nothing to suggest any exclusion. ‘You’ve seen Victor, our other son, Doctor Pryor. He also has no marked resemblance to either Emily or me.’
He continued his account of the strange meeting in the Angel Hotel. The young man said that he was a French-Canadian, living in Montreal under the name Pierre Fouret. He said that he would explain the different name shortly and that actually he had grown up thinking that his name was Annan Thongchai!’
A tortuous story emerged, which Louis said made it almost believable, for how else could such a fantasy be constructed without a basis of truth?
‘Pierre’ was less than a year old when he vanished from Yen Bai and his first memories were of living in a remote village with his ‘mother’, Sukhon Thongchai. Later it emerged that this was in eastern Siam, a region flooded with refugees from the war across the frontier in French Indo-China. Though he had jet-black hair, it was obvious that he was European, but he was accepted by the village community and was brought up in infancy as a Siamese, the only language he knew apart from a smattering of French that Sukhon had picked up in Yen Bai. She eked out a living as a seamstress and with the charity of her extensive family, as this was her home village before she went away to work. Pierre Fouret did not know how his appearance was explained, but later assumed that the village accepted that some virile French soldier had ‘put her in the family way’, in spite of his lack of any Asian features. He accepted Sukhon as his mother and only in later childhood did he become curious as to his different appearance, about which his mother was always evasive. In retrospect, it was apparent that the barren woman had always been yearning for a child of her own and the flight from the rebellion had given her an opportunity to abduct Maurice and make her way home to her village in Siam.
Louis broke off his long explanation to ask for more tea and Angela took the opportunity to fill up all around.
‘But how did this Pierre get to know all this detail?’ asked Richard, as fascinated as his partner with the story.
‘Be patient with me, doctor,’ replied Louis with a wan smile. ‘I will be coming to that very soon.’
When he resumed, he explained how this potentially unstable situation was again thrown into chaos in 1940, when the Japanese occupied Indo-China, now administered by Vichy-France. Sukhon and her family knew that it was only a matter of time before the Japanese invaded Thailand, as Siam was called after the 1934 revolution. Realizing that such an obviously European boy might become a target for the invaders, she reluctantly took her adopted son to a Catholic orphanage near Bangkok, persuading the Thai sisters to shelter him.
‘They were unwilling at first,’ declared Louis, ‘but Sukhon claimed that he was the child of a French soldier and his wife, who were killed in the insurrections of a decade earlier. She was deliberately vague as to how she had saved the child, but said she had found him abandoned during the turmoil, and escaped with him to her village over the border.’
Being French, and hence a Catholic, the sisters were persuaded and they kept him in the convent for several months, until they managed to place him with an expatriate French-Canadian couple who were patrons of the orphanage. Lucas Fouret and his wife, Angelique, had lived in Bangkok for several years, as he was the senior representative of a Canadian farm machinery company. Childless, they agreed to unofficially adopt Annan Thongchai and as this was patently not his birth name, they decided to call him Pierre. But yet again, total disruption descended upon them, as soon after being taken into the Fouret household in a suburb of Bangkok, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and immediately demanded that Thailand allowed their armies to cross the country to invade British Malaya and Burma. The Thai government capitulated after only eight hours’ armed resistance and the Fourets lost no time in catching a train from Bangkok down to Penang and then on to Singapore.
‘Thankfully, they kept ahead of the invading Japanese,’ said Louis Dumas. ‘They were lucky enough to get a ship to Australia and then another onward to the United States, from where they reached their home city of Montreal. From then on, Pierre led the life of a normal French-Canadian youth, soon becoming fluent in French.
‘He now looked on the Fourets as his parents and, when he left school, his adopted father found him a job in the tractor company, where he flourished so that now he is one of the European sales team.’
Monsieur Dumas seemed to come to a turning point in his narrative and, putting his cup and saucer back on the low table, he continued more briskly, as if he was determined to put sadness aside and get to the point of this meeting.
‘You might be wondering how Pierre tracked us down after all these years. He explained that when he became a teenager, the Fourets gradually told him what they knew of his past, having learned all there was from the nuns in Thailand, who in turn had been given a sketchy version by the amah, Sukhon. She had never divulged where she ‘found’ the child nor who the true parents were and Pierre suspected that she had hoped to reclaim him from the orphanage, if no problems had arisen from the Japanese occupation. He happily accepted his new life in Canada and it was only when he began working that the urge to seek his past roots developed. He began making enquiries, hoping to trace Sukhon, but the orphanage had closed down during the war and the nuns were dispersed.
Then he was sent for several months to Paris as a sales representative for his company and took the opportunity to seek information from the relevant newspapers of the time and the archives of the Ministry of Defence. Many of the army records had been lost during the various wars, but eventually he tracked down the siege of Yen Bai, which would have been when he was a small infant.
Then his researches at last came upon the tragedy of the missing child of Captain and Madame Louis Dumas. Convinced that he must be the missing boy, he then had to trace them and further problems arose from the reluctance of the military authorities to divulge personal information. However, with the help of the Red Cross, they were tracked first to London and then, through Louis’s pension payments, to the address in South Wales.
He managed to get a temporary transfer to the British sales office in Slough and made his first contact by telephone.
‘And that is where our bittersweet problems began!’ said Louis Dumas, pensively.
SIXTEEN
On the first day of Christmas week, there was a development in the efforts of the Birmingham police to move forward their investigation into the Winson Green murder, as it had become known. A period of frustrating stagnation had occurred since the head had been matched to the bog body. Attempts to find Mickey Doyle’s former gangsters and winkle information out of them had proved futile. A couple of minor thugs had been unearthed who had once been associated with his felonies, but they steadfastly denied knowing anything about the bizarre corpse, other than that, years ago, the head had occasionally been exhibited during drunken revels at the Barley Mow.
Then on that Monday, a letter addressed ‘To Whom it May Concern’ arrived at the police headquarters and rapidly filtered down to the detective chief superintendent. After reading the short message, he hurried to the ACC’s office and within an hour, a conference was being held in his room, to which DI Trevor Hartnell had hastened up from Winson Green.
Several other senior CID men were present and their chief lost no time in passing around copies of the letter that had arrived in the morning’s post. Eyebrows were raised as they scanned the brief note and a DCI muttered, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ as his comment on the news.
‘May be a red herring, of course,’ cautioned the chief. ‘There may have been more than one Batman tattoo in Britain at that time!’
He cleared his throat and read the letter aloud, to impress it on his listeners. ‘He says, “I am an antiques dealer in Ludlow, having been in business there for many years. Yesterday, I happened to see in a copy of the Birmingham Post, which was wrapped around a delivery, a request for any information about a man with a Batman tattoo, of which there was a sketch in the article. I recall seeing a man in late 1944, who had an identical tattoo on his upper arm. I could give some further details if they were of interest to you… Yours sincerely, Bertram Tomlinson.”’
He looked around at his audience for a response.
‘Seems that the Chief Constable’s idea about publicity paid off,’ offered a DCI from the Division adjacent to Hartnell’s.
‘But why the hell didn’t he give us the details he mentioned?’
