Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘Thank you,’ I said – for want of anything better.
‘If you find that my hand strays in that direction at any point during the evening, feel free to say something about it. I’m an incorrigible groper these days, I’m afraid. The older I get, the less control I seem to have over this wretched libido of mine. You mustn’t hold an old man’s weaknesses against him.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I knew you’d understand. Here we are: it’s the blue Citroen 2CV.’
It took us a while to get settled in the car. Findlay’s ancient joints groaned loudly as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat, and then, while struggling to find a suitable resting place for his cane, he dropped the car keys which I had to retrieve, contorting myself and almost pulling a muscle in my effort to reach down behind the gear lever. Once the engine had started, on the fourth attempt, Findlay tried to get the car moving with the handbrake on and the gears still in neutral. I sat back and resigned myself to a bumpy ride.
‘The news that you were writing this book came as a great surprise to me,’ said Findlay, as we headed for Oxford Street. ‘It delights me to say that I’d hardly given that appalling family any thought for about ten years. May I ask what could possibly have induced such a charming and – if you don’t mind me saying so – handsome young man as yourself to get involved with that shabby crew?’
I told him the story of Tabitha and how I came to be offered her peculiar commission.
‘Curious,’ he said. ‘Very curious. There must be some new scheme behind all this. I wonder what she’s up to. Have you been in communication with her solicitor?’
‘Solicitor?’
‘Think about it, dear boy. A woman confined to an insane asylum is scarcely in a position to go around setting up trust funds all of her own accord. She’d need a responsible agent to act on her behalf – just as she did thirty years ago, when she decided to engage the services of a private detective. I suspect that she continues to deal through the same fellow – if he’s still alive, that is. His name was Proudfoot: a local man, unscrupulous enough to be swayed by the thought of all that money lying around in high-interest accounts.’
‘And he was the one who first approached you: that was how you came to be involved with the Winshaws?’
‘Well, where shall I begin?’ We were waiting at a red traffic light, and Findlay showed every sign of sinking into a deep reverie. Fortunately the angry horn of a car behind us startled him out of it. ‘It all seems such a long time ago, now. I imagine myself almost as a young man. Ridiculous. I was already in my late fifties. Thinking about retirement. Planning long days of sunlit debauchery in Turkey or Morocco or somewhere. Well, look what happened to
that
idea … London was about as far south as I ever got.
‘Anyway, there I was, my business pretty well established in Scarborough, ticking over nicely, money coming in – the only cloud on the horizon, as usual, being the tendency of the local police to pounce on me whenever I got involved in a little bit of harmless naughtiness. Things were getting worse on that front, now I come to think of it, because for some years I’d had the benefit of a mutually satisfying arrangement with a certain detective sergeant, who sadly had just been transferred to the North West. He was a beauty: Herbert, I think his name was … Six foot five of solid muscle and a bottom like a ripened peach …’ He sighed and fell momentarily silent. ‘I’m sorry, I seem to have lost my drift.’
‘Business was ticking over nicely.’
‘Precisely. And then one afternoon … early in 1961, it would have been … this solicitor fellow, Proudfoot, turned up. As soon as he mentioned the name of Tabitha Winshaw, I knew that something special had arrived on my doorstep. Everybody knew about the Winshaws and their mad old sister, you see. It was the stuff of local legend. And now here was this slovenly, rather repulsive character – with whom, I’m pleased to say, my further dealings were kept to a minimum – bearing a message from the woman herself. Word of my reputation had reached her, it seemed, and she had a job for me. Quite a simple, innocuous little job it sounded at first. I’m sorry, are you ticklish?’
‘A little,’ I said. ‘Besides, you should really keep both hands on the wheel while you’re driving.’
‘You’re quite right, of course. Now, you’re aware, I think, that when Godfrey’s plane was shot down, he wasn’t the only person in it? There was a co-pilot. And apparently Tabitha had been brooding about this, and had decided that she wanted to trace this unfortunate man’s family and to make them some sort of financial reparation, by way of atonement, as she saw it, for the treachery carried out by her brother. So my job was to find them.’
‘Which you did?’
‘In those days, Michael, I was at the peak of my powers. Mental and physical. Such a task really presented no challenge to a man of my experience and abilities: it was the work of only a few days. But then I went one better, and managed to present Tabitha with rather more than she’d bargained for. I found the man himself.’
I stared at him in surprise. ‘You mean the co-pilot?’
‘Oh, yes. I found him alive and well and living in Birkenhead, and with a most fascinating story to tell. His name was Farringdon. John Farringdon. And this was the man that Lawrence Winshaw bludgeoned to death in the manner so vividly described in your manuscript.’
It took me a few seconds to take this in. ‘But how did he survive the crash?’
‘Parachuted to safety at the last moment.’
‘Does this mean … did it mean that Godfrey was still alive?’
‘Sadly, no. I did entertain some hopes, for a while. It would have been a tremendous coup on my part. But Mr Farringdon was quite adamant on that point. He himself had seen Godfrey consumed by the flames.’
‘So how on earth did you find this man?’
‘Well, it seems that he’d been picked up by the Germans and was imprisoned for the rest of the war. Then, when it was over, he returned home – anxious to be reunited with his family – but discovered that he had been reported dead, and that his mother had never survived the news. She’d died within a week of hearing it, and his father had remarried little more than a year later. And so he couldn’t bring himself to do it. To render all that grief … senseless. He kept the truth to himself, moved to a new town, took Farringdon as his new name, and began a long, lonely and restless existence, trying to build up some sort of life on these ruined foundations. There was one member of his family, a distant cousin, whom he had to take into his confidence when he needed to retrieve some personal documents; and that was the person who started me off on my search. He never came right out with it, but he wanted me to know, I’m sure. There were one or two carefully dropped hints – enough to send me off to Germany, to pick up the beginnings of the trail.’ He sighed again. ‘Ah, that was a happy time. Tabitha was paying my expenses. It was spring in the Rhine Valley. I struck up an all-too-brief friendship with a cowherd called Fritz: a vision of bronzed loveliness, fresh from the sunkissed slopes of the German Alps. I’ve been a pushover for anything in
lederhosen
ever since.’ We had reached Islington by now, and he turned off into a side street. ‘You must indulge an old man in his foolish reminiscences, Michael. The best years of my life are behind me, now. Only memories remain.’ He pulled over to the side of the road, about two feet from the kerb, the back end of the car sticking out alarmingly into the flow of traffic. ‘Well, here we are.’
We had arrived outside a small terraced house in one of Islington’s less fashionable byways. Findlay led me inside, up several flights of uncarpeted stairs until we reached the attic floor, where he threw open the door on to a room which caused me to gasp in sudden astonishment: for it was a perfect replica, as far as I could see, of the apartment described by Conan Doyle in
The Sign of Four
, when Sherlock Holmes first encounters the mysterious Thaddeus Sholto. The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries did indeed drape the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly mounted painting or Oriental vase. The carpet, too, was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. There were even two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it, increasing the suggestion of Eastern luxury, and a huge hookah standing upon a mat in the corner. To complete the
hommage
, a lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room: as it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odour.
‘Welcome to my little nest, Michael,’ said Findlay, shrugging off the raincoat which he had slung across his shoulders. ‘You’ll excuse all this kitsch, this ersatz Orientalism. I was brought up by uncouth parents, in surroundings of meanness and austerity. My life ever since has been an attempt to cast all that aside. But I have never been a wealthy man. What you see here is an expression of my personality. Voluptuousness on a low budget. Spread yourself out on the Ottoman while I go and make us some tea. Does Lapsang suit?’
The Ottoman turned out, on closer inspection, to be an MFI sofa-bed swathed in threadbare pseudo-Turkish blankets, but it was comfortable enough. Findlay’s tiny kitchen led off from the sitting room, so it was easy to continue our conversation as he busied himself with the kettle and the teapot.
‘This is a wonderful flat,’ I said. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘I moved down in the early sixties – almost immediately after my brush with the Winshaws. Partly to escape the attentions of the police, as I said: but there were larger reasons as well. After so many years, the narrowness, the insularity, the petty pride of provincial life had become more than could be borne by a man of my temperament. Oh, but this whole area was different then: it had a bit of style, before the brokers and the management consultants and all the other capitalist lackeys moved in. It used to be Bohemian, vibrant, thrilling. Painters, poets, actors, artists, philosophers, faggots, dykes, dancers; even the odd detective. Orton and Halliwell lived just around the corner, you know. Joe used to come round occasionally, but I can’t say I ever took to the man. It was over before you started with him. There wasn’t a shred of affection in it. Still, it was a terrible end they both came to, you wouldn’t wish that upon anybody. I was able to help the authorities in clearing up one or two small details, as it happens, although my name doesn’t appear in any of the official accounts.’
Interesting though I found these recollections, I was anxious to get back to the matter in hand. ‘You were telling me about Farringdon, the co-pilot,’ I prompted.
‘A dangerous man, Michael. A desperate man.’ Findlay emerged from the kitchen and handed me a cracked bone-china cup filled with steaming tea. ‘Not a vicious man, by any means. Capable of strong feelings and great personal loyalty, I would have said. But a man embittered; destroyed by circumstance. He had never managed to settle; had drifted around the country for years, taking factory jobs, casual jobs, edging closer and closer to the world where private enterprise starts shading into crime. Getting by pretty well on a combination of versatility and personal charm. Because he was indeed charming: and handsome, in a chiselled sort of way. His eyes were like blue velvet, I remember, and he had the longest and most luxuriant of eyelashes: not unlike your own, if you’ll permit me a small compliment.’
I looked away, bashful.
‘I might almost have been tempted to try my luck, but his inclinations lay only too clearly in the opposite direction. A breeder, through and through. He claimed to have conquered a few hearts in his time, and it was easy enough to believe. To sum up, a charismatic rogue: not by any means an uncommon type, in the post-war period, although he had more excuse than most for going to the bad.’
‘And what did you tell him, exactly?’
‘Well, first of all I told him that I was acting on behalf of the family of the late Godfrey Winshaw. That in itself had an extraordinary effect. He immediately became very passionate and animated. It was clear that Godfrey had inspired him with feelings of the most devoted friendship.’
‘As he seems to have done with everybody: Tabitha being the most extreme example.’
‘Quite. So this naturally brought us on to the subject of the plane crash, and raised the tricky question of whether I should tell him about Tabitha and her eccentric theory. As things turned out, it could scarcely be avoided, because Farringdon himself was in no doubt about the matter. He was convinced that the Germans had been tipped off. He said that their plane had been intercepted well before it reached its destination, and well before it could have been picked up by radar, in normal circumstances. Somehow or other, the enemy had been forewarned of their mission.’ Findlay drained his teacup and stared thoughtfully at the leaves, as if they could offer a reading of the past. ‘I could tell at once that there hadn’t been a single day in the last eighteen years of this man’s life when he hadn’t thought about this incident, puzzled over it, agonized and baffled. Wondering who the traitor might have been. Wondering what he would do to the villain if fate ever sent him his way.’ He put the cup down and shook his head. ‘A dangerous man, Michael. A desperate man.’
Findlay stood by the window and drew the heavy, slightly moth-eaten curtains, after taking a final look outside at an evening which had now turned rainy and cold.
‘It’s getting very late,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d care to stay the night, and we could continue this story in the morning. Sadly this is a small flat and there is only the one bed, but –’
‘It’s only twenty to nine,’ I pointed out.
Findlay smiled apologetically and sat down opposite me with a crestfallen air. ‘It’s no use, I know. You see through the wiles of a lonely and pathetic old man. I disgust you, of course. Try not to make it obvious, Michael. That’s all that I ask.’
‘It’s not that at all –’
‘Please, no kind words. You’ve come to carry out a simple business transaction, I realize that. Information is all that you want from me. Once you have it, I can be discarded, like a used rag.’