Found Wanting (4 page)

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.

The boys eventually outgrew that fascination. They naturally saw less of him after they left for Cambridge in the autumn of 1975, though no return to the Island was complete without at least one visit to the old man. He never accused them of neglecting him. Somewhere, Eusden had a photograph taken by Gemma of the three of them – Richard, Marty and Clem – standing together on the Parade in Cowes, with the
QE2
visible out to sea, cruising up the Solent towards Southampton. Clem had just passed ninety then, but looked as spry as ever.

Eusden remembered borrowing a photographic history of the Island from Newport Library once in an attempt to imagine the Cowes of Clem’s youth. The town had a pier then; women wore long dresses and wide-brimmed hats; the men boaters and high-collared jackets with waistcoats. The sun seemed always to be shining, pennants fluttering from the massed yachts on regatta days, watched by parasol-twirling ladies. Ironically, Eusden would need an equivalent volume for more recent decades to re-imagine his own youth now: the ice-cream days of summer, when he and Marty took buses to distant parts of the Island, supplied with sandwiches and orange squash by their mothers, free to roam and explore. Alum Bay, Tennyson Down, Blackgang Chine, Culver Cliff: the places were all still there; but the times were gone, beyond recall.

Over the years, Eusden’s visits to the Island had become fewer and farther between. His sister Judith still lived there. She and her husband ran a garden centre at Rookley. Physically, his mother was still there too, vegetating in a nursing home at Seaview; mentally, though, she had left long since. Judith occasionally rebuked him for neglecting his nephew and niece. He found it impossible to explain to her just how painful it was for him to return to the sights and sounds of his childhood and adolescence. ‘When you went off to Cambridge, I thought you’d be back for Christmas,’ she said to him in a soulful moment after their father’s funeral. ‘But you know what, Richard? You never did come back. Not really.’

When Clem Hewitson died, in the summer of 1983, aged ninety-six, Marty was in the Middle East. He did not attend the funeral. Neither did Eusden. He had often regretted his absence, though he doubted Clem would have held it against him. The old man was as hard to offend as he was toforget.

As the train drew out of Waterloo station, Eusden gazed up at the attaché case lodged in the luggage rack above his head. The mere sight of those initials – CEH – had plunged him into helpless reminiscence. This had made him wonder if Marty wanted whatever the case contained to reconcile himself to his past in some way; to make peace with the times and the places – and the people – he had effectively fled from. It was hard to conceive of any other reason why he should be so eager to retrieve it. But there might be such a reason. Eusden realized that. And in two and a half hours, he would find out whether there was or not.

BRUXELLES

FIVE

The Belgian countryside and the outskirts of Brussels had looked grey and bleak through the train window. But there was nothing to be seen of the outside world on the concourse of Bruxelles-Midi station. Eusden was in a man-made realm of platform buttresses and garishly lit retail units: fast food and quick fashion amidst the tidal swash of travellers. There was nothing to be seen of Marty either, at the spot where he had told Gemma he would be waiting: Sam’s Café, adjacent to the escalator down from Eurostar Arrivals. This did not worry Eusden unduly. The train had got in ahead of schedule and Marty had never been on time for anything in his life. Eusden changed a tenner into euros at the Western Union next to the café, bought himself a coffee and sat down at one of the tables out front.

Ten minutes later, he was beginning to grow a little anxious. Marty was not a well man. It was easy to imagine some disaster had overtaken him. Eusden decided to check the arrivals screen for trains from Amsterdam.

He had risen from his chair with that in mind when a figure appeared at his table from inside the café: a tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged man in a dark suit and an elegant bottle-green overcoat. He was lantern-jawed and sharp-nosed, with grey quiffed hair and pale blue eyes, sparkling behind gold-framed spectacles. He stood, decisively it seemed, in Eusden’s path.

‘Excuse me,’ he said in a clipped
Mitteleuropa
accent. ‘You are Richard Eusden?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I join you?’ He set the cup of coffee he was carrying down on the table and extended a hand. ‘I am Werner Straub.’ The edges of his mouth curled in the faintest of smiles. ‘A friend of Marty.’

‘Really?’

They shook. Straub’s grip was hard and cold.

‘Yes. Shall we sit?’

They sat. Straub’s glance fell instantly on the attaché case, propped next to Eusden’s briefcase in the chair next to him. The clamour of the PA and the gabble of passing travellers seemed suddenly distant, as if an invisible bubble had formed round the table.

‘Perhaps you are surprised that I know who you are,’ said Straub, his voice quiet but distinct. ‘Marty told me that his ex-wife would come.’

‘There was a change of plan.’

‘I know. She phoned him . . . after the change.’

‘Ah. Right.’ This was a surprise. Gemma had not said she meant to warn Marty of the substitution. Eusden would have thought her keen to avoid explaining herself.

‘Then Marty phoned me. I was already on my way, you understand.’

‘Where
is
Marty?’

‘Cologne. He travelled there yesterday from Amsterdam. To meet with me.’

‘And your connection with him is . . .’

‘We are business partners as well as friends.’ Straub sipped his coffee. ‘Not such old friends as you and he, of course.’

Eusden’s surprise was turning to confusion. Straub looked about as unlike someone who would befriend Marty – or indeed do business with him – as it was possible to imagine. ‘Why did Marty send you rather than come himself?’

‘Sadly, he is unwell. A bad headache. You know about the . . . tumour?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘So unfortunate.’ Another sip of coffee. ‘You must have been distressed to hear of it.’

‘I was.’

‘He is resting at the hotel. He will be better by tomorrow, I think. The headaches . . . come and go. It is a pity you will not see him. I know he is sorry about that.’

‘So am I.’

‘But it cannot be helped. You have brought . . . the article he wants?’

‘Yes.’ Eusden lifted the attaché case on to his lap, feeling strangely glad of the excuse to take hold of it. ‘Here it is.’

Straub studied the initials for a moment. ‘CEH. His grandfather, no?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Good. So, I take it from here. And you are free to go home.’ Straub smiled and extended a hand, seemingly expecting Eusden to surrender the case there and then. But Eusden made no move. Straub’s smile took on an edge of puzzlement as he slowly withdrew his hand. ‘You are . . . unhappy about something, Richard? I may call you Richard, I hope. I am Werner. We are both friends of Marty. We are both . . . obliging him.’

‘Look, I don’t want to appear suspicious, but . . . I don’t know you.’

‘No. Of course not. I understand. And there is no hurry. My train is not for an hour. We can talk. We can get to know each other.’ Straub snapped off a piece of the small biscuit that accompanied his coffee and ate it, regarding Eusden with apparently amiable curiosity as he did so. Then he flicked a crumb from his fingers and continued: ‘You are Marty’s oldest friend. I am probably his newest. You can tell me about his past. I can tell you about his present.’

‘So tell me.’

‘He is one of those people who . . . adds enjoyment to other people’s lives. I first met him on a matter of business. I liked him from the start. I became his friend. I will miss him if the doctors are right and he dies as soon as they say he will.’

‘Do you think they might not be right?’

‘No. But . . . there may be hope. That is where our business comes in. Do you know what is in the case, Richard?’