Daughter of Riches Page 30

  Juliet had to admit she did not. The war was yet another subject on which her family were curiously reticent.

  ‘Well there is plenty of evidence everywhere of what happened then,’ Dan said drily. ‘ The Jersey tourist industry is quite determined to make sure no one ever forgets we were the only part of England to be under German domination. You could be forgiven for saying we trade on it just the tiniest bit.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that!’ Juliet protested. ‘Actually I want to have a look around some of the war museums but I haven’t got around to it yet. I keep hoping one of the family will offer to take me but they don’t and I don’t like to suggest it. I don ‘t want to impose on them too much.’

  ‘So why don’t I take you?’ He said it without thinking, almost shocking himself. Juliet, too, looked surprised.

  ‘Really? Well, that’s very kind. But I didn’t mean …’

  He smiled. ‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. It would be my pleasure. I suggest the Underground Hospital. It was built by prisoners-of-war and it’s pretty spectacular. I keep meaning to go and have another look at it myself but you know how it is when you live in a place – it takes a visitor to make you make the effort.’

  ‘That’s true. I live in Sydney but how often do I go to the Opera House?’

  ‘I don’t know. How often do you?’

  ‘Practically never. Silly really.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Good lord, is that the time? Don’t you have a job to go to?’

  ‘It’s all right. I work for myself, which is why I shall be able to take you to the Underground Hospital tomorrow if that suits you.’ He said it smoothly but then went swiftly on before she could ask him what it was that he did: ‘It might be best if I didn’t pick you up though. Will you come to my house or shall I meet you there?’

  She frowned slightly and he cursed himself, knowing she was wondering why he did not want her family to know he was seeing her. He should know better than to mix business with pleasure, dammit! And he still wasn’t sure why he had done it. She was a very attractive girl, not a doubt of it, but he wasn’t interested in girls, attractive or otherwise … was he?

  ‘You think they might recognise you and ask some awkward questions?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Well, transport is no problem for me. Perhaps it would be easiest if I met you at the Hospital. I’m sure I can find it from my map without too much trouble.’

  ‘Shall we say about three?’

  ‘Why not? I don’t suppose I’ll have been able to find out anything by then but …’

  ‘At least we’ll be keeping in touch.’

  And that, he told himself, explained it. He didn’t want to risk losing contact with Miss Juliet Langlois now because he didn’t want to lose the chance of a rattling good story. Anything else was purely incidental.

  Chapter nineteen

  Dan had his key in the lock when he heard the telephone ringing. He pushed the door open and strode across the hall to snatch up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Dan? I was just about to give up on you! Phil Gould.’

  ‘Phil!’ Dan only just stopped himself from saying ‘Mr Gould’. ‘I’ve been out to lunch.’

  ‘Lucky for some!’

  ‘It was business.’

  ‘Oh yes? I’ll believe you. Dan – you know what you were asking me about? And you know I said I reckoned it was purely a family affair? Well there was one thing I forgot. There’s probably nothing in it, but there was a connection with Raife Pearson.’

  ‘Raife Pearson? The Jersey Lily Nightclub man?’

  ‘The same. Louis had been there, at the club, the night he died – and he and Raife had had a bust up. They were great pals, he and Raife, or at least they had been. You might say they were two of a kind, both flashy opportunists. At the time, of course, Raife looked the flashier. He was the one to catch the tourist trade in the early seventies with his big extravaganza varieties full of so-called star names that nobody had ever heard of – smutty comics and off-key singers, six-foot ex-Bluebell dancers in feathers and tights, second-rate magicians and even a fire-eater, you know the sort of thing. Seedy glitz. Whilst Louis, of course, represented the respectable end of the luxury market. But as I say they’d always had enough in common to be great pals – until that night.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Well there was some kind of almighty row. Half the staff heard it though no one seemed to know what it was about.’

  ‘How do you know all this if the case was never investigated?’

  ‘One of the barmen came forward after Louis was shot, thinking we might be interested. Said he’d been passing the office door and heard them yelling at one another. He thought he heard the word ‘‘blackmail” mentioned, but that seems unlikely. Raife hardly had – or has! – the sort of reputation that needs protecting. Anyway, Louis left the club soon afterwards with his bit of stuff. The barman said he heard him yell it wasn’t all over yet, he’d see to that. But of course he never had the chance to see to anything. That night he was shot.’

  Dan’s eyes narrowed. Little hairs were standing up on the back of his neck the way they always did when he was on to something.

  ‘This is an entirely new angle to me, Phil,’ he said. ‘It sounds very promising! Why was it never followed up?’

  ‘Two reasons. One, Sophia Langlois confessed and Ivor Fauval was determined to believe she was guilty. And two, Raife had an indisputable alibi. He never left the club that evening. He watched the second performance of the floor show, he sat with some guests at one of the tables in full view of everyone in the place and he did not leave until well after the time Louis was found dead. He didn’t do it, Dan. He couldn’t have. But I thought you might like to know about the row. Just for the hell of it.’

  ‘Thanks, Phil. But what made you remember now all of a sudden?’

  There was a chortle at the other end of the line. Dan could imagine Phil Gould plucking at his ginger moustache as he did when he was amused.

  ‘I have to confess I didn’t remember. Not off my own bat, anyway. After talking to you I came back and got out the files, just to refresh my memory. That’s where I found it. As I say, I don’t think it will do you any more good than it did us twenty years ago. But I’m telling you anyway.’

  ‘I’m grateful. Don’t forget, if you think of anything else …’

  ‘I know. I’ll be in touch. And you can buy me another drink when you see me.’

  ‘I certainly will.’

  But there wasn’t a lot in it for him, Dan thought as he put the phone down. A bit of extra colour, perhaps, the contrasting character to the suave sophisticated Langlois family. But even that scarcely applied any more. Middle age had taken the edge off Raife’s flamboyance. These days the Jersey Lily Night club was as respectable a nightspot as Caesar’s Palace and Swansons, booking only well known TV artistes, and Raife himself, with an extra covering of flesh beneath his well-cut dinner jackets, looked softer and less dangerous than the man Dan remembered from the impressionable days of his childhood. In those days Raife had driven around in a car with smoked glass windows, he recalled, and when he had emerged he had looked a little like a Mafia character in an American gangster film with his jutting jaw, hooded eyes and cigar. It was a wonder, Dan thought, that he hadn’t been pulled in for questioning over the Louis Langlois shooting on the strength of his appearance alone! But he hadn’t been and that must mean that there had been nothing there worth following up.

  Dan rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his face. He was grateful to Phil Gould for taking the trouble to look up the file and phone him with the additional information but he had to admit that it certainly looked as if Ivor Fauval had been right to dismiss the quarrel as irrelevant. If Raife Pearson hadn’t had such a cast iron alibi it might be a different story. But he had. Yet still Dan’s intuitive antennae were buzzing. There was something here, he was sure of it, but what? Was it possible Raife had had a hit-man do his dirty work for him? He was certainly the t
ype. But timewise it didn’t really fit. It would have been too much of a coincidence if there had been someone suitably qualified on the premises – convenient chances like that simply did not happen. And there would not have been time between the quarrel and the shooting for him to have put out a contract. He could have made a phone call, of course, but it was still cutting it pretty fine – getting hold of the person he wanted, just like that, the hit-man being in just the right place to kill Louis less than an hour later – it could have been done but Dan knew hit-men liked to plan their jobs meticulously and this was all too sudden, too haphazard. Unless it had been vital Louis died that night.

  Dan chewed on his thumb nail, considering, then rejecting it. By all the standards he’d ever worked to it didn’t hold water. Desperate people took chances, amateurs took chances. Professional hit-men did not. Pity, Dan thought. What a story it would make! And Juliet would be pleased too.

  The thought caught him almost by surprise and he had a quick vision of the way her face would light up if he was able to tell her that not only had she succeeded in clearing her grandmother’s name but the rest of the family were in the clear also. But he wasn’t going to tell her. With Raife’s innocence a more or less unassailable fact there was no point. In fact it might very well be counter-productive. She might latch on to his introduction of a diversionary character and let up on the investigation he wanted her to conduct amongst the members of her own family. That would be a great pity, for a chance like this to get inside information wouldn’t come again. No, he must not do anything that might rock the boat in that direction for the sake of what was almost certainly a red herring. But it would be nice to know what Raife and Louis had quarrelled about, all the same.

  Dan stood for a moment longer deep in thought. He could always ask Raife, but it wasn’t likely he’d get a straight answer. And if the staff had said at the time that they didn’t know what it was all about then there was very little chance of learning anything from them now, even if he could find them, which he doubted. Hotel and club workers in Jersey were a notoriously transient lot.

  But there was one favourite avenue of investigation he had not yet started down – the archives of the Jersey Post. In the past Dan had found the archives to be a rich vein of information, indisputable black and white reporting of events as they had appeared at the time, not coloured by a witness’s personal recollection some years on. There might be nothing there, of course. It was hardly likely that the Post, excellent newspaper though it was, had printed information which the police had been unable to unearth – except, of course, that the Jersey Post would probably have been trying where the police, it seemed, had not. But scouring the columns of news at about the time Louis had died might uncover some valuable clues, titbits which could slot into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle though at the time they had seemed unimportant or irrelevant. At the moment Dan did not know what it was he was looking for but he was sure he would know it when he saw it.

  Dan smiled to himself. He was feeling very good about this investigation. As yet there was nothing to go on, nothing new or different from anything that had been public knowledge twenty years ago. But if he knew anything about it there soon would be. The feeling of standing on the very brink of an exciting unknown tickled Dan’s nerve endings again.

  He reset his answering machine and fetched a new pad and pencil from his office. Then he retrieved his keys from the hall table where he had dropped them as he came rushing in, and went out, locking the door behind him.

  In the long low attic room at La Grange Juliet was sitting on the boarded-in floor working her way methodically through an old wooden box of mementos. It was fascinating stuff – everything from old photographs to yellowing theatre programmes, postcards to school reports – and although she had not yet found anything with any obvious bearing on Louis’s death she was enjoying herself immensely.

  Perhaps, she thought, her parents had had her welfare in mind when they had whisked her away to a new life in a new country. No, no perhaps about it, she was sure that they had. But at the same time they had deprived her of the rest of her family and a hung chunk of her heritage. Now, though her main purpose in asking to go through some of the old photographs and memorabilia in the attic was to try to build up a picture of Louis, yet at the same time the faded scraps in the dusty boxes were a treasure trove of collected family memories and Juliet felt a little as she had done when as a child she had been given her first magic painting book. That same sense of wonder she had experienced as she brushed water on to the page and saw the black and white picture take on softly muted colour was with her now as she leafed through the long-forgotten mementos.

  Some teased, posing more questions than they answered, like the Valentine’s card signed only by a question mark and three kisses, others were clues to the growing-up years of Louis, Robin and David.

  Even as a child it was obvious Louis had been the wild one – the sporting mementos were all his and almost without exception his school reports read: ‘Could do better if he tried’, ‘Should learn to take discipline’ and, most revealing of all: ‘If Louis applied himself to his work with as much enthusiasm as he does to getting into mischief he would be an excellent pupil’. Her own father’s reports, on the other hand, spoke of his day dreaming, whilst David’s depicted a less than brilliant boy who achieved good results through hard work. The photographs, too, told their story – Louis always ready, it seemed, to pose for the camera, the other two more interested in whatever it was they were doing. There was also a photograph of Louis and Robin with a young girl who Juliet recognised as her mother. They were in a field, all three of them, Molly between the two boys, her arms linked through theirs, but once again it was Louis who had stolen the shot. What a handsome boy he had been! Juliet thought, and tried to ignore the fact that Molly was standing a little closer to Louis than to Robin, leaning her head towards him as she laughed for the camera.

  Juliet stacked the papers she had already sorted into a neat pile and delved into the trunk again. At the bottom was a box file, bulging at the edges. Carefully she lifted it out. Something had been written on it, not on a label but straight on to the grey cardboard with a thick black pen. Juliet held it to the light and read: ‘Louis Langlois. Private Papers.’ Her skin prickled with excitement and she opened the box eagerly. Then disappointment set in. The box appeared to be full of nothing but bank statements and receipted bills, ‘Private’ as opposed to pertaining to business, and a small red-covered petty cash book. Nothing there. She was on the point of putting it back when something made her flip the cash book open, reading a few of the entries at random.

  At first she did not understand them. Just names and sums of money. Enormous sums of money. Then, as she pored over Louis’ flamboyant scrawl light began to dawn. The accounts were connected with gambling – Louis’s winnings and losses at a couple of London casinos. But there were individual names too – presumably Louis had also gambled privately and recorded the results with enormous precision. Juliet’s immediate reaction was one of disgust but she read on in almost morbid fascination. And as she did so one name leaped at her from the page, and then reappeared with shocking regularity.

  Paul Carteret.

  The dates beside the amounts were all in 1970 and 1971; totalling them Juliet realised they came to thousands of pounds. Sums like that wouldn’t mean as much to a Langlois or a Carteret as it would to many people, of course, but it was a lot of money all the same. And none of it appeared to have been paid off. Whilst lines had been drawn through most of the other transactions, Paul’s debts to Louis stood out with startling clarity. The last one was dated November 1971 – just days before Louis’s death.

  Carefully Juliet replaced the cash book beneath the bank statements and put the whole lot back in the box where it had lain neglected for almost twenty years. She felt slightly sick – so Dan had probably not been far out when he had said that some of her family had motives for killing Louis – she had just unearthed
Paul’s. Eight thousand pounds worth.

  Juliet got up, realising her feet had gone numb from sitting on them so long. She had, she thought, done more than enough investigating for one afternoon.

  Of all the wartime museums in Jersey perhaps the most unforgettable is the German Underground Hospital at Meadowbank, St Lawrence. From a cave-like entrance at the foot of a steep hillside the tunnels and caverns burrow into the solid wall of rock, each perfectly symmetrical, each with its own specific purpose, each hewn by the sweat of a prisoner-of-war.

  As a child Juliet had left Jersey long before she was old enough to be taken to the Hospital, so now she stared almost in disbelief at the monument to the terrible times her grandmother and the other islanders had lived through.

  Dan had paid for them to go in and Juliet walked slightly ahead of him through the turnstile and down the first echoing tunnel, chill and dark after the bright sunshine outside. She wanted time to read each and every one of the pieces of information on the display boards, to look into the half-shored up unfinished passages and soak up the atmosphere that emanated from every inch of bare rock face. It was, after all, part of her heritage, a heritage which she had lost without even realising it.

  Dan obviously knew the Hospital well; he pointed out the pipes for central heating and air conditioning and the rooms behind their protective grilles laid out as hospital wards, operating theatre and officers’ mess rooms. Here, in the honeycomb of passages, Juliet forgot for the time being the twenty-year-old mystery that dominated her thoughts and wondered what it had been like living here in the knowledge that human beings were dying like slaves of old as they constructed an impregnable fortress for the invaders. They were Polish and Spanish, Russian and Belgian, the plaques on the walls said, and Juliet found herself remembering that her great grandparents, Charles and Lola, had been prisoners-of-war themselves. When their children saw the mistreatment of the poor men who had built the hospital they must have known that their parents were suffering a similar fate. How terrible it must have been for them! Yet somehow they had survived it and Paul had even managed to escape to England in his father’s boat.