The Yellow Room Conspiracy (19 page)

I moved into the open. The ground-floor windows seemed intact. Then I saw the starred pane in the second one along on the upper floor—one of the Yellow Room windows. That was a considerable shot, a six on most grounds. I must have completely misread the flight of the ball, or perhaps the force of the blow, having seen grace and timing but evidently not having allowed for Lucy's wiry strength.

There was a movement behind the broken window, as somebody climbed onto a chair to reach the catch. In the pause I heard the sisters still laughing, with the appalled but delighted laughter of children who have broken the rules. The sash slid up and Nancy leaned out.

“No pocket-money for a month! Any of you!” she called.

Her tone was mock-severe, but she too was laughing. My perception of the scene, I found, had changed. I was now mostly conscious of its falsity. I felt that the five of them were making a concerted attempt to regress to an earlier period when the family was united and happy, and it then struck me that this might be part of Nancy's scheme for dealing with Gerry, to suggest that it was still possible for him too to return to that lost Arcadia and make a fresh start. Well, if so, she was wrong, and naively wrong. Time doesn't work like that, and if she had summoned the rest of us to take part in the same charade, we were in for an even more uncomfortable week-end than I had imagined.

Also, if that was the case, what part was Ben playing? Or was she perhaps joining in unawares, merely wishing to heal her own rift from the others by this regression?

“Somebody go and get Mr Chad,” called Nancy.

“Coming, coming,” he answered, ambling along past the porte-cochère to inspect the damage. “But aren't you girls a bit old for this type of horse-play, then?”

The response was another burst of laughter, still false to my ears.

My move into the open had brought me into Nancy's view. She waved and pointed. The others turned, and Lucy came loping across, mannish in her pads and thus more feminine than ever.

“Wasn't that a terrific shot!” she said.

“Not the best place for a net if you're going to cart the bowling,” I said.

“We always have it there. It's the only bit of East Lawn anything like a decent pitch. I'm not facing Ben on a ploughed field, thank you. And Mr Chad keeps spare panes ready cut. Isn't it hot? It's supposed to thunder tonight, according to the wireless.”

“And clear up for tomorrow?”

“Fingers crossed. Nan's put you in Miss Bolton's Room. I hope that's all right.”

“Fine,” I said.

(Miss Bolton had been a quasi-mythical governess who had educated Lord Vereker's elder sisters. The threat of her return had still been used as an incentive to virtue when Lucy's generation were in the nursery.)

“I wish I could stay, but we've got the Rest of the World to dinner and I've got to go back,” she said.

“The Rest of the World and his wife these days, I suppose.”

“I'm afraid so.”

She sighed, looked at me, ageing right up into the present as she did so, and bent to unbuckle her pads.

The family had already had tea, but Harriet brought me a fresh pot. By the time I took it out on to East Lawn to watch the net continue Lucy was gone, but had been replaced by both Nancy and Gerry. Ben was now batting, and Mr Chad had his ladder up to the Yellow Room window, where he was already puttying in a fresh pane. I was drinking my second cup when Gerry left the net and came over.

“Glad you could make it,” he said. “Tolerable drive?”

“Barely.”

“Sorry about that, but it would have been worse tomorrow. Finished? Come and have a look at the lake.”

I put my cup down reluctantly and walked beside him towards the Plantations. I had no idea what was going to come up in our interview, but knew I was not looking forward to it. As we passed the stables he nodded up and said, “Lady V's had another fall. Off a horse, this time.”

“Lucy told me. Something wrong with her balance, I gather. She can't be much over sixty.”

“Fifty-nine. We're going to have to find someone to be with her all the time.”

“How's she going to like that?”

“Not at all. She's still under the impression she's safe to drive. She's got enough energy to power a battleship, only the controls are disconnected.”

“It's a worry for you.”

“Two worries. First, what to do about it. Second, how to pay for it. What about you? How's your flotation going?”

“Just about ready to slide down the slipway.”

“All the shares taken up?”

“Good as. Bobo's people wanted a higher price, but I wasn't going to risk anything being left with the underwriters.”

“I imagine you're retaining control.”

“For the moment, anyway.”

“You'll be a rich man.”

At this point I realised that the reason Gerry had wanted me to come down early was that he was going to ask me for money. No doubt this was what Bobo had been about to warn me of in the urinals at Bury.

“Eventually,” I said. “If all goes well.”

He grunted and seemed to fall into a reverie. The air in the narrow path between the trees was dense and still and swarming with insects.

“Nan is insisting I cut myself loose from Michael,” he said. “It's part of the deal.”

I made some non-committal mutter.

“He'll be turning up for supper tonight,” he said. “She wants me to have it out with him then. Have you any views?”

“It's none of my business.”

“I need your help.”

“Last time we spoke about it you seemed to have nothing but admiration for Michael.”

“Things have changed.”

We turned the corner and the South Lake stretched before us, dully reflecting the listless woods. Above its surface, in a layer dense enough to look like a band of dark smoke trapped there by the heavy atmosphere, swarmed the midges that had bred from it. The path looked totally uninviting, but Gerry wrenched up a couple of stalks of hog-parsley and gave one to me. We walked on, switching them around our faces.

“Michael and I are not technically partners,” he said. “We are merely associates. There are companies we are co-directors of, but in theory we can separate at any time, by either of us expressing a wish to do so. In practice, of course, because we've worked closely together, it's going to take time, which Nan is not prepared to give me.”

“Have you already spoken to Michael about this?”

“Not yet.”

“What will his attitude be?”

“He will try to prevent me leaving him.”

“Can he do that? Can he do any more than make things difficult? If you are not even partners?”

“I'm afraid so. To put it simply, I've discovered that some of the things Michael has encouraged me to do have not been legal. I've always relied, naturally enough, on Michael's advice on legal matters, and he himself has always taken the line that it's important to stay inside the law. The trouble is that the richest pickings are just in those areas where the law is obscure or uncertain, so it's those areas we have tended to exploit. Until a few months ago I was perfectly happy about this, but I happened to fall in with an old ruffian in the East End who was an Essex supporter. These people tend to have a sentimental streak, which they use as a substitute for morals, and in his case it's cricket. He'd seen me play a decent knock against the county some years back, and he made a point of taking me aside and telling me he didn't like seeing a good lad getting into bad hands. I asked him what he meant, but all he'd say was that a bent lawyer was a bent lawyer … I don't know. Nan had been telling me for months that Michael was using me. There'd been one or two other things I'd more or less shut my eyes to. And this old boy spoke with authority. He's seen it all, as they say. Michael was away, sailing with Ben in the Med. I decided to read up on a particular detail of tax law about which Michael had assured me we were in the clear, and I discovered that we weren't. I took counsel's opinion, and he confirmed it. It wasn't that Michael had been mistaken. He'd expressly misinformed me.”

He paused for comment. As far as it went his story seemed possible, if not plausible. I recalled his difficulty in engaging his intellect with the convolutions of military bureaucracy. He might well have a similar blind spot about the technicalities of tax legislation.

“Did you tackle Michael?” I said.

“As I say, he was away. I checked the files, and discovered that a number of documents were missing, in particular a detailed memorandum from Michael on how to set up a trust structure to our advantage and what and what not to tell our official lawyers to that end. Without it there was nothing to show that the whole scheme was not my idea. I checked more extensively and found that the same thing had happened elsewhere. In fact on any point where we might be in trouble decisions which I knew to have been joint now appeared to have been made by me alone. All the crucial cheques had been signed by me. I also began to suspect that my apparent shares in a number of our major assets might be almost worthless.”

“So if you try to leave him he can threaten to turn you over to the tax authorities? I'd have thought he'd be reluctant to do that. They're bound to go over his own affairs extremely thoroughly. On the other hand, if you do leave him you will be … penniless?”

“Good as.”

“Have you told Nancy any of this?”

“Most of it. Her line is that we should call his bluff. I actually know enough about his affairs to cause him serious trouble. Though it will be nothing to the trouble that I shall be in myself, it might still not be worth his while. What I would prefer, though, is to wait. Not to tackle Michael immediately, but to carry on as if I knew nothing, but meanwhile to play him at his own game, accumulating documentary evidence of his wrongdoing until I'm in a position to force him to play fair with me. I need, at the most, three months' grace.”

He stopped and paced broodingly along the path, as if that was as far as his thoughts had taken him. I walked beside him, dry-mouthed, appalled. The lake was a dismal grey sheet, blotched with blanket-weed. The tired leaves hung motionless. The air was heavy with electricity and dim with the pestilent midges. There seemed to be no end to the path. Gerry's tone and demeanour were in keeping, those of one who is lost, and knows it. For myself, I had listened sick-hearted. Did he really expect me to help him? Perhaps he had told me the truth about Michael's dealings with him, but surely not about his own naïveté and innocence. Michael might have led him step by step down the slope, each step seeming to follow logically from the one before, but surely there must have come a point, and far earlier than he had suggested, when he had looked around him and seen the pit he was in? If not the financial and legal trap into which Michael had coaxed him, then at least the moral repugnance of what he was doing?

How had he come to this? All those talents, that easy buoyancy, soured into this squirming mess? It didn't bear thinking of. Anyway, he was clearly about to ask for money, a loan of some kind, possibly a block of my shares which he could then use as collateral, either to convince Michael that he would not be in desperate financial straits if they parted, or else to persuade Nancy that they could afford to wait while he came to terms with Michael. Without thinking it through I decided to forestall him.

“You want me to suggest some way of raising funds to see you over the gap?” I said.

“Well, something like that, but …”

“Before we discuss it I want you to explain something to me. A few months ago you asked me to help you find a call-girl. I told you to telephone Mrs Mudge. You later told me that she had not been able to help. Not long after that a young woman called Samantha Whitstable insinuated herself into a dinner party at the Seddons”, dressed as a man. She was asked to leave, but before she did so she gave Seddon her card. Next you asked us to the opera, saying you had spare tickets. You suggested I should bring Lucy, which I did, but it turned out we were seated separately from you. Miss Whitstable was in a box with a man who tried to keep out of sight, but whom Lucy recognised as her husband. The girl pointed us out to him. After the opera Lucy and I followed them to Greek Street, and you followed us. Some thugs tried to abduct the girl, and you intervened. We then went off to supper as though nothing had happened. You had told me the tickets were available because friends of Nancy's had fallen through, but it became apparent that she was only reluctantly there, and very much gave the impression that you had made her come. Wait. Next day I telephoned Mrs Mudge, and she told me that the girl she'd suggested to you was this same Samantha Whitstable. She said that you'd persuaded the girl to leave her agency, and implied that the fracas in Greek Street was an attempt on the part of her friends to take the girl back. Did you, by the way, know that something like that was going to happen? Was that why you followed us?”

“No.”

I waited while he paced on in silence. But for the single syllable I might have begun to feel that he hadn't heard anything I had said. I pressed him again.

“I want to know what on earth you thought you were up to with this scheme. I want to know whether it was your idea, or one of Michael's you were carrying out on his behalf. And then I want to know why you should believe, after what you appear to have done, that I should either trust or help you in any way at all.”

“Because you have to,” he said. “Like me, you have no other course of action, unpleasant though it may seem. I will answer your earlier question. When I followed you after the opera I had no idea that that woman was going to try and get the girl back. I just wanted to see that you didn't get into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The attack could equally well have been on you, if it had been noticed that you were following the girl. She is now under the protection of a much larger and more ruthless organisation than anything Mrs Mudge can command. Now as to why you are forced to help me. You have to understand that Michael has two complementary drives. The first is to achieve total power over those he chooses to dominate. Second to revenge himself in any way he can on those who defy or remove themselves from his control. He doesn't want to hurt them physically, but so to speak spiritually. He will go to almost any lengths to achieve this in certain cases. I tell you, unless you help me to reach a stage where he can himself be controlled by the threat of exposure of his affairs, he will in the end destroy Lucy.”