38

The county records office was in the town hall, near the top of the high street. It faced the gatehouse to the ancient -castle, the heart of the town.

I explained I was thinking of buying some property on the Forest, wanted to check some chains of ownership, and we were shown to a reading room. After a couple of minutes’ wait, an elderly man brought in an ancient map, hand-drawn on heavy cloth and lacquered with some kind of protective layer that turned the whole thing yellow. He laid it out on the table for us and handed me a clipboard with a slip of paper and a pencil.

‘Write down the number of the property you want the information for, and we’ll retrieve it from the archives,’ he said, with difficulty. He wheezed as he talked.

‘Gas?’ I asked.

He shook his head. Didn’t want a fuss.

‘Where do we find you?’ I asked.

‘I’m always here,’ he said, as he closed the door.

We pored over the map. I traced Palehouse Lane from the main road. Ford was written in blue in elegant italics where the stream crossed the road. At the end of the lane, more italics, this time in capitals – WORKS. An inch back along the road, surrounded on all sides by pink contours, was the Leckies’ house. There was a short column of handwritten numbers next to the house, and I copied them down. I -assumed they referred to historical -transactions.

Margaret had the list from Gooch. She read out each -address in turn. I found it on the map, and she copied the numbers onto the clipboard.

‘We need pins,’ I said, ‘so we can see the pattern.’

‘This’ll do,’ Margaret said, rummaging in her bag and producing an old train ticket. She ripped it into pieces and put a piece of the coloured card on the location of each of the houses.

We looked at the map. The pieces of card covered a random selection of properties on the Forest. There didn’t seem to be a pattern.

At the front desk, I gave the clipboard to the wheezing man. He looked dubiously at the list of numbers.

‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ I asked.

He looked at his watch.

‘Two hours.’

*

‘You’re not eating your meat roll?’ Margaret asked, as she finished her own meal.

‘You can have it,’ I said.

‘Sure?’

I swapped plates and she set to work. She was welcome to it. The meat was mostly fat, and the first mouthful had been enough for me.

We were sitting in a dusty church hall, newly repurposed as a ‘British Restaurant’ – Churchill’s name for a communal kitchen – designed to give people a chance to supplement their rations. They were all the rage, and we’d had to queue for twenty minutes to get a table. The food wasn’t worth the wait. A grey concoction designed to make a few pounds of low-quality meat go a long way. I’d eaten enough mutton in the North-West Frontier for any man, so I sat and watched Margaret as she tucked in.

‘How’s your cook doing with your rations?’ I asked, as she put away my portion.

‘I’m going to have to let her go. Can’t afford to pay her.’

‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked. I didn’t see Margaret doing very well, rattling around what I presumed was a massive kitchen in her stately home. ‘Do you know how to cook?’

‘How hard can it be?’ she said. ‘If I can learn to field-strip a Bren gun, I think I can learn how to cook a pork chop.’

‘How much trouble are you in, financially speaking?’

Margaret glared at me.

‘I can take care of myself,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

I returned to reading the paper. The early edition of the Argus had a photograph on the front page. A German officer in handcuffs, being escorted onto a train. The photographer had got a good shot of him. He looked familiar, something about the scar on his face.

‘They found the parachutist,’ I said.

I read the short article below the photo.

‘Bailed out of his plane over the Forest. Wreckage found north of Hartfield.’

I turned the page.

‘Presumably there’s a distinction,’ Margaret said. ‘A parachutist would be someone sent to deliberately jump out of a plane. An invader. A pilot bailing out’s a different kettle of fish. More of a win for us.’

I read the article closely. Understandably, information was sparse.

‘Does it specify whether he was a pilot bailing out or a parachutist?’ Margaret asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Maybe it’s your man, maybe not,’ she said.

She took the paper from me.

‘Handsome-looking chap,’ she said. ‘Looks a bit like you in the right light.’

‘What’s for pudding?’ I asked, peering up at the menu board.

The pudding was more of a success. Spotted dick. Hard to mess that up, although they’d clearly done their best.

*

The wheezing man was waiting for us. He’d found something. Could barely contain his excitement. Probably as good as it got in his line of work.

He pushed a sheet of paper across the reception desk. The form from the clipboard – one code number per property. He’d researched each property and filled in the salient information from the files. He’d completed each line in immaculate handwriting. Each line was the same.

‘No information on file.’

‘What does that mean?’ Margaret asked.

‘It means there’s no information for those properties,’ he said.

‘That’s impossible,’ Margaret said.

He shook his head.

‘Records get lost. Or they get returned to the wrong file. Once that happens it’s impossible to track them down. They show up when they show up.’

‘But you don’t think this is a coincidence,’ I said.

‘Seven properties, all connected,’ he said. ‘Unlikely.’

‘What’s the connection?’ Margaret asked, looking at the old man for the answer.

‘We’re the connection,’ I said. ‘Or rather, the criteria that put each property on the list. On the Forest. Recently vacated by the tenants. And now we’ve got proof that something’s going on. Someone’s been here and messed about with the records to make it hard to find who owns them.’

We hurried back to the map room. The yellowing map sat on the table, with its pieces of colourful card seemingly placed at random.

‘Is there another way we can find out who owns these properties?’ I asked.

‘You could find out who did the conveyancing,’ the old man said. ‘But I doubt they’d tell you.’

The answer was in front of us, I was sure. I walked around the table to look from another angle. A trick I’d learnt from Blakeney, my old CO. But all I could see was an upside-down view of Sussex.

Then I saw it.