Betrayal (5 page)

I said abruptly, ‘They’ve already been in touch, actually.’

‘The police? You’ve seen them?’

‘Soon. In half an hour, in fact.’

‘Oh!’ He looked at his watch, reached back over his desk for his diary and flicked a page over. ‘If you want me to come along, I
might
be able to swing it.’

‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’ But the fact that he’d suggested it planted a small seed of anxiety in my heart.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘All right,’ he conceded immediately. ‘But don’t forget, Hugh – they have small brains. Strictly one-track.’

I
WOKE WITH
a terrible start, my heart crashing against my ribs, and fumbled for the burbling alarm. Sinking back on the pillow, I waited for my heart to quieten down and my brain to stop racketing. Dream fragments jostled disturbingly in my mind. Most were nightmarish, riddled with scenes where I was caught red-handed in some misdemeanour. Only one held any comfort, and for a moment I clung to the warm echo of a time long ago, a faded image of a remote bay and firelight, and, at the water’s edge, the slim elusive figure of Sylvie.

Then, in the harsh dawn light, this, too, plunged into nightmare as it came to me with a fresh lurch of disbelief that Sylvie was dead, and that I would have to wake to this stark knowledge for the rest of my life.

My violent awakening hadn’t disturbed Ginny. She lay on the far side of the bed, her thin arm reaching out across the pillows towards me, the eye-mask reducing her face to a ghostly triangle of mouth and chin. At some point in the night she had turned on the light and taken a pill. She had glanced towards me but I had feigned sleep. In the dark of the night I had felt too raw for conversation, too unsure of where it might lead. Ginny hadn’t been fooled, she’d known I was awake, but we’d both kept up the pretence.

I slid out of bed, sending a shower of papers to the floor: the amended buyout terms I had tried to read at one-thirty or whenever it was I had got to bed. Soundlessly, I put the pages into some sort of order and noticed that my hands were trembling. I showered and shaved, nicking the scar on my upper lip as I always did when I was tense or more than usually overtired. Some beads of watery blood dropped into the basin and I wiped them away with a tissue. I didn’t have to look too closely into the mirror to know that the worries of the last few months were stamped all over my face.

I reached for a cord jacket, the sort of thing I generally wore for a day at Hartford, but, remembering the message I would be delivering to the people there, I changed it for a suit of sober grey worsted. I must have lost some weight because the waistband was slack and I had to search out a pair of braces.

I went down to make some three-spoon coffee to keep me awake on the journey. It was barely six-thirty but someone had already been into the house. The girl we contracted to do the flowers must have been to market early because through the open door to the laundry room I could see several large buckets crammed with fresh blooms standing amid spatterings of water. That meant we were having a party tonight. It also meant that, not for the first time, it had slipped my mind. The prospect of a houseful of chattering people filled me with dismay. I dimly hoped it wasn’t going to be a charity event, then at least I might know a few of them.

A soft conspiratorial knock sounded from the hall. I unbolted the door to find Julia, my assistant, poised tensely on the step.

In my jittery state I assumed bad news. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing’s happened,’ she said hastily.

‘Then what are you doing here?’ I asked, more in curiosity than annoyance.

She handed me a file. ‘I thought you might want this.’ She made a doubtful face that admitted to the thinness of the excuse.

I waved her in. ‘A bit early for you, isn’t it?’

She gave a short laugh, glad that I could still tease her. ‘I
have
been up at dawn before, you know. Well – once.’

The file was one we both knew I didn’t really need. I raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘Today’s
Times
,’ she announced. Pulling the business section out of her bag, she found the page for me.

It was in the snippets column, the place where they put the news that isn’t going to influence share prices. The source, whoever it was, had been meticulous with the facts. ‘Buoyant’ china and lighting manufacturer A. L. Cumberland, fresh from its takeover of – and it stung me to read it – ‘debt-ridden’ HartWell Glass, the family-owned crystal and tableware company, was putting HartWell’s loss-making Hartford Crystal division up for grabs. Cumberland’s chairman was quoted as saying that slow-moving crystal did not mesh well with Cumberland’s dynamic mass-market product profile.

But it was the final paragraph that really needled.
After years of lacklustre sales and low investment, Hartford Crystal would seem ripe for absorption by brand leaders in the highly competitive export-dependent crystal market. An attempted management buyout led by HartWell’s erstwhile joint managing director and major shareholder, Hugh Wellesley, is thought to be facing an uphill struggle
.

Julia remarked, ‘A bitch, eh?’

‘Yup,’ I said bitterly .

‘I thought you’d better see it.’ Julia fought a losing battle against her indignation. ‘You can’t help noticing the timing!’ she hissed. ‘I had an idea something like this was coming, that’s why I went and got the papers on the way over.’

If she meant to surprise me, she succeeded. ‘You knew?’

‘Well, I guessed. Don’t ask how. You wouldn’t approve.’

Not yet thirty, Julia was the best assistant I’d ever had, exceptionally shrewd and efficient, yet when she’d first arrived her attitude, openly cynical and opportunistic, had rather disturbed me. Now I took a more ambivalent view.

‘You think it came from inside Cumberland?’

She gave me a heavy look. ‘I
know
it did.’

She meant it had come from Howard who, until the takeover, had shared the managing directorship of HartWell with me. In the process of courting Cumberland and negotiating the takeover, Howard had managed to secure himself a seat on the Cumberland board and a lucrative share option deal. For Howard there was no such thing as an old loyalty, and the moment he’d stepped over the Cumberland threshold six weeks ago he’d belonged to them, heart and soul.

‘It could have come from a City guru,’ I suggested.

‘Sometimes, Hugh, I think you’re too trusting for this world.’

I shook suddenly, the tensions welled up, I heard myself snap, ‘And sometimes I think you’re too damn sure of yourself!’

Her eyes rounded, she stared at me, eventually she stammered, ‘Sorry. You’re right. That was out of order.’

‘It’s just . . .’ I pressed a hand to my head, I couldn’t explain.

Julia was still looking astonished. I think she had been under the illusion that I never lost my temper.

Regaining some control, I gestured apology. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to think about who might have done it. Not when it’s too late to do anything about it.’

‘No, of course . . .’

There was a short silence while we both recovered from our second angry words in the two years we had worked together. The first, I realised with dismay, had been only yesterday.

Finally Julia said in a muted voice, ‘I know you said you wanted to drive yourself down to Hartford, but I’ve got a driver on standby just in case. I thought you’d be exhausted.’

‘I’ll drive myself.’

She gave it one more try. ‘It’s such a long way and he’s just outside.’

But I wouldn’t have been comfortable arriving at Hartford in a chauffeur-driven car, not when there was an axe hanging over the factory’s future.

‘No, but thanks anyway.’ I took
The Times
and
Telegraph
from her and opened the door.

‘Sorry I was out of line,’ she repeated unhappily. ‘I think you’re right, it’s altogether too early for me.’

‘For all of us,’ I smiled.

She hesitated. ‘You’re looking terribly tired.’

‘I’ll catch up on the weekend.’

‘If there’s any more I can do. To take some of the load . . .’

‘I don’t think so, but thanks anyway.’

She paused on the point of saying more, then, thinking better of it, declared, ‘Good luck for today. I hope it goes well. You really deserve it!’ In a gesture that was uncharacteristically demonstrative she reached out and grasped my hand in both of hers before striding off down the street.

In the kitchen I quickly leafed through the papers. I turned each page with an odd mixture of dread and hope, but there was nothing more about Sylvie. The initial report two days ago had been sparse: a woman’s body had been recovered from the River Dart; it had been identified as that of Sylvie Mathieson. I wasn’t sure what I expected now. Some details of how she had died perhaps; some idea of what the police were doing. But maybe there was simply nothing to report. Maybe the police had imposed a news blackout. The uncertainty did nothing for the anxiety that coiled and twisted in my belly.

I gulped the rest of my coffee and thrust the
Times
article into my briefcase. Crossing the kitchen, I glimpsed the flowers again. I picked out a white fluffy bloom – it might have been a dahlia – and, not really sure what I meant by the gesture, carried it upstairs and propped it on the pillow next to Ginny. I took a sheet from the pad and scribbled ‘Sorry’. I didn’t know what I meant by that either. All I knew was that flowers and notes were thin substitutes for all the time we never had together.

Looking down at Ginny, I felt the familiar blend of bewilderment and guilt, mainly guilt. Things hadn’t been right between us for such a long time, and I didn’t really know why.But then my whole life seemed to have gone adrift, and I wasn’t absolutely sure why that had happened either.

I changed my mind about the flower – too crass – and thrust it into the bin.

I was halfway down the stairs when Ginny’s voice cried out, ‘Hugh.
Hugh?
’

She was sitting up in bed, her mask pushed back over her head. ‘What’s the time?’

She looked so fragile that I felt a pull in my chest somewhere, a tug of emotion and regret.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you—’

She focused on me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Hartford.’

‘Must you?’

‘I’ve got a meeting.’

She seemed momentarily confused by this and I guessed she was still groggy from the sleeping pill or whatever it was she had taken in the night.

‘You won’t be late back?’ she asked.

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘You haven’t forgotten tonight?’

‘No.’ But I couldn’t maintain the pretence. ‘What’s the party for exactly?’

Usually Ginny would cast me a flicker of resentment at such lapses, as though I made a point of forgetting these things simply to belittle the importance of her work, but nothing showed on her face. Instead she said dully, ‘It’s for the premature baby unit, the fund-raising committee. I promised ages ago.’

‘Am I essential?’ Seeing her eyes widen in reproach, I added hurriedly, ‘I’ll try not to be too late. I’ll do my best.’ For all her shoulder-rubbing with the great and the good, for all her grace and poise, Ginny had never found it easy to face the world on her own. Even as I made my promise I knew with sinking heart that I’d be unlikely to keep it, and that by letting her down I would yet again be fulfilling her gloomy expectations of me.

Aware of the time, I moved towards the door.

‘It’s the last party,’ Ginny said abruptly. ‘No more after this.’

I turned back. I wasn’t sure what to make of this statement, except that it was meant to be momentous in some way. ‘No more?’

She gave a slow shake of the head and pressed her fingertips to the corners of her eyes. I tried to read the signs. Was I expected to question her, to listen to whatever social disappointments or imagined slights had led to this decision? If so, Ginny’s timing was as unerring as ever; she always managed to choose a moment when I was rushing off to some meeting or so tired that I could barely think. Yet she could never understand how this, more than anything, doomed our conversations to failure before they had even started.

‘I’m desperately late,’ I ventured. ‘Otherwise—’

I waited for the soft glance of injury she produced on these occasions, but her face was bare of emotion. She gave the faintest of nods, and my heart lifted as it always did when we avoided a tiff.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, reaching up to pull the mask back over her eyes. ‘Oh, and Hugh?’

Trying not to show the slightest impatience, I put my head back round the door.

‘Take care, won’t you?’

She said it with strange solemnity, and it struck me again how very thin she looked.

‘Of course.’

‘You’re overdoing it at the moment.’

‘Just until the buyout’s over . . .’

Her eyes were unfocused, she was hardly listening. ‘Well, take care anyway.’

Winding my way through the Chelsea streets, driving out through the suburbs, I did take care. The coffee and lack of sleep had made me light-headed and I didn’t entirely trust my reactions. But as the well-worn road to Totnes unwound before me and my mind skittered over the myriad problems that lay ahead, my concentration began to waver. To keep alert, I turned on the radio and aimed the air vents at my face.

The
Times
article kept returning to haunt me. The more I tried to persuade myself that it wouldn’t diminish our chances of funding the buyout, the more damaging it seemed to become. And, when I really wanted to torture myself, which was quite often, I imagined Zircon, the venture capitalists who were backing our bid, having second thoughts and pulling out altogether.

Needing to take some action, however unproductive, I called Julia on the car phone and asked her to find a corporate PR adviser for us. Then I spent a fruitless twenty minutes trying to locate Pollinger, our contact at Zircon, but, despite mobiles, pagers and home numbers, he seemed to lead an elusive life.

In search of distraction, I switched on the radio again and, finding a discussion programme, raised the volume until the voices filled the car.