Requiem

by Clare Francis

  She saw him coming. She straightened up, she bent to peer at the car, she moved forward and, reaching the kerb, began to gesticulate or wave or both. Nick stopped in the middle of the road, indicating right, and met a fresh volley of abuse from the vehicles behind. Seeing a tight gap in the oncoming traffic he stepped on the throttle and bolted across, causing one driver to stand on his brakes and flash his lights in rage.

  He shot onto the pavement ahead of Daisy and had to brake suddenly as she ran towards him, swerving round the bumper. He jumped out and they nearly cannoned into each other. She was already talking: she must have been talking even as he opened the door. If he hadn’t been so alarmed by the look of her he would have laughed. Her skin was very pale, her eyes dark with shadows, her hair plastered onto her head by the rain.

  He grasped her tightly by the shoulders. ‘God – are you all right?’

  But she was gabbling insistently: ‘You didn’t give him the files, did you? You didn’t, did you? Did you?’

  ‘Slow down! Slow down! It’s all right.’ She was shivering under his hands.

  ‘You didn’t, did you?’ Her voice was wobbling dangerously.

  He spread his lips into a grin. ‘Not quite everything.’

  ‘Not everything?’

  ‘I gave them what we didn’t need,’ he said truthfully. ‘And kept the rest.’

  ‘Kept the rest, kept the rest.’ She was taut as a wire, humming with a furious electricity. ‘Maynard – he took it all back, everything. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t – ’ She broke off. Her eyes had a dark and empty look.

  ‘Morgan’ll be after him by now.’

  ‘Morgan?’

  ‘From Scotland Yard.’

  She seemed to take that in. ‘Alan Breck – is he all right? Is he – ’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘Must get to him. Must get to Scotland. Must – ’ She tugged at his sleeve in agitation and looked around as if some airborne transportation might at any moment manifest itself.

  ‘Daisy, it’s all right. Slow down.’

  She froze. She had caught sight of Campbell getting out by the passenger door. For an instant she stared at him blankly, then she hissed: ‘Campbell!’ and from her tone one might have thought she was cross with him.

  She looked back at Nick and then at Campbell and her expression folded inwards. She dropped her head against Nick’s chest and gave a great shudder and said: ‘Oh, I’m so tired.’

  Hillyard’s hands were wet on the wheel. Furiously he rubbed them one at a time on the side of the seat. Turning a corner into the Wandsworth Bridge Road, he almost clipped a parked car. Christ, he thought, I’m falling apart. Get it together, get it together. The cow won’t talk, not when her big friend has form, not when she herself could get debarred or whatever they did to lawyers caught breaking and entering.

  No, she wouldn’t talk. But hearing himself repeat this, he realized he was far from persuaded. Christ. He must think this through, must get his story fixed up. He’d say that if the cow got trapped in the flat then it must have been accidental. He’d say that on discovering the burglary he’d taken a quick look around, repaired the door – the hammering would have covered any sounds from upstairs – and gone to Beryl’s to sleep. He would flatly deny the rest. Beryl would back him up. She’d provide an alibi for the evening. Biggs and his lunch companion would cover for the earlier part of the day.

  Would it be enough? Yes, yes, of course it would be enough. The girl could never prove otherwise, not without incriminating herself. The thought calmed him, and he indulged in a different scenario, one in which he was above all suspicion, and the police, on the strength of his evidence, were forced to charge the Field bitch with burglary.

  Approaching Battersea, he tried Biggs on the walkie-talkie but either he was out of range or he was already back inside the office because there was no answer. Parking, he looked for Biggs’ car but couldn’t see it. He approached the door in the wall and saw that the door which he’d wedged tightly shut was now slightly open. He prodded it with his finger. It swung open further. He listened. Somewhere upstairs, Beji began yapping, but without enthusiasm.

  Hillyard stepped inside. He heard a voice drifting down from the office. He recognized the inimitable sound of Beryl gabbing on the phone. He felt a mingling of relief and anger. He did not need Beryl in her shrewish mode, carping at him for screwing up, telling him exactly where he’d gone wrong, going hysterical about the carnage to her beloved files. At the same time the sound of the old trout’s voice was oddly reassuring.

  As he began to trudge upwards, Beji appeared on the turn of the stairs, growling softly. ‘You can shut your face for a start!’ he hissed. The dog bared its teeth. Continuing past, he aimed a blow in the dog’s direction, a blow which, as his hand travelled through the air, took on all the considerable force of his pent-up fury and caught the animal a clout that sent it sprawling against the wall.

  He was seven steps up and almost onto the landing when two unpleasant sensations hit him one after the other. The first was a sudden, sharp pain in his lower calf which, as Beji’s teeth cut deeper into his flesh, grew to such excruciating proportions that it was a moment before he could find the breath to scream. The second sensation was of a dark shape coming up the stairs behind him, a shape that wasn’t Biggs. As he twisted round to beat Beji away from his leg the shape was no more than a blur, a snatched impression of a tall figure stepping round the bend of the stairs, but by the time he had torn the dog’s teeth quite literally out of his calf he had recognized the confident step and heavy expressionless gaze of a CID man. Seeing the second one coming up behind, Hillyard realized they must have been waiting for him. He fell back against the wall sobbing and spitting, and it wasn’t entirely because of the pain in his leg.

  Chapter 39

  IT WAS A day of brilliant light and deep winter shadows. Snow lay on the hills and across the floor of the pass and on the north-facing slopes where the January sun couldn’t reach. The landscape seemed to reflect itself upwards into the whiteness of the sky, but as the road dropped down towards the loch the colours came back into the earth, rich and golden, and the sky turned a pale crystalline blue.

  The potholed road to nowhere wound its way upwards through the conifers towards the low roof of the Bells’ cottage. As Daisy turned the last corner Campbell’s figure came into view, waiting motionless by the gate. It was just as they had planned: no one else at all.

  In the back of the car, Meg Bell said prosaically: ‘Well, here we are then.’ But the calmness of her voice could not entirely conceal her emotion. Daisy glanced in the mirror. Adrian was staring ahead, holding the dazed, gravely incredulous expression he had worn since they had picked him up from the hospital.

  She drew up at the gate. Campbell opened Adrian’s door and helped him out and when Daisy looked again Adrian was enveloped in Campbell’s awkward hunched embrace.

  Daisy looked away over the broad landscape. There was no wind, and in the stillness it seemed to her that there were strange imperceptible sounds echoing softly from the hills, sounds that had always been there but which she had never heard before. She looked away towards the west, to where the head of the loch lay unseen around the bend of the hills, and thought of the parkland and the empty house beyond. In her mind the house was cold and barren. He would sell it eventually, she thought; he would sell it and move on to another life.

  She turned. Campbell, one arm around Adrian, was helping him up the path and into the cottage.

  The four of them ate in the front room, sitting around a table in front of the small open fire. Daisy had syphoned off some cash from the legal fund to install four dimple radiators and put something aside for the fuel bills, and now the cottage was warm and dry and free of fumes.

  Adrian seemed to wake to his freedom by slow degrees until, fired with something approaching energy, he gave a sudden smile. Daisy’s pleasure was tempered by the lingering frustrations of the seven-week legal battle,
and the knowledge that, though Adrian was out of hospital and clear of the place of safety order, he was not completely free, since the local authority had obtained a supervision order. Adrian would not be able to travel or start new medical treatment without the social services’ permission, nor could his case be publicized in any way. Daisy reflected that, when doing battle with the authorities, there was no such thing as a good clean win. The best that could be hoped for – at least until Adrian reached sixteen and had more hope of establishing his right to refuse medical treatment – was a truce, albeit an uneasy one.

  On the plus side, the whole process could have taken a great deal longer. Six months, or even more, was not uncommon in child-care cases. And Adrian, though he had been virtually comatose on the heavy drugs given him in the early weeks and had lost a great deal of the weight he had fought so hard to gain, seemed at the same time to have acquired a fresh determination, a new resilience to his disabilities, exhibited by his insistence on leaving the hospital on foot under his own power.

  No amount of will-power could sustain his energy for long though, and at the end of the meal he lay on the settee, looking drained. But he was not so tired that he didn’t want to inspect the book of press cuttings that Daisy had brought with her.

  ‘The show that runs and runs,’ Daisy remarked, not without a certain satisfaction. The Sunday Times had made Silveron a lead story for three consecutive weeks, then, after a break for Christmas, had picked it up again for another two. They ran Dublensky’s story for the first two weeks and the anonymous pilot’s the next, with appropriate responses or evasions from Morton-Kreiger, politicians and pressure groups. The rest of the press had been forced to cover the story – giving due credit to the Sunday Times – because numerous questions had been asked in the Commons and the new Minister of Agriculture had been forced to make a statement. Coming on top of Driscoll’s sudden resignation for ‘family reasons’, with attendant rumours of unsuitable women, blackmail and late-night parties – rumours subsequently confirmed by Angela Kershaw who had sold her story to the News of the World for £45,000 – the ministry had been pushed firmly out of its complacency and into the political spotlight, and there was talk of a major rethink, of imposing more stringent regulations on all pesticides, of having data independently analysed. There was even renewed talk of splitting Food from Agriculture, and creating two separate ministries with non-conflicting aims.

  But the item that thrilled Adrian more than anything was the Sunday Times’ New Year lead feature. The cutting had been smuggled into hospital to him, he had already read it twice, but now, looking proud and embarrassed in turns, he could not get enough of it, and who could blame him, since he himself was the star of the piece. Well, the unacknowledged star. To work its way around the injunction on publicity, the newspaper had been forced to use pseudonyms, to move the Bell home to ‘somewhere in western Scotland’, to alter all other facts that could in any way identify Adrian. But for all that, the story was very much Adrian’s, some of it told in his own words, courtesy of a tape recorder and a list of questions that Daisy had taken into the hospital when posing as an assistant to the Bells’ solicitor.

  But if Adrian was intoxicated by his stardom, Daisy got most satisfaction from the two items that had appeared in last Sunday’s paper. First, the bald front-page news that Silveron’s UK licence had been suspended; and that in the States the EPA had announced an urgent and thorough investigation into Silveron and all other chemicals tested by TroChem.

  The second item, another massive four-page leading article, was the exposure of the dirty tricks and surveillance campaign mounted against Catch and its sometime employee Daisy Field by Reynard Associates at the behest of the mysterious Workham Overseas Holdings. There were facsimiles of the expense sheets detailing the operatives and vehicles used to keep tabs on ‘Jackie’ (no suggestion of how this and other material had been acquired, Daisy noted), an invoice made out to Workham Overseas Holdings showing the accommodation address in the Cayman Islands, a photograph of the bug like the one found in the phone socket at Daisy’s flat, a calendar of the long series of unexplainable and violent events culminating in the Octek fire, and a detailed re-examination of the facts surrounding the fire itself.

  The newspaper also noted the arrest of the managing director of Reynard Associates, one Colin Hillyard, on certain charges which, being sub judice, were closed to further comment.

  Then, just when it seemed that no more revelations were likely to be squeezed out of the story, came the punch, the point where the newspaper, at possible risk of an injunction and almost certainly amid the violent screams of its lawyers, had taken the plunge and stated that Cayman Islands sources had linked Workham Overseas Holdings to an offshore subsidiary wholly owned by Morton-Kreiger. These sources, as Daisy knew, had first consisted of friends and contacts of Nick’s manager David Weinberg, but the information had subsequently been corroborated by the newspaper’s own investigations, the nature of which Simon wouldn’t reveal to her.

  Significantly, Morton-Kreiger had neither confirmed nor denied the allegations. The company seemed to be in much-denied turmoil. Their chief executive (agrochemicals) had left in early December to join one of the big cola companies, their head of research had taken early and abrupt retirement just before Christmas and then, with the breaking of the Silveron story, their share price had taken a very nasty bump on the stock market. Although just days ago Daisy had noticed that, with the announcement of better-than-expected profits and with high contingency reserves, their share price had recovered to within a few points of its previous level.

  Adrian had fallen asleep. Leaving him, they went into the kitchen, Mrs Bell to prepare tea, Campbell to thirst after a celebratory drink of a stronger nature, which he satisfied by spiriting a flask out of his jacket. For someone who in less than two weeks faced an assault hearing, he was extraordinarily sanguine. But then Daisy suspected he was making the not uncommon mistake of believing too heartily in his own defence – a defence first suggested by Daisy and subsequently endorsed by his lawyers. The plea was to be guilty – no escaping that – but with lashings of mitigation: emotional strain, an over-developed protective instinct – which was one way of putting it – and a misreading of modern psychological techniques which had resulted in Campbell’s not unreasonable belief that Adrian, far from being helped by the psychologist, was actually being attacked by her. The lawyers reckoned that, with luck and a good performance from Campbell – patent regret and no aggression, he would get a hefty fine or maybe three months suspended.

  ‘Well then! Very fine! Very fine!’ Campbell beamed across the table in a surge of bonhomie. He insisted on pouring a large measure of whisky for Daisy, and his sister as well, although she never took more than a sip. ‘Everyone home, everyone well and good,’ pronounced Campbell with magisterial pomp, an emotional wobble in his voice. Everyone home. Everyone well and good. Contemplating this, Daisy thought of Adrian and a future in which his hopes of recovery had improved little, at least in the short term, but which promised a much better chance of compensation, although the fight would undoubtedly be long and bitter, a grind through the courts which might well take five, six, even ten years. She thought, too, of Dublensky and his family setting up home near the new trust headquarters in Oxford, a Dublensky who, delivered of his moral burden, blossomed with pride and zealous energy, who, far from retiring from the fray, had offered to visit Washington to testify publicly before a congressional committee on the Silveron affair.

  But there was someone Campbell had forgotten. Nick was not back yet. His European tour had closed in Amsterdam just the previous night. He had last telephoned a few days ago, wanting to hear the news, agreeing proposals for the trust, confirming that he’d seen the latest Sunday Times. He had been surviving the tour reasonably well, he said, had even, to his surprise, enjoyed parts of it. As always during his irregular calls she had, to her slight shame, listened for traces of drink in his voice, for small signs of despair,
but he had sounded happy, and if anything caught her attention, it was perhaps a hint of preoccupation in his tone. He had apologized for not phoning more often, but he’d been very tied up. At which Daisy’s imagination had bounded off in new and unwelcome directions.

  He had been vague about when he was coming home, murmuring about studio time and a recording that he must finish. He hadn’t even said which home he would be coming to.

  But Campbell knew. ‘Ashard,’ he declared. ‘It’s been readied.’

  She looked away through the window then back at Campbell. ‘You’re sure?’

  Campbell waved a hand, as if to indicate that his sources were impeccable. ‘Aye, expected this mornin’.’

  She thought of phoning but changed her mind. Ten minutes later as she was on her way out, Campbell called: ‘And tell Mr Mackenzie I’ll be after my jacket directly. Tell him it was never in the wood store, though I must have searched a dozen times.’

  The gates were open, the housekeeper let her into the house. The hall was warm, there were displays of flowers. But it was not until her knock on the studio door went unanswered and she pushed it quietly open that the dream from the long night in Hillyard’s flat came back to her. Nick sitting at the console, music pouring from the amplifiers, the strong white light at the windows: the scene was a mingling of old and imaginary images, so that she wasn’t sure if this hadn’t already happened and she wasn’t in some extraordinary way reliving it.