Not wanting to lose this advantage, which he knew could only be temporary, he stalked out. From his mobile phone in the car park he rang Gott, who said, ‘That stupid fucker – I’ll call him in Aberdeen and shut him up. I’ll make him come straight back. In the meanwhile, get a local security firm in there pronto. Well done, boy. Now, speed up to Kirkby Rodney and get on with the rest of it.’
That evening, early, Jeremy went to the larger and better kept of the two local pubs and tried to start a conversation with the landlady, a heavily made-up forty-year-old, who said she could remember nothing about people who had lived in the village when she was a child. She was busy – the pub was full of tourists, many of them walkers and climbers in heavy boots. But her eyes were hard and alert and Jeremy felt sure there was something she wasn’t saying.
He decided not to approach the few local men sitting in a corner and instead headed off down the road, where tidy cottages, front doors with gleaming brass knockers, hanging baskets of flowers and ivy hinted at well-off retired people in residence. He went round the corner into a less prosperous small street, at the end of which was a second pub, set back from the street, with about a dozen motorbikes parked on the concrete outside. He braved the looks of the assembled bikers, bought himself a pint at the bar and went into a corner where two old men, one bald, one cloth-capped, were drinking at a beer-puddled table. He offered a drink to the old men – on closer examination they seemed to be in their fifties – and said he was a journalist, researching for an article on Alan Petherbridge.
‘Oh, aye,’ said the bald man. ‘Him what’ll be Prime Minister next time, if the Tories get in. I remember the family, don’t you, Don?’
‘What?’ said the other man.
‘Wallaces,’ the bald man said loudly. ‘Wallaces of Foothunt House.’
‘Wallaces?’ enquired Jeremy.
‘Wallaces,’ confirmed the bald man. ‘The stepfather. That’s two pints,’ he reminded Jeremy. Jeremy had to push through the massed bikers at the bar. It took time to get served and as he pushed back with the drink someone nudged him, deliberately, he thought, and some of the beer slopped on to his trousers. He ignored this.
‘So,’ he said, when he had put down the pints, ‘Alan Petherbridge had a stepfather, Mr Wallace? He doesn’t mention him.’
‘What paper?’ asked the bald man.
‘Paper?’ asked Jeremy. ‘Oh – the Observer.’
‘That right?’ said the man in the cap. He looked down at Finn. ‘Nice dog,’ he remarked.
‘He is,’ said Jeremy.
‘Doesn’t seem like a London dog.’
‘He was born in the country – Gloucestershire,’ Jeremy told him.
‘That right?’ said the man. The words ‘down South’ hovered in the air.
‘What did Mr Wallace do for a living?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Not much,’ said the man in the cloth cap. ‘I think he were retired. They never had much to do with the village. The boy, Alan, went to a public school.’
A silence fell. Jeremy, noticing both men’s glasses were almost empty, made his way back to the bar. Music started up, old punk rock. Jeremy, pushing through the leather elbows, was unhappy. A voice behind him said mockingly, ‘Excuse me, barman. I wonder if you would make me a cocktail?’ Eventually, Jeremy was served and again had to force his way through to get back to the table. This was the last time, he thought. He was not going back to the bar again.
He set the glasses down. ‘Can you remember anything else about the Wallaces?’
The bald man said, ‘They kept themselves to themselves.’
The capped man said, ‘It were a while ago.’
‘Funny to think he’ll be the Prime Minister,’ said the first man.
‘I’d not vote for him,’ said the second.
‘I’d not vote for any of them.’
‘Do you remember Mrs Wallace?’ Jeremy asked hopelessly.
‘Poor woman. She died,’ said the capped man.
‘Buried her up at St Martin’s, didn’t they?’ said the bald man. ‘Near Jessie Comstock.’
‘Never – she’s right over the other side. Mrs Wallace is by my auntie – Auntie Bee Watts.’
Jeremy gave up. He said goodnight to the two men and made his way through the throng in the pub, feeling eyes on his back. He returned to his lodgings. He had been brought up in a village himself and thought he was unlikely to find out very much about a family who had not lived in Kirkby Rodney for thirty years. There would be few who would remember and those who did might not be prepared to speak. He began to calculate how much Leslie Mundy’s discovery might eventually be worth to him – Gott had given him some Rodon shares – and fell asleep.
Next morning, Jeremy much enjoyed Mrs Carshaw’s substantial breakfast of eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes and black pudding, as did Finn, who got a few bits of black pudding under the table. Jeremy told her that he planned to go and take a look at Foothunt House, where the Wallaces had once lived, and then take Finn for a good, long walk. He would return to London that afternoon.
Mrs Carshaw offered to make him a packed lunch. He asked for directions to St Martin’s, where the men had told him Mrs Wallace was buried. Mrs Carshaw told him where the church was. ‘I’m going to Mrs Wallace’s grave,’ he told her. ‘But I’m not getting much local information.’
‘That’s Yorkshire for you,’ said Mrs Carshaw.
‘I suppose so,’ said Jeremy.
He went uphill out of the village to Foothunt House, passing stony fields in which sheep grazed, then found a drive beyond two pillars mounted with weather-beaten animals of some kind. There were manicured lawns on either side of the drive, and behind the house, high moors stretched. The house, when he reached it, was not large. The two main floors had small windows. Jeremy calculated there were probably no more than six or seven bedrooms. The front door was narrow, and protected by a portico. Even under bright August sunshine the building seemed gloomy and featureless. Jeremy flinched at the thought of those small rooms and the winds coming off the moors in winter. If the Rodon shares turned out to be worth anything, he wouldn’t be planning a move to anywhere like Foothunt House. Then a Rottweiler came round a corner of the house, ran up, stopped quite close to him, crouched down and barked at him. He looked round and noted Finn walking, with dignity, back down the drive away from the Rottweiler. Jeremy followed suit.
He headed for the sunny uplands, walked round the waterfalls and ate lunch in a tree-fringed glade with the sound of the falls in his ears. He concluded he had found out as much about the early life of Alan Petherbridge, the future Prime Minister of Great Britain, as he could, unless he spent another month in Kirkby Rodney. Or perhaps another ten years. If he left early he would be able to get down to Gloucester by early evening and talk to Annabel Petherbridge early next day, a plan which suited him very well.
On the way back he visited the churchyard of St Martin’s, a small stone church, four hundred years old, set in hilly fields just outside the village. The churchyard was small and in one corner, near the church wall, he found a mossy headstone on which the name of Annette Wallace was cut. Although many of the headstones of other graves had been cleaned and had flowers and plants growing on them, Annette Wallace’s resting-place had been neglected. Below the headstone grew only grass, dry and brown at this time of year.
He returned to his B&B where the smell of baking attracted him. When Mrs Carshaw offered him tea he was sorely tempted to stay but told her that although he would appreciate a cup of tea and a biscuit, he had to start on the next leg of his journey. In Mrs Carshaw’s neat front room, which he had not before entered, he noted a Times lying on a small table beside her armchair with most of the crossword filled in while in front of the fire was another table where, on a chess board, the positioned pieces suggested an ongoing game. Mrs Carshaw caught his glance at it and explained that she was expecting a neighbour later, for their regular game.
Jeremy looked into Mrs Carshaw’s roun
d, unlined face and understood everything. He had several ordinary-looking aunts. One, retired, had been a senior officer at the Foreign Office and another was an expert, or perhaps the expert, on Hittite inscriptions. He took his cup of tea, sat down in the well-stuffed chair opposite Mrs Carshaw’s and came clean. He told he was not a journalist and worked for Lord Gott, whose career he explained. If Mrs Carshaw was surprised by this information she did not show it. She asked him, ‘What does your employer hope to achieve by getting information about Alan Petherbridge?’
‘Lord Gott believes in information for its own sake,’ he replied. ‘He’s capable of taking a few scraps and coming up with a whole scenario.’
‘Does he get it right?’
‘Usually,’ he replied.
‘Alan Petherbridge is going to be the head of Lord Gott’s party. Why would your boss investigate him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jeremy told her. He felt as if he’d been caught in the drawing room holding a football with the pieces of a vase at his feet.
‘Do you like Lord Gott?’ asked Mrs Carshaw.
Jeremy thought. ‘Yes – I suppose I do.’
‘I still don’t understand why he would investigate his own leader,’ Mrs Carshaw persisted.
‘He told me he was concerned – that was the word he used.’
Mrs Carshaw sat quite still, thinking. Evidently she came to a decision. ‘This isn’t for publication?’
Jeremy felt compelled to be honest. ‘No – but I can’t guarantee it wouldn’t be, at some point.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you. This has nothing to do with politics, of course. It all goes back over forty years, while I was still at school. The Wallaces must have moved into Foothunt House when I was in my early teens – the boy, Alan, would have been about seven but he didn’t go to the village school. He was at a preparatory school somewhere. The Wallaces didn’t mix in locally, even less than most incomers to the neighbourhood who buy large houses here. They didn’t shop locally, they didn’t seem to go out much, they didn’t seem to know anybody and obviously didn’t want to. Alan, when he was home from school, wasn’t allowed to play with the local boys. It must have been a lonely life. The point about the villages in this part of the world, which were once very cut off from the rest of the world, is that people feel threatened when they know nothing about the neighbours.
‘In a remote village you used to need to know your neighbours, what they do, who they are and whether you could rely on them or not. And the feeling’s still there. And, of course, there’s nosiness – the Wallaces didn’t mix. They didn’t have anyone to help in the house. No one went inside. No wonder everybody thought they had something to hide. Of course, gossip went round and then finally it came out that Wallace beat his wife. That wasn’t gossip. That was fact. They’d been in the village about five years by then so Alan would have been about twelve or thirteen. Then Annette Wallace was admitted to hospital – where the postmistress’s sister was a ward sister. She’d been badly beaten – concussion and broken ribs – she was unconscious and apparently it took her the best part of a day to come round. In other words, her injuries were so severe her husband had no choice, that time, but to get her to hospital. And there – although she made the usual excuse that she’d fallen downstairs – it was plain that this was a beating, and not the first. There were old bruises and badly mended bones when they looked. They tried to talk to her about it but she denied everything – there was nothing anybody could do. They patched her up and sent her home.’
‘Oh,’ said Jeremy, shocked. ‘What about Alan, did his father – stepfather—beat him, too?’
‘Hard to say. Didn’t seem so. Anyway, two years after that Annette Wallace was dead of cancer. It was the same thing again – she didn’t get to hospital until it was too late to do anything about it. God knows what she went through.’
‘I saw her grave,’ Jeremy said. ‘I didn’t realize …’
Mrs Carshaw shook her head. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Do you think Alan knew what was happening to his mother?’
‘A lot can be hidden from children away at boarding school,’ she said.
But Jeremy could not help imagining a boy with intelligent black eyes, in pyjamas, on a landing, seeing his mother being punched about the hall, or perhaps just hearing the accompanying sounds, the thuds and crashes of a woman being savagely beaten. Then there would be the limping figure in the morning, the pallor, sleeves falling back to show bruises on the arms. He said, ‘Alan must have been fourteen when his mother died. He must have known something.’
‘Probably.’
‘I wonder what that does to you?’
‘Seemingly it doesn’t prevent you from becoming the Prime Minister,’ said Mrs Carshaw.
‘What happened after that? What happened to Wallace? Did he die?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘He got crippled with arthritis. He’s in a retirement home now.’
Jeremy stared at her. None of this had been in the clippings. ‘Where is he?’
‘It’s called Fairlawns. Near Lancaster. I go to see him every Christmas, as a duty. He’s a horrible old man. You can’t just go there – you have to ring in advance.’
‘I’d better go anyway,’ declared Jeremy.
‘You can try,’ said Mrs Carshaw. ‘I hope they let you see him.’
‘Who?’ he asked.
Mrs Carshaw shook her head. ‘I don’t suppose Mr Petherbridge trusts his father.’
As Jeremy paid his bill Mrs Carshaw sketched a map on the back of an envelope. Handing it to him she said, ‘You won’t enjoy it.’
‘I don’t suppose I will,’ said Jeremy, who was still a little shaken by the story she had told him. ‘Tell me this, Mrs Carshaw. You’ve been dealing with children all your life, and you’ve seen a lot of them grow up – do you think anyone could survive that background?’
She shook her head. ‘No – it’ll have an effect, but you can’t judge what that effect will be.’
‘Why did you tell me?’ he asked, as he walked away.
She paused, as if she hardly knew the answer herself. ‘I’m like your boss – concerned.’
Fairlawns Retirement Home, Judge Beacon Street, Lancaster. August 26th, 2015. 4.30 p.m.
Fairlawns Retirement Home was a long, two-storey house, no doubt built by some successful coal owner or merchant during the nineteenth century. A drive ran between two well-kept lawns with trees beyond. Jeremy parked his car and entered the hall, with no idea what to expect. He had phoned Lord Gott from the road outside, half-expecting him to be more or less uninterested in the tale of Petherbridge’s background of domestic violence. Instead, Gott had said, ‘God Almighty. Get into that home and talk to the old man. Have you got a recorder?’ When Jeremy told Gott he hadn’t Gott told him, ‘Drive into the town and buy one.’
‘I may not get in – there seems to be a system,’ Jeremy warned.
‘Make bloody sure you do.’
Now Jeremy, with the pin-sized recorder under the lapel of his jacket, stood in a wide tiled hall. Against one wall there was a pedestal on which stood a massive arrangement of flowers, and beside it was a wheelchair containing the slumped body of an old lady. There was the sound of loud music and gunshots from a television. After a minute a small, dark woman in a checked uniform came hurrying in from one side of the hall, went to the wheelchair and grasped the handles firmly.
‘Excuse me,’ said Jeremy. ‘I’ve come to see Mr Wallace, Robert Wallace.’
‘Through there,’ said the small woman in an accented voice, nodding towards the doorway through which she’d come. ‘By himself. By the window,’ she added, as she began to push the wheelchair with its unconscious burden briskly towards a door on the opposite side of the hall.
Jeremy, realizing he had evaded whatever security system the home operated, moved swiftly into a long, forty-foot room, previously, no doubt, the drawing room of the house. On the near side was a cluster of some f
ourteen elderly people, seated in chairs or wheelchairs arranged round a large TV showing an action film. Soldiers moved through a desert; explosions went off. Many of the viewers seemed to be asleep. Jeremy crossed a long stretch of carpet to the window end of the room, where a figure in a wheelchair was gazing out at the lawn in front of the house.
Jeremy went to the side of the wheelchair, looked down at a craggy face and asked, ‘Mr Wallace?’
The face, with its prow-like nose, looked up at him. Robert Wallace said, ‘Who are you?’ His small blue eyes, under overgrown grey eyebrows were sharp and angry.
Jeremy put out his hand and said, ‘Jeremy Saunders, from the Observer. I wonder if you could spare me some time to talk about your stepson.’
‘The shit,’ said the old man, as if confirming the identity of the subject.
‘Alan Petherbridge,’ said Jeremy.
‘That’s right,’ Robert Wallace said.
Wallace’s legs were covered by a plaid blanket. His hands, emerging from the sleeves of a crisp blue shirt, were placed on the arms of the wheelchair. The knuckles were huge and the fingers distorted, looking, Jeremy thought irrelevantly, less like human hands than the hands of some alien monster in a film. He got a chair and put it near the window, sideways on to Wallace, who had not yet moved his head. Perhaps, Jeremy thought, any movement was painful. He looked at the long, bony profile, topped with a shock of badly cut grey hair, and reflected that Wallace must have been a good-looking man, in his time. ‘I expect you know that your stepson is likely to be the next Prime Minister in the autumn. My paper is collecting some background information—’
‘He was a little shit as a boy. He still is,’ said Wallace. ‘I need to get out of here – look at it – zombies round the TV – zombies in charge. Will he do anything? No, he won’t. His wife should be looking after me. But no, he likes me trapped here. I’m surprised you found me.’
Jeremy decided to skirt round this topic and thought that from what he’d seen of the old man so far, in Petherbridge’s shoes he might want the old man caged up somewhere far away from him. There was the sound of a shattering explosion from the TV, then swelling music.
Fifty-First State Page 10
