She checked the alarm clock and rolled out of bed. At eight o’clock the house was still silent. Neither Jack nor Gwen would be awake for another half hour. Wait until the papers arrived, she thought, they’d be able to read about the latest gruesome discovery at their only child’s place of employment. Gwen would probably find a way of implying that she was somehow to blame.
Her parents’ friends were all offshoots from the same cultivated tree. The men were higher-echelon professionals; their partners were wives before they were women. In the uppermost branches were the families fortified by generations of old money, trust funds, and minor titles. Below were the rising tendrils of the nouveaux riches. Jack and Gwen were locked into a precise level of British life, sparkling ammonites in their strata of London society. They lived in town, which was becoming too cosmopolitan for some of their friends, a euphemism for their perception that it was filling up with foreigners. In mitigation, Chelsea was an enclave of comfortable white families like themselves. They had a small farmhouse in Warwickshire, and an orange-tiled villa on Cap Ferrat. Gwen considered herself a working woman. She was a voting member on her husband’s business boards, and a hostess on the many charity nights their friends arranged to promote fashionable causes, preferably ones connected with horses or photogenic children. Here in the upper-middle reaches, the rules for social climbing had to be strictly adhered to. Jack’s money was not yet old enough for them to be allowed to behave as they liked.
Further complicating the family’s position was the fact that Jerry’s difficult personality had encouraged her parents to enrol her at a small private school in Chelsea which enjoyed a fine reputation as a clearinghouse for the problem children of the comfortable classes.
Jerry had never had to tidy her own bedroom; that job was reserved for the Swedish au pair. She was not allowed to put posters on the walls because of the pin marks they left. If she told Gwen how she had talked to the police, her mother would probably faint from sheer embarrassment. Jerry had a sneaking suspicion her parents lived in fear of children developing strong imaginations. In their eyes it encouraged creativity, which prevented young people from becoming productive. It was important to them that she did something useful. As she bathed and dressed, she wondered if they would ever allow her to choose her own course in life. So much could happen in the space of a single week. She had glimpsed death and conspiracy, had spoken to the working-class men and women who dealt with it as part of their daily routine, and now she wanted to know more. She still had the Bible in her possession. She needed to consider her next move very carefully.
As she wiped condensation from the mirror and combed back her wet hair, she thought about Joseph Herrick. He had been busy working on his designs for the theatre, but the next time he came past the reception desk, she decided, she would ask him out on a date.
For the first time, it seemed that anything and everything was possible, so long as she kept her own counsel.
Daily Mail, Tuesday 14 December 1973
Exclusive
NEW LINK IN WHITSTABLE DEATHS
‘DENIED BY POLICE’
According to a source close to the police team working in London’s most controversial murder investigation division, vital evidence linking three bizarre deaths in the past week is being deliberately ignored.
From its inception, the Peculiar Crimes Unit has drawn charges of elitism, and faces criticism for its working methods, which encourage experimentation over traditional investigative procedure. Now it is being suggested that a vital clue common to all three deaths has been discounted in favour of obscure ‘alternative’ theories.
William and Peter Whitstable, together with their lawyer Maximillian Jacob, were supposedly murdered in circumstances bearing no links, but the Daily Mail has learned that police know of a symbol common to each victim that had deadly connotations.
The sign of the sacred flame is popularly used by members of the Whitstable family and their business associates. But during the Second World War this very symbol had a more sinister meaning. It was a code used by German assassins to mark predetermined British targets.
Between 1941 and 1944 no fewer than thirty-seven English men and women who were perceived to be a threat to the German invasion were coded with the sacred-flame symbol. All were subsequently eliminated in a variety of bizarre scenarios. The sacred flame has a mythological origin connected to German Olympian ideals.
Few now remember the terror that this sign once inspired. The reemergence of the flame’s use, timed at the start of a conference which is of great importance to Britain’s entry into the Common Market, suggests the return of powerful right-wing German interests.