CHAPTER 5

Joe had picked up some relaxed phrases and refreshing attitudes from the American officers he’d worked alongside in the later months of the war. One of his favourites was: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

He reckoned he was well into the stage of enemy action.

“I’m sure I shall,” he said. “It’s a Tuesday. You save me from the Police Canteen’s version of not very Hot Pot.”

He’d decided that Hunnyton—if that was his name—had recognised him, had even perhaps been lying in wait for him, and had drawn him here for a purpose. Joe had shared his information on the superintendent’s interest in the portraits but was keeping silent on the second and more interesting record of the name Hunnyton that he’d turned up on police files recently.

The steak pie was all that had been promised, served swiftly and correctly with a flurry of starched white napery and good silver cutlery laid out on the table between them. By unspoken consent both men held off from serious conversation, content to enjoy a work of culinary art when it was offered.

“There’s lemon syllabub or Eton mess to follow, or just strawberries,” Hunnyton invited. “The Cambridge Favourites are in season at the moment. New variety.”

Joe was glad he’d taken the hint and declared for the strawberries; the plump miracles of summer magic were duly served on Delft-patterned dishes with a matching pot of yellow Devon cream so thick it had to be spooned from the jug. Finally, comfortably bloated, relaxed and unharried, Joe calculated that his subject must be feeling much the same and decided to come at him crabwise. “Tell me about your name, Adam. Truelove? Hunnyton? Should I guess at a mother in common?”

“Not that.” The idea seemed to amuse him. “No, it’s a father we share.”

Joe absorbed this and was wondering how to frame his next question without giving offence when Hunnyton continued bluntly, “Illegitimate. That’s the word you’re skating around. You could—well, perhaps not you, Commissioner—could say by-blow. Wrong side of the blanket. Baseborn. Bastard. I’ve heard them all.”

“And I’ve heard it said, Hunnyton, ‘There are no illegitimate children, just illegitimate parents.”

Hunnyton managed a smile. “Well, the guilty parties in my case were the old Sir Sidney and one of his domestic servants. Before his marriage to James’s mother, the then young and spirited Sidney had an affair with a young and spirited upstairs maid. My mother. She had red hair—a big beauty in the style of Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, who gave the Romans such a bad time. I’m just surprised she let Sidney get away with it undamaged. No one else ever got the better of her. Sorry, sir, it all gets a bit predictable from now on and I risk boring my audience.”

“Not at all,” Joe said. “I’m all twitching ears and attention.”

“The inevitable happened. In those days, and I’m not so sure it wouldn’t happen now, the girl would have to leave the village for good or perhaps go and spend a month or two with her aunty in Ipswich. She’d return having mysteriously lost all that weight she’d been putting on. Childless, of course. But in my mother’s case, the pregnant girl was married off hurriedly to a by no means unwilling man on the estate, the whole arrangement sweetened by the offer of a cottage on the village green complete with a half-acre potato patch and bake-oven. I was a six-month baby. ‘Popped out just in time for a slice of his mother’s wedding cake,’ as they say in the village.”

“And in Westminster!” Joe chortled. “Quite a few of those about, in all ranks of society. No names, no pack-drill, but I can tell you that one or two of our politicians have surprising dates on their birth certificates.”

Hunnyton grunted. “They can keep it quiet. It’s harder to hide in a small village. Especially when the child is unfortunate enough to grow up looking the spitting image of his real father.”

“Good lord! Must have been difficult for Mr. Hunnyton, whose name I take it you bear?”

The craggy features softened in affection. “No. Nothing ever flummoxed the old feller. Head Horseman by trade. That’s a pretty stylish thing to be in Suffolk. It has a certain standing and my stepfather lived up to it. No one would be disrespectful to him or his family, whatever that consisted of. He knew what he was taking on; he loved my mother very much, I think, and he was never less than kind to us. No—he was no Mr. Murdstone.” He grinned. “Dickens would have found no inspiration for a heart-rending family saga in my early situation. Freud wouldn’t have known what to make of a child with a loving mother and two caring fathers.”

“Two? Old Truelove kept himself in the picture, did he?”

“He did. I think he took his inspiration from Charles II, whom he much resembled. Charming rogue but affectionate to all his offspring including the illegitimate ones. He had me educated. I outgrew the village school pretty quickly. When he noticed this, he put me into private tutoring alongside his other children. This led to three years at the university. Strings were pulled—perhaps money changed hands—and I was offered one of the eleven ‘poor boy’ places at Trinity. Reading a subject useful to my position in life, of course. In the good old tradition, Sir Sidney was having me raised to become steward of the estates. The land and the house were his passion and he was pleased to find, in me, an equal enthusiasm. I’d been keeping the accounts from the age of sixteen, buying stock, helping to run the farm. I was on the payroll from an early age.”

“A position which gives you access to the best pies in town?”

“It’s an honorary extended membership these days. I gave up my position of servitude—like many others—when the war broke out. I joined up.”

“The Suffolk Regiment?”

“Second battalion. It was quickly mobilised, not short of volunteers, and sent off to France. We were there from Mons to the Armistice. The army changed my perspective. By the end, my mother and stepfather were both dead. I was twenty-six. I wanted to spread my wings. There were openings everywhere for big, healthy chaps like me with a degree in economics and a commission, and I chose the police force. For much the same reasons as yourself, I expect. Once I’d done the basics, promotion was quite quick, and I enjoy the work.”

“Have you maintained your connections with the present lord of the manor? Sir James?” There was no sign in Joe’s polite enquiry of his intense personal interest in Sir James.

“We were never bosom pals. I always felt he resented my relationship with his father. Looking like him, thinking like him, did me no good in Master James’s eyes. ‘Stop bossing me about, Adam! You’re as bad as Papa!’ he used to squeak. James favoured his mother. He’s got that family’s dark, handsome looks. And their talent for manipulation.”

“To say nothing of their political clout and family money?” Joe suggested. “Perhaps the younger brother would provide more interesting material for Herr Freud?”

“There’s no overt bad feeling between us any longer. We began to get on better after the old man died and he inherited. I’ve always admired his energy and intelligence. In fact there is—and always has been—a level on which we meet and understand each other. Under that glossy layer of sophistication there’re some pretty rugged characteristics that he gets from his pa. Just tell him there’s coppicing going on in the twenty acre wood and he’ll be down there like a shot, wielding a bill-hook, and wielding it well. He can layer a hedge, grallock a stag and sink a pint of cider with the best of ’em. I taught him to ride myself. Picked him up, dusted him down and popped him back on his pony whenever he fell off.”

Joe noted the unemphasised implication of Hunnyton’s horseman’s skills, learned from his stepfather no doubt, and he remembered his own older brother performing the same service for him as a three-year-old beginner. He remembered also the gratitude had been mixed with a much stronger emotion—a resentment that he was less skilled, less strong, less mature. Infantile frustration had so consumed him on one occasion that Joe had burst into tears and hit about him with his whip. Not at the horse, of course. His older brother Tom had borne the brunt of it, holding the squalling, thrashing child at arm’s length and laughing until the rage subsided.