Found Wanting

ONE

The sky over Whitehall is doughy grey, the air chill and granular. It is a Monday morning in early February, yet winter has seemingly only just begun after a dank, extended autumn. The cold is almost a tonic for Richard Eusden as he emerges from the Churchill Café, mug of strong black coffee in hand, and sits down at one of the pavement tables. He drops his briefcase beside his chair, sinks his chin within the sheltering collar of his overcoat and lets the warmth of the coffee seep into his palm as he surveys the familiar scene.

The traffic is thinner than usual, but slow-moving nonetheless, thanks to the pelican crossing adjacent to the café. It beeps and blinks in service to the dark-suited men and women crossing in both directions who are bound for their desks and work places in the ministries either side of Whitehall. Many already have their security passes dangling round their necks, their identities surrendered and declared, their working weeks about to begin in variations on an institutionalized theme.

Richard Eusden’s security pass is still in his pocket. He will take it out only when he is most of the way down King Charles Street and turning into the Foreign Office staff entrance. The delay is a small assertion of his individuality, pitifully small in all conscience, but one of the few open to him. A civil servant closing fast on fifty with an index-linked pension no longer an unimaginably distant prospect cannot afford to cock a snook at the government machine he is undeniably part of. But there is no need to rush to take his place within it this morning. It is not yet 8.30. His train was neither late nor overcrowded. He is feeling less than usually travel-worn. He sips his coffee and tries to savour the moment. He knows he should put it to more obviously practical use, if only for the benefit of any of his colleagues who may pass by. There are file notes in his case he intended to study – but did not – in the course of the weekend. He could profitably cast an eye over them now. Staring into space is perhaps not the wisest image to project in the ever more image-conscious culture that has engulfed his profession. But still he goes on staring, through the plume of steam rising from his coffee.

The truth, he recognized long ago, was that he should never have become a civil servant. Deep within his soul he lacks the vital capacity to think the conventional thought – and to believe it. Having become one, he should have quit once he realized his mistake. He should have dropped out, travelled the world, searched for something else – anything else – to do with his life. But he had just married then and assumed he would have children, who would need the comfort and security his career could supply. And by the time that and a number of other assumptions about his marriage had been confounded, he had persuaded himself it was too late to make the break. More accurately, it was too easy to refrain from making the effort. Now it really is too late. Life, he is well aware, is what you make of it. And this is what he has made of his. He is smartly dressed and well-groomed. He is not losing his hair or running to fat. His blue eyes still glisten. His brain is still sharp. By most people’s standards, he leads an enviable existence. He tries to remind himself of this as he contemplates the predictable day and unsurprising week that lie ahead of him. He needs a change, but he does not expect to get it. He takes a deeper swallow of coffee and sets the mug down on the table.

His fingers are barely free of the mug handle when three short blasts on a car horn snap his attention to the other side of the street. A pea-green Mazda is cruising slowly through the pelican crossing as the light flashes amber. The driver’s window is opening and a face coming into view that Eusden senses he is on the brink of recognizing, only for a dirty red slab of bendy bus to cut off the view.

The bus slows for traffic ahead and merely crawls forward. It is an open question to Eusden whether he will see the Mazda again. It may already be past the Cenotaph and heading towards Trafalgar Square. He knows nobody who drives such a car. He has no concrete reason for supposing the horn was sounded for his benefit. The incident seems about to de-spool into the ebb and flow of the morning.

But it does not. The Mazda completes a fast and illegal U-turn into the bus lane as the blockage to Eusden’s view finally removes itself. The car jolts to a halt at the pavement’s edge, the driver waving through the windscreen to attract Eusden’s attention. He starts with astonishment. The driver is Gemma, his ex-wife. He has not seen or spoken to her for several years. They have, she memorably assured him the last time they met, nothing to say to each other. The clear implication of her manner on that occasion was that they never would have. Something has changed her mind – something urgent, to judge by her behaviour.

‘Richard,’ she shouts through the open window. ‘Get in.’

Eusden grabs his case, jumps up and strides across to the car, stooping to engage Gemma at eye-level. She looks, if anything, younger than he remembers. Her hair is shorter, her face slightly thinner, her skin clear, aglow with health. She is dressed in a black tracksuit and trainers. She appears what she is: fit, energetic, intent.

‘Get in,’ she repeats.

‘I’m on my way to the office,’ Eusden objects, though with little force. He already badly wants her not to drive away without him.

‘Sod the office. Will you please just get in the car?’ Her tone is impatient, but her gaze is pleading. She needs him. For once, she really does. ‘Please, Richard.’

A double-decker is bearing down on them along the bus lane. Something has to give. He hesitates, then opens the door and climbs into the car. Gemma accelerates away, tyres squealing.

‘Sorry,’ she says, though whether she is apologizing for her driving or her unannounced reappearance in his life is hard to tell.

‘What’s going on, Gemma?’ Eusden asks, buckling his seat belt as they swerve into Parliament Square.

‘I was looking for somewhere to park when I saw you. We have to talk.’

‘What about?’

‘Marty.’

Marty Hewitson. Eusden’s childhood friend. Gemma’s other ex-husband. Of all the subjects under the sun, Marty should be the last she wants to broach between them.

‘He’s asked me to do something for him.’ She keeps to the right, circling the square, looking ahead, avoiding any danger of meeting Eusden’s eyes. ‘I want you to do it instead.’

Surprise gives way to disbelief. ‘Why the hell should I?’ is Eusden’s instinctive response. But all he actually says is, ‘Really?’ Certainly he can imagine no reason why he would even consider helping either of them. Then Gemma supplies such a reason. By answering the question he has not asked.

‘He’s dying, Richard.’ She shoots a glance at him. ‘Marty’s dying.’

TWO

‘Dying?’ Eusden repeated incredulously as they drove along Birdcage Walk through the visibly unaltered but transformed workaday morning.

‘An inoperable brain tumour,’ said Gemma, sorrow deepening her matter-of-fact tone. ‘He’s got a few months at most. But it could happen sooner. It could happen any time.’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘No. And I don’t want to. I don’t think I could handle that, Richard. But I’d have to see him to do this favour he wants. That’s why…’

‘You thought of me.’

‘You and Marty were friends long before I came into your lives. You shouldn’t let him die without… patching it up between you.’

‘Shouldn’t I?’

‘No. Of course you shouldn’t. You know that.’ Her sidelong glance caught him unawares, his expression doubtless revealing more than his words. ‘Don’t you?’

Nearly forty years had passed since Richard Eusden’s first meeting with Marty Hewitson. Carisbrooke Grammar School, Newport, Isle of Wight: a cool day in early September, 1968. They were of the last generation of boys on the Island to take the eleven-plus and found themselves standing next to each other when the first year intake was corralled in the windy school yard that morning. Of such chances are friendships made. They were both intelligent and inquisitive, intellectually ambitious as well as mildly rebellious. They stuck together through seven years at Carisbrooke, Richard thriving on exams, while Marty, the more naturally gifted of the two, kept pace with him effortlessly. Then on to Cambridge, where their fateful shared infatuation with the bewitching Gemma Conway began.

It took more than two decades for the tragicomedy of their triangular relationship to play itself out – insofar as it had. After Cambridge, Richard joined the Civil Service, Marty went into TV journalism and Gemma studied for a Ph.D. They were all based in London. Marty seemed to have won the contest for Gemma and Richard tried to accept defeat graciously. But Marty was already beginning to hone a serious drug habit which Gemma could not tolerate. She left him for Richard. They married while Marty was ITV’s Man in the Middle East. Gemma secured a teaching post at Surrey University. They moved to Guildford. Suburban conformity beckoned. But Gemma recoiled from it. Marty returned from the Middle East, Lebanese girlfriend in tow. They began to spend time together as a foursome. Gemma landed a post at the LSE. Soon, she was back with Marty, despite the drugs, though Richard did not find out until the Lebanese girlfriend told him. Divorce followed. Gemma married Marty. They moved to Italy, where Marty was supposed to be writing a novel while Gemma taught at the University of Bologna. There was a kind of rapprochement. Richard visited them several times. Everyone behaved in a very civilized way. But it was not clear if they had their hearts in it. Naturally no novel was written. Cocaine became more important to Marty than Gemma. She left again – for a fellowship at Cambridge. Marty drifted back to London. His greatest attribute – the impossibility of holding a grudge against him – was unimpaired. Richard knew better than to try holding one anyway. Winning back Gemma was a different matter. He could not stop himself trying to do that, with some success, at least for a while. But too much had gone wrong too often. Their relationship finally fizzled out around the time Marty copped an eighteen-month prison sentence for drug dealing. The experience did not prove salutary. He was on remand for a second offence when he skipped the country. Richard, who had put up his bail money, had neither seen nor heard from him since, bar one cryptically apologetic postcard from Uruguay. The triangle was broken at last. Or so it had seemed.

‘Where are we going?’ Eusden asked as Gemma took off from the lights by Buckingham Palace.

‘Hyde Park. We can talk there.’

‘OK.’

He opened his briefcase and took out his phone. ‘I’d better call the office and let them know I’ll be late.’

‘Say you can’t make it today at all.’

‘Why not?’

‘That favour I mentioned. It’s now or never.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ll explain. I promise. Just wait till we’re out of the traffic and I can concentrate.’

Memories gather poignancy like dust. They confer on the past a magical unattainability. Schooldays on the Isle of Wight; student years at Cambridge; married life in Guildford; evenings in pubs with Marty, rivalry for Gemma sharpening their arguments about politics and economics and the future of the world: Eusden mourned them all now as lost interludes of contentment, even though contented was not what he had felt at the time. Marty Hewitson was the best and closest friend he would ever have. And he would never love another woman as he had loved Gemma Conway. Those were facts of his life. He could not alter them. He could not wish them away. Even if he wanted to. Which of course he did not.

There had been plenty of spaces in the car park by the Serpentine. Joggers and dog-walkers were thin on the ground at this hour. The bare trees were skeletal against the gun-metal sky. Some geese were still asleep, heads tucked under wings, denying the day had begun. Only the coots were active, corvetting noisily around as Gemma set a brisk pace past the boathouses, the hotel blocks of Park Lane rearing ahead like the buttes of a sunless desert.

‘Where’s he been these past few years?’ Eusden asked, breathing hard from the effort of keeping up with her.

‘Amsterdam, mostly. He doesn’t think the police have been trying very hard to find him. But he doesn’t want to risk arrest by coming back here.’

‘So, what’s the favour?’

‘He phoned me last week. I was too shocked by his news to realize how… difficult I’d find it to see him again. He wants something taken to him.’

‘In Amsterdam?’

‘No. He’s coming to Brussels to meet me off the Eurostar this afternoon. I’m hoping you’ll agree to go instead. It’s just a day trip, Richard. You’ll be back this evening. The Foreign Office can spare you for twenty-four hours, can’t they?’

‘Why is it so difficult for you to see him again?’

‘Because I’ve got over him. I don’t want to see him looking ill or old. I don’t want to be reminded of what we once had – and what he threw away.’

‘You can’t bear to see him because you loved him once. But you can bear to see me.’

‘You’re not dying.’

‘Actually, we’re all dying, Gemma. Just at different rates.’

She stopped and looked at him. ‘Are you going to do this?’

‘Depends what this is.’

‘A package of some kind. I’m to collect it later this morning from a Bernie Shadbolt.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Someone Marty met in prison. Someone he trusts.’

‘Why doesn’t he trust him to take the package, then?’

‘He said Shadbolt couldn’t spare the time. For what it’s worth, I suspect it’s a ruse. To see me again. Maybe to… try to persuade me to go back to him… for as long as he’s got left.’

‘When did that possibility occur to you?’

‘When Monica pointed it out to me.’

Ah, Monica. Eusden had wondered how long it would be before Gemma’s Cambridge housemate found her way into the conversation. He had tried hard not to ponder the true nature of their relationship. Naturally, he had failed. ‘Did she also point out that carrying a package through Customs for a convicted drug dealer isn’t the smartest of moves?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Richard.’ Gemma looked genuinely disappointed that he had asked such a question. ‘No one’s trying to set you up. Marty lives in Amsterdam. He doesn’t need to smuggle drugs over from the Isle of Wight.’

‘The Isle of Wight?’

Gemma sighed. ‘The package is a family keepsake of some kind. Something he wants to have with him… in the months ahead. However many months there are. Shadbolt picked it up for him from Aunt Lily.’

Marty’s aunt lived in a chocolate-box cottage beside the village green in St Helens, one of the Island’s more picturesque settlements. She was, as far as Eusden knew, Marty’s only living blood relative. It was plausible enough that she should be storing something for him. But that fact did not banish every hint of a set-up. It merely rendered the set-up, if there was one, more arcane. ‘So, Shadbolt could spare the time to look up Aunt Lily, could he?’

‘He had business on the Island, according to Marty.’

‘Friends in Parkhurst to visit, maybe.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Gemma?’

‘No. It really is very simple. One of us has to go. We can’t just… abandon him. I’d be grateful if you went. I think it might be good for you. And Marty. But I can’t force you to go. It’s up to you.’

The café at the eastern end of the Serpentine had just opened when they reached it. Gemma did not object when Eusden suggested going inside for a coffee, even though she already had what she wanted from him. He had agreed to take the package to Brussels, as she had doubtless been confident he would.

They sat by a window table, looking back up the Serpentine to the bridge they had driven over twenty minutes earlier. They sipped their coffees, a silence looming towards awkwardness.

‘When I first set eyes on you,’ Eusden said at last, ‘you had blonde hair and an Alice-band. And you were wearing a dress with a flower pattern on it and a petticoat showing beneath the hem.’

‘Are you making some point, Richard?’

‘Just reflecting… on your change of style.’

‘Well, no one could accuse you of changing.’

‘Would it really be so hard for you to see Marty again?’

‘Yes. It would. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Have you got your passport with you?’

‘What do you think? I wasn’t planning to leave the country today. I wasn’t planning to leave the office.’

‘I’m sorry for the short notice, all right?’ Gemma’s mouth tightened. ‘I hardly slept last night. I was still intending to go myself when I went to bed. Tossing and turning, I eventually realized… I couldn’t.’

‘You could have phoned me.’

‘I had to get on the road. Besides, I thought you’d react better… face to face.’ She sighed. ‘My mistake.’

‘I’ve agreed to go, Gemma. Isn’t that enough?’

‘I suppose it’ll have to be.’ She drank some coffee, glanced at her watch, then drank some more. ‘We need to collect your passport before we meet Shadbolt. And the train’s at twelve forty. So, I suppose we should start moving.’

‘If you say so.’

‘The flowers on the dress were forget-me-nots, by the way,’ she said as she stood up. ‘It went to Oxfam years ago. I don’t have any dresses now.’

THREE

The round trip to Chiswick to collect Eusden’s passport took the best part of an hour. It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time Gemma drew up in the yard of Shadbolt & Daughters Ltd, Car Repairs and Servicing, Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey. Trains into and out of London Bridge were rumbling overhead along a weed-pocked yellow-bricked viaduct, three arches of which, plus two aged Portakabins, constituted Bernie Shadbolt’s business premises. And business seemed to be brisk, to judge by the number of cars on view in various stages of dismantlement and the flashes of an arc welder that periodically floodlit the cavernous recesses of the archways.

They headed for the Portakabin with a fluorescent striplight shining through its chicken-wired windows and entered a paraffin-heated fug of cigarette smoke. The smoking was being done by a preposterously busty blonde in a low-cut T-shirt and straining jeans, currently engaged in a telephone conversation. The space was shared by a younger, slimmer woman wearing jeans that were under much less stress and a capacious cardigan over a higher-necked T-shirt. She had dark, shoulder-length hair and a pale, anxious face. She looked up from a computer screen as they entered and smiled. There was a sisterly resemblance despite their many dissimilarities. Eusden took them to be the eponymous daughters.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I’ve an appointment with Bernie Shadbolt,’ said Gemma. ‘My name’s Gemma Conway.’

‘Oh, yeah. He’s expecting you. Hold on.’ The daughter reached up to a wall-mounted telephone, took it off the hook and pressed a button.

A bell started ringing somewhere in the vicinity. The response was swift. Eusden could hear the growled ‘Yeah?’ from where he was standing.

‘They’re here, Dad.’ Eusden did not catch the response to that, but the daughter supplied one as soon as she replaced the receiver. ‘He’ll be right with you.’

It was odd, Eusden thought, that she had said ‘They’re here’ so naturally, almost as if his presence had been foreseen, an idea he found far from comforting. His gaze strayed to a noticeboard just inside the door. Amidst various flapping print-outs of health-and-safety regulations and fire precautions was a postcard, held by a single drawing-pin. The picture looked uncannily like an Amsterdam canal-side scene. He was about to prise it back for a sight of the handwriting, when the door opened behind him.

‘Mornin’,’ said Bernie Shadbolt. He was a tall, wiry man of sixty or so with crew-cut grey hair and a boxer’s face, sea-grey eyes regarding them cautiously over the flattened bridge of his nose. His clothes – Crombie, polo-neck, tailored trousers and stout-soled shoes – were in varying shades of black. He looked like a man who meant business even when he was not engaged in it.

‘I’m Gemma Conway,’ said Gemma.

‘Got any ID?’

‘Do I need any? I thought you were expecting me.’

‘I was. But you can’t be too careful.’

To Eusden’s trained eye, Gemma was finding it difficult not to be riled. But she managed it. ‘My passport’s in the car.’

‘Can I take a look?’

‘All right.’

As Gemma headed for the door and Shadbolt stepped back to make way for her, he turned his attention to Eusden. ‘Who are you?’ He was clearly not a man who wasted time on niceties.

‘My name’s Eusden. Richard Eusden.’

‘Ah. Right.’

‘Heard of me?’

‘Yeah. Packing your passport too, are you?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘Good.’ Shadbolt gave a taut little smile and waved him on ahead.

Passport inspection was a cursory affair. Shadbolt did not seem seriously to suspect they were impostors. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said when he handed them back. ‘Just playing safe.’

‘Richard’s an old friend of Marty’s, Mr Shadbolt,’ said Gemma, who evidently felt some kind of explanation was called for.

‘Call me Bernie.’ Shadbolt grinned at her wolfishly, then looked at Eusden. ‘Marty told me all about you, Richard.’ His instant familiarity was disturbing. ‘He reckoned it was fifty-fifty you’d go along for the ride.’

‘You’ve got what we’re here to take?’ asked Gemma, who had clearly decided against mentioning that only Eusden would actually be going.

‘Yeah. It’s in the boot of my car. But look…’ Shadbolt glanced at his watch – a chunk of pseudo-Rolex. ‘Why don’t we hop round the corner for a drink? You’ve got time before your train.’ Marty had obviously briefed him well. ‘It’s only twenty minutes from here to Waterloo.’

Gemma frowned. ‘I think we should probably-’

‘Great,’ Shadbolt declared. ‘Let’s go, then.’ He grinned. ‘My shout.’

The pub round the corner was the kind of place Eusden was happier visiting on a Monday morning than a Friday night. Signs advertised karaoke and meat raffles. The island bar was reached through a sparse array of utilitarian tables and chairs. The only upholstery in sight had been ripped, the foam innards spilling out like a fungus. It was barely ten minutes past opening time, but they were not the first customers. A couple of elderly derelicts had already started on pints and cigarettes.

The landlady’s wary face lifted marginally at the sight of Shadbolt, who ordered himself a Scotch and a packet of crisps. The crisps, it transpired, were for the pub dog, much the friendliest of its inhabitants. Gemma’s request for a Perrier and Eusden’s for a half of bitter elicited a frisson of disapproval.

‘Cheers,’ said Shadbolt, starting on his whisky. Eusden reciprocated half-heartedly. Gemma said nothing. ‘I couldn’t let the two most important people in Marty’s life come and go without at least standing them a drink.’

‘The two most…’

‘That’s right, Richard. You and Gemma. It’s what he called you when he filled me in on this little fetch-and-carry operation.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, now am I?’

‘I suppose…’

‘You’re with the FO, right?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘Any chance you could put me wise on that dodgy dossier, then? Only, I’ve got a nephew in Iraq. He’d be interested in exactly how you Whitehall wallahs managed to get it so wrong. If you did get it wrong. Know what I mean?’

‘It’s good of you to have done this for Marty,’ said Gemma, taking pity on Eusden.

‘Well, I owed him one.’

‘What exactly is the package?’ asked Eusden, feeling no keener to discuss the nature of Shadbolt’s debt to Marty than the calibre of government intelligence.

‘Don’t you know?’ Shadbolt shot back at him.

‘No. How could I?’

‘You’re his childhood chum. I reckoned you’d know all about it.’

‘’Fraid not.’

‘So, what is it… Bernie?’ asked Gemma, smiling tightly. ‘The package.’

‘Some old attaché case. I mean, really old. Locked. Marty’s got the key, natch. You could force it open easily enough. But that wouldn’t be playing the game, would it? Marty didn’t say what was in it. I guess he’s keeping us all on need-to-know.’

‘Didn’t you ask his aunt?’ Eusden put in.

‘According to Vicky, she didn’t know either. Or, if she did, she wasn’t-’

‘Who’s Vicky?’ queried Gemma.

‘My daughter. You were just speaking to her.’

‘So, you didn’t go yourself?’

‘Nah. Too busy. Besides, I thought Vicky’d go down better with the old biddy. Plus it gave her a break from all that secondary smoking Jules inflicts on her.’

‘We ought to make a start for the station,’ said Gemma, polishing off her Perrier. ‘You’re supposed to check in half an hour before the train leaves.’

‘No worries,’ said Shadbolt, passing his glass to the landlady for a refill. ‘I’ll drive you. You can leave your car at the yard. Want the other half, Richard?’

‘No, thanks. I…’

‘I’m not going, Bernie,’ said Gemma, uncomfortably but emphatically. ‘It’s just Richard. So, I’ll drive him to Waterloo. Thanks all the same.’

Shadbolt smirked at her. ‘I must have misunderstood.’

‘Like you, I’m rather busy at the moment,’ she said defensively.

Eusden smiled grimly. ‘Whereas I have all the time in the world.’

‘Crying shame about Marty,’ said Shadbolt during the short walk back to the yard.

‘So it is,’ agreed Eusden.

‘Tell him from me if there’s some specialist he needs to see who could pull off a miracle cure, he doesn’t have to worry about the money.’

‘That’s very generous of you,’ said Gemma.

Shadbolt beamed at her. ‘That’s what friends are for.’

He led the way across the yard to his car – a vintage Jag polished to a fine sheen. Eusden caught a glimpse of Vicky watching them through the window-mesh of the Portakabin as her father unlocked the boot and swung it open.

‘There it is,’ he announced.

And there it was. A battered old leather attaché case. Very old, as Shadbolt had said. Probably Edwardian, Eusden judged. But he had an advantage in dating it. There were initials stencilled on the lid: CEH. And he knew what they stood for.

‘Seen it before, Richard?’ Shadbolt asked.

‘No.’

‘Funny. You look as if you have.’

‘I’ve never seen it before.’ Eusden looked Shadbolt in the face. ‘But I recognize the initials.’

‘Reckoned you might.’ Shadbolt raised an index finger across his lips. ‘But don’t tell, hey? If Marty didn’t think I needed to know, we’d better keep it that way.’

FOUR

‘I recognized the initials as well,’ said Gemma as they drove away from the yard.

‘I suppose you would.’

‘I guess they confirm what Marty told me. A family keepsake.’

‘Strange Aunt Lily doesn’t know what it is, then.’

‘Maybe she just pretended not to know.’

‘Yeah. And maybe she’s not the only one.’

‘You think Shadbolt was holding out on us?’

‘I’m certain he was.’

‘Why would he?’

‘I don’t know. But Marty can explain everything when I see him. He’s bound to tell me the truth, isn’t he?’

‘You’re getting this out of proportion, Richard.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘I am. Give me a call when you get back. You’ll see things differently then.’

‘I wonder.’

Gemma’s return ticket was for the six o’clock train from Brussels, due into Waterloo, thanks to the time difference, at 7.30. If everything went according to plan, Eusden would be back home an hour later, his simple task accomplished. And he would have seen his old friend Marty Hewitson, probably for the last time.

The attaché case passed unremarked through the X-ray machine at the Eurostar terminal. Eusden was momentarily tempted to ask the operative what he could make out of the contents. The weight, about equal to that of his own briefcase, suggested they might be documents of some kind.

He waited in the departure lounge for boarding of the 12.40 to be called. It was a quiet day for Eurostar. Most business travellers would have caught an earlier train. And it was a slack time of year in the leisure market. He sat alone, flanked by his two items of luggage: his briefcase and the battered old attaché case.

CEH was Clement Ernest Hewitson, Isle of Wight police officer, father of Denis and Lily Hewitson, grandfather of Marty. He had lived into his nineties and was more than twenty years dead. A long departed relic of a bygone age. But not forgotten by any who had known him. Which included his grandson’s childhood friend, Richard Eusden.

Eusden had based a school project on the life and times of Clem Hewitson. He was, in a sense, the only biographer the man had ever had or was ever likely to have. Clem was already over eighty when young Richard first met him. A widower of long standing, he lived alone in a spotlessly clean terraced house in Cowes, just up the hill from the floating bridge. His grandson’s home was socially a world away – a mock Tudor residence set in half an acre of land at Wootton Bridge – but it was only a short bus ride from Cowes. Most Saturdays would see Richard and Marty meeting at the Fountain Arcade, where Richard’s bus from Newport arrived, for several hours of aimless wandering around the town that usually ended with tea at Clem’s.

The old man was a natural storyteller, whose life had given him a seemingly inexhaustible fund of entertaining recollections. Born in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (as he never tired of pointing out), he followed his father into work at White’s shipyard, but rapidly tired of the physical toil and exploited a family connection with the Chief Constable (Clem’s uncle had served under him in the Army) to get himself taken on as a police constable. He rose through the ranks to become a detective chief inspector, in charge of the Island’s modest CID, and clocked up more than forty years in the force, inclusive of four in the Army, braving shot and shell on the Western Front during the Great War (as he always referred to it).

Richard had plenty to choose from when it came to selecting incidents from Clem’s career for inclusion in his project: suffragettes, German spies, drifting mines, burning ricks, suicide attempts, escaped prisoners – Clem had tackled them all, along with a varied assortment of burglars, arsonists, fraudsters and the occasional murderer. Hard though it was to believe, in view of the almost total uneventfulness of life on the Island as experienced by the average schoolboy in the late 1960s, Clem could look back on excitements galore – and was happy to do so.

Richard was not blind to the possibility put to him by his father, when he relayed some of Clem’s stories, that they were exaggerated, if not entirely invented. Reluctantly, he concluded that this might well apply to the old chap’s single most startling claim: that he had saved the two eldest daughters of Tsar Nicholas II from murder by an anarchist in Cowes in the summer of 1909. As Clem told it, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana went shopping in the town during a visit by the Russian imperial family to Cowes regatta that year. Clem stopped, disarmed and arrested a gun-wielding would-be assassin who was in the process of entering the rear of a millinery shop where the two girls were idly debating a hat purchase. This brave and timely intervention earned Clem the personal thanks of the Tsar. ‘Pleasant fellow,’ said Clem of Nicholas. ‘Probably too pleasant for his own good, though, considering how things turned out for him.’

As it transpired, the story was too good to be true. Richard took himself off to the County Records Office in Newport after school one day and looked up the Isle of Wight County Press for the relevant week. The Tsar and Tsarina and their children had indeed been in Cowes in August 1909, or, more accurately, off Cowes, in the moored imperial yacht. And the two eldest Grand Duchesses had definitely gone shopping in the town. But no assassination attempt thwarted by a PC Hewitson was mentioned. The four days of the imperial visit had passed without incident.

Richard was too embarrassed to challenge Clem on the point, but Marty was not. And Clem had a ready answer. It took no great effort for Richard to retrieve a clear memory of the old man as he was that day: tall, bald, lean and stooping, eyes twinkling, mouth curling in a smile beneath his yellowy-white handlebar moustache, studying Richard across the tiny front parlour of his house, the room smelling of pipe smoke and stewed tea, sunlight streaming through the window on to the brightly patterned tiles flanking the fireplace and the framed photograph above it of Clem on his wedding day back in 1920, when his moustache was lustrously dark and his back was ramrod-straight.

‘You’ve been checking up on me, boy? Well, we’ll make a detective of you yet.’ The laugh merged with a cough. ‘It comes down to politics, see. They couldn’t have it said the Tsar’s daughters weren’t safe on the streets of England. So, it was hushed up. I should have had a formal commendation by rights. But that’s the way of the world. Might be best if you didn’t put it in your project, though. It could still be a state secret for all I know.’

Richard did not believe him, much as he wanted to. But absolute veracity was hardly to be expected from such an inveterate yarn-spinner as Clem Hewitson, whose claims of secondment to Special Branch during the Second World War and missions abroad he was still not free to talk about were as tantalizing as they were dubious. Certainly his son, Marty’s father, Denis Hewitson, had no time for the old man’s ‘romances’, as he called them. Denis ran a ship-design business in Cowes which he took very seriously, as he did his golf and his garden. His outrage when pop festival-goers slept on his lawn one summer’s night in 1969 kept Richard and Marty – and Clem too – laughing for weeks. Richard’s father was equally strait-laced, as befitted a deputy county surveyor. At heart, Clem was younger than either of them. That plus the distant reach of his memory – he often recalled watching Queen Victoria’s funeral cortège, the mourners led by the new King Edward VII, and his cousin the Kaiser, when the grand old lady’s body was conveyed from Osborne House to the waiting royal yacht Alberta on a sparkling winter’s afternoon in 1901 – made him an object of fascination as well as fondness.

The boys eventually outgrew that fascination. They naturally saw less of him after they left for Cambridge in the autumn of 1975, though no return to the Island was complete without at least one visit to the old man. He never accused them of neglecting him. Somewhere, Eusden had a photograph taken by Gemma of the three of them – Richard, Marty and Clem – standing together on the Parade in Cowes, with the QE2 visible out to sea, cruising up the Solent towards Southampton. Clem had just passed ninety then, but looked as spry as ever.

Eusden remembered borrowing a photographic history of the Island from Newport Library once in an attempt to imagine the Cowes of Clem’s youth. The town had a pier then; women wore long dresses and wide-brimmed hats; the men boaters and high-collared jackets with waistcoats. The sun seemed always to be shining, pennants fluttering from the massed yachts on regatta days, watched by parasol-twirling ladies. Ironically, Eusden would need an equivalent volume for more recent decades to re-imagine his own youth now: the ice-cream days of summer, when he and Marty took buses to distant parts of the Island, supplied with sandwiches and orange squash by their mothers, free to roam and explore. Alum Bay, Tennyson Down, Blackgang Chine, Culver Cliff: the places were all still there; but the times were gone, beyond recall.

Over the years, Eusden’s visits to the Island had become fewer and farther between. His sister Judith still lived there. She and her husband ran a garden centre at Rookley. Physically, his mother was still there too, vegetating in a nursing home at Seaview; mentally, though, she had left long since. Judith occasionally rebuked him for neglecting his nephew and niece. He found it impossible to explain to her just how painful it was for him to return to the sights and sounds of his childhood and adolescence. ‘When you went off to Cambridge, I thought you’d be back for Christmas,’ she said to him in a soulful moment after their father’s funeral. ‘But you know what, Richard? You never did come back. Not really.’

When Clem Hewitson died, in the summer of 1983, aged ninety-six, Marty was in the Middle East. He did not attend the funeral. Neither did Eusden. He had often regretted his absence, though he doubted Clem would have held it against him. The old man was as hard to offend as he was toforget.

As the train drew out of Waterloo station, Eusden gazed up at the attaché case lodged in the luggage rack above his head. The mere sight of those initials – CEH – had plunged him into helpless reminiscence. This had made him wonder if Marty wanted whatever the case contained to reconcile himself to his past in some way; to make peace with the times and the places – and the people – he had effectively fled from. It was hard to conceive of any other reason why he should be so eager to retrieve it. But there might be such a reason. Eusden realized that. And in two and a half hours, he would find out whether there was or not.