The Yellow Room Conspiracy (24 page)

I don't know what Nan had said in her letter to Ben, but I guess Ben showed it to Michael, or asked him about it. All Michael would think was that Gerry must have told Nan some of what was going on. That's why he rushed ahead and married Ben, to have some kind of a hold over Nan. I don't know whether Michael had had it out at all with Gerry in London. They may not have had a chance, because first Michael was on his honeymoon with Ben and then Nan and Gerry had theirs at Blatchards, mainly because Nan wanted to keep him out of Michael's way. So that meeting in the Yellow Room may have been the first chance the pair of them had to try and sort things out.

So Michael showed up with his clothes all sopping and they turned the fire on and put his coat on the chair to dry. Gerry knew that Nan would be listening, so he started to say what they'd agreed, loud enough for her to hear, but after that they mostly kept their voices down. Why? Because Gerry as well as Michael was talking about things they didn't want her to hear. You remember Gerry locked himself in and deliberately passed out when it was over? I thought it was funny at the time, though Nan seemed to think it was alright, that he didn't at least let her in to tell her how things had gone, and I'm pretty sure the reason was that he'd got Michael to agree to something he—Gerry—wanted, but it wasn't what Nan had wanted.

He wanted to borrow money.

Alright, I don't suppose it was as simple as that. Michael probably hadn't got the money—not enough of it—m—to lend him. What Gerry was probably asking for was to use some of their joint property as security for a loan, or something like that. Yes, that makes sense, because in that case he actually couldn't ask for a split-up. The point was, a split-up wasn't going to get him the money for the currency scheme soon enough, and even when it came it wasn't going to provide enough for him to run Blatchards. He absolutely had to get his scheme through first, and then he'd be in a much stronger position to deal with Michael.

And, just as he had with Paul, he tried to blackmail Michael into letting him do what he wanted. He said what Nan had told him, about how much he'd found out about the way Michael had been setting him up to be a stooge in case what they'd been doing ever came out. The funny thing is, I think Michael gave in, at least for the moment. It sounds like that. Perhaps he was hoping to find a way out by Monday. Or perhaps he was prepared after all to let Gerry take the risk, and hope he got away with it. I don't know.

But then he heard Gerry lock himself in. He waited outside the doors into King William's Room to see if Gerry let Nan in, and try and hear what they said, I expect, but Gerry didn't, so he went upstairs to Ben.

I don't know when he had his idea. After they'd made love, I should think. He used to lie on his back and think then, and he shut you up if you tried to talk. Then he went quietly down and along to King William's Room to see if the Yellow Room lights were still on. They were, so he went on down to the cellars and found the equaliser tank and traced the separate pipe that led up to the Yellow Room—Mr Chad had showed him all this, Paul says, remember? It would have its own tap. Turn it off, using his handkerchief because of fingerprints. Wait for the elements to cool so that the fire doesn't relight, and turn it on again. Then back to bed with Ben. He'd wake her up and make love again, I bet, because he was feeling pleased with himself.

So why was he so keen at the inquest to make sure it was suicide, not just an accident? What did it matter to him? Because, when the Affair broke and everyone was after his blood, then he said that he hadn't quite told the truth at the inquest. It was to spare the family, he said. What he and Gerry really talked about, he said, was that Gerry had admitted he'd got their partnership into a mess in various ways, a lot of them crooked, without telling Michael. He'd done it because he was desperate for funds with which to run Blatchards, and could Michael help him out of the jam? And Michael had told him no, it was too serious for that, and they'd have to split up because he wasn't going to have any part of it. He'd been Gerry's last hope, he said, and that was why Gerry had killed himself. He announced that he was doing everything he could to make up for Gerry's crimes, and he made a great public fuss about it, but he didn't really do much, just enough to get by. Nobody who knew him believed him, but nobody could prove anything either.

What else? Oh yes. Nan was up and dressed because Gerry hadn't come to bed and she was going to look for him. Bobo knew what to do about breaking into the Yellow Room because he was like that. I bet I've left lots out, but that will have to do.

Well, that's that, and I've almost finished. Just a bit more cleaning up. Paul's said what happened to Harriet and Bobo, and I've done Janet. Tommy and I stayed officially married but after a bit we stopped living together, though we were good friends always. He gave up politics and wrote books about it. He had a secret life I didn't ask about. He died in his sleep a few years ago. I miss him.

Ben. You know, I think she'd have stuck with Michael if he hadn't started beating her up, but she left him in the end and married Gino, who was a sweetie apart from having phases when he felt he'd got a duty to Italian manhood, or something, to lay every moderately pretty woman he came across. She left him too and didn't marry again. She went to live in New York where she switched to modern dancing because her height wasn't a problem for that, and became a complete New York intellectual. (They never seem all that intellectual to me, but my goodness they talk better intellectual gossip than anyone else, anywhere.) Then, poor woman, a short-sighted jogger ran into her in Central Park and knocked her over and broke her hip and it didn't mend right so she had to stop dancing, and without that she became more and more reclusive and wouldn't go out, and in the end they found her dead in her apartment because she hadn't had anything to eat for days. She was still quite young. Only fifty-something.

Nan. She held herself together and had the baby—it was a girl, and she called it Gwen—but then she fell apart for a bit, drank too much, wore thick make-up, like armour, rushed up and down to London, slept around and didn't enjoy it—she told me all this one afternoon in Eaton Square, where she'd come to pick up the baby who she'd dumped on Nanny—I'd only expected her for five minutes but she stayed four hours and cried in my arms –Nan!—about how she missed Gerry, dreadfully, much more than she missed the house. (She'd pulled it down and converted the old Brew House into a pretty little cottage.) I'd no idea. They were like a couple of trees that have grown into each other in a hedgerow and got themselves all out of shape, but when one dies you can still see from the other one exactly where it used to be.

Then she did one of her deliberate self-changes and joined what they hadn't quite started calling the jet-set and met a wildly rich Lebanese grain merchant and lived very plushly with him for several years, trailing Gwen around with her. They were on a Caribbean cruise when they ran into Dick Felder, and Nan dropped her Lebanese—left him flat, between lunch and supper, she told me—and remarried Dick. I used to visit them most years, and they seemed as happy with each other as if they'd been married all along. Dick was an ordinary millionaire now, but they did pretty well. He adopted Gwen, who turned out to be something like Gerry, only small and neat, but full of sparkle and amazingly good at everything at school. Dick was determined she was going to be an Olympic horsewoman and lavished wonderful horses on her and she started to win all sorts of prizes, but then she said no. She was studying law, and married a boy she met at law school, and they did well in an ordinary kind of way and now they live in a rambling timber house by a lake in Connecticut with woods all around and they've got six children, and in a funny way I suppose it's a bit like an American version of Blatchards. It's a place where you are happy to visit, even though you feel you are somehow still being left out of the inner circle of happiness which the family keep for themselves. So now at least I know what people mean about visiting us in the old days.

When Dick died Nan stayed on—went native, in fact, golf and diets and charities and face-lifts. She got very involved with a guru who said you could be immortal if you only tuned yourself in to the right cosmic resonances, but she kept her sense of humour and died of cancer like anyone else, about twelve years ago. I miss her too.

Who does that leave? Teddy got famous, so you'll know about him. And Michael. I know if I was just hearing this as a story I'd want Michael to be punished, really hurt and humiliated, but it didn't happen like that. Like I've said, he managed to wriggle out of everything during the Affair—I don't know how many libel writs and injunctions he issued, but it worked—so he just became a respectable property developer and pulled down nice old chunks of London and put up enormous office blocks nobody wanted, but that didn't seem to stop him becoming enormously rich. You didn't hear about him much, because he did his best to stay out of the papers. I saw him a few times, in restaurants and places like that. The last time must have been somewhere in the late 'seventies, I suppose. It was in the Gay Hussar. We'd just come in from the opera, and his party were finishing, coffee and liqueurs, but Michael was wolfing another steak, the way he used to. He had a blonde dolly-bird on one side and a smart mean-looking beauty on the other, and everyone was watching for what he was going to say next so that they could be the first to agree. He looked gross, repulsive, slimy, evil. The thought that I'd once let him touch and stroke me made me feel ill. When he got up to leave he needed two sticks to walk with. I told myself that I could see from the way he moved and talked that he knew exactly what sort of thing he had become. I don't know if that's true, but I hope so.

Somebody told me he'd had a stroke not long after. It was the sort which leaves you so you can't move or speak, only sit there with your head on one side and your mouth hanging open, waiting for the next person to come and feed and clean you. You know all about it but there isn't anything you can do except make little grunting noises nobody understands. Then he died.

Well that's it. Only there's one more thing I want to say. I realise that all this sounds terribly narrow and obsessive, as if we'd all of us spent all our lives worrying about Gerry and longing to be back at Blatchards when we were girls and everything seemed easy and golden. It wasn't like that, really it wasn't. We've all had proper lives, full of interesting other things, and other people and places.

I've always been a tidy person. I try not to leave clothes on chairs and shoes all over the house, but especially before I go off on holiday I sort everything out and fold them up and get them into their drawers. It just seems decent, I suppose. Well, this is like that, a last bit of folding up and tidying away, so that I can go off with a clear conscience. That's all.

About the Author

P
eter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England­. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of 
Punch
, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.

The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children's literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers' Association for two books running:
Skin Deep
 (1968) and 
A Pride of Heroes
 (1969).

A collection of Dickinson's poetry, 
The Weir
, was published in 2007. His latest book, 
In the Palace of the Khans
, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Peter Dickinson

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-5040-0492-3

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