Betrayal (29 page)

‘Sorry,’ I said, wondering how she put up with me. ‘
Sorry
.’

‘What about the rest of the weekend?’

‘I told them we had lunch at about one. That we worked on through the afternoon and left for London at about nine.’

She was waiting expectantly again.

‘That was it,’ I said.

She looked thoughtful, then, reasserting her newfound composure, said, ‘I just wanted to be clear.’ Some doubt must have remained on my face because she added, ‘I’m frightened of saying the wrong thing, that’s all.’

She didn’t speak during the drive to Exeter. She looked intently at the road ahead, and I had the feeling that she was going over the story again in her mind.

To avoid any chance encounters with the press we’d arranged to meet Tingwall at a hotel on the outskirts of town before he took Ginny on to the police station.

As Tingwall came across the lobby I searched his face for a hint of developments, but he was too busy giving Ginny a mushy dumbstruck stare to be sending out those sorts of signals.

‘What’s the news?’ I asked, bidding for his attention.

He dragged his gaze towards me. ‘News?’ he echoed. ‘Oh, nothing, I’m afraid. And nothing on the car or the house, either. No saying when they’ll be finished with them.’

‘What about getting back to London?’ I sighed. ‘I’ve had to miss a couple of important meetings.’

‘If you can hang on a bit longer. Say, till the weekend.’

‘And if something comes up and I have to leave?’

‘Let me know.
Please
. Just let me know.’

Before I could say more, Ginny touched my arm, as if to remind me of why we were here.

‘All right?’ I murmured to her profile as we walked out to the car park but, keyed up for the ordeal ahead, she didn’t reply. Tingwall sped ahead and opened the door of his car for her and waited solicitously while she got in. He closed the door like a chauffeur, softly, with only the faintest click. I saw him smile to her as he got in beside her.

I stood and watched them drive off but she didn’t look back.

Beginning a potentially long wait, I sat in the car and prepared to make some calls. I hadn’t shouted my troubles from the rooftops, I certainly hadn’t mentioned them to the people at Zircon or the banks, and Julia had been careful to put the postponed meetings down to general scheduling problems. A small paragraph announcing ‘an arrest’ had appeared in two of the national dailies that morning, but either the police had been laudably reticent or some legal principle prevented the press from saying too much because neither report had mentioned my name. I had been hoping my anonymity would last but the moment I got through to Pollinger at Zircon I knew my period of grace was over.

The tone of his greeting warned me before he said crisply: ‘Hear you’ve had a spot of bother.’

‘This police inquiry, you mean?’ I said casually. ‘I was interviewed, yes – the victim was someone I’d known years ago – but that was it.’

‘I heard,
arrested
.’

I didn’t try to deny it. ‘The police overreacted a bit, to put it mildly. But they let me go straight away without charge.’

‘All sorted then, is it?’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘Not good for the buyout.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘This sort of rumour needs to be knocked firmly on the head, Wellesley, otherwise it could keep doing the rounds. Get fixed in people’s minds.’

I wasn’t sure I knew how to go about killing any sort of rumour, let alone one this salacious. ‘How did you hear?’

‘Me?’ Pollinger had gone into the City straight from Winchester; he wasn’t used to being asked to reveal his sources. ‘Look, all I can tell you is that if the story isn’t all over the place by now, it soon will be.’

‘What do you think, then? A press release?’

‘A bit of a sledgehammer, old chap. A letter to your backers might be a bit more politic.’

Pollinger was right about the news travelling fast. Julia confirmed it as soon as I spoke to her. Most of Cumberland knew, she told me, and at least two of their lawyers, and possibly the Chartered Bank, though she couldn’t be absolutely sure about the bank, short of asking them outright. Oh, she added caustically, Howard had called, asking if it was true that I had been charged with murder. She had taken the liberty of telling him that, if his spies couldn’t do any better than that, he should think about taking them off his payroll. She hoped that was all right.

It was a strange feeling sitting there in a car park on the outskirts of Exeter, knowing that my life was being picked over in a dozen offices up and down the country. I could imagine how thrilled the banks were at the prospect of loaning their money to someone who looked as though he might be charged with murder at any moment. And I could see Howard hastily diving into his damage limitation mode, rapidly distancing himself from me and the buyout, and casting it about that, in all the years we had worked together, he’d always had his doubts about my stability.

I asked Julia to draft a fax to Zircon and the banks, explaining the situation and setting their minds at rest. I didn’t have the heart, or the nerve, to make any more calls after that. I sat listlessly in the car, watching the traffic go by and thinking of Ginny. I pictured her in the stuffy interview room, sitting straight-backed on the worn chair, meeting Henderson’s cool gaze as she told him about the cup of coffee she was meant to have had with Sylvie at Dittisham House. I saw Henderson searching her face as she described bumping into Sylvie in the village and inviting her over. I heard him ask her what she and Sylvie had talked about. Then – the tactic was so obvious that I winced at not having thought of it and warned her – I heard him trying to catch her out, asking her what Sylvie was wearing, whether she’d been driving a car, and if so what sort of car it had been. I pictured Ginny pale and tense in the face of this crisis, yet, oddly, I didn’t hear her falter. Though I replayed the scene several times, though I built up Henderson into some kind of super-sleuth, Ginny’s aura of composure remained unassailable in my mind.

My confidence wavered only when I thought of the places where the police might have found Sylvie’s fingerprints – in David’s old room, on the bed post – and how hard it would be to explain their presence after a single coffee session. But you could go mad thinking things like that. You could go mad wishing for the hundredth time that you hadn’t lied about something so mundane as an extra-marital affair.

I closed my eyes. I must have dozed for quite a time because it was dark when the sound of the passenger door woke me.

‘How was it?’ I asked Ginny as she climbed in.

She sank into the seat and shook her head. ‘I’m so tired,’ she sighed. ‘I’m so tired. Can we just go back, please?’

As I drove I kept glancing across at her. She had her head pressed against the headrest and her eyes closed. After a minute or two she said, ‘I’m not sure. How it went.’ And there was something in her voice that sounded a small warning in my mind.

‘The weekend in France?’

‘He didn’t ask about that.’ Each word seemed an enormous effort for her.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No.’ Her voice was so faint I could barely pick it up.

‘And having Sylvie in for coffee?’

‘No.’

‘What –
nothing
?’

‘Oh, I told him,’ she murmured. ‘I told him, but he didn’t want that.’

‘What did he want then?’

She didn’t speak for so long that I began to think she hadn’t heard. ‘He wanted to know how often I’d been at Dittisham.’

I tried to read her profile in the reflection of the lights. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said . . . I said I hadn’t been down very often. Just three times. He . . .’ Another pause. ‘He wanted dates. I told him I’d need my diary, that I’d have to let him know. But it wasn’t that he really wanted . . .’

‘What was it then?’

She dropped her head forward and her hair fell across her cheek. ‘That last weekend,’ she whispered. ‘He wanted to know all about that last weekend.’

‘What, the times or . . .?’

With great weariness she lifted her head again and looked ahead. ‘Sunday. Mainly the Sunday.’

‘What about the Sunday?’ I had to force my attention back to the road.

‘Everything.’ She echoed bitterly: ‘Everything.’

‘But what about it?’ I repeated doggedly.

She didn’t reply.

‘
Ginny
. . .’

‘The boat. It was the boat.’

I had a bad feeling then, a sick foreboding. When I next glanced across, Ginny had half turned her face towards me, her expression hidden in the darkness.

‘They know she was killed on the boat.’

My stomach lurched, I had a strong sense of unreality. I looked for a place to stop and there was nowhere. Finally I saw a farm gateway and lurched to a halt across it. ‘
They said that?
They said she was killed on
Ellie
?’

‘They didn’t have to say. It was obvious.’

‘What do you mean?’ I cried.

‘Everything they asked . . . Everything.’ Her voice was harsh, close to desperation or tears. ‘Wanted to know who’d been on board . . . Why I’d gone out there on the Sunday . . . Whose idea it was . . . Why I’d scrubbed the floor . . . Had I noticed any marks or’ – she could hardly say it – ‘stains.
Stains
. They didn’t have to say, did they? They
know
. They know she was killed on the boat.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ I argued. ‘You must have got it wrong! You must have!’

She shook her head, and kept shaking it.

‘But Ginny, that’s crazy! How can they . . . How can they . . . Christ! It’s ridiculous! You
must
have got it wrong!’ I babbled on like this for a moment or two until I drifted to a forlorn halt and, leaning my forehead against the wheel, closed my eyes. ‘Christ.’ And this time it was an expression of dread.

I heard the squirt of Ginny’s inhaler. She gave a couple of deep coughs before whispering in a raw voice, ‘Let’s get home.’

The two men from the Chartered Bank were in their mid-forties, wearing almost identical grey suits, and with the untroubled faintly jocular air of employees of large organisations who have never known what it’s like to risk their own money or have their careers seriously on the line.

They liked the glass blowers best. They stood back and shook their heads in self-conscious admiration before venturing forward for a closer look. They asked the standard questions. How did the team of blowers manage to produce the correct shape and thickness each and every time, how did they prevent bubbles from getting into the walls of the glass, and how long did they work before taking a break.

They peered dutifully at the cutters manipulating the blanks against the cutting wheels, they inspected the packing room, and then George and I led them back to the front hall to present each of them with a gift set of six wine goblets and a decanter, which they could safely take home without having to mention it on their tax returns.

We smiled as we escorted them out to their car and shook hands. They smiled back. None of this smiling fooled anyone. No final commitment had been made, no date had been fixed for signing the loan agreement. The two executives would only say that they were returning to the bank for ‘final consultations’ and would let us know within three days. It was inconceivable that these final consultations would not involve discussion of my fax, transmitted the previous day to all our backers. Julia had written the text. While avoiding blatant untruths, she had managed to suggest that rumours of my arrest were little more than pernicious gossip, put about by those with a vested interest in seeing the buyout fail. When she first read it out to me I’d told her that this was incendiary talk, that allegations of conspiracy could easily backfire, but with so many distractions I was no match for Julia at her most persuasive, and the fax went out more or less as she had drafted it.

George and I waved the car off and strolled back. It was a lovely autumn day, bright and clear with a slight bite to the air. The factory looked almost handsome in the afternoon sunlight, its dingy bricks tinged with a rosy hue, the ventilation pipes gleaming like the funnels of a steamship. The main doors had been given a hasty coat of blue paint for the bankers’ visit while the flower troughs on either side were newly planted in scarlet and white. The old place looked like a middle-aged girl tarted up for a new lover.

‘I’m sorry if I lose it for us,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ But he knew exactly what I meant.

‘This trouble of mine – it could be more of a liability than we realised.’

‘Nonsense.’ He gave me a glare that was both a denial and an acknowledgment.

‘Look at it from their point of view.’ I tipped my head in the direction of our recently departed guests. ‘Would you commit two million plus to someone who might be locked away for life?’

‘But you’re not going to be locked away.’

‘They don’t know that though, do they?’

‘You’re beginning to sound like Howard, for God’s sake!’

Realising his gaffe, he gave an exaggerated grimace.

‘What’s Howard been saying?’

‘Hugh . . .’ He made a gesture as if to suggest we forget the whole thing, then almost as quickly lifted a resigned hand to concede the uselessness of trying. ‘Oh, he’s been bleating on.’

‘Saying?’

‘Talking some tripe about assurances. Saying Cumberland requires assurances.’

‘Oh, yes?’ I laughed grimly. ‘What kind of assurances?’

‘That we’re in a position to continue with the buyout. That sort of stuff.’

‘Or else? What was the ‘‘or else’’?’

‘Hugh, he was just making noises. You know him.’

‘What was it, George?’

‘Oh, he talked some stuff about having to consider the best interests of the shareholders.’

‘He wants to break our agreement?’

‘He didn’t say that.’

‘But that was what he meant.’

‘You know the way Howard is – it was just talk.’

I didn’t believe for a moment that it was just talk. Howard would have seized any excuse to block our bid and prevent me from making a success of Hartford. He couldn’t bear the thought of my showing what could be done with the company when he wasn’t around to interfere in it.