Legacy

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

Contents

Chapter 1........................................................................................................................2

Chapter 2........................................................................................................................7

Chapter 3......................................................................................................................14

Chapter 4......................................................................................................................18

Chapter 5......................................................................................................................19

Chapter 6......................................................................................................................24

Chapter 7......................................................................................................................26

Chapter 8......................................................................................................................28

Chapter 9......................................................................................................................32

Chapter 10....................................................................................................................35

Chapter 11....................................................................................................................43

Chapter 12....................................................................................................................48

Chapter 14....................................................................................................................57

Chapter 15....................................................................................................................61

Chapter 16....................................................................................................................69

Chapter 17....................................................................................................................73

Chapter 18....................................................................................................................79

Chapter 19....................................................................................................................83

Chapter 20....................................................................................................................91

Chapter 1

It looked like any other day to start with. Just shows how wrong you can be. I had just finished breakfast when I heard the post drop through the letterbox, so ambled into the hall and picked up the usual raft of junk mail, a couple of bills, and an impressive looking envelope in very heavyweight paper and with the name of a firm of solicitors printed in the top left hand corner.

Groaning inwardly I went back into the kitchen, sat down and opened it with a kitchen knife, reflecting as I did so that Hazel, my ex-wife, must have changed her solicitors, because I did not recognise the company name, Howard & Ross.

The contents, however, had nothing to do with our acrimonious divorce four years earlier, nor the ongoing disputes about my access to the children and my maintenance payments. The letter was brief, and not terribly informative:

“Dear Mr. Richards,

We have in out possession papers belonging to the late Graham Henry Richards. Mr.

Richards left instructions that these papers were to be passed on to his nearest living male relative sixty years after his death. Our understanding is that you are that nearest male relative and would therefore be grateful if you would contact the under-signed to arrange a convenient appointment to allow us to pass them on to you.

Yours Sincerely

James Kirtley”

I studied the letter for several minutes. Graham Richards was my grandfather – a grandfather I had never known as he died some twenty years before I was born. Born in 1910, he had been just thirty-seven years old when he and my grandmother died in a flying accident. A former pilot in the RAF during World War Two, he had retained a love of flying and had maintained a light aircraft; it was in that aircraft he had met his death, although I had never heard, nor been terribly interested in learning, the full details of the crash.

I was intrigued; what on earth could be amongst those papers that caused my grandfather to delay their acquisition by anyone for sixty years? I gave quick thought to my commitments for the day and decided that there was nothing which could not wait for a few hours – one of the advantages of being self-employed – and accordingly presented myself at the office of Mr. Kirtley that very afternoon. His office was in the centre of Edinburgh, so I decided against driving any further than my nearest railway station at Perth and let the train and a taxi perform the rest of the journey for me.

I was ushered into Kirtley’s office by a middle-aged secretary; given the tone of the letter and the age of the secretary I had assumed that Kirtley would be, at the least, mature and was surprised to be greeted by an exceedingly tall, fair haired young man who could not have been a day over thirty. He waved me to a chair, enquired if I

would take tea or coffee and upon my declining, simply pushed a large packet and a folded sheet of paper across the desk to me.

I unfolded the paper. It proved to be a letter from my grandfather giving instructions for the retention and eventual disposition of his papers. It was brief and to the point:

“ 1st January 1947

Dear George,

I should be obliged if you – and doubtless your successors – would hold the enclosed for me until sixty years after my death. Upon the sixty years expiring please pass the package on to whomsoever will be my nearest male relative. If by the sixtieth anniversary of my death I have no living male relative please arrange for the package to be destroyed unopened.

Regards

Graham”

Kirtley waved at the paper.

“The George referred to was George MacPherson, who was the senior partner here back in 1947. He retired – and died – many years ago, of course, but I understand from my father, who followed him as senior partner, that he and Mr. Richards – your grandfather – were close friends, which is presumably why he left his papers with us.”

“Any idea what they are about?”

“None whatsoever, I’m afraid. They’ve stayed unopened in our storeroom for just over sixty years now so I doubt they can refer to anything of any pressing urgency.”

In that I had no doubt Kirtley was correct and after signing a receipt for the package I took my leave of him.

In view of the size of the package and the fact that squeezing and bending it gave the impression that it contained a number of papers and possible something else as well, I refrained from trying to open it on the train, so it was after six that evening before I finally sat down once more at the kitchen table, plied the kitchen knife, and looked inside to see what my long dead relative had bequeathed to me.

It was an odd collection – a number of sheets of paper, some of them handwritten, others typed, some photographs, a collection of medals, and a key.

The first paper in the pile was handwritten and I recognised the handwriting as the same as that of my grandfather from the letter Kirtley had shown to me.

“To my unknown relative – greetings.

I wonder who you are? If it is you, David, I must apologise to you for landing this in the lap of a man who must himself by now be very old. Perhaps when you have

looked at everything you will decide to pass it all on to someone younger; perhaps you will decide to destroy everything. The decision is yours entirely.

However, it is far more likely that you, my relative, are unknown to me – and me to you. The papers you will read – if you decide to read them – are of a time long removed from your own. What, I wonder, will the world be like in perhaps 2030 or so?”

I felt a pang of pity for him at that point. Obviously he had no way of knowing that he was destined to die only a few months after writing those words, nor that David, my own father, would also die relatively young. I returned to the letter.

“I don’t know how different things may be, but I am sure that murder will still be a crime –and as you will see from the papers, there are those who might claim that what I did was murder. It is a claim I would refute; there was a war on and I believed at the time and still believe today that the man I killed had forfeited the right to life by his own actions. You will see that in killing him I unknowingly obtained possession of a very great deal of money, money to which I felt I had no right and of which I had no real need as my own income has always been more than adequate. However, things by now may be different. The money may be of far greater value to you than it would have been to me, or you may feel that there are other recipients to whom it should be made over.”

The mention of money aroused my interest, as no doubt my ancestor had thought that it might. I was not poor – but with Hazel forever rapacious, and the children approaching school-leaving age, nor was I rich. My living was reasonably comfortable; I was self-employed, a journeyman portrait painter of artefacts – aircraft mainly, but I also sketched and painted motor vehicles, railway locomotives, buildings – anything that would produce an income. I even painted the occasional portrait of a living being, human or animal mattered not. To call myself an artist was, to my mind, stretching things a bit, but the income from my work, my RAF pension, and some income from stocks and shares as the residue of my father’s legacy to me meant that I had little fear of starving. However, the phrase ‘a very great deal of money’ was interesting; very interesting.

I turned to the rest of the package. The medals immediately caught my eye. For a moment I thought that they were my grandfather’s, but then realised that could not be the case. His medals had passed to my father and as far as I was aware my mother still had them. The medals were, however, British and those of an RAF officer who had fought in World War Two – a Distinguished Flying Cross demonstrated that, for whilst the other medals could have been those of a non-commissioned member of the RAF, the DFC had only been awarded to officers at that time. The Aircrew Medal demonstrated that the holder had flown on operations, although not necessarily as a pilot.

The medals were similar to those, as far as I could remember, that my grandfather had earned, although they included the North Africa Star, whereas my grandfather had never left the UK during the war. None of the medals had any inscription on the reverse to indicate the name of the recipient.

I next turned to the photographs. There were five of them. One was already familiar to me; it was a studio portrait of my grandfather, taken after he had just been commissioned and received his pilots wings in 1931, looking ridiculously young and extremely self-conscious. A bigger version hung on the lounge wall in my parents’

house. The others were new to me. One was again a portrait of my grandfather, although a casual one of him in the cockpit of an aircraft. He had his arm on the sill of the cockpit, the sleeve showing the three rings of a Wing Commander, so it had been taken in the last six months or so of the war in Europe – he had been promoted from Squadron Leader just before Christmas 1944. It also meant that it had been taken at Dungeness, where he had been wing leader of three squadrons of Typhoons, charged with hunting down German troops and armour as the Allied Armies retook France and pushed on into Germany. Looking at the two pictures side by side it was difficult to believe that only fourteen years separated the shy youth with his new uniform and wings from the assured, but exhausted looking, thirty five year old in the later shot.

Grandfather had joined the RAF in late 1928, completing his flying training in 1931, so was already an experienced pilot when the war started in 1939. A Flight Lieutenant in a Hurricane squadron at the outbreak, he had fought in the Battles of France and Britain in 1940, been on fighter sweeps over occupied Europe in 1941 and 1942, been rested, then gone back to operations until the war ended. He had thought of staying on in the Air Force, but the immediate cut-backs in personnel and budgets decided him to resign in 1946 – a few months before he had entrusted the mysterious package to his friend George MacPherson.

He had, perhaps, started something of a tradition in the family, as both my father and myself had also served in the Air Force. My father had done so as a medical officer.

After qualifying from Edinburgh University School of Medicine he had tried, and quickly tired of, general practice and had joined the RAF medical branch, eventually specialising in the medical effects of high altitude flight – a very leading edge area in the fifties and sixties. My own service had been more run of the mill. Always keen on flying I had been a fighter pilot, flying F3 Tornados. I had harboured hopes of a long term career, but the many cuts in the nineties had decided me that there was little prospect for high rank, so I had negotiated a deal which included a partial pension and resigned my commission aged thirty four. Two years later another sea-change; our increasingly unhappy marriage finally broke down and Hazel and I divorced. When I had been in the RAF she complained about having to be forever on the move; once I left it she complained that I was always under her feet. Finally I tired of the complaining.

That, however, was the past. The message from beyond the grave possibly hinted at the future, and I turned to the remaining photographs. One was of a group of RAF

aircrew – as far as I could see all pilots – standing in front of an aircraft. Not much of the machine was visible, but I was sure that it was a Hurricane of 1940 vintage. My grandfather was in the group and the other figures – ten in all – included four sergeants, the rest being officers, although it was difficult to determine their ranks on the small print.

The other two prints were each of a single person. One was yet another RAF pilot; a Flight Lieutenant, pictured leaning against the wall of an unidentifiable building. He looked tall, with a long, narrow face and a head topped by limp, light coloured hair; additionally he had a small moustache. The last picture was of a young woman, her

hair arranged in what looked to me like the style of the nineteen forties. Alone of the pictures it carried an inscription; across the front, faded but still just legible, was the message ‘All my love, Helen’. The black and white print made it difficult to get any idea of her colouring other than that her hair was neither blonde nor very dark.

In total the pictures were meaningless to me, but presumably they had had some meaning to my grandfather, or why keep them in a package destined not to be opened for decades?

I compared the photo of the pilot leaning against the wall with the group photo; he was, I was certain, in the group shot, standing next to my grandfather. The group shot confirmed that he was, indeed tall – well above the height of anyone else the camera had captured. Roughly comparing his height to the parts of the aircraft which were visible indicated that he was something like six feet four or five; at that height he would have found the Hurricane cockpit quite cramped.

Having learnt nothing from the medals nor the photos, I turned to the papers. They were a mixed bag and mystifying in the extreme. One was a carbon copy of an RAF

combat report dated 1942. There were copies of a marriage certificate and a death certificate, and several sheets covered in my grandfather’s handwriting. The two certificates needed only a glance; one recorded the marriage, on the 4th January 1943

of Mrs. Helen Cramer (widow of Flight Lieutenant David Cramer, née Helen Wilson) to Flight Lieutenant George Henry Carpenter. The other was the death certificate, dated 11th March 1944, of Helen Carpenter. The cause of death was given as accidental drowning.

The combat report told a brief, tragic story reported many, many times over in wartime. Filled out by Carpenter, at the time a Flying Officer, it recorded that he had flown as number two to Cramer in a fighter sweep over occupied France – the Pas de Calais area. There had originally been four aircraft on the sweep; they had attacked a locomotive pulling goods trucks a few miles inland from Calais itself. In the course of the attack one of the aircraft had been damaged by anti-aircraft fire. Cramer, in command of the four aircraft, had ordered the damaged aircraft to return home, with the fourth aircraft accompanying it for protection. He and Carpenter had then pressed on to seek other targets. They had attacked an airfield, destroying a German aircraft on the ground. In Carpenter’s words was happened next was:

“Red Leader then executed a turn to port and commenced to climb away, with me following him. As we passed Angels One I observed strikes on Red Leader’s a/c which rolled over and went into the ground. I did not see a parachute….”

Reconstructing what had happened, the two Spitfires had come in very low, probably no more than a hundred feet off the ground, perhaps even less. At that height and speed (they would have been flying at top speed under such circumstances) there is very little time to see and fire upon a target, so it was a case of a quick burst of gunfire and away. The American’s have a succinct phrase for it – “One pass, haul ass”. Cramer had climbed away as he left the scene – Angels One meant one thousand feet – and must have done so too soon, with the result that ground fire had been able to track and hit him – and kill him. The air is a very unforgiving place in war.

I laid the combat report aside and turned to the major, handwritten document. What I read was a story which was to change my life for ever.

Chapter 2

The story starts (my grandfather wrote) in 1932. I was a Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force, having received my commission the previous year, and was serving in 33

Squadron at Lowbury Heath, an RAF station some miles north of Birmingham. We were equipped with Bristol Bulldog fighters – destined to be the penultimate biplane fighter in RAF service – and life for a young man mad keen on flying could only have been better if I had been posted either to a station nearer to my Edinburgh home or the delights of London – the big city.

It was in July of that year that I first met David Cramer. A few months younger than myself, he was posted into the squadron and we shared a room in the mess. As a result we got to know each other very well and become firm friends. David came from Surrey, where his father was a consultant surgeon at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford. Like myself, from an early age he had been madly interested in anything that flew, and joined the RAF straight after leaving school.

Life as a young officer in the RAF during the early and mid 1930s was a grand experience. We bought a sports car between us and ranged far and wide during off duty periods. Girlfriends came and went and, above all, there was flying. The Bulldogs we flew were laughably slow by the standards of even a few years later –

level speed flat out was only 178 mph – but they could turn on a sixpence and in 1932

we thought them ideal.

By 1936 there were ominous signs, readable even by a couple of Pilot Officers in their twenties, that all was not well in Europe. Nazi Germany seemed to gather strength almost day by day and there was much discussion in the squadron of when, not if, war would come. News that the Luftwaffe was re-equipping with a new monoplane fighter capable of over 300 mph – nearly twice the speed of our Bulldogs. We asserted, in public at least, that speed wasn’t everything, that the far superior manoeuvrability of the Bulldog would make it more than a match for any opponent. In our hearts, however, we wondered.

I mention all this because it sets the background to the rest of my story. During 1937

the RAF also started to re-equip, but with another biplane, the Gloster Gladiator. Even though over seventy miles per hour faster than our beloved Bulldogs, it was still a lot slower than the German Messerschmitts we were sure that we would be facing in the not too distant future. On a personal basis, however, the more important happenings were that both David and I were promoted to Flying Officer and David married Helen Wilson, the girl who had become his regular girlfriend. They married at the little church in Helen’s village of Nettlesham in Warwickshire and I was David’s best man.

Helen’s parents were there together with a whole raft of cousins but no siblings; as with David (and indeed myself) Helen was an only child.

I had not been to the Wilson’s house before the wedding reception; David had said it was ‘rather grand’ but that description had in no way prepared me for my first sight of what I can only describe as a mansion set in perhaps thirty acres of grounds. The day, the 12th of July, was a fine summer’s day and the hundred or more guests simply

vanished into the huge house and its gardens. There was a formal wedding breakfast in the evening in the ballroom which, again, easily coped with the numbers. My speech as best man was well received and after the meal was over and the happy couple had departed, I, like most of the guests, simply wandered about outside in the summer twilight.

It was to prove an eventful wander because during it I bumped into, quite literally, the girl who was to become my own wife. Fiona Harris was a friend of one of Helen’s cousins and had come to the event with him, but had left him indoors, rather drunk, after an argument. Striding out of the open French doors onto the patio, not looking where she was going, she collided with me and spilled my half-empty glass down my uniform. She apologised, I assured her that it didn’t matter, and we got chatting. On learning that her escort was in no fit state to drive her home I volunteered my own services. She proved to live only a few miles from our airfield, so it was genuinely no inconvenience to drop her off on my way back to the mess – but not before I had arranged to meet her again.

We married on 12th February 1939. It took us some eighteen months from our first meeting and during that period the situation in Europe had got worse and worse. The Munich crisis had come and gone, Hitler had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and within four weeks of our wedding had occupied Czechoslovakia. It was against this background of the storm clouds of war gathering that we decided to wait no longer. Just as I had been David’s best man, he was now mine Two weeks later both David and I were posted away from Lowbury Heath to Goreham in Sussex. With war coming ever closer it was in the south east of England that the RAF would base its major fighter assets and David and I were to join a newly formed squadron. From our point of view there were three major advantages to the move; we were promoted to Flight Lieutenant, we would be flight commanders, and 44 squadron was to be equipped with Hurricanes. We met our new CO, Lewis Davis, and our senior NCOs and started getting things ready for the arrival of our pilots and our aircraft. Establishing a new squadron from scratch is a chaotic business and there was no time for family life. At Lowbury Heath both David and I had, with the blessing of our CO, rented cottages nearby; at Goreham, however, there could be no question of either of us living anywhere but on the base. Our wives were not overjoyed at the prospect, but saw that there was no alternative. In the midst of all this I became a father; David was born on the 11th December and Helen gleefully acquired a new role as honorary auntie. In the circumstances it had seemed pointless to retain our cottages and it was Helen who suggested that, at least as an interim measure, both she and Fiona should live at Nettlesham with Helen’s parents – heaven knows, there was enough room even when the baby arrived.

Lewis, David and I were all experienced pilots, but the rest of the squadron were virtually straight from flying training and a lot of time was spent trying to cram experience into them for the battles ahead. We three leaders could do our best to try and give them the skills that made handling their Hurricanes second nature, but in one area we were as inexperienced as they. None of us had ever fired our guns in anger, never mind got into an aerial battle.

Over the winter and into early spring we virtually kicked our heels. A few lone German aeroplanes came over and we tried to intercept them, but to no avail. Our early Hurricanes simply lacked the performance in the climb to reach the intruders before they had turned back. We were promised that things would improve when new propellers were fitted but they were a long time coming.

Our peaceful, if frustrating, existence changed dramatically in April when we were sent over to France as part of the air support to the British Expeditionary Force. We were based at a rough and ready airfield near Calais, and the squadron we replaced had encountered enemy aircraft on a fairly regular basis. The encounters had always been with small numbers and the squadron had lost five aircraft, with two pilots killed, one wounded and one missing, for a claimed destruction of ten of the enemy.

Everything changed on the 10th of May with the German invasion – the famed and notorious blitzkrieg. We were thrown into action escorting RAF bombers attacking the advancing German forces. Neither the bombers, nor we, had much effect in stemming the tide, despite the incredible courage and self-sacrifice of the bomber crews, few of whom survived.

We had our own losses, the most significant of which were the loss of Lewis Davis, our CO and Pilot Officer Harry King, both shot down and killed by 109s on the 14th of May. The loss of Lewis meant that for a few days I was the acting squadron CO; the replacement for Harry was George Carpenter, a newly qualified Pilot Officer with, like our other replacements, all of whom were sergeants, no relevant experience at all.

Although Harry had been a member of my ‘A’ flight, other losses and injuries decided me to attach George to ‘B’ flight under David.

The story of the British retreat from France is too well known for me to mention it here; suffice it to say that by the end of May the squadron was back in England, licking its wounds after receiving a severe mauling at the hands of the Luftwaffe.

In view of our losses we were pulled back from the south east, where the main battle was clearly going to be fought, and located back at Lowbury Heath to get back up to strength. Whilst there David and I took it in turns to pay a flying visit to the girls, and to play with little David, already the boss of the huge house and his honorary grandparents!

Our new CO, Richard Ellis, arrived within a day or two of our relocation and I gratefully handed over my temporary responsibilities to him.

Our rest and refit time didn’t last very long; on the 11th August we were sent down south again, this time near Canterbury in Kent, just in time for the opening exchanges of what was to become the Battle of Britain. Again, the battle has little direct effect upon my story; like other squadrons we fought hard, exhaustingly hard. Some of us survived unscathed; most didn’t, being either wounded, killed or posted away when they reached a stage of total collapse. David and I were two of the lucky ones; so was George Carpenter. Richard Ellis had better luck than his predecessor, although even he had to leave us before the end of the battle after being wounded by return fire from a bomber he was attacking. It wasn’t all one way traffic. We destroyed more of the enemy than we lost ourselves. George Carpenter proved a natural, shooting down

eight enemies. Neither David nor I, despite our far greater experience, were that successful, but I brought down three Germans, two 109 fighters and a Junkers 88

bomber, whilst David had five victories to his credit.

The injuries to Richard Ellis – who had brought down three Germans before being wounded – meant that I was again acting CO, and this time for a couple of months before Richard returned in November. By then the daytime battle was over and it was the night bombing that had to be countered. Our Hurricanes were poorly equipped for such a task and although we flew some attempted interceptions we saw neither hide nor hair of a German during that winter. During that period, however, George Carpenter had a crash landing at night which he was fortunate to survive. Severely injured, he was shipped off to hospital and 44 squadron was to see him no more – but he remains in my story.

In the spring of 1941 the RAF went on the offensive, with aircraft sweeping over occupied France in numbers. By now both David and I had also left 44 squadron. I had gone to be an instructor for sixth months at an Advanced Flying Training School at Grantby near Newcastle, whilst David had been posted to North Africa as a flight commander on a Hurricane squadron out there. He had only been over there for a couple of months when he, in his turn, was wounded by ground fire and shipped back to Britain.

He convalesced at Nettlesham. By now Fiona and the baby had joined me at Grantby, but we kept in touch with David and Helen by letter. In a letter in September we learned that George Carpenter had re-emerged. Still not fully recovered from his injuries, he had met up with David in London when they had both been before a medical board to determine their futures. In both cases the board had decided that they were fit enough to be returned to flying duties in the not too distant future, but in the meantime were to remain on sick leave. George was staying with friends in London and not enjoying the city, so David invited him to stay at Nettlesham until he was fit again or alternatively bored of country life. It was an invitation that was to bear tragic consequences.

In December 1941 Helen’s parents went up to London to stay for several days; William Wilson had numerous business interests which required him to visit London about every two or three weeks and on this occasion his wife came with him to visit friends and do some shopping. On the night of the 14th the hotel at which they were staying received a direct hit and they were both killed.

As their only child, Helen inherited everything and become an extremely rich young woman. That was little consolation; her parents had always made her a generous allowance so money had never been a problem for her. I know that it sometimes worried David that his wife was so much wealthier than himself, but I know that Helen made no bones about the matter – so far as she was concerned everything was theirs, not hers.

The next event was David’s return to full duties in February 1942. He was posted to 91 squadron, flying Spitfires. George was told to stay on leave for a further two months and both David and Helen persuaded him to stay on at Nettlesham. The house

did, after all, still have staff in the form of an elderly couple and their daughter who between them covered the various duties around the house and grounds.

I do not know, nor shall I ever know, if Helen and George conducted an affair over that period. I suspect that they did, but have no proof. What I do know is that in April 1942 George, now fully recovered, managed to persuade the powers that be to post him to 91 squadron were he and David resumed their friendship.

David was lost on the 12th June 1942. You will see George’s account of what happened in the copy of his combat report which I obtained some time later. I visited Helen shortly afterwards to sympathise and was a little surprised to find George at the house. He was, he said, on a flying visit and certainly he had only arrived the previous day, but I remained a little surprised at the coincidence. We both took our leave of Helen the next morning; George to return to 91 squadron on the south coast, I to an appointment at the Air Ministry where I would hopefully obtain a decent posting – I was fed up with instructing, especially as the original six month period had stretched to well over twelve.

To my delight I was offered promotion to Squadron Leader and a posting as CO of a Spitfire squadron – number 77 which was based only a few miles away from George’s 91.

That was the 1st July 1942. The next event in my story occurred on the 1st April 1943

when Helen and George married. I was in the thick of things with my squadron at the time and was unable to get to the wedding, but Fiona was there and reported that Helen and George made a very happy picture of married bliss.

That bliss, however, was overtaken by tragedy on 11th March 1944, although I didn’t learn of it until some days later. Helen was found drowned in her bath; apparently she had slipped getting out of it, fallen and struck her head on the bath’s edge, slipped beneath the water and drowned. George was in the house at the time on a couple of days leave. I visited him at his squadron as soon as I heard the news; he was, naturally enough, devastated and his CO had stood him down from flying for a few days until he had a chance to recover from the shock.

And there it might have all ended, but for a chance encounter I had in July of that year.

I had led a patrol over the Normandy beaches, still the scene of men and materials being unloaded at a furious rate to reinforce the armies as they thrust into France. The Luftwaffe had made occasional raids; the targets could scarcely have been more tempting, but the umbrella of Allied fighters which was maintained kept them at bay.

A lone raider – a Focke Wulf 190 – tried to break through fast and low but I took my section down and my number two shot him down. In the process, however, we flew through ‘friendly’ anti-aircraft fire put up by some over-eager troops on the ground and my engine received some damage. The patrol still had over thirty minutes to go, so I handed over control to the senior flight commander and, accompanied by my number two, headed for home.

The engine got worse and worse; it was clear that I wouldn’t make it back to base, but I did make it into the first airfield I saw, which was the USAAF base at Thornbury.

By now it was nearly dusk and I accepted an invitation to stay overnight.

Thornbury was an American fighter base and after dinner I got into conversation with a Captain who flew Mustang escort missions, accompanying the American bombers on their raids deep into Germany. Naturally enough we got to debating the relative merits of our two aircraft; the American, Don Lowe, had been in the UK since 1940, having volunteered to fight with the RAF and only transferring to the USAAF in 1942. To my surprise he had served with 37 squadron who had at one time shared the airfield with my own squadron at the time, 44. Don had actually known quite a few of our pilots, although somehow he and I had not met at the time. He was still with 37 in June 1942 and, amazingly, had been a witness to David being shot down.

Apparently his own squadron had been engaged in a similar sweep to that being undertaken by David and George. Don’s aircraft had been hit by ground fire and he had had to bale out. He had managed to escape back to England, taking nearly three months over the journey, but the day he had been shot down had been the day David failed to return. He had actually been on the ground near the airfield they were attacking.

“Yeah, that sure was a tragedy” he said “ I guess the number two mast have panicked in all the confusion. Any idea what happened over it?”

I looked at him in puzzlement. “What happened over what?”

It was his turn to look puzzled. “Well he shot down his own leader.”

“He did what?”

According to Don, the two Spitfires had made a fast, low pass, shooting up an aircraft on the ground and some vehicles. They had left the immediate vicinity of the field with one aircraft close behind the other; then, to Don’s horror, the following aircraft poured a long burst into his leader who went straight into the ground and exploded.

I was astounded. At that time I had not seen George’s combat report – I obtained that later – but I had heard from George himself his version of the story.

“Did you report this at the time?”

“Well, no – I was on the run from the Germans for about ten or eleven weeks and by the time I got home it was old news.”

I said no more at the time, but the story gave me a lot to think about.

I should have asked Don to put his tale down in writing, but didn’t think of it at the time; two days later he was lost over Germany and I no longer had my witness to what had happened.

The whole thing made me think very hard for a long time. George had, I felt sure, had an affair with Helen before David was killed. After David died, George married his widow – an extremely wealthy widow. Then Helen had died in her bath. With no living relatives, George had inherited everything. I had no idea how much he was now worth, but it must have been well over one million pounds. He had got that money, I

was now more and more sure, by murdering two dear friends of mine, and I vowed to bring him to justice over it.

But how? Don Lowe was dead and had taken his evidence to the grave. I had no proof that Helen’s death had been anything other than a tragic accident – certainly the local authorities had assumed that at the time. I could tackle George about it – but to what end? In view of his combat report (a copy of which I had now obtained) he could not do anything other than deny Don’s story. Helen’s death was impossible to lay at his door. And yet – the more I thought about it, the more positive I was that the man I had thought a friend was actually a murderer.

It was August of 1944 when I finally made up my mind on a course of action. One of my flight commanders was being promoted to command of his own squadron and I needed a replacement. George was now a flight lieutenant and I approached him, and his CO, pulled a few strings, and George was posted to my squadron as senior flight commander from the 1st September.

Over the next few weeks I took the opportunity to introduce the names of both David and Helen into conversations, trying to make it seem as casual as possible, and watching keenly to see how George reacted. On the surface he seemed, as one would expect, simply saddened at what had happened, but somehow I got the impression that the sadness was an act for my benefit.

Eventually I resolved to do something. I was by now convinced that I knew the truth.

George was a double murderer and the penalty for murder is death.

It took a little while for the necessary circumstances to fall into line but on the 7th November 1944 it finally happened. Returning from a low level sweep in foul weather the squadron had become separated and George and I were alone together.

Remembering how George’s treachery had been observed from the ground I took a very, very thorough search of the area as we flew low over the Channel then, convinced I would be unobserved, I shot George down into the sea.

On my return I said that we had been flying very low in conditions of low cloud and sea mist – which was true – and that George must have had a temporary loss of concentration for he had simply flown straight into the water. It was by no means the first time such a thing had happened and the only outcome was sympathy for such an experienced flier as George going in so stupid a fashion.

My friends were avenged – but there was one more twist to come. George had no relatives; in his will he named me as his beneficiary. I was horrified to find that as a result of meting out summary justice I was now rich beyond my wildest dreams.

It took me some time to work out what to do. Selling Nettlesham under war-time regulations was pointless; however, there was a crying need for large houses for a variety of official purposes. Indeed I was surprised that it hadn’t been requisitioned years before. I offered it up as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen and women, but at the time that proved to be an area where there was already adequate provision. With the war in its final stages, but still demanding all my attention, I took the matter no further at that point, but once the war was over I resurrected the idea and set up a trust to provide just such a service. The trustees were to be an appointee of

my solicitor’s, my accountants, and a representative of the Royal Air Force Association. It would be a great pleasure if one of the family would also join in as a trustee and I have set up papers to enable this.

That still left an appreciable amount of money and with some of it I set up a trust fund for our son with the proviso that once he reached thirty years of age, or whenever he married, whichever came sooner, he should receive the capital. The rest I exchanged for jewellery and lodged with the papers regarding the Nettlesham trust in a bank strong box.

So there you have it, my relative. The bank details are in this package, as is my key to the box. You bear no guilt for how the wealth was accumulated; feel free to do with it exactly as you please.

Graham Henry Richards.

Chapter 3

I laid the paper aside and leant back in my chair. What, I wondered, do I do now? It seemed a total waste to leave the jewels in the bank; nobody benefited at all by that. I could understand Graham Henry’s unwillingness to profit from Carpenter’s death and I admired him for it. I was less happy about what he had done; but for the amazing coincidence of the American flier witnessing David Cramer’s death there would have been no grounds to take any action at all against Carpenter. On the other hand, coincidence or not, I could only believe that story. Why should it be a fabrication?

Unless, I thought uneasily, it was a fabrication but by my grandfather, not by the American. Was it possible that my grandfather, suspicious of Carpenter over the matter of Helen’s death, had wanted to justify himself in the eyes of whoever finally read his account and Captain Lowe and his account were a fairy tale? But why should he bother? If he had been consumed with guilt after killing Carpenter why go to such lengths?

Well, at least I could check up on Captain Lowe. There are a number of web-sites devoted to recording many facets of the war and ten minutes after firing up my computer I had at least one piece of the jigsaw slotted into place.

Donald Edgar Lowe had been an American citizen. He joined the RAF on the outbreak of war, serving with 37 squadron, just as my grandfather had said. He had stayed with 37, eventually rising to Flight Lieutenant until on 1st November 1942 he had transferred to the USAAF with the rank of Captain. He and his Mustang had been lost whilst escorting a raid of Flying Fortresses over Bremen on 21st of July 1943.

As Lowe obviously had existed, and as his official record tallied with my grandfather’s account, I no longer had any doubts. Graham Henry had been told about Carpenter’s treachery and had, in his own eyes, been justified in acting upon what he knew. Whether one agreed with what he had done was another matter entirely.

So now what? I looked at the sheet of paper which gave the bank details. It was in Edinburgh, so that meant another trip to the capital – but not today. Instead I perused the other documents. One gave the accredited inheritor of Graham Henry’s estate – in

other words me - the absolute power to become a trustee of the convalescent home should he so wish. The other was a paper authorising the manager of the bank holding the deposit box to release it to, again, me.

I decided to look up Nettlesham convalescent home on the ’net, but to my surprise I could find no trace of it. It was now late evening, too late to do much digging so I decided to sleep on the matter.

* * * * *

The next morning I was still no nearer to a decision as to precisely what I wanted to do about my unexpected legacy, but I felt that the first thing to do was to try a bit harder to track down the Nettlesham home. I didn’t have an exact address; throughout his narrative my grandfather had referred to the house as ‘Nettlesham’ and there certainly existed a village of that name, But I supposed that it was quite possibly that the house itself had actually been called something else.

As it had been set up with the trustees coming from the solicitors and the RAFA, I telephoned James Kirtley and asked him what he knew about the house. My request was met with a baffled silence for a moment.

“A convalescent home? I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of it. Are you sure that your grandfather meant that our firm was to appoint a trustee? I feel sure that I would know of it if that had been the case.”

That threw me. I had assumed that as my grandfather and the then senior partner of Kirtley’s firm had been friends then it would have been logical for him to use that firm – but I had no sure indication without looking at the trust deed, a copy of which awaited me in the Edinburgh strongbox. The paper which would make me a further trustee referred to the trust by name as the ‘Convalescent Home established at Nettlesham in the County of Warwickshire’ and its reference number in the roll of the Charity Commissioners but only to ‘the existing trustees’ in requiring them to accept me to their number.

I thanked Kirtley, saying that it looked as though for some reason my grandfather must have used some other firm. I then phoned the RAFA and explained what I was looking for. An extremely helpful young woman promised that she would access their records and come back to me. An hour later she did so, but in a state of puzzlement.

“Mr. Richards, I looked through all the various trusts with which we are involved but I can find nothing like the one you mention, It is possible, I suppose, that the trust was wound up some time ago and the records are no longer with us.”

Now I was even more puzzled. I knew that to wind up a trust could be an extremely complicated matter, involving the Charity Commissioners and heaven alone knows who else; on the other hand, depending on the actual details, it could be done very easily. I simply had to look at that trust deed. It was beginning to look as though some time over the last sixty years since it had been set up the trust had gone into liquidation, but I wondered under what circumstances.

* * * * *

Despite my impatience to inspect the trust deed and the other contents of that mysterious strong box, the next two days were spent visiting a client in Truro who had commissioned me to paint a family portrait of himself, his wife, their three children and their two dogs. Normally I would have worked from photographs to produce such a work, but Colin Everitt, the client, had been insistent that it should be ‘from life’

and when the deal had originally been struck, the idea of a few days in the west country had appealed to me.

Now, of course, I was fretting to be back to continue my investigations, but had to possess my soul in patience as I drove six hundred miles on the Wednesday, spent the Thursday making sketches for the portrait and taking numerous photographs of the family and their house and garden, demonstrated a rough sketch (which was received with encouraging enthusiasm) and then on Saturday started the drive back to Scotland.

As the bank would be closed anyway, there was no point in doing the journey in a single day, so I stopped overnight at a hotel in Preston, where an early dinner, and an early night, were followed by an early start on the Sunday which saw me back home for a late lunch.

Monday morning once more saw me on the train from Perth to Edinburgh and at eleven o’clock I met the bank’s Mr. Morris. Morris was a middle aged man, rather running to fat, who perused my letter of authorisation minutely before finally conducting me to the bank’s vault area. The room in question was quite large, with its walls formed by the ends of dozens of deposit boxes of varying sizes. Mine was small, with a front about eight inches by six and, when pulled from its recess, proved to be some two feet long. Morris carried it to a table in the middle of the room and then left me alone with it, indicating a bell push which would summon him to lead me back out again when I was finished.

I opened the box and looked inside. There were two soft leather bags, a large envelope of heavy brown paper, and an ordinary envelope. Both envelopes were sealed; the bags were closed with drawstrings. I opened one of the bags and spilled its contents out onto the table top. An assortment of about 50 rings and earrings lay glinting in the light. They were all set with stones which were crystal clear in colour which I assumed were diamonds, although my assumption was purely based on my grandfather’s reference to ‘jewellery’. I carefully scooped them up and replaced them in the bag, then turned to the second one. Here the contents were again rings and earrings, but with coloured stones, brilliant reds, blues, and greens – rubies, sapphires and emeralds?

I turned my attention to the envelopes. The smaller one was a plain white envelope and from its slimness could contain nothing of any bulk; indeed, upon opening it I found myself holding a single sheet of notepaper folded over. I unfolded it and saw once again my grandfather’s handwriting. I read it slowly:

‘13th December 1946

Dear relative,

So you have decided to follow through with your unexpected inheritance. I am pleased; the contents of this box are just too valuable to moulder forever in a bank

vault. I don’t know if you have any knowledge of jewellery – I certainly didn’t and the pieces here were chosen for me by a discreet friend, an elderly jeweller who must by now be long dead, as he is considerably older than myself.

He tells me that none of the pieces is worth more than £200-£300, because to dispose of really valuable pieces is very difficult without drawing attention to oneself. Given the intrusive nature of government over the last few years I have the unhappy feeling that in the distant future such things may have become even more difficult.’

I stopped reading temporarily whilst I reflected on the accuracy of his foresight; I also wonder what the value of a ring worth £300 in 1947 was now. I read on:

‘You will see that the trust deed is as I described in my earlier letter – it gives you the right to join the trustees of the foundation and I am assured by my lawyer that it is indisputable.

I wish you luck and happiness for the future,

Graham Henry Richards’

I turned my attention to the larger envelope. Within it, written out by hand in the nature of legal documents of the time, was a four page document on very heavy paper, the whole bound together with red tape and sealed with wax bearing an imprinted seal of an RAF crest – presumably something that grandfather had had made.

Rather than study it at length in the bank vault, I put everything into my briefcase and rang for Mr. Morris.

A few minutes later, having confirmed to Morris that I would not be needing to retain the deposit box, I was on my way home, horribly conscious of the small fortune I was carrying in so cavalier a fashion. The prospect of being mugged, or forgetfully leaving my case in the taxi or on the train was too awful to contemplate – and quite needless as I arrived home in due course safe and sound.

* * * * *

Once home, I spread the document out and studied it carefully. In essence it was simple enough. It made over the Nettlesham house to a trust to be called

‘Collingwood House Recovery Home Trust’. That at least solved one small mystery; the house was not, as I had earlier assumed, called anything to do with Nettlesham itself.

In the first instance the trust was to be administered by three trustees; a representative of the Royal Air Force Association, a member of Glade and Forbes, the solicitors who had drawn up the deed, and a representative of Selby and Partners, chartered accountants. Both the solicitors and the accountants had addresses in London, which rather surprised me, as grandfather had returned to Scotland once the war was over.

Why, I wondered again, had he not used Howard & Ross, when the senior partner had been a personal friend and they had, so far as I was aware, conducted all his other business? At least now that I knew the name of the trust I could get back to the helpful young lady at the RAFA and find out more about it.

One hour, and one telephone call later, at least some of the puzzle was explained..

Whilst the RAFA had no trace of currently being involved in any such trust, my helpful contact had searched their archives and confirmed that they had been back in the 1940s but that the file had been closed as long ago as 1949. The file itself had long since disappeared, but there was in the file index enough information for her to be able to tell me that much. On the off chance, I then tried directory enquiries but unsurprisingly there was no telephone entry for a Collingwood House.

My curiosity was by now truly aroused. I checked the Internet for any mention of a law firm of Glade and Forbes without success, then telephoned the Law Society but the man to whom I spoke pointed out at that after such a lapse of time the firm might well have gone out of business or have been absorbed by another one. He advised me that in either case, it should be possible to search through their records but that such a search would take time and, regretfully, would have to paid for. Had it not been for the jewellery, which now sat on the kitchen table, still in the wash-leather bags, I might have demurred at that point – I knew from bitter experience only too well how much legal time cost – but I asked him to go ahead and let me know the result as soon as possible.

The final link was the accountancy firm, but here again I drew a blank. Neither an Internet search, nor a telephone call to the Institute of Chartered Accountants produced anything useful, and unlike the Law Society the person I spoke to at the ICS

could offer no hope of tracing a firm from the1940s.

I went to bed that night in a more confused state of mind than ever.

Chapter 4

The next morning I decided to try and trace the house which seemed to be at the centre of everything. I had already discovered Nettlesham to be the name of a village or small town; now I knew that the house had, presumably, been called Collingwood House, so I should be able to track it down.

I was wrong. No manipulation of the possible names brought up any indication of a Collingwood House anywhere near Nettlesham. I did find that the village my grandfather had obviously known during the war had grown to a town of over twenty thousand inhabitants, but that was it.

I didn’t know what to do; unless the Law Society came up with anything there seemed no way of finding out just what happened about the trust and its assets – and what had happened to those assets was of particular interest to me. Under the terms of the trust deed, if for any reason the trust was wound up the trustees were required to realise its assets for the benefit of any of my grandfather’s descendents. If it was wound up and there were no such beneficiaries the proceeds were to go to the RAFA. Obviously neither of those provisions had been followed – so what had happened?

Several days passed with nothing happening, but on the Thursday the man at the Law Society came good. A letter arrived that morning containing information (together with a bill which caused a sharp inhalation of breath) on the firm of Glade and Forbes.

The firm had been set up in 1945, just after the end of the war, by two partners, John Henry Glade and Richard George Forbes. Both had qualified as solicitors before the war but had ceased to practice on the outbreak of war – they must have been called up. The partnership had been dissolved at the end of 1957 and neither partner had ever practised again.

On a hunch I searched for RAF war time records of the two men. Both had, indeed served in the Air Force. Both had been fighter pilots and both had served in my grandfather’s Typhoon wing in late 1944 and early 1945. At last I had a link – and a probable reason as to why grandfather had used a firm of London solicitors to set up the trust rather than the usual family solicitors. He had simply been putting business in the way of former forces colleagues, nothing more complicated than that. But then what?

At least I now knew the names and had the service records of Glade and Forbes, and over the next two weeks, in between bouts of working, I tracked them down via the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Glade had never married and had died on the 14th March 1978 in California – his death was also registered in the UK because of assets he still owned over here at the time of his death. Forbes, on the other hand, had married Mary Christine Gerrard on the 12th September 1945 and they had had one son, William Richard, born on the 3rd July 1946. As far as I could ascertain, William Richard was still alive, so I started another search.

This showed that he also had married, to one Jane Rachel Phillips, on the 5th April 1973, and they had two sons, George Henry, born on the 2nd May 1975 and William John born on the 7th November 1976. Jane Forbes died in 1990 and her widower married Elizabeth Noreen Lacey on the 3rd March 1991. Forbes new wife was considerably younger than himself; at the time of the wedding he was forty-four, his bride just twenty-seven, only ten years or so older than her elder step-son.

So, whilst the original Mr. Forbes was dead for twenty years or so, perhaps his son or other members of his family could help me in my quest.

Chapter 5

There are companies who, for a fee, will seek out the existence and location of people by searching the electoral rolls and I employed one such. In these days of computerised records and the internet, the whole transaction was completed on-line in under forty eight hours and over that weekend I pondered my next move.

William Richard Forbes and his wife Elizabeth lived in Surrey, in the small town of Haslemere, some fifty miles south-west of London. The two sons both lived in London itself and it seemed logical to approach Forbes senior in the first instance.

For some reason that I can not explain I felt a little uneasy about the whole affair. The disappearance of the trust niggled at my mind. What had happened to it? It had been based on a building described by my grandfather as a mansion in thirty acres of grounds – a valuable asset at any time.

On a whim I decided to delay contacting the Forbes family until I had tried to investigate Nettlesham a little more thoroughly, so the next day saw me headed south into England and Warwickshire.

As I had already discovered via the map, the village of grandfather’s day was now a small town and I found a reasonable hotel from which to start my enquiries. First port of call was a local estate agent. From the trust documents I had a plan of the original property and its grounds, but it was insufficiently detailed for me to identify its exact location, even assuming that it still stood.

I was in luck. The agency was a small set up, owned and run by one man with three assistants. The man was Kenneth Vardy, a tubby individual with a wisp of pale, lank hair combed across his scalp. Perhaps fifty years old or so, he exuded friendliness, and his pale blue eyes twinkled in amusement as he studied the map I had laid before him.

“Now this is really fascinating,” he enthused. “My family have lived in Nettlesham for well over a hundred years – my grandfather was born just down the road from here

–he was a teacher and a bit of an historian and had a number of maps of the area which got passed on to me. Please, come into my office.”

He led the way into a small, cramped office. Two walls were lined with filing cabinets almost up to eye-level, a third had its rank of cabinets pierced only by the door, but the fourth boasted a window and, either side of it, some maps in glass frames.

“Here, you see, is the village as it was in 1788. Just here” he tapped the glass with a podgy finger “is Nettlesham Farm. Now, if we move to this map,” he indicated a second frame “you can see that the farm house has gone and, more or less on its site, is a large house. That was Collingwood House. It was built in the 1820s by a man, Josiah Little, who had served aboard the Royal Sovereign at the Battle of Trafalgar.

As you doubtless know, the Royal Sovereign was the flagship of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s second in command, and Little named the house in honour of his old commander. Little himself rose to be a captain, but retired from active service in the Navy in 1815 at the end of the war and quickly made quite a fortune for himself investing in a variety of enterprises, mostly in the Far East. Collingwood House was completed in 1823 and Little lived there until he died in 1839. The house then passed to a nephew, one Paul Henry Alfred Wilson, who built on Little’s fortune and became very wealthy indeed. He had a son, now, let me see – yes, he was John Alfred, and John Alfred’s son was William Paul, who was killed in a London air-raid in the war –

but then, as you say, you know that.”

Vardy paused for breath and then came to the information I really wanted.

“Now, again as you already know, the house was inherited by the Wilson’s daughter but she died shortly afterwards and after the war it was rented out. In 1957, however, it was demolished and its site, and its grounds, are now the area where most of the development of the town occurred.”

He now pointed to a modern map and, now that I knew the story, it was clear that where the Wilson’s house had stood there was now road after road of housing; there must have been something like four or five hundred houses in all.

I thanked him profusely and made my way to the nearest pub where I sat and mulled over my new found knowledge as I consumed a sandwich and a pint of bitter. For the life of me I could not see how the letter from my grandfather and what had happened in Nettlesham tied together. Clearly the trust must have been implemented it appeared in the RAFA records, but only for a couple of years. Then the realisation hit me that my grandfather had died only a few months after the trust deed had been drawn up.

Perhaps that had something to do with it.

I realised that the only course of action left to me if I wanted to find out more would be to ask William Forbes if he knew anything. At the time the trust was established he would have been only a babe in arms, so could have known nothing at all directly, but to satisfy my curiosity it was worth asking the question.

I thought about driving to Haslemere – about a hundred and fifty miles away, but adding another round trip of three hundred miles on the off chance seemed a bit pointless; I decided to go home and write to the man.

Accordingly, a couple of days later I wrote to Forbes, outlining how I had come into possession of the information about the trust my grandfather had set up (but not mentioning the jewels) and asking if he knew what had happened about it. It was a week before I received a reply in which he said that, regretfully, he could not help. He had been a baby at the time and had no knowledge of the affair.

And that is where things should have ended – but they didn’t. At a loss as to how to make any further progress I let the matter slip from my mental list of priorities and concentrated instead on turning the jewellery into cash. I had an uneasy feeling that there were bound to be rules and regulations governing large transactions which would doubtless result in the taxman taking a huge slice of the money so I started off by only selling one of the rings to a jeweller in Edinburgh. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome. Grandfather had bought the items for between £200 and

£300 each; I received a total of £3,500 for the ring I offered for sale. I expressed my surprise and gratitude at the value of a ring which I claimed had been in the family for many years (which after all was perfectly true), and with the jeweller’s comments about Capital Gains Tax ringing in my ears I escaped into the street.

I then went to another jeweller’s in another part of the town and sold a second ring, this time for £2,800 – and again had to listen to comments about the iniquitous Capital Gains Tax. At least by selling them separately I had not fallen foul of the tax limit of

£6,000, but I was unclear in my mind whether had I sold them together whether or not their combined value would have counted - and I had no intention of asking anyone!

Returning home £6,300 richer, I calculated that the total value of my inheritance must be in the region of quarter of a million pounds. A tidy sum indeed, and I wondered what I would do with it. My current income was adequate for my needs, living alone meant that I had no need of a larger house, I enjoyed my painting and would not even

consider giving it up. About the only thing that I might consider for the immediate future was changing my car - my aging Mondeo was approaching the end of its useful life and a replacement was just about due anyway.

Of more immediate concern, however, was what to do with the items themselves. At that moment they resided in a small fireproof case with my passport, chequebook and some of my more important documents. The case was small enough, even though somewhat heavy, to be picked up and carried away and the thought of a burglar finding such largesse made my blood run cold.

I looked around the house and had to accept that there was nowhere which could be regarded as even remotely burglar-proof. Finally I decided to do what seemed the simplest solution – I buried them in the garden in a suitable plastic container. I then gave thought to the trust document. Even though things seemed to have reached a dead end, I decided that it would be as well to keep it safe, so I photographed it page by page and the next day I lodged the original with my solicitor.

I decided that, as the Mondeo was just about time expired, now was as good a time as any to change it and spent the few days arranging for its replacement. I was briefly tempted to use my windfall and go for something a bit more upmarket, but in the end common sense prevailed and I settled on another, but considerably younger, Mondeo.

In the process of changing cars I had made a number of fairly short journeys as I went from one salesroom to another and on one particular day I had the distinct impression that I was being followed. I kept seeing – on perhaps four or five different occasions –

the same car, a 2006 registration Jaguar. The next day, however, there was no sign of it and I dismissed the matter from my mind as just coincidence.

Three days later I was burgled. It was the weekend and I was away to visit the children in Hazel’s house at Ynysforgan, about five miles outside Swansea. When we divorced she had returned to Wales to be near to her parents and further away from me. At the time I had complained at the difficulty it created for me to visit the children, but mine was a lone voice in the matter. In view of the distance I only got to see the children once a month and had developed a routine of driving down on the Friday, staying in a local hotel, taking the children out on the Saturday and possibly again on the Sunday, before returning home either on the Sunday or the Monday. On this occasion I only saw them on the Saturday. It was a less than satisfactory visit; Harry was missing a rugby match and Sue was anxious that the visit should not be over-long because she wanted to go out with friends that evening. Sadly, I had to accept that my children were growing further and further away from me. Harry was now sixteen, Sue fifteen and I knew nothing of their friends and little of their life. I asked the usual questions posed by estranged fathers everywhere – how was school, what did they want to do after school, would they go to University, and so on. They had heard, and answered, the questions many times and were clearly weary of responding to them yet again, but for the life of me I could come up with nothing more original, so it was with a heavy heart that I dropped them off at their mother’s.

On a whim, I decided not to stay overnight but to drive straight home. Ynysforgan is just off the M4 and once on it the journey was virtually all motorway to Perth, and then another ten miles or so to home, so although it was some five hundred miles,

leaving at six in the evening would see me home at around two in the morning, allowing for a couple of tea breaks on the way.

In fact, it was just a little after two when I drove into my garage. The garage is built on to the side of the house with an interconnecting door between the two and it was this I used to walk into my kitchen.

The next thing I knew was that I was lying on the floor with a splitting headache and feeling violently sick. I got as far as onto my hands and knees, vomited copiously, and collapsed again.

I once again recovered consciousness at just after seven in the morning. Still feeling thoroughly awful I managed to make my way to the phone and dialled 999. I contemplated calling for an ambulance as well as the police, but by now I was slowly feeling better so contented myself with just calling the police out.

It was not an edifying experience. On learning that my attacker or attackers were presumably no longer on the premises, police interest evaporated rapidly. Someone, they said, would be along as soon as they could spare a car.

‘As soon as’ turned out to be nearly mid-day, by which time my suffering had diminished to a bad headache, reduced to manageable proportions by some pain-killers. Examining myself in the mirror was unproductive, but carefully exploring fingers found a large bump on the back of my head. It was thus in a somewhat fragile, but scarcely parlous, state that I recounted what little I knew of the event to a police constable. I suppose if I had triumphed over the burglar and given him a beating I would by now have warranted an armed response unit and a period in the cells.

I took him round the house. Every room had been entered, every drawer pulled out and the contents strewn over the floor. My little strong box was gone, as was my laptop computer, although not the desk-top machine in the office. However, the TV

and DVD recorder were untouched, as were some rather nice silver candlesticks which had been a wedding present from my parents.

The young constable surveyed the scene, sucked in his cheeks, and gave me the benefit of his thoughts.

“I think you’ve been lucky, Mr. Richards. Looks like you disturbed them, so they didn’t clean you out – and although they knocked you unconscious, you haven’t been badly injured.”

And with that – and a crime reference number for insurance purposes – I had to be satisfied. I wondered about going to my GP or to the local A&E department in case there was damage I couldn’t find, but in the end decided against it. I tidied up the house in a perfunctory manner and went to bed, even though it was scarcely six o’clock.

Chapter 6

I woke in the small hours. The headache was still there, but diminishing, but I also had a raging thirst, so I got up and made myself a cup of tea, which I drank in the kitchen whilst mulling things over. My first thought was one of thankfulness that I had not left the jewellery in the strongbox. My next was to puzzle over the things that the robbers had not taken. The desk computer was pretty old, with a big, heavy monitor. The actual heart of the computer was, again, big and heavy by current standards. I suppose the whole set up – top end of the market when purchased some five years earlier – wouldn’t have fetched more than a few pounds if offered for sale now. The laptop, on the other hand, was very new and expensive, so was clearly more valuable, so its loss was understandable. But why leave the candlesticks? The DVD

recorder was also new and expensive – why leave that for the sake of unplugging a few wires, even if they didn’t fancy lugging out a big, heavy and – again – old TV?

Again – why had they spent time turning out drawers so thoroughly? Quite literally, every single drawer in the house had been gone through, including those in what had been the children’s rooms which had still contained a few items not taken away by them when they left with Hazel and which I had never got around to clearing out. It almost seemed as though they had been looking for something – and presumably had not found it.

But if that was the case – what had they been looking for? The only things I had which were worth such a search were the jewellery – but nobody knew I had it.

Morris at the bank knew I had taken the contents of the strong box, but not what was in it. In theory he might, I suppose, have looked inside – but the bank claimed that only the leaser of the box had a key, and the box had been there long before Morris could possibly have started working for the bank. Why – and how – should he have decided to check its contents? Two jewellers in Edinburgh had each bought a ring from me, but had no knowledge of the rest of the cache.

Then I started to wonder once more about the disappearing trust. Was this somehow less straightforward than I had imagined? If the burglars had been after the trust document, then they were out of luck – the original was safe with my solicitor and the photographs I had taken of the pages were in the form of digital photos which were stored not on either of my computers but on a memory stick which I always had with me. I had been an early user of such devices as they enabled me to carry files, whether documents or pictures, around on a device no bigger than a disposable cigarette lighter which I could call up on any computer anywhere. The memory stick on which the trust pages were stored also contained images of several paintings I was either working on or had recently completed, plus ongoing correspondence on a number of matters. I kept such files on the memory stick rather than on either of the computers because it meant I didn’t have to remember to keep them up to date on both computers – I often took the laptop away with me and using the memory stick meant that there was no danger of finding I didn’t have the latest version of something with me when far from home.

Even though it was Monday, I felt so drained of energy that I decided that the boring process of getting a new passport and advising the companies involved of the loss of the documents from the strongbox – a couple of insurance polices, the car registration

documents and the like, would have to wait a day or so. I did reflect on the fact that my robbers now knew quite a bit about me from those documents, including my bank details, so I did call the bank’s 24 hour service to advise them of the theft.

One thing they wouldn’t know about; although they had details of my car they wouldn’t know that it wasn’t my only vehicle. I also owned a motorcaravan which made an ideal base when away for events such as airshows – which I frequently attended. However, I don’t have space for it at the house – it was too big to fit in the garage and to park on the drive would mean that I couldn’t get my car out without moving it. It was therefore kept in a large barn which I rented from a friendly farmer whose farm-yard was about fifteen minutes walk away. Normally its papers would have been in the strongbox with everything else, but I had recently re-taxed it and forgotten to bring the papers home. In consequence they were still in the glove compartment and the vehicle’s existence unknown to the burglars. Whether this was of any consequence I had no means of knowing, but it was gratifying to think that I had, albeit inadvertently, kept it a secret.

At lunch time I decided that I didn’t feel like staying in the house, so drove to a pub in a village a few miles away and treated myself to a pub lunch. The pub didn’t have a car park, so I had to leave the Mondeo in the next street. I spent nearly three quarters of an hour over a decent ploughman’s lunch and a pint of bitter, then strolled round the corner to collect my car. It was gone.

At that point I remembered that as well as the various papers it had contained, my strongbox had also held the spare car keys. Again, by sheer good fortune, the spare keys for the ‘van were not in the box. I always left them with Dennis Crane, the farmer, in case he needed to move the ‘van for any reason.

Resignedly, I got out my mobile phone and informed the police of what had happened, pointing out that the car had probably been stolen by the same person or persons who had burgled my home. The officer to whom I spoke seemed less than impressed, and not terribly sympathetic.

I phoned for a taxi – not the easiest thing to obtain during a busy lunch-time, so it was well gone three before I got home – to be greeted by the sight of my car sitting in the drive. Cautiously I approached the house, wondering if the car thief or thieves had decided to have another look over the house, but it was deserted. I phoned the police and updated them. The lack of sympathy now bordered on downright disbelief; the officer clearly thought that I had probably reported the car stolen to guard against being caught in some activity I didn’t want known about and that I was now reporting its near miraculous reappearance as the danger, whatever it might have been, was now over. He sounded less sceptical when I advised him that, whilst the car had been returned, it wasn’t unharmed. All the windows and lights had been smashed and someone had enjoyed himself taking a hammer or something similar to the body work. The car which I had only bought that week looked ready for the scrap heap.

“It sounds as though somebody has a grudge against you, Mr. Richards” the policeman stated. I could only agree, although I also said that I hadn’t the faintest idea who it could be.

“Did your neighbours see anything?” he enquired. I explained that I lived on the edge of farmland and the house had a tall hedge to the road. My nearest neighbour was nearly quarter of a mile away and could not have seen my car once it had been driven through the gate. The damage to it had clearly been done after it had been driven in –

there was broken glass on the drive as well as inside the car.

I phoned my insurers and explained what had happened; they said that they would have the car collected on Tuesday. In the meantime I was without transport unless I went over to Dennis’ and collected the van. I phoned him and explained my predicament; to me pleasant surprise he offered me the loan of one of the farm Land Rovers until I could sort out a hire car or the insurers agreed that the Mondeo had been badly enough damaged to warrant letting me have a courtesy car – something likely to take at least a couple of days.

Accordingly, I walked round to Dennis to pick up the Land Rover and receive commiseration from him and Alice, his wife. They were friends as well as neighbours and I had often dined with them; Alice was a superb cook. Both were horrified when I recounted my full tale of burglars and car thieves, although I did not mention the gems, nor the mysterious trust.

Chapter 7

By Thursday things were getting back to normal. A breakdown van had taken the Mondeo away on Tuesday and the insurers had agreed to my having a courtesy car –

as it happened, another Mondeo which I had picked up that very morning. I had also returned the Land Rover to Dennis and as a small gesture of thanks had presented him with a portrait of Alice which I had pained from a combination of memory and a photograph of the three of us which their son, Mark, had taken earlier that year. He, and Alice, were both thrilled with it and I accepted their flatteringly exaggerated praise of my talent with pleasure.

Because of picking up the car and then going straight over to Dennis and Alice, it was nearly noon before I returned home and picked up my post. One element was a stiff brown envelope with my address printed on a label rather than written or typed direct onto the envelope itself. I opened it and got a nasty shock. Inside were two photographs of my car, both taken outside the house. One showed it before, and the other after, it had been damaged. There was also a piece of paper. Printed on it in a large typeface was the stark message ‘Don’t interfere again, or the house will be next’.

I was worried. These people knew where I lived, had already broken in once, had attacked me – I had no option but to take their warning very seriously indeed. My initial reaction was to go to the police; indeed, I even got as far as lifting the telephone to dial before changing my mind. All this had to be connected with grandfather’s legacy. Nobody but myself knew about the gems, but several people knew of my interest in Collingwood House. There was the Law Society, the RAFA, Vardy, the estate agent at Nettlesham – and William Forbes who had written to tell me that he knew nothing about the trust set up by my grandfather. By a very long way he was my main suspect – but supposing I went to the police – then what? They had scarcely

been over-enthusiastic about getting involved so far, and whilst I could undoubtedly create greater interest by telling them about Forbes, what information could I offer to link him to what was going on? There was also the question of the gems. I was pretty sure that any official recognition of their existence would lead to a hefty tax bill, and I was damned if I saw why I should pour more money into the insatiable maw of the tax man than I already did. And again – were the police likely to have any success? A man in his sixties living in far-off Surrey, a trust set up years ago when he was a baby and a house demolished when he was eleven – what was there to tie him to my plight?

The police were far more likely to take the view that I had upset somebody locally; in a day and age when vandals needed no excuse to target people, which was the more likely?

I decided that before I did anything else at all I would try and find out some more about William Forbes and that I would do it myself. I didn’t want to entrust enquiries to a third party who didn’t have my vested interest in making sure that Forbes didn’t realise that I was investigating him. If he was behind the burglary and the attack, I wanted him to stay in complete ignorance of what I was up to.

It would mean a trip to Haslemere in Surry, some five hundred miles away and after a little thought I decided to go in my campervan rather than stay at an hotel anywhere near. My ‘van was a small one; when Hazel and I were still married we had a big vehicle and enjoyed taking ourselves and the children off whenever the opportunity and the inclination coincided. Now that I was on my own, however, it had been far bigger than needed so I had exchanged it for a far smaller vehicle – one about the size of a Ford Transit and which was scarcely less convenient as a means of transport than a large car yet offered adequate sleeping, eating and toilet facilities.

Accordingly I set off for England the next morning. There was no great need to hurry and I made a couple of over-night stops on the way, so it was the Tuesday morning before I drove into Haslemere. In the meantime, however, I had experienced a recovery of my memory of the night of the burglary. Up until then I had remembered nothing after walking into the house until I came round on the floor some hours later.

As I drove South, however, I slowly recollected more. I had walked into the kitchen to see a man there. Engrossed in rummaging through one of the wall cabinets he clearly hadn’t heard me enter. I started towards him intending to challenge him, but as I did so a second man entered from the hall and shouted a warning – something like ‘Look out, Bill!’ The name wasn’t too clear, the reason being that both men had ski masks on, which they had pulled about to cover their mouths, so his voice was muffled. The name could equally well have been Will or Phil. Whatever, the shout caused the first man – who was wearing a similar mask – to swing round. I leapt at him, swinging a punch, but he parried it and we collided. I tried to wrap my arms round him but the second man joined in at that point, pulling at my shoulder. I swung round to meet this new threat – and man number one struck me down with something hard and heavy.

So – I now knew that there had been at least two intruders, that both were of a little over average height – perhaps five feet eight or nine. One was quite heavily built, the other was quite slim. Both had worn, in addition to the masks, black sweaters and jeans; both wore leather gloves. From the speed with which they had attacked me I reckoned that both were relatively young – certainly not elderly.

So it was with still more to ponder on that I drove into the pleasant town of Haslemere. I had Forbes’ address; I realised that I was in one of the more well-to-do parts of the country, but I was unprepared for the virtual mansion I drove past.

Surrounded by a high stone wall pierced by an ornate set of wrought iron gates, the property must have been worth, quite literally, a couple of million pounds or more. As I drove past I could see for a moment up to the house itself; parked in front of it was a small van – about the same size as my campervan – with the legend ‘Forbes Construction’ on the side. In my ignorance I had originally thought that a bit of covert skulking would give me a view of the man himself and some idea of the domestic situation, but this was clearly going to be impossible with such a set-up. It looked as though I had wasted my time and effort on coming down South, with the possible exception of one thing – that van. Surely it wasn’t coincidence that a van bearing the same name as the house owner was in the drive? I drove back past the house again and this time managed to see and remember the firm’s telephone number which was also painted on the van’s side.

Armed with this new information I drove away, anxious to find a computer with Internet connection. I guessed that there would probably be such a facility in the local library but it was too near to Forbes for me to feel happy using it. Instead I drove the fifteen miles to Guildford, the nearest large town. There I was able to use a computer in the local library and after quizzing the Companies House web site I was in possession of the latest information on Forbes Construction. The directors were listed

– four in number, namely Forbes, his wife and their two sons, the elder of whom, George, was identified as the CEO with a Mrs. Angela Forbes – presumably the wife of one of the sons, named as company secretary. The company’s registered office was in London, and the trading report showed that it dealt in construction both in the UK

and in France. The annual turn-over surprised me – over one hundred million pounds, so this was no tuppenny-halfpenny set-up. A bit more digging and I came up with confirmation that Angela Forbes was, indeed, the wife of George.

So, now what? If it really was Forbes who was behind the attack on me and my property, what could I do about it? Given the attitude of the police so far, going to them with the flimsy evidence I had so far – if indeed it was worthy even of being called ‘evidence’ – would surely be pointless.

My original plan had been to talk to some local folk and sound them out about Forbes, but people who live in two million pound estates are unlikely to be on first name terms with the local pub crowd, nor were local shopkeepers likely to be able to provide much information.

Feeling very deflated, I turned the van northwards and headed for home.

Chapter 8

In the event, I decided to take a short break, rather than return straight away, and I planned a meandering route back via Oxford – long one of my favourite cities -

Keswick and Skye before finally turning south and east for home. I spent my time taking photographs, wandering through the back streets of Oxford and admiring once again the grace of some of the architecture, walking in the Cuillin Hills on Skye,

including reaching the summit of the highest of them, Sgurr Alasdair at 3255ft, something I had intended to do for years but never got round to.

The summit can be reached by several routes, none very easy, some very demanding.

I took the easiest – a ‘scramble’ rather than a climb and enjoyed the peace and solitude that so often accompanies high places, for an hour or more before returning to the van.

It is strange how life changing incidents can be triggered by random events. Had I left the peak even ten minutes earlier, my life would have been different ever after.

I had left the van parked off the road – although really ‘road’ was too ambitious a name for what was actually little more than a rough track – and on my return to it I found a young woman sitting on the grassy bank nearby. I called out a cheery ‘Hello’

and she responded with an unexpected request.

“Hello. Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you could help me?”

“If I can, what is the problem?”

“I’ve been very stupid. I’ve been walking with a couple of friends, but we had a bit of a disagreement and they decided to push on, whilst I decided to return to my car. We came in two cars and they are both parked about a mile north from the mountain rescue post. The problem, though, is I fell a few hundred yards back and I’ve sprained my ankle. I tried using my mobile phone – but the coverage here is non-existent. Do you think that you could possibly give me a lift?”

“Of course – I have to go past the rescue post anyway.”

I crossed over to her and helped her to her feet. The sprain was clearly a bad one; despite my help and the use of her walking poles, it took several minutes, and a considerable amount of obvious pain – at one point I thought that she might faint -

before I had her safely belted into the passenger seat.

I drove away to find her car, and as I did so I introduced myself.

“I’m Alan Richards; I was having a short break on my way home – I live the other side of Perth.”

“I’m Sally – Sally Hammond. I’m staying with my brother – he lives on Skye – he’s an estate manager. I wanted to walk in the Cuillins and I met up with a couple I used to know – they are on holiday up here. The problem was – I used to go out with the husband a few years ago, and I didn’t know that he had never told his wife about me, so I rather put my foot in it. When they wanted to press on to Sgurr Dubh Mor and I was already feeling a bit tired, it seemed a good idea to split up. Big mistake!”

I sympathised, that a practical point struck me.

“Your car, are you going to be able to dive it? You should be OK with an automatic, but is your foot up to a manual?”

Her face fell.

“Oh Lord, I never even thought if that. It’s an old Land Rover – my brother loaned it to me as more useful around here than my Mini – and it has a beast of a heavy clutch.”

“Where does your brother live?”

“Just outside Broadford, on the road from Loch Slapin.”

“I’ll take you to him, then.”

“Are you sure – it’s miles out of your way. I could always find a phone somewhere and ring him at work – then he could fetch me when he finishes.”

“But you’d still have the problem of getting the Land Rover back, unless he comes with someone. What time does he finish work?”

“It depends – sometimes at this time of year not until seven or eight.”

It was now not quite two and at this latitude darkness would soon be with us on this January day, so she could be in for a long and unpleasant wait, in considerable pain, before her brother could rescue her.

“I’ll take you to his place – it’s no problem, honestly.”

“Well, if you are sure – thank you, thank you very much.”

The journey to her brother’s home passed pleasantly enough. My unexpected companion was an attractive girl, not very tall, definitely not over-weight, but adequately curved. Her fair hair, down to her shoulders at the back, cut in a fringe across her forehead, framed an oval face containing blue eyes, a slightly retrousée nose and full lips. Despite the pain she was still suffering, she had a ready laugh and a bubbly personality. I learned that she was, or rather had been, a middle ranking member of a bank which had been taken over the previous month. The new owners –

a French corporation – had wasted no time in wielding the axe of rationalisation, and Sally, along with a large number of her colleagues, had been made redundant. She was now looking for a new job, but as the redundancy package had been reasonably generous, was taking a few weeks to look around and had preceded the ‘looking around’ with a visit to her brother.

It was dark by the time we reached the house, just a couple of miles before the small town of Broadford on the unclassified road from Loch Slapin, which had made the last few miles something to be taken with extreme care, but at last we arrived and I pulled off the road through an entry gate set in a stone wall onto a large gravelled area in front of a substantial stone-built bungalow. The bungalow was long and narrow, with its length running parallel to the wall. At either end outhouses joined the two, creating a hollow square. I parked the van in a corner to avoid blocking the entrance and helped Sally down and into the house.

“Will you come in for a cup of coffee or something? I can’t just send you on your way after you have been so helpful.”

“I’d love to – thanks.”

She limped into the house, still using her walking poles for support and ushered me into a large, comfortably furnished lounge. In the long wall there was a big, gas-fired imitation fire and she tried to bend to light it, then found that such a move would lose her the support of the poles, so I crossed over and turned on the gas tap, pressed the igniter button, and was rewarded with instant flames.

“There,” she said, “the room will soon warm up. You sit down and I’ll make some coffee – or would you prefer tea or a drink?”

“Coffee’s fine, but I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you point me in the direction of the kitchen, then sit down and rest the ankle, and I’ll make the coffee?”

“Actually, if you are sure you don’t mind, that would be a blessing. The kitchen is at the far end of the corridor, on your right.”

She subsided gratefully into a large armchair and I went in search of the coffee.

The kitchen was a surprise. Given that the bungalow was obviously old, I had expected something fairly rural, but the quite large room had clearly had a fairly recent make-over, with stainless steel and granite much in evidence. Obviously, brother Hammond was no pauper.

I found coffee and the kettle and a couple of minutes later bore two cups back into the lounge.

Perhaps not surprisingly in view of the draining effect of her injury, Sally was asleep in the chair. I carefully placed her cup on the small table beside her, took my own to the chair opposite hers, and sat down.

As she slept, I studied her, and realised that she was somebody I found very attractive.

I wondered what, and who, featured in her life, and to my surprise found that I was hoping that I could become a part of it.

“Come off it,” I told myself, “she’s a banker looking for a new job. If the money spent on this house is anything to go by, and if she is in the same financial bracket as her brother, you are out of your class.”

I stopped at that point. Given my unexpected inheritance of jewels, and the possibility, however remote, that I might gain something from the long-ago sale of Collingwood House, perhaps I wasn’t out of their bracket after all.

At that moment she woke; for a second she looked around in confusion, then worked out where she was and who I was.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I dropped off. Have I been asleep long?”

“Only a minute or two. Your coffee is still hot.”

“Oh, thank you.” She lifted the cup and drank deeply from it. “Hmm, that’s good –

just what I needed.”

We had scarcely finished our coffees before we heard a car draw up outside.

“That’ll be Jack – I’d better meet him.” However, before Sally had managed to struggle to her feet from the low armchair, the door opened and a tall, heavily built man entered.

“Sally, what’s happened?”

I rose to my feet to meet the newcomer as Sally introduced me.

“Jack, I’m very sorry – I had a fall and couldn’t drive the Land Rover back. This is Alan Richards – he very kindly brought me home – that’s his van outside.”

Hammond and I shook hands and surveyed each other. What I saw was a man a bit younger than myself, and totally different in looks from his sister. Dark, virtually black, hair instead of blonde, dark brown eyes rather then blue, and a craggy, square jawed face of a weather beaten complexion – a face that could have belonged to the hero of a Hollywood Western. In fact, had the face been longer, not unlike the young John Wayne.

We shook hands; his was rough and callused, the grip of a man used to using them in his work.

“Alan, I can’t say how grateful I am to you for helping Sally.” He turned to his sister,

“But why didn’t Jim and Polly bring you back?”

Sally coloured slightly.

“Well, we didn’t see eye to eye on the route – they wanted to press on to Sguur Dubh Mor, but I was already feeling a bit tired, so turned back. I’d got to within a bit over a mile from where we had parked when I fell.”

“Sally, that was just plain stupid. How many times do I have to tell you that the hills around here aren’t like your Edinburgh – if you don’t pay them enough respect they can kill you.”

“I know, and I’m sorry –I promise I won’t do it again.”

“OK, just please do make sure you don’t. Now – seeing that ankle is hurting, I’d better cook – Alan, will you stay and eat with us, please? It’s the least that I can do after what you’ve done.”

Sally also pressed me, and without much need for persuasion, I agreed, and Jack disappeared into the kitchen.

Once he had disappeared, Sally turned to me.

“Alan, do you think you could pour me a Scotch, please – the bottle is in the cupboard over there – and do have one yourself.”

“Well, I’ll be driving..”

“Oh no, by the time we’ve eaten it’ll be too late for going back to Perth. I’ve brought you all this way off your route, the least we can do is offer you a bed for the night –

there’s plenty of room.”

And on that, I accepted. Another life-changing moment.

The meal was delicious – Jack Hammond was an accomplished cook and the venison casserole, accompanied by a heavy Burgundy and followed by local cheese, was a delight. He echoed Sally’s insistence that I stay the night and so it was that I slipped into a large, comfortable bed at nearly midnight; we had spent the evening in general gossip – I had told them a lot about myself, including the divorce and my time in the Air Force which had been a prime cause of it. I did not tell them about my unusual inheritance, nor the events surrounding it. In turn, I learnt that their parents were still living; as I had assumed from Jack’s soft Highland accent, they originally came from the West coast, from the tiny village of Pollewe, on the shore of the sea loch, Loch Ewe. I knew the area, it had been a favourite area for holidays with Hazel and the children a few years back and I was able, with total truth, to enthuse about its beauty.

Their father, Alec Hammond, had been a hill farmer in the land above the loch, and a part-time fisherman with one of his cousins in his earlier years. Now retired, he lived in the village of his birth. He had met his wife, Mary Munro, on a rare visit to Inverness when they had both been taken shelter from a heavy downpour of rain.

“Love, literally, at first sight for both of them – and they’ve been the traditional happy ever after.” Sally informed me.

They had both gone to university; Jack to Dundee as a mature student to study land management, Sally to Edinburgh to take a course in business. Jack now managed the Lingow Estate, a huge corporate holding stretching into the Cuillins, with animal husbandry, forestry and tourism all within his responsibilities. Sally, as I already knew, was currently out of a job, following the demise of Masefield, James & Holland, the private bankers she had joined in 1998 after graduating.

They were fascinated to learn of my self-employed status and I felt that Jack, at least, was somewhat envious. His job was clearly very onerous – over a hundred people either worked directly for him or were greatly affected by what he did, the decisions he took. In addition to that he was responsible, not to some Highland laird, but to a limited company based in Glasgow, with a board of directors for ever looking for increased income and reduced costs.

I drifted off to sleep, replete and happy.

I was woken in the small hours as a cold form slipped into the bed beside me.

“What..”

“Hush, it’s me. Alan, my ankle still hurts and I can’t sleep. I thought that you might like to help me forget the pain.” She giggled as she said it, and I needed no further invitation. I rolled her onto her back and did my very best to banish the pain of the ankle.

Chapter 9

When I woke again she was gone, a weak sun was giving some light on the bedroom and my wristwatch advised me that it was gone seven o’clock.

One of the things I always find difficult when staying with other people is to know when one should get up. Here, however, there was no problem, because I could hear sounds from the house which indicated that at least one person was on their feet, so I rose from the bed, had a quick shave and dressed; one of the advantages of having

been travelling in the van was that I had changes of clothing available, instead of having to face the day in yesterday’s apparel.

I made my way to the kitchen, where Jack and Sally were already in occupation. Jack was finishing a cup of tea, an empty plate before him. Sally was by the working surface, toasting some bread. They both turned towards me.

“Alan, good morning,” this from Jack “How did you sleep?”

“Fine thanks. Sally, how is the ankle this morning?”

“It’s improving; I couldn’t run a mile on it, but I can limp around now.”

Jack spoke again. “Alan, I wonder if I could ask another favour of you?”

“Surely, what is it?”

“I’ve got to go to Glasgow today for a meeting with the board. I don’t really want to leave the Land Rover abandoned, and Sally swears that she is OK to drive the Mini as it’s an automatic. Could you possibly go with her and bring back the Land Rover?”

“Of course – no problem at all.”

“That’s great. I suppose that you’ll be gone before I get back – it’s a lunch time meeting, so I’m not likely to get back much before seven – it’s a four hour drive from here even if there are no hold-ups.”

“Well, yes – my movements are flexible, but I was expecting to return home yesterday, so I suppose that I should be on my way today.”

“Well, I hope we meet again, Alan, and thank you once again for what you did for Sally.”

And with that, and a handshake, he was gone.

Sally smiled mischievously at me. “And I’d like to thank you for what you did for Sally.”

I smiled back. “Did the therapy improve the ankle?”

“Oh yes – with a bit of luck I’ll be able to hobble around enough to earn sympathy, but not enough to make people expect me to do very much for a day or two!”

“So, what about collecting the Land Rover?”

“Well, as you saw yesterday, it’s a pretty slow road, and a long way round, so I suppose we’d better start right away.”

As Sally had said, it was a slow journey, for although the distance in a straight line from the house to where the Land Rover had been left was only about twelve or thirteen miles, by road it was easily three times that as the road – and in many places it was little more than a track - had to wend its way around the mountains and there was scarcely a straight mile anywhere in it. As a result, it was nearly ten o’clock by the time we reached the abandoned vehicle, and despite her protestations, Sally was clearly still in considerable pain.

“Are you sure that you are going to be all right to drive back?” I asked anxiously.

“I’ll manage – in fact, I’ll really have to.”

The return was even slower than the journey out, but at last we were back at the bungalow. It was gone two and the dull day was already gloomy, and I didn’t really fancy the drive home which, in the van, would be nearer five hours than four and much of it in darkness.

As we walked into the lounge, a red light was flashing on the telephone, indicating that someone had left a message. Sally crossed over to the instrument, pressed a button, and Jack’s disembodied voice filled the room.

“Hi, Sally, it’s me. Look, love, I’m sorry, but I’m having to stay over in Glasgow tonight. The Finance Director was supposed to be here for the meeting, but he is in France for some separate business and his flight from Nantes was cancelled, so he can’t get here until early evening. By the time we’ve met with him it’s going to be too

late to come home. If Alan hasn’t gone yet, why don’t you ask him if he’d like to stay and keep you company? See you tomorrow evening – ‘bye.”

Sally looked at me with a glint in her eye.

“Well, would you like to stay and keep me company?”

“Very much so – your place or mine?”

“Your place or mine? Oh – you surely don’t mean your van, do you?”

“Well, it is a thought – it’s quite comfortable, but to be honest – I’d prefer your place!”

And so I kept her company, with a high degree of mutual enjoyment and satisfaction.

Later that day she turned to face me with a serious expression on her face.

“Alan, I know this has all been very sudden. I don’t want you to think that I automatically jump into bed with every man I meet. It’s just that, somehow, from the moment you were so kind and considerate to help me, a total, and totally stupid, stranger, I knew that this was going to happen, and I’m very, very glad that it has. But what about you? Is it going to be a case of ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ and off in your lovely little van tomorrow?”

“No, it’s not going to be like that – I don’t know how things are going to work out between us, but I don’t want these two days to be the beginning and end of everything. How would you like to come away with me for a few days so that we can get to know each other better?”

“I’d like that a lot. I don’t know what I will tell Jack – he’s been very good to me and I’ve never run off like this before. Also, if we were to just go off now, before he gets back tomorrow, I think that he would believe the worst of you – that you were taking advantage of his poor little jobless sister – and it’s nothing at all like that. I want him to know that it’s all open and honest between us.”

“I wouldn’t want it any other way – apart from anything else, I most definitely would not want your brother pissed off at me – I reckon that if he wanted to, Jack could be a very serious man indeed.”

“Yes, I suppose that he could. You know he said that he was in the Army?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he hardly ever talks about it, but he was in the Falklands – he was in the Paras at Goose Green and was wounded, so wasn’t in the final fighting, but I know that he never likes to talk about the fighting that he did see. He didn’t mention it, but he was awarded the Military Cross after the fighting there. Dad got it out of one of his comrades at the investiture – apparently Jack and his sergeant outflanked an Argentinean machine gun post and killed the crew – the sergeant got the Military Medal, but he told dad at the Palace that all he did was to follow on after Jack went in.

Jack killed five men with a grenade and a sub-machine gun. Sometimes I look at him and wonder how much I really know about him. I can’t bring myself to really believe that he did all that – and he was only just nineteen at the time. What about you though

– you said that you were in the RAF.”

“So I was, but nothing like what Jack went through.”

Sally didn’t pursue my comment, so I didn’t have to relive the terror of taking the Tornado down through the triple-A over Baghdad during Desert Storm. Dropping bombs on vaguely identified targets couldn’t compare with charging into a machine gun nest and killing enemy soldiers at point blank range. Also, I had been twenty-four years old, with six years experience behind me at the time, not a teenager freshly arrived in my unit.

The result of all this was that the next evening, when Jack returned, he was met with an unexpected development; Sally and I were going off the following morning for an

indeterminate period. Whilst taken by surprise, Jack didn’t seem to be taken aback, and he wished us both good luck.

The wish was a little tempered when he and I were alone for a few minutes. Those dark brown eyes fixed on mine. “You will look after her, won’t you Alan? She is very dear to me and I wouldn’t want to see her hurt.”

I assured him that I would; he hesitated and then spoke again.

“I don’t know if I should tell you this –I’m sure that she will tell you herself in good time, but I think that you should know. She was involved with someone recently – it finished about six months ago – and she was very badly let down by him. I’m pleased to see her come out of the shell that affair put her into, but a second let-down would really hurt her.”

“I won’t let her down, Jack – you can rely on that.”

He looked me in the eyes and held out his hand. I took it, and although he didn’t indulge in the childish show of strength so many are fond of, I could sense the power in him. Jack Hammond, MC, was definitely not a man to cross.

“Good.” He said simply.

Chapter 10

We set off in the van immediately after breakfast, but only made a relatively slow journey as we drove via Loch Lomond and stopped there for lunch – nothing grand, I heated up a ready meal in the van’s oven and we washed it down with mineral water.

As a result, the short winter’s day was already over when we got to my house and even though the Mondeo was still at Dennis Crane’s place I decided to leave it there until the morrow, parking the van outside my door.

Sally followed me in as I unlocked the front door and stopped in surprise in the hall.

Most of my visitors did. The house had been an old farm house, but the farm lands had been bought up by a bigger, more successful farmer back in the 60s and I bought it very cheaply in 1990 soon after marrying Hazel, even though we didn’t live in it until I left the RAF in 2001. Although it had stood empty for those first eleven years in my ownership, it had not been neglected, as I had had a lot of renovations undertaken. When Hazel and I broke up I cursed myself for all the money I had spent on what had been intended to be our family home and now could never be. Today, however, I wondered if perhaps the money had been wasted after all.

It wasn’t a renovation that stopped so many in their tracks, however. It was a painting which concealed virtually the entire wall facing the front door – over six feet wide and four high. It was, in a way, a self-portrait – except that my face could not be seen, just the helmeted and visored head of the pilot of the Tornado, captured over down-town Baghdad, steeply banked towards the viewer who could see into the cockpits of the machine, with myself in the front seat and my friend and ‘back seat driver’ Micky Jacobs in the back. The red and black blossoms of anti-aircraft fire surrounded the Tornado, which showed damage to its left wing and tail surfaces as it trailed smoke and vestiges of flames.

It was a piece of pure egotism, and I varied between being pleased with what I regarded as my best piece of work and embarrassment at the blatant exhibitionism. On balance, if it hadn’t been so big I would have taken it down long ago and put it somewhere less conspicuous.

“Did you paint that?”

“Well, yes, I did actually.”

“Is it a real event or just illustrative.”

“It really happened, although I can’t swear to the accuracy of the backdrop of buildings. That was my Tornado in Desert Storm.”

The more I spoke, the more embarrassed I felt. I heartily wished that I had taken the thing down – it now seemed the most awful line-shoot, even if it was all true, even if I had painted it as a tribute to Micky as much as anything for myself. Micky the irrepressible, who had recovered from his wounds in Desert Storm, wounds received in the action depicted by the painting, only to die in its aftermath ten years later. By then I had been a newly-hatched civilian. Micky’s had been the last RAF face I had seen as I left the squadron for the final time. He hadn’t even died in action, but as the result of a piece of poor flying by his pilot which had killed them both.

Sally looked closely into my face. “Tell me about it, Alan.”

“It’s quite a long story – let’s get our stuff out of the van and sit down in comfort and I’ll tell you then.”

In truth I was hoping to wriggle out of the recounting, but no such luck. Half an hour later, sitting in my lounge after Sally had been treated to a quick tour of the house, she returned to the subject.

“Come on Alan, tell me about that painting.”

Reluctantly, and after a large swallow from my glass, I began.

“Desert Storm. It’s seventeen odd years ago now. It’ll soon be in the history books –

if anyone reckons that it is history worth remembering, that is.

“We had been tasked to bomb a specific building which was had been identified as a standby communications centre for the Iraqi army. The main installation for command and control had already been taken out by the Yanks, but this one was still transmitting a lot of radio traffic. The sooner it was hit, the better, so we went in as soon as it had been identified for certain – which meant that it was a daylight raid.

“We hit the building all right, but it was heavily defended and we took a couple of medium calibre anti-aircraft strikes. The tail was damaged, as was the left wing and a fire started in the port engine. Worse that that, however. Micky, my weapons systems officer, was badly hit. If we had been over a friendly area, or even open country, I could have ejected both of us out, but parachuting down amongst people you have just bombed isn’t a very bright idea, so I headed us for home.

“On the way Micky passed out. I had no way of knowing how bad he was hurt, so the obvious thing to do was to get him back as quickly as possible. We made it, and it was in time for Micky – although he had lost a fair amount of blood, the medics had him back on his feet in a month or so.”

Sally regarded me quizzically. “That isn’t everything, is it?”

“Well it is really – it’s the important stuff.”

“It’s not the only important stuff, though – I can tell. You were wounded yourself, weren’t you – and they gave you a medal?”

“Well I was hit, but nothing serious – I could still fly, and I only had a short time in sick quarters. The medal, well, yes, they did – but I never really felt I deserved it – I just drove us both back as anyone would have done.”

“The medal – don’t tell me, let me guess. The DFC, right?”

“Yes – but how did you guess?”

“Because it’s the RAF equivalent of Jack’s Military Cross – awarded for courage in the face of the enemy, and you often tend to get wounded in whatever it is that you do to come to deserve it. Don’t forget that my big brother was a soldier for years – I came to know about such things – and you are just as bad as he is – ‘Oh, I didn’t do anything much’. Not half you didn’t, the pair of you. Why did you leave the RAF?”

“Too many cuts, not enough opportunity.”

“That’s sad – and it is very much what Jack said when he left the Army.”

That evening was the start of something very special for both of us. Right from the start we seemed to be made for each other, real Mills and Boon stuff, and it was only a matter of a few days before I told Sally a lot more about myself, including the mystery of my inheritance from my grandfather. I don’t think that she was totally happy with my refusal to declare the jewellery for tax – I suppose bankers have a more correct view on such matters than ex-fighter pilots – but she went along with me on it, and on the question of the trust she was very indignant about what was clearly a major piece of fraud.

She wanted me to involve the police with what I had to date, but after talking it through, had to agree that as evidence it wasn’t worth very much at all.

“What about your grandfather’s will? Have you actually studied it?”

“No, only the trust deed that he left me – and the various papers he left with his solicitors in Edinburgh – the ones Kirtley passed on to me.”

“Does the will still exist?”

“I honestly don’t know. If anyone does, I suppose it would be my mother.”

“Why not ask her?”

“I’ve got a better idea – why don’t we visit her? I know that she would love to meet you.”

Sally hesitated. It was understandable; had the positions been reversed I would have been apprehensive. Then she made up her mind.

“I’ve love to – but there is a price!”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“That we go and see my parents as well.”

Hoist with my own petard! “OK – you’re on.”

So it was that, after telephoning that evening, the very next day saw me park the Mondeo outside my mother’s house near King’s Lynn. The house had been bought by my parents in anticipation of my father’s retirement from the RAF when he reached the age of 55. His final posting had been to RAF Marham, just a few miles away, where he had been leading a medical team investigating the effects of long-term stress on the operational capability of aircrew. It was a subject that the RAF had kept under review for many years, but my father’s team had worked on the effects, both immediate and long term, of various new medications which had become available.

Sadly, they had only enjoyed the house for some five years before he died of a heart attack. By then my mother had established a circle of friends and decided to stay in Norfolk. It was, after all, many years since she had last lived in Scotland and she had lost touch with the folk she had known there.

As we got out of the car the door opened and my mother came to greet us.

“Sally, welcome – I’ve been longing to meet you. Come inside.”

Left to bring in the cases, I followed on; it was over a year since I had last seen my mother, but I was pleased to see that she still looked as good as ever, a youthful sixty-three year old who appeared a good few years younger than her actual age.

We all ended up in the sitting room with tea and biscuits, whilst mother pumped us unmercifully about out plans for the future, with unspoken but clearly hovering, the question “Is this permanent? Will you marry?”

After about half an hour of this, my mother suddenly turned to me and said, “Alan, I forgot to get any wine for dinner, Would you be a dear and pop out to the village – the little Co-op has some quite nice wines there. We are eating veal escallops with potato julienne and vegetables, with a fruit salad to follow.”

As I left the house for the ten minute walk to the village centre, I knew full well that my mother would never have forgotten the wine – it was a ploy to get Sally to herself for a few minutes. Knowing this, I had been tempted to suggest to Sally that she came with me to stretch her legs, but I thought that it would have been mean to deprive mother of her chance to apply the third degree. So I went by myself, bought a couple of bottles of Anjou Rose, and didn’t hurry back.

Whatever had been said between the two women in my absence, it clearly had gone well, for which I was very grateful. Dinner was an enjoyable meal – mother had always been a fine cook, and by the time we were reclining once more in the sitting room with coffee and a small glass of cognac each, I had almost forgotten the underlying purpose of our visit.

“Mum, I wonder if you can help me? I’ve had an idea for a book of pencil sketches of Battle of Britain pilots. I know that sort of thing has been done almost to death, but virtually everything so far has concentrated on the big names, with perhaps an addition of those chaps associated with them. I think that there is a place for a book featuring lesser known people – people like granddad. I know you have the picture of him in the hall – but that was 1931. Do you have anything later of him?”

I am pleased to say that everything I told my mother about the book was true – I had had the idea for some time and even done a few preliminary sketches for it. The idea of incorporating my own grandfather was a genuine desire, as was my wish not to show him in his carefree 1931 pose.

“Well, I’m sure that we have some later pictures of him, although I don’t know how much use they will be. Do you remember that old trunk of your father’s that he used to get odds and ends of rubbish he couldn’t bear to be parted from?”

“Yes – it was in the loft for years.”

“Well, I’m afraid that it is still up there, so I suggest you leave having a look at it until the morning.”

“OK, thanks.”

The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast, I climbed into the loft and rummaged through the detritus of over half a century in the old tin trunk which my father had taken around with him for years. As I had hoped, it contained a wad of old papers, and included in them was grandfather’s will. It also contained a sheaf of correspondence between my grandfather and Glade and Forbes regarding the Collingwood House purchase which would merit close study. Now I had a dilemma. How much did I tell my mother, if anything? Or did I just walk off with the papers?

I climbed down the loft ladder, bearing the wad of papers and a tatty album of photos.

The next hour or so was spent in going through pictures whilst my mother or I, and sometimes both of us, dredged up memories triggered by a variety of snapshots.

Finally I had identified four or five pictures on my grandfather from around 1940, and then asked my mother about the papers.

“Mum, all these old papers – they look as though some might be interesting as a sort of story of the family – they even include grand-dad’s will. Would you mind if I had them to go through? I promise I won’t throw anything away.”

”Oh, now that they are out of the trunk, keep them, Alan – and once you have finished with them, by all means throw them away. After all, I never knew Graham; he and Fiona were killed in the accident long before I met your father. I don’t think that there is anything of your father’s there, but if there is, please let me have that back when you’ve finished.”

I put the papers in the car and left them untouched until, a couple of days later, Sally and I returned to my house – which I hoped that would soon be able to regard as our home.

It was a long drive, so it was the next day before we got down to going through the papers I had brought away from Norfolk. I had already ascertained that the will was there, but now we could study it in depth.

It was very straight forward. It left everything to my grandmother or, should she die first, to my father. As he had only been eight years old at the time of Graham Henry’s death, the estate had been looked after by his solicitors – my father had been brought up by a fairly remote relative, Peter Appleby, who, in conjunction with the solicitors, had acted as his guardian. The solicitors weren’t Glade and Forbes, but Graham Henry’s usual solicitors, Howard & Ross, to whom he entrusted the mysterious letter I had been handed and which had started all this off. There had been ample funds to send my father to Fettes College, one of the leading independent schools in Edinburgh, and the one to which I had gone myself. As Fettes was a boarding school, Peter Appleby had only had to look after my father during school holidays. I had heard vaguely about Peter Appleby from my parents, but as he had died before they married, it was only my father who had actually known him. He had died in 1958, aged about 70 or so, and my parents didn’t actually meet until 1963. I had never really understood how he had come to be my father’s guardian, but as he had been almost totally bereft of any relatives following the death of my grandparents, I suppose it had just been one of those things. Certainly my father had never said anything but good about the man. Had my grandmother’s parents lived, they would have been the obvious choice, but her father had died a year or two earlier and her mother had died from complications arising from her birth. Similarly, Graham Henry’s parents were already dead. His father, Gordon William Richards had been a Major in the RFC in the first World War and had died in action – he had been a squadron commander – in 1918. His mother had died in 1944, when a V1 had hit the house of friends with whom she had been staying on what had been intended to be a brief visit south to visit relatives, as she had originally come from London So it was that Appleby, some sort of distant cousin of my great-grandfather, had come into the picture. He had been a good guardian by all accounts and also relatively wealthy, and my father had been his sole legatee.

All this meant that there was not a lot of family history to the Richards family other than the lives of just a handful of people, and the papers from the trunk where therefore simple to understand. Except in two instances.

Firstly, the letters between my grandfather and Glade and Forbes regarding the purchase of Collingwood House were quite explicit in that it was to be set up as a convalescent home for serving or ex-service personnel and if it ever ceased to be used as such, then the value was to revert to the family in the shape of Graham Henry’s beneficiary or beneficiaries. That being the case why wasn’t it known about at the time of the death of my grandparents and included in the estate?

Secondly, in simply leaving everything to my grandmother or, should she die first, my father, my grandfather’s will did so without stipulating just what was included in

‘everything’, but attached to it was a summary of the estate prepared by Howard & Ross as executors. It showed my grandparents’ house, itemising its contents in some detail, stocks and shares and the residual value of grandfather’s third part share in an aircraft described as ‘Percival Proctor registered as G-ATFY’, but absolutely no mention of Collingwood House.

There was a further point of interest about the aeroplane; the names of the other two part owners. One, David George Walsh, with an address in Dundee, was a man of whom I had never heard, but the other was John Henry Glade, who by then was a solicitor practising, of course, with Forbes, in London. Why on earth would he have had a share in an aircraft based in Scotland?

Thinking it over, however, I supposed it was not so odd. Clearly he and my grandfather had been, if not necessarily friends – I had no way of knowing – at the very least acquaintances with a lot of memories and colleagues in common.

The other thing about the aircraft – it was the one in which my grandparents had died.

I had never felt any desire to go into the details of that crash, but now I felt that perhaps I should. One element to help me was that amongst the papers in the trunk was the Proctor’s logbook. The aircraft had been totally destroyed in the crash. It was insured and a one-third part of the insurance payout had formed an element of Graham Henry’s estate, the other parts obviously having gone to Walsh and Glade.

Attached to the logbook was the report of the investigation into the crash, and with my mind already uneasy as a result of the disappearing Collingwood House, it made chilling reading. No mechanical nor electrical fault could be found in the aircraft. The aircraft had been modified to dual controls from its original configuration; all aspects of the modification had been carried out satisfactorily. The pilot had made no discernible attempt to reduce power before ground impact. The weather was fine, with unlimited ceiling and visibility. The crash site was basically level. Post mortem examination of the pilot and passenger indicated no presence of alcohol nor drugs in either body. The pilot’s body showed no sign of heart disease nor similar health problem which might have triggered a sudden collapse.

At that point the investigators had clearly given up, even though the report ran to several more pages. On the face of it, a young, fit, highly experienced and highly competent pilot had flown into the ground in perfect flying conditions. No crash into a fog-bound hillside or anything like that. So, why?

I turned to another document, which turned out to be the aircraft maintenance log book. The Proctor had been regularly looked after in full compliance with the manufacturer’s specifications. Its last 100 hour overhaul had been only two weeks, and under three hours flying time, before the crash.

There was a second aircraft log. Not unusual for shared aircraft, this one showed the various flights made by the three owners, so that they could be sure nobody was getting more than his fair share! The flight immediately prior to the crash had been the previous day, with David Walsh at the controls and, interestingly, John Glade along as passenger, so Glade was up in Scotland at least for the day previous. The Proctor was a dual control aircraft, so they may well have shared the actual flying, but what significance could there be in that? They had been airborne for only twenty minutes, described as ‘local flying’ – circuits and bumps in all probability. However, Glade’s presence in the aircraft the very day before my grandparents died in it niggled me. The manner of the crash was inexplicable judging by the investigators’ report.

Suppose, just suppose, that Glade had somehow come up with a method to incapacitate Graham Henry? The motive existed – Collingwood House and the money it represented. But what could the method have been?

I went back to the medical part of the report. No alcohol, no drugs. Forensic pathology in 1947 was a lot less advanced than it is today – suppose some substance had been administered which had rendered the pilot unconscious? Could my grandmother have landed the plane (she held a private pilot’s licence, having been

taught by her husband)? Or at least used the radio to call for help? Or could they both have been incapacitated?

I wondered how, or even if, it was possible to find out, and then I had an idea. Whilst I had been in the RAF I had on several occasions met up with my father, and had also met an officer who had been his deputy for a while. John Marriott had ended up as one of the most senior medical men in the RAF, retiring as an Air Commodore. He had come to my father’s funeral which had been only a few weeks before he himself retired. He had given me his address and I still had it in my address book. I knew that he now lived somewhere in Surrey, and I felt that if anyone could advise me on the likelihood of my grandparents being incapacitated during that fatal flight, then he was the man.

I told Sally about him and she immediately suggested that we not only get in touch with him, but try and meet him face to face. A meeting, she said, would surely be much better than trying to explain things over the telephone, and face to face we could also show him the pathology report.

I was at first reluctant to take another long trip down south, but Sally persuaded me, with the result that a few days later I was knocking on the door of a large detached house just outside Dorking.

The door was opened by a pleasant looking woman in her late fifties or early sixties, dressed in a smart skirt and sweater, a single row of pearls at her neck. She greeted us with a smile.

“You must be Alan and Sally – John is in his study, do come through.”

She ushered us past the open door of a large lounge, into a smaller room at the back of the house. As we entered, Marriott rose to greet us. I had only ever seen him in uniform in the past; now dressed in casual slacks and a baggy sweater, both far removed from his wife’s casual elegance, he seemed even bigger than I remembered, towering over the two of us as he waved us into comfortable armchairs.

“Thank you for agreeing to see us, sir. I really am very grateful.”

He waved my thanks aside.

“My pleasure – and the name’s John. We are neither of us in the service any more.

Now, how can I help?”

“Well, as I said on the ’phone, I was going through some old papers of my father’s and of his father and I came across the report on the crash that killed my grandparents back in 1947. I just can’t make sense out of it. It was perfect weather, nothing could be found to be wrong with the aircraft, yet a highly experienced pilot simply crashed into the ground. I suppose it is all academic now, but I really would like to have a better idea of what could have happened.”

I handed him the investigator’s report and he read rapidly thought the salient elements.

“H’mm – I see what you mean. Why on earth should that crash have occurred?

According to these findings, it simply flew gently into the ground, hitting in an almost level attitude. Throttle at cruise setting, no malfunctions, propeller blades crumpled showing that the engine had still been running at impact… I agree with you, on the face of it, no reason for the crash ever to have happened.”

He lifted his eyes from the paper and fixed me with a penetrating gaze. The eyes, deep-set and deep brown, seemed to bore into me.

“Alan, you think something fishy happened, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. OK, I never met Graham Henry, but by all accounts he was a first class pilot. He had his wife in the aircraft with him. I can’t believe that he did anything silly

– an aerobatic manoeuvre that went wrong, for instance. As far as can be ascertained,

he was cruising at about three thousand feet and then simply allowed the aircraft to descend gradually until it hit the ground. Is it possible that he had eaten or drunk something that caused him to pass out?”

“It’s possible. Whether it happened, who can tell after all this time?”

Sally interjected. “But if that had happened, wouldn’t the post mortem have shown it up?”

“Not necessarily. Apart from really virulent episodes – the sort of thing immediately obvious to a pathologist, like food poisoning causing vomiting, or one of the more obvious poisons such as cyanide – there are a lot of substances which could cause you to pass out without leaving obvious traces. A pathologist could find them, but to do so he would have to be looking for them, do you see? Toxicology is a very well developed science now, and given the time, money and inclination, can find even minute traces of almost anything in a body. But it isn’t a case of waving a scientific wand and getting the results just like that – you have to run a number of very specific tests, each searching for different substances. Unless you suspect the presence of something, or have a good reason to exhaust every possibility, many substances will go undiscovered.

“Now, in the case of your grandparents. Firstly, this was a fatal accident investigation.

No question of sabotage to the aircraft. The pilot didn’t have a heart attack or anything like that. The next of kin was an eight year old boy – no family to demand explanations. Pathology in 1947 was less well developed than it is now; toxicology investigations were, comparatively speaking, much more expensive. They were also much more time-consuming with no computers to help out.

“On balance, I think that it is highly probable that your grandparents lost consciousness in that aircraft. They did so gradually – a sudden loss of consciousness would probably have caused the pilot to flop forward, pushing the control column forward and sending the aircraft into a steep dive – which we know didn’t happen.

Now – three ways that could have happened, assuming that some substance was involved. It could have been taken accidentally. It could have been taken deliberately.

It could have been administered by a third party.

“Now, accident. They could have taken some form of soporific by mistake, thinking it was, say, aspirin for a headache – but that requires them both to make the same mistake, as I can not believe that your grandmother would simply have sat there with her husband unconscious and let the aircraft hit the ground. The Proctor had dual controls. She could have taken over and tried to land, but we know that didn’t happen.

Neither of your grandparents were actually holding the control column at the time of the impact – if a pilot is holding the control column when a crash occurs, there will be a quite distinctive pattern of broken bones in his hands and arms. Neither of them had any such injuries.

“Deliberately taking a drug of some sort – unless it was a most bizarre suicide pact –

which I don’t believe – out of the question.

“Finally – administration by a third party. To be honest, this seems the most likely.

But by whom? And why?”

I hadn’t told him about the Collingwood House mystery, nor of my strange inheritance. He continued.

“Third party – in other words, murder. Who stood to gain? What happened to his money – for I assume that he was a fairly wealthy man?”

“With his wife dead, his will left everything to my father. Dad was cared for by a distant relative who didn’t gain in the matter – on the contrary, when his guardian died, dad inherited all his estate – and he was also quite well off.”

“Business partners? What did your grandfather actually do, by the way?”

“After he left the Air Force he went back to Scotland and bought a small estate. He was living the life of a country gentleman; no business partners, and when he died the estate was sold. Nobody apart from my father benefited from his will.”

Which was perfectly true, but I was concealing the fact that two men had very much benefited from Graham Henry’s death.

“So how could it have been done?”

“Well, back then, the most common sleeping tablet was phenobarbital. GPs prescribed it fairly routinely, so just about anyone could have got hold of it. I suppose the easiest way to administer it to someone without their knowledge would be to put it into a fairly strong tasting drink – strong black coffee, sweet tea – that sort of thing.

Depending on the amount administered, it could take as little as perhaps an hour to induce unconsciousness. Too strong a dose would be fatal – the Nazis used high dosages of phenobarbital to kill off people of whom they disapproved in the early days of the concentration camps – before they perfected mass murder with gas ovens.”

That was about as far as we could take things. John was intrigued about the mystery and made me promise to let him know if I found out anything further, and we drove away in ruminative mood.

We had come down in the van to avoid having to book into a hotel anywhere and drove as far as the Birmingham area that day before stopping in a lay–by off a small lane for the night. As we lay in bed, Sally voiced a thought which had been in my mind as well.

“I wonder if it would be possible to discover if Glade was at the airfield the day of the crash?”

“I don’t see how – after all it was sixty years ago. I can’t imagine that there would be any record.”

“That airfield is quite near to us, isn’t it?”

I picked up on the ‘us’ with pleasure, but answered factually.

“Yes, under ten miles away. I actually go there quite a bit.”

“Oh, I hadn’t realised.”

“Yes, I still keep up my PPL..”

“PPL?”

“Private Pilot’s Licence. To keep it current you have to have a medical every couple of years and fly a minimum of two hours and have a check out every year. I actually own an aircrat which I keep there andd I go down for an hour or two every now and then.”

“I’m learning more about you all the time – I didn’t realise that you still flew. Would you take me up sometime? I’ve never flown in anything other than an airliner.”

“OK, you’re on. How would sometime soon after we get back suit you?”

“Lovely – and we can dig around to see if there is any way of finding out if Glade was there at the same time.”

Chapter 11

We took a couple of days over our return – with Sally as a passenger I found it very easy to get distracted from mundane matters like travelling just to get somewhere, and the weather was foul when we did get back, so it was just on a week before we got to the flying club. As my own aircraft, a Chipmunk, was in dock for its annual overhaul, I had arranged to hire a small Cessna – the ‘Fiesta of the Skies’ as one of the lads put

it – and spent an enjoyable couple of hours cruising up along the west coast to Aberdeen and then a swing inland to return, taking in an over-view of the Grampians on the way, a sight which never fails to stir me.

Sally enjoyed the experience and was quite disappointed when we finally landed and returned to the club house for a cup of tea.

As we were drinking a club member I knew fairly well wandered in. Johnnie McAvoy was, like myself, ex-RAF, although a good ten years or so older and our paths had never crossed in the service.

“Alan, how are you? Not seen you here in ages – and who is your lovely friend?”

“Nice to see you Johnnie – how’s the wife? Johnnie, meet Sally Hammond.”

“Delighted, Sally – I hope that you haven’t allowed this fellow to tell you that he actually knows one end of an aeroplane from another?”

Sally grinned back at him – he had that effect on just about everyone he met, male or female – and replied. “We’ve just landed from a lovely tour of the area. Alan hardly made any mistakes – more than once!”

Johnnie laughed and sat with us, nursing a large mug of tea, a mug emblazoned with the RAF crest on one side and ‘Johnnie’s Jug’ on the other.

“Johnnie, now that you are here, do you know if the club keeps its old visitors’

books?”

“No idea, old boy – but Charlie Ross is bound to know.”

I turned to Sally. “Charlie is the club secretary – been here ages.” I turned back to Johnnie. “Do you know if he is likely to be in today?”

“Sorry, can’t say that I do. Look, I must be off – I want to practice a bit in the Pitts.”

And with that he was off. Sally turned a puzzled face to me.

“What does he mean, practice in the pits?”

“Pitts, double ‘t’ not pits with one ‘t’ – it’s an aerobatic aircraft, a little biplane.

Johnnie owns a half share in it and he is a pretty good aerobatic pilot – enters a few competitions, that sort of thing. If he had the time to practice more he might well be good enough to make the British team, but he’s a busy man. Not content with a wife and five children, he runs a chicken farm up Dundee way, which is a pretty full-time occupation.”

We hung around for an hour or so, but there was no sign of Charlie Ross, so I phoned him that evening. He was surprised at the query, but confirmed that the old visitors’

books were still in existence. I explained that I was trying to understand a bit more about my grandfather’s crash after finding some papers about it in my mother’s house down south. I realised, I said, that it was an awfully long time ago, but I was wondering if there was any record in the book about what had happened that day.

“Well, the books won’t tell you anything about that, I’m afraid, Alan. They just show who visited and which member signed them in. It was well before my time, of course, but why don’t you talk to old Walsh about it?”

“Walsh – do you mean David Walsh who had a share in the Proctor?”

“That’s the fellow – he’s still a member, although as he is getting on a bit he hasn’t flown for some years now.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“In Dundee somewhere – lived in the city all his life. He’s got a big house out near Mains Castle, although I do believe that he is thinking of selling it and getting somewhere smaller – his wife died last year and I think he rattles around a bit in it.”

“He must be pretty old, mustn’t he?”

“Well, let’s say he’s even older that I am!”

* * * * *

After telephoning and receiving an invitation to visit, Sally and I arrived at David Wash’s house the next afternoon. Walsh proved to be a small, alert man smartly dressed in slacks and sweater, who welcomed us into his house and provided tea and biscuits. As we sat back, I studied him. He must, I knew, be in his eighties, but he still had a shock of white hair and his face, whilst naturally lined, could well have belonged to a man ten, even twenty, years younger. He returned my gaze with equal interest.

“So you’re Graham’s grandson. Such a shame, that accident. What would you like to know about it?”

“Well, Mr. Walsh, I was going through some old papers for my mother when I came across the accident investigation report. I’d always known how my grandparents died, of course, but I’d never known them and I never felt that I needed to know any details. Now that I have read the report, it all seems so strange – an experienced pilot flying in perfect weather, simply flies into the ground. It seems so odd, so anything I can learn about it might set my mind at rest over it.”

“Well, firstly – you know that I was a part owner of the aircraft?”

“Yes, I understand that you, my grandfather, and John Glade each owned a third.”

“That’s right, although it was actually my father who paid for my share. I was twenty, very keen on flying, but the RAF turned me down – my eyesight wasn’t good enough to be a service pilot. It was, however, good enough for civil flying and I learned to fly privately. My father paid for a share in the Proctor for me as a present for my twentieth birthday.”

“I don’t suppose you know why my grandfather sold shares in it, do you? He was quite well off, so it seemed a bit strange.”

“Your grandfather was a very generous man – but he didn’t like to flaunt the fact.

Probably nobody now associated with the flying club knows that he actually paid for much of the clubhouse refurbishment immediately after the war – it was just an empty shell, but Graham and a couple of other members did some of the work themselves, and what they couldn’t cope with, Graham paid to have done professionally – wiring and plumbing, that sort of thing. I was mad keen on flying and the Proctor was probably the best aircraft on the field, so Graham took me up in it several times. He saw how much I enjoyed it, and offered my father the chance to buy into it at what, I am sure, was actually a very bargain basement price.”

He stopped and leant back in the chair. “You know, I can visualise that aircraft even now. Graham bought her in a sale of surplus RAF aircraft – a lot of aircraft were sold off by the force after the war – and had her completely overhauled. She had been used as a communications aircraft, ferrying RAF people around all over the country, and was pretty scruffy in consequence. He had the camouflage paint stripped off and had her repainted in silver and royal blue. The RAF seats were taken out and replaced with leather seats that would not have been out of place in a Rolls Royce, and he had dual controls installed. I’ve a picture of her here.”

He rose from the chair and crossed to the sideboard, upon which lay a rather battered photograph album. He opened it and handed it across before resuming his seat.

I found myself looking at a black and white print about eight inches by six, clearly taken by a competent photographer, for the detail was pin sharp. It showed the aircraft and, standing in front of it, three men. One was clearly Graham Henry, a second, considerably younger than the other two, was presumably our host. However, it was the third man who most aroused my interest. A bit above average height and stockily built, he was dressed in a business suit, contrasting with the overalls worn by the other

two. His dark hair was parted in the middle in a very 1940s style, and he stared into the camera with an air almost of belligerence. Was this John Glade? Was this the murderer of my grandparents?

“Who is the third man – is that John Glade?”

“Yes it is. The refitting of the aircraft had just been completed and John was up on a visit to Graham. In fact it was just then that John bought into the aircraft.”

“I don’t understand that, you know. He was based in London; why would he want a share in an aircraft in Scotland?”

“Graham suggested it to him – it was a bit of a fiddle, really. John was a member of a flying club in Surrey – based in Redhill, I think. The club allowed its own members’

aircraft to use the field without paying landing fees, but they charged fees to any other aircraft that landed there. John was a bit hard up at the time, and he wanted to keep his hand in as a pilot, so Graham suggested that he bought a share of the aircraft and that when he, Graham, needed to go down to London, he and John would fly down in the Proctor and land at Redhill. At the time Graham was interested in buying some properties in London with a view to renovating them and renting them out. After the war there was a crying need in London for housing, so much had been destroyed or damaged in the bombing and Graham saw an opportunity there. As John was already in practice in London, he intended dealing through him in the legalities of everything.”

“But why the aircraft, anyway?”

“I know it seems hard to believe now, but back then a lot of people, myself included, thought that the enormous strides aviation had made in the war would result in air travel becoming the dominant form of getting from A to B for any lengthy journey.

Don’t forget that at the time there was an enormous number of redundant RAF and USAAF bases all over the country and there were no motorways. A lot of ex-RAF

machines were sold off cheaply, and finally, there was nothing like the current level of red tape attached to it all. Graham had several times flown down to Redhill from up here to meet up with John. Sometimes they had flown back together. The Proctor didn’t quite have the range to make the trip in one hop safely, but even stopping to refuel around Manchester still meant that it was a lot quicker than the train – and on the roads and with the cars of the 1940s going by road offered absolutely no comparison.”

His words came as something of a shock; until then I hadn’t given a thought to just how convenient air travel on such a basis must have been. Walsh was speaking again and I concentrated on his words.

“The dream died, of course. It got much more expensive, much more hemmed in with red tape. The airfields got built over, commercial aviation became based on moving large numbers of people at a time – but the dream was good whilst it lasted. Only a couple of weeks before the crash I took my girlfriend away to Cornwall for the weekend, then whilst we there, we decided to pop over to France – just like that.

Imagine trying to do that today.”

“What actually happened on the day of the crash, Mr. Walsh? Do you know?”

“Of course. I was there that day and as you can imagine, I will never forget it. John and I had flown the Proctor the previous day, just a bit of local flying, and Graham wanted to fly it the next day to go up north to overfly some land around Inverness that he was thinking of buying.”

This was news to me; up until that moment I had assumed that the flight was just a bit of aerial sight-seeing.

“Do you know where the land was?”

“Not exactly – just that it was out beyond Culloden Moor somewhere.”

“That’s odd – they came down nowhere near Culloden.”

“That’s right – they crashed about twenty miles north-east of Arbroath in the Howe of the Mearns area. It’s pretty flat around there – well, compared to much of the country up there it is, and I wondered if they were trying to make it to Edzell – it’s long been disused now, but in those days there was an airfield there. From the crash site it looked as thought they could have been headed that way.”

“But that means that they were well south of their intended destination and heading south, going further away from it.”

Walsh shrugged. “I know, but what can one say? Perhaps one or both of them felt unwell and they turned back – or perhaps they just changed their minds for some reason. When we heard about it, John and I were totally mystified.”

“When do you hear?”

“Almost straight away. The crash was only a mile or so from houses so the police and the ambulance were there very quickly. The aircraft’s registration told the police where the Proctor was based, so they phoned through to check. The club steward took the call – nice chap he was, very friendly, and he was really upset – he’d seen us all drinking coffee less than two hours earlier and now Graham and Fiona were dead. We couldn’t believe it either. John had been going to stay with them again that night, of course, and he ended up coming back home with me.”

“Oh, you were still in the clubhouse?”

“Oh yes. John was waiting for Graham and Fiona to return, and I was hoping to cadge a flight with one of the other members in his Tiger Moth, but he was held up and hadn’t arrived. John was very lucky, of course.”

“Lucky? Why?”

“Well the Proctor was a four seater and Graham offered to take him on the trip. It wasn’t anything to do with the possible land purchase – John only dealt with Graham’s legal work down in London, he used somebody local for stuff up here.”

“That really was lucky. Do you know why he declined the offer?”

“He said that he had a bit of an upset stomach and didn’t want to risk being caught short in the air. I remember Fiona said that it must be the club coffee, because it seemed to get worse every time she drank it.”

Was to that simple? Something in the coffee?

“It must have improved over the years – we had some yesterday!”

“Well, I was a bit surprised myself, because mine tasted fine. John apologised – after all he had made it at the bar whilst the steward was serving somebody else.”

To my mind, the mystery of the crash was solved. Glade had made the coffee for all four of them – and put something into the cups of Graham and Fiona. I couldn’t do anything about it – he was long dead – but I could perhaps try and do something about the way that the Forbes’ family had benefited from murder.

Walsh was talking again. “It was such a shame – two really nice people and a fine aircraft – and nobody knows why it happened.”

“Yes, it really is so sad. Tell me, Mr. Walsh, do you still fly?”

“’Fraid not – the doc told me I had to give up about five years ago. I miss it, you know. It wasn’t too bad whilst Alice was alive, but now that she is gone..” he hesitated, then resumed “still, that’s that – can’t burden you two young people with my story.”

I glanced quickly at Sally and she clearly read my mind and agreed with what I was about to suggest.

“Mr. Walsh, I don’t know if you know, but I have an aircraft at Perth – a Chipmunk.

It’s just had its annual overhaul, so I was intending to give it an air test tomorrow – I wonder if you would care to come along as well?”

“Are you sure? If so, I would be delighted – haven’t been up in a Chippie since – oh, heaven alone knows when. You are sure though? I’m not current, of course.”

“I’m very sure – I’d be delighted to have you along if it doesn’t interfere with anything you might have planned?”

“My dear chap, my plans at the moment begin and end with what might or might not be on the TV.”

“That’s grand then – suppose I pick you up around ten tomorrow? Would that be OK?”

“Absolutely – I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to it.”

“Until tomorrow, then.”

The next day, as promised, I picked Walsh up from his house and drove the three of us to the airfield. The air test was a formality; everything was fine with the little aircraft and, much to his delight, I handed over the controls to Walsh for most of the time.

We landed, met up with Sally again, and after a cup of tea I drove back to Walsh’s house. Once we had seen him inside, I turned the Mondeo’s nose back to home for lunch.

During the afternoon I once again turned matters over in my mind, and once again fruitlessly. I could prove that Collingwood House had effectively been stolen, but then what? The two men responsible for the crime were dead. One of them had left no family behind. The other had set up a prosperous business. Would the law take the view that I was entitled to some of that business? Even if it did, what would I then do?

I would have earned the enmity of the existing owners, people who had already practiced violence against me and got away with it. I could scarcely expect any cooperation from them, and any attempt to claim anything from them would surely have to go to the courts – and probably cost a fortune and take years to sort out. And then what? I was already reasonably well off, despite the cost of my divorce from Hazel. The jewellery I had inherited from Graham Henry was a very pleasant extra. I had enough money for my foreseeable needs, so was there any point in pursuing the matter? It was just the injustice of it which rankled so. My grandfather, no matter what one thought if how he had come by Collingwood House, had intended to use that inheritance for charitable ends; Glade and Forbes had, I was sure, murdered him and his wife and then robbed him after his death and made themselves very wealthy at the expense of a good cause.

Resolutely, I pushed the problem to the back of my mind. Sally and I talked about it from time to time, but neither of us could come up with any sensible course of action.

That should have been the end of it all, I suppose, but it wasn’t.

Chapter 12

Twenty months had gone by, Sally and I had been married just over a year and she was three months pregnant, a situation which delighted her parents and brother and my mother, but most of all, the two of us.

What I had assumed to be the final act of the mystery had come in an obituary column in the paper. William Richard Forbes had died on the 13th May 2009. The obituary was quite flattering, relating how he had developed the building firm to an international player, making a fortune for himself and his family in the process. Only sixty-two years of age, he was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Doreen, aged forty-four, and his sons, George Henry, thirty-four, and William John, thirty-three.

And that, I told myself, must surely be that. With now no longer even the son, only the grand-children (and, I understood, a great-grandson) left of the family of the man I was sure had committed murder all those years ago, the matter of the embezzlement of Collingwood House and the murder of my grandparents, had no life left in it –

literally.

But I was wrong.

Sally had driven into Perth to do some shopping, get her hair done, and meet up with a couple of girl-friends, so I wasn’t perturbed when she was still out at eight o’clock.

In June in north Perthshire it stays light until eleven or so, so it wasn’t as though she would be driving back in the dark.

It was therefore without an inkling of the nightmare which was about to envelop me that I answered the phone when it rang.

A man spoke; a man with a flat, characterless voice.

“Mr. Alan Richards?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Please listen carefully, Mr. Richards. I think that you will recognise the voice you are about to hear.”

There was a brief silence, and then Sally’s voice came on the phone, but in a tone I had never heard before, clearly terrified.

“Alan, these men, they forced me off the road and say you must do what they tell you.”

She broke off with a sound that was a mixture of a gasp and a sob, and the man came back on the line.

“Yes, Mr. Richards, we have your wife. If you want to ever see her again you will do precisely as I tell you. Do you understand?”

“Who are you? What are you doing to my wife? If you harm her..”

I got no further. There was a shriek of a woman in pain in my ear. The man spoke again.

“Don’t talk, Richards – listen. Listen to me and do as I say. You have a document which I want. You will deliver it to a place of my choosing, at a time of my choosing.

I know it isn’t in your house. Where is it?”

I knew exactly what he wanted – the trust document.

“It is with my solicitor. I can’t get it until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be fine. Get it from him, come home and wait for me to contact you again. Under no circumstances are you to get in touch with the police. If you do so, or if you fail to do precisely as say, your wife will simply disappear. You will never know what happened to her, only that you will never see her again. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, I understand,” I replied dully. At that point the phone went dead.

For several minutes I remained seated, the handset still clutched in my hand. What was I to do? If it bought Sally’s freedom then I would give up the document without a moment’s hesitation. But would it? Could I trust them to give her back?

I got unsteadily to my feet and wandered around the room, totally at a loss as what was the best course of action to follow. I had been told not to contact the police.

Doubtless standard procedure for kidnappers, but if I did so by telephone, how could they know that I had? The worry would be if they were watching the house, or if they would somehow follow me. If they were true to the threat that had been made, the moment I approached the police, or the police approached me, I would be signing Sally’s death warrant.

Obviously, the most important thing at the moment was to get the document on the morrow; however, I decided that it was not the first thing that I needed to do.

When my grandfather had flown on operations over Occupied Europe, one of the pieces of equipment which had always been with him was a service revolver. When he had left the RAF he had somehow, quite illegally, retained the weapon as a souvenir. At the time I doubt that my grandmother had known and obviously my own father, just a child at the time, would not have been privy to the fact. After the deaths of my grandparents, it had lain undiscovered in an old tin trunk and it wasn’t until my father died in 1999 that it had once more come to light. My mother had asked me to go through some of the ‘old junk’ in the attic of their house, and in the process I had, to my astonishment, discovered the gun.

It was one of the standard British service sidearms from World War Two – an Enfield No. 2 six shot revolver of 0.38” calibre. Big and heavy, it was a frightening looking device and I was in a quandary as to what to do with it. There was already at that time a total ban, backed by a mandatory jail sentence, for private citizens owning handguns. To admit to its existence to the police would place my mother in a very difficult position; to claim, however, truthfully, that she had no knowledge of its existence, might very well not be believed.

In the event, I did not tell her of my discovery, but that left me with the question of what to do with it. I could not take it home; the thought of Hazel or the children coming across it was absolutely out of the question. Harry was just eight years of age, Sue only seven.

At the time we were still married, still living near Leuchars where my squadron was based, but we had already bought my present house. It had been very cheap because it needed a lot of work and I had put that work in hand a little at a time, doing some things myself, having others done for me. By 1999 it was well on the way to completion and a far cry from its state as bought, but there were still things to be done. One of those things was completing the garage, which had open rafters, by now partially closed in. In the roof space I had created a small boxed in area and in it I had hidden my grandfather’s pistol. For some reason that, even now, I cannot explain to myself, I had left a discrete hatch to the area, only accessible by ladder, and even then not obviously able to be opened – unless you knew how I had constructed it.

I went through to the garage, propped a ladder up against the wall so that I could reach my hatch, and climbed up. Opening the hatch there was the usual accumulation of cobwebs – what do spiders live on in such places? – but the plastic box in which I had placed grandfather’s pistol was clearly in pristine condition, so I pulled it out and carried it back to the kitchen.

I opened the box and the Enfield was just as I remembered it; squat, black and ugly.

There had been ammunition with it – after all, had there not been I wouldn’t have bothered with it – and that was still nestling in its cardboard box. Twenty four rounds of Government issue 0.38 pistol ammunition; twenty four small brass cylinders tipped

with cupro-nickel coated lead bullets. Twenty four potential causes of death and destruction.

But would it still work? It was, after all, over fifty, no, over sixty, years old. If it didn’t work, again the weapon was useless – just a lump of metallic junk.

First things first. I carefully disassembled the pistol, oiling everything capable of being oiled and checking that the mechanism still worked. It did.

But would the ammunition? This was the countryside. A shot, heard in the distance, would cause no surprise. I took two rounds out of the cardboard, selecting them at random, and loaded them into the revolver, then carried it into the garage again.

I hunted around for a suitable bullet stop, and eventually came up with a cardboard box which I filled with sand from the two fire buckets I always had close to hand.

Whilst in the RAF I had been trained to use the then current sidearm, the Browning 9mm pistol, slimmer, lighter and far more sophisticated than the near-vintage artefact I was now handling, and it was with my earlier training in mind that I gently squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed more firmly and this time the revolver fired. In the brick and concrete garage the noise was appalling. The cardboard box jumped in the air; only the fact that I had placed it right against the garage wall prevented it, and its contents, from going all over the place. This time, prepared for the noise, I fired again with the same result.

I went over to the box; to my surprise the sand had failed to stop totally the two bullets. They had passed right through with still enough energy to gouge two small craters in the brick wall. Clearly the ancient revolver still possessed a formidable punch. On the other hand, the very heavy trigger pull meant that I doubted that I could expect any high degree of accuracy. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and there was just a chance that this further legacy from my grandfather might come in useful.

I wondered how I was going to carry it whilst keeping it out of sight; it was quite a formidable lump of metal to try and hide away. Finally, I settled for pushing it into my belt at the back and covering it from sight by a loose jacket over a loose shirt.

* * * * *

The next morning, after phoning ahead to warn them, I called at my solicitors’

offices and retrieved the trust document, wishing with all my heart that I had never seen the wretched thing, never approached the Forbes, never heard of Collingwood House. Pointless: no good crying over spilt milk.

Less than fifteen minutes after I returned home the telephone rang, strengthening my suspicion that the house was being watched to a certainty.

I picked it up.

“I see that you have the document, Richards. Now listen carefully. Place it in a large brown envelope and seal it.”

“I don’t have a big enough envelope in the house, not of any colour – it’s a bulky document.”

In truth I probably could find such an envelope, but I wanted to deprive the caller of the assumption of absolute control over me. If he had to change plans, even only minutely, it might be to my advantage – and Sally’s.

There was an irritated drawing in of breath at the other end of the line.

“Very well – what do you have that you can wrap it in?”

“We’ve got some Christmas wrapping paper left over – will that do?”

“Yes – describe it.”

“Hang on – I’ll have to get it.”

I put down the phone, and waited several minutes. I could imagine the man at the other end beginning to wonder if perhaps I had, after all, contacted the police and that they were at that very moment tracing his call, so I didn’t dare wait too long in case he panicked.

The paper had, in fact, been in the desk within two feet of me, so I got it out and picked up the phone again.

“I’ve got it now – it’s basically a mid green colour with pictures of Christmas puddings and snowmen on it.”

“Right. Wrap the document in it. When you have done that, go into your front garden. Beside the white rose bush you will find a plastic bag containing a mobile phone. Switch it on and wait.”

The phone went dead.

I replaced the handset and went out into the garden. Sure enough, beside the rose bush – which Sally had planted when we married – was a small clear plastic bag with a phone inside it. I went back into the house, removed it and switched in on, examining it as I did so. There was nothing in the slightest unusual about it – just a perfectly normal pay-as-you-go mobile like millions of others. I switched it on; it was fully charged.

And for most of the rest of that day I waited for it to ring. The intention was obvious; they wanted the waiting to prey on my nerves, to reduce me to a nervous wreck. I was determined that they would not succeed. One of the aspects of training that I had received in the RAF had been how to cope as best as one could with imprisonment and interrogation.

It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening when the phone finally rang. I snatched it up doing my best to give the impression that their assault upon my nervous state was succeeding.

“Yes?”

“Listen to me again, Richards. Get in your car and drive to Blairgowrie. Once there, take the A926 to Kirriemuir. Park as near as you can to the High Street – it doesn’t matter where – and wait in your car.”

The phone went dead again.

I was being sent on a journey of about twenty five miles. By the time I reached Kirriemuir it would be half past nine or a bit later – but this was June – up here it would still be full daylight.

Sure enough, it was nearly twenty to ten before I managed to park in Bank Street, just off the High Street. I switched off the engine and waited. Nearly twenty minutes passed. The phone rang and I answered at once, doing my best to give an impression of a man panicking.

“I’m here – what now?”

“Calm down, Richards. The next step is vital if you want to see your wife ever again.”

“I’m listening – tell me what to do.”

“For a start – shut up and listen. In a moment you are going to get out of your car, with the package, and walk to the High Street. When you get there, walk to where it meets with Glengate and Roods. You will see a newsagents there. Walk down Glengate until you get to Tannage Brae – walk down there to the car park and wait.

Have you got all that?”

“Yes, yes – what do I do then?”

“I told you – wait.”

The phone went dead again.

I got out of my car and started walking. The route that I had been ordered to take covered perhaps three quarters of a mile and by the time I got to the car park it was past ten o’clock – but still light enough to see – there was a clear sky and darkness would not fall for more than another hour.

As I reached the entrance to the car park the phone rang again. I stopped, fished it out of my pocket, and answered it. The voice spoke immediately.

“Don’t move. Look around you. In front of you there are some public toilets – do you see them?”

“Yes – I can see them.”

“Good. By the entrance to the gents there is a rubbish bin. See that?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Lay the package down beside it so that it cannot be seen from the road, turn around and walk back to your car. Walk fast, don’t look back. When you get to your car drive home and wait. When you are there I will tell you what to do next.”

“But what about my wife? Where is she?”

“Just do as you are told and you will have her back soon. Disobey what I have told you and you will never see her again.”

I looked around the car park. At this time of the evening it was almost deserted, just half a dozen or so cars parked at random. All, as far as I could see, were empty. In the far corner of the park there was a decrepit Ford Transit. Sixty yards or so away, it looked empty but it was always possible that there was somebody in the body of the van, watching me. Surely my tormentor must be in visual contact? He would not dare leave that package in full view of anyone going to the toilet block.

For a moment – but only for a moment – I was tempted to go across to the van and see if anyone was in it and watching me, but immediately decided against such a move. Instead I did precisely as I was bid. As I did so I discovered that the location chosen for the package wasn’t quite as fraught as it had seemed – the toilets were closed due to vandalism, and where I left it, the package was not only hidden from the road but from the parked cars as well.

I strode back to the car, anxious to get home as quickly as possible.

Never had a twenty five mile drive seems so long, but at last I turned off our lane though the gates. As the wheels crunched on the gravel, the headlights swept across the front door; there was a figure huddle against it. I slammed on the brakes, leapt from the car and rushed over. It was Sally and she was unconscious.

I picked her up and hurried into the house with her, into the living room where I laid her on the settee. She felt cold to the touch, and for an awful, heart-stopping moment I thought that she must be dead, but I could see that she was, in fact, definitely breathing, although rapidly and shallowly. I piled blankets on her, turned on the gas fired imitation log burner and, pausing only to secrete grandfather’s pistol under the settee, dialled 999 for an ambulance.

It was a quiet evening; scarcely ten minutes had elapsed before an emergency ambulance, its blue light flashing, pulled up at our door.

I explained as quickly as I could to the crew that I had returned to find Sally in the state that they could see. Thankfully, they wasted no time in asking questions, but in moments had transferred her to a stretcher, loaded her into their vehicle and were away again, with me in the back of the ambulance with one of the attendants and Sally. She looked awful; her face was almost blue and despite the oxygen mask strapped over nose and mouth, her breathing seemed, if anything, even more rapid and more shallow than before.

The journey, to the A&E department at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital seemed never-ending. The attendant, who named himself as John, was clearly worried about Sally’s condition and had radioed ahead, so we were met at the doors by a doctor and three or four other emergency staff. They whisked Sally away out of sight and I was left to my own devices.

Time dragged whilst I pondered my next step. Now that Sally was back it was obvious that the police would have to be involved and that I would have to tell them everything. The only thing I intended to hold back on was the existence of the jewellery – after all that had happened, the retention of that source of additional income was something to which I felt that we were entitled. That, however, was all for the future. My immediate, and over-riding concern, was with Sally, and it was with a sense of dread that I saw the same doctor approaching me some two hours later.

“Mr. Richards?” I nodded dumbly. “I am Doctor Ross, the Senior Registrar on duty.

What can you tell me about how your wife came to be in such a state? She is suffering from an extremely heavy dose of sedation – in fact she is lucky to be alive.”

“Will she live?”

“Yes, Mr. Richards, I am confident that she will survive, but it will be some time before she is returned to health. We are keeping her here for at least a few days –

she is being transferred to Intensive Care as we speak – but I am most anxious to know what has happened.”

“She was kidnapped. The kidnappers dumped her on our doorstep after I gave them what they wanted.”

He looked at me in amazement; for the first time I looked at him beyond the inevitable white coat and stethoscope. He was perhaps thirty years old, a heavily built man with crinkly black hair cut just long enough to refuse to lie flat, and brown eyes in a lightly tanned face. A square cut face and short blunt fingers on square palms between them gave a combined impression of strength and competence.

“Are the police involved?”

“Not yet – they said they would kill her if I contacted them, but now that she is back I am going to get in touch with them. They will want to talk to her, I’m sure – will that be possible?”

Ross shook his head. “Not at the moment – she is still unconscious and likely to remain so for at least twenty four hours.”

It was the start of the worst time of my life. It took Sally three days to regain full consciousness. On the second of those three days she lost the baby, the result, I was told by Ross’ boss, the A&E consultant surgeon, a Mr. McKay, of the grossly excessive and terribly dangerous dose of barbiturate she had been given.

The police were as helpful as they could be, but Sally was able to tell then very little. She had been driving home and on a deserted stretch of road a Land Rover had started to overtake her then, when it was alongside, the driver had simply turned the wheel and run her off the road. The verge had a hedge at that point and it stopped the Mini in its tracks so forcibly that Sally had been knocked semi-conscious.

The next thing she had known was being tied to a chair in an otherwise empty room.

A large man, wearing a ski mask over his head to conceal his features, had entered.

He told her that he wanted the trust document from me and that if I refused to cooperate he would kill her. The message was delivered in so matter of fact a manner that she totally believed him. He then produced a mobile phone and phoned

me; in the course of the conversation he made her deliver the message that had so horrified me.

After that she had been given an injection and had known nothing more until she woke in hospital more than three days later.

The senior police officer I met, a Detective Inspector O’Donnell, had gone through every element of the case with me. I had explained about grandfather’s legacy and showed him the photocopies that I had made of the trust document. Although he made no comment, I am sure that, like me, he believed the Forbes to be responsible, but proving it would be another matter. They certainly hadn’t carried out the abduction themselves. In answer to my vehement claims that they were to blame, O’Donnell advised me that neither had even been in the country at the time.

George, CEO of Forbes Construction, had been in Paris, combining a business trip with a week-long holiday with his wife. William had been on New York on a purely business trip. To my assertion that they must have had someone do their dirty work for them, O’Donnell had sadly explained that the Crown Prosecution Service would need proof of that, not unsupported allegations. They had been interviewed and had claimed total ignorance of everything connected to the matter. Collingwood House?

Never heard of it. Alan and Sally Richards? Never heard of them. Letter from Alan Richards to their father? Their father never mentioned any such letter and now that he was dead it was impossible to prove such a letter ever existed. Deceit over the sale of Collingwood House? Already said they’d never heard of it and anyway it had happened, if it had happened, many years before they were even born. I don’t know how hard the police tried to establish any possible link between the Forbes brothers and the perpetrators, but however hard it was, it failed.

I felt as though I was trapped in a quagmire; nobody else could possibly have known about the document, nobody else could have any reason to want to acquire it. I no longer cared about having been cheated out of the proceeds of selling Collingwood House. My anger was over what had happened to Sally. I wanted revenge. I wanted to see whoever had done this to her punished. But above all, I wanted her well again.

Her health, both mental and physical, had been dealt a shocking blow by what had been done to her. The hospital gynaecologist had examined her and had told us that it was unlikely that she would be able to have any more children. We had been planning on two, possibly three, so the kidnappers had not only murdered our unborn child, but had denied life to others.

The news had devastated Sally. From an outgoing, bubbly person, always ready to see the good things in life, an irrepressible optimist, she became withdrawn, given to sudden fits of deep depression. She was frightened to leave the house alone and even with me to accompany her, could not wait to get back home. She wouldn’t answer the telephone if it rang, nor answer the door.

After weeks of this, her GP referred her to a psychiatrist and after several sessions the doctor had us both in her consulting room. I looked at her; Dr. Alice Folland was perhaps fifty years old, a plump, short woman with black hair, streaked with grey, pulled back from her face. Dark brown eyes surveyed the world from a chubby face.

All this was immaterial; what mattered was what she was saying to us.

“You see, Mrs. Richards, I feel that you need a total break from your current situation. As a start, a stay here at my clinic for two weeks at least. Then if at all possible, I think that you should get right away from your home environment for at least a month, preferably two. Is that possible?”

We looked at each other. At least my self-employed status meant that there were no difficulties in getting away.

Sally answered hesitantly.

“I suppose so. I could go to my brother on Skye...”

Dr. Folland shook her head.

“No, that will be too familiar a situation. You need to be right away from anywhere you are already used to. Ideally, somewhere like a health spa or a quiet hotel in an unfamiliar part of the country, perhaps even abroad. Could you do that?”

Sally looked at me helplessly; I answered.

“Yes, we could do that. Is there anywhere in particular you would recommend?”

“Well, autumn is just about here. It would help if it was somewhere warm. The last thing you need, Mrs, Richards, is to be stuck indoors watching the rain come down.”

I thought hard, then remembered a former RAF colleague.

“I know somebody who has a small villa in the south of France. It is just outside Saint Laurent d’Aigouze. He lets it out in the high season, stays there himself off season from time to time. If his place isn’t available I’m sure that he would know of somewhere nearby. It’s a small town, only a couple of thousand or so population, set in wine producing country – in fact, Bob’s place is right on the start of miles of vineyards, and it is about fifteen miles from the Mediterranean coast.”

I cast my mind back to Bob Ackroyd. He had been a friend on the squadron. Like me, he had left the RAF in despair of the way things were going and had purchased the property in France as a complete break. I had even visited him and his wife there a few years ago when I had treated myself to a tour of southern France in the motorhome. As I had said, it was perched at the edge of vineyards, where the Rue Robert Florentin left the town and formed a T-junction with the Chemin de Vacaresse. There was a cemetery immediately opposite and I wondered if perhaps that might not be such a good location after all.

In the event, I did not have to worry about the view. Bob had sold the property earlier in the year and now owned two properties, a slightly larger place a few hundred yards along the road and a small flat in the town centre. He was only too happy to offer us the use of the house for a few weeks – he had no bookings until the spring and would see us there as he and his wife were using the flat for another week before returning to the UK for a while. He also promised to introduce us to the couple who would be our next door neighbours. All I had to do was to get us there.

That wasn’t quite as easy as might be. The thought of travelling by commercial airline horrified and frightened Sally – she could no longer cope with crowds, seeing large numbers of strangers as a source of potential danger.

I toyed with the idea of flying us out there in the Chipmunk, but it only had a range of around 250 miles which meant three hops to the south of England and another four or five to the south of France. Each hop would take about two and a half hours, a tiring experience if taken in short order.

The alternative was to go in the campervan, which would take five days, again a tiring experience for Sally.

Then I decided to call in a favour. One of the more prestigious aircraft based at our local field was a Piper Seneca, a twin engine six seat aircraft capable of cruising at 200 mph and with a range of a thousand miles. It was owned by a local business man, David McLean who had earned a sizeable fortune in the building trade and, at the age of fifty, had decided to retire. One of his ambitions had always been to fly; as a young man he had volunteered for the RAF but been turned down as not meeting the very stringent medical requirements for RAF aircrew. The following

years had been simply too busy to allow his ambition to be realised, but once he had retired he decided to realise that ambition at last. He had come along to the club and had tried to learn, but seemed to have little, if any, aptitude. For some reason, he and I had immediately hit it off and I had spent hours coaching him, with the result that he had eventually qualified as a private pilot. Once that had been achieved his confidence – and his ability – had blossomed and he had added qualifications to fly twin engine aircraft to his basic ticket. That had led him to buying the Seneca and a lovely aircraft it was. I had phoned him, explained the position and without hesitation he offered to fly the two of to the south of France as soon as we wished.

He even tried to wave aside my offer to meet the costs involved, but I insisted that I should pay for fuel and landing fees.

As a result, David landed at the small airport at Nimes at just before tea-time the following Saturday. I complimented him an a smooth flight and smooth landing – a trip so smooth that Sally was still dozing in the Seneca’s comfortable deep leather seat as David taxied to the dispersal point and switched off the engines.

True to his word, Bob Ackroyd was there to meet us and ferry us away the twenty miles or so to Saint Laurent d’Aigouze, which proved to be a delightful little town full of light coloured buildings reflecting the afternoon Mediterranean sun.

The villa was all that I could possibly have hoped for. Actually a bungalow, it sprawled behind a tall wall, with a lush lawn in front and a swimming pool at the back. The Mediterranean sun bounced off its glitteringly white walls and red tiled roof; inside, however, it was deliciously cool.

After we had unpacked and got our bearings, Bob took us next door to introduce us to our neighbours. Henri Legrande was a tall, suave man. Dressed in white slacks and shoes, a dark blue blazer, with a red cravat at the open neck of his white shirt, he conveyed an air of Gallic charm from the first instant of meeting him. Deeply tanned, with silver hair and deep blue eyes, he could have been a film star. In fact, he was a recently retired officer of the French air force, the Armee d’Aire. I knew from Bob that Henri had reached the rank of Colonel – the equal of an RAF Group Captain. Twenty years earlier he had led a squadron of French Jaguar ground attack aircraft in the first Gulf War and was delighted to learn that I had also been a participant in that conflict, but we were promptly seized upon by his wife and forbidden to talk shop when she and Sally were present.

Yvonne, like her husband, could only have been French, Small, dark haired and dark eyed, vivacious and immaculately dressed in a white trouser suit, she whisked Sally off to a quick tour of their house whilst Bob, Henri and I enjoyed a glass of crisp white wine.

It was the start of a rather better interlude in our lives. Sally gradually became less tense, less likely to jump out of her skin at the slightest unexpected noise. Even so, she still wouldn’t go out of the house by herself, and I was only too aware that the demons besetting her were still lurking below the surface.

After nearly three months we returned home; David McLean picked us up and flew us home to save Sally the trauma of a commercial flight and when we finally got back to our house I was hopeful that things would eventually get back to normal for us.

Chapter 14

I was wrong. Horribly, totally wrong.

Three weeks had gone by, and although Sally still wouldn’t go out by herself, at least it was reassuring that the return to familiar surroundings had not, as I had feared might be the case, made things any worse.

I had gone into Perth to do some shopping, leaving Sally in the house. On my return, I walked in through the door, calling out to her. Normally she would reply, her voice a little anxious, until she was sure that it was really me and that I was alone.

This time, however, silence. I walked through to the kitchen – and stopped in horror.

Sally was backed into the furthest corner of the room, a look of absolute terror on her face. Held out in front of her she had a carving knife.

I took a pace forward. “Sally, what’s wrong, love?”

I got no further.

“Keep away from me,” she screamed, “who are you?”

I stopped in my tracks, terrified that she might harm herself with the knife, wickedly sharp and with a nine inch blade.

“Sally, love, it’s me. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know you – go away. Come any closer and I swear it – I’ll stab you.”

I took a pace backwards, totally at a loss.

“Go away!” she screamed again.

“Sally, it’s alright – look, I’m going back out of the kitchen.”

I backed slowly out of the room. All the time she kept her gaze fixed on me, the knife held unwaveringly in front of her.

What to do? If I called for an ambulance there was no knowing what the arrival of strangers might cause her to do. I stood irresolute for several minutes, perhaps as many as ten, then I heard a noise in the kitchen as if she had fallen. Very cautiously, I put my head round the door.

She was lying in a heap in the corner. To my intense relief, the knife was on the floor, near to her, but just about out of her immediate reach. I crossed over to her, kicking the knife further away as I did so, and picked her up in my arms.

I carried her into the living room, laid her down on the settee, and dialled her GP. I dismissed the idea of dialling 999 because an ambulance crew might be male and I hoped that she would be less scared of a woman.

Fortunately Fiona Ross, Sally’s GP, was in her surgery and after listening to what I had to say promised to be with us as quickly as possible.

The surgery was only a few minutes’ drive away, so Dr. Ross was in the house before Sally regained consciousness. She was, of course, aware of what had happened to Sally and wasted no time in pointless questions. Instead, after checking her pulse and heartbeat, she sedated her and got on the phone to the psychiatrist, Dr. Alice Folland.

Less than an hour later Sally, still unconscious, was in one of Dr. Folland’s clinic beds and we were going through everything that happened over the last few days, seeking desperately for some explanation to Sally’s behaviour.

“You say that whilst you could see her, she held a rigid pose?”

“Yes – she was backed into the corner – pressed up into it, in fact, with the knife held out in front of her. I didn’t really take it in at the time, but now that I think about it –

the knife didn’t waver in the slightest – almost as though she was like a statue.”

“That is a classic indication of Catatonia – a condition that can result from post traumatic shock. What I can’t understand is why it should happen to Mrs. Richards so long after the event. Something, I feel, must have occurred to actually trigger that attack, something so traumatic to her perception of things that she has effectively retreated from reality as a self-protective mechanism.”

“What will happen? How long will this last?”

“I honestly don’t know, Mr. Richards. Usually the condition is short-lived, but not always.”

“Can you treat it?”

“Benzodiazapine is usually effective, and as soon as the sedative that she has been given has worked its way out of her system, that will be my first course of action.

However, using drugs to alleviate such a condition – and that is all that they do – is not the whole answer. We must find out what actually triggered the attack and find a way of getting your wife to come to terms with whatever it is.”

And that was as far as we were able to get at that stage. When I got home I wracked my brain even more desperately than I had whilst with Dr. Folland, but nothing would come. Sally had been her normal self when she got up: her normal self over breakfast: her normal self when I had left the house. What could have happened in the ensuing two hours to trigger such a disastrous mental collapse? Admittedly, her ‘normal self’

under the present circumstances was far removed from her ‘normal self’ before her abduction, but I felt sure that if there had been anything out of the ordinary to be noticed, then I would surely have noticed it.

I went round the house in a state of confusion – and of extreme concern. I looked at the post – which had not arrived until after I had left – but it was the usual junk mail plus a cheque for a painting that I had done for a local famer of his wife. No explanation there. We were too far out of the village to have the newspaper delivered

– I had brought it in with me – so nothing there that she could seen to upset her. It was now late afternoon and in a fit of despair I flopped down on the settee and turned on the BBC 24 hour news programme. I watched and listened with perhaps ten percent attention, until a name penetrated my near subconscious attention. I turned up the volume and paid more attention.

The item was referring to a local construction project, funded by the Scottish Government, to create, at long last, an improvement to part of the A9, Scotland’s most dangerous road. A particularly notorious section was at last going to be made dual-carriageway. What had caught my attention, however, was the name of the company which had successfully tendered for the work - Forbes Construction. Not only that, but the item included an interview with George Forbes, the CEO. Surely that must have been the trigger? Sally often watched the news on TV – she knew, of course, that I was certain that Forbes and his brother were behind her abduction.

I wasted no time in phoning Dr. Folland and telling her what I surmised. She in turn felt that it was highly likely that the sight of Forbes on the screen had been enough to trigger Sally’s collapse. That, however, was the easy part. As she explained to me, just discovering the trigger was one thing. Bringing Sally to a state where it no longer affected her could well be very much another.

It was the start of a long period of work for Dr. Folland and her staff, work which seemed to stretch on interminably with no sign of success. Sally remained unable to recognise me, or indeed anyone else. Her parents and brother visited frequently, I visited every day, but all to no avail. I spoke at length with Jack Hammond and we jointly railed at the inability of the authorities to touch the Forbes brothers.

My eventual suggestion was born of that frustration.

“You know, Jack, if I thought that I could get away with it, there is nothing that I would wish for more than the opportunity to make those two bastards suffer the way Sally has.”

“Yes, it would be nice, wouldn’t it? Trouble is, if anything happened to either of them, you and I would be immediately suspects.”

The next day, after Jack had left for Skye, I came back, again and again, to what the two of us had said the previous evening. How could I visit vengeance upon the two brothers without making things even worse for Sally by ending up in prison myself as a result?

The thought of incarcerating them somewhere, somewhere which would offer them no hope of escape for an indeterminate time, so that they might have some understanding of the horror that they had inflicted on Sally, filled my mind. But how to achieve it?

A thousand plots, all totally impractical, seethed through my mind. The basics however, were that I couldn’t involve anyone else – the only person I was sure that I could trust in such an undertaking would be Jack, and I had no intention of involving him. So, given that I would have to act alone, how on earth could I hope to abduct two fit young men with families and colleagues forever in attendance, by myself?

It simply wasn’t possible.

From time to time I wondered about the chances of finding the men who had actually carried out Sally’s kidnapping – as it was clear that the brothers themselves had unimpeachable alibis. The only way I could find them was through the brothers – no easier a task than abducting the brothers in the first place.

I even contemplated murdering the two of them. After all, they had caused the death of our unborn child, and made the prospect of any future children improbable, thus denying further life. Wasn’t that as bad as murder? Again, however, the high probability of being caught was a total deterrent.

I visited again the next day, once again suffering the heartache of her not recognising me and, on a whim, dropped in at the flying club instead of going straight back to the empty house.

I took the Chipmunk up for an hour, hoping that the need to concentrate on flying would lift my own depression, but to no avail. The sunlight playing over the Sidlaw hills and sparkling on the waters of the Tay beyond them seemed to accentuate, not relieve, my misery and I landed with a feeling of nothing achieved and nothing likely to be achieved.

As I climbed from the cockpit, I saw that David McLean’s car was parked by the clubhouse and for no better reason than to delay going home, I went inside, to find him sitting in an armchair reading the paper, a cup of coffee at his elbow.

“Alan, nice to see you – how is Sally?”

David was one of the few who knew that she was in hospital and, with a shake of my head, I told him that there was no change. He sympathised deeply, but obviously there was nothing that he could do.

We chatted idly, then I remarked that the paper had contained news of the upgrading of the A9; apparently work was due to start in a few weeks.

David frowned.

“I only wish it wasn’t those Forbes brothers who got the contract.”

I pricked up my ears.

“Oh, why do you say that?”

“They’re a pair of crooks – even worse than their old man.”

“Why do you say that, David?”

“The old man started it – oh, thirty years ago now, I suppose. He was always sailing close to the wind – nobody ever proved anything, but it was generally accepted that

his overseas contracts – which is where he really grew the company – were won on a basis of bribery and intimidation. He made a lot of money from African contracts –

contracts that went to him and, surprise, surprise also saw government ministers entertained and slipped back-handers and labour leaders finding themselves out in the cold – a few were thought to have disappeared altogether. The sons are carrying on the same way. Of course, they have to be more careful in Europe, but even so, I wonder just went on behind the scenes to get that A9 contract.”

This was all very interesting, but I doubted that it was anything that I could use to get back at Sally’s abductors. David, of course, had no idea of their involvement in my affairs, it was pure chance that he had mentioned them, but it was something else to wonder about.

It did, however, make me follow the news of the progress of the road contract and anything else I could glean about Forbes Construction, and eventually, I found something that I could use.

Chapter 15

It was a mundane item in the financial pages, but the name of Forbes was enough to ensure that it caught my attention. The company had successfully tendered for a job in France, a bypass near Saint Laurent d’Aigouze, the town where I had stayed with Sally and where I had fondly imagined that our troubles were behind us. The scheme was to create a bypass for the small town of Marsillargues, only three miles or so from Saint Laurent d’Aigouze. At present the main road, the D34, went through the town centre and a recent increase in heavy traffic was proving a nuisance to the locals.

The scheme was being funded partially by the EU, and there was some local dissatisfaction that it was not going to be undertaken by a French firm, dissatisfaction which had led to some acrimonious local council meetings before the objections had finally been over-ridden. There was a whiff, so far unproven, of scandal about the ease with which some objectors had suddenly come round to favouring the scheme.

To my mind it seemed quite likely that David McLean’s comments about the Forbes sharp practices were being justified.

I wondered if there was any way in which I could take advantage of the situation; on the face of it, it seemed unlikely in the extreme, but what had I to lose?

I made three telephone calls. The first was to Dr. Folland. I had, I explained to her, to go away for a few days if I possibly could, but I was worried about the effect not seeing me might have on Sally. The good doctor assured me that in Sally’s present state she was almost certain to be unaware of my absence.

With that most important hurdle cleared, my second call was to Henri Legrande, who had been so agreeable a neighbour during our stay in France. I had been enormously impressed by the retired colonel and had kept in touch with him. As a result, he was already aware of what had happened to Sally, and when I told him that I was trying to come up with something which might in some small way alleviate her troubled mind, I received an instant invitation to stay with him and Yvonne.

The third call was also to a number in France.

So it was that five days later I landed the Chipmunk at Nimes airport, where Henri met me in his car and took me to his home. The journey had been uneventful, although the Chipmunk’s limited range had meant it had meant that it had had to be done in five stages and I was pretty tired by the time we met.

What I kept from my host was the fact that my five stage journey had in actual fact been six stages. Whilst Sally and I had been staying in Saint Laurent d’Aigouze, Henri had mentioned that one of the local vine growers had a microlight which he kept on his land and we had met him over drinks organised by Yvonne for us to meet some of the neighbours. Jacques Skrela was, like Henri and myself, a former military pilot; he had inherited the vineyard on the unexpected death of his elder brother only a couple of years before. Jacques was on the verge of retiring from the air force anyway, so settled quite smoothly into his new role. He retained his love of flying, however, and the little microlight was, he enthusiastically declared, the nearest thing to being a bird that one could imagine. He had even let me have a flight in it, and I had to agree that it was a very different, and much more basic, form of flight even compared to the Chipmunk, let alone a Tornado.

I had realised whilst thinking things over, that Jacques’ little airstrip was just big enough for the Chipmunk to land and take off and, without informing air traffic control, I had made a five minute stop-over there before finally landing at Nimes.

The next day I drove a hired car to meet up with Jacques and retrieve the package that I had entrusted to him, a package I had no wish to allow to be seen by the prying eyes of customs officers. The contents were highly illegal for a visiting Brit to possess.

In 1989 my squadron had played host to a couple of foreign pilots for an exchange visit for a couple of our own pilots. Henrik Croeze and Nils Berger were South Africans and fine pilots both. Their visit was a resounding success and at its end there had been a party to remember in the Mess. So good had been the party that they both departed the next morning without a fair amount of their kit, and I was deputed to sort it out and send it on to them. Amongst the items were a handful of aviation magazines, clearly well read from the dog-eared pages; it seemed pointless to send them on and I kept them to peruse myself. One way and another, it was nearly a year before I got round to reading them and there, tucked into one of them, was Henrik’s passport. I put it to one side, intending to send it on to him, but a few days later we were sent to the Gulf as part of Desert Storm and all thoughts of Henrik’s passport slipped my mind. Almost as soon as I returned Hazel and I were married and in the inevitable life changes that event brought about, I completely forgot the passport.

I only rediscovered it after Hazel and I divorced in 2003 and by that time there was no point in sending it back: It was many years out of date and if Henrik had ever needed it, I was sure that I would have heard.

Why I kept it, instead of simply throwing it out, I have no idea, but ever since then it had languished at the bottom a drawer in my bureau. Now, however, it had come in useful. Henrik and I were of an age – he was actually two years older – and similar in build and colouring, although fortuitously his photograph in the passport looked a good bit older than either of us had been back in 1989. Some very careful work with scalpel and ink changed the expiry date on the passport so that it now appeared to be in date. The alterations would never have passed the scrutiny of a suspicious customs officer, but that was not my intent.

It is wonderful what you can find on the internet – another document in my package was, ostensibly, a South African driving licence. This was a complete fabrication; again, it would not have deceived a South African policeman, but there were no such characters in the small French provincial towns in which I was operating.

The documents were needed because I wanted to someone other than Alan Richards at some point, because Alan Richards had a clear link to the Forbes brothers. Henrik Croeze did not.

The final item in the package was hopefully unnecessary, just a sop to my paranoia. It was my grandfather’s revolver together with twenty two rounds of ammunition for it.

Jacques was no fool; he knew full well that the package I had dropped off with him was something I could not afford to let French officialdom know about, but, like Henri, he had met and liked Sally and seethed over the injustice of being able to do nothing to bring her abductors to book. In consequence, he had not hesitated to agree to keep my package until I called for it.

He handed the package to me without demur, although I had no doubt that he would have loved to know what was in it and what I intended to do with its contents and I explained a little of my plan to him, the upshot of which was that he drove me to the nearby slightly larger town of Lunel, about ten miles from Saint Laurent d’Aigouze, where I hired a car in the name of Henrik Croeze. We then returned in convoy to his place where I left the newly hired vehicle and returned to Henri’s in the car I had hired in my own name.

I had already explained to Henri and Yvonne that I was going to spend a few days touring round the area looking for some sort of evidence that I could use against the Forbes, and I drove off the next morning with their best wishes. I drove to Jacques’

where I swapped cars and drove away, this time to Marsillargues where, in my Henrik Croeze persona, I booked into the small Hotle L’Eden in the narrow Rue Blanqui.

Once established, I reviewed what I knew and what I hoped to find out. There was a good reason for my taking five days between phoning Dr. Folland and arriving in France. The time had been spent in hours of research on the internet, looking into everything that might have the slightest relevance to the Forbes brothers and their company, and also into their Marsillargues project. The community website for the town and the on-line copies of the two local papers had been thoroughly scoured, and one thing had leapt out at me. The tenders for the project had been analysed by the appropriate local government department – roughly the equivalent of a county engineer’s department in Britain – and the Forbes bid had been recommended to the full council. That was where the arguing had started, with local noses put out of joint at the prospect of the job being awarded to a British company. Eventually the protests had been overcome on the strictly utilitarian grounds that the Forbes bid was the cheapest and it had been accepted.

However, the wrangling wasn’t what interested me. What had caught my eye was an apparently unconnected occurrence some weeks before the bid was presented to the council. A local Marsillargues girl had gone missing and there had been considerable concern for her safety. Happily, she had turned up five days later, alive and well, with a tale of teenage tantrums and staying with friends to teach her parents a lesson. The girl was fifteen, her name Marie-Jo Rive. Her father was a local government official, a senior member of the engineer’s department. More digging revealed that he had been in charge of the tender analysis for the by-pass scheme.

This, I felt, was no coincidence. Given my own experience of the Forbes, and Davis McLean’s comments about the company’s business methods, I smelt a rat – a very large rat.

My digging had also brought up another interesting fact. By the standards of Forbes Construction, the Marsillargues scheme was of only middling size, if indeed it was even that. However, only a few miles away from Marsillargues ran the A9 motorway and there was a very major upgrade planned. Given that Forbes Construction already had an entree to the area, they might be well placed to bid for that scheme as well.

It was at that stage that I decided to visit the Rive family and try and find out just what lay behind their daughter’s short term disappearance. I had no idea what, if

anything, I might find out, but I had no wish for any discussion I had with them to lead back to me, hence the impersonation of Henrik.

So it was, that after leaving my things in my hotel room, I drove to the outskirts of town, to the Rue Mozart, where the Rive family lived in an attractive two story villa set behind an enclosing four foot high wall, the house’s white walls dazzling in the sunlight, the blue painted shutters and the windows behind them open to the gentle breeze.

I rang the bell and waited. After no more than a moment or two, the door was opened by a man in his late forties, early fifties, still dressed in what were obviously his office clothes. A little below average height, a little above average weight, thinning hair brushed neatly down on his domed skull, he surveyed me with light blue eyes through heavy rimmed spectacles.

“M’sieu Rive?” I enquired pleasantly.

“Oui.”

I continued in French – my grasp of the language is pretty good, although my spoken French is irretrievably marred by an accent which might have been the prototype for the old schoolboy joke of the lad being praised by his master for speaking French like a native, swiftly followed by the put down line ‘A native of Glasgow’. I might not be a native of Glasgow, just a native of Scotland, but I reckoned that other than branding me instantly as a foreigner, M. Rive would have no idea from whereabouts in the rest of world I hailed from.

“I would like to talk to you about your daughter’s abduction, M’sieu. May I come in?”

I expected one of two reactions at this point. Either M. Rive would immediately call for the police, in which case I would have to retreat defeated, or he would profess total ignorance of what I wished to discuss.

In fact, I got a third reaction – fear. M. Rive was clearly frightened by my words. He glanced nervously over my shoulder, presumably checking if I was alone, then stepped back.

“You’d better come in.”

I did so, and as I did so endeavoured to put him at ease.

“M’sieu, let me assure you that I have nothing to do with your daughter’s abductors. I am here to beseech your help, as my wife was subjected to the same ordeal by, I believe, the same people. It is your help I desire.”

He hesitated for a moment, then led me into a large, attractive room which ran the length of the house.

Seated on a settee was a woman, presumably Madame Rive, who rose as we entered, inspecting me quixotically.

Rive spoke first.

“Helene, this gentleman wants to talk to us about Marie-Jo’s abduction.”

The fear that had been generated in her husband was duplicated in his wife. She sank back onto the settee, her hand going up to her throat.

“What do you want with us?” she demanded.

“Madame, I want your help. I believe those who took your daughter also kidnapped my wife, and made her very ill.”

She relaxed a little, but was clearly still very wary of me.

Rive indicated a chair opposite the settee.

“Won’t you sit down, M’sieu ..”

“Croeze, Henrik Croeze, M’sieu. Thank you.”

Hi wife continued to regard me warily.

“You are not French, M’sieu?”

“No, Madame, I am South African, but I have lived in England for the last few years and it was in England that my wife, like your daughter, was kidnapped.”

“So why come here?” Rive asked. “What makes you think that we can help you?”

“I have come because, like me, you were forced to perform a service for the company Forbes Construction.”

Both of the Rives went very still. The pause was long enough to demonstrate that, no matter what was said next, I was on the right track. My long shot was paying off.

Finally, Rive broke the silence.

“I am afraid I know nothing that can help you, M’sieu Croeze, and I cannot think what makes you believe that I can.”

I held up a hand in placatory fashion.

“M’sieu Rive, I assure you that I am not here to embarrass you, nor to cause you problems, but believe me, I do know that you were forced to assist them in the matter of their tender for the bypass. My own situation was different, they made me surrender a lot of money to them, but the method was the same – Forbes Construction benefitted at my expense and, more seriously, at the expense of my wife’s health –

she is still in hospital as a result. Like you, there was no apparent connection on the surface – but you and I both know that had we implicated the company, our loved ones would have suffered.”

I wasn’t telling the truth, of course; I had tried everything I knew to implicate the Forbes, but Rive’s situation was clearly different. Had he told the police everything that contract would have gone elsewhere.

Madame Rive spoke again. “They said that we would never see Marie-Jo again, never know what had happened to her, unless Auguste did as they told him.”

Her husband shot a warning glance at her, but it was too late, the cat was well and truly out of the bag.

“There is another thing to consider, M’sieu,” I said, “Having forced you to their will once, what is to stop it happening again? Tell me, will your department be involved in the scheme to upgrade the A9?”

Rive hesitated and I pursued the point.

“How safe is Marie-Jo if they decide that they want your help again? I give you my word, I have no interest in how you helped them, nor if you will help them again in the future to safeguard your family. I only want to track down the men who took my wife and who are, I am sure, the same men who took Marie-Jo.”

They both continued to look unhappy, but perhaps a little less so. After a moment, Rive spoke.

“But how do you expect to find these men? And if you should find them, what would you then do?”

“If I am right, these men are English, sent over from England for the specific task of kidnapping Marie-Jo. To do that they would have to have a house of some sort available to them – I assume Marie-Jo was kept in a house somewhere?” He nodded, as did his wife. “In that case they must either have rented somewhere or have an accomplice who is native to somewhere around here. To be honest, if that is the case, I think the chance of finding them is virtually non-existent, but if they had to rent somewhere, there is surely a chance of tracing them?”

Madame interceded.

“We know that Marie-Jo was held somewhere near – she thinks that the drive after she was taken was no more than about ten minutes.”

“Can you tell me just how it all happened?”

“I can, but I think that it is probably better if she tells you herself – we find that encouraging her to talk about it helps her get over the experience.”

“Well, if you are sure it won’t upset her....”

Madame Rive rose gracefully to her feet and disappeared, reappearing a few moments later with her daughter.

Marie-Jo was, I knew, fifteen, nearly sixteen. She clearly took after her mother rather than her father, tall and slim with fair hair to her shoulders. Already, she looked an extremely attractive young woman, dressed as she was in figure hugging jeans and a loose silk shirt.

I rose from my chair and extended my hand, which she shook gently, and we all sat down again.

“I’ve told Mary-Jo that you want to find the men who took her, but that is all so far.”

So I recounted my tale, or at least the edited version that I was using here, and the girl’s blue eyes widened in a mixture of astonishment and horror.

“So you see, Marie-Jo,” anything you can tell me about what happened may be of help to me – can you help me?”

“I will if I can, M’sieu. What do you want to know?”

“Well, how did they take you – and where?”

“Right in the road here, only a few metres from our front door. I walk home from school, and I had just turned the corner out of Chemin des Calinières into our road.”

I nodded; their road, Rue Mozart, formed the leg of a T-junction with Chemin des Calinières and the Rive’s house was perhaps seventy or eighty yards along from the junction.

“As I was walking along, there was a car parked on my side and two men got out of it.

I didn’t really notice them – I had my MP3 player on and was listening to my music.

As I approached them they parted so that they would pass either side of me, but as I reached them they suddenly grabbed one of my arms each and pulled me back to the car. One of them opened the back door and pushed me inside, his hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t scream, the other got in the front and drove off. The man in the back with me forced me down onto the floor of the car; he had a knife and he threatened to cut my face if I made a sound. I was too frightened to do anything anyway, but that really made me scared so I was really quiet. Then he got a hood of some white material out of his pocket and pulled it over my head so that I couldn’t see.”

“As they drove off they would have had to turn very soon. Which way did they turn, left or right?”

“They turned left, then almost immediately right.”

“So that means they turned onto Avenue Edmund Rostand?”

“Yes, that’s right. They drove for about ten minutes, but they made several turns and I got confused, so I didn’t know where we finished, but they turned off the road and I could feel the bump as we drove over the entrance to a house. Then they pulled me out of the car and hurried me indoors.”

“When they did that, were you out of doors for a moment or two?”

She nodded, the fair hair swinging round her face as she did so.

“So, they took you to a house about ten minutes drive away, so it must be in town somewhere. What happened when they released you?”

“It was after dark. They put the hood over my head again, took me out of the house and into the car, drove for about ten minutes again, then stopped. There was one of

them in the back with me and he opened the door, pushed me out and the car drove off. When I pulled the hood off my head I found I was right outside home.”

I had to admire the sheer nerve of the abductors. They had taken Marie-Jo in broad daylight, just yards from her home, kept her for five days somewhere no more than a mile or two away, then returned her, all without anyone noticing anything.

“What can you tell me about the house they kept you in?”

“Well, I was upstairs and at the back of the house. The windows were screwed shut, but I could see out of them, but all I could see was a garden with tall trees and bushes at the end of it.”

She may not have been able to see anything but the garden, but her description narrowed down the number of suitable properties. For them to risk taking her out of the car in daylight, it couldn’t be overlooked by neighbours. It was at least two storey and had a garden. It must have been available to rent for a relatively short period. In a fairly small town such as Marsillargues there surely could not be many properties meeting all those criteria.

I had another thought.

“Tell me, Marie-Jo, did the house seem new or old? The bathroom, for example?”

She hesitated, thinking for the moment.

“I hadn’t thought about that before – but I think it all looked very new. It certainly wasn’t like grandma’s.”

I looked questioningly at her parents.

“My mother,” explained Madame, “she lives in a cottage about thirty kilometres away

– built in 1887.”

Our next task was to trawl the internet, identifying places to rent in the town. After eliminating the many attractive bungalows, we were left with a long list of eighteen houses. Then, thanks to the wonder of Google Maps, we were able to locate each of them and examine their surroundings. As a result, our eighteen became three; three houses so placed in their respective roads that they were not overlooked by neighbours. Three houses with back gardens containing enough greenery to prevent a view beyond their rear gardens. Three houses with detached garages, so Marie-Jo would have to have been briefly in the open.

Now all we had to do was to find out who, if anyone, had occupied them over the relevant period.

Whilst all this had been going on, the Rive adults had become more and more engrossed in proceedings. I had expected them to shy away from any direct involvement, but the more we progressed, the more determined they became to help me track down their daughter’s abductors.

In fact it was Auguste who suggested the next move.

“Now we think we have identified the most likely houses, we need to know who was in them. The letting agents are unlikely to just tell you if you go and ask them, but I think I can see a way round that. Our department is responsible for setting the standards of accommodation – things like fire escape facilities, building standards and the like. Now, I could go to each of the agents and tell them that I am updating the departmental records and ask to check the level of occupancy they have been experiencing. You could come with me as my ‘assistant’.”

I agreed with alacrity, with the result that the next morning we presented ourselves in turn at each of the three letting agencies – as it happened each house was the responsibility of a different agency.

We struck lucky on the third visit. The house had been rented for two weeks by an Englishman. His name was Harold Cunningham and whilst Auguste occupied the

clerk in conversation, I was able to take a look at the papers pertaining to his occupancy. Because he was a foreigner, the top item was a photocopy of his passport.

British passports give no address of the holder – but they do give details of a next of kin or other person to be notified in the event of an emergency – and Cunningham’s gave the details of a Mrs. Cunningham, whom I assumed to be his wife, with an address and a telephone number in Guildford – not far from the Forbes family home in Haslemere. Was I, at last, on the right track?

We returned to Rive’s house. Marie-Jo was at school, but Madame was home. I thanked them both profusely for all the help that I had received and took my leave of them. By the end of the day I had returned the hire car booked in Henrik’s name, booked out of the hotel, and returned to Henri, where I updated him and Yvonne on the progress that I had made – as I had already done with Jacques.

I intended to leave the next day, but it did give me one problem – my package of false documents and the revolver. Flying into France had been easy – you do not have to clear customs when leaving the UK and my subterfuge of the brief stopover at Jacques’ had taken care of customs clearance coming into France.

Leaving was another matter. When you leave an EU country you have to clear customs on the way out. That meant that I had two risk points. French customs from my final departure point – because the Chipmunk couldn’t make it from Nimes to the Channel in one hop I would have to have an intermediate stop and then land near the coast for refuelling and customs clearance, and wherever I landed in the UK on my return.

I had given the matter considerable thought before leaving Scotland and I had what I felt to be a reasonable solution. I would depart France from Calais/Dunkerque, after an interim stop for fuel at Besancon and I would land at Shoreham Airport as my first stop back in the UK. This was the reverse of my journey into France. When I had landed at Calais on the way in I had avoided customs as I was simply refuelling, being en route to Nimes and would clear customs there. Now, however, I would have to clear customs at Calais as my departure point from France and my ‘illegal’ package would have to be safe from prying eyes. In truth, I was not over concerned about Calais. Unless they have specific grounds for suspicion, most customs officers are not very interested in what you are taking out of their country; it is what you are bringing in that really interests them. Shoreham, however, might well be another matter altogether. Her Majesty’s Customs are very hot on looking for anything that might be regarded as being smuggled in for profit – cigarettes are a particular bête noire of theirs, representing a reasonable return on something light in weight if rather bulky.

The documents were fairly easy – I just tucked them inside a couple of my charts, which were then pushed into a chart holder attached to the cockpit wall down by my left foot. The revolver was a trickier proposal. I could, of course, have simply abandoned it in France, but my paranoia wouldn’t let me. There was no legal way that I could replace it and I had this unhappy feeling that somehow, somewhere, I was going to wish that I still had it if I disposed of it.

The solution was fiddly; I took it to pieces until it was a collection of pieces of metal, springs, etc., but that still left the three largest elements looking exactly like what they actually were - parts of a handgun.

Near the tail of the Chipmunk there is an inspection hatch which allows you to check the state of the cables which work the elevators and rudder. Removing this gave me access to a large space, but the access hatch itself was only large enough to enable you shine a torch on the cables; if work was needed on them the whole tail unit had to come off the aircraft – a major job. What it did enable me to do, however, was to

wrap the parts of the revolver in a cloth and, with a considerable degree of difficulty, attach the resultant bundle to the fuselage skin with epoxy resin with a cutting wire attached to the bundle so that when I needed to retrieve its contents I could tear the package open remove its contents and simply leave the cloth itself stuck in place.

Removing them was going to be difficult, but I was confident that it could be done –

and if I couldn’t remove them, nobody else was going to find them.

It worked like a dream. At Calais/Dunkerque, as I expected, the clearance was limited to checking that my paper work was in order. At Shoreham the investigation was more rigorous, but it didn’t include taking off the inspection hatch. Eighteen hours after departing Nimes, I was back home, with the Chipmunk safely hangared at Scone, awaiting removal of its illegal cargo the next time I took her out.

Chapter 16

The next occasion was a couple of days later. Arriving early at the field, I had the hangar to myself and after some skinned knuckles and bad language, the various pieces of the Enfield were safely tucked away in my car whilst I did some local flying.

In the meantime I had visited Sally, worried in case my absence had upset her, but as far as anyone could tell she was unaware of the interruption in my visits. I spoke with Dr. Folland about her and the message was ‘no change’.

Her lack of progress depressed me greatly. The elation I had felt in France on discovering the identity of her probable abductor vanished as though it had never been. In the aftermath, however, I was more determined than ever to somehow strike back on behalf both of Sally and myself.

But how? I could hardly roll up at his door and ask for his help. I could try to kidnap him and put pressure on him – but one on one would I succeed?

Reluctantly, in fact very reluctantly, I revisited my determination not to involve Sally’s brother in the affair. I had originally determined that I would not do so – if whatever I attempted blew up in my face and got me in trouble with the law, I didn’t want Jack involved, further adding to Sally’s woe.

I decided that this was something that had to be discussed face to face, not over the telephone, so two days later the two of us were seated in his Skye home whilst I outlined what I had found out.

“So, Jack,” I concluded, “I’m at a loss to know what to do next. Ideally, I want to get this Cunningham to implicate the Forbes brothers and set the law on all of them, but I don’t rate my chances very highly. I mean, at the moment, I can’t even be one hundred per cent sure that I have the right man, although if it isn’t it stretches the bounds of coincidence to an incredible degree.”

“I agree – it must be the same man. I can’t see much point in putting what you’ve learned to the police. What could they do with it? All he would have to do is look bemused and deny any idea as to what they are on about. It might be possible to interest the gendarmes, but again – what chance of getting anywhere? No, if anything is to be achieved, you and I are going to have to do it.”

“That’s how I see it- and I can’t see any way that we can do it legally. I don’t like the idea of asking you to break the law....”

Jack interrupted savagely.

“Never mind breaking the law – if this guy is who we think he is, I’d happily break his neck.”

We plotted into the night, roughing out a plan of campaign which we felt had at least some chance of success and which, at the same time, should keep us safe from the law unless things took a very unexpected turn.

I had reached Skye in the Chipmunk, landing at the small airfield at Broadford, and the next morning saw two grimly determined men fly off again in the little aircraft.

Two and a half hours later we were at my place, indulging in a glass of whisky whilst we set about organising our crime.

We needed to reconnoitre Cunningham’s location and habits; there was a slight chance that he might have seen me when I dropped the trust document off in Kirriemuir and we dare not take the risk of alerting him.

Our plan depended upon having an anonymous means of transport and I had accordingly bought, for cash, an elderly white Ford Transit from a private seller in Glasgow, hopefully far enough away not to automatically point back to me should things go wrong. To further hide my tracks I had provided the seller with a false name and address.

My resolve was hardened when my mobile phone rang the night of the very day that I bought the van.

“Alan Richards,”

“Alain, mon ami, ici Auguste. I have the most bad news for you.”

It was Auguste Rive. We had promised to keep each other informed in the remote chance of something of mutual interest occurred. At the time I had had no expectations of any such event, but I could not have been more wrong.

Cunningham – for Auguste and I were sure that it was him – had been replicating his old tricks. The fifteen year old daughter of a senior official in another town on the route of the A9 improvement had been kidnapped. As with Auguste, the distraught father had been told to take action that would seriously hamper the granting of that element of the contract to a local construction company. No favours had been asked on behalf of Forbes Construction, but with a major rival removed their prospects had to be greatly improved.

This time, however, things had gone wrong. The father had informed the gendarmerie and a trap had been set – and the trap had failed. He had told the father that the girl had been left in a deserted barn for her mother to pick up when he, Cunningham, was advised by a phone call that his instructions had been followed, but something in the phone conversation had alerted him to possible trouble. He had, as an exercise in pure vindictiveness, misled the family as to where the girl was and to date she had not been found.

Three days later, having driven down overnight, we arrived in the Guildford area just after eight in the morning. The van, whilst old and fairly tatty, had performed perfectly, so that aspect of our plan was working out all right.

We had sleeping bags with us, intending to sleep in the van rather than risk leaving a paper trail by booking into an hotel anywhere.

Cunningham lived in a road which also contained a few shops, so the parked van didn’t stick out like a sore thumb as it would have done in a more residential setting.

We were in luck straight away; parked near to his house, we saw Cunningham, easily recognisable from his passport photograph, leave the house and walk the few yards to the local newsagent. A few minutes later he returned, carrying a paper and a carton of milk.

There was a car in the drive, a fairly recent Mondeo, and mid-morning a woman, presumably Mrs. Cunningham, got into it and drove away.

So, our prey was near at hand. All we now had to do was capture him and transport him somewhere without being ourselves apprehended in the process. It was at that point that, for the first time, I mentioned to Jack my possession of my grandfather’s revolver. He pondered for a moment, then reached into the small overnight bag at his feet. From it he drew a pistol and laid it on his lap.

“I was wondering when I could tell you about this – so we are both armed illegally.”

I looked at the weapon. Clearly more modern than my own, it was a fairly large automatic pistol. Jack explained its provenance.

“I took it from the body of an Iraqi in the Gulf. My platoon had cleared out some houses in a village on the way to Baghdad. They had been defended, not very effectively, by a group of Revolutionary Guards who must have been cut off, as they had no support, no radio, just small arms. They had with them some civilians who were also armed. In all there were about fifty of them. After a quite short fire fight, several of them were killed or wounded, and the rest surrendered. Checking over the houses I found a dead civilian in one room. He had a rifle, but on searching further, I found this. We were all a bit wary of the amount of military kit which was already disappearing and likely to end up who knows where, so I took charge of it. At the time the only man with me was one of my corporals who didn’t see me pick it up – he was checking the corpse of an enemy soldier in the same room at the time. I was too busy to hand it in straight away, and by the time I did have time, I decided to keep it as a souvenir.”

“What is it?”

“It’s unusual for where it came from – it’s Russian, a Makarov 9mm, and not a weapon that the Iraqi Army used, but then this chap was a civvie. Heaven alone knows where it originally came from. It was a standard Russian side arm back in Cold War days and was a prime example of their paranoia – although it is a 9mm pistol, like millions of others throughout the world, the Makarov uses ammunition that won’t fit any other 9mm pistol – and similarly Makarov ammunition can’t be used in any other 9mm pistol, The thinking was that if it came to a fight, NATO troops would not be able to use captured Russian ammunition stocks – shows a touching lack of faith in their own folk.

“As a result, I only have what ammunition is left in the magazine – five rounds – and no chance of getting any more, but if we get into a situation where we actually have to fire these things, I reckon that we will be in deep, deep trouble anyway.”

That was my own thinking – I saw the Enfield, and now the Makarov, as frighteners, ever perhaps as clubs, but if we really started firing them, I couldn’t see us keeping out of jail one way or another.

“So, let’s go and kidnap Cunningham.”

We worked quickly as we had no idea when Mrs, Cunningham might return. I drove the van around the block, finally parking it right outside the house. Then we walked up to the front door, rang the bell, and when Cunningham answered, Jack simply pushed him back into the hallway and shoved the Makarov under his chin.

He was taken totally by surprise and within minutes I had backed the van into the drive, we had bundled Cunningham, hooded and with his hands and feet securely bound with plastic cable ties, into the back, and driven off.

In view of Cunningham’s escapades in France I was confident that he must have at least some grasp of French, and it was in that language that I had spoken the few words needed to tell him to be quite or have his head blown off.

We drove for a bit over three hours before pulling off the motorway for fuel and, in a secluded lane, for a toilet stop – unpleasant but necessary.

Four hours later we arrived at my home and the van was hidden from view by my high hedge.

We bundled Cunningham into the garage and tied him, still hooded, to a chair, then left him to his own thoughts. It was still only late afternoon and we wanted him to worry about his predicament for a good while before taking any further action.

Whilst we were letting him stew, I received another phone call from Auguste Rive, a call which further fired my determination to effect some sort of revenge on Cunningham and his employers. The kidnapped girl, Eloise Dupont, had been found, but she had died of hypothermia before being found. She was just fifteen years old.

We returned to the garage in grimly determined mood. I removed the hood from Cunningham’s head and he blinked his eyes at the sudden influx of light. Before he could begin to evaluate his circumstances I hit him savagely across the face, forehand and backhand, his head snapping back at each blow.

I stared into his eyes.

“Eloise Dupont est mort. Je connais que vous êtes le meurtrier.”

He looked blankly back at me.

“What are you talking about? Who’s Eloise whatshername?”

I hit him again, harder.

“Parlez-vous Français, m’sieu?”

He shook his head.

“Only a bit – what are you saying?”

“Very well, in English. Eloise Dupont has died. The gendarmes found her, tied hand and foot, in the barn where you left her. Don’t bother to deny it – you kidnapped her, you left her to die.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about – you’ve got the wrong man – I’ve never been to France in years.”

I pulled a piece of paper from pocket and read to him the dates and locations of his hotel stays and the number of his passport. The colour drained from his face.

“So you see, m’sieu, lying will not help you.”

“Who are you two – what are you up to?”

“We are friends of the Duponts – and of the Rive family. They want vengeance and we are going to give it to them.”

Now I could see fear in his eyes. To compound it I drew the Enfield from its place tucked into my belt at my back. His eyes followed the ugly black weapon.

“You can’t do this – you wouldn’t dare.”

I laid the pistol across his thigh, pointing at the wall. His tried to push away from it, but Jack was behind the chair, holding it immobile. Slowly I squeezed the trigger.

As before, the noise echoing off the brick walls and concrete floor, was appalling.

Cunningham cried out in a mixture of pain and fright. What he did not know was that the round I had fired was a blank, with nothing more dangerous than a wad of soap, backed up by cotton wool, leaving the Enfield’s muzzle. Even though a blank, the noise and the flash were impressive, and the muzzle blast had left a scorch mark across his jeans, and doubtless there was a minor burn to the flesh beneath.

I removed the pistol and stared into his frightened eyes.

“We are going to leave you alone now, m’sieu, so that you can think things over, but first, let us make you more comfortable.”

We had prepared carefully for ensuring that he could not escape, nor pose a danger to us. We passed a length of chain round his neck, securing it with a padlock. The other

end of the chain went round one of the legs of my workbench, a heavy structure securely bolted to the floor, and was also fastened with a padlock. The length of the chain would allow him to take a pace or two in any direction, but would not let him reach the garage door so he could not attack us as we entered.

A bucket for waste was also provided and with that we left him to his own devices.

Chapter 17

The next morning we went into the garage. Cunningham was slumped against the wall, presumably having slept that way, if indeed he had been able to sleep at all.

As Jack stood guard beyond the reach of the chain, I laid a plastic plate with some bread and butter, and a plastic beaker of water, beside our prisoner.

Without saying a word we started to withdraw when Cunningham spoke.

“What’s going on? What do you want from me?”

We neither of us answered, simply leaving and closing the door behind us.

Before taking any more action against Cunningham, we had to dispose of the van we had used. In a day or two it would probably register as uninsured in the DVLA database and would come up as such should it be picked up on a police number plate recognition camera, so I drove it to Glasgow, with Jack trailing me at a distance in the Mondeo, and left it in what looked a fairly rough area with the keys still in the ignition. We them both returned home, without incident, in the Mondeo.

All that day we left Cunningham to himself; only at eleven o’clock at night did we return to him. He looked up at us, once again blinking at the sudden onset of light after hours in the dark.

Once again Jack stood guard as I walked over to Cunningham. The man looked a wreck, hollow-eyed, unshaven and clearly cramped from lack of movement. He was a slightly built man, perhaps five foot eight, ten stone or so and his lank brown hair needed cutting. Altogether a far cry from what one might expect a hired killer – for that was what he was – to look like.

I stared into his eyes.

“Listen carefully, m’sieu. We know that you are a murderer. We know that you work for the Forbes. You are going to prison when we have finished with you, not in one of your British holiday camps where you watch TV and play the ping-pong, but to a French prison which you will find much less pleasant. Now, we don’t want you alone.

We want those for whom you work. Think very carefully. We need proof that we can take to the gendarmes, not just your word. Documents, photos, tapes, whatever – but they must be proof. Do you understand?”

He nodded mutely and we left him again.

The next morning we again left him some food and water – enough calories to sustain life, but nothing more.

“Well, m’sieu, have you thought about what I told you?”

He nodded.

“Yes, but I haven’t got anything like that. Everything was done over the phone or face to face.”

“That is too bad for you, m’sieu. You could be here for a long time before we tire of your company. Keep thinking – you future depends on what you can tell us.”

Back in the house we discussed our lack of progress to date.

“I can’t help feeling,” Jack said, running his hand through his hair, “that he will have nothing we can use.”

Morosely, I agreed. I had hoped that there would be something useful that we could squeeze out of Cunningham, but it was beginning to look very unlikely.

“So, what next?” Jack asked.

“I think that you should go back to Skye. You can’t be away from your work much longer and I can cope with Cunningham – he’s a broken man now.”

“But how long will you keep him? And then what?”

I shook my head. I had no intention of confessing, even to Jack, what I planned for Cunningham’s future.

“I’ll dump him somewhere when I think that he has suffered enough – but that won’t be yet. That scum needs to really suffer for a while yet.”

As a result, Jack left later that day, leaving me alone with my prisoner.

The next day I sat with him for over an hour – keeping out of his reach the while –

and quizzed him about every meeting or phone conversation he had had with the Forbes.

Neither of us mentioned the abduction of Sally; I wanted him to believe that I was French, solely interested in his activities in France, and clearly from his point of view there was nothing to be gained by admitting to further atrocities.

I went through everything I could think of and finally, almost by chance, extracted a nugget of information that seemed as though it might be useful. Apparently, his first meeting had been with George Forbes, the elder brother and CEO of the company, whereas all later meetings, and phone conversations, had been with William, the younger brother. At that first meeting there had been three people present; Cunningham, Forbes and a John Blake who, from what was said,, was clearly a senior officer of the company. However, Cunningham had never had any contact with him again.

I returned to the house and did some digging on the Internet. Blake had for a fairly short while been the company Finance Director, but had left some six months ago. I wondered if he might be a source of information, because a bit more digging in the financial reports of the time made it seem that Blake’s leaving had not been amicable.

I decided to track the man down. Nothing to lose, just possibly something to gain. In the meantime, however, there was Cunningham to think about.

I had long ago decided that he was not going to survive his captivity. In short, I was going to murder him. Given his own crimes, crimes for which the likelihood of him ever being brought to book were laughably small, I felt totally justified in such an action, just as had my grandfather all those years ago.

The only problem that I had with the idea was the sheer logistics. Clearly, I had no intention of allowing the law to discover my crime. Therefore, I had to ensure either that his body was never found, or that if there was a chance of it being found, then it would bear no evidence of his incarceration at my hands.

Shooting him was out of the question if there was the remotest chance of him being found – a body with bullets in it would launch an immediate, thorough investigation.

Similarly, a body bearing the marks, as Cunningham’s currently would, of having been tied and chained would be immediately suspicious.

I had given the matter a lot of thought and had decided that the only sure solution was to take him out to sea and put him overboard. The question of a suitable boat had been the main stumbling block to such a solution, but an answer was to hand. In addition to his Piper Seneca, David McLean, who had flown Sally and I to France what now seemed a lifetime ago, owned a small motor cruiser which he kept at Dundee. I had

already approached him with a view to borrowing the vessel, which was small enough to be handled by one man, on the pretext that I would like to get out and do a little sea fishing to take my mind off my problems. David, in typically generous fashion, had said that I was welcome to borrow the vessel anytime I wanted – just phone and let him know.

I did just that and laid some groundwork – twice in the last couple of weeks I had taken the Alicia out as dawn was breaking. As it happened, on neither occasion had I seen anyone at any of the other boats and I had to hope that my luck would hold on this third occasion.

I now arranged to borrow the boat – she was called the Alicia after David’s daughter

– for the next day. All I had to do now was get Cunningham, either alive or dead, on board without being seen.

It went smoothly. I dissolved some strong sleeping tablets in his evening drink; the next morning, after tying his hands and feet and gagging his mouth with duct tape, I wrapped his unconscious form in an old piece of tarpaulin and put him in the boot of my car.

The drive to Dundee was worrying; at that hour of the morning there was only light traffic and I was fastidious in my driving, observing the speed limits, stopping early for traffic lights rather than trying to beat them, and all the time anxiously scanning the road for police cars. At least Cunningham was still alive; at worst I was a kidnapper transporting his victim. To have had a corpse in the boot would have seen things go far worse for me had I been stopped.

At last I got to the Alicia and deposited Cunningham, still deeply asleep, in the bottom of the boat, still wrapped in the tarpaulin. I also loaded my fishing rods and a small hamper, just as I had on the previous uses of the boat.

I started the engine and chugged serenely out of the Tay estuary to the open sea. The weather was cooperating – only gentle seas which were no problem to Alicia and after an hour’s sailing I decided that I was far enough from the shore and any possibility of being observed, to complete my task. I had thought of rousing Cunningham to make him fully aware of what was happening to him and why, but in the event decided that it would be too inhumane, Instead, I contented myself with using the chain which had secured him in the garage to attach some iron weights to him and slipped him over the stern. Weighed down by over thirty pounds of iron he disappeared instantly.

I stayed nearby for an hour or so, ostensibly fishing. I even caught a couple of fish, but threw them back into the sea; one death was enough for the day.

On the drive back home, and after I got home, I reflected on what I had done. It wasn’t the first time I had caused someone’s death, but those other deaths had been from the comparative safety and detachment of a Tornado cockpit. This was very different, but given what Cunningham had done I felt no remorse and certainly no guilt.

I telephoned Jack and told him that I had released Cunningham far away so that he would be unable to identify where he had been kept and extremely unlikely to know who had held him, even though he had seen our faces.

I am pretty sure that Jack had surmised what I had actually done, but he accepted my story at face value. To this day I have never admitted to anyone what actually happened to the Forbes’ hired killer.

Later that day I drove to the clinic to visit Sally. I met Kathy Yates, one of the nurses I had come to know well, and instantly I was aware of a suppressed air of excitement about her.

“Alan, Sally recognised me this morning!”

This was incredible news – but would she recognise me? I hurried to her room and opened the door eagerly. Sally was sitting in an armchair by the window, gazing out at the garden, and turned her head as I entered. Even before she spoke, I could see from her eyes that she knew me at last.

“Alan!”

I went down on my knees, unbidden tears cascading down my cheeks and we hugged each other.

The rest of the day was something of a blur. Dr. Folland saw us and a long, three-way discussion ensued, the upshot of which was that Sally and I left the clinic that very evening, and were at last reunited and at home. Advised by phone, her parents, my mother, and Jack were all ecstatic.

I know that it could only have been the wildest coincidence, but deep down in my superstitious subconscious I felt that Sally’s recovery was inextricably linked with the disposing of Cunningham. Checking with her nurse, Kathy Yates, Sally had recognised her at what must have been within minutes of my heaving the killer overboard to his death.

It was the next day before I told Sally what Jack and I had been up to. As with Jack, whilst I did not actually lie to her, I left her with the impression that I had dumped Cunningham somewhere.

“He won’t come back again, will he?”

“No, there is no chance of that. He hasn’t the remotest idea who Jack and I are – he believes us to be Frenchmen acting on behalf of the Rive and Dupont families - and what the Forbes wanted, I gave them. So no, there is no need to worry any more about him.”

I told Sally about the possibility that I might be able to pursue the Forbes via their former finance director, She understood my desire for revenge against the brothers for what had happened to her, but begged me to give up the attempt if nothing came of talking to John Blake.

I was unsure of how best to try and tackle Blake. It seemed from the reports that he had been thrown out by the Forbes rather than leaving of his own accord, but the first thing was to try and find out a bit more about him.

That took some days of digging, and whilst I was engaged in it I had a further call from Auguste Rive. Dupont, now that his daughter was dead and he felt no further threat could be made against him, had raised a storm with the gendarmerie and they in turn had tracked down Cunningham in much the same way that we had. They had liaised with the Surrey police and a warrant had been issued for Cunningham’s arrest.

When the police arrived at his house, however, he was nowhere to be found. Hardly surprising; by the time they arrived Cunningham was already at the bottom of the sea.

I wondered uneasily if this official activity would lead the police to me, but Auguste set my mind at rest. He had not been approached by the gendarmes, who remained in ignorance of the threat against his family and what had later transpired. The Duponts,

of course, were unaware of my existence, so as far as the police of the two countries were concerned, there was nothing to tie me into the affair.

My next step was to contact John Blake. Careful investigation had discovered that he lived in Surrey, just outside Godalming, only a few miles away from the Forbes family house in Haslemere.. It was a nuisance that he was so far away; it meant that I would have to leave Sally alone whilst I pursued him, so I delayed for several weeks, giving Sally the opportunity to return as far as possible to a normal way of living, but at last I once more drove down south, again in the motorhome so that I would not have to rely upon staying in a hotel in case I needed to take any action I would not want known about.

I was surprised at Blake’s house. Given that he had been a senior member of a large company, and therefore not poor, I had expected something more impressive that the three bedroomed semi-detached in a road full of similar dwellings.

I had hired a car, using once again the Henrik Croeze passport and driving licence which had served me so well in France, and simply parked a few doors away from Blake’s house at eight in the morning. Half an hour later the front door opened and two girls, both in school uniform, emerged. Aged perhaps twelve and fourteen, they were clearly sisters and walking to the end of the road, vanished from view in the direction of the nearest bus route.

A little later a tall, blonde woman dressed in a black trouser suit, presumably Mrs.

Blake, also came out of the front door. The house had no garage, but parked in the road outside was an elderly Mondeo and she got into it and drove off. If he was home, Blake was now presumably alone.

I got out of the car, walked to Blake’s front door and rang the bell.

The man who opened the door came as a shock. In the company literature I had perused his picture portrayed a rather plump individual with smarmed down black hair parted in an old-fashioned style. The Blake who stood before me was hollow cheeked, unshaven and bleary eyed. His hair was unkempt and far more grey than black. I knew him to be some three years younger than myself, but anyone seeing the two of us together would surely think him the elder by a decade.

“John Blake?”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Who are you?”

“My name isn’t important – what I want to talk to you about is what matters. I want to talk about the Forbes brothers.”

He took a step back and the look that passed over his face was undoubtedly one of fear. He looked nervously up and down the street.

“You’d better come in.”

He stepped back and I followed him into a small, cramped, cheaply furnished living room. Without being bidden, I sat in an armchair and he sank into its mate opposite me.

“What do you want of me this time? Haven’t they had enough yet? Tell them I won’t say anything to anybody – that they don’t have to worry about me and tell them to keep that thug Cunningham away from my family.”

My mind was in a whirl. Clearly Blake was at his wit’s end over his relationship with his former employers; I was also surprised at his reference to Cunningham who, according to what he had told me, had only met Blake once. One thing seemed certain, however. I need have no fear of Blake still being in the Forbes’ team.

I settled back in the chair, thinking over what I was going to say.

“Mr. Blake, I am not from the Forbes – but I do want to talk to you about them. But first, let me tell you why. The Forbes had Cunningham kidnap my wife to force me to give then some papers they wanted, papers which saved them from having their family revealed as thieves. The theft happened a long time ago – before the brothers were even born, but had it come to light it would have had very serious implications for their company. Being kidnapped caused my wife to have a complete breakdown from which she is only now recovering. Cunningham was the man who kidnapped her. I’ve met him and can understand your worry about him, but he is now out of the picture. The Forbes used him to put pressure on a family in France and he went too far. The daughter of the family died and the French and British police are after him for murder. He has disappeared and he isn’t going to reappear – he is probably out of the country altogether by now.”

Blake visibly relaxed a little, but only a little.

“How do you know all this?”

“I have contacts in France who are keeping me informed. I can assure you, Cunningham is no longer a cause for concern for you.”

“But what is to prevent the Forbes finding somebody else to do their dirty work?”

“Given time, perhaps nothing. That is why I want to talk to you, to see if there is any way of stopping them. Tell me, what did they threaten you with?”

He looked at me in silence for a long time before replying.

“I was their director of finance, but only for a matter of months. My predecessor, who was also my boss, died suddenly and I was promoted to the vacancy. Up till then I had been responsible for general accountancy matters, but nothing on company policy or the like. To be honest, I was surprised to get the job – everyone expected them to appoint somebody from outside.

“I had only been in post a couple of months when I realised that there was a lot of false accounting going on. The company’s books were, to say the least, a work of fiction, as a result of which the company, and in particular the Forbes themselves, were paying far less tax than they should have been. I went to George with what I had found and told him that I would not be part of it and that unless he did something to put matters right I would report it all to the authorities.”

He paused for a moment.

“I will never forget his reply. He looked at me for a long moment and then said ‘How are you two daughters keeping?’ I was taken totally aback and asked him what he meant. ‘John,’ he said, ‘just think how vulnerable young girls are in this day and age.

Every day you read about young girls being abducted, disappearing, being raped or attacked. We don’t want anything like that to happen to Mandy or Kirsty, now do we?’. Even then I couldn’t really believe how serious he was. ‘Why should anything happen to them?’ I asked. He just smiled at me and told me that he had ‘people’. Then he went on to tell me that one of those people was meeting with him later that very day and I was to join them at that meeting. That was how I met Cunningham. I sat there in disbelief as I heard the two of them agree on the kidnapping of a girl in France to force her father to act illegally to the benefit of Forbes Construction. When Cunningham left, George turned to me and said that if I even thought of betraying him and his brother to the authorities he would have Cunningham do something to my girls. ‘For instance, John, he said, ‘I know that they are both good looking girls –

suppose somebody arranged for them to have acid thrown in their faces? How would they get through life then?’ It was enough, more than enough, to ensure that I kept my mouth shut. He also arranged for a loan the company had made to me to be called in –

and the only way that I could repay it was to sell our house and move here.”

I looked at Blake; he clearly looked at his wit’s end and was living in fear for his family. I had hoped that it would be possible to recruit him as a positive ally, but that seemed beyond the realms of possibility – even if I convinced him that Cunningham was no longer a threat, I was sure that he would assume that the Forbes would simply find somebody else to carry out their dirty work – and given the situation, I could see his point.

“Look,” I said, “I can understand your position. If I were in the same boat I am sure that I would feel the same – but is there anything you can give me, or tell me, something that doesn’t point back to you, that might help me?”

At first I thought that he was simply going to say ‘No’; in fact the word started to form on his lips, but then he hesitated. Sensing an opening, I pressed him.

“Yes? Is there something?”

“Well, I don’t know if it would get you anywhere, but.... you remember that I said that my predecessor died suddenly?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it wasn’t natural causes. He died as the result of a mugging. The police never caught anybody, and I know that he had seemed preoccupied for a while immediately before he died, as though something was worrying him. At the time I didn’t think anything about it, I just assumed that it was one of those awful things – wrong place and time sort of thing – but now that I think about it – could the Forbes have had anything to do with it? You say that man Cunningham murdered a French girl.

Perhaps he had a hand in Lionel’s death. Perhaps Lionel was unhappy at the way things were being done in the same way that I was. Thing is, he had no family to threaten, His wife, Elizabeth, died two years ago from cancer. They never had any children, so there was nobody they could threaten to put him under pressure as they did with me.”

“Was there nobody close to him he might have confided in?”

“I don’t know. I know that he has a brother, but he lives in Scotland and I don’t think that they were very close.”

“Do know his address or phone number?”

“No, but he lives in just a small place – Kirriemuir – so it shouldn’t be too hard to find him. George Ferris is his name.”

I was agreeably surprised. Kirriemuir was only a few miles from our house; I knew the town well and was confident that I could find George Ferris without too much trouble. Whether finding him would be of any use only time would tell.

Chapter 18

Finding George Ferris was no problem at all, although I let the matter ride for a couple of days after driving all the way home from Surrey. I felt that I needed a break, even in only a day or two, from my pursuit of the Forbes brothers, so Sally and I spent the time pottering around.

Finally, however, I decided it was time to talk to George Ferris in what might well be the last throw of the dice in my pursuit of the Forbes. He lived just outside the town itself, in a large house lying back from the Glamis Road. I had phoned to make an appointment and he received me in a spacious living room with a large picture window overlooking a well tended garden. He was, I judged, about fifty, heavily built

with a thinning dark hair swept back over his skull. Deep-set, dark eyes regarded me with curiosity.

“So, Mr. Richards, you want to talk about my brother Lionel. Why?”

I explained at length that I regarded the Forbes as crooks, touching on Cunningham’s activities on their behalf, the fear in which John Blake still lived, and finally my summation that given everything I knew or suspected about the brothers, one had to wonder whether the death of Lionel Ferris wasn’t something more than it seemed at first sight. He heard me out with clearly mounting amazement.

“Do you really think that they might have had Lionel murdered?”

“I think it is possible. Alone of those they have picked on, he had no family to have to protect. In all other cases they have had a lever against their victim – my wife, the daughter of the French families and John Blake.”

“But this all seems so far-fetched. Lionel and I weren’t very close – we weren’t antagonistic to each other, or anything, just didn’t see much of each other – it’s the sort of people we were, I suppose. The last time we actually met was when he came up here about three years ago. He had just been promoted to finance director and we had a small celebration.”

I pricked up my ears. I had not realised that Ferris, like Blake, clearly hadn’t been in post as finance director for very long – no more than a couple of years at most. But the younger Ferris was still talking.

“Apparently his predecessor had gone to a job overseas at rather short notice. Lionel was pleasantly surprised to get his job as he hadn’t been with the firm very long.”

He paused.

“There is one thing. About a month before his death, Lionel telephoned me. He said that he was thinking of leaving the company because he didn’t like the way it was being run. Apparently he had been appointed when the father of the Forbes brothers was still around. After he died – it was in ’09 – the brothers seemed to change the way in which things were done, and Lionel didn’t like the changes, although I have no idea what those changes actually were – he never said. When he was promoted I get the impression that he became more disenchanted pretty quickly.”

“What actually happened when he died?”

“I had a visit from the local police who broke the news to me. As you can imagine, I was terribly shocked and didn’t really take very much in. I went down to Surrey and had to identify Lionel’s body and then arrange for his funeral – I had him cremated as there was nobody down there to look after a grave, or even know if one existed. We don’t have any family - we were our parents only children and their were themselves only children, so once Elizabeth, his wife, died a couple of years back there were only the two of us left, as I married thirty years ago, but it didn’t last. I’m settled up here –

I run a small engineering company in Dundee, although I’m really semi-retired, only pop in a couple of times a week to keep an eye on things –he was established down there – or so I thought, so there was nothing really keeping us together apart from the occasional phone call.”

It seemed a sad sort of family history, but all too common in modern times. As an only child myself, I had often envied schoolmates with brothers and sisters, or a raft of cousins. At least I still had my mother alive and, thanks to Sally, some fine in-laws.

George Ferris really had nobody. Ferris continued his tale.

“There is one thing which, now you’ve told me your tale, that might be a bit odd.

Lionel named me as his executor and I inherited what he had – one of the reasons I can afford to be semi-retired – and when I was sorting out his estate, one of the things I did was to contact his company to pick up any personal things from his office and to

ask them what, if anything, might need tying up. They told me there was nothing I need worry about – Lionel didn’t have any of their papers at home, nor anything else that needed returning, and they sent back the personal things from his office by courier.

“One odd thing. When we each reached our twenty-first birthdays, our parents gave us a gold wristwatch each and also a perpetual desk diary – rather like a Filofax, but bigger. I lost mine years ago, but Lionel was inordinately proud of his and always kept it on his desk. I suppose that he might have got out of the habit in later years, but he certainly always had it whenever I visited him at his office up here before he moved down south. It was quite distinctive in appearance – leather bound, and with sections for telephone numbers, keeping track of expenses, pages for jotting down notes and the like as well as the pure diary section. It wasn’t amongst his things that were sent back to me at the time, and I was too upset by his death to take any notice of the fact. It was only later that I realised that it had disappeared, and by then there seemed no point in asking if it was still with the company. Now that I have heard what you have to say I wonder if there was anything in it that they didn’t wish to be seen by an outsider.”

I shared his thought – if that diary had anything of the slightest danger to the Forbes, it was long gone. Ferris paused as a thought seemed to suddenly strike him.

“You know, when I sorted out Lionel’s papers from his house I found that the deeds to the house were held by his solicitor, and when I requested them so that I could organise selling the house, they also sent me other papers that Lionel had left with them for safe keeping. Nothing very earth shattering – I already had his will, of course, and the other papers were a melange of things – some share certificates, receipts for money he had paid for some extensions he had made to the house, and the correspondence he had had with the local planning department, all that sort of thing.

Most of it was several years old at least, but there was one packet which was only a few months old. It was a jumble of things and I didn’t pay much attention to any of it, but I must admit to being a hoarder – can’t bear to throw things away – and I kept it intending to study the contents more closely when I had the time and the inclination, but to tell the truth, I never got round to it. I wonder if anything in it might me relevant?”

“Would it be possible to check?” I asked, far more in desperation than with any real hope.

“Don’t see why not – it’s in my office still. I’ll fetch it out.”

A couple of minutes later he returned from the office bearing a stout envelope of A4

size and spread its contents out on the table. It was an odd collection of letters, some sheets of manuscript, some bills, all marked as having been paid, and at first glance seemed a strange collation to seem to need being entrusted to one’s solicitor.

We thumbed carefully though the collection with a growing sense of pointlessness, but then Ferris stopped short in the act of placing two sheest of paper in the

'examined' pile, and studied them more carefully.

"Look at this," he said slowly and handed them over to me.

Both were hand-written; the first had a series of initials with question marks against them, plus two sets against which there were emphatic ticks. All were in ball pen; the ticks so heavy that they had virtually penetrated the paper.

Those initials were ‘GHF’ and ‘WJF’ – the initials of the two Forbes brothers. The second, another sheet of A4 paper, had with two sets of figures, each arranged in two vertical columns. The columns were headed. That on the left was titled 'Declared', that on the right 'Actual'. There was no indication as to what he the individual figures

referred, but as the number of entries in the two columns was identical, and in each case the figure in the right hand column was greater than that in the left, and given Ferris senior's post of finance director, it seemed a reasonable assumption that they were some sort of budgetary analysis. But 'Declared' to whom? Or what?

That question was soon answered; also in the envelope was a folded over group of papers, clearly photocopies, of some sort of official forms. Ferris took one look at it and identified it for me.

"That's a return to the revenue for corporation tax," he said. "Lionel must have kept a copy for some reason."

I looked quickly though the forms and it struck me that the number of figures entered looked much the same as the number of entries Ferris had written down on the paper we had just studied. Closer examination showed that the official return did, in fact, show the same figures as the 'Declared' column in Ferris' handwriting.

Ferris gave a low whistle.

"If this is what I think it is," he began slowly, "Forbes Construction are fiddling the taxman in a big way. If the difference between Lionel's figures for 'Actual' and

'Declared' are what they seem to be, they have under-reported their profits by just over ten million pounds. With the tax at twenty eight percent, that means they have somehow hidden away nearly three million pounds."

"But Forbes have a turnover of getting on for two hundred million - surely to do this sort of a fiddle is a big risk for a small return?"

"It may be a big risk, but it isn't necessarily a small return. Depends on what they have done with the money. Just suppose that the Forbes brothers have somehow channelled it to themselves? Having gone to this trouble, I don't suppose they would have declared it for income tax - in fact they couldn't, because it would then stick out like a sore thumb. That means that they may have taken ten million tax free between them, so they have cheated the revenue out of about three million corporation tax plus the income tax they should have paid, in all around six million lost to the taxman."

Six million pounds, I thought grimly, could well be an adequate motive for murder, quite apart from any other considerations.

"There's another thing," Ferris added, "I would be surprised if this is a one off. The auditors would surely have noticed such a fall in profits with no commensurate drop in turnover - it's the sort of thing they look for. They could have been doing this for years."

Was there any way, I wondered, that I could use this against the Forbes? I'd disposed of their hired killer, but that hadn't done either of them any personal harm, and as far as I was concerned what they had caused to be done made the matter very personal indeed. The obvious step was to get in touch with the inland revenue and let them sort it out - but would they? I had no idea what sort of evidence they would need, nor how Lionel Ferris had obtained the figures he did. For all I knew they information might be totally buried in a way that it couldn't be found. After all, the brothers were clearly not fools, and they were also totally ruthless. I now had no doubt whatsoever that Lionel Ferris had been murdered to ensure his silence. There was also George Ferris to consider; the papers were his and if they were forwarded to the authorities it was always possible that the Forbes might take some action against him.

Another alternative was to go to the police and tell them of my suspicions over the death of Lionel Ferris - but what could they do? In my own mind I was just about certain that the killer would have been Cunningham, and he was at the bottom of the sea. Even if the police reinvestigated the case and somehow discovered Cunningham

had, indeed, been the killer, what then? There would be no link back to the Forbes, of that I was certain, without Cunningham able to give evidence against them.

The more I thought about the matter, the more I seemed to be banging my head against a brick wall.

I wondered if I should talk again to John Blake. I knew from my talk with him that he was already aware that false accounting was going on in the company. However, Blake lived in fear of the Forbes and what might happen to his family if he crossed them and was extremely unlikely to prove a resolute helper. I could not for a moment imagine him being willing to give evidence anywhere against the Forbes.

Ferris broke into my train of thought.

"So, what now? Is there anything that we can do to bring these two to justice? If they caused Lionel's death I want to see them pay for it."

"So do I , and for what happened to my wife, and in France. But who do we go to? I can't see how we can prove that Lionel's figures on a scrap of paper will carry much weight by themselves, and seeing that the Forbes have successfully fooled their auditors, possibly for years, I wonder what chance any investigation might have.

Cunningham is already being sought by the police both here and in France; if they ever find him they may link him to your brother's death, but I wonder how likely that is. The one thing that might help there is that if they do find him, he may lead them back to the Forbes anyway."

I felt bad lying to Ferris in this way, but I could hardly admit to him that Cunningham was dead at my hands. With both of us feeling totally frustrated, all that we could do, as I took my leave, was to promise to keep each other in touch should anything ever transpire.

I made my way home and reported to Sally that we seemed, yet again, to have reached a dead end.

Chapter 19

I did my best to put the unsatisfactory state of affairs out of my mind, but, just as your tongue can’t resist playing with a nagging tooth, so I seemed to keep coming across mention of the Forbes. I had hoped that they might get caught by the seemingly never ending recession, but on the contrary, they seemed to go from strength to strength.

The financial pages reported that the firm had won new contracts in both Scotland and France to carry out improvements to the respective A9 roads in both countries and a further snippet reported that William was now the finance director of the company.

Given the problems they had experienced with the post I was surprised that they hadn’t kept it in the family earlier.

There was one thought which, from time to time, nagged at me. When Sally had been abducted there had been two men involved. Cunningham, of course, had been one, but who had been the other? I had lost sight of this possible second lead at the time, because everything from then on had either seen seen Cunningham apparently working alone, or, whilst he was in France, using a local man to assist - when she had been taken, Marie-Jo, the Rive’s daughter, had heard both men speak and was certain that one was a Frenchman, not a foreigner speaking French. The Scottish number two wasn’t one of the brothers – the police had established beyond any doubt that they had both been out of the country.

When Jack and I had snatched Cunningham he had on him his mobile phone. I had kept it, hidden away with the revolver in the garage, in the vague hope that something on it might come in useful, but there were only a few numbers in its memory, none of

which gave any connection to the Forbes, and were in any case mostly mobile numbers – phones which could just about be anywhere on earth. One of the numbers, however, was for a Dundee land-line. At the time I had dismissed the possibility of tracing it, but now I decided to try and do so. Had I had access to a reverse telephone directory – where you put in the number and up comes the address – it would have been simplicity itself, but such things aren’t available to the normal citizen, only the authorities and, doubtless, any criminal with a mind to possess one.

There was another way, though. It entailed laboriously going through a normal telephone directory checking the numbers instead of the names. Fortunately, the penny pinching of the BT meant that instead of the huge directories of yesteryear, we had quite a small book, covering Perth, Dundee and the villages in between, so although daunting, the task wasn’t impossible.

It took me over seven hours, split over most of a week, to succeed, and even then luck was on my side; the name was Ferguson, quite early on in the listing. The address, as I had assumed from the number, was in Dundee, and a quick look on Google Maps showed a block of flats off Charleston Drive, quite an attractive location. G.H.

Ferguson lived in Flat 12 in a block which looked as though it must have contained at least twenty. An immediate problem; how could I identify my quarry? The block might quite easily contain the better part of a hundred people, men, women and children, and even though it was a man for whom I sought, that only reduced to number to a score or more. I couldn’t just go and ring on the bell – too many chances of being identified, even recognised by Ferguson if he had indeed been involved in Sally’s kidnapping. Somehow I had to identify him without revealing myself.

The idea I hit upon was simple and by no means guaranteed to succeed; I telephoned, pretending to be offering a great deal on telephone and broadband.

It succeeded partially. The man of the house wasn’t home but a woman answered, presumably wife or partner and I managed to elicit that Ferguson was George of that ilk.

I let a couple of days pass, and then phoned again. This time I was masquerading again, but on a one off chance that I had the right man.

The woman answered again.

“George there, is he?”

“Yes, who’s that?”

“Never mind who – he’ll know.”

I could sense the irritation, but she put down the phone and I heard her calling Ferguson. A moment later and a man was on the line.

“Who’s there?”

“George Ferguson?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“And what friend might that be?”

“Name of Harry mean anything?”

“Might do – Harry who?”

“You know him – he knows you. I wanted him to do something for me, but he can’t.

Suggested you might help.”

“Help how?”

“Not on the phone, George, not on the phone. Just let’s say it’s a couple of grand for you – perhaps more depending on how things go, easy job. Interested?”

There was silence for a good few seconds. I could imagine the unknown George Ferguson mulling matters over in his mind.

“I might be interested – let’s talk about it.”

“Harry said that you probably would. We need to meet soon – how about tomorrow evening?”

“Suits me – where?”

“I’m from out of town, George – you say.”

Another pause.

“There’s a pub near to hospital – can’t miss it – The Shand. I’ll meet you there at seven.”

“How will I know you?”

“Don’t worry about that – how will I know you?”

I paused for a moment.

“I’m five foot seven, not much hair and what’s left is light brown. I’ll be wearing a dark blue anorak, blue jeans, Nike trainers. Good enough?”

“OK – and what do I call you?”

“Let’s say Bill for now, OK?”

“OK, Bill-for-now – see you tomorrow.”

I had no intention of actually turning up for that meeting: I simply wanted to identify Ferguson whilst contemplating my next move. Originally I had thought of getting Jack’s help and simply grabbing the man as we did with Cunningham, but I couldn’t see us being able to do that with somebody who lived in a block of flats, with neighbours to hand, and, for all I knew, four second-row Rugby playing sons in the flat.

I had two choices, really. Either try and bribe Ferguson to help me, or get him to do so under duress – and the second choice looked a pretty forlorn hope. There was, of course, also the question of how much he actually knew, even if he was willing to reveal it.

Just before quarter to seven the next evening I was parked on the opposite side of the road to The Shand pub, facing the way Ferguson would come from his home, whether by car or on foot. Of the two, I guessed that he would drive – it was just far enough to make it worthwhile getting out the car – assuming that he had one, of course.

As I waited several people entered the building. Two couples and a trio of young women I could obviously discount, but just before seven two men entered separately.

Both looked to be in their thirties, casually dressed. Both arrived from the direction from which I expected Ferguson, one on foot, the other by car.

I waited until just on seven and then phoned Ferguson’s number. The woman answered.

“Hello?”

“George still there is he? Tell him it’s Bill.”

“You’ve just missed him – he left a couple of minutes ago.”

“Shit!” I exclaimed in feigned annoyance. “I was due to meet him at seven and my bloody car’s got a flat. Look, does he have a mobile on him?”

“Yes, he always carries it.”

“What’s his number? I’ll have to ring him and rearrange our meeting.”

She recited the number without a second thought and a moment later I had dialled it and Ferguson answered.

“George, it’s Bill.”

“So where are you?”

“Stuck on the sodding M8. I had a flat so was late starting, and now I’m still miles away. Look, I’ve got to be in Perth in half an hour so I can’t get to you. I’m still offering the job, though. How about same time and place tomorrow?”

He hesitated, but only momentarily.

“OK – but if you don’t make it this time, I’ll reckon you are just buggering around so we can forget it. All right?”

“OK with me – see ya.”

“Yeah – see ya.”

I waited patiently; having gone to the trouble of going to the pub, I assumed that Ferguson would surely have at least one drink before leaving. After about fifteen minutes, the man who had arrived by car just before seven emerged. As he approached his car I rang Ferguson’s mobile. The man stopped and reached for his pocket. I rang off immediately, leaving him puzzling over the failed call. Got him!

The reason for my subterfuge was simple: I did not know if Ferguson would recognise me. He might have been in the van in the car park in Kirriemuir where I had been instructed to leave the Collingwood House papers as a ransom for Sally’s return.

Had that been the case, he might well have decided not to make himself known to me and I would have reached another dead end.

So it was that the next day I was again parked outside the pub, waiting for Ferguson to make an appearance, which he did a few minutes before seven. I gave him a few minutes to get settled, then followed him in.

He was sitting at a table, a pint glass of beer in front of him, from which he had taken one, perhaps two, mouthfuls. He looked up as I came through the door but gave no sign of recognition. He either had never seen me before or had failed to remember me, and continued to look out for the mythical ‘Bill’.

I went to the bar, bought a pint myself and then walked over to Ferguson’s table, setting the glass door and seating myself. He looked at me in mild surprise. I smiled at him.

“Hello, George”

He was startled.

“Who are you?”

“Let’s say Bill-for-now, shall we?”

“You don’t look like you said.”

“No, well, I wanted to sound as harmless as possible, no threat to anybody.”

He viewed me uneasily.

“And are you a threat?”

“That depends, George, that depends.”

I examined him closely. There was nothing remarkable about him. Aged perhaps mid-thirties, five foot seven or eight, slim build. Lank light brown hair was already thinning on top and brown eyes regarded me from under thin eyebrows. All in all, he looked a totally forgettable person – the type you might meet briefly and be unable to describe nor recognise a day later.

“On what?”

“On whether you want to help me and earn a couple of grand, or whether you want the police to start looking for you as well as Harry.”

“Why should the police be wanting to look for me – or for Harry, for that matter?”

“Come on, George. Don’t play silly buggers. The police are looking for Harry because of that woman the two of you lifted. The police and the French police are

looking for him over the death of that little French girl, Eloise DuPont, and the kidnapping of the other one, the Rive girl. At the moment they are only looking for Harry and my gen is that they can’t find him. As far as I know, you aren’t in their radar – if you were, I’m sure that you would have had a visit by now. That, however, could be changed.”

Ferguson was looking unhappier by the moment, but pulled himself together and attempted a counter-attack.

“Don’t know what the fuck you are on about, mate. Now piss off and leave me alone.”

“Alright, George, your decision.”

However, I did not get up to go. Instead, I took my mobile out and dialled a number.

As it started ringing, I pressed the speaker key so that Ferguson could hear both ends of the conversation.

After the ringing tone, a male voice answered.

“Tayside Police, how can I help you?”

I looked across the table at Ferguson. He shrugged.

“Chief Inspector Graham, please.”

“I’m not sure that he is in, sir – who is calling?”

“Could you tell him, please, that it is William Gaunt – he’ll know me.”

There was a long pause at the other end. Before it could be ended, Ferguson’s nerve failed him.

“OK – we’ll talk.”

I pressed the ‘Off’ button on the phone. What Ferguson did not know was that the

‘Tayside Police’ number I had phoned was in fact Jack Hammond – we had previously arranged the charade. Had Ferguson held out, ‘Chief Inspector Graham’

(which was the name of a genuine Tayside officer in case Ferguson checked) would have been unavailable, but would be given a message to phone me back.

“Right, George. Now, a while back, you and Harry lifted a woman – ran her Mini off the road in your Land Rover, held her for a couple of days, returned her alive but not too healthy. Now, let’s just say that I am a friend of the family – and also a friend of the DuPont and Rive families. We know you helped Harry lift the woman – we don’t know for sure that you helped him in France, but we reckon that you did – you’d worked with him in Scotland, why not there as well?”

“What do you want from me – and anyway – I’ve never been to France, so you can forget that part right away.”

“As I am sure that you have guessed, George, the reason I sought you out instead of going straight to the police and fingering you, is because I want to know more about what went on. For starters – Harry worked for the Forbes brothers in all three cases.”

At the mention of the name Forbes a flicker of recognition appeared on Ferguson’s face momentarily. “Now, I – and the families – want to hit back at the Forbes. We, and especially the DuPont family, want them to suffer for what has been done. If you can help us there will be money for you. If you can’t help us – and you can convince me that you would help if you could, and aren’t just holding out – then I’ll leave you alone. If you won’t help – then expect the law to come calling.”

He stared back at me across the table, clearly weighing up his options for a long time before speaking again.

“Look, I know that Harry got the contract from the Forbes – he mentioned them one day at the house were we held that woman – but that’s all I know about it. He paid me for a simple job. I never met these Forbes and don’t know nothing about them. Now, why don’t you just give me the money you promised and fuck off out of it?”

His left hand was lying on the table. I made as if to reach for my glass, but instead grabbed his left hand with my right and squeezed as hard as I could. Ferguson was slightly built, considerably smaller than me and his hand was lost in mine, and pain registered on his face as I maintained the pressure.

“Don’t talk to me like that George – I don’t like it. Now, if that is all you know about the Forbes, you’re no use to me, so our business is ended.”

I released his hand and watched as he determined not to rub it or show in any sign of pain. He regarded me malevolently.

“You watch yourself, mate. If I come after you you’ll be sorry, believe me.”

I stared back.

“No George. Just think on. I know where you live. If you give me cause, I’ll come after you – and you won’t like the result, believe me. Think on something else – why do you think nobody, not even the law, can find Harry Cunningham? Think on, George, think on.”

At that I got up and left. Another dead end.

I left the pub and drove away to a public phone box that I had previously reconnoitred, that rarity, one which still worked.

I dialled the number that I had committed to memory.

“Tayside police.”

“Look, there’s a guy in the Shand pub and I know he’s got a gun in his car. He’s talking about blowing some character away tonight.”

I had the immediate attention of the policeman on the other end of the line.

“What’s his name, do you know – and can you tell me your name, please?”

“He’s George Ferguson – nasty piece of work, stays at that block of flats off Charleston Drive.”

“And your name?”

“No way, mate – I don’t want any chance of getting dragged into this. I don’t want him after me. Like I say – he’s in the pub right now, car parked outside, an old Volvo estate, a W reg.”

I put down the phone.

The next day the local paper had a report of how a man had been arrested by police for possession of an illegal firearm. He wasn’t referred to by name, but the detail was sufficient for me to know that my revenge on Ferguson had worked. Further confirmation was some months away, but eventually the same paper carried the news that a Dundee man, George Ferguson, had been sentenced to five years in prison for possession of an illegal firearm, namely one Makarov automatic pistol, and ammunition.

It was, of course, Jack’s Makarov. Whilst I had been in the pub talking to Ferguson, Jack had forced the door of the Volvo and secreted the pistol, unloaded, under the squab of the back seat. The ammunition had been slipped under the loose carpet behind the driver’s seat. To explain the lack of Feguson’s fingerprints on the weapon, Jack had wiped it scrupulously clean and left a couple of pairs of thin latex surgical gloves with it, inviting the clear assumption that Ferguson had handled it in gloves for the very purpose of avoiding having his prints on it. We had worked out the plot as soon as I found out where Ferguson lived. Jack had come down to us for a couple of days and when I phoned him with my ostensible ‘Tayside Police’ call, he was actually on his mobile just outside the building. Part of Jack’s Army expertise had been getting into locked vehicles as a security skill; the old Volvo had been child’s play for him.

Had Ferguson actually been able, and willing, to give us real help the call would have been delayed – but I would still have made it eventually.

So, I had taken revenge on the two men who had been directly responsible for Sally’s ordeal, but I was still dissatisfied. Not until I had somehow make life miserable for the Forbes themselves could I rest easy, but every step I had taken to date had simply led to a dead end.

I had even contemplated – but only very briefly – trying to kill them, but I simply could not justify that to myself. Cunningham’s death caused me no pangs of conscience at all. The man was a child murderer. As a combat pilot I knew full well that my bombing raids must have killed people far less blameworthy than Cunningham and although there was a big difference between war and my killing of the man, it didn’t trouble me.

The Forbes brothers were a different case. Yes, they were crooks, and yes, their employment of Cunningham had led to the death of Eloise Dupont, but not for one moment did I think that they had intended her death any more than they had intended Sally to lose our baby. It was possible that they had ordered the death of Lionel Ferris, but equally possible that they had not – that it really was a mugging.

I went back to wondering if, even now, there might be a way of getting at them via their tax fiddles. I had discarded the possibility before as having too small a chance of success, but I could think of no other approach left to me.

My mind returned to John Blake, the former finance director at Forbes Construction.

Frightened out of his wits by the threats to his daughters, he would be of no help in anything that smacked of going against the Forbes, but there was one point on which he could, and perhaps would, throw some light for me.

My earlier digging into the company had revealed that there were four directors at that time – Forbes senior, now deceased, his wife and his two sons. I had leant, from George Ferris, that upon the death of the father, the sons had apparently racked up the extent of their false accounting, and from what we had seen in Lionel’s papers they were profiting considerably as a result. Nothing in those papers, however, had made any mention of the wife, now widow, of William Forbes, and I wondered just how she now fitted into matters. I telephoned John Blake, and after some initial hesitation, he gave me some background that I should have asked for much earlier.

Apparently the sons greatly resented their stepmother. Only a few years older than themselves, her marriage to their father had seen them effectively take a substantial cut in their incomes as William pandered to a new, young bride with expensive tastes.

Forbes Construction was not a public company – you couldn’t buy shares in it on the Stock Exchange or anything like that – but it did have shares. Back in 1985 William Forbes had wanted to lay his hands on some capital to finance an expansion to his works site. He needed half a million pounds, but the banks were unwilling to help, so he approached a number of friends and acquaintances. In all there were twenty of them and between them they provided the capital he needed.

In order to formalise matters, Forbes created one thousand shares in the company and sold shares to his backers at the rate of ten thousand pounds per share, so fifty of those one thousand shares were held by outsiders. What they got for their money was a promise to buy back the shares at face value plus an allowance for inflation after three years and a guaranteed percentage of the firm’s profits in proportion to the number of shares each person held in the interim, and if, they didn’t seek to sell back their shares after the three years, the same proportionate income, but without the guaranteed level of dividend, thereafter, and without the buy back at face value clause. The remaining nine hundred and fifty shares Forbes split between himself, his wife – his first wife, Jane – and his sons. He kept six hundred shares for himself, with fifty for his wife and one hundred and fifty each for his sons. This meant that he always retained control of

company policy – all the shares had voting rights, but his was the controlling interest.

He promised his investors a minimum return of twenty percent on their shares for the three year period, a simple proportion thereafter. As a result, someone buying one of his shares and selling it back at the end of the three years would receive six thousand pounds plus an inflation-proofed ten thousand. It was attractive and his investors were happy. They had, in fact, mostly had sold their shares back to Forbes at the end of the three years.

As a result, at the time of his death, Forbes owned six hundred and forty shares in the company; only ten remained with an investor. Even that, however, represented an initial outlay of one hundred thousand pounds. Blake, as the one-time finance director, knew that the investor had, in fact, died back in 1997 and the shares formed part of his estate held in trust for his only child, a daughter born in 1995, until her eighteenth birthday, still over a year away.

What was even more interesting, however, was what happened when Forbes himself died in 2009, an event which had precipitated the increase in false accounting that Lionel Ferris had noticed. William Forbes had left his shares in such a way – two hundred and eighty to his wife, one hundred and thirty to each son – that all three ended up with equal holdings of three hundred and thirty shares. George and William junior were furious. They had never liked their stepmother and now, instead of inheriting all their father’s holdings, as they had expected, they now were on an equal footing with her. They had three hundred and thirty shares each, So all three of them had an equal holding and therefore the expectation of equal shares in the company’s profits.

Interesting. The brothers were considerably out of pocket compared to their expectations. Given their known and assumed history I wondered what Elizabeth Forbes’ will stated? If her stepsons were to inherit I wondered at her chances of reaching a ripe old age.

Then another penny dropped. The money which wasn’t going to the taxman. Not for one moment did I suppose that George and William shared it with their stepmother –

and it offered a sensible explanation as to what had triggered the change. So, they were cheating her as well as the taxman.

I had checked with Blake. Over the last few years the company had declared quite modest dividends – Forbes senior had been reinvesting heavily in the company to finance its growth. He had structured things so that his sons drew a basic salary in addition to their shares income, whilst he and Elizabeth only took the shares income.

A dividend of just one per cent had been declared for several years. Given that his own shares had a face value of six million, three hundred thousand pounds, that gave him a shares income of sixty-three thousand a year. Not enormous, but I had no doubt that there were additions hidden in the books somewhere. It gave the boys just fifteen thousand each in addition to their salaries. It must have been a great shock to them to see their stepmother suddenly so well provided for at their expense.

Faced with that situation they had two options. They could have declared higher dividend levels. That however, would have benefitted their detested stepmother as much as themselves. Alternatively, they could keep the declared dividend low, cook the books, and skim off money that Elizabeth would never know about. That, I was sure, was what they were doing.

I wondered if the antipathy that the two of them felt for Elizabeth was reciprocated?

Could she possibly be a chink in their armour? By my reckoning, by keeping the dividend so low and skimming off money illegally, they must have cheated her out of at least £50,000 or so a year, possibly more.

Chapter 20

I had learnt more from Blake: in Forbes’ will his wife had been left, in addition to the shares in the company, the house in Haslemere, but little else. Virtually everything Forbes had was tied up in the company; even the cars he and his wife drove, respectively a two year old Bentley and a slightly newer Mazda M-5 sports car, were in the company’s name. If she only had the income from the shares - £33,000 a year as long as the one per cent figure was maintained - running that big house would prove a millstone round her neck. Blake also told me that whilst Forbes had been alive the household expenses had been charged against the company by some neat legerdemain, and that one of the first thing that the brothers had done after their father died was to exclaim in pious indignation that such a thing was not right. Regretfully, they said, their father had clearly been ill-advised; it simply was not legal for the company to bear those costs, so in future their stepmother would have to meet all the bills herself. It had, apparently, led to an almighty row at the time, and whilst, as he no longer worked at the company, Blake didn’t know if that still rankled, he would have been very surprised if there had been any burying of hatchets since he left.

I determined to seek out Mrs. Forbes and try to enlist her support in bringing down her stepsons, but how to go about it?

There was always the chance – albeit a slim one – that she had patched up matters with George and William and that an approach from me would put them on their guard. She might feel that she was herself implicated in the tax fiddles, although judging by what Blake had said that also seemed unlikely.

In the end, I decided that the simplest approach was the best. I telephoned her.

“Elizabeth Forbes.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Forbes. We have never met, but I would like to suggest to you that your stepsons are cheating you out of considerable sums of money. I have my own reasons for not wishing them well, and I think that it could be mutually beneficial if you and I were to meet.”

There was a long silence at the other end of the line, then she answered, speaking slowly.

“Who are you? What do you know about George and William?”

“My name is Alan Richards. I know that the brothers robbed me, were responsible for my wife having a breakdown and have a history of intimidation as a business method.

I also know that you and they do not get along.”

“Mr. Richards, this all sounds very far-fetched. If you have anything against my stepsons, why not pursue your complaints with whatever might be the appropriate authorities – the police perhaps?”

“I have involved the police, but they worked through intermediaries and the police couldn’t prove anything against them.”

“So, why do you want to speak to me?”

“I am hoping that you will find it in your own interests to learn a lot more about what they have been up to and how you are being cheated by them.”

There was another long pause. At least she hadn’t rung off.

“Very well, Mr. Richards. When can we meet?”

“I’m in Scotland, so how about tomorrow evening? Say about seven?”

“That will be fine – I’ll be expecting you.”

And so it was that at seven the next evening I rang on the doorbell of the large house in Haslemere. I was not alone; learning that Mrs. Forbes had agreed to see me, Sally had insisted on coming. To be honest, whilst I was still concerned about her, I saw

this as a positive move – not long ago she would have been reluctant to meet somebody new.

The door was answered; I knew that Elizabeth Forbes was forty-six or seven, but she could easily have passed for five, even ten, years younger. Tall and slim, deep blue eyes surveyed us from a long face, attractively tanned and framed by shoulder length silver blonde hair, streaked with gold highlights. For the occasion she had dressed in a cream linen trouser suit, the jacket open to show a scarlet silk blouse. Both wrists were encircled with heavy gold bracelets. Altogether, as Sally later commented ‘Quite a package’. It was easy to see why William Forbes senior had married her, and perhaps why his sons objected to her so strongly.

She looked surprised at seeing two of us, not just myself, but invited us in without hesitation.

We were shown into a large sitting room, one wall of which was virtually all window, looking out to an immaculate garden, a well kept lawn surrounded by flower beds.

She waved us to a white leather settee and sat herself down in a matching item, facing us.

“Right, Mr. Richards – what do you want to talk about?”

I told her almost everything, leaving out any reference to my abduction of Cunningham, although making clear what had been done to Sally, and emphasising the financial smoke and mirrors being indulged in by her stepsons. I showed her copies I have made of the papers in George Ferris’ possession and recounted what I had been told by John Blake.

It took quite a time and she listened without interruption, only the expressions on her face indicating her reactions.

At last I had finished and she regarded us without speaking for a long time. At last she spoke.

“So, you are telling me that once William had died, George and Will – he is always Will in the family, my husband was always William – began a campaign of kidnapping and intimidation to secure contracts, and tax evasion to cheat me and the taxman of our dues?”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

I didn’t say that, in my opinion, the intimidation and tax evasion had actually been started long ago by her husband and that the sons had simply racked up the intensity. I had no proof that such was the case and there was the danger that she might not wish to believe any such accusation against him. I wanted her on our side.

“So, Mr. Richards, what now?”

“Well, as a director of the company, I think that you need to go to the police. The Surrey Fraud Squad to be precise. There are millions involved here, so they are bound to take it seriously, and they will find out what has been done and how.”

She shook her head slowly, and for a moment I thought that we had lost her, but her next words set my mind at rest.

“You know, I have always known that George and Will resented me, especially after William’s will made us equal partners in the company, but I never dreamt that it went so far. And what they had done to you,” she turned to Sally, “was absolutely wicked.

Yes, I’ll contact the Fraud Squad. I’ll do it tomorrow – and I would like you both with me when I do.”

We readily agreed – this was going better than my wildest expectations.

The next she did as she said and contacted the police, the result of which was that two days later we all three of us were closeted with an Inspector Kenneth Hall of Surrey’s Fraud Squad.

A man in his mid thirties, Hall was a short, slim individual, positively exuding energy and determination. Sharp, intelligent dark eyes searched our faces as we recounted our story. He was particularly interested to hear of the demise of Lionel Ferris so soon after he had apparently become worried about the company.

“I have had a look at the file about Mr. Ferris’ murder. Sadly, no leads, but this does look like a motive and I have asked for it to be looked at again, just in case any link can be established, although I must say that I am not very hopeful. The possible fraud s another matter, however. If we can prove your allegations there could be a very strong case indeed.

“Now, I need to formalise all this. Mrs. Forbes, you are a director of the company. I need you make a formal complaint, in writing, to me expressing your concern that the financial affairs of the company are being conducted in a fraudulent manner and requesting that they be investigated. I will then obtain a warrant to seize the company records and we will take it from there.”

“Of course, Inspector. How soon do you want it?”

“No time like the present, Mrs. Forbes – if you like to dictate something suitable,” he took a pocket Dictaphone from a desk drawer and pushed it across to her, “I’ll have it typed up straight away and you can sign it.”

She took the little machine, thought for a moment or two, and then rapidly dictated a letter, addressed, as Hall advised, to the Chief Superintendent in charge of Guildgord police station. As soon as she had finished he removed the mini-cassette from the machine and disappeared with it, returning a couple of minutes later, saying that the letter was being typed up and would be brought back as soon as it was ready.

Sure enough, ten minutes later a knock on the door heralded the entrance of a young woman bearing the typed letter which she handed to Hall. He glanced at it briefly and handed it across to Elizabeth Forbes. She read it carefully, then signed it and handed it back, retaining a second copy which had been with it.

Hall handed the signed copy back to the typist.

“Helen, see that this goes into Chief Superintendent Sawyer’s in tray straight away please.”

She nodded and left.

Hall looked across the desk at us.

“Right, Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Richards, Mr. Richards. That sets things in motion. The chief super will authorise obtaining a search warrant for the company offices together with the homes of George and William Forbes. Obviously, it is essential that they remain in ignorance of what is coming their way, so please don’t talk to them.”

“Don’t worry, Inspector, I have no intention of going anywhere near them until all this is over.”

“Good. Incidentally – as your late husband was the chief executive of the company for a long time, I am afraid that I will have to include your house in the searches. Not to do so would be seized upon by defence counsel to claim that it was you, rather than your stepsons, responsible for any wrong doing, following on from your late husband’s activities.”

Elizabeth clearly had not anticipated this.

“Is this really necessary, Inspector? I am sure that William would have nothing to do with this sort of thing.”

Oh dear, I thought. I believe that the second Mrs. Forbes is in for an unpleasant shock.

“I am afraid that it is. I am sure that you are right, but I must demonstrate that every possible avenue has been explored or your stepsons may well get away with their crimes.”

Elizabeth Forbes was clearly unhappy, but accepted the inevitable with good grace.

“Do I have ot be there, Inspector? If not, I think that I will book into an hotel until your people are finished.”

“That would perhaps be for the best, Mrs. Forbes. The officers doing the search will be as careful as possible, but it would bound to be inconvenient for you if you were in the house whilst it was all going on.”

And on that note we took our leave of the police. Sally and I stayed overnight in the same hotel that Elizabeth Forbes booked into and we then made an early start for home the next morning.

Two days later the financial pages were full of the news that Forbes Construction was in trouble with the police and the taxman. George Forbes, as CEO, was ‘helping the police with their enquiries’, but younger brother William was apparently nowhere to be found. He was out of the country when the warrants were served and his family professed to total ignorance as to where he might be.

It was some little time before we heard anything more, but the police search was thorough and successful. The Forbes brothers had over-estimated their own ability to hide their tracks and under-estimated the ability of determined searchers to uncover those tracks. The result of the police effort was to discover that the brothers had cheated the taxman of over six million pounds in just two years. The search also discovered that the cheating had been going on, although on a considerably smaller scale, long before the death of Forbes senior. During his time at the helm he had salted away a grand total well in excess of five millions, but spread over more than a decade and far better hidden.

Elizabeth, we discovered, was devastated by the news. She genuinely had no idea of her late husband’s dishonesty and found it very hard to come to terms with the knowledge.

There was still no sign of William Forbes; his brother was arrested and charged with fraud and tax evasion, and a European arrest warrant issued for William, but he had vanished like a puff of smoke.

Time went by; George Forbes was brought to trial, found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison in addition to being very heavily fined. Forbes Construction, stripped of its two senior managers, struggled for a while until Elizabeth, advised by her solicitors, managed to appoint a new CEO. It was in the future, but the new set-up worked well – and honestly. There was still no sign of William Forbes.

It was almost a year later that I was in the studio, working on a portrait of the newly appointed chairman of the council, the commission for which had come as a pleasant surprise and was the result of mutual acquaintances – like myself, he was ex-RAF. I heard the phone ring briefly and then stop as Sally presumably answered it. A moment later she came in, offering me the cordless handset.

“Alan, it’s Elizabeth Forbes and she sounds a bit strange.”

I took the phone.

“Elizabeth, hello – it’s Alan.”

“Alan, I’m not far away from you and I wonder if I could pop in and see you and Sally? Just a visit, nothing important.”

“Yes, of course. Where are you, and I’ll give you directions to get to us.”

Oh, it’s alright, I know your address. See you in about twenty minutes.”

I rang off and looked at Sally.

“I agree, she sounded a bit odd- a bit strained. And even if she looked us up in the phone book, unless you know the area it would be difficult to find us without directions.”

“Google Maps?” Sally suggested.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that – I suppose that could be the answer.”

Rather less than twenty minutes late a car turned off the road and stopped in our drive.

Hearing it, we opened the door in time to see Elizabeth Forbes climb out of the driver’s seat of a Mondeo with Scottish plates – presumably a hire car.

As she got out we went to greet her, and stopped short in surprise. Her hair, normally so carefully arranged, was awry, her lips were swollen and her left cheek had the beginnings of a large bruise.

More of a surprise, howeve, was the fact that she was not alone. From the other side of the car a man emerged – William Forbes.

We looked at him dumbfounded. What on earth was he doing here? He stepped behind Elizabeth and roughly pushed her forward.

“All of you,” he ordered, “into the house.”

I started to take a pace towards him, then stopped as he produced a small automatic pistol from his pocket and waved it in our general direction.

“Do as I say, or believe me, I will shoot.”

Not willing to risk him carrying out his threat, the three of us returned through the front door and allowed ourselves to be shepherded into the lounge. Once there, he ordered us all to sit whilst he remained standing, the pistol still in his hand, but pointed at the floor, not in our direction any more.

He regarded us with hatred in his eyes.

“You three have ruined me – and my brother. Thaks to you, he’s in jail and I’ve been on the run like a common criminal. You are going to pay for what you have done, believe me, you are really going to pay.”

He delved into his left hand trouser pocket and produced some lengths of cord which he tossed onto Elizabeth’s lap.

“Tie the other two’s hands,” he instructed her, “and make sure that you do it right –

make it tight.”

Under the threat of the pistol, Elizabeth stood up and crossed over to me. I held my hands out to her and she tied my wrists, but not tightly. Forbes watched her suspiciously and came over, pushing her roughly aside, to check my bonds. To do so, he pushed the pistol back into his jacket pocket. A mistake.

During our preliminary training in the RAF we had been taught many things over and above basic airmanship. Escape and evasion techniques, how to cope with interrogation, and, most germane to our present situation, unarmed combat. I visualised our instructor. Flight Sergeant O’Hara was nothing out of the ordinary to look at. Forty or so, five feet eight, eleven or twelve stone, Despite his non-descript appearance he was one of the toughest, and certainly the most dangerous, man I ever met. He taught us how to fight without weapons, despairing of our lack of fitness and our softness, determined to do the best that he could to prepare us for any eventuality should we find ourselves unarmed and faced with an enemy.

Two of his dicta stayed in my mind. First one: “Don’t hesitate – hesitation gets you killed. Don’t be half-hearted – half-hearted gets you killed. Don’t be squeamish –

squeamish gets you killed. Strike first, strike hard and keep on striking until the need to strike is over. Use whatever you have – feet, fists, head – whatever it takes.”

Second one: “Most men who are any good at all will assume that you will either try to punch or to kick or to knee then in the groin. They will be ready for you to try those.

Very few will expect you to head butt them, A head butt can be very effective – do it properly and the other man has a broken nose, a lot of pain, a lot of blood. The shock is short-lived, however – you need to follow it up with whatever you can. If you don’t, he will quickly recover enough to fight back – and he’ll be pretty mad at you.”

As Forbes reached out to check my bonds, I launched myself at him, head first, smashing my forehead into his face. I felt his nose break and blood splash on both of us. Just as Flight Sergeant O’Hara had prophesied, the immediate shock gave me a temporary advantage and I kicked Forbes savagely in the crotch as he staggered back, clawing at his face with his left hand, at his pocket with the pistol with his right.

Because he was staggering back, the kick had less power in it than I would have wished, but it still clearly hurt him and he staggered back further, half doubled over. I kept on attacking, O’Hara’s advice ringing in my ears. I used my bound hands as a club, smashing them against the side of his head, then managed to kick his legs from under him. He went down and i followed him, driving my knees into his chest, forcing the breath from his lungs. Still he tried to get the pistol from his pocket and I grasped his right wrist in both my hands, pulling his arm away to the side and then, twisting away from him, I managed to roll him onto his face and pulled his arm right back against the socket. He shrieked in agony as his arm was dislocated and I let go, grabbed him by the hair and smashed his face repeatedly against the floor until he went limp. Hurriedly I scrabbled for the pistol, cursing at the clumsiness caused by my hands being tied together, but at last I had it, and got back to my feet, backing well away from him and keeping the pistol trained on him. Amazingly, he was still conscious, although in a pretty bad way, and some inner determination had him starting to rise again. I almost shot him there and then, but at the last moment changed my mind. I waited until he was half way up and kicked him again, this time in the ravaged face, adding more damage and producing more blood. He went down onto hands and knees and I managed at last to wriggle one hand out of the bonds that Elizabeth had tied loosely.

The whole fight had taken only a matter of seconds, although it had seemed like half a life time to me as I strove to incapacitate the man. For the first time since launching my attack I checked on Sally and Elizabeth. Neither had moved, Sally still seated, Elizabeth still standing to one side where Forbes had pushed he before making his ill-advised check of my bonds. Both were regarding me with shocked expressions, numbed by the ferocity of the scene that they had just witnessed.

I fought ot control my breathing.

“Sally, call 999 please. Say that we have apprehended a violent intruder. Don’t mention the gun whatever you do.”

As if in a trance, she rose from the chair, crossed to the phone, and with shaking voice, called for help. I had told her not to mention that Forbes had been armed – I was concerned that mentioning that a firearm was involved would result in delay whilst an armed response team was assembled and, in all probability, some long-winded risk assessment process carried out.

Even so the help took twenty minutes ot arrive and took the form of a police car containing two uniformed officers. In the meantime we had tied Forbes hand and feet

and sat him in a kitchen chair, worried that leaving him lying down with the damage to his nose and face might see him in danger of drowning in his own blood. Even so, I kept the pistol on him until we heard the police car arrive. When I heard them, I placed the pistol on the table well away from all of us.

The next few hours were chaotic. The police took one look at Forbes and called for an ambulance to take him away, and we all went to the police station to give statements.

They refused to believe that I had acted purely in self-defence and assure me that ‘the incident’ would be fully investigated.

At last we were allowed to go home, although Elizabeth was warned not to leave the area until they said that she might, so she booked into an hotel in Perth.

The next few days were anxious ones as I was interviewed several time, but at last I was told that they accepted that I had acted in self-defence and in defence of Sally and Elizabeth, and that there would be no charges for me to answer. To be honest, instead of feeling relieved, I felt angry at the disbelief that I had had to overcome in their attitude, but at least it was now over.

Or so I thought. Four months later I found myself in court as a witness in the trial of William Forbes, accused of kidnapping Elizabeth and assaulting her, possessing an illegal firearm and using that firearm to create fear of harm (cutting through the legalese). I took the witness stand and answered the prosecution barrister's questions.

Yes, I had seen Forbes drag Elizabeth into my house. Yes, I had seen evidence of assault in the bruises to her face. Yes, he had threatened us all with a pistol. Yes, I had managed to overpower him. And that, I foolishly assumed would be end of the matter.

Then the defence lawyer got to his feet and smiled at me.

"Mr. Richards, have you ever killed anyone?"

I almost said no, then realised what he was up to - it would have been untrue and he could use it to place a question mark over anything else that 1 said.

"I flew combat missions in the first Gulf War and dropped bombs. I have no doubt that people died as a result."

"So causing death and destruction is something you would be comfortable with?"

"Not at all."

"But you did it, Mr. Richards."

"The country was at war. I did my duty."

"Ah, duty - so easy an excuse for violence."

I was beginning to be very grateful for the RAF training on dealing with interrogation -

the man was clearly trying to vilify me in the eyes of the jury.

At that point the prosecution barrister interrupted.

"My Lord, I fail to see what this line of questioning by my learned friend has to do with the matter before us. Mr. Richards' military history has no bearing on this case." The judge pondered for a moment, then turned his attention to the defence lawyer.

"I find myself inclined to agree with the prosecution in this matter Mr. Gillespie. Can you explain how your questions are relevant?"

"My Lord, I am merely attempting to ascertain the character of the witness."

The judge pondered again before speaking.

"I think that the questions you have put to the witness are an adequate degree of following that path. Perhaps you would now be kind enough to direct your questions more directly to events."

Gillespie bowed his head slightly."As Your Lordship wishes."

He turned back to me.

"Mr. Richards, I want to be sure that I have a complete understanding of what happened in your house the day my client was so badly beaten that he ended up in

hospital. "

I remained silent.

"Tell me, Mr. Richards. the pistol that you claim my client used threaten you, Mrs.

Richards and Mrs. Forbes. Had you ever seen it before'?"

"No."

"You are quite sure about that?"

"Yes."

"So, Mr. Richards, why is it that only your fingerprints are on the weapon and not those of my client?"

"My fingerprints are on it because I took it off him. I don't know why his aren't."

"Well, one reason for that could be because he never handled it. That it was in fact you who had the weapon and you who threatened my client with it after you had savagely beaten him."

I remained silent.

' No answer, Mr. Richards?"

"I wasn't aware that you had asked me a question."

"Let me rephrase, then. Did you have the weapon in your possession before my client entered your house?"

"No."

"And you arc sure of that?"

"Yes."

"But my client says that the first time he saw the weapon was when you produced it after savagely beating him."

"Then your client is lying."

"So you claim that, despite the absence of his fingerprints on it, it was my client who produced the weapon und that you took it from him?"

"Yes."

"Let us move on then. Now, you claim that my client threatened you, your wife and Mrs. Forbes. Tell the court how he did that."

"He pushed Mrs. Forbes into our house, ushered us, under the threat of the pistol, into the lounge and told us all to sit down. He then produced some lengths of cord, threw them to Mrs. Forbes and told her to tie my hands and those of my wife, with me first.

He told her to make sure that she tied them tightly. He must have been suspicious that she had not done so, because he came across after she had tied my hands to check on them. He put the pistol back in his pocket and as he got close to me I attacked him and managed to overpower him. In the struggle he tried to draw the pistol but I prevented him from doing so and was able to take it from his pocket."

The barrister looked at me for a long, silent period, scepticism writ large on his face.

"So, Mr. Richards, you expect the court to believe that, despite having your hands bound, you were able to overcome an armed man, inflicting upon him a savage beating," he consulted a piece of paper he had in his hand, “.. a beating which resulted in a broken nose, a broken jaw, three missing front teeth and two further front teeth broken, three broken ribs, a dislocated right arm and sundry cuts and bruises, and all without suffering so much as a mark upon yourself? I put it to you, Mr. Richards that a far more credible scenario is that you were never bound and that, as my client avers, you threatened him with the pistol and then launched a savage and unprovoked attack which put him in hospital."

I returned his gaze.

"Your client is lying - it happened as I described."

He shook his head slowly. "No Mr. Richards, I am afraid I find your account just too incredible to accept and I am sure that the jury will share my disbelief. No

further questions. "

He waved his hand dismissively and sat down.

I looked over at the jury and was horrified to see that, on at least three or four faces, furrowed brows as though they accepted the questioning of my evidence.

The prosecution barrister was back on his feet.

"Two questions, Mr. Richards. Firstly - the RAF trained you in unarmed combat?

And that training would envisage just the sort of situation in which you found yourself?"

"Yes."

"And second - you have told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"

"Yes."

"Thank you Mr. Richards."

He turned to the judge.

"No more questions, my Lord."

The judge nodded and turned to me.

"Thank you for your evidence, Mr. Richards, you may stand down."

I did so gladly, although I was inwardly fuming at the attempt of the defence to discredit me.

Thankfully, it was to no avail. The evidence of Sally and Elizabeth bore out my own.

A fingerprint expert explained that the reason there were no identifiable fingerprints from Forbes on the gun was easily explained - mine overlay his, smudging them beyond the legal level needed to demonstrate identification, but those smudged prints clearly showed that I was not the only person to have handled the weapon.

The jury retired for no more than thirty minutes to return a guilty verdict and Forbes was sentenced to five years in prison.

He was also still charged with fraud and tax evasion, as had been his brother and eventually, like his brother, he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years. I found it ironic that his cheating the Treasury of money resulted in a more severe penalty than kidnapping and assault, possession of an illegal firearm, etc., but I suppose that is the way of the world. I was also disappointed that his sentences were to run concurrently, not added one to the other, but again, I suppose that is the way of the world.

One major surprise was that in their investigations the police actually found the documents relating to Collingwood House that I had used to buy Sally's life from her kidnappers and that legal opinion was that the trail of inheritance entitled me to the value of the property. More difficult would be establishing that value and against whom it could be levied. The Forbes company owed its existence to a large degree to the original profits made back in the 1950s by the development of the Collingwood House site. The wealth of the brothers (and for that matter of Elizabeth) descended from the company's success.

It had all the makings of a legal tussle lasting years and costing millions in lawyers' fees, but Elizabeth had a simpler solution. In return for £500,000 I relinquished all claims to participate in the company's affairs or expect further benefit from the tangled affairs of Collingwood and the Forbes family. It was an amicable arrangement. The company. even after having to stump up the money the brothers had cheated out of the Treasury, could well afford it, and I was very satisfied. Elizabeth now controlled the company and had made appointments of a CEO and a finance director. I was pleased to see that in the latter post she offered John Blake his old job back and, with the malign influence of the Forbes brothers a thing of the past, he happily accepted.

There was even better news to come, however. Sally had recovered much of her previous joie de vivre, but not all of it. She was still uneasy in large crowds, still more nervous than in the past, but the demons were slowly dying. Their final death knell came a couple of months later.

I had been out all day, photographing a vintage aircraft which the owner had sold to an overseas buyer and discussing with him the content of a large painting he could hang in his hall. The painting was to be a bit unusual; he wanted it to be of the aircraft - a Tiger Moth - but also to include himself, his late father who had owned the aircraft before him, and the aircraft's original owner who had sold it to the client's father just before the outbreak of World War 2. Armed with photos of the three men and my own shots of the aircraft, I returned home just after seven o'clock to be met by a beaming Sally, who flung her arms round my neck and kissed me enthusiastically. We broke for breath and she had tears running down her face.

"What's wrong, darling, why are you crying?"

"Because I am happy, so, so happy. What do doctors know? I'm pregnant!"

My wife was back.

Table of Contents

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19