In the Blood (44 page)

Bastion crossed the room to Hayne and indicated the piles of paper Hayne was going through.
 
“These all appear to be copies of certificates and other records,” Bastion said.
 
“Records for all the names that appear on the wall here.
 
Births, marriages and so on.”
 
Bastion picked up one of the records from the sideboard.
 
It was separate from the rest of the pile, sitting alone.
 
“This is the only document that’s not a photocopy,” he said, crossing back to Tayte inside the doorway.
 
“Looks like the original.”
 
He handed it to Tayte.
 
“You said Schofield’s killer baited you with the promise of seeing a probate record, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Well I need to know if this is the document you expected to see, and if you’ll testify to that in court once we’ve brought Simon Phillips - a.k.a. Daniel Hawthorne - in.
 
I could make out a few words, enough to know what it is, but the rest of it might as well be in Swahili.”

Tayte opened the document.
 
The text it contained was written by a wavering hand in a form that to most would be considered hard to read.
 
To Tayte’s experienced eyes however, no transcript was required.
 
He scanned the opening lines: ‘This is the last will and testament of me James Fairborne of Rosemullion within the parish of St Mawnan in the county of Cornwall’.

“This is it,” Tayte said.
 
“The document was missing from the record office in Truro.
 
I’ve wanted to see this from day one.
 
How did Simon get hold of it?”

Bastion and Hayne looked at one another, like they were questioning how much of the case they should share.
 
Then Bastion gave Hayne a nod.

“It seems that working the ferry wasn’t Simon’s only job in the area,” Hayne said.
 
He crossed the room and flashed a plastic pass-card at Tayte; an ID that bore the Cornwall County Council’s logo and the words ‘Cornwall Record Office’ above a passport sized photograph of Simon Phillips.

“That explains a few things,” Tayte said, recalling the phone call he’d made to the record office on his way back from Devon; the uncooperative assistant he’d spoken to who Penny Wilson had said worked there part-time.
 
He could have found so much out from Penny.
 
She knew Tayte’s agenda; knew when he was coming to England from all the times he’d called her.
 
And she had his number.
 
Simon could easily have gotten that from her.
 
Simon would have been on the lookout for him from day one.
 
“An easy job for an insider,” he mused.

“And I should think his position there helped him no end with all this,” Bastion said, throwing an arm towards the chart.
 
“What does it all mean, Mr Tayte?
 
What’s he up to?”

Tayte studied the wall again.
 
“He’s clearly made a connection to someone in the past he thought he was related to.
 
Someone very wealthy.
 
Tayte pointed to the name at the top of the chart.
 
“That would be James Fairborne,” he added.
 
“Then he’s set out to prove his lineage, which is where our paths crossed.”

Tayte paced the room towards the chart.
 
“I was looking into Mathew Parfitt here,” he said, pointing at the corresponding box on the wall.
 
“A letter turned up proving that Mathew Parfitt was Lowenna and Mawgan’s son.”
 
He raised his arm to indicate them on the chart.
 
“It gave Simon all the proof he could want.
 
That’s what I gave him this morning when I was trying to get Amy back.”

“But why try and kill you over it?” Bastion said.
 
“What does it matter who knows?
 
Surely he wants everyone to know he’s part of such a family.
 
Sir Richard Fairborne’s a baronet after all and very well connected.”

“I’m sure he wanted the world to know about it in time,” Tayte said.
 
“But not just yet.”

Hayne interjected.
 
“So there’s more to it?”

Tayte spun around to face them.
 
“There is,” he said.
 
“Simon had to kill me because I was getting too close.
 
There was a risk that I would discover the same thing he’s looking for.
 
Maybe even beat him to it.”

“And he’s kidnapped Amy Fallon for insurance?” Hayne said.

Tayte nodded.
 
“And all because of the box she found.
 
Simon must have known she had it.
 
He just needed to be sure.”
 
He thought about the clue that had been left under his wiper blade at Bodmin and how it had led him straight to Amy.
 
“I helped draw the box into the open where Simon could see it,” he added.
 
“When I left Amy that night he must have gone in after it.”
 
He knew well enough that Simon was at Ferryman Cottage the night Amy disappeared, and it didn’t sit well on his conscience that he’d paid the kid to take him there.

“Only Amy no longer had the box,” Hayne said.

“That’s right.
 
I was taking it to London next morning.”

“So the killer revealed himself to Amy,” Hayne said.
 
“He couldn’t have just apologised and left again.
 
He had to take her with him.
 
Then he came up with a plan to get the box from you at Nare Point.”

Bastion winced.
 
“It’s a good thing for Amy that she
didn’t
have the box,” he said.
 
“Or that might have been her body we found at Treath.”

The truth of that hit Tayte hard.
 
Life or death, it seemed, balanced by a fine silk thread wherever the box was concerned.
 
“The writing box is the key,” he said.
 
“It holds the secret to a truth we’re both searching for.”

“Something to do with the Fairbornes?” Hayne said.
 

“I’m sure of it.”

Bastion threw Hayne a puzzled look and Hayne returned a self-conscious smile.
 
“Why else would Simon Phillips want to hide James Fairborne’s will? Hayne said.
 
“It has to be related.”

Tayte turned his attention back to the probate record in his hand.
 
He read the date, noting that James Fairborne’s will was proven in 1829, being the year it was made official in the Probate Registry of the High Court, but not necessarily the year James Fairborne died.
 
It was a short will for one of such magnitude and the reason promptly manifested itself.
 
Tayte read, ‘sole beneficiary’ then skipped the wordy formalities to the part that revealed the fortunate recipient and heir.

‘... That is to say, I give and bequeath unto my brother William Fairborne of Rosemullion in the Parish of St Mawnan ...’

“Everything!”
 
Tayte said.
 
“Nothing to any servants or children?
 
It all went to his brother, William.”
 

The significance of what he’d just read took a while to register.
 
When it did he had to sit down.
 
He lowered himself into the nearest armchair.
 
His eyes remained on the words, ‘William Fairborne’.
 
“This can’t be,” he said.

Bastion and Hayne came closer, like a pair of aroused sniffer dogs that had just picked up a new scent.

“I’m working for the descendants of William Fairborne’s family now,” Tayte said.
 
“I know he never came to England.
 
My research suggests that James and William didn’t even get along.
 
Whoever benefited from James Fairborne’s will sure wasn’t his brother.”

“So this family weren’t the legal heirs?” Hayne said, running a hand down the chart to Warwick Fairborne.

Bastion glared at Hayne.
 
“Steady Sergeant.
 
That’s dangerous talk without the evidence to back it up.”
 
He took the probate record from Tayte and read the name of the beneficiary for himself.
 
The name at least was clear.
 
“Are you sure?” he said.

Tayte looked Bastion in the eyes and nodded like he was never so sure of anything in his life.
 
“I’ve got a copy of William Fairborne’s death record,” he said.
 
“He was buried alongside his wife in America and I can tell you that his wife was not the lady on the wall here.”

Bastion sat down himself.
 
“Then who’s the fella this James Fairborne left his fortune to?”

“I don’t know,” Tayte said.
 
“But he must have had some hold over James Fairborne.”

Chapter Fifty-Four

G
azing up at the family tree in Simon’s flat, Tayte was curious again to know why Mathew Parfitt had dropped his claim against James Fairborne’s will.
 
It seemed all the more unusual now Tayte knew that Mathew had a valid reason to contest it.
 
Mathew was blood, related to James Fairborne; the man his grandfather left everything to in his will was not.
 
Tayte supposed Mathew must have known that, or he at least suspected James’s decision had been influenced.

A thought crossed Tayte’s mind that had been there before.
 
It concerned someone he’d given little thought to on this assignment, purely through a lack of information about him.
 
Lowenna had died young; that much he knew from Emily Forbes, from that fateful story she’d told him.
 
But her brother, Allun Fairborne - what had become of him?
 
He would have been a relatively young man at the time of his father’s death.
 
Why hadn’t
he
contested the will?
 
The most likely reason was that he’d died before his father and Tayte began to wonder at the circumstances that surrounded Allun’s death.

He looked down at the stacks of paper on the sideboard - the photocopies of Simon’s family history records.
 
Then he looked back to the wall and across the top of the chart.
 
There were entries for as yet unexplored family lines.
 
To the right of Lowenna was an entry for her brother, Allun.
 
No further names appeared beside it or below it, but he realised there could be information on those record copies that might tell him more about Allun Fairborne.

He turned to Bastion and Hayne who were right behind him, watching him think.
 
“Grab a pile,” he said, reaching for one of the stacks.
 
“I need to find anything in here relating to a guy called Allun Fairborne.”

Bastion and Hayne each took up a handful of papers.
 
They were ordered and Tayte soon knew where he was relative to the wallchart.
 
Allun’s records, if there were any, would be close to Lowenna’s and their father’s, towards the bottom of one of the piles.
 
He riffled through the papers, finding nothing that dated that far back.
 
Then Bastion interrupted his flow.

“Here you go.”

Tayte leaned in over Bastion’s shoulder.
 
He’d seen the record before; he had a copy in his briefcase.
 
It was Allun Fairborne’s birth record.
 
“Anything else there?”
 
Tayte said.

Bastion shook his head.
 
“Just this.”

“So, Simon couldn’t find the old records either,” Tayte mused, concluding that the missing death record information must have been removed way back, when they were still maintained by the church, not stolen by Simon Phillips.
 
Even if Simon had access to the original records, Tayte knew he couldn’t get to all the indexes.
 
References to the documents would have existed in too many places.
 
From a local church registry however, before the records were centralised and catalogued...
 
They would have been easy enough to get at then.

“What about James’s wife?”
 
Bastion said.
 
“Wouldn’t Mrs Fairborne have had something to say about all this?”

“Susan?”
 
Tayte said.
 
The suggestion had merit.
 
“Let’s take a look.”
 
He went to the stack of records where Bastion had found the copy of Allun Fairborne’s birth record.
 
Behind that he found the records for James and Susan Fairborne.
 
He pulled out Susan’s death record copy and glanced over it.
 
“According to this, she died a couple of years before James.”
 
He checked the cause of death.
 
“Decay of nature,” he read aloud.
 
“She wasn’t around to contest the will herself.”