Sausage Hall

by Christina James

  They’ve found no endemic crime within de Vries Industries – its accounts are all in order. (They don’t seem to connect this with the fact that Sentance was a painstakingly efficient FD – with all that that implies!) The supervisors were obviously conducting some kind of prostitution racket, no doubt masterminded by Sentance, but there’s little enough concrete evidence of that and apparently the Crown Prosecution Service is still compiling its case. It’s a moot point whether Margaret Nugent knew that the papers she was given were false. It appears that the twenty-odd girls they’ve found won’t speak up. That doesn’t surprise me. I know what women like that are like.

  DI Yates is concerned that Sentance might have had some nefarious way of disposing of girls no longer hot enough for the game, but I gather there’s no evidence of that, either. And Sentance has left no trace at all of the identity of the girls’ clients.

  No doubt owing to compassion for my grief, I’ve apparently been exonerated of all wrongdoing. Squeaky clean! They didn’t charge me with abducting Archie and they even agreed to fast-track the legal adoption papers and his passport. They understood that there’d be no possible chance of finding his real parents, who had abandoned him before Sentance first discovered him. Jean has been a great help with this. Her motives are suspect, of course, but I think she’s beginning to understand there’s no future for ‘us’. God knows why I had that fling with her. Temporary madness when I found out about Joanna, I suppose. I need to keep Jean sweet for the moment, though, because I’ve had a bid for the company from our biggest competitor and I definitely intend to take it if the price is right. I’ll need Jean to help me to see it through.

  Best of all, I believe I’m getting somewhere with Archie. It’s going to be a long process, but already he’s speaking more and seems to hate me less than he did. I’ve hired a specialist doctor and a nurse to work with him. They’re coming out to St Lucia to join us in a day or two. Archie and I will get settled in first. We’re on the flight now. He’s dozing against my shoulder. Partly it’s the effect of his medication, but generally he’s more placid, more prepared to try to enjoy his life. Neither of us ever mentions Joanna. Her memory will always be too dangerous a place to visit.

  It’s getting dark when we touch down in St Lucia. Derek is waiting for us at the airport. He’s never seen Archie before, but he is as discreet as ever. He makes no comment about the boy as he greets me. He stows all our luggage in the four-by-four while I bring out Archie, who is now sound asleep, and fasten him into the back seat.

  It’s midnight when we arrive at the Caribbean Laurieston (I’m resolved to change its name as soon as I can). The house is in darkness, but I see that Derek has turned on the swimming pool lights.

  “A drink in the cool of the evening, Mr Kevan, before you turn in?” he asks.

  “Thank you, Derek, that would be excellent,” I say. “Just let me put Archie to bed and get changed; I won’t be very long.”

  I carry Archie up to the suite of rooms that belonged to Joanna. He’s never seen them before, of course, but I’m still fearful that some trace of her might unsettle him. I check that the sheets have been changed as I ordered. I take off Archie’s outer clothing and settle him in the bed. He barely stirs. I open one of the wardrobe doors and note with satisfaction that it has been emptied, again as I directed: the hangers swing free; her clothes are all gone. Archie will be fine here.

  I think I hear a sound – a footstep on the polished floor, an arm brushing the wall? I listen again, but there is only silence. It must have been the trill that rippled through the coat-hangers. It lingered longer than I thought. I am not expecting anything to happen tonight. Not yet.

  I make my way to the swimming pool, pausing only to wash my face in one of the rest rooms as I go, pulling the robe around me. Derek has dimmed the poolside lights now, so that they cast a deep turquoise glow over the water. It is so tranquil, so restful, so full of peace. Archie and I will stay here until he is quite well. Perhaps we will stay here forever. Just a little unfinished business now stands between me and a life of perfect blamelessness.

  I sit down on a sun-lounger, recline against its tilted back. Derek comes across and draws over a small table. He is wearing his white jacket now and carries a white bar towel on his arm. He sets down a tray of canapés.

  “May I pour you a drink, sir?”

  I smile up at his broad black face. There is nothing complicated there: no irony, no sarcasm, no sense of treacherous double-dealing. He is the perfect servant: it shines out of him that he wishes only to please, to do his job well so that I will admire him and, as he also knows, reward him. Opa was right to buy this house. His mistake was to build his life and his business in Lincolnshire, to come here only for holidays. If he’d based the business here, how pleasant life would have been. I’d have been surrounded by straightforward folk like Derek; never have had to suffer devious pricks like Sentance.

  I lie back and sip the whisky that Derek has handed me. I close my eyes. I open them again briefly to see Derek tip-toeing away. He dims the lights still further, but he doesn’t switch them off. The night is very warm. Soon I am deep in sleep.

  A noise awakens me. Someone has knocked against the table. I open my eyes. Sentance is there, standing over me. Standing very close. He’s too close. I sit up, try to edge away. Sentance advances a step or two to the very edge of the lounger. I knew he would come and I am ready for him, but still I feel at a disadvantage, waking like this to find him standing there. He is much taller than I am, even when I’m standing.

  “Sentance,” I say. “I knew you would come. Not necessarily in the middle of the night. Do you want a drink?”

  “No,” he says, “Mister Kevan.” The sneer in his voice is threatening. “I want nothing from you except money.”

  “You’ve already helped yourself to plenty.”

  “Five hundred grand, a hundred of which went to Harry Briggs to feed his gambling habit? Do you think that’s enough to keep me for the rest of my life?”

  “Why should I give more?”

  “I think you know why. Whiter than white, aren’t you, Mister Kevan? Not interested in girls. Knew nothing about what was going on at Sutton Bridge. Blessedly faithful to your lady wife. Marriage made in heaven. Distraught when she died.”

  “Of course I was distressed when Joanna died. She meant the world to me.”

  “She did, eh? What about that little peccadillo with the solicitor?”

  “Joanna knew about that. It always caused pain between us, but we managed to move on.”

  “I see. And did she manage to move on from your visits to the caravan site?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you? Don’t you really? Do you remember stopping off for a drink at the Bridge Hotel last winter, after you’d been to the plant?”

  “Not clearly, no. I’ve been in there several times.”

  “Well, on this particular occasion you met Harry Briggs in there. Does that jog your memory? He introduced you to a couple of his friends. Young girls.”

  I swallow.

  “You weren’t to know that we were running those girls, of course. Nor that we had cameras set up in the containers.”

  He fans out several grainy black and white photographs on the table. The quality isn’t good, but you can clearly see that the man with the girls is me.

  “Joanna didn’t like these pictures when I showed them to her. In fact, she hated them!”

  “You showed these to Joanna! When?”

  “I posted one to her as a taster while she was still here. I showed her the others more recently. On the night she died, as a matter of fact. Now, if you . . .”

  I see red. There is a momentary look of horror before he crumples, and my finger remains curled tight around the pulled trigger in my robe pocket.

  “Sir!”

  �
��It’s all right, Derek. Just deal with this, will you? We don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  I walk back into the house, secure in the certainty that there will be no visible stain on the paving or on the rest my life.

  Acknowledgements

  Authors often say that it would have been impossible to complete their books without the help of their family and friends. For Sausage Hall, this is literally the truth! Without the hawkish editorial eye of James Bennett and Annika Bennett’s incredible memory for detail, Sausage Hall would not have seen the light of day. Thank you! And thank you both, Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery, for your enthusiasm, encouragement, amazing good humour and, even more important, the faith that you always place in my work. I’d also like to thank four friends who have been unfailingly supportive: Pamela, Robert, Mandy and Sally. And Chris my son, for his pithy comments. And thank you to all my readers and friends, including my many ‘virtual’ friends across the globe. You enrich my life every day.