Death of a Sunday Writer (23 page)

Lucy found his attitude baffling. He was utterly unperturbed, just interested. And why should she trust him? There was no way of knowing what he planned to do. He still seemed like a retired chicken-farmer with nice manners, but she was more or less frightened of the idea of him. But, then, she thought that no one would dare touch her. “You remember what I said the other day,” she said. “That a copy...”

“Yes, yes, yes. You have deposited a copy of this diary with your lawyer to be opened if anything happens to you. Never fear. Wally Buncombe, was it?”

“How did you know?”

“Wally looks after a lot of people round Woodbine.”

“I'm going to tackle Johnny Comstock.”

“Not yet. Let's surprise him.”

“That's what I want to do. He surprised me enough.”

Cowan looked at her thoughtfully. “I see. When will you surprise him?”

“He's got a horse running next Wednesday.”

“That'll give me time.”

Whatever Cowan's plan was, he was not going to disclose it to her, but she could see little risk in waiting. “I don't want anyone hurt,” she said.

“Never fear, Mrs. Brenner. Never fear.”

And there was the detail that she hadn't told anyone, which gave her an idea for developing an ace up her sleeve. The glasses. Back in her office, she called Jack Brighton. “There's something I want to talk to you about. Do you mind?”

“I told you, if you're going to pick my brains, it'll cost you.”

“Take it off my finder's fee.”

In Brighton's office, she produced the glasses and found that she had to tell Brighton some of the story.

“You think he might have been frightened by someone who came to collect a bet, had a heart attack, collapsed, and this other guy took the money and ran, dropping his glasses on the way? How much time is unaccounted for before that travel agent noticed him on the floor?”

“Not long. Hardly any time, really. But enough.”

“All right, I'll find out if I can track down the owner of these specs. I wouldn't think so.”

“Do you have a magnifying glass?”

“Well, yeah.” Brighton grinned and blushed. “I've never used it before.” He opened a drawer and retrieved a large black-rimmed lens, then closed the blinds. “Slip the catch on that door, would you. I feel like a horse's ass with this thing. Someone might walk in. So what am I looking for?”

“Inside the ear-piece. There's a whole series of numbers and letters. They must be some kind of identification.”

Brighton looked through his glass, still with the stance of a man who does not want to make a fool of himself. “Right,” he said. “You're right. There they are. Okay. I'll call you. What now?”

“I promised everyone I would wait two days.”

“That's probably best. I should have the answer to this by then.”

There were no more calls from Johnny, and The Trog had stayed away. The next day, Lucy wrapped up the case of the Longborough heir, pulled back to it by a phone message, a request by Mrs. Tibbles to call. Lucy telephoned and Fluffy said that by “call,” Alice meant “in person,” and that they would wait for her.

Before she left, Lucy thought through the case again. There seemed now to be three boys: Tibbles, Potter and Lacey. Potter was dead, Tibbles was in Toronto, so where was Lacey? And why was Lacey identified in the
Examiner
as the dead Potter? If, in some way, Potter was not dead, but another boy had been so identified, a boy named Lacey, then where was Potter? Because the legacy was his, Lucy was determined to keep the Dentons' hands off it until she was sure. She was going to have to trace these three boys through the passenger lists, the Red Cross lists, everywhere they might have been recorded in their trans-Atlantic journey. She felt the need of Brighton's help, but there was no time before she had to leave to see Mrs. Tibbles.

When they were settled in the living-room, once more with tea, Alice said, “You've been very busy, Mrs. Brenner. You're very good at your work, aren't you?”

“I've done my job. Or rather, I'm doing it. I don't think I've finished yet.”

“What haven't you figured out yet?” Mrs. Tibbles breathed interestedly, as if sharing with Lucy a mutual crossword problem.

“Quite a lot, but I do have a place to start. The last time I was here, your son said that he had been at school in England, at a place called Clanfield. There is no record of a boy named Tibbles ever having gone to that school.”

Mrs. Tibbles nodded. “Anything else?”

“There is a picture of someone identified as Brian Potter in the Longborough Examiner accompanying the story of his death. It's not Brian Potter. It's a boy name Lacey. A boy who did go to Clanfield.”

“What did you plan to do next? Hello, Henry,” she said to her son who had just arrived and sat down next to his mother.

Lucy said, “In the first place, I was hired to find Brian Potter, and then when I found he was dead, to establish that Nora Denton was his cousin, because she apparently stands to get some money. Now, I'd like to know what happened on that train, and perhaps that ship, and maybe the Dentons' farm. I suppose I want to make sure that Nora Denton doesn't get the money until I am certain Brian Potter is dead, and how he died.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Now Lucy looked long and hard at Henry Tibbles. “First, I'm going to look at the records in Longborough
going back to about 1930 to see who was born at that time. Then I'm going to try to find out what happened to the boy Lacey who was sent to Canada in 1940, at the same time as Brian Potter and your son.”

Tibbles leaned forward in his chair and squeezed his hands together, looking at his feet. His mother watched him, waiting for a signal. Tibbles looked at Lucy then, and said, “Mrs. Brenner. I suppose I ought to start by asking if you could let sleeping dogs lie, or some such. First of all, you aren't going to find some terrible dark secret behind this. No one has killed anyone. No ten year-old that you don't know about lies in a grave in the Dentons' back forty. But you won't take my word for this, will you?”

“I can't, can I?”

The Tibbles seemed at a loss, as if they needed a time-out before they said anything else. Lucy said, “How did you know I was still working on the case?”

Mrs. Tibbles came close to putting an edge on her voice. “My family has friends, still, at Clanfield, Mrs. Brenner, and in Longborough in the municipal offices as well as the newspaper office. When you make enquiries about something touching me, they naturally tell me. And there are other detectives in Toronto.”

Lucy nodded. A lesson learned. “Can you save me some trouble, then? If I go to the records of births in Longborough around 1930, what will I find?”

“I've been thinking,” Tibbles said. “You're not working for anyone at the moment. You've satisfied the queries you had from England. This latest business you're doing on your own behalf. How about working for us? We'll pay a retainer. Say five thousand dollars.” He glanced at his mother, who nodded.

“What would I do?”

“Nothing.”

She shook her head. “I have a feeling that I'm going to look silly before I leave here, but I want to know.”

“What?”

“Who was the boy Lacey, and where is he now?”

Again the Tibbles exchanged looks, and Mrs. Tibbles with a tiny nod released her son to speak.

“I thought it might come to this, so I'll answer your question, and then, if you don't mind, tell you a story. The boy Lacey is lying in a cemetery in Trois-Rivieres.”

“And you are Brian Potter,” Lucy said quickly, only because she wanted credit for having discovered this before he told her.

“How did you know?” Mrs. Tibbles' voice seemed fainter than ever.

Lucy dug in her purse and produced the photograph the English lawyer had sent her.

“Where did you get this?”

Lucy explained, then realised what the question meant. “You have one, don't you?”

“Yes. He's instantly recognisable, of course.” She looked up at Henry, smiling.

“So I am Brian Potter, and the boy Lacey is in the cemetery at Trois-Rivieres. As for the boy Tibbles, he never existed, except in me. Shall I start at the beginning?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well, then, in 1940 a ten-year-old boy, Brian Potter, was put on a train to Liverpool by his mother. At Liverpool he was to embark on a ship, the
Cumbria,
to Canada, there to join his uncle, also named Potter. He was put in the charge of a Red Cross lady and his mother disappeared. Quite literally. You see, while we were waiting
in the train, the news came that the ship would be delayed and we should return four days later. There were three or four children not accompanied by their parents, but in their cases the parents were waiting on the platform to wave them off. I was the only one whose parents had disappeared. We had been staying in a hotel in Bloomsbury for the week previously, but, when they checked it, my mother had not returned. I never saw her again.

“I wasn't surprised. It made sense of a long talk my mother gave me just before she took me to the station, about how I had to be a brave little man and learn to stand on my own two feet because she was not sure what was going to happen to her at this point. In other words, she was abandonning me. I was illegitimate, and a nuisance, and when the war came along, then the opportunity to have a good time — I suppose she was about thirty — was irresistible and she figured out a way to get rid of me. I saw a letter from my uncle in Longborough saying that she could send me over if she liked, but to make sure and tell me that it was going to be hard work and no mistake about it, and if I brought any English airs and graces with me they'd soon be knocked out of me. Even at ten, I knew what that meant.

“So a kind lady looked after me until the train left and I duly embarked for Canada. I've never forgotten that train: the tiny orange lights because of the blackout, the seats covered in a sort of carpet material, and the window that let down with a huge strap. I rather enjoyed the journey. There were four or five of us travelling alone, and I soon joined up with one about my own age, and we stayed together all the way across.”

“The boy Lacey.”

“Right. Jim Lacey. He was a wonderful pal, never at a loss for something to do, tougher than me — I suppose the boarding school did that — and imaginative, I suppose you'd have to call it. We played some terrific games that he just made up. One reason why Lacey and I teamed up was we found out from our labels on the train that we were both going to Longborough, Ontario. We didn't have a chaperone from Montreal. The conductor was supposed to look after us, but when Jim got sick, the conductor panicked and called for an ambulance at Trois-Rivieres. Well, not panicked, exactly, that's not fair, because Jim was very ill, and he died the next day. I went with him to the hospital because someone insisted — I was the only one who knew him. When he died, they took me back to the railway station and I caught the next day's train.

“I'm telling you all this, because without it the next bit might seem unlikely. I overheard someone saying he wouldn't recover so I switched identities as we waited for the ambulance at Trois-Rivieres. By now, I knew all about him, and about this nice aunt who was looking forward to keeping him safe — he'd showed me her letters — and his destiny was in stark contrast to mine, so I switched. I knew she'd never seen Lacey, and I had all the documents and family stories to back me up, so it was easy, I thought. I fooled her completely, I thought.” He looked at his mother.

Lucy turned to Mrs. Tibbie. “Did he? It sounds unlikely.”

“Of course not.” She gave a small chuckle. “What he did was give me time to think. You see, I was in a very disturbed state myself. I had some news for my nephew — since he had left England, his parents had been killed in an
air-raid and I was now his closest relative — his father had quarelled with his own family — and I didn't know when I could tell him. Then this strange child was foisted on me as Jim Lacey, looking nothing like the picture I had of him and I heard the story of how Brian Potter, his friend, had died on the journey. I thought the child demented, or shell-shocked, but he kept calling me 'Auntie', so I thought I'd take him home and talk to a doctor. The next day, I got my husband to drive me out to the Dentons' farm, and what I saw there made me very thoughtful. I began to suspect that Jim was not in shock at all, but behaving very rationally indeed. So I went home and talked to Jim until he broke down — it didn't take long — and confessed that he was Brian Potter, and he told me what had happened to Jim. And then I thought, why not. If I let the Dentons have this boy, he will probably become a farm slave — have you ever read the stories of what happened to some of the Barnardo children who were sent out to Canadian farms? — so I thought, who can say us nay, and that was that. I didn't seem to be having any luck having children of my own. When Jim's parents were officially pronounced dead, I applied to adopt him and so Henry Tibbles was born. Tell me what I've done wrong.”

Lucy was silent. Then, “You have all of the Potter boy's identification?”

“Yes. Now tell me what you are going to do?”

“I guess I have some kind of duty to report to the English lawyers that Brian Potter is still alive.”

“That damned woman abandons him — before I adopted him I did have someone like you in England search for her but she'd covered her tracks well — and then clears her conscience on her death-bed by opening all this mess up.”

“Your son should inherit the money. I don't know how much it is.”

“Forty thousand dollars. He doesn't need it.”

“Then it goes to the Dentons.”

“Yes, that is an objection, all right. Denton will drink it up in three months, but it's a price that's worth paying. On the other hand, if you do go ahead, then there will be a giant embarrassing fuss in the newspapers, Henry will be accused of having committed some kind of crime when he was ten, and I of having connived in it, and Denton won't believe it so he'll insist on having Jim Lacey's body dug up or something equally horrible. Leave it alone. That's why we asked you here. I wanted to stop you making the fatal enquiry that would put anyone else on the track of the story.”