Murder in Hell's Corner Read online

  ‘Should do. I publish him.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I never joke about business,’ he replied with dignity.

  ‘He wrote the 362 Squadron history.’

  ‘Not for me. In 2001 he did a guide to the sites where the flying bombs fell during World War Two.’

  ‘So you know where he lives?’

  ‘Of course. I can’t hand over his address, but I’ll contact him for you.’ He looked at her more closely. ‘Have some tea. You look as if you need it. Did you miss lunch?’

  ‘I had a bar snack.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. At Woodring Manor Hotel.’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘By your white face. See any ghosts, did you?’

  ‘Plenty. Someone walked over my grave.’ She grimaced. ‘That’s a stupid phrase, isn’t it? In fact it was me walking over Patrick Fairfax’s.’ She hadn’t yet told Luke about Peter’s discovery, and until they had reached a firm decision she didn’t want to, so how come she was blurting out his name? She could have kicked herself.

  ‘The Battle of Britain pilot?’ he asked with interest. ‘Don’t tell me. That isn’t the unsolved murder, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nothing she could do now. ‘But before you whip out a contract let me tell you it isn’t certain yet that we’ll do it as our next book. We need to get further along.’

  He pulled out a drawer, selected a new contract form and waved it in front of her face. ‘Take it, take it now. Fill in your own figures.’

  That made her laugh. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking to you about Marsh & Daughter’s professional wrangles.’

  ‘Wrangles? You two wouldn’t know a real wrangle if you met one in the street. You’re the only partnership I’ve run across that actually works.’

  ‘So I thought.’ Georgia felt highly gratified ‘Until we met this case.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘If I knew it wouldn’t be one. I just can’t get a mental grip on it, even though everything that Peter is turning up – plus what we were told this morning by the investigating police sergeant at the time – suggests there should be something to investigate.’ This was as far as she’d go. No mention of the dell. He might remember how it had affected her.

  ‘Perhaps you’re prejudiced,’ Luke replied matter-of-factly. ‘That valley put you off for some reason, so you can’t see the case as a justifiable one to investigate. You want to know why not? It’s not the case of Patrick Fairfax that’s upsetting you; it’s the background behind it. The Battle of Britain.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s it.’ Stop right there, Luke, she thought. She wasn’t ready to dig deeper.

  He hesitated. ‘It’s not my field, but perhaps it’s too broad for you.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  He put his arm round her. ‘Normally you begin a case with an individual, don’t you? At the most, with a family. That’s your starting point: Ada Proctor, Fanny Star . . . That gives you the handle on the situation, which leads onwards into the broader field with your hand still on the tiller.’

  ‘And so?’ She felt the prickle of self-defence rising in case he should come too near the truth – whatever that might be – and she would have to acknowledge it.

  ‘And so here you don’t. Even if the same factor is present, in that Patrick Fairfax was killed by someone who hated him – jealous wife, jealous husband, the usual suspects – you can’t see that. You’re seeing him through the squadron’s eyes because that’s how you first approached it. Those five old men and what they represent. You’re trying to grapple with a huge canvas full of death, painted at a time when young men like Fairfax were being shot out of the sky daily on both sides. That was war – and because you’ve seen the squadron survivors gathered years later, heard about the Hell’s Bells Club and Hell’s Corner, you’re seeing Fairfax’s death through that perspective, even though his murder was thirty years later. Beside the enormity of the numbers of dead brought about by war, you can’t reach through in your imagination to touch the core of Fairfax. One man, one corpse, beside the loss of so many.’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes, she thought dully. That could be it. In the basement of that hotel, in the dell, and because of those five men, the hotel reeked for her of the Second World War, not the 1970s. If she could clear her mind and see them as they had been thirty-five years after the Battle of Britain, the case would be clearer. It would be possible.

  She put her arms around Luke and kissed him in gratitude.

  ‘Georgia,’ he said after a moment. ‘I had this in the post today.’ He picked up a leaflet from his desk. It was an estate agent’s circular about an old property near Haden Shaw. She hardly took in what and where it was. Only what it meant. ‘Shall we go for it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes!’

  Chapter Three

  ‘This one’s yours,’ Peter had told her. ‘You can drop me off at Woodring Manor Hotel, and I’ll wait for you there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Georgia muttered as she collected her laptop and notebooks. She supposed it was fair enough that she should be the one to tackle Jack Hardcastle, since it was she who was dragging her heels over Patrick Fairfax. She had read This Life, This Death and Dancing the Skies but she still felt dissatisfied. She needed to get a firmer grip on the man himself. She could tell that her father was already hooked. Even though he’d been living with this case for only two and a half weeks, computer files were ready for the off, source lists were organized, and his pride and joy – the Suspects Anonymous software created for them by her cousin Charlie Bone – was raring to go. Peter had already set up the 362 Squadron pilots as participants – somewhat prematurely in her view. Factual details of timings, movements and motives could all be fed in, with each participant, whose icons were jovially named the ‘Burglar Bills’, complete with striped jersey and bag of swag, ready to move at the touch of the mouse. It was an apparently frivolous tool for a serious purpose, and Georgia only hoped the day would produce good data for it.

  Jack Hardcastle lived in Eynsford, a Kentish village in the Darenth valley. It was still, if one hunted it down amid the super highways, an attractive village set in rolling countryside. After an inadvertent detour to Brand’s Hatch, a favourite haunt of Peter’s despite his accident, she found Bramley House set back on the outskirts of the village, in the direction of Lullingstone Castle and the famous Roman villa. Roman villas had once been spread all along this valley and she contemplated the fact that beneath her feet somewhere, their whereabouts probably noted in some dusty Victorian file, they or their ruins still existed. Rather like the dell was the unwelcome follow-up to this thought. What secrets lay hidden there beneath its blue spring covering? And did that mean she was duty-bound to find out? If so, to whom? To the unknown, to Peter, to Luke – or to herself? She had a nasty feeling it was the latter.

  She brought her thoughts firmly back to Patrick Fairfax. Talking to Jack Hardcastle might be the deciding factor as to whether they should continue with this case.

  As she opened the gate she saw someone bending down weeding behind the bordering hedge. In gardening smock and corduroy trousers, Mrs Hardcastle – as presumably she was – stood up welcomingly as Georgia entered. She liked the look of this garden. It was already looking promising for the year ahead with early roses in flower, plenty of spring flowers, and no gnomes or classically undraped stone ladies. Instead beautifully carved wooden aircraft – a Spitfire and a Hurricane, as she could now recognize – flew either side of the door, both well secured she noted. There was a bench too, and no ordinary one. It was a huge seat shaped into two Spitfire cockpits (or so she guessed) side by side. She tried hard to admire it, but failed.

  Mrs Hardcastle must have seen her gazing at it because she laughed. ‘I learned to live with it long ago. I’m Susan Hardcastle, you must be Georgia Marsh.’

  As she spoke the front door opened, and Jack himself came out to greet her.

  ‘Come into the hangar,’ he said genially
. Fortunately this hangar resembled an orthodox study, with workmanlike computer, box files and books, books, books. Georgia felt she could relate to this room – and, she thought cautiously, to Jack. He was a well-built and hearty man and looked to be in his early sixties.

  ‘Are you a World War Two specialist or a general aviation historian?’ she asked as he waved her to an ancient leather armchair.

  ‘Bury my heart at Wounded Knee as they say, or in my case in the two world wars. Unfortunately man rarely lives by only doing what he wants so I’ve a broader range by now. Tell me to scramble and I’m off any runway in search of a cheque.’

  ‘But your heart flies with 362 Squadron?’

  He considered this as Susan brought coffee in. ‘Thanks, love. Yes and no, Georgia. Kent in World War Two would be more exact.’

  ‘Hell’s Corner itself. Isn’t that what the Germans called it?’

  ‘Hell for both sides,’ he said. ‘The RAF went through hell as well as the Germans. So did the civilian population here. Think of it. It not only had the Battle of Britain waged over its head, plus the problems and the threat of invasion, but it went through pretty well non-stop bombing after that, including a raid on Canterbury. Then it was hit by the doodlebugs – the V1 flying bombs – and the V2 rockets. It was jolly good of the powers that be to deceive the Germans into shortening the range of the flying bombs, but they had to fall somewhere, so the south-east of London and Kent copped it instead. Some of them fell in the countryside with luck, but a lot more didn’t. Ever seen a map of where they fell?’

  ‘No.’ She peered curiously at the framed map hung on the one wall not dedicated to bookshelves and books. It was thickly speckled with black dots indicating the sites.

  ‘And this map doesn’t even show all of Kent. It stops at Dartford. Further towards London they were falling like conkers in a high wind. The map would have been solid with black dots if it had stretched as far as the county border.’

  ‘Were you in Kent during the war?’

  ‘I’m not competing with Methuselah yet,’ he grinned. ‘I was a babe in arms when the flying bombs fell in 1944 and ’45. My father was in the RAF, that’s why I got interested.’

  ‘He survived the war?’ Georgia decided she liked Jack Hardcastle. Hearty men weren’t usually her type, but he exuded a genuine warmth.

  ‘Yes. Never talked about it. Not a word. That’s what made me curious.’ He paused. ‘Just like you and Patrick Fairfax. Your father said on the phone that you were thinking of his murder as a subject for one of your books.’

  ‘We’re undecided,’ she said truthfully. ‘From the little we know at present, it could just be a blind alley, if for instance he was killed without reason by a passing maniac.’

  ‘I don’t think you need go up that road. The disappearance of the gun would rule that out.’

  A sharp man too, Georgia realized.

  ‘I’ve read a couple of your books,’ he continued. ‘I thought they were good. What is it about Fairfax that attracts you as a subject?’

  Attracts? That was hardly the word, so far as she was concerned. She sought for an answer and remembered Mike’s comment. ‘The fact he did so much during the war only to die in an apparently senseless murder.’

  ‘How much do you know about him?’ He shot the question at her abruptly.

  Was it an odd one? No, not in the circumstances, she decided. ‘We’ve read your biography and squadron history, of course, together with This Life, This Death, plus what the internet turned up, which is quite a lot. We always cover the secondary sources first, before talking to friends and family, so that we already have a pretty good idea of the background and of whether we’re going ahead.’

  ‘And what decides that?’

  She was being tested, so nothing but the truth was needed here. ‘We never know until it happens. How do you decide what book to write next?’

  He chuckled. ‘When I see a hole in the market I can fill.’

  ‘With us, it’s probably something that shouts so loudly to us that we can’t ignore it. I suppose that boils down to the same thing.’ Was that true, she wondered. The dell was still shouting almost too loudly and yet she longed for a chance to ignore it.

  ‘And how does Fairfax’s death fit with that?’

  ‘He narrowly missed the VC, he wrote a remarkable book and was clearly an outstanding personality.’ She was trotting out the obvious, but what else was there at present? ‘Would you agree with that? You must have known him to write his biography after his death.’

  ‘I only met him a few times. I was an insurance agent until I took up writing full time. Covered his club and the hotel in fact.’

  ‘You liked him?’ She thought she sensed reservations here, but she must have been wrong because he answered immediately.

  ‘Everyone liked Patrick. He was the happy-go-lucky sort. Gung-ho. Up boys and at ’em. Dashed into one battle with his section without a moment’s doubt. He was a pain in the neck as a business partner for Matt Jones, but as a man of the air, first class.’

  ‘Were you at the reunion the day he was killed?’

  ‘No. That reunion’s a closed shop, restricted to Woodring Manor pilots, who were there in the Battle of Britain. I go to the general squadron reunions in London. After all, important though it was, that battle was only a part of the air war. The squadron arrived in mid July and flew out at the end of October when 66 Squadron came in from Gravesend. There were another four and a half years of the war still to go then.’

  So Luke had been right about its being part of a reunion. ‘There must have been more survivors from the squadron than the five we met, who were Matt Jones, Bill Dane, Harry Williams, Jan Molkar and Robert McNee.’ It was hard to think of the quintet individually. Jack’s phrase ‘Woodring Manor pilots’ was an odd description, she thought, or perhaps she was seeing innuendoes where none existed.

  ‘Plenty more, but not from the Battle of Britain. Between July and October the squadron lost fifteen, shot down or crashed. The CO, Arthur Cox, was one of them. He was killed towards the end of the battle in October.’

  ‘I thought it ended on September fifteenth?’

  ‘That was the watershed, and after that the enemy postponed the invasion sine die and decided to concentrate on bombing Britain into submission, so the fighters were then chiefly attacking bomber escorts. Some of the novice pilots only lasted a day during the battle. They’d arrive eager to blow the enemy to smithereens and be picked off like baby chicks by a fox. Others died later in the war. Of those who survived, some of them have obviously died since, and some wanted out the minute they were released from the force. You can understand that point of view.’

  ‘Yes.’ Peter’s father had, and so apparently had Jack’s.

  ‘For instance, Alan Purcell has lived abroad since the war ended. Won’t talk about it at all. No use asking him.’

  ‘Was he a Woodring Manor pilot? What does that imply anyway? Just those who were accommodated there?’

  She must have passed another test because he looked at her with keen interest. ‘The unspoken subject, Georgia. Yes, Purcell was flying officer rank during the battle. Woodring Manor was for commissioned officers only. They’d usually been through the proper channels – public school, university, university training corps, etcetera – but there were non-commissioned pilots as well, those who had the ability but not the background. Where they drank at night and what medals they were awarded had nothing to do with achievement, but everything to do with rank. Some of the best pilots in the battle were sergeants – Don Kingaby of 92 Squadron for example.’

  She had difficulty coping with this. ‘You mean, officers and NCOs deliberately didn’t mix in the evenings even though they flew during the day?’

  ‘Not deliberately. The Blitzkrieg broke out in May, Dunkirk followed at the end of the month, and after that invasion was obviously imminent and that meant an air battle first. The Air Ministry decided no one below NCO rank should fly – so a lot of airme
n got instant promotion to sergeant or warrant officer. Good news for them because their pay went up, but they still had their own mess. That system couldn’t be changed overnight.’

  ‘How many NCO pilots were there in 362 at the time?’ It seemed an innocent question, even though it was a side alley so far as Patrick Fairfax’s death in 1975 was concerned. Nevertheless she sensed Jack wasn’t eager to answer. Could he too be class-orientated?

  ‘Four,’ he answered. ‘None of them around the manor in 1975, of course.’ A pause. ‘What did you make of the Famous Five you met at Woodring? Are you thinking of them as potential murderers?’ This too seemed a casual question, but by now she suspected Jack never asked anything without reason.

  ‘Too early to say,’ she said just as casually. ‘They’d have been in their fifties in 1975, and at least it has to be considered. It seems unlikely, since they’d mostly left by the time of the murder. As to what I thought of them, Matthew Jones seems very vague now. Not Alzheimer’s exactly, but distanced. Shut up in his own worries. Was he always like that?’

  ‘No. He used to be as sharp as a needle. He was commander of A Flight from August onwards. A real mother hen looking after his lads. Took it hard when he lost one – which was often. Went on to command a squadron in Malta, which was no sinecure either. He ended the war as a wing commander, like Fairfax. Came out, went into the family business, raked up the cash to buy the hotel, which was going for a song after the war, and then made his mistake. Patrick Fairfax suggested he joined him and Matthew agreed. Bonhomie and big names were what Patrick did, and did it well. I don’t see Matt as the sort to murder his way out of a difficulty though.’

  ‘And Bill Dane? He seemed the liveliest of the five.’

  ‘Right. DFC. Daz Dane they call him. Know why? Daz for Dazzle. He was the one with attitude, the snazzy scarves, the poise, the lovable eccentric, the squadron madcap. He was in A Flight, went on to become a brilliant Wingco, pushed himself too hard, burnt out early in ’45. Took orders not long after the war. Married a bishop’s daughter called Alice. Settled down to pastoral life in Suffolk.’