Betrayal (28 page)

Some dense material must have been fixed over the window because the small room was very dark except for two candles burning either side of a large bed which filled virtually half the available space. Sylvie lay propped up on the pillows, entirely naked and uncovered, like something from a Botticelli. Beside her was the dark hairy figure of Joe, equally naked, like something from a horror film. Sylvie turned her head towards me with immense slowness as though it were very heavy, and creased up her eyes with the effort of focusing. Joe was on another planet altogether, blowing out his lips and chuckling wildly to himself like a bin case.

Sylvie, focusing at last, gave a warm smile and a low laugh. Come and join us, she said.

Joe’s manic giggles followed me down to the car and fed my nightmares for weeks to come. In one dream I watched Sylvie dive into the water with a lead weight tied to her back. When I realised she was drowning I did nothing to save her.

I
WOKE
beside Ginny in the airy yellow guest room at Furze Lodge and wondered, as I had wondered on each of the previous two mornings, if this would be the day when I would be summoned again. Sometimes I saw the delay as a sign that, despite their investigation of houses, boats and cars, the police had found nothing against me and would soon be forced to admit their mistake. At other less confident moments I saw the delay in more sinister terms. I imagined that somehow or another they had assembled a few miserable scraps of evidence against me and were simply waiting for the right moment to return.

The uncertainty lurked in my gut, I couldn’t eat, I slept badly, yet on this morning, as each morning before it, I got into a company car and drove to Hartford as if life were perfectly normal.

I had told George and the others about my arrest, I had made no bones about being under suspicion. I had even managed to make a thin joke about the possibility of being arrested again. They may have noticed how shaken I was, they may even have suspected that so far as my relationship with Sylvie was concerned there was unlikely to be smoke without fire, but on the face of it they refused to take the idea seriously and studiously avoided the subject, as if the outcome of the investigations was so much a foregone conclusion that it required no comment. And so, in the midst of my personal emergency, we continued to work flat out towards the buyout, due for completion in two weeks’ time. George was pursuing another fifty thousand, Alan thought he’d identified an investor good for a hundred thousand, we were near agreement with the staff on the wage and productivity agreement, and later in the day the Chartered Bank people were arriving for their crucial tour of the factory.

There was no need to make any sort of announcement about my arrest to the Hartford staff. With forensic people all over Dittisham House and
Ellie
beneath plastic sheeting at the boat yard under a twenty-four-hour police guard, with divers searching the river bed around
Ellie
’s mooring, the news might as well have been broadcast in ten languages on all four channels. The local rag could also have saved itself its rather coy report about an unnamed man being arrested and released on police bail, and printed my name two inches high.

The staff did not mean to make life uncomfortable for me. They smiled to my face and did not stare at me until my back was turned, but their curiosity was so palpable that whenever I went down to the factory floor I felt like an exhibit in a zoo, and it wasn’t long before I found excuses to stay away.

Evenings at Furze Lodge had developed their own tensions. While David retreated into his habitual mood of preoccupation, Mary compensated with a bracing show of family solidarity. Her constant flow of chatter gave conversations a certain momentum, it was impossible to distrust her good intentions, yet after a couple of days the verbal onslaught began to wear family affections thin. There was a brittleness in Mary’s manner, a determination in her cheerfulness that didn’t allow for weakness or doubt, and for me, in my questionable state of confidence, this approach left out too much.

I don’t know what I’d expected from Ginny – not a great deal in the way of understanding perhaps – but I had misjudged her. By sheer force of will she managed to impose a rigid dignity on herself, a kind of all-encompassing calm, and, knowing what this must have cost her, knowing how alien it was to her anxious jittery nature, I was doubly grateful. It was as though she had taken a decision to rule herself out of the equation, to suppress her own feelings and concentrate all her efforts on me. When under this new guise she offered small gestures of support, when her thin fingers reached for my hand and grasped it, I was terribly moved.

On the Wednesday evening as we sat in the kitchen after David and Mary had gone to bed I said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to survive this without you.’

She shot me a look which contained a flash of uncertainty. ‘We’ll get through it,’ she said.

‘Once this is over everything’ll be different. I promise.’

Her eyelids began to beat. ‘Will it?’

‘I’ll cut down on work, we’ll spend more time together.’

‘Oh Hugh.’ Shaking her head, she said without rancour, ‘You’ll always work too hard. You won’t change.’

‘But I want to change. I don’t want to go on in the same way. What’s it achieved, all this work?’

‘It’s made you happy.’

‘Has it? Once, maybe. But I keep thinking of what it’s done to us. It hasn’t made
us
happy, has it?’ I really wanted to know. ‘Has it?’

She said in a wary voice, ‘I thought we
were
happy. At least I always felt happy when you were happy.’ She stood up abruptly and took the coffee cups to the sink. ‘And when you weren’t happy any more . . .’ She hesitated before saying with sudden anguish, ‘Then I didn’t know what to do.’

‘You should have said something.’

‘Should I? But, darling, what would I have said? It seemed to me that everything I did was wrong, that you were determined to . . . move away from me.’ She shook her head to deter me from denying it. ‘No, it’s true, you know it’s true.’

‘I never blamed you for anything. I just felt –
besieged
.’

She came back to the table. ‘I would have done anything to help. Anything. I felt so useless. Worthless. I felt you didn’t need me any more.’

‘Ginny – it was never a question of not needing you any more. I just . . . lost my way.’ But my avowals were beginning to sound contrived even to my own ears, and I fell back on a more certain truth. ‘Well, I need you now, that’s for sure.’

She smiled ruefully at that, and when we went to bed we held each other for a long time.

Ginny’s mood of containment held until Thursday when Tingwall told us that the police wanted her back in Exeter for a further statement. Then, despite her attempts at calm, she showed some of her old nerves.

‘It must be the trip to France,’ she gasped.

‘Why?’

‘They didn’t ask me very much about it before. Only dates, things like that. They must want more detail.’

We were sitting side by side on the bed in our room at Furze Lodge, the only place where we could be certain of being alone.

‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’ she asked. ‘So long as we stick to what we said. That’s the important thing, isn’t it?’

The desperation of her plea did little to reassure me, not only because it reminded me of how thin our story about France was and how easily the police would see through it, but because it made me suspect that, however much she denied it, Ginny believed I had a lot more than France to hide.

‘That’s the thing, isn’t it?’ she repeated, seeking some reassurance of her own. ‘To stick to it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘Ginny – I’m
not
sure,’ I admitted straight away. ‘Oh, I know saying we were together seemed like the best thing to do at the time,’ I argued cautiously. ‘I’m not blaming you, darling, but I can’t help thinking how bad it’ll look if the truth comes out.’

‘How would it come out?’

‘I don’t know. But it has to be a possibility, doesn’t it?’

‘You were seen in France?’

‘No. Well – not that I’m aware of anyway. Though we had dinner at that restaurant in Cherbourg, the one all the British go to, and you know how it is, there’s always someone, isn’t there? And then when we set out we rowed out from the pontoon in full view of the village—’ I halted, remembering that Ginny herself had seen us, that Ginny had been on the shore somewhere, watching secretly, and an avalanche of unhappy thoughts followed as I wondered how long she had been there and what else she had seen that weekend. I closed my eyes involuntarily at the memory of Sylvie and me on the sofa at Dittisham House, in full view of the uncurtained windows.

‘Even if no one saw Sylvie, there’s still . . .’ I hesitated, weighing up the wisdom of delivering such a belated and unwelcome truth. ‘The thing is . . . on the way back from France, coming up the river that night, the customs came and boarded us. Well, not
us
. Sylvie wasn’t there. She’d disappeared, swum for it. There was just me. But the point is, I told them I was alone. They could
see
I was alone. And now we’ve told the police you were on board. If they compare notes with the customs how do we explain you not being there? Why would I have wanted to hide
you
?’

Ginny looked down at her hands and I could hear her breath catching in her lungs. She didn’t speak for some time. Finally she raised her eyes towards the window and announced in a tight voice, ‘We have to stick to what we said.’

‘Yes,’ I murmured, though it was more to convince myself than anything else.

Ginny had started to overbreathe and, in an effort to regain control, she tightened her mouth to slow her intake of air before blowing out with a slight hiss, like a smoker exhaling a long plume of smoke.

‘Could you take me through it?’ she said between breaths. ‘What you told them? I want to be sure of getting it right.’

I thought back to the interview room and Henderson and the long stream of questions. ‘All I said was that it was you who’d come to France with me, not Sylvie. I didn’t give them any details, though. They didn’t ask for any.’

‘But I must have them, mustn’t I?’ she pointed out. ‘In case they ask.’

So I told her what time we had left the river, and how perfect the weather had been on the way over and how quickly we had reached Cherbourg. I described the market place and the restaurant and the dinner, and the long hard slog back across the Channel. If the police challenged her about the customs raid, I suggested she tell them that she had been in a hurry to get ashore and had asked me to drop her at a jetty in the town where she could find a cab. As an explanation it didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was all I could think of.

Ginny absorbed this with a fierce concentration, chewing on her lip, nodding from time to time like an earnest student.

‘And the last weekend, when she died, can we go over that again, just in case?’ Her voice faltered and she disowned this display of weakness with a brief grimace.

‘I simply told them what happened. How I got down to Dittisham at about seven-fifteen—’

‘I meant—’ She wheeled a hand. ‘What did
we
do? What did you tell them about
us
?’

Here was the focused Ginny, the one who always caught me off-balance. ‘Of course . . .’ I made another effort of memory. ‘I just told them what we did. I said you arrived at about nine, that we had a basic supper.’

‘Was I expected?’

‘They didn’t ask me that. But . . . I certainly didn’t say you weren’t.’ I remembered the sound of the front door opening and the sight of Ginny appearing in the doorway, and how I had stood there in blank surprise.

‘Why had we travelled down separately?’

‘They didn’t ask that either.’

She ventured, ‘I could have been held up in London, doing some homework for a committee meeting, couldn’t I? What do you think?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Will that do?’

I laid my hand on hers. ‘I’m sure that’ll be fine.’

She didn’t withdraw her hand exactly, but she didn’t welcome the distraction either, and I took my hand away again. I said, ‘They didn’t ask any of this before?’

‘No, it was just times and events, nothing else. Did I say I was arriving at nine or . . .?’ She was thinking the thing through as she went along. ‘Or hadn’t we said a time?’

‘We needn’t have said a time.’

‘The evening then . . . I’d told you I’d be getting down some time in the evening,’ she recited before leading herself resolutely on. ‘And after that?’

‘Oh, I said we had supper. I didn’t give them many details – nothing about what we ate or anything like that – then I said David popped in at about ten and stayed a few minutes. Then we went to bed at about eleven-thirty. It
was
about then, wasn’t it? Then they asked about Sunday. I was vague about when we had breakfast – I thought about nine – then I said we spent the rest of the day going through the house and the boat.’

‘Going through them, that’s what you said?’

‘Yes . . . Clearing everything out of the house before it was sold. Sorting through the attics, that kind of thing.’

‘And the boat?’

‘I said we were getting
Ellie
ready to be laid up. They weren’t sure what laid up meant,’ I added, recalling Henderson’s pedantic query. ‘I had to explain. They seemed interested in the fact that it was you who’d gone to the boat while I’d stayed in the house.’

‘Yes?’ she urged.

‘I explained that I was busy with Pa’s papers, that it was left to you to do the other jobs. I said I didn’t tell you to go to the boat, that it just sort of worked out that way.’

‘And? What else?’

‘That was all.’

‘Those were your exact words?’

‘I think so. But darling,’ I said gently, ‘I don’t think we have to match our stories word for word. In fact, it’ll sound really odd if we do.’

She gave me the look she reserved for my less intelligent statements. ‘I do realise that,’ she said with a show of patience. ‘But I still needed to know.’