Betrayal (32 page)

He was not enjoying this game. He blew out his lips. ‘It varies so much, I couldn’t give you a figure. It all depends on the circumstances and the judge. Anything from a few years to fifteen, eighteen, with half off for good behaviour. It’s such a wide range.’

Significantly less than life, at any rate. For some reason I fastened on to the idea of seven years as a time which seemed survivable, a time which, long though it was, had a foreseeable end. I imagined visiting Ginny in prison year after year, the two of us getting older, nearing fifty before we could start our lives again, in France perhaps, or Italy. Survivable.

A lorry shuddered past in the street outside, filling the room with a low rumble.

‘So manslaughter might be the best bet?’ I said, groping for reassurance.

‘We’ll have to wait for Counsel’s recommendations, and he won’t be able to put anything to Ginny until he has everything in front of him, until he has her story.’

Ginny’s story. The great unknown. Part of me longed to hear it, the other part lived in dread of what it might contain. ‘She hasn’t said anything to you?’

‘No. And I haven’t pressed her. The only thing I would like to know fairly soon, though, is whether anyone can vouch for her whereabouts on that Saturday afternoon. In my experience alibi witnesses are best caught early, before their memories fade. But she hasn’t really been in any state to consider that, so I’ll ask her again on Monday.’

‘An alibi witness?’ I said doubtfully. ‘You think that’s likely?’

He looked rather disappointed in me, as if I had failed to grasp an essential point. ‘What
I
think is neither here nor there,’ he stated. ‘At this stage we must rule out nothing at all. It would be a terrible mistake to overlook the smallest thing that might help the defence. A case must never be lost for lack of trying.’

He did not remove his energetic gaze from my face until he was sure I had understood the importance of what he was saying, and in that moment I felt an upsurge of confidence in him, and, with this, a small easing of the burden.

‘No stone unturned,’ I said.

We got to our feet.

‘Not a pebble either.’ He endorsed this with a diffident smile. ‘You mustn’t believe there’s nothing that can be done, Hugh. It’s very rare that nothing can be done.’

But just then it seemed to me that Ginny’s situation was almost hopeless.

A horn tooted and I looked round to see my car move off a yellow line and sweep in to the kerb beside me. Julia lowered the window and one glimpse of her expression told me that there had been no call from Cumberland.

‘Want to drive?’ she asked.

I shook my head and went round to the passenger side.

‘So, no reprieve?’ I asked, getting in.

She cast me a scathing glance. ‘Was there ever likely to be? All this talk of asking the board to reconsider at the eleventh hour was just Howard playing off both sides against the middle. There was never a chance!’

It was over then. At some point that morning the Cumberland board had formally accepted a bid from another company, a glass manufacturer called Donington. In their explanatory fax to the Hartford team, sent at six last evening after rumours had been circulating all day, the board had cited their responsibility to serve the best interests of the shareholders, a duty they felt would be best fulfilled by accepting the Donington bid.

So it was over, for me at least. Late last night George had talked about fighting the Cumberland board, about writing to every Cumberland shareholder to put the facts before them, to call an extraordinary general meeting and persuade them to oppose the Donington bid and back our own; he had talked about unleashing every trick in the book, using the media, the politicians, all the spoiling tactics we could think of. He talked fiercely, he made a lot of sense, but in my heart I knew my own fight was over. I was ready to let Hartford go, I was no longer bothered by the idea of Howard beating me. In the shadow of Ginny’s catastrophe my own battles seemed rather insignificant. The only thing that still had the power to upset me was the thought of Hartford closing, of the people who would never work there again, and the death of the furnaces.

Julia drove along the one-way system, muttering at the lack of road signs, until I pointed her towards the Totnes road.

‘George has told everyone, has he?’ I asked.

‘He will have by now. He warned them yesterday, so they’d be ready for it. And while we’re on the subject of staff,’ Julia added firmly, ‘I’ll stay on for as long as you want me, a day or a month, and no redundancy required, thank you very much. I’ve got another job lined up for when I leave.’

‘I wish I could keep you on.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Won’t be able to afford you.’

‘That’s what my boyfriends say.’

I hadn’t faced the money situation yet. Now that the buyout had failed I would have to meet the expenses of the bid, for which I had made myself personally liable – the fees of the venture capitalists, accountants and lawyers – a sum I didn’t care to add up quite yet but which would certainly run a long way into six figures. And then, most important of all, I would need to put plenty aside for Ginny’s defence, on which no expense was to be spared.

‘When did it finally come back?’ I said, indicating the car.

‘Wednesday.’

I looked for traces of the police examination. Fingerprint powder or whatever they used, but the dashboard was clean and there was nothing to be seen on the doors.

‘Mary told me they’ve finished with Dittisham House as well,’ Julia added, ‘though it’s too late to save the sale, apparently. The people got fed up with waiting.’

Or they didn’t like the notoriety that was fast attaching itself to the house, though neither of us remarked on that.

‘Mary wanted to know if you were intending to stay the night with them.’

I hadn’t got that far. All week I had been choosing a place to sleep almost at random, sometimes driving miles back to London after seeing Tingwall, sometimes travelling the forty minutes to Melton after seeing Ginny at the prison, or one day – it must have been Wednesday – just shutting myself away in Glebe Place, drinking and sleeping, occasionally crying my eyes out, until, waking at two in the morning, I had driven through the night to Dittisham and, going down to the quay, sat on a wall watching the dawn come up. When it was light I had gone to the boat yard and through the fence looked at the draped outline of
Ellie
on the hard standing, and briefly wept again.

I hadn’t stayed with Mary and David since the weekend. I hadn’t been avoiding them exactly, but at the same time I wasn’t ready to discuss the details of Ginny’s case with anyone but Tingwall. Julia understood this intuitively, as did David, who, though he had called several times, had been careful to restrict himself to practical matters. Mary was unlikely to be so easily rebuffed, however. When we’d spoken on the phone she’d kept asking the sort of questions that I wasn’t ready to answer. While I still valued our friendship, while it had seemed natural to confide in her on the subject of Sylvie, Ginny was an entirely different matter, and, for the moment at least, Mary’s curiosity had caused me to pull up my drawbridge.

‘I’ll decide later,’ I said.

‘Mary said she could leave supper out for you if you were late. That reminds me.’ Julia reached behind her seat and handed me a sandwich. ‘It’s compulsory,’ she said.

I didn’t argue. I’d been eating spasmodically, if at all, and I knew that if I was to be any good to Ginny I had to start pulling myself together.

We reached Hartford under a darkening sky and spitting rain, which cast a gloom over the factory windows and leached the colour from the flowers around the entrance.

Heather, the receptionist, raised puffy eyes and dabbed at them with a handkerchief. ‘Oh, Mr Wellesley, I’m so sorry,’ she cried, pulling a tragic face.

‘I’m very sorry too, Heather.’ And for a confusing instant I wondered if we were talking about Hartford or Ginny.

George, Alan and John were waiting in Pa’s old office. We shook hands with more than usual energy, the closest we could safely get to emotion.

George declared with a defiant upward thrust of one fist: ‘We may have lost the battle, Hugh, but we haven’t lost the war! They had the nerve to tell us Donington’s bid was worth more than ours? Well, it’s not! They’re taking some of it in Donington shares – aiming for another merger or whatever – and the market value of the shares is ten pence down on the paper value. I’ve been on to the lawyers. They say it’s good enough for an extraordinary general meeting. We can still get ’em, Hugh! We can still win!’ And he gave an excited cry that seemed to intensify the flush of his florid cheeks.

Because I couldn’t think of what else to say, I murmured, ‘You’ve been busy then.’

We clustered around the table, ready to sit down. There was a pause while Alan and John looked towards George, waiting for him to make some sort of announcement.

‘Yes, uhh . . .’ George frowned. ‘All of us would like to express our sadness at what has happened to your wife, Hugh. And we’d like you to know that if there’s anything we can do you only have to call on us. Anything at all.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’d like to second that,’ said Alan.

John added a brisk, ‘Me too.’

‘Thank you. I can only say that . . .’ It was hard to compose even these few words. ‘I appreciate your thoughts. And if my family problems tipped Cumberland’s decision against us, then I regret that very much. For you and for everyone else at Hartford.’

George made an exclamation of denial and Alan followed fast with: ‘Listen – Cumberland were out to make our lives difficult from the start, weren’t they?’

‘Howard was, you mean,’ George chipped in. ‘One way or another.’

Alan urged, ‘Don’t blame yourself, Hugh. It was always going to be a battle.’

They were saying what they thought I wanted to hear, but I knew, as they must have known, that the publicity over Ginny, the terrible nature of the crime, and the knowledge that, with all my problems and preoccupations, I couldn’t possibly sustain any practical involvement in Hartford, must have counted heavily against us.

There was a slight pause, a moment of mutual sympathy and unease, before we left the subject behind.

Even as we were settling in our seats, George launched his plan of attack. ‘The first step,’ he said blithely, ‘is to get this EGM off the ground. All we need is the backing of ten per cent of the equity. What with your holding, Hugh and your brother’s—’

‘George—’

Perhaps he knew what was coming, because he frowned at my interruption.

‘Are you sure you still have Zircon and the banks behind you?’

I had used ‘you’ not ‘we’ and ‘us’, but if he realised I was excluding myself from this process he didn’t comment on it.

‘I was coming round to that,’ he said rapidly. ‘I realise only too well that we’ll have to sell them the idea of hanging on. But if we’re going to get this EGM off the ground at all, we have to move fast.’

‘I think you might have to move fast on the banks too,’ I said in my most diplomatic tone. ‘I think they’ll already have gone cold on you, and the news of the Donington bid will finish them off. I think there’s no time to lose.’

This was met by an exchange of glances between George and Alan.

George said, ‘In fact, we were hoping you might tackle the banks. We thought it would come best from you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It would come worst from me. They won’t want to know about me.’

‘Why not?’

Was this a mistaken show of loyalty or could he really not see the problem? ‘George, quite apart from my personal credibility, they’ll know I can’t possibly have my eye on the ball any more. They’ll know I can’t possibly give it a hundred per cent, and they’ll be dead right.’

‘We realise it won’t be easy for you, Hugh. We realise your time will be limited. But we’ve discussed it – and, Hugh, we don’t think we can do it without you.’

‘I think you could do it without me very well.’

George ignored this. ‘You talk the banks’ language.’

How to make him realise it was all over? ‘I’m out, George.’

‘We’ll do the rest, all the legwork, all the nitty-gritty. We’ll take everything off your back. Just the banks, Hugh,’ George pleaded. ‘Please – just give it a try.’

I had forgotten how stubborn George could be, and how this quality, so valuable in a production director, could seem less attractive from the receiving end. ‘My heart simply wouldn’t be in it,’ I said, trying to spell it out for him.

‘That’s the way you feel now, Hugh. And we all understand that. But give it a while. Give it a few days, give it a week.’

‘No time,’ I argued again. ‘I wouldn’t have the time.’

‘Maybe not just at the moment. But in the future, maybe you’ll have more time than you think. Maybe you’ll be glad of a project.’

Unexpectedly, this hit a chord. In the months ahead I had been planning to spend my time supporting Ginny, meeting lawyers, doing everything I could. But now that some of the shock had worn off I could see that I had perhaps been idealising my role, or at least oversimplifying it. Once Ginny got bail she might not want me under her feet the whole time, and I might be glad of some distraction; both of us might be desperate for a semblance of normal life.

Seeing the chink in my armour, George played his last card. ‘We owe it to our people, Hugh,’ he said in a blatant appeal to my conscience. ‘Otherwise they’ll be on the scrapheap, claiming benefits, having their skills go to waste. Surely we owe them one last go.’

‘I might do more damage than good. With the banks.’

‘We’ll risk it.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

They were waiting.

‘I’ll
think
about it,’ I sighed, realising that this was as good as a promise and that, somehow or another, I had managed to manoeuvre myself into a corner.

I dropped Julia at the station and drove on to Dartmouth to see David. His surgery, a utilitarian single-storey building which he shared with his two partners, was set on a precipitous slope above the harbour with views across to Kingswear and the marina. Among the sea of yacht masts I found myself looking for the sleek outlines of the customs launch and wondering if the customs men had known of Sylvie’s activities before our trip to France. In the next moment I pushed the thought impatiently aside. What did it matter now? It was finished. Sylvie would never be coming back. Except, it seemed, to destroy my life.