The Forgotten Son Page 11

  He took the Land Rover back to the pub, leaving Bishop at Redrose to keep an eye on things. The lights were out at The Rose & Crown, so he did not knock the door. He supposed they would have their own telephone, but that didn’t matter – he wasn’t here to disturb the Barns’. There was a red phone box outside the pub. No doubt the only one in the village. He had tried contacting the local Green Jackets via walky-talky earlier, while he and Bishop had been driving around the village, but there was no signal in Bledoe. Too far from the nearest radio transmitter, no doubt. So the phone was the only alternative left to him.

  He inserted a coin and pressed a button. It took a few moments for him to be put through to the nearest operator in Liskeard, and she seemed a little put out by being disturbed so late at night. He doubted there were many phone calls made at such a time usually. He asked to be put through to the London Regiment office, and waited once more while she connected him.

  There was no one on duty connected to the Arnold case: Major Douglas had found a bunk to sleep on, and neither Corporals Wright nor Bell were there. The private asked if he wanted her to disturb Major Douglas, but Lethbridge-Stewart said no. Dougie had been working hard all day, and had many long days ahead of him. He should enjoy all the sleep he could get. But there was one person he didn’t mind disturbing, even at this hour.

  ‘Alistair, where have you been?’ Sally asked as soon as she picked up the receiver. He felt a twinge of guilt at the concern in her voice.

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she replied, but the following yawn belied her denial.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lethbridge-Stewart said. ‘I’ve been following a lead in a little village a few miles out of Liskeard.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ve been waiting for you to call for hours.’

  ‘Any sign of Arnold?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Sally said, a little put out by the officious tone of his voice. He could not blame her. He had woken her and immediately turned to work. He shook his head, frustrated, and listened as she relayed the facts. ‘The Green Jackets and local police force searched Liskeard, but there was no sign of him. Inquiries are still being made, but nothing strange has been reported in the town, so it seems likely he’s moved beyond Liskeard now.’

  Then where would he have gone? Lethbridge-Stewart looked out through the Perspex windows of the phone box at the field beyond. There were many villages around Liskeard that Arnold could have gone to, but Lethbridge-Stewart didn’t bother telling Sally to arrange a search. He felt certain that Arnold was heading this way. He didn’t know the connection between Arnold and his mother, but the odds of both of them coming to Liskeard at the same time was too high for him to write off as coincidence. Not that Lethbridge-Stewart could really tell Sally this; he doubted even she would believe him. He would talk to Hamilton in the morning.

  ‘Dougie’s really enjoying his new administrative role,’ Sally offered to fill the silence while he thought. She was always good at that. ‘We may get to Brighton after all,’ she added.

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Say it once more with feeling.’

  ‘Sorry, distracted.’

  ‘Did you know Arnold well?’ Sally asked, not missing a beat.

  ‘Barely at all, met him during the London Event. He seemed to be a good man. Dependable, knew his stuff. Captain Knight spoke highly of him. But…’ Lethbridge-Stewart couldn’t blame the dead staff sergeant, really, but he did wonder just for how long Arnold had been an agent of the Great Intelligence. Perhaps they would never really know.

  ‘Any idea why he’d go to Cornwall? We’ve been discussing that here, and there’s a bunker in Devon that…’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and Dougie.’

  ‘I see.’ Lethbridge-Stewart should have expected that; Dougie and Sally had been friends for a long time, and both knew something of the London Event. It was only natural that they would speculate.

  He sighed, suddenly feeling like he shouldn’t even be in Bledoe. He should have insisted on taking his leave as planned. He preferred to leave the past where it belonged, behind him. This felt too much like running backwards.

  They ran, heading deeper into the wood. Lewis knew the wood quite well, certainly better than Charles, but even he had to admit he was losing track of their position. Draynes Wood wasn’t immense, but at night time it seemed to go on forever.

  They crouched down, trying to hide behind a large tree.

  Charles looked at him, sweat on his forehead, a big smile plastered across his face. ‘What are those things?’ he asked.

  It was the first time they had a chance to talk, other than panted instructions as they ran. Lewis poked his head around the tree and listened. No sign of them.

  ‘I’ve seen them before,’ he replied. ‘In a book. Some expedition in the Himalayas in the ‘30s… Owain used to love all that kind of stuff. I think they’re abominable snowmen. They look the same, even down to the…’ Lewis stopped, the image of Owain rushing to the front of his mind. ‘What has happened to Owain?’ He shook his head.

  ‘Seemed to be controlling them.’

  ‘What? My brother? Come on, Charles, you saw what I saw. His eyes… That thing on his head!’

  ‘Yeah, some kind of metal hat.’ Charles slumped down on the damp earth. ‘This is mad,’ he said, smiling again.

  ‘What are you so happy about?’

  Charles waved his arms around. ‘All this. We’re in the woods being chased by… what did you call them?’

  ‘Abominable Snowmen.’

  Charles frowned. ‘Snowmen in Cornwall? In March? Abominable ones at that!’ He laughed suddenly. ‘Tell me you’re not having fun? That this isn’t more exciting than anything you’ve ever experienced?’

  Lewis couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This was not putting it to ‘the man’, this wasn’t stirring up a revolution – this was something else entirely. This was dangerous.

  He was about to give his forceful answer, but the sound of movement nearby stopped him. He looked around the tree. In the distance three dark shapes were approaching. No sign of Owain this time, though.

  ‘Come on, we need to keep moving.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Charles agreed, standing. ‘Let’s reach some kind of high ground, go on the offensive.’

  Charles set off at a run. Lewis remained where he was for a moment. What was Charles on about? They couldn’t fight abominable snowmen. They were just two boys and those things were… He swallowed. Charles was mad, and was going to get them both killed.

  Lewis closed his eyes for a minute, once again seeing his brother advancing on them by the Manor, eyes glowing. He swallowed. This was wrong – both of them should have been home, safe, asleep.

  ‘You really should go and sleep,’ Lethbridge-Stewart said. He and Sally had talked a little about their intended holiday, anything to distract his mind from what was going on, but he could tell that Sally was in desperate need of sleep. She tended to cackle a lot when too tired, laughing at things which were barely pithy.

  It was bad enough that his private and professional lives were colliding; he didn’t wish to compound things further by bringing Sally into whatever was going on in Bledoe.

  ‘When you sleep, so will I.’

  He looked around the cramped telephone box. ‘Unfortunately I don’t think this thing is made for sleeping in. I will need to drive back to Redrose Cottage before I manage to get any sleep.’

  ‘Redrose Cottage? Sounds lovely.’

  ‘Yes, it’s my…’ He stopped himself. He was about to call it his home, but that wasn’t right. No matter how much the cottage felt like his home, he was an intruder here. A man alone. He was the forgotten son of Bledoe, and he preferred to keep it that way. He did not belong here. But until he solved the mystery of his memory and his mother’s return, he knew he was stuck here. ‘…It’s where I’ve been put up for the night.’

  ‘You work yourself too hard, Alistair, I keep telling you this.’


  ‘Yes, you do, but I have a job to do, and I intend to do it. You knew my career comes first, you’ve always known that, Sally. Ever since Dougie introduced us. I never kept it a secret.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’ He could hear her shaking her head on the other end of the line. ‘What is this lead?’ Sally asked abruptly.

  Lethbridge-Stewart smiled. She never could let something go, and in this instance it served him well. Gave him a reason to switch back to official mode. ‘I’m afraid it’s need-to-know, Corporal. Please advise Major General Hamilton of my position and tell him I shall contact him in the morning and fully brief him on developments.’

  ‘Alistair, I…’ She stopped. ‘Yes, sir,’ Corporal Wright said, and the phone went dead.

  He remained there, the receiver in his hand, pressed against his ear. The dialling tone continued for a few moments before the voice of the operator broke in.

  ‘Is there somewhere else I can connect you to?’ she asked, tired but respectful now she knew he was a military man. Lethbridge-Stewart wondered how much of the conversation she had listened in on. Too much probably. Tomorrow he would need to find a signal for the RT; he couldn’t report to Hamilton over an open phone line.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said and put the phone down. He pushed open the door of the phone box, never as easy as it should have been, and stepped out into the fresh air. It was only as the air hit him that he realised that the phone box had stunk of cigarette smoke. He had never been one to smoke, and didn’t much care for the smell, although he found himself getting used to it as more and more people took up the disgusting habit. Soon everywhere would be clogged up with the fug of cigarette smoke. Including any home he set up with Sally, as she was a habitual smoker herself.

  What a glorious world, he considered, glad that for now at least he was in the clear air. He fully unwound the window of the Land Rover as he set off back to Redrose Cottage, enjoying the cold breeze on his face.

  Lewis shivered and looked up at the greying clouds in the dark sky. The weather was about to turn. He could smell the rain coming. He’d lost track of Charles a little while ago. More of the snowmen had come at them, and without even checking, Charles had hared off, leaving Lewis with no choice but to continue on his own.

  He had found his way to the gorge. It was a bit too open, but if he could cross it then he might have been able to put some distance between him and the pursuing beasts. He looked around. If he remembered correctly… Yes, over there he saw the little rope swing that he and Owain had built a few summers ago.

  Lewis walked over to it, his eyes continuously roaming the spaces between the trees. The first drop of rain fell. He glanced up. It was soon going to get worse, and he’d left his parka at home. If he didn’t get out of the wood soon, he was going to get soaked. Although if the rope swing didn’t hold… well, a bit of rain would be the least of his problems.

  For a moment he froze, his hand barely inches from the rope. Owain. He had to find his brother, save him from whatever trouble he’d found himself in. Charles said Owain was controlling the snowmen but that was insane. His brother – behind this? No. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew his brother.

  Lewis unwrapped the rope from around the tree trunk and pulled on the stick fastened at the end of the swing. It seemed strong enough.

  Just then he heard the crunching of twigs. He looked back. Abominable snowmen closing in. Lewis smiled, feigning a bravery he was far from feeling.

  ‘Bye, fellas,’ he said and swung.

  He hadn’t even reached halfway across the gorge when one of the snowmen lifted what appeared to be some kind of gun and fired.

  Lewis wasn’t quite sure what he expected to come out of the gun – from its fantastical appearance, maybe a death ray of some sort – but it certainly wasn’t a type of web.

  The sticky substance hit him and his fingers lost their hold.

  His limbs freezing as the web wrapped itself around him, Lewis could do nothing but fall helpless into the gorge below, and in those last moments his mind went to his brother, to his parents. He should never have said he was going to leave them.

  He knew she wasn’t there before he even woke. It was an odd feeling, but one he had honed after almost twenty years of marriage. George lifted himself onto his elbow and looked at the empty space left by Shirley, the sheet still creased in the shape of her. He sighed and listened to the rain hitting the bedroom window.

  He had been a little drunk when he returned home, only to find his wife still sitting at the dining table, looking out to the window. Neither of the twins had returned, and he reminded her once again that they were almost eighteen and had to take care of themselves. It was time their mother stopped worrying – was she going to worry every day after they moved out? Which, for Lewis, was likely to be the next day.

  What followed was an argument about how George never showed the twins enough affection, and how their family was falling apart and he didn’t even care. Of course he cared, but he showed it in his own way. Shirley wasn’t there when he and Owain did their weekly rounds into Liskeard, she knew nothing of their quiet pints in the beer garden, neither did she know about the long discussions he and Lewis had about life in London and the impact the Beatles had, and how both of them wanted to one day visit India and meet some of those Buddhists who Lennon talked so much about.

  Instead of telling her this – after all if she didn’t know how he felt by now then it was no point explaining it to her – he had turned on the television to watch a snooker match, something that he found relaxing now that he had a colour television and could actually follow the game properly. After half a dozen frames, the argument forgotten, he had gone up the stairs to bed.

  He sat up in the darkness. Something hard was caught in his chest, a deep stabbing pain. For a moment he thought he was about to have a stroke, brought on by too many cigarettes and alcohol, but the pain passed. He looked around.

  The room felt empty all of a sudden, the silence deafening. Before he knew he was going to do so, he’d slipped his feet into his slippers and crossed the landing to Lewis’ room. There he stood, looking in at the empty bed, feeling tears fall down his face.

  The old soldier continued moving, biting hungrily into the fruit he had stolen from the house. It wasn’t much, but he ate it with gusto, vaguely recalling a time when such things were unknown in England. He still didn’t know who he was, or where he was going, but he knew he had to keep moving. The further he went the more likely he would find himself once more.

  He stopped and looked back at the house. He supposed he should feel guilty about the theft, at least leave a note apologising, but he remembered when he was a boy in London, forced to steal because his family had so little money. He had lived through tough times, learned that charity was not as common as people liked to believe. Sometimes you had to help yourself.

  It was the first real memory he had managed to recall that was his own. He had remembered all kind of things since entering the village, but none of the memories seemed to belong to him. They were the memories of a woman, of her horror at the sight of the dead boy next to the cascading water, surrounded by trees. He didn’t know who the memories belonged to, but he knew they weren’t his. Stealing food in London, that was him.

  ‘Arnold!’

  He looked around quickly, but there was no one there. Just the dark village. Only the voice… No, he had not heard it. He’d remembered it. He remembered being in a dark tunnel, train track by his feet and a man calling out to him. He knew the man, tall, straight back, a clipped moustache… But no name came with the face. The man was talking to him.

  Finally he knew his name. Staff Sergeant Arnold of the British Army.

  It was unusual for the boys to be joined by the girls, but Mrs Fleming had insisted on bringing her daughters with them for the picnic along the River Fowey. Young Alistair didn’t mind, as it meant he was not the youngest for a change, and didn’t have to feel like Raymond and James were le
aving him out. While the parents continued to chat some distance away, the children went to a relatively narrow part of the river. James and Raymond decided it would be fun to impress the girls by jumping the four-foot wide gap.

  James, being the tallest and the fastest, bravely volunteered to go first.

  ‘Come on, Jim!’ Raymond shouted, and pretended to fire an imaginary starting gun.

  Making sure Jemima was watching, James took a short run up and comfortably reached the other side, shouting ‘easy-peasy’ as he landed. Raymond soon joined him. Next up it was Alistair, who, at only seven, was still somewhat short and almost certainly would never make the jump. But Jemima and Joy were watching so he knew he had no choice.

  ‘Come on, Al! You can do it!’

  Alistair looked at James on the other side of the bank. The older boy urged him on, and not wanting to disappoint him, Alistair took his run at the river. His short legs worked against him and he hit the edge of the bank. He flapped his outstretched arms in a circular motion, trying to keep himself upright. But he only succeeded in making matters worse when his right foot slipped on the wet mud and he collapsed head first into the freezing water…

  Lethbridge-Stewart awoke, gasping to fill his lungs with air, before his mind took over and he realised he was lying on the bed in his old bedroom. It was still dark, the cottage quiet.

  He remained sitting there for a while, recalling the events of the dream. It was his first fully formed memory of the James he had heard about. He closed his eyes, picturing James’ face. The eyes, the smile… It was all very familiar. But still Lethbridge-Stewart couldn’t quite work out how.

  He laid back down. Perhaps he would learn more if he continued to sleep? If not, then he would have some questions for Raymond in the morning.