The Bell Ringers (21 page)

‘So, that's about it. My motto has been belt and braces. One way or the other, all the necessary material will reach you. Now it's up to you.

‘I send my love to you, my true friend, with thoughts of all our times together. There is so much I wish to say to you now but the words are all tainted with the consciousness of my own shame and stupidity. I feel completely inadequate. Good luck, Sister. Destroy this tape at the earliest opportunity. Now, I must say goodbye.'

The recording didn't end immediately. She heard him walking across gravel and a door being opened. A cough then silence. Eyam had slipped away. Faded like some bloody ghost. He'd had the last word and hung up on her before she had time to ask all the questions that had accumulated during the ten minutes of the recording. ‘Bastard!' she said, slamming a hand on the dashboard.

‘Bastard Eyam! Don't do that to me!'

She got out of the car, her mind tearing at the substance of the tape, such as it was, and the references to DEEP TRUTH. Was this a project or some kind of operation? And then there was the will. Had he made it because he expected to be killed like Holmes and Russell, or was he ill? That cough sounded chronic and there was an air of resignation about the whole recording that was utterly unlike Eyam, whose optimism was the nearest thing he had to a faith. And how could he be so stupid as to assume that she'd got the dossier?

She climbed back into the car, and sat for a few seconds, overwhelmed by an anguished sense that through their entire relationship
they'd kept missing each other, and that this was just another occasion when his voice, his need, went unanswered. With a tug of will she shook herself and pulled back onto the road, certain that if Eyam had been defeated she stood very little chance of success. Whatever virtues she might claim, fighting lost causes wasn't one of them.

It would be perfectly simple to give in now, put the bloody cottage back on the market and return to London, yet as she drove through the deserted Cotswold landscape, she recognised something was drawing her back – the unfinished decryption of Dove Cottage, the sense of abridgement in Eyam's tape, and her straight curiosity about DEEP TRUTH.

She stopped in a small town of honey-coloured stone houses for a bite to eat and bought some groceries. Sitting on a bench by the town's war memorial she worried at the problem with a bleak sense of her own impotence. Then she tried Kilmartin's number. There was no reply so she continued on her journey. Near Cheltenham she hit the traffic coming from the racecourse and swung north to cross the River Severn near Tewkesbury. On the road to High Castle she received two calls: the first was from the coroner's clerk, Tony Swift, who asked to see her that evening. ‘Well, OK,' she said with a slight hesitation and a hope that the bull-necked Swift had not taken encouragement from a goodbye kiss.

He added, ‘I'll have some friends with me. They want to meet you. Same place? Good.'

A few minutes later she answered to a voice that said: ‘Darling?' Only her mother could deliver the word with such a note of crisp accusation. ‘Are you driving? If so will you pull over? I need to talk to you now.'

Kate seldom thought of her family, but when she did a photograph often came to mind of the five of them standing round a table twenty years ago. On one side were Kate and her father, Sonny Koh; on the
other her mother – pleated tartan skirt and twinset – her sister Laura in a similar uniform and brother Bruce.

The two sides could not have been more different. Her father, a gambler and disruptive genius, who killed himself a few months after Charlie Lockhart died, stood back with mischief dancing in his expression, the mixed ancestry of Indonesian Chinese, Indian and Dutch traders evident in his light, liquid eyes and the sheen of his black hair. He was better looking than any man Kate had ever seen and he provoked a passion in her mother that would never otherwise have surfaced in her rather formal personality. Her love for him was epic and, to Kate, redeeming, and when he overdosed in a hotel in the Sumatra leaving debts and an ex-mistress with a child she retreated into a granite stoicism, throwing herself into her work as a barrister, which would eventually lead her to the bench.

Stricken by her father's death so soon after Charlie's, angry at her mother's self-control, Kate found a kind of solace in the law too – it was the only thing they had in common. New York made it impossible to dwell on her loss, but the anger smouldered like a peat fire deep underground. Even before she talked to a grief counsellor, who despite her misgivings was actually quite good, she realised that the hostility towards her mother was in fact rage for her father. Like Eyam, he had left, vanished without the slightest thought for her or how she would survive without him.

‘Are you still in the country, Kate?' her mother asked.

‘Yes. Sorry I've been very busy,' she said as she pulled up.

‘Were you going to ring, or were you just going to flit off again?' Her mother didn't wait for an answer. ‘Well, I'm sure you were going to get in touch when you had time. I read about David Eyam's death and heard from Oliver Mermagen that you were at the funeral. That is one reason why I am calling.'

‘Oliver Mermagen! What the hell's he doing ringing you?'

‘It was the only way he knew how to get hold of you. He found me in the phone book. He told me that you had moved back to this country and were looking for a job. Is that true?'

‘I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet.'

‘But have you left your job in New York?'

‘I left the job, not the firm.'

She cross-examined her for a few minutes while Kate wondered without much regret why all their conversations lurched from one misunderstanding to another. Her younger sister, Laura, and Bruce got on well with her and had obliged her with conventional marriages and the regular production of extremely dull, pale-faced children. But Kate and her mother always found themselves circling each other.

‘The point is,' she said as though Kate had needlessly interrupted her, ‘Oliver Mermagen has found you a job – a very well-paid post in London working for a man named Eden White.'

‘I've already talked to White, Ma. He's a creep.'

‘But he's influential and wealthy and he wants to see you again.'

‘It would be like going to work for the Mafia, Ma.'

‘Oliver says you would be perfect for his organisation. I gave him your number. Surely you realise that it's very considerate of him to go out of his way like that, don't you think? He was always a good sort.'

‘Yes,' said Kate.

‘Good, well I'm glad we've spoken. I was sorry to hear about your friend. He was evidently a very gifted person, if you believe what you read in the obituaries. But he went off the rails. Perhaps he should have married.' She stopped to underline that. ‘I can just remember his face – very intelligent eyes.'

‘Yes, that was Eyam.'

‘I hope we'll be seeing you in Edinburgh soon, Kate.' She paused. ‘Don't leave it too long, darling: we're becoming strangers.'

‘I won't,' she said, caught off guard by the genuine appeasement in her mother's voice.

Tony Swift led her from the Mercer's Arms to a private room at the back of the Black Bear pub where five people sat round a table. She recognised the photographer Chris Mooney and Alice Scudamore. A tall man in his mid-forties got up and introduced himself as Danny Church. He was followed by Andy Sessions, a web designer who seemed to her the epitome of the word ‘bloke'. The last was Michelle Grey, a therapist of some sort, who offered her a slender hand that jangled with bracelets.

Bottles of red and white wine were on the table. The atmosphere
would once have been thick with cigarette smoke but now the private room smelled of the pub's food and the fumes of the coke fire in the grate.

Tony Swift grasped a pint of beer from a wide hatch that opened onto the bar, sat down and threw a hand out to the table. ‘Who's going to start?'

Danny Church said he didn't mind, and stroked a soft beard streaked with grey hair. ‘We're here to make contact with you and to tell you about us. With Hugh Russell's murder everything's changed. It's obvious he was killed because of his association with David Eyam and that makes us all feel really jumpy.'

‘Threatened,' said Alice Scudamore.

‘We think things are coming to a head,' said Andy Sessions.

‘Everything is connected,' said Chris Mooney fiercely. ‘Our lives have been made hell. They're trying to crush us – police, tax inspectors, bailiffs, local authority snoops.'

‘Is that really true?' asked Kate pleasantly. ‘Can you prove there is an organised campaign?'

‘Not in the legal sense,' said Alice Scudamore. ‘But it exists. They're gradually stripping my house because I refuse to pay identity card fines. They won't jail me because that would be too public. They just barge in, take what they want and leave. They can do that now you know.' She shook her head and looked down. ‘I can't work, I've got no money and I'm stressed out. And the worst thing about it is that we all know they're listening to our phones. They're watching our email, monitoring our movements. They make it obvious. We see the same men outside our houses. They're everywhere. Rick and Andy's web company is falling apart because they've lost all their contracts. The tax inspectors are around every moment of the day. Their bank has withdrawn its loan facility. At least six of us have been charged with new offences. The VAT inspectors turned over Penny Whitehead's home and took her computer to try to prove fraudulent claims, and Michelle's partner received the same treatment at his restaurant.'

‘But you can't prove it's a coordinated campaign. The authorities will argue that they're just doing their job properly, and most people would support them judging by what I read in the papers.'

‘That's exactly what we were told by our member of parliament,' said Chris Mooney. ‘We tried taking the story to the media, but we got nowhere. They're not interested – not even the local rag or radio station. They just think we're all being paranoid. The national media couldn't give a toss. The wankers down in London have no fucking idea what's going on out in the sticks. Do they ask what's happened to the rights of ordinary men and women? Do they give a fuck? No, because they're not being persecuted and pushed around like we are. They don't see what's happened and you know why – it's because they're part of the problem.'

Alice Scudamore began nodding. ‘Look, just take our word for it: this is a campaign of persecution. They've practically admitted as much.'

Tony Swift took a long draught of his beer and looked at Kate. ‘I didn't tell you about this the other night because . . . well, I wanted to consult these good people here and . . .'

‘What he's trying to say,' interrupted Chris Mooney, ‘is that they offered me a deal. They told me that everything would stop if I informed on the others. They gave me the names of the people they wanted me to watch, but I didn't turn them down flat. I mean, I've got to think of my family.'

‘Have you any record of this approach? A tape or a phone recording or anything else?'

‘No, they stopped me on the road because of a traffic offence and then after a few minutes this guy gets out of an unmarked car that's pulled up behind me and he leans in the window and tells me he wants me to inform on my friends. I mean, it's unreal.'

‘Did this individual say where he was from?' asked Kate.

‘No, I guess Special Branch or maybe MI5. I didn't ask. Look, they've got me by the fucking balls. I can't move without one of these bloody agencies giving me a hard time. I've had the VAT people on my tail, building inspectors, the police, some damned busybody from social services threatening us with a parenting order and a home
environment study
because my youngest is in trouble at school. My elder daughter's flat at university has been searched by the police twice – they say she's linked to some extremist environmental group. They know everything about my family. When the man offered me a deal he mentioned my
wife's depression. That was like ten years ago. How would they know unless they'd looked at her medical records?'

‘So what are you going to do?'

‘I'll play along with them and just tell everyone in the group that I have to do this.'

‘They'll offer the same deal to someone else who may take it,' she said, ‘which means they will know you're stringing them along.'

Mooney opened his hands in dismay. ‘Fuck it. I'm not used to this. I'm a bloody photographer, not a double agent.' He stopped. ‘But you're a lawyer. Tell us what we should do.'

She thought for a moment. ‘You need a narrative and a timeline of exactly what has happened to all of you. It's no good you fighting this thing by yourselves. You need to band together and make a convincing case – which takes in everything – and find other people across the country who appear to have suffered like you. Then go to a London lawyer who specialises in this area of the law and campaigning and make your pitch. Someone will take it on. Get it out in the public domain.'

Andy Sessions, who with Michelle Grey had not spoken, drummed his fingers on the table, leaned forward and said, ‘Tell us about yourself, Kate. You arrive out of the blue and inherit David's house and all his possessions. We want to know who you are and where you stand on all this.'

The noise from the bar swelled and briefly silenced the group. Kate looked up and through the hatch saw the slender black man Tony had signalled to two evenings ago. He was standing at the bar between two young men, who looked like identical twins. Her eyes met the black guy's and he turned away to one of his companions.

‘You know what?' she said. ‘I'm not really in the mood to explain myself to a bunch of complete strangers. If what you say is true about your group being under surveillance it wouldn't really be sensible, would it? I am sorry about your problems but I'm no part of them. David Eyam is dead. Hugh Russell is dead. Forgive me if I don't get too worked up about your tax inspections and parking fines.'