October skies

CHAPTER 15

Sunday

Fulham, London

Julian was glad to be home in his modest flat. Junk mail was piled up against the inside of his front door, and the smell wafting through from the kitchen suggested some food in his waste bin had gone off. In the fridge there was nothing to grab — he noticed some pate had grown some blue hair, and a litre jug of milk had separated into curious layers of yellow liquid and pale gunk.

Otherwise, though, his flat was the tidy little sanctum sanctorum he had left behind a fortnight ago.

Though keen to hit the sack and catch up on the sleep he’d missed in the woods and on his uncomfortably hard motel bed, he called Soup Kitchen’s part-time receptionist, Miranda, to grab a handful of phone numbers that he’d be calling later.

Then he turned his attention to finding some details on B.E. Lambert.

Three hours later he pushed himself away from the desk, wandered over to the phone and ordered himself a pizza. With twenty minutes to wait, he sat back down at the desk and reviewed the notes he’d printed out.

It appeared that Benjamin Lambert had come from a very wealthy family. His father, Maurice, had made a fortune on property in the Square Mile, but accrued most of his wealth as a result of investments he’d made in America. Most of this information Julian had found on the website of Banner House Hospice (formerly Asylum). Maurice Lambert had donated substantially to the institution, funding the building of a wing — the Lambert Wing, naturally.

Maurice Lambert, knighted later on, had only one son with his wife Eugenie — nee Eugenie Davies, a distant relative through marriage, Julian discovered, to the Duke of Westminster. Their son, Benjamin Edward Lambert, went to Westminster Boarding School and on to Oxford to study medicine, later specialising in the emerging discipline of psychiatry. Julian wondered if that was his father’s aspiration — for his son to practise medicine in the hospital he paid for?

He also managed to find a short article in The Times’ online archive, an article dated 1855 in which it was mentioned that Benjamin Lambert, son of Sir Maurice, had announced that he was preparing to extricate himself from polite London society and travel to the Americas to explore the wilderness of the west. He planned to write a study of the frontier, perhaps even a novel, which he would publish on his return. The paper wished him bon voyage and looked forward to serialising his work.

And that’s where the trail of information dried up.

Julian chewed absent-mindedly on a biro.

That didn’t necessarily mean Lambert perished out in those woods. There might be further biographical footprints from later on in his life, elsewhere. For example, he might have survived and stayed in America — in which case, there would be a trail somewhere.

But for now, there was nothing more he could easily find. Any further information on Lambert would require some digging.

The doorbell rang, and five minutes later Julian was sitting in his bay window looking out past rain streaks at the evening traffic on the road below, enjoying a glass of wine and tearing hungrily into a slice of pizza.

Idly, his mind kept drifting back to Rose and what might have happened last night if there’d been just a couple more empty beer bottles on the table between them.

Get a grip, Julian. You work together… it’s best that nothing happened.

Outside a siren bounced off the block of flats opposite as a police car tore down the wet street. The noise broke the spell. And he figured, if it was a spell broken so easily, then perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.

Back to work, slacker.

He wiped grease from his fingers and returned to the keyboard, opening up Google and typing ‘Preston Party’.

He got the usual avalanche of irrelevant hits. ‘Preston’s Bar’ in Chicago was having a party. There were photos of a Preston Macey’s graduation and subsequent party. Preston Town’s civic hall was hosting a question and answer session with their MP from the Labour Party. Preston Entertainment, an online DVD store, had a list of movies with Party in the title. And so on, and so on.

Julian sighed. There was so much tat on the web these days. He tried refining his search: ‘Preston Party’ + ‘Mormons’.

He got several more pages of hits to wade through. The ‘Mormon’ tag was predominantly giving him loads of community and church pages, featuring chatty reportage about recent, wholesome family days out and pending prayer meetings. Lots of pictures of happy, shiny faces; pictures of church elders, respectable and smart — successful by the look of many of them — gathered at picnics and fairs and camps and tents. Pictures of sandy-haired kids in smart casual clothes, innocent and healthy, baring happy grins as they hugged each other and goofed around for the camera.

Julian wondered if any of these kids would one day walk into a high school dressed in black and packing an assault rifle in their shoulder bag ready to do God’s work. Perhaps not. Whilst Julian was not a big fan of religion he conceded that it seemed to hold communities like these together like a sturdy glue. It always seemed to be the loners, the kids who’d floated off into their own lonely parallel universe, who ended up blowing their classmates away.

He leafed through the printed pages of the journal, looking for something. Finding a reference to the preacher’s first name, he tried again: ‘William Preston’… and for good measure he added ‘+Missing Wagon Train’.

The search was too specific. It gave him only one hit. He was about to have another go when something about the brief thumbnail description caught his eye.

… account of a Mormon wagon train on their way to Oregon that went missing…

He hit the link and was immediately presented with a simple page, a black screen topped with a banner that read ‘Tracing William Preston’s Party’. Beneath that was a rather dry and blandly written block of text laid out in a small and tiresome font that described little more than the early history of the Mormon church. If Julian hadn’t had a particular interest in the subject, this drab-looking web page would have had him clicking away very quickly.

The solid block of text started out by briefly describing how the Church of the Latter Day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith; then the subsequent troubles in Nauvoo; the unpleasant in-fighting of the church; the schisms; how the Mormon church was rounded on by non-Mormon Christians; the outbreaks of violence; and then, finally, describing the Great Mormon Exodus across the Great Plains.

Further down the page, there was a little detail on a minister by the name of William Preston who had formed one of many breakaway Mormon groups and was delivering his flock from the decadent United States into God’s untamed wilderness to set up their own Eden. The short article concluded that Preston’s party set out from a place called Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the spring of 1856 and stopped off at an outpost named Fort Kearny. From there they set out into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.

Julian noticed an email address at the bottom. That was it; there were no other links for further reading, no hyperlinks to other related pages, just this one page of text written by someone who clearly needed to work on his writing style.

There was a comment beside the email address.

I am working on a book about this. If you have information, or wish to share information, please contact me at Arnold. Zuckerman@artemis. com.

Julian hovered over the link, tempted to bash out a quick email to see if he could pump the person behind this page for some quick and easy details. Maybe if he suggested he had some — loose — association with the BBC, the author would be flattered enough to open up and share everything with him.

He clicked the link and started to write an introductory email and then stopped.

Hang on. Maybe I should finish up on the Lambert journal first?

Yes. It would make a lot more sense if he knew how the story of the Preston Party was going to go before hooking up with anybody else. He decided this might be someone worth contacting at a later stage, if he needed to fill in some details. But not right now. Whilst this page was most likely authored by some retired old enthusiastic amateur, it might just be another journalist or, God forbid, another programme researcher with the scent of a story in his nostrils.

Instead of emailing the person, he bookmarked the page.

‘We’ll talk in good time,’ he muttered.

He poured himself another glass of red, settled back in his bay window which was rattling with spots of rain, and picked up the pages of Lambert’s journal.