Arnold looked blankly across the desk. Usually, ignorance in his customers would serve to increase his own personal sense of superiority. This did not happen with Pitt.
‘You have three separate accounts with our bank. You might like to check that you do not also have others, thanks to the work of Mr Hardyman.’
This information neither excited nor impressed Pitt. Where others might immediately have been keen to establish how much money there was in the accounts, inferring from the fact that Arnold had suggested investing some of the money in the vineyard that there might well be a substantial sum, Pitt was curious, no more.
‘It’s as well, then, that he left you in so much credit, rather than debt, given your level of ignorance,’ said Arnold bravely. Pitt did not reply. Arnold could barely hold his gaze and stared back down at the papers.
‘In total, between the three accounts, you have something in the region of two hundred and forty-seven thousand pounds.’
If Pitt was surprised by this, it did not register on his face. He looked blankly across the desk. Immediately calculating. He had much for which to thank Hardyman, and already mourned his passing. The fact that he had taken care of him financially in a way that Pitt had not thought to do for himself did not change anything.
Now there was just a large amount of money to think about. A few days earlier he would not have thought twice about using the money to keep the bank at bay. However, he had moved on. The wine had been overtaken in his priorities. As he sat with face impassive, he ran through a mundane calculation.
No amount of investment would improve the wine. When the bank manager spoke of investment, he meant wine tasting and tours and a shop and a restaurant. If he used the money to pay off some of the debt, he would only be struggling again in another few years. That was not why Hardyman had taken care of him in this way, while his back had been turned and all his energies directed at the vineyard.
‘You could easily alleviate the problems of the business by investing some of your personal fortune back into it,’ said Arnold, trying to cover his discomfort by slipping into purely banking terms. ‘It would be standard practice in this kind of situation. It would allow you to service the debt, as well as invest in the future to ensure that this kind of situation did not arise again.’
Arnold looked up from the file, the ends of his fingers placed together, like those of a television journalist.
‘No.’
36
Pitt returned to the house some time before twelve. He had seen Daisy briefly in the morning, but not Mrs Cromwell. After his fears of early discovery, Daisy had not emerged until almost nine o’clock. Pitt had been drinking coffee. It was symptomatic of their relationship that, while Daisy was extremely curious as to the whereabouts of Ju, she did not ask. Pitt was ready with a straightforward, deadpan lie, and so far had not had to use it.
Then he had gone to the small office in the outbuildings to call the bank; then out to the vineyard to see Jenkins. Having not thought of the need for a photograph for Ju, he had had to address the issue of finding a camera. He knew Daisy had one, but intended neither to ask nor search for it. Having not been able to think of a shop in the village that might sell one, he had gone straight to Tewkesbury. He had bought a small digital camera, not something that he had ever used. He had taken five minutes with the sales assistant to ensure that he understood the process, then he had made the short trip to the bank. The meeting with Arnold had not changed everything, but it had certainly given him new options.
Daisy and Mrs Cromwell were in the kitchen with a middle-aged police constable. She was sitting at the table with a cup of tea and a notebook in front of her. The radio, which she had attached above her bulletproof vest, was crackling quietly as Pitt entered.
Mrs Cromwell eyed Pitt with suspicion, Daisy audibly tutted.
‘You decided to come home then?’ she said.
Pitt glanced at the clock. On another day it would have been the signal for him to shut down all communicative function. PC Kilfoyle immediately had the relationship worked out.
‘Did you see Yuan Ju this morning?’ asked Daisy.
‘No,’ said Pitt, his back turned. He was at the kettle, turning on the gas, shaking the coffee beans into the grinder. Already he could see signs at the sink that spoke of Ju’s absence.
‘Did you usually see Yuan Ju in the morning?’ asked Kilfoyle, automatically recognising that Pitt was bound to dead bat anything his wife said.
Pitt turned round. His face was expressionless, as ever. Mrs Cromwell suspected him, but could read nothing in his eyes.
‘Of course,’ said Pitt. ‘She was always here from very early.’
Kilfoyle scribbled something in her notebook; the only sound was the gas burner and the low rumble of the kettle.
‘But not this morning?’
‘No.’
‘What time did you get up?’
Pitt had the bag of coffee beans in his hand. His fingers were still.
‘Four-thirty or thereabouts. Maybe a little later.’
He was new to lying, but he knew the basics. Keep everything as close to the truth as possible.
‘And you didn’t see Ju?’
‘No.’
‘Did you think that was odd?’
‘Yes.’
Kilfoyle scribbled. Mrs Cromwell glanced at the notebook, although, from where she was sitting, she could make nothing out.
‘Would you like to sit down, Mr Pitt?’ asked Kilfoyle.
Pitt laid the bag of beans behind him on the kitchen top. He had not sealed the bag properly, and as it toppled over, the top of the bag opened and a few beans spilled out. One of them fell to the floor.
Pitt sat down across the table from Kilfoyle. Usually he felt nothing for either Daisy or Mrs Cromwell; at that moment he was angry.
‘You didn’t mention to Mrs Pitt that it was odd you hadn’t seen Yuan Ju?’
‘No.’
Kilfoyle already knew there was no need to question this. She could imagine the atmosphere in the family home on a daily basis. She saw all sorts of human life, but often it was the tidy respectable homes where the relationships depressed her more than anywhere else.
‘Did you know that Mrs Cromwell had contacted the police to notify us of her suspicions regarding Yuan Ju?’
‘Daisy told me.’
He could not remember the last time her name had crossed his lips. It sounded strange.
‘Do you think there might be a connection between this and the fact that Yuan Ju appears to have left the house?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ said Pitt. ‘I never spoke to Yuan Ju.’
‘Have you any idea how she might have come to know that the authorities had been contacted?’
Pitt had thought the questions through already. Knew what to expect.
‘It was discussed openly in front of her. I don’t know if there was an assumption that she did not understand what was being said. Perhaps she did.’
Kilfoyle scribbled. She cast a glance at Daisy and Mrs Cromwell.
‘Was that an assumption that you made?’
Had he been a man to enjoy anything in relation to his wife or mother-in-law, Pitt might have taken some pleasure in that question. He knew that Mrs Cromwell had spoken openly in front of Ju to taunt her if she understood, to scorn her if she did not.
‘She’d never said a word,’ said Daisy. ‘Never batted an eyelid. She was like this... I don’t know what she was like.’
‘Cipher,’ said Mrs Cromwell abruptly. ‘She was a cipher. She just stood there. Things happened around her.’
‘She never did any work?’ asked Kilfoyle.
‘God, she was brilliant,’ said Daisy. ‘The food was a bit, you know, foreign. But she was neat, I’ll give her that.’
Kilfoyle wrote in her notebook. Pitt looked at the top of her head. The kettle rumbled close to boiling. Kilfoyle looked up, engaged Pitt again; a straight look in the eye.
‘Mrs Cromwell’s susp
icions were aroused by the fact that Yuan Ju disappeared every Saturday evening, and from the nature of how she came to work for the household.’ She paused while she looked at her notes. ‘And from her general suspicious nature. Is there anything you can add to that? Anything else that might make you suspect that she was not legitimately in the country?’
Pitt held her gaze for a second. Answer everything quickly and as honestly as possible. Not too rushed, no long gaps. He read her eyes; she thought she was wasting her time. The call-out had been spurious to begin with, the evidence flimsy. Kilfoyle recognised that there was mischief-making taking place, and that, even if there had been some sort of case to be made against Ju, the likelihood was that she’d picked up on what they were planning to do and had left.
The kettle started to whistle; water splashing out from the lid spat onto the hot surface of the hob.
‘Nothing,’ said Pitt.
He got to his feet and walked to the hob, turned off the gas. Kilfoyle made a note. Daisy stared at the table, her head shaking marginally. Mrs Cromwell’s eyes followed Pitt. She imagined that her look tore into his back, tore through his spine, ripped him apart.
Pitt’s spine would forever remain intact, oblivious to Mrs Cromwell’s malicious glare.
Kilfoyle looked up, gazed at an indistinct point in the kitchen.
‘So, apart from contacting the agency, if it is an agency from whom you first employed Yuan Ju, you have no other ideas of where she might have gone? Did she have any friends? Was she friendly with anyone who worked at the vineyard? Any of the other staff?’
‘Never saw her speak to anyone,’ said Pitt. ‘Don’t even know if she spoke English.’
He was aware that he was talking about her as if she was dead, and while it troubled him to do that, it could only help. As far as the house was concerned, Ju was already gone.
Kilfoyle looked at the two women. Daisy shook her head. Mrs Cromwell stared out of the window.
Kilfoyle closed her notebook.
‘Right, I’ll get on to this number. You haven’t called it again?’
‘No,’ said Daisy. ‘Didn’t realise she’d gone until this morning. You were supposed to be here on Saturday.’
Kilfoyle disregarded the remark, pushed her chair back and rose to her feet.
‘Thank you for the tea,’ she said, although she hadn’t touched it.
She tapped her fingers against the notebook, and threaded the pen through the spiral binding. She looked at the two women, neither of whom engaged her; a final glance at Pitt, the only one in the room she had gauged to have had any honesty about him. Then she nodded, saw herself to the door and she was gone.
Pitt did not look at his wife. He made himself coffee, looking at the clock, calculating how long it would be before the men came in for their lunch. The calculation continued through Ju not being there and Daisy being unlikely to immediately step into the void.
‘I’ll call out for sandwiches,’ said Pitt.
37
conversations with hardyman
‘Why did you marry her?’
Hardyman had been aghast as Pitt described in absurd detail Daisy’s tortuous insecurities. Her horrible lack of confidence that had once made Pitt’s life miserable, something from which he had long ago learned to shut himself off. Trivial, mean-spirited jealousy, an ill-humoured fear that at any minute he was about to walk out of her life; a fear that, although she protested her love for him, seemed to make every waking moment of their life together so utterly miserable for her.
Individually, each of their university friends had asked Pitt the same question before the wedding; afterwards, they all sadly accepted it, as Daisy drove them away. She would possess Pitt, have him to herself; Pitt’s affections would not be drawn in any other direction.
Hardyman sensed a change in Pitt’s attitude, looked curiously at him.
‘Seriously, it sounds miserable,’ he said. ‘I mean, plenty of marriages become miserable, I should know. But you sound like you were miserable from the start. She wasn’t pregnant, was she? You don’t have some thirty-year-old kid you never mention?’
‘No kids,’ said Pitt.
Garlic and pea soup, with a buttery flavour, liberally sprinkled with parmesan. Chunky brown bread. A glass of cheap Soave, to which Hardyman had become partial, and which Pitt was happy to share.
‘What then?’ asked Hardyman. Chicken and sweetcorn soup with chorizo, finely chopped thyme and parsley. Two slices of white bread on which he’d spread too much butter. ‘Did you both want the same things?’ he added, searching.
‘She wanted a man,’ said Pitt, and he smiled darkly.
‘What did you want?’
‘I don’t know. I never knew.’
Pitt thought back to the time. He knew why he had married her, but it had been absurd and of course he had never mentioned it to anyone. The university crowd would have kidnapped him to save him from himself. Or to save him from Daisy. He would just have gone back to her when they let him go.
‘So, what was it?’
‘It just happened,’ said Pitt. ‘We drifted towards each other because all our friends were either tied up or gay. We didn’t know anyone else, so we started going out by default. At some point, fairly early on I might add, I realised how messed up and insecure she was. She didn’t think she was messed up and insecure.’
‘They never do,’ muttered Hardyman.
‘Suddenly, there I was, in a situation where the only way out was to finish it and make her even more miserable. I went to France to get away from her, but even then, when I had the chance, we never broke it off.’
‘You went to France. Wasn’t that a clue?’ said Hardyman,
‘She said, “that’s it, you’re going, you don’t want to see me again”. I found myself sliding into my default position of trying to counteract her insecurity, trying to persuade her that everything was going to be fine, that the world wasn’t as miserable and that people weren’t as selfish as she thought they were.’
‘You did that?’ asked Hardyman, and Pitt almost laughed.
‘I was young. It wasn’t like I didn’t agree with her, but she was determined that everything in her world was bad. So I’d tell her it wasn’t. Then, when I went to France, rather than call her up and say, “sorry, you were right”, I thought that I would be bloody-minded and prove her wrong.’
‘And I bet she didn’t appreciate that one bit.’
‘Not so that I noticed,’ said Pitt.
He took another couple of mouthfuls of soup. Hardyman gave him time, appreciating that Pitt talking about himself and his past was a rare thing.
‘I got back, and suddenly, France included, we’d been seeing each other for four years more or less. So we got married.’
‘You poor bastard,’ said Hardyman. ‘I mean, really, there are other options. You don’t have to get married.’
‘No. I thought...’ then he hesitated and sighed, though there was nothing light about the sigh. Took another spoonful of soup, a sip of wine; dragged a piece of bread around the rim of the bowl. ‘I thought maybe it would make her happier. It didn’t.’
‘Would it have made you happier? Did it make you happier?’
‘No. I just did it, it was just... it made things easier.’
‘What? You don’t marry someone to make things easier. That’s the rest of your life you’re talking about.’
‘I was always, I don’t know if afraid or scared is the right word, but I generally wouldn’t contradict her because I knew it would bring this great avalanche of emotion. So I ended up doing what was easier.’
‘Holy crap,’ muttered Hardyman. ‘That sounds... This isn’t like you, and I don’t mean to be, you know, rude or anything, but it sounds weak.’
‘It does, you’re right. I don’t know if I was. At the time I just thought I was being pragmatic.’
Hardyman lifted his glass, which was half-full, and drained it, as if needing the fortification. He looked around for the
waiter to come and pour the next one from the bottle, which was three feet away on ice.
‘What about now?’
‘There’s nothing now. We don’t fight; she rarely unleashes the dogs of insecurity. I guess she knows I’m not going anywhere. We just ignore each other. I do the wine, she does... God, I don’t even know what she does. Don’t care.’
‘Now that sounds more like a marriage.’
‘Sometimes, she gives me the benefit of her opinion on how I should run the yard. I switch off.’
Hardyman laughed. The waiter arrived to pour his third glass. Pitt, who had to drive home, waved his hand over his glass. Usually Pitt would have one, while Hardyman had the remainder of the bottle; not that Hardyman did not also have to drive home.
‘Neither of you ever want kids?’ asked Hardyman, once the waiter had departed the scene.
‘Daisy did for a while. For a few years.’
‘Didn’t happen?’
‘I had a vasectomy when I was twenty-four,’ said Pitt.
‘What?’
‘Didn’t tell her.’
Hardyman looked curiously across the table. His friend seemed so steadfast, so resolutely dull sometimes, that he was rarely surprised.
‘Your wife wanted kids, and you had a vasectomy so she wouldn’t get them? And didn’t tell her? Jesus, that’s vicious.’
‘She would have been a terrible mother. I couldn’t countenance bringing children into the world to be raised by her. Imagine if they had grown up in her image.’
Hardyman was still staring across the table in awe, his jaw slightly hanging.
‘Or mine for that matter,’ added Pitt.
‘There was me calling you weak,’ said Hardyman, ‘when in fact you were a completely brutal bastard. That is just vicious. Holy crap.’
‘Thank you,’ said Pitt, and he could feel the wall going up. He had opened up for a while, now it was time to shut back down. They probably still had another hour of lunch to go, and he wasn’t going to spend it talking about himself.
‘Didn’t she find out? I mean, when no kids came, didn’t she want you to get yourselves checked out? If she’d found out, that would have been a pretty big fucking avalanche of emotion.’
A Room With No Natural Light Page 14
