Crossfire (20 page)

“Kauri House Stables,” I repeated. “Can I help you?”

“Mrs. Kauri, please,” said a whispered voice.

“Sorry?” I said. “Can you please speak up? I can’t hear you.”

“Mrs. Kauri,” the voice repeated, still in the same quiet whisper.

“I’m sorry,” I said extra-loudly. “She can’t speak to you just now. Can I give her a message?”

“Give me Mrs. Kauri,” the person whispered again.

“No,” I said. “You will have to talk to me.”

The line went click again as he hung up.

My mother was crosser than ever. “Thomas,” she said, “please do not do that again.” She was almost crying. “We must do as he says.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why!” she almost screamed. “Because he’ll send the stuff to the tax man if we don’t.”

“No, he won’t,” I said confidently.

“How can you know?” she shouted. “He might.”

“I think it most unlikely that he’ll do anything,” I said.

“I hope you’re right,” my stepfather said gloomily.

“What has he to gain?” I said. “In fact, he has everything to lose.”

“I’m the one with everything to lose,” my mother said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “But you are paying the blackmailer two thousand a week, and he won’t get that if he tips off the tax man. He’s not going to give up that lucrative arrangement just because I won’t let him speak to you on the telephone.”

“But why are you antagonizing him?” my stepfather said.

More than two thousand years ago Sun Tzu, a mysterious Chinese soldier and philosopher, wrote what has since become the textbook of war, a volume that is still studied in military academies today. In
The Art of War
he stated that one should “beat the grass to startle the snake.” What he meant was to do something unexpected to make the enemy give away their position.

“Because I need to see who it is,” I said. “If I knew the identity of the enemy, I could then start to fight him.”

“I don’t want you to fight him,” my mother said forlornly.

“Well, we have to do something. Tax returns are overdue, and it is only a matter of time before the VAT fraud is discovered. I need to identify the enemy, neutralize him, recover your money and tax papers and then pay the tax. And we need to do it all quickly.”

The phone rang again. I picked it up.

“Kauri House Stables,” I said.

Silence.

“Now, listen here you little creep,” I said, beating the grass still further. “You can’t speak to Mrs. Kauri. You’ll have to speak to me. I’m her son, Thomas Forsyth.”

More silence.

“And another thing,” I said, “all the horses from these stables will, in the future, be trying their best to win. And if you don’t like it, hard bloody luck. You can come and speak to me about it anytime you like, face-to-face. Do you understand?”

I listened. There was another few seconds of silence, followed by the now familiar click as he disconnected.

I had just committed a huge tactical gamble. I had put
my
head way up over the parapet, exposing myself to the enemy, beating the grass in the hope that this particular snake would be startled enough to give away his position, so I could shoot him.

But would he shoot me first?

 

 

S
unday had been an uneventful day, with apparently no further telephone calls from the whispering blackmailer. However, I couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t called during the time I’d been out in the middle of the day.

My mother had responded to my initiative of Saturday evening by withdrawing into her shell and not appearing at all from her bedroom until six in the evening, and only then briefly to raid the drinks cabinet before returning upstairs to bed. Derek had been dispatched downstairs later to make her a sandwich for her dinner.

I was certain that if the whisperer had called while I was out, my mother wouldn’t have told me. Perhaps she felt like most of the civilians I had encountered in Afghanistan. Even though we firmly believed that we were fighting the Taliban on behalf of the Afghan people, they didn’t seem to share the same view. The old adage “my enemy’s enemy is therefore my friend” simply didn’t apply. It was true that most of the population loathed the Taliban, but deep down they also hated the foreigners in their midst who were fighting them.

In the same way, I wondered if my mother considered me to be as much her enemy as her blackmailer.

Ian Norland had not made another appearance in the house on Sunday morning, and I had watched through the kitchen window as he had directed the stable staff in the mucking out, feeding and watering of the horses. I had taken it to mean that he had decided to stay, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, the broken reins in question were sitting safely in the locked trunk of my car.

At noon on Sunday I had driven into Newbury, using the Jaguar’s satellite navigation system to find the address that Derek had finally given me, the address to which he sent the weekly cash payments.

“But it’s so close,” I’d said to my stepfather. “Surely you’ve been to see where it is you send all this money.”

“He said not to,” he’d replied.

“And you obeyed him?” I’d asked incredulously. “Didn’t you just drive past to see? Even in the middle of the night?”

“We mustn’t. We have to do exactly what he says.” He had been close to tears. “We’re so frightened.”

I could see. “And how specifically did he tell you not to go and see where the money was going?”

“In a note.”

“And where’s the note now?” I’d asked him.

“I threw it away,” he’d said. “I know I shouldn’t have, but they made me feel sick. I threw all the notes away.”

All of them except the one I’d found on my mother’s desk.

“So when did the telephone calls start?”

“When he started telling us the horses must lose.”

“And when was that?” I’d asked.

“Just before Christmas.” Two months ago.

I hadn’t really expected the address to provide any great revelation into the identity of the blackmailer, and I’d been right.

Forty-six Cheap Street in Newbury turned out to be a shop with rentable mailboxes, a whole wall of them, and suite 116 was not a suite of offices as one might have thought, but a single, six-by-four-inch gray mailbox at shoulder level. The shop had been closed on Sunday, but I had no great expectation that, had the staff been there, they would have told me who had rented box number 116. In due course, when I was ready, the police might be able to find out.

I had returned to Kauri House from Newbury via the Wheelwright Arms in the village for a leisurely lunch of roast beef with all the trimmings. I’d been in no particular hurry to get back to the depressing atmosphere at home. I decided it was time to start looking for more agreeable accommodation—past time, in fact.

 

 

E
arly the next morning, I drove to Oxford and parked in the multistory parking lot near the Westgate shopping center. The city center was quiet, even for a Monday in February. The persistent cold snap had deepened with a bitter wind from the north that cut through my overcoat as effortlessly as a well-honed bayonet through a Taliban’s kurta. Most sensible people had obviously decided to stay at home, in the warm.

Oxford Coroner’s Court was housed next door to the Oxfordshire County Council building in New Road, near the old prison. According to the court proceedings notice, the case in which I was interested was the second on the coroner’s list for the day, the case of Roderick Ward, deceased.

It was too cold to hang around outside, so I sat in the public gallery for the first case of the day, the suicide of a troubled young man in his early twenties who had hanged himself in a house he’d shared with other students. His two female housemates cried almost continuously throughout the short proceedings. They had discovered the swinging body when they had returned from a nightclub at two o’clock in the morning, having literally stumbled into it in the dark.

A pathologist described the mechanics of death by strangulation due to hanging, and a policeman reported the existence of a suicide note found in the house.

Then the young man’s father spoke briefly about his son and his expectations for the future that would now not be fulfilled. It was a moving eulogy, delivered with great dignity but with huge sadness.

The coroner, having listened to the evidence, thanked the witnesses for attending, then officially recorded that the young man had taken his own life.

We all stood up, the coroner bowed to us, we bowed back, and he departed through a door behind his chair. In all, the formal proceedings had taken just twenty minutes. It seemed to me to be a very swift finale to a life that had lasted some twenty-two years.

Next up was the inquest into the death of Roderick Ward.

There was an exchange of personnel in the courtroom. The young suicide’s father and his weeping ex-housemates trooped out, along with the policeman and the pathologist who had given evidence. In came different men in suits, plus one in a navy blue sweater and jeans who joined me in the public gallery.

I glanced at him, and just for a moment, I thought he looked familiar, but when he turned full-face towards me, I didn’t know him, and he showed no sign of having recognized me.

There was no young woman in the court who might have been Stella Beecher. But there again, she had never received the letter sent to her at 26 Banbury Drive by the Coroner’s Office, to inform her that the inquest was going to reconvene today. I was absolutely sure of that, because the said letter was currently in my pocket.

The inquest began with the coroner giving the details of the deceased, Mr. Roderick Ward. His address was given as 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford, but even I knew that was false. So why didn’t the court? I wanted to stand up and tell them they were wrong, but how could I do it without explaining how I knew? Once I started there would be no stopping, and the whole sorry saga of the tax evasion would be laid bare for all to see, and especially for the Revenue to see. My mother would be up on a charge quicker than a guardsman found sleeping on sentry duty.

The coroner went on to say that the body of the deceased had been identified by his sister, Mrs. Stella Beecher, of the same address. Another lie. Had the whole identification been a lie? Was the body found in the car actually that of Roderick Ward, or of someone else? And where was Stella Beecher now? Why wasn’t she here? The whole business seemed fishy to me, but only because I knew that Roderick Ward himself had been busily working outside the law. To everyone else it was a simple but tragic road accident.

The first witness was a policeman from the Thames Valley Road Traffic Accident Investigation Team, who described the circumstances, as he had determined them, surrounding the death of Roderick Ward on the night of Sunday, July 12.

“Mr. Ward’s dark blue Renault Mégane had been proceeding along the A415 in a southerly direction,” he said formally. “The tire marks on the grass verge indicate that the driver failed to negotiate the bend, veered over to the wrong side of the road and struck the concrete parapet of the bridge where the A415 crosses over the River Windrush. The vehicle appeared to have then gone into the river, where it was found by a fisherman at eight a.m. on the morning of Monday, July thirteenth. The vehicle was lying on its side with just six inches or so of it visible above the water level.”

The coroner stopped him there as he made some handwritten notes. “Go on,” he said eventually, looking up at the policeman.

“The vehicle was removed from the river by crane later that morning, at approximately ten-thirty. The deceased’s body was discovered inside the vehicle when it was lifted. He was still strapped into the driver’s seat by his seat belt. The Coroner’s Office was immediately informed, and a pathologist attended the scene, arriving at”—he consulted his notebook—“eleven twenty-eight, by which time I had also arrived at the scene to begin my investigation.”

The policeman paused again as the coroner wrote furiously in his own notebook. When the writing paused, the policeman went on.

“I examined the vehicle both at the scene and also at our vehicle-testing facility in Kidlington. It had been slightly damaged by the collision with the bridge but, other than that, was found to be in full working order with no deficiencies observed in either the braking or the steering. The seat belts were also noted to be in perfect condition, locking and unlocking with ease. At the scene I examined the concrete parapet of the bridge and the tire skid marks on the grass verge. There were no marks visible on the road surface. It appeared to me from my examinations that while the vehicle had struck the bridge wall, this collision in itself was unlikely to have been of sufficient force to prove fatal. While it was noted that the airbag in the vehicle had deployed, the damage to both vehicle and bridge indicated that the collision was minor and had occurred at a relatively low speed.”

He paused and drank some water from a glass.

“From the position and directions of the marks on the grass and the lack of skid marks on the road, I conclude that the driver might have fallen asleep at the wheel, been awakened when the vehicle rose up onto the grass verge, had then braked hard, slowing the vehicle to between ten and fifteen miles per hour, before it struck the bridge parapet. The force of the collision, although fairly minor, had been sufficient to bounce the vehicle sideways into the river, the damage to the car and the bridge being consistent with that conclusion.”

The policeman stopped and waited while the coroner continued to make notes.

“Has anyone any questions for this officer,” said the coroner, raising his head from his notebook.

“Yes, sir,” said a tall gentleman in a pin-striped suit, standing up.

The coroner nodded at him, clearly in recognition.