EG02 - The Lost Gardens (31 page)

‘You don’t look surprised. Yes, I’ve known about the paintings for a long time but unfortunately I’ve never been in a position to do much about them. But I knew that when you started to nose around, getting more and more inquisitive about Ryder and this place and why that ungrateful bastard left it all to a bloody American woman, of all people—I had a gut feel that sooner or later you’d find them. All it took was patience and a little help along the way. Oh yes, I know all about the paintings and I know damned well that I saw one of them in your possession in that room.’

He started to walk towards Kingston, waving the gun in the direction of the steps. ‘Why don’t we do this?’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s go down and have a little talk with that idiot friend of yours. I have a feeling after that you’ll want to tell me.’

Kingston descended the steps followed by Fox.

At the foot of the steps, Kingston stopped. Ferguson was gone.

‘Looks like that talk may have to wait,’ said Kingston.

‘A foolish move on his part and he’ll regret it.’

‘I have to know. Is Jamie hurt? We heard the shot.’

Fox didn’t reply. Clearly he was flustered, trying to figure out his next move. He moved next to the trunk and knelt beside it, looking up at Kingston. ‘Step back,’he said motioning with the gun. ‘Make a move and I’m going to use this.’

Kingston watched as Fox examined the inside of the trunk, glancing up every few seconds to check on him.

‘You don’t believe me. There is no false compartment,’ said Kingston.

Fox stood. ‘You’re coming with me,’ he said, aiming the gun at Kingston. ‘Get up there.’

Kingston started up the steps. Despite the fact that his life and quite possibly Roger’s were in jeopardy, he couldn’t stop agonizing about Jamie. The idea that Fox might even have taken a shot at her enraged him. He reached the top of the steps and entered the chapel. When he reached the aisle he stopped and, hearing Fox coming up the steps behind him, took a quick glance over his shoulder.

He almost gasped but managed to suppress it. Fox was on the second to last step, his head and shoulders just above the chapel’s floor level. Behind him, concealed by the pew, Jamie was waiting, hands above her head, brandishing one of the bronze candleholders like a baseball bat. She’d apparently ripped it off the wall. No sooner than Kingston saw her, she brought down the candlestick with a surprising display of force on the back of Fox’s head. Kingston turned to meet Fox’s eyes just before they closed and his body slumped to the floor.

Jamie dropped the makeshift weapon clattering to the stone floor and ran to Kingston. For a moment they embraced, her head resting on his chest. Kingston felt a huge surge of relief, followed by an impassioned desire not to let her go. He’d forgotten completely how it felt to hold a woman like this.

At long last he let her go and held her at arm’s length, looking down into her brown eyes. ‘That’s quite a swing you’ve got,’ he said, smiling.

‘I owe it all to softball,’ she answered.

‘More like hardball, if you ask me.’

They separated and turned their attention to Fox. Kingston knelt down and checked his pulse.

‘He’s not dead, I hope—is he?’

Kingston found the question strangely poignant. Unconscious in front of him was a psychopath who’d clearly demonstrated that he was not above burying people alive, maiming or killing to get what he wanted and Jamie was concerned about his health. If it had been up to Kingston, he would have given Fox a couple more whacks.

‘No, don’t worry, he’ll make it.’

‘Then I hope he spends the rest of his life locked up,’ she said.

‘We were
terrified
when we head that shot, Jamie. What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I was outside the chapel when I realized that, even though I had a good lead on Fox, he could still shoot me in the open. He’d know I would head for the house. So I changed my mind. I figured that if I hid in the chapel, I stood a much better chance. Seeing the chapel empty, he would conclude that I’d run outside. And that’s exactly what he did. The problem was that sooner or later he would come back and it turned out to be sooner. I was wondering what I should do, when I heard the shot, too. A few seconds later, he stormed back into the chapel and went below.’

‘So, he fired the shot—what, in anger?’

‘That’s what I think. He was so furious that I’d got away.’

‘You took a big risk staying here—’

‘—but it paid off, didn’t it?’

Kingston nodded. ‘Certainly did.’

Jamie’s expression changed. She looked perturbed. ‘Where’s Roger?’

‘He’s still down in the catacombs somewhere. He probably heard everything that Fox and I said and, knowing we were on our way back down, he did the smart thing and made himself scarce.’

Kingston walked halfway down the steps and shouted, ‘Roger! You can come out, it’s all over.’

It was a minute or so before Roger made an appearance. His forehead looked a mess where the blood was starting to congeal. He’d been hiding in one of the rooms close to the steps, he said. Seeing Fox’s body and the candlestick he knew quickly what had happened. ‘How did you manage it?’ he asked Kingston.

‘Ask Jamie,’ he replied. ‘A home run, you might say.’

The police arrived quickly. First, a van and an incident-response car followed by an ambulance and then, five minutes later, a car with Detective Chief Inspector Chadwick and Sergeant Eldridge.

After seeing Fox lifted on a stretcher into the ambulance, the DCI and sergeant accompanied Jamie, Ferguson and Kingston back to the house. A police constable was instructed to retrieve the trunk and its contents and anything else left in the catacombs at the foot of the stairs and bring it all up to the house.

Chapter Twenty-six

In the dining room, Jamie sat at one end of the long dining table, Kingston at the other. Between them, on the shiny mahogany surface, was a hotchpotch of yellowing papers, envelopes, folders, documents and a couple of cigar boxes. On the floor close to Jamie stood the leather-handled trunk; next to it, strewn on the oriental carpet, the framed photographs.

The last policeman had left fifteen minutes earlier. Since then, Jamie and Kingston had been studying the photos and were only now starting to examine Ryder’s personal papers, correspondence and keepsakes. For the occasion, Jamie had opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne.

The photographs spanned many decades, the earliest—guessing from the style of the clothing and the military uniforms, which, it turned out, Kingston knew quite a lot about—dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly all the pictures were sepia or black and white. When they first started to look at the photos, Jamie had remarked that she felt like a voyeur looking through a one-sided mirror into a family’s private life. Kingston had no such misgivings. He viewed them dispassionately, simply as historical documents, much as he imagined Roger Ferguson would when he got to see them. Roger had left soon after they’d got to the house, complaining of a nasty headache and nausea. Jamie had volunteered to take him to the hospital to have the wound properly dressed and to get an X-ray but he had insisted that he could manage on his own.

Here were photos of babies and children of all ages, in christening robes and sailor suits, tow-headed and pigtailed; dashing young men with starched collars; elegant ladies with parasols and fancy hats, mostly taken in various parts of the garden; wedding couples and groups; holiday snaps; uniformed soldiers, sailors and airmen; moustached and stern-looking patriarchs and their busty spouses; granite-faced, white-bearded grandfathers and frumpy grandmothers—it was an intimate family portrait spanning more than a century. Kingston had set aside all the pictures that showed parts of the garden where specific plantings or garden features could be seen. He had also separated the photos that showed men in uniform, specifically the more recent ones. Eliminating those of the young man in Royal Air Force uniform—one of the three Ryder brothers—left a handful of photos of the two other brothers. They bore a remarkable family resemblance; there was no telling which of the two was James Ryder.

The papers and documents, and they were numerous, were like signposts through Major Ryder’s life. Despite his endeavour to preserve his anonymity, these were clearly things that he simply couldn’t bring himself to destroy. His birth certificate with a King George V stamp dated Sunday, 14 December 1919 in the Registration District of Taunton, father’s name, Randolph William Ryder, mother’s name, Elizabeth Mabel Ryder, formerly Carlisle. A suede pouch held his British passport. Kingston flipped through it checking for entry stamps of foreign countries. As expected, there were none. In his latter years Ryder hadn’t travelled out of Wickersham, let alone the country. A number of military documents tracked his service career, notably a Staff College Certificate from Sandhurst. Birthday and Christmas cards were stuffed in a manila envelope. Each contained a handwritten note of varying length, obviously of sentimental value to Ryder. There were miscellaneous letters, nearly all personal; membership cards; newspaper and magazine clippings, including several obituaries of what must have been friends and family members; a small collection of ticket stubs and programmes from various concerts and performances, equestrian events, car and horse races.

They were nearing the last of the papers and only a few odds and ends remained in the centre of the table. All the papers, documents and memorabilia that had already been examined had been pushed to one side.

Kingston leaned back in his chair and sipped the champagne. The chill was off but the bubbles were still coming. Sign of a good champagne, he knew. He looked at Jamie over the rim of the glass. He rarely had the chance to watch her thus, while her attention was fully taken by something else; when he could study her features at length with little risk of being caught in the act. Discreetly, he took in her body language, the graceful hand movements, the animated lips and the soft hollows below her cheekbones, all her natural beauty and little mannerisms.

She looked up and smiled. ‘Have you gone on strike?’

He smiled back. ‘No, not at all.’ He was about to add the word, ‘dear’ but caught himself just in time. ‘I thought I’d let you finish the rest. I was hoping that we’d find something that would shed more light on his art dealing days. But he seems to have erased that part of his life. Come to think of it, if Fox hadn’t showed up, we might never have found out about that side of his life in the first place.’

Kingston finished the last of his champagne and watched as Jamie opened a foolscap-size envelope and turned it upside down. A small black book fell on to the table. It was about the size of a deck of cards but nowhere as thick. The leather cover was blank.

‘What’s that?’he asked.

‘Looks like some kind of diary,’ she muttered, opening it and starting to read.

Kingston watched idly as she started turning the pages. Soon, he became aware that her expression was growing more and more perplexed. She looked up suddenly.

‘What is it? Kingston asked.

‘It’s written by a soldier.’

‘Really?’ Kingston got up and joined her, standing behind her chair, looking over her shoulder.

‘Listen to this, Lawrence.
This will be the fourth night we’ve been stuck in this godforsaken hole. Hawkins, Nobby Green and Stevenson all bought it today. When Terry got hit, he was not that far away from me. At least he didn’t suffer by the looks of it. That’s a blessing. I’ve lost count of how many of us are left now. It can’t be more than three dozen or so. The good news is the Jerries have stopped using mortars but their snipers are picking us off like flies. It’s quiet for the longest time, then there’s a shot and we all pray that the bugger missed. Stevenson, poor sod, told me yesterday that he’d heard we were running out of ammo. I’m beginning to hope that he was right. Then we would have to throw in the towel
.’

She flipped through it, scanned a few more pages and handed it to Kingston. ‘It’s tragic,’ she said. ‘Just to think what those men went through is enough but then, to take the time to write about it …’ Her words trailed off.

Kingston wasn’t listening. He was now seated in the chair next to Jamie and had his eyes glued to the diary’s open pages. The descriptions were simply phrased, almost naïve, which gave them even more gravitas. The thoughts and feelings that accompanied them were like a mirror reflecting the young man’s embittered soul.

Reading on about the soldier’s account of the catastrophic plight that had befallen him and his comrades, Kingston was transported back to those dark days in Europe sixty years ago. Suddenly he looked up. ‘This is starting to sound awfully familiar.’

‘Familiar? What are you thinking?’

‘That it could be Kershaw’s or more likely Kit’s diary.’

‘There’s no name in it, is there?’

‘I haven’t come across one so far. But think about it. How and why did it end up in Ryder’s possession?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Jamie, shaking her head. ‘Here, finish this up.’ She poured the last of the champagne into his glass. ‘There’s not much left to do with this lot, I suppose. I think I’ll leave it to you and go and have a bath.’

‘Wait. Listen to this:

It’s night-time and for the first time in days it’s quiet. But the silence is terrible, perhaps worse than the fighting because all I do is lie awake and relive the horrors of the day and dread the coming of tomorrow. I can’t even begin to describe what kind of hell this place is. Every day there are more dead bodies, men with missing limbs and horrible wounds. We’re hopelessly outnumbered by the Jerries and almost out of ammo and I can’t see the point of fighting any more with just a handful of men. Another thing, I’m almost out of fags so things are getting serious!

‘I’d hoped against hope that we would make it out of here alive but it doesn’t look that way now because we are being ordered to fight on to the bitter end. I’ve never believed much in fate but I’m starting to now.

‘Cousin Jeremy has been a lifesaver but I’m beginning to see signs that even his optimism has now deserted him and though he won’t come out and say so, he knows that it will take a miracle for us to survive.’