The article only heightened Umber's fears, formless though many of them were. He made for the payphones and called Claire again. It was the same story: recorded messages at the practice and Alice's house and no joy on Claire's mobile. Nor did the story change at the second, third, fourth or fifth time of trying. Eventually, he gave up.
The flight, short as it was, felt agonizingly protracted to Umber. Several drinks failed to quell the whirl of his anxious thoughts. It was too late to expect an answer from Claire's practice by the time he made it through baggage reclaim and Customs at Gatwick. But she or Alice really ought to be answering on the Hampstead number. Except that they were not. And the mobile was still switched off.
Umber's only recourse now was to head for Hampstead and hope to find them in when he arrived. Even if he had not been in a hurry, he would have taken a taxi after the Gatwick Express had delivered him to Victoria; the box he was carrying seemed to weigh more every time he picked it up. Even so, the journey contrived to take longer than the flight from Jersey and it was gone 8.30 when the taxi pulled up outside 22 Willow Hill.
The hall light was on, but the ground and first-floor rooms were in darkness. Claire's TVR was not parked nearby. The auguries were far from good. Umber had wheedled an undertaking out of Claire to dissuade Alice from going to Monte Carlo to grill Michel Tinaud. But it was beginning to look as if they had both overestimated her powers of dissuasion. Or perhaps she had simply tired of waiting to hear from him. He had asked for a few days' grace and, technically, that is what he had already had.
The lights were on in the top-floor flat. It was occupied by an articled clerk called Piers. Alice had made several references to him, though Umber had not actually met him. Telling the taxi driver to wait, Umber clambered out, hurried to the door and pressed the bell next to the neatly printed label PIERS BURTON.
There was no intercom system and consequently no way to tell whether Piers was going to respond or not, until, just as Umber was about to give the bell a second prod, the door opened. A sleepy-eyed, curly-haired young man in fogeyish casual wear regarded him through owlish, black-framed glasses and ventured a wary hello.
'Piers, right?'
'Yes. I -'
'I'm David.' Some instinct deterred Umber from volunteering his surname, sharing it as he did with a deceased former tenant of Piers's flat. 'I'm, er… a friend of Alice's. I was staying here at the weekend.'
'I was out of town.'
'Well, we'd probably have bumped into each other if you'd been here.'
'Probably.'
'Look, the thing is -'
'Alice isn't here.'
'So I see. Has she gone away?'
'Yes. Last-minute decision, apparently. There was a note waiting for me when I got home this evening. She's taken off with her friend Claire. She's been staying here. I know that.' There was a hint in his tone that Claire's presence in the house was something he could vouch for, whereas Umber's was altogether more debatable.
'Did the note say where they'd gone?'
'No. Maybe she didn't want to make me feel envious.'
'What about for how long?'
'Open-ended, apparently. A few days. A week. She wasn't sure.'
'Right.' Monte Carlo it had to be. Claire's mobile had probably been switched off during the flight. If Chantelle had tried to contact her, she would not have succeeded. The fail-safe Umber had supplied her with had proved to be useless. 'Well, thanks.'
'No problem.'
No problem to Piers, perhaps. For Umber the situation was much more complicated. He went back to the cab and climbed in.
'Where to now, guv'?' the taxi driver prompted, when ten seconds or so had passed without a destination being supplied.
'I…' Umber thought of what Chantelle had done after fleeing Tinaud's rented apartment in Wimbledon five years ago. It was possible – just – that she had done the same after trying to speak to Claire. 'A hotel near Euston station.'
'There are quite a few, guv'.'
'Near as in opposite.'
'There's a Travel Inn on the other side of Euston Road. That'd be more or less opposite.'
'Then that'll do.'
It was a long shot and Umber was disappointed but not surprised to be told there was nobody called Fontanet – or even Hedgecoe – staying at the Euston Travel Inn. Fast running out of options, he booked himself in for the night. He thought about trying Claire's mobile again, then thought better of it for reasons that had only just begun to take shape in his mind.
He did some more thinking in the large and noisy pub a few doors along from the hotel. There was nothing Claire could do for Chantelle in Monte Carlo. If she and Alice were intent on confronting Tinaud, it might be better, in fact, if they knew as little as possible about his errant former girlfriend's whereabouts.
But that conclusion left Umber alone and resourceless. If he was no better placed come Friday, the roof would fall in on all of them. He had to do something. He had to seize the initiative. But how? With what? There was nothing: no answer; no hope. Then, quite suddenly, around the time a tsunami of cheers burst over him following a goal in the football match splashed across the pub's widescreen TV, the glimmer of an answer came to him. And with it a sliver of hope.
Junius held the key. Chantelle had said as much and maybe she was right. Wisby believed Griffin had been done away with by Tamsin's abductors. His special edition of Junius's letters had ended up in the hands of Marilyn Hall. Did that make her one of the abductors? If so, it was a chink in the armour of whoever she had been acting for – the juicy-voiced man in the car for one. If Umber could pin Griffin's murder on her, it would give him a bargaining chip, maybe a decisive one. It was a tall order. It required him to trace the previously untraceable Griffin. And that brought him back to the hunt for Junius himself, a hunt in which he had made only faltering progress. But something had changed now. Something had been returned to him. And it was time to remind himself what it contained.
THIRTY
Opening the Junius box returned Umber for the duration of a sleepless night to a long unremembered past: his past, before Avebury, before the last Monday in July, 1981. His life had been so simple then, so unfettered. A sense of that freedom reached him from every eagerly scribbled note, every neatly labelled batch of papers. They were the work of a younger, keener-eyed, sharper-brained man, a man who believed academic zeal was the best and surest way to prise a secret from its history.
Separate bundles of notes and photocopied documents recalled to Umber the time and effort he had devoted to each, THE CHATHAM SPEECH. If, as Junius implied, he was in the House of Lords gallery when Lord Chatham made a speech attacking Lord Mansfield on 10 December 1770, who among the Junian candidates did that date and location eliminate? THE FITZPATRICK CONNECTION. A French spy reported to Louis XVI that Junius was actually Thady Fitzpatrick, smooth-tongued man about town, an idea scotched by Fitzpatrick's death several months before the letters stopped. But who among his boon companions might be a more plausible suspect? THE GILES LETTER. In December 1771, a Miss Giles of Bath received an amorous poem from an anonymous admirer, accompanied by a note of commendation in a hand now commonly agreed to be Junius's, although the poem itself was in a different, less distinctive hand. With how many Junian candidates could Miss Giles and her family be linked? THE HIGHGATE SOURCE. Examination of postmarks revealed that a significant number of the Junius letters were despatched to the Public Advertiser by penny post from the Highgate Village post office. Which of the candidates lived in Highgate or had friends or relatives who lived there? THE JUNIA EXCHANGE. Goaded by a provocative letter from a woman calling herself Junia, printed in the Public Advertiser on 5 September 1769, Junius replied in flirtatious vein two days later, then almost immediately wrote to Woodfall asking him to print a denial that the reply was his work, blaming the lapse on 'people about me'. Did this raise the serious possibility that the letters were collaborative compositions and, if so, could such collaborators be found among the Junian candidates? THE COURIER QUESTION. Junius began a letter to Woodfall on 18 January 1772 with the tantalizing statement 'The gentleman who transacts the conveyancing part of our correspondence tells me there was much difficulty last night'. Woodfall's letters to Junius were always left at one of several pre-arranged coffee-house drops around the Strand. So, did Junius always use the same courier for their collection? Was that person also responsible for posting Junius's letters to Woodfall? And, if so, was there any evidence as to his identity? the Franciscan theory. Would an exhaustive analysis of the known movements and activities of the hot favourite among the candidates, War Office clerk Philip Francis, reveal any occasion on which he was quite simply in the wrong place and/or at the wrong time to be Junius? the amanuenses. What were…