JT02 - To The Grave

  T o t h e G r a v e

  S t e v e

  R o b i n s o n

  Copyright © 2012 Steve Robinson

  The right of Steve Robinson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

  The characters in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Kindle Edition

  Release 1.3

  www.steve-robinson.me

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For the Nans

  Prologue

  Jefferson Tayte was sitting at the table in his hotel room, wondering how his latest assignment had come to this. It should have been easy. All he had to do was reconnect an adopted woman with her birth parents. She’d even been able to give him a name and address, albeit as it was in 1944. Now he was thousands of miles from home, staring into the barrel of a Walther P99 semi-automatic handgun.

  “Head or heart?” the man sitting opposite him said.

  “What?”

  Tayte had heard the question but he had to ask to make sure he’d heard it right. The man didn’t say it again. He just moved the muzzle of the gun slowly from Tayte’s chest to his head and back again. He was a younger man, Tayte thought: early thirties, dressed in a navy pinstripe suit, shirt open at the neck. And he was leaner, too, much leaner, and he would be all the more agile for it.

  “I guess I can’t talk you out of this, can I?”

  “No,” the man said.

  “And if I go for the door, you’ll shoot me in the back, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  The man shook his head only slightly. “You wouldn’t make it out of your seat,” he said through thin lips that sat dead straight on his face.

  Tayte tried to swallow but he couldn’t. He knew he was going to die. A part of him had known it the minute he’d walked into the room and saw this man sitting there. They were both very calm about it and somehow Tayte wasn’t surprised by how he felt. He knew it was going to happen. They were resolved between them to kill and be killed. Head or heart? What kind of a choice was that?

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” the man said. He shifted as he adjusted the round, frameless glasses that were pinched to the bridge of his nose. “But if you choose heart, there’s a small chance the first bullet will miss. Your head on the other hand…”

  Tayte tried to imagine what a head shot would be like. Quicker perhaps, but what if the bullet went in through his eye? He winced. It didn’t bear thinking about. He really did not want to be having these thoughts.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that you won’t feel a thing, Mr Tayte. But this is not personal. I’m not here to hurt you. Either way, the pain won’t last long.”

  Tayte turned away and looked out through the window, thinking that this man was as cool as the January night that had settled an early frost on the cars below. He breathed deeply and wondered where the time had gone. His time. He thought how ironic it was that he should die a lonely man in some nondescript hotel room trying to connect another client with her birth parents while he still had no idea about his own. How could he die without knowing who he was? He scoffed, thinking that death would certainly spare him that pain.

  How had it come to this?

  “Head or heart?” the man opposite him repeated.

  Chapter One

  Five days ago.

  It was a Friday afternoon and Jefferson Tayte was with his client at her home in Washington DC, a few miles east of the capital and not many miles from his own home on the other side of the Potomac river. They were sitting opposite each other by an open fireplace that had served to chase the January chill from Tayte’s fingers and toes since the heating in his much loved Ford Thunderbird had decided to pack up on him during one of the coldest spells he’d known in years. The thin white shirt and loose-fit, tan linen suit he was wearing felt entirely inadequate.

  He’d first met Eliza Gray two weeks earlier when she’d called his number from the advertisement he ran in the classifieds section of the Washington City Paper. Assignments had been plentiful of late, if bordering on mundane at times, so when she’d told him that a suitcase had been sent to her with an anonymous note saying that the contents belonged to her real mother and that the sender thought she should have them, he called to see her right away. The note said nothing more than that and it had come as something of a shock to Eliza because in all her sixty-six years she had no idea that she’d been adopted. Her late, adoptive parents never told her.

  That was one of the reasons Tayte had taken the assignment. It was a little outside his usual routine, but he understood how Eliza felt and he wanted to help her fill the void he knew was growing inside her if he could. The first thing he’d done was to prove the note’s claim that Eliza had been adopted. He’d called his friend, Marcus Brown, an eminent genealogist who worked at the National Archives in London, and asked him to see if his client had an entry in the Adopted Children Register. The index to the register was only available publicly on microfiche at six locations in England and Marcus had been happy to go along to the City of Westminster Archives Centre to check.

  When Marcus had called back to say that he’d found Eliza’s index reference, Tayte downloaded the forms she had to fill in and they sent them off the same day. A week later she attended a mandatory interview with a local adoption advisor and a few days after that she received two certificates. The first was her amended birth certificate, which looked like a regular birth certificate but gave her adopted name, Elizabeth, and the names and address of her adoptive parents. The second was a copy of her original, confidential birth certificate to which the amended record was linked. It showed her original name of Virginia and no father was listed, which was as Tayte had expected.

  The other reason he’d taken the assignment was the red suitcase that was beside him on the sofa, and if he was honest with himself his own intrigue around how and why it c
ame to be there had got the better of him. Eliza hadn’t kept the packaging, which was a shame because he knew it would have offered some clue as to who had sent it.

  Tayte picked the suitcase up and set it down on his knees. It was a small suitcase, like a child’s suitcase, and it put him in mind of the kind of thing he’d seen in the small hands of countless British evacuees in photographs taken during World War II. It looked pristine apart from the dust that had settled a tacky grime into the locks and hinges, which over the years had tarnished the metal. He thought it had to be at least seventy years old and it had that familiar, musty odour he knew could never be removed - although judging by its condition it had travelled very little.

  “I wanted to take another look before I set off, Mrs Gray,” Tayte said. “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you.”

  “Of course you haven’t.” Eliza threw him a smile. “And I thought we were on first name terms now.”

  “Yes, of course. Eliza,” Tayte said, smiling back.

  He thought she looked much younger than her years. She had shoulder length, red-brown hair, a slim frame and youthful dress sense. And he liked the energy she exuded as she spoke, despite everything that had happened to her in recent years. He imagined she must have been a very active woman before the car accident that had taken her husband’s life and left her in need of walking sticks for the remainder of hers. He found it easy to admire people like that, who kept smiling through no matter what.

  “I’d like to take the book with me if that’s okay,” he continued, opening the suitcase. “I thought it might help open a few doors. You know, prove my authenticity should the need arise.”

  “Go right ahead,” Eliza said. “Take the whole suitcase if you like.”

  Tayte laughed through his nose. “That’s okay. The book will do just fine.”

  It was a pale pink hardback library copy of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. It had been amongst the few layers of clothing that were in the suitcase with several personal items such as a hairbrush, a half used lipstick and other items of makeup, and a toothbrush wrapped in an off-white facecloth. There was also a teddy bear with a button in its ear that read, ‘Made in England by Merrythought Ltd’. The case seemed full of things that a young girl might not want to be separated from given the choice and it was the reason they had been separated that intrigued Tayte the most.

  Eliza poured coffee from the percolator Tayte had helped bring in from the kitchen when he’d first arrived.

  “You don’t take sugar, do you?” Eliza said.

  Tayte looked up from the book. “No thanks.” He patted his stomach. “At least, I’m trying not to.”

  Eliza’s smile broadened as she sat back again. “So, tell me what you’ve managed to find out,” she said as she tried to get comfortable again. “You wouldn’t believe how restless I’ve been since your last visit.”

  Tayte thought he would, but he didn’t want to get into his own ancestry issues just now. He opened the book and eyed the library card that was still inside the jacket.

  “Philomena Lasseter,” he read aloud, and Eliza’s eyes grew wider at hearing what she now knew to be her birth mother’s name.

  The name and address of the girl whose belongings had been sent with the note were written in the book, and with that information Tayte had thought it would be a breeze to find Philomena, especially after he’d written to the address and confirmed that the Lasseter family still lived there to this day. He’d received a phone call from a man named Jonathan Lasseter who was keen to speak to him.

  And that’s when it had all gone wrong.

  Tayte had expected to learn something about the girl whose suitcase had found its way to Washington after all these years, but any hope he had of an easy assignment was dashed when Jonathan told him he knew very little about Philomena. By the time the conversation had ended he was of the impression that her life was little more than a rumour. Tayte had seen the warning signs, but they had only served to further pique his interest; like when he’d seen Eliza’s original birth certificate and noted that her mother’s name was recorded as Mena Fitch, not Philomena Lasseter, although the address given was the same as the address found inside the copy of Madame Bovary.

  “The news isn’t as good as I’d hoped for,” Tayte admitted, closing the suitcase. “When I spoke to Jonathan, he told me that Philomena was something of a family mystery. He said he’d heard of her and that he’d seen a few old photographs, but he also said that he hadn’t seen any beyond the war years, when Philomena would have been in her late teens.”

  “So she could have died during the war?” Eliza said.

  “That’s a possibility, but I don’t think so. You see, while I was waiting for a response to my letter, I started looking for Philomena’s vital records online - in the UK birth, marriage and death indexes. It’s an uncommon name, which helps a great deal. From the address I had, I was able to identify the parish where she was born and I found the record of her birth in Leicester, England in August 1927, making her seventeen years old when this library card was stamped in September 1944.”

  “But there’s no record of her death?” Eliza said, second-guessing him.

  Tayte shook his head. “No record of any marriage either. From the information on her birth certificate I could identify her parents, Margaret Lasseter, nee Fitch - which is where the name on your original birth certificate comes from - and George Lasseter, who was a general medical practitioner at the time. I searched for Philomena under both Lasseter and Fitch, but I couldn’t find anything relevant.”

  “Any clue as to who my father might be?” Eliza asked.

  Tayte opened the book to the page where a piece of material had been placed inside it like a bookmark. “Even less to go on there,” he said, removing what he recognised as a military nametape. It was a piece of olive-drab cloth with the name, ‘Danielson’ sewn into it. “All we have so far is this, but it could be anything or nothing.”

  “Or it could be a clue,” Eliza said.

  “Yes, it could, but by itself it doesn’t mean a thing.” He slid it back into the book. “It could have been picked up just about anywhere in 1944.”

  Eliza shifted in her seat and Tayte could see that even sitting too long in one position was uncomfortable for her.

  “Didn’t you find anything else?” she asked.

  Tayte pushed his hair back off his brow. He had a thick crop of black hair that never looked tidy for long no matter what he did with it. “I made some general checks online,” he said. “I went through all the newspaper archives I could and I looked at several other resources for any mention of anyone called Philomena Lasseter or Mena Fitch. I checked the British electoral registers, too, and the online London Gazette where enrolled changes of name by deed poll are printed.” He shook his head. “My results aren’t conclusive, but so far I can see why her life became a family mystery.”

  “But you do think she could still be alive?” Eliza said, as though holding on to that hope.

  “If she is she’d be eighty-four years old, so there’s every chance, yes. But I can’t do any more to confirm that from here.” Tayte bit his lip as he added, “I’m booked on an overnight flight to London.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going for a few days yet, or was it next week?”

  “I know, but I was just putting it off because I don’t like to fly and sitting around worrying about it just makes it worse. I’m all packed.”

  “Well now that’s the spirit, Mr Tayte.” Eliza said. “What doesn’t kill you, eh?” she added, and Tayte wished she hadn’t.

  “I need to go and talk to the family,” he said. “I figure I’ll have all weekend to find out what I can from them and when the local record office opens on Monday I’ll go and see what they can tell me. I’ve arranged to meet Jonathan Lasseter and his wife at their home tomorrow afternoon.”

  Eliza was on the edge of her seat now, clearly excited by this sudden sense of urgency. “Is there someone who can go
with you?”

  Tayte had to think about that. A moment later he shook his head and said, “No. There’s no one.”

  “Well Madame Bovary will have to keep you company. She’ll help take your mind off things.”

  Tayte just smiled and glanced down at the book he was still holding. If only it was that simple, he thought.

  “I want to know everything about her,” Eliza said. “What kind of life she led, and -” She paused. “And I’d like to understand why she gave me away.”

  “Of course,” Tayte said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “And you’ll keep me updated? I won’t be able to sleep otherwise.”

  “Just as soon as I have anything to update you with.”

  “Good. Well have a safe trip and if you need anything just let me know.”

  Eliza reached for her walking sticks like she was about to get up and Tayte could see that she was eager for him to get started, despite the fact that he couldn’t make his plane take off any sooner.

  “There’s no need to see me out,” he said, getting up himself. He leant in and gently shook her hand, which seemed tiny in his. “I’ll call you tomorrow once I’ve touched down,” he added, forcing positive thoughts into his head as he imagined himself at the baggage reclaim at Heathrow, stressed as he knew he would be by then, but alive and kicking and whistling an up-beat show tune to calm his nerves.