Fault Line - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  2010

  THIRTY-FIVE

  WHEN THE SOUND of a car engine broke my reverie, I assumed it was Vivien returning to her home from home at Lannerwrack Dryers, where she’d find me waiting for her. But almost immediately I realized the note of the engine was all wrong for the Volkswagen Beetle that Pete Newlove had told me she drove. It was too low, too throaty, altogether too powerful. It sounded more like a sports car.

  And that’s what it was: a sleek blood-red speed machine that I guessed belonged to Adam Lashley before I actually recognized him as the driver. He braked to a sharp, pebble-spraying halt beside Vivien’s caravan, pushed the door open with his foot and heaved himself out.

  Adam hadn’t improved with age. I suppose he was never likely to have. The vain, spoilt, tempersome child was still there to be seen in the fat, ruddy-faced, scowling forty-seven-year-old. He was wearing an expensive suit, but bought off the peg. The sleeves of the jacket were too long and I’d have bet against him being able to fasten it. The trousers were too long as well, the bottoms gathered in folds at his ankles. The shirt he’d paired it with seemed designed for a beach holiday. Altogether, the man was a mess.

  I suspected the mess was as much psychological as physical. Adam had never played more than a notional role in the running of Intercontinental Kaolins. He lived (and lived well) on the allowance his father paid him, spending most of his time in Thailand. Office rumour left no vice unimagined where his activities there were concerned, though it had always struck me that for a pleasure-seeker Adam never looked as if he was enjoying himself.

  True to form, his expression as he glanced round him was thunderous. But, also as usual, he didn’t see what was in front of him: me. He took the cigar he was smoking out of his mouth, hawked up some phlegm and spat it out, then slammed the car door and strode towards the caravan.

  He must have known, from the absence of the Beetle, that Vivien wasn’t there. Perhaps that was why he didn’t bother to knock. He just gave the door handle a few futile wrenches, then peered in through one of the net-curtained windows. That got him nowhere, of course, though where he was actually trying to get was unclear.

  It didn’t stay unclear, however. He stalked back to the car, opened the boot and pulled out a crowbar. Not liking the look of that, I eased the door of the Freelander open and stepped lightly out.

  He had his back to me as I hurried across the yard and he didn’t hear me coming. He took a last puff on his cigar, threw it to the ground, then stepped up to the caravan and tried to find a levering point for the crowbar between the door and frame. It was a clumsy effort that ended with the crowbar jolting free.

  Adam was shaking a jarred thumb and swearing to himself when I called out his name. He whirled round and his face darkened instantly. ‘Kellaway?’

  ‘Hello, Adam.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘No harm. Unlike you.’

  He looked past me and registered the presence of the Freelander. Then his scowl was back on me. ‘Why don’t you mind your own fucking business?’

  ‘Business is why I’m here. Boss’s orders, you could say.’

  ‘What orders?’

  ‘Those missing records that have held up Doctor Whitworth’s researches? I’ve been sent to find them.’

  ‘The fuck you have.’

  ‘Didn’t your father tell you?’

  The question touched a raw nerve – one of many. He brandished the crowbar as if tempted to attack me with it. I took half a step back. ‘Why don’t you just retire and give us all a break, Kellaway?’

  ‘I will. After this last job.’

  ‘I don’t know where the fucking records are.’

  ‘I never said you did.’

  ‘Maybe Vivien stole them. Has that crossed your pathetic little mind?’

  ‘It has, yes. And it looks like it might have crossed yours, too. Planning to search the caravan, were you?’

  ‘This is IK property. I am IK. So, if I want to give an illegally pitched caravan the once-over, I can. And I will.’

  ‘It’s here with your father’s consent. I can’t let you break into it.’

  ‘How are you going to stop me?’

  ‘Don’t do it, Adam. It’d be a big mistake. Haven’t you made enough of them in your life?’

  ‘What would you know about it? Luckily for me, you’ve mostly been out of my life since you cost my mother hers.’ It hadn’t taken him long to remind me of my role in the events that had led to Muriel Lashley’s death. But the blame game wasn’t one I had any intention of playing.

  ‘Doctor Whitworth told me you’d been in touch with her.’

  ‘So what if I have?’

  ‘I’m puzzled, that’s all. Why should you care whether a history of the company gets written? It’s not a subject you’ve ever shown any interest in before.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to the likes of you.’

  ‘That’s true.’ It always had been. One of the first things he’d ever said to me, as a five-year-old boy, was, ‘You don’t matter.’ I remembered then what Oliver had said about him on that occasion: ‘If you gave him a real gun, he’d be happy to shoot me.’ Nothing had changed. Nothing, I’d lived long enough to understand, ever really changed at all.

  ‘Why don’t you just piss off, Kellaway?’

  ‘Why don’t you, Adam?’

  I don’t know if I’d intended to provoke him. The retort was out of my mouth before I’d weighed the words. But the effect wasn’t long in coming. Something dark and primitive I’d seen a few times before blazed in Adam’s eyes. He strode towards me and took a vicious swing at my head with the crowbar.

  He was probably drunk, or drugged. Or maybe he’d ingested so much over the years that he was never free of the effects. Either way, my reactions were quicker than his despite my age. I dodged to one side and he decapitated a chunk of thin air. The force of his swing carried him off balance and he was suddenly sprawling on the ground.

  He’d let go of the crowbar in the process. I grabbed it and backed away. He stared woozily around, as if confused about how he’d ended up where he was. Then he noticed me and confusion was evidently dispelled. ‘Clever fucker, aren’t you?’ he panted.

  ‘Go home, Adam,’ I said, genuinely hoping he’d take my advice.

  He pushed himself up and scrambled to his feet with a lot of help from the wing of his Lotus. The glare he shot at me then was impersonal, I felt. It bore the hostility with which he always confronted the world.

  ‘I’ll hang on to this for the time being,’ I said, keeping a firm grip on the crowbar.

  ‘You’ve got it coming, Kellaway. You know that? Some time soon. Oh yeah.’ He nodded for emphasis. ‘You can count on it.’

  ‘Any message you want me to give Vivien?’

  ‘The same goes for her. You can tell her that.’

  ‘She’s got it coming as well?’

  ‘You all have. The fucking lot of you.’

  His hatred was indiscriminate. I doubted he could have supplied a coherent explanation of who ‘the lot of us’ were. Nor could he have said what form his wrath would take. He probably wouldn’t remember the threat a few hours after uttering it. But he was angry. That at least was clear. He was very angry. He had been all his life.

  ‘Think I’m joking?’ He wagged a finger at me. ‘Wait and see.’ He staggered round to the driver’s side of the car, clambered in and started up. The high-performance engine supplied some of the machismo he’d come up short on. He swept round the yard in an arc, then put his foot down and sped away.

  I watched the dust settle in his wake and listened to the fading growl of the Lotus. Then I walked slowly back to the Freelander.

  Fate hadn’t been kind to Adam’s family. That justified some of his bitterness, I couldn’t deny. The rest was a product of his own personality. He believed he was entitled to every good thing in life. And his resentment that some of them had eluded him knew no bounds.

  His m
other’s death was a trauma and a tragedy. But at twenty-one he’d been old enough to recover. The fact that he never really had made me wonder if part of him hadn’t welcomed the excuse it supplied to gorge on self-pity. His father’s prompt remarriage (indecently prompt, many said) couldn’t have helped, though I suspect it was nothing compared with Adam’s horror when, at nearly seventy, Lashley had sired another child. At least it had been a daughter rather than a son for the old man to dote on.

  Michelle Lashley was now, at twenty-three, a top-flight equestrian, with Olympic aspirations much burnished by her mother. The Lashleys’ residence near Augusta was large enough to accommodate enough stables, paddocks and training facilities to supply a cavalry troop, let alone one pampered and privileged young woman with a perfect seat. I hadn’t seen Jacqueline in years and had never summoned the nerve when I had to ask how and why she’d come to marry a man three decades older than she was. Maybe her (apparently) perfect daughter was the answer. Connubial bliss hardly seemed to be, based on the amount of time they were reported to spend apart. When Lashley was at home, Jacqueline and Michelle would be three-day eventing in Europe. When they returned, he’d take himself off to Capri. He stayed there more and more. The dry heat of the island was certainly better for a man of his age than the humidity of Georgia. But the arrangement may have had more to commend it than that. It appeared to suit all parties.

  When Vivien had last been to Capri, or Georgia, I wouldn’t have liked to guess. If Adam was feeling sorry for himself, he could always have reflected on how much more fortunate he was than his half-sister. The admission she’d gained to the aristocracy by marrying the Honourable Roger had led to nothing but scandal and catastrophe. Roger’s drug habit probably explained his accidental shooting (mercifully not fatal) of a rambler on a footpath that crossed his father’s estate. But six months in prison only made the habit worse. Then their son, Dylan, embodiment of so many of Vivien’s hopes for the future, wrote himself off in the Lamborghini he’d been given for his twenty-first birthday. Within two years, Roger was dead of an overdose. How Vivien had coped (or not) I didn’t know. Lashley confined his discussions with me to business and I never saw any other member of the family. Harriet Wren was dead by then. My mother could tell me nothing and had preoccupations of her own as my father’s health began to fail. All the IK rumour mill reported was what I could easily have guessed. Vivien was a stricken soul.

  The rumour mill had it that Roger’s father, Viscount Horncastle, did everything he could to support Vivien. But he too was dead now and according to Pete Newlove the new viscount, Roger’s younger brother, had sent her packing from the ancestral home. Her estrangement from Lashley, which Pete had also mentioned, was perhaps no great surprise. They weren’t blood relatives, after all. And his second wife was the same age as Vivien. It wasn’t a recipe for good or close relations. Whether through choice or circumstance, then, she was alone. No longer young, no longer wealthy, no longer a mother, she dwelt now in the ruins of her life.

  The afternoon advanced. The greyness of the day deepened. And then she came.

  I watched the car come to a sputtering halt next to the caravan. A woman stepped wearily out. She was wearing jeans, trainers and a baggy dark-red jumper, with an unzipped blue fleece on top. Her grey hair was tied back plainly behind her head. Her face was Vivien’s, I persuaded myself with an effort, but it was the face of an altered Vivien, puffy and pallid, with loose flesh around the jaw. She’d put on some weight. There was a bulkiness to her figure the shapelessness of her clothes couldn’t conceal. And there was a stiffness to her movements. Someone who didn’t know her would see a luckless old woman leading a threadbare existence. I saw the memory of the beautiful girl I’d fallen in love with. And I saw the cruelty of what she’d become.

  She peered at the door of the caravan for a moment, then unlocked it and swung it open. She fetched a couple of bulging black plastic sacks from the boot of the car and went in. The door closed behind her. I waited for a minute or so, then climbed out of the Freelander and started across the yard.

  When I was a few yards from the door, I heard the key turn in the lock.

  I knocked and called her name. ‘Vivien.’

  ‘Go away, Jonathan,’ she called back. Her voice hadn’t changed at all. It was soft and slightly husky, just as I remembered.

  ‘I only want to talk to you.’

  ‘There’s nothing for us to talk about.’

  ‘Most of Wren and Co.’s records have gone missing. Have you heard?’

  ‘I didn’t take them.’

  ‘I’m not accusing you of anything.’

  ‘Have you been sent to find them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By Greville?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I don’t talk to people who take Greville’s orders.’

  ‘We’re talking now.’

  ‘Go away. Please.’

  It was the please that touched my heart. I felt suddenly and deeply moved. And I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

  Vivien didn’t say anything either. But she unlocked the door. And pushed it open.

  We looked at each other in a frozen interval of silence, all our memories, the good and the bad, compressed between us as something solid but invisible.

  Eventually, Vivien broke the silence. ‘You remember when the circus used to come to town, Jonathan? In our childhood?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘There was always a gypsy fortune-teller. One year I pleaded with my father to let me have my fortune told. He forbade it, which was unusual. He never normally forbade me anything. “It’s best not to know the future, kitten,” he told me. He used to call me that sometimes – kitten. I was disappointed. I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to know the future. Well, I understand now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Vivien,’ I said, genuinely but unavailingly.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Most of it’s none of your fault.’

  ‘I’m still sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t help. But thank you, anyway.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘To see if I’m hiding the missing files?’

  ‘If you tell me you didn’t take them, I believe you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t. I’m the obvious suspect.’

  ‘Because of Oliver?’

  ‘I’m glad you haven’t forgotten him.’

  ‘I’ll never do that.’ I took the pig’s egg out of my pocket then and offered it to her. ‘I thought you might like this.’

  ‘Oliver gave it to you. You should keep it.’

  ‘Do you have many reminders of him?’

  ‘I have his photograph album. That’s about it.’

  ‘Are there any pictures of him in it?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘I’d really like to see them. If you’ll let me.’

  She stared at me pensively, then nodded. ‘All right. Come in, then.’

  She moved back and I stepped inside. The caravan wasn’t quite as cramped as I’d expected, largely because there was so little in it. Wherever most of Vivien’s possessions were, they weren’t there. The kitchenette at one end, the bed at the other and the living area in between were equipped with the barest of essentials. There was a tall cupboard where I assumed the contents of the black sacks had already been stowed, another cupboard under the sink and another, with sliding doors, beneath the bed. Storage space was otherwise non-existent. A pile of stolen CCC files was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘I left just about everything I own in Lincolnshire,’ she said, as if some kind of explanation was required. ‘I left most of me there as well.’

  ‘Has it got any easier … to bear your loss?’

  ‘I suppose it must have. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be living and breathing and … existing.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’d rather not talk about it, Jonathan. Honestly. We can talk about Oliver. Long enough has passed since you and I saw him floating
in the lake at Relurgis for us to do that. Time really is some kind of healer.’

  ‘I haven’t come here to upset you.’

  ‘No. You’ve come here to find out if I know who might have removed those files. Who, when and why. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘The only person I can think of who ever showed any interest in Wren’s records was—’

  ‘Oliver.’ She looked at me.

  ‘Yes. Oliver.’

  ‘So, I might have taken them … to search for what he was so interested in.’

  ‘You might have.’

  ‘But I didn’t.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Someone … covering their tracks.’

  ‘Tracks of what?’

  ‘It’s your job to find out, apparently. Maybe it always was.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Oliver chose you, Jonathan. I’m not sure why. But he did.’

  ‘Chose me to do what?’

  ‘Finish what he started.’ She stepped across to the tall cupboard, opened the door and took something down from a high shelf. It was the photograph album she’d mentioned. It had stiff black covers and a gold tassel at the spine. She laid it on the table that stood in front of the window and flicked through the pages until she found what she was looking for. ‘There he is,’ she said softly.

  It was a snapshot of Oliver as I remembered him: slim-faced and high-browed, his hair straw-blond in the slightly faded tones of the print. He was squinting in strong sunlight, his eyes in shadow. There was the faintest of smiles for the benefit of the camera. Behind him was an overgrown headland and a broad expanse of blue ocean.

  ‘I took that near the Villa Jovis when we went to Capri in the summer of ’sixty-seven,’ said Vivien. ‘The pictures of Oliver in the album are amateur efforts compared with the others, because he could take those himself, obviously.’

  ‘Was he a keen photographer?’

  ‘In the same way he was a keen chess player. Whatever he did, he wanted to be the best at. Look at these.’

  She turned several pages over in slow succession. As many of the photographs were black and white as colour. They were mostly impersonal studies of the clay country: spoil heaps, drying sheds, railway lines, mica lagoons, refining tanks, often pictured from unusual angles and either early or late in the day, to judge by the thin, slightly eerie light. There was an expertise to them that amounted in some cases to true artistry. ‘I’m surprised you’ve never shown me these before,’ I said.