Betrayal (38 page)

‘I had killed her.’

Her mouth seesawed, she lifted one hand, the beginning of a plea. ‘Don’t think too badly of me, don’t . . . But I couldn’t think what else –
who
else – it could have been.’

‘No.’

‘The way you’d been behaving. Frantic. Off your head. I couldn’t think . . .’ Again she put it to me, ‘Who else could it have been?’

‘No, I can see . . . I would have thought the same thing.’

She grasped at this. ‘Would you? Would you really?’

‘Definitely.’ Again I tried to give her the reassurance she craved. ‘Finding her there on the boat. You thinking I’d been aboard . . . I was the obvious person.’

‘Yes!’ she affirmed fiercely. ‘You
were
, you
were!
’ She jerked her arm so violently that she spilt her wine. I took her glass and, putting it on the table, went to the cloakroom to find a cloth and dampen it with water.

She dabbed at her sweater, breathing heavily, clenching her lips. I fetched a glass of water which she drank greedily.

When we had been quiet for some time, she repeated reproachfully, ‘It had to be you. It had to be.’

Her eyes flicked towards me, and I quickly agreed, ‘Yes. It had to be me.’

Gathering some comfort at last, she prepared to go on. ‘I fell apart for a while,’ she said shakily. ‘The whole thing seemed so ghastly, so totally un—’ the word eluded her ‘so un-
saveable
. You know how something can happen which is so ghastly that there’s nothing you can do to make it right again. Once it’s happened, it’s happened. However much you may wish it different, there’s no
un
doing it, ever,
ever
. Except this was twice as ghastly as anything I could ever have imagined. But then I thought— Then I thought—’ She straightened up in her seat and some of the life came back into her voice. ‘Perhaps I
can
undo some of this. Usually I pretend that difficult things aren’t happening, don’t I? I just push them out of my mind.’ She held up a staying hand as if I were about to disagree. ‘Oh, I do, I know I do! All my life . . . always. But this time – well, I
could
make things right again, couldn’t I? Oh, not totally, of course. But almost right. For
you
anyway. For us. And Hugh—’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘It thrilled me. I mean – I felt glad. Glad that I had thought of it. Glad I was going to do it. I was absolutely determined, you see. Determined not to be weak and pathetic. Determined to carry it through to the very end.’

The phone was ringing but neither of us made a move to answer it and eventually it stopped.

Ginny was still lost in her story. ‘I imagined you’d rushed off in a state of shock. Rushed back to London. It seemed to me that I had plenty of time – time to do the thing properly. So I planned it! I thought it through! I sat in the bottom of the cockpit where no one could see me, and I thought about every detail. I was determined, you see, not to forget anything.’ Her mouth fell. ‘It wasn’t possible, of course – not to make any mistakes. But I didn’t realise that then.’ Suddenly her control deserted her and she clamped a hand to her eyes. Just as abruptly she pulled her hand away again and went on, as though any loss of momentum might sabotage her chances of finishing.

‘I knew there was blood – I’d seen it,’ she began at speed. ‘I knew I’d need something to wrap her up in, to stop the blood and keep it from— So I looked in the cockpit lockers and found some plastic sheeting and a rope. Then I braced myself to go below. The strange thing was that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Partly because I’d geared myself up for it. Partly because I’d made up my mind that I wasn’t going to
let
it bother me. Mind over matter,’ she exclaimed with a hint of pride, ‘like doctors and operations.’ She paused for breath before racing on. ‘I didn’t look at her, though. I half shut my eyes. And I kept talking to myself, blabbering away, which seemed to help, God only knows why. The hardest thing was getting the plastic all the way round her. Not getting any blood on the
outside
—’ She jerked to a halt and cried in sudden anguish, ‘God, you don’t want to hear all this, do you! You don’t want all the ghastly details!’

Part of me wanted to hear everything, but it was a part of me I didn’t trust. ‘Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to,’ I said.

‘Nothing I don’t want to,’ she repeated with irony, blinking back the hovering tears. ‘The awful thing was – half of me was proud of what I was doing! So methodical. So efficient. Not forgetting a single thing!’ And she gave a sad empty laugh. Blowing her nose, she continued with attempted toughness, ‘So! I put her in the plastic, I wrapped the rope round several times, I knotted it. Then I cleaned up as best I could. I was already planning to come back the next day and scrub the floor, scrub every inch of the boat. With bleach – I knew bleach was the only thing. But there wasn’t anything more I could do that night, not until dark, so I sat in the companionway and waited. That was the worst, waiting. The darkness seemed to take for ever.’ The pretended toughness had vanished. Large splashy tears dropped silently onto her sweater and dripped off her nose. She had run out of tissues so I went and fetched some more. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes ferociously, as though this might be enough to stem the flood.

‘It was hard. Moving her.’ The effort of speaking was very great and between gasps her voice was all over the place. ‘I used a rope – a halyard or something – to hoist her up. I tried using a winch but the rope got into a terrible mess. It took me ages to unravel it. So in the end I just put the rope over the boom and hauled that way. God, it was hard –
hard
. But somehow,
somehow
. . . I got her up. I got her onto the deck and . . .’ She trailed off and with a low moan leant forward and sank her head into her hands.

I put an arm round her shoulders, I murmured vague words of comfort, but I hardly knew what I was saying, the images that crowded my mind were so overpowering. I saw Ginny pulling the body onto the side deck and forcing it under the guardrails, I saw it hanging out over the edge of the boat before it finally broke free and slid into the blackness, I heard it hit the water with a low splash, I saw it bobbing up and floating away on the tide. I saw all this and began to realise what a massive undertaking it must have been for Ginny. I felt astonished at her strength of mind, at the sheer force of her determination.

Not trusting myself to say anything useful quite yet, I resorted to offering tea. Ginny nodded from the depths of her hands. When I came back with the mugs she was sitting up again, blowing her nose.

‘Sometimes in the night I dream that it didn’t happen,’ she breathed. ‘I dream that it was just – well, a dream. And then I wake . . .’ She took the tea and her hands were trembling.

‘You’ll tell Charles the whole story, won’t you?’

She gave a tight shake of her head.

‘
Ginny
– for God’s sake.’

‘Oh, I
suppose
,’ she surrendered wearily. ‘For what it’s worth. But it’s not going to do any good, is it?’

‘Ginny, don’t be—’ I caught myself on the brink of saying
ridiculous
. ‘There must be a way of proving what happened. But we can’t expect him to even
begin
to help us until he knows the truth.’

‘But everyone’s going to think I’m making it up, aren’t they? They’re going to think I’m lying. I mean, who’s going to believe that I did what I did if it wasn’t to cover up for you? I mean, why would I bother, if
you
hadn’t killed her? Or if
I
hadn’t killed her? If neither . . . then why . . .’ In her weariness she was confused by her own argument and put a hand to her head. Emerging from her daze, she said simply, ‘It’s no good – I’ve thought it through, I’ve thought it through a million times. And Hugh—’ Her gaze was like a baffled animal’s. ‘I can’t see any way out. And it frightens me to death.’

I tried to keep my own fear out of my face as I pulled her against my shoulder and murmured reassurances which sounded empty even to my own ears.

We lapsed into the silence of exhaustion, and when I finally spoke again I realised Ginny was beyond further talk. I took her up to bed and watched her count out her tablets and wash them down. As we lay in the darkness she grasped my arm and whispered apprehensively, ‘Thank you for believing me.’

Knowing what she wanted to hear, knowing she wouldn’t sleep until she heard it, I said, ‘I never doubted you for a moment, darling. Not for a moment.’

Later as I lay awake with no chance of sleep, I found myself believing almost too much of what she had said: I found myself believing that there was no way out.

‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

I wasn’t sure what George had just said, but I gave an authoritative nod.

We were sitting in one of those conference rooms that looks identical to every other conference room in the City, with vertical slatted blinds at the picture windows, neutral walls and an ostentatious elliptical table that stretched almost the length of the room. Our small band was scattered round one end of the table. There was George and Alan and myself, one of our lawyers, and three Chartered Bank people. Significantly – or otherwise – the Chartered party did not include either of the two grey-suited executives who had smiled their way round Hartford on the conducted tour. Instead we had graduated to two full directors.

Now that I was listening properly I realised that George was labouring a point that he had already made twice that morning. The bankers had not been impressed by his argument the first two times around and, hearing it a third time, were looking distinctly po-faced. George was asking them to knock a point off the interest rate they were demanding. He couldn’t see why we should pay over the going business rate. He couldn’t see that we were in a poor negotiating position, and that the bankers, having let themselves be talked into granting us the loan virtually against their better judgment, were in no mood to do us any more favours. The meeting had gone on too long, we were losing ground. Risking George’s wrath, I interrupted him in mid-stream. ‘Suppose we agreed to carry this premium for a period of one year?’

They didn’t commit themselves, but they didn’t turn it down either. They’d probably offer four years, and we’d settle on three, two if we were lucky, which wouldn’t be bad under the circumstances. They said they’d come back to us the next day.

I could feel George looking daggers at me as we went down in the lift. He managed to restrain himself until we reached the street.

‘It would be nice not to have the ground cut from under my feet,’ he said with barely concealed indignation.

‘We were never going to win that one, George.’

‘Maybe not, but it would have been nice to discuss it, feel we had a
strategy
.’

‘We had to concede something.’

‘Why the hell should we pay over the odds?’

‘Because we have no choice, that’s why.’

‘It’s another twenty grand a year!’

‘We’ll have to live with it.’

‘I’m not sure we can!’

‘In that case we shouldn’t be here at all.’

He retorted acidly, ‘Well, that’s a thought!’ Then, sighing hard, he shuffled his unwieldy feet and made an apologetic face. ‘It gets me, that’s all, the way they squeeze us dry.’

‘I know.’

He cast a scornful eye over the glass canyons. ‘It’s not as if they actually
make
anything, is it? Apart from fat salaries. You know, I’m never bothered by anything the factory throws at me. Employees’ problems, suppliers, later deliveries – you name it. No trouble. But this lot! They’d screw their own grandmothers, wouldn’t they? And then ask for another meeting to renegotiate the terms. You just never know where you bloody are with the slippery buggers. That’s what I can’t take!’

‘Won’t be long now, George.’

‘Ha! That’s true enough! Death or glory.’ He rolled his eyes, then, with a conciliatory expression, asked cautiously, ‘Look, Hugh . . . can you spare a couple of hours? I wouldn’t bother you, but Cumberland’s lawyers are trying to throw a whole new set of spanners in the works. And that’s only a half of our problems.’

I hesitated, and in hesitating it came to me that a great deal hung on this small and apparently insignificant decision. A couple of hours would undoubtedly stretch into three, and then the whole afternoon would be gone and I wouldn’t get back to Melton until nine or even ten. Tomorrow I was due at Hartford for a late-morning meeting which, given half a chance, would run into the afternoon. Before very long I’d be back on twelve-hour days and fast-evaporating weekends. And Ginny would be on her own with time to think and brood.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

George stuck out his chin. ‘Tomorrow then, after the meeting?’

‘It won’t be possible, George. I can’t give you any more time at the moment.’

‘Just for the next two weeks, until after the EGM? Until we sort out the lawyers?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘If I came to Wiltshire?’

I knew I was sounding unreasonable. ‘No.’

He exclaimed, ‘This is our one chance, Hugh!’

‘Don’t think I don’t know it.’ If we didn’t win the backing of the Cumberland shareholders at the EGM then the buyout would finally be dead and buried.

George clamped his mouth shut and looked away. Then, with a sigh that seemed to settle in his stomach and swell his considerable girth, he said in an altogether softer tone, ‘I didn’t mean to be, you know – unsympathetic. You’ve got your priorities.’

‘I’m sorry I can’t do more.’

‘You
will
put the motion at the EGM though?’

‘Oh, I’ll put the motion.’

‘See you tomorrow then.’ He touched my arm as he left.

Walking to the car, I wondered how I would feel if the buyout failed at the eleventh hour through some avoidable error, if I discovered too late that George had missed some obvious move. It would exasperate me, it would hurt me, but it wouldn’t kill me. Responsibility had its limits, and I had reached mine. In making the decision to distance myself from Hartford, I was wrenching my life out by the roots and shifting it to new ground. But it was my own choice, made on my own terms. Perhaps, if Ginny were right, the first independent choice I had ever made.