Name To a Face

SEVEN

Funny how things turn out.” Ray Trathen was right on the money there as far as Harding was concerned. Carol had been on the boat when Kerry Foxton met with her fatal accident. And Carol had been Kerry’s friend before she became Barney Tozer’s wife. She had never mentioned any of this to Harding. She had never breathed a word to him. Maybe she had reckoned he was unlikely to hear of it. Maybe Barney had as well, though he had certainly tempted fate by asking him to go to Penzance: Whatever their calculations, Harding had heard of it now.

Extracting as many details as he could from Trathen had been a delicate exercise. He had not wanted to admit why he was so interested in the part Carol had played in events. Nor had he wanted to reveal Hayley’s role as his informant for fear of causing trouble for her. That consideration had prevented him from probing the question of the switched video. It was hard to imagine it contained anything other than the material Metherell had recorded on the day of the accident. But it was, evidently, not the original. Trathen had referred in passing to that still being in Metherell’s possession.

So, what was the long and short of Trathen’s account of the accident and the background to it? Harding asked himself that question as he walked back to the Mount Prospect through the soft, dank Penzance evening. Kerry Foxton, freelance journalist, proclaiming an interest in the total eclipse of 11 August 1999, arrived in Cornwall from London a couple of weeks beforehand. She spent half her time with her college friend, Carol Janes, on St. Mary’s, where Carol was running a café in Hugh Town, and the other half on the mainland, mostly in Penzance, where Starburst International maintained an office-later closed when its fish-farming interests were disposed of. Barney Tozer was at the time living in a big house near Marazion with a succession of short-stay girlfriends, though he was as often as not abroad on business. Kerry contacted Trathen, then on the Starburst payroll, to suggest profiling his boss. Trathen recommended the idea to Tozer, who agreed and immediately took a shine to Ms. Foxton. She already knew the Association story and he had the means to arrange a dive to the wreck. John Metherell obtained the necessary permit and hired a boat and crew for the trip. Though no diver himself, he was keen to go along in order to visit the stretch of ocean where the subject of his book had gone down.

The party set off from Hugh Town, St. Mary’s, in ideal weather, on Friday, 6 August. They cruised out to the Western Rocks and stopped at the dive site near the Gilstone. Metherell videoed the preparations, then Tozer and Kerry went down. None of those left on the boat thought there was anything wrong until Tozer surfaced, saying he had become separated from Kerry and was worried she was in difficulties. He went down again, returning about ten minutes later, holding Kerry limp in his arms. They hauled her aboard and found she was not breathing. Tozer could not say how long she had been in that state. He had found her half in and half out of the wreck. Alf Martyn got her breathing again, but she was still unresponsive. There was a lot of panic. Trathen had only a confused recollection of the fast and bumpy ride back to St. Mary’s. Martyn radioed ahead for help. There was an ambulance waiting for them when they reached Hugh Town. They stood on the quay watching it speed off to the island hospital. Kerry was flown to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth later that day. Trathen for one never saw her again.

The police made desultory enquiries, but never seemed to think it was anything other than an accident. Kerry’s air-supply hose had been pierced, presumably by contact with the wreck, draining her oxygen cylinder before she could surface. The equipment belonged to Tozer, who claimed it was in good condition. But then he would, as Ray Trathen saw it. The whole venture was risky, according to local divers, who reckoned twin cylinders with separate hoses a must for wreck penetration. Tozer countered by saying penetration had never been the plan. They were just going to take a look. Kerry must have decided to go in alone, knowing he would try to stop her. Ultimately, that was the coroner’s conclusion. In effect, it was all her own fault.

Trathen never went along with that and, to hear him tell it, his doubts on the issue were why Tozer eventually sacked him. Harding suspected he had voiced those doubts only after being sacked. Tozer wanted out of Cornwall. Trathen was just part of the baggage he discarded in the process.

As to Tozer’s relationship with Carol Janes, there too Trathen was sceptical. He thought it might have begun before the accident. Maybe Carol was an accomplice in sabotaging Kerry’s equipment. The hose could have been tampered with, causing it to blow under pressure. If Carol did aid and abet her friend’s murder, her reward was a marriage of convenience and a share in Tozer’s fortune. Trathen had no evidence to back any of this up, of course. It was just the kind of slanderous nonsense an aggrieved former employee-and alcoholic to boot-would come up with. He claimed EU auditors had started asking awkward questions in the months before the accident about the use Starburst had made of lucrative development grants. But he could not prove Kerry Foxton was on the trail of the scandal, if scandal it was. The auditors were still sniffing around when Trathen was sacked. What they subsequently uncovered, if anything, he had no idea.

Trathen admitted the police had studied Metherell’s video without noticing anything suspicious. He did not mention his interest in Gabriel Tozer’s video collection, however. Nor did Harding. Neither was being completely honest with the other.

Carol’s abrupt transition from Kerry Foxton’s friend to Barney Tozer’s wife left a bad taste in Harding’s mouth, though, there was no denying it. She had always said they had met when Barney strolled into her café in Hugh Town one day. That now looked at best a distortion, at worst a lie. They had married in Cannes only a few months later, while Kerry was still lingering on life support in a hospital bed in England. The Foxton family had insisted on keeping her alive long after all hope of recovery had faded. According to Trathen, she had finally died sometime in 2003. The inquest had been held in October of that year.

Harding was already acquainted with the Tozers by then, although his affair with Carol had not yet begun. Barney’s fleeting return to Penzance to give evidence had presumably been camouflaged as yet another business trip. Nothing had been said about its real purpose, least of all to Harding. It was as if it had never happened.

Talking to Carol again after suddenly learning so much about her that he had never known before was a daunting prospect. Harding had turned off his phone before entering the Turk’s Head and found himself hoping there would not be another message from her when he turned it back on.

There was not. For a simple reason, as he discovered halfway back to the Mount Prospect: his phone was no longer in his pocket.

It was not being kept for him behind the bar at the Turk’s Head. No one had handed it in. Recalling his encounter with the supposedly drunken Darren, Harding started to feel queasily certain that it had been stolen from him. Darren was long gone, of course. His surname was Spargo, according to the barmaid. He stacked shelves in one of the supermarkets on the edge of town. Tesco or Morrison’s. She could not remember which. Neither could any of the locals. Trathen had moved on too, perhaps, it was thought, down the road to the Admiral Benbow.

But Trathen was not in the Admiral Benbow. And Harding doubted it would have helped a lot if he had been. The dismal truth was that tracking down Darren Spargo was unlikely to achieve anything. Harding could not prove he had stolen his phone. Maybe young Darren was in the habit of topping up his weekend drinking and clubbing fund with the odd opportunistic phone theft.

Or maybe, which was a far more disturbing thought, it had not been opportunistic at all.