Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Seven

Pebble Deeping turned out to be exactly as I had imagined it; the epitome of English country life, tucked into a gentle valley in rural Shropshire.

The village consisted mainly of a small cluster of grey stone buildings. Some of the tiny houses had thatched roofs, others carried blue-black slate from the welsh quarries that had toiled only an hour away. In total, the entire ensemble was small enough that I could count the dwellings as we drove through and inventory all the amenities on a single hand; a pub, a post office-cum-general store and a small modest-looking church.

Edge was forced to slow the Land Rover to a crawl when passing the church due to a tractor that trundled along the main road bisecting the village. I looked out of the passenger window at a large gathering in the churchyard. The villagers all wore black and there were no smiles present, so I ruled out the possibility that it was a wedding party. Using my professionally attuned powers of detection, I determined that a funeral had just concluded.

It was the hearse parked in front of the church's lychgate that really gave it away.

Less than a mile past the end of the small clutch of stone houses, Edge braked sharply and swung the Defender left onto a rough dirt track that was pock-marked by areas of loose stones. A crude wooden fence lined the entrance on one side, and a row of tall leafy trees dotted along the opposite; giving a boulevard feel. We followed the track into a cobbled farmyard and pulled up next to a squat, stone walled farmhouse.

Edge sighed as he turned off the ignition and sat motionless for a moment.

"Here we are," he said at length.

"Châteaux Edge," I quipped.

He did not reply, but, after several more seconds, disembarked and made his way to the rear of the Land Rover. I heard him dropping the board and the clank of metal on metal as he rummaged about. He re-appeared at the driver's door moments later with a large camouflaged rucksack over one shoulder and a folder and sheaf of papers under his arm.

"Come on in, Satchmo," he called jollily as he opened the oak door and stooped to enter the farmhouse.

I took him up on his invitation after having reviewed my options and determining that I had nothing better to do.

The farmhouse was old; at least 150 years, I guessed. It was built from irregular blocks of granite and exposed oak bean joists. The walls had been whitewashed once, but now cracked and peeled in places and were bare in many others. The ceilings were low, and the interior cool and slightly musty on the nostrils.

I noted with interest that there was no ornamentation in any of the rooms; no horse brasses, photos, or trinkets. It seemed that Morgan Edge had not been one for sentimentality or keepsakes. The hall opened onto a sitting room with a single comfy chair positioned in front of an open fireplace that was laden with ash.

I followed Tyrone through the room and into a spacious kitchen, where he dropped the papers he was carrying on a broad dented wooden table and began searching through the few cupboards that lined one wall. I moved to the old leaden window over a deep porcelain sink and looked out on Edge's newly inherited property.

It was a lovely sight.

A meadow lush with wildflowers and calf-high grass swept gently downhill from the farmyard for about a hundred metres, at the end of which there was scrub, which, in turn, melted into woodland that crept up the side of a hill in the distance. On one side of the pasture sat a curious, angular, grassy and rather incongruous mound maybe seven metres high and forty across at the base.

"Beautiful place, isn't it?" Edge said, pouring steaming liquid from a thermos into the two plastic mugs.

"It is," I replied. "How much of the land is yours?"

"Well, Reeman and I went through the deeds quickly," he said, handing me a mug. I eyed the contents suspiciously, remembering my prior exposure to his beverage choices.

He stood next to me pointing. "It runs down the meadow here, across the river and about fifty metres into the wood, then to the other side of the mound past the pool and boathouse."

I nodded; Edge clearly knew this ground well. I saw neither waterway, pool nor boathouse from the kitchen window. Sipping tentatively from my mug, the contents of which were sweet and vaguely nutty, I noticed that he had lapsed into silence, lost in thought or memory.

"Ah, Tyrone?"

"Out behind the house the meadow runs narrow and tapers off along the boundary of the wood. There is a paddock the other side of the track from the road. You saw the old barn across the yard, there is a good-sized cowshed, and several small outbuildings," Edge concluded, snapping out of his daydream with a sweep of his arm.

"And please, call me Ty."

It was a sizable piece of land and hadn't been noticeably farmed for a long time, so far as I could see. There was no mention of existing livestock and I wondered how Morgan Edge could afford this place, let alone keep it. Perhaps it had been in the family for generations.

"This is some info on Morgan, you read it over while I go for a quick look around," Ty said patting the papers on the table.

"Time to earn my keep, eh?" I muttered.

"Indeed," he said over his shoulder as he headed back out of the front door, ducking under the granite lintel.

There seemed little conviction in his voice, but I shrugged it off and sat down to read. Some of the sheets were old, yellowing and typed. Many were written in a rambling and scrawling hand. There were a few clippings from newspapers which had paragraphs ringed with green felt-tip pen ink, and several black and white photos. All-in-all it was a comprehensive file and made for compelling reading. It took me an hour to skim the lot. I then spent another spreading it across all the available flat surfaces, re-reading parts and putting them into little piles.

Morgan Edge was, or had been, a very interesting man.

I was still engrossed in the individual scraps of writing, which had by that point crept haphazardly across the table, when Tyrone Edge flowed silently through the door. He carried a brace of rabbits in one hand and three large eggs in the other.

"How have you been getting on?" he asked me, placing the food on the table, then extricating a crumpled glossy flyer from his pocket and adding that to the pile.

"What have you got there?" I asked, nervous that he might have murdered a local family's pets.

"Lunch!" Edge replied brightly. "Oh, and some bollocks advertising a new build development in the next village," he said smoothing out the flyer to reveal an idyllic watercolour depiction of ghastly three and four bed homes that looked nothing like any of the houses for fifteen miles in any direction.

"Your uncle was quite a chap, it seems," I said, steering the conversation away from edible wildlife and nudging a dog-eared black and white photograph across the table to Ty. It showed a young man, no more than eighteen or nineteen years of age, with a boyish face and a steely and confident gaze.

The photo seemed to have been taken in a large and well-manicured garden. It looked to me like a stately home; the kind of National Trust grounds I used to be dragged around at weekends.

Young Morgan was dressed in army fatigues, and he wore a beret at a rakish angle. In the crook of his arm nestled what I thought was a STEN gun, which he seemed to be holding as a natural extension of his body rather than showing-off for the photo. There were no badges or insignia of any kind on Morgan's uniform or cap which, even with my shaky knowledge or things military, I knew to be very unusual. Along the bottom of the picture was scrawled a short message.


Ready for the drop, May 1944.

Tyrone smiled when he saw the picture. "Yes, he served during the war."

"No rank or regiment insignia on his uniform," I said. Ty's smile grew broader.

"Good spot! Strictly speaking, he was not officially in the Army. He had a particular mix of skills that took him in a unique direction," Ty replied.

"Oh really?" I pressed.

"Morgan had been working down the pits in the Rhondda Valley since he was knee-high. He knew tunnels and he knew demolition. He was also something of a radio ham in the few spare hours he had above ground. He spent his Sundays, and most of his money, building and operating radios. He was actually recruited by the owner of a small radio component supplier in Caerphilly, if you can believe that."

I nodded. Blowing stuff up and being handy using and fixing radios suggested that Morgan had been working with the Special Operations Executive, helping the French Resistance. Those men and women were closer to spies than soldiers and many of them were parachuted into occupied France. Large numbers were caught and shot.

I turned back to the piles of paper that I had spread around. Some of them were typewritten and carried the seal of various government departments. They described hair-raising events and action over a thirty-year period.

"After the war, Morgan seems to have found himself in..." I checked the papers, "... Korea, Hungary, French Indochina, Czechoslovakia then back in Vietnam."

"Morgan continued to work for the government for the bulk of his life. It turned out that his skill-sets had expanded quite a distance from being a young Welsh trapper boy," Ty nodded.

The reports and various newspaper clippings described events that occurred across the flashpoints of the early and mid-Cold War, it read like the Lonely Planed Guide to Proxy Wars. Morgan was never named in the paperwork, but the documents occasionally referred to agents and one name was consistent; Glyndŵr.

Evidently, Morgan also had quite the sense of humour.

"Hungry?" Ty asked.

I was, extremely so. I checked my watch; he had been gone two hours. It seemed like our discussion of the life and times of Morgan Edge, such as it was, was over for the moment.

Tyrone lit a fire in the hearth then skinned and cleaned the rabbits while the flames caught. He removed a large bunch of greenery from a pocket, chopped it roughly with his wood-handled knife, beat one of the eggs in a chipped enamel mug and mixed most of the greens in. This mixture he plastered over the animals, now flat and part-boned, before placing them on a grill positioned over the heart of the fire. There was a pleasing sizzle and a smell that made my mouth water instantly.

While the meat cooked, he scrambled the remaining eggs in a dented aluminium mess tin, pausing only to turn the rabbits twice. Edge removed two plates from his rucksack and placed a portion of BBQ bunny and a spoonful of eggs on each.

No sooner had he finished when I began pulling meat from the bones, blowing on my fingers, and popping it into my mouth. It tasted better than it smelled, and I wolfed it down.

"Good?" Edge smiled.

"Mmm Humph" I said through a mouthful of scramble.

"So, you read it all?" Ty gestured at the papers with his fork. I nodded.

"What did you think?" he asked with a cocked eyebrow.

I swallowed "Your uncle seemed like a very resourceful man," I fumbled a little over a suitable adjective.

"That he is... was... I have some more things to show you, but they can wait."

We ate our meal, and I took occasional sidelong glances at Edge, wondering why he had hired me and why he couldn't let his uncle rest in peace.

"What else have you got then?" I asked as he rinsed off the aluminium crockery.

"Inside the plastic bag in my rucksack," he replied. I rummaged and fished it out.

"Reeman gave it to me with the deeds to this place. Morgan had given it him only a fortnight before with instructions to pass it to me if anything should happen," he said with a knowing look spreading across his dark features.

"Curious," I said absently as I emptied the contents onto the table.

"It implies Morgan expected trouble, which further implies that all was not well with his demise," Edge said.

It certainly did, and my interest was becoming piqued. The bag contained a newspaper and a couple of other smaller items. One of which was a postcard featuring a picture of a stucco fort baking under a burning sun and an azure sky.

On the back of the card was a single sentence in what I now recognized as the scrawled hand of Morgan Edge, it read Remember the Alamo.

Secondly there was a strip of paper which had a single word written on it in block capitals; "BUGGERALL" No space.

"No space," I said aloud.

Lastly, I inspected the newspaper which had various words underlined. I flicked through it and saw Some of the page numbers where ringed; perhaps this was some sort of code? I folded the newspaper back as I had found it.

"What is all this stuff?" I asked Edge.

"Clues," he replied smiling broadly.