was broken.

She read on in the stillness of the library, strangely stirred by the prose of war, her reading only stopped by her eye happening upon a word she did know – Dunkirk. Churchill had written of ‘the deliverance of Dunkirk' in the last week of May and the first week of June.

By then, calculated Amelia, according to Phoebe, Octavia Harquil-Grasset must have known for certain, mice, frogs, and rabbits notwithstanding, that she was pregnant – and that there would be blood, toil, tears, and sweat ahead for her, too, never mind Great Britain.

Amelia turned back to Winston Churchill, seeking the history of another month in that year of peril.

December.

On 15th December 1940 Octavia Harquil-Grasset had given birth to a live female infant in a London already facing attack from the air. And given birth, too, apparently without benefit of clergy, so to speak. Her mind skipped back to the egregious Mr Fournier: did he know about Erica Hester Goudy's
sub rosa
birth? And was this why he was so reluctant to take her great-aunt's funeral service? Or had it been because he was a fundamentalist and her great-aunt a Darwinian biological scientist?

Answer – not unnaturally – coming there none, she went back to Churchill. There was nothing
sub rosa
about Churchill. He was, Amelia decided, a man you felt you knew where you were with. She sat on alone in the quiet study considering whether she had extracted all that she possibly could from the birth certificate.