Francesca was silent.
‘If his mother hadn’t died, if his father hadn’t rejected him, he would still have found something to make a fuss about, some excuse for his failures. Naomi’s had enough, if you ask me, and I can’t blame her. She’s kept him for years now, and it’s not right.’
‘But she earns so much, and – ’
‘Francesca, you have been listening to him. I thought so. Don’t. Or take some of that salt with you next time. What Naomi earns has got nothing to do with it. He ought to have some pride. And some guts.’
‘I think it takes quite a lot of guts, to stick to what you believe in,’ said Francesca.
‘Depends what that is,’ said Jess. ‘I don’t call sitting around letting your wife keep you believing in anything. Except what your own vanity tells you. No, Francesca, Liam sees himself as a special case, and always has done. It’s very nice of you to stick up for him, but he doesn’t deserve it. I’ve bought Jack a present, by the way,’ she said, clearly deliberately changing the subject, ‘one of those transformer things. He told me all I had here was puzzles, and they were girls’ things. He’s right,’ she added. ‘This looks much more fun.’
‘Granny Jess!’ said Francesca, grateful for the change of direction. ‘Haven’t you heard of sexual conditioning?’
‘Unfortunately yes,’ said Jess. ‘Load of rubbish. Pattie was the same, never let Barnaby have any guns to play with. He used to pull the legs off the girls’ dolls, use them for guns instead.’
Francesca laughed, slightly hysterically. She felt tears suddenly stab at her eyes, turned away quickly. Jess looked at her, frowned, then said, her voice rather gruff, ‘What is it, Francesca?’
‘Oh – nothing,’ she said, dashing her hand across her eyes, ‘just a bit tired. That’s all. It’s difficult this, you know, with the company and Bard and everything.’ She sounded cross, even to herself.
‘Yes, of course it is,’ said Jess. ‘I realise that. And anything to do with Isambard is more difficult than it need be. But – ’ She frowned again. ‘Is there more to it, Francesca? More than the company going down, I mean?’
‘I – don’t think so. No. Not really.’
There was a silence, then: ‘I think there is,’ said Jess, ‘and I think you know there is. So does he. I’m not a fool, you know.’
‘Of course you’re not. But – ’
‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me. And I know how loyal you are. But if you want to talk about it, you can. It would go no further, I promise you that.’
Francesca looked at her and longed more than anything to tell her. To get some of her tough, uncompromising views, to be told what to do. And knew, because Jess loved Bard so much, because he was her son, she could do no such thing.
‘No,’ she said finally, ‘no, it’s all right really. Everything’s quite all right.’
Oliver went with Melinda to see his mother on Sunday afternoon. He didn’t really want to, indeed he could hardly face it, but anything was better than being alone with his thoughts, with thoughts of Kirsten, with the phone silent. He listened to the two of them discussing the clothes in the Next Catalogue, wishing they would shut up, and drinking endless cups of the disgusting nursing home tea. He would never have believed anything could hurt so much.
Bard arrived back late on Sunday night; Francesca, lying in bed, heard the car pull up. She switched her light off quickly, so that she could pretend to be asleep. She really couldn’t face him now. She felt no further on in her dilemma; she had nothing to tell him, she didn’t want to see him.
But then she’d had nothing to tell him for what felt like a long time, and nor had she wanted to see him; and that thought alone was deeply distressing.
She heard him coming up the stairs and tensed, dreading his hand on her door-handle, his figure appearing in her doorway. But the footsteps stopped at his dressing room; she heard the door open and then close again behind him. She relaxed; but she couldn’t sleep.
In the morning he was politely distant. ‘I’ve told Nanny you’ll ring her this morning, either go down there or get the children back here. I dropped in last night, Jack’s missing you.’
‘Yes, all right. I’ll probably go down there. What are you going to do today?’
‘God knows,’ he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee, ‘but I – oh, thanks Sandie.’
She had appeared with the post; he leafed through the thick heap of letters. ‘God. Dozens of them. All commiserating, no doubt, all needing to be answered. Well, you can help with those. I – Christ, what’s this?’
He had pulled a letter rather roughly out, thrown the envelope down on the table. It was a heavily deckled job, addressed in a rather uneducated hand. The postmark was Torquay.
‘What is it?’
‘Ssh,’ he said, quite quietly, ‘I’m trying to – ’ He sat, deathly still, reading it, and then, after a moment, looked at her across the table. ‘Did you take a call?’ he said, and his voice was deceptively light, easy. ‘From a Maureen Hopkins? A week or so ago?’
‘Oh – oh, God, yes, I did,’ she said. ‘Well, it was on the answering machine actually. I’m sorry, Bard, I forgot to tell you. It was just before – before the crash. You know, that Thursday? You were away, in New York I think. It didn’t seem terribly important. With so much else going on, I just – ’
‘It didn’t seem terribly important?’ he said, and his voice now had the deathly quiet tone to it that preceded a violent outburst. ‘Is that right? Is that what you decided?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. It was just – ’
‘You have no right,’ he said, and the voice was rising now, ‘no right at all, to decide what is important and what is not. Do you understand? It was important, as it happens, hugely important. How dare you make decisions about my phone calls, decide what you will and won’t tell me …’
‘Bard, I didn’t decide. I forgot.’
‘Oh, well, that makes it perfectly all right, doesn’t it? That you forgot. Christ almighty, Francesca, this is – oh, never mind.’
He turned and left the kitchen; she heard him going along the corridor to his study, heard the door slam behind him.
Five minutes later he came back. He looked very drawn, very strained. ‘I’ve got to go out,’ he said, ‘I have to go and see someone.’
‘Who? This – this Mr Hopkins?’
‘Yes. This Mr Hopkins. As you call him. He’s very ill. If you hadn’t decided he wasn’t important, I could have gone sooner. I may not be back until very late. Possibly even tomorrow.’
‘Why, where are you going, where is he?’
‘He’s in hospital. In Torquay. Bit of a long journey. Still, I don’t exactly have a lot to do …’
‘Bard, why on earth are you going all that way so suddenly? What’s wrong, what’s happened?’ And then she stopped, staring at him. It was something else, something else he wasn’t going to tell her. Something else wrong.
‘I can’t stop and have some bloody silly conversation with you now,’ he said, picking up his keys, ‘I’ve got to go. And if by any chance your friend Mr Townsend should get on the phone, tell him to climb back up his own arse, would you? And that he’ll be hearing from my lawyers. All right?’
‘Bard,’ she said, ‘he’s not my friend. But yes, all right.’
Graydon Townsend sat in his window seat on the first flight in to Jersey from Heathrow that morning, meditating upon two things: one, that the catering services of British Airways must be in the hands of someone with a profound dislike of and disdain for the entire travelling population, that they would offer for its sustenance at at eighty forty-five in the morning a shrinkwrapped bread roll that was at the same time stale and soggy, filled with ham, tomato and a rather too thickly sliced, over-vinegared gherkin, and coffee that seemed to have already done several hundred hours of flying time; and two, whether his hunch was going to pay off and his insistence that his editor invested upwards of £500 on a trip to back it up was really going t
o result in a story such as was only granted to a journalist to write once or twice in a lifetime.
Chapter Twenty-five
It was raining when Gray’s plane landed; he stood in a rather long taxi queue for rather a long time and thought that if he were a paid-up visitor to Jersey he’d feel pretty much like getting back on the plane and going home again.
He checked into his hotel in the centre of St Helier (called les Deux Jardins, most inappropriately since it seemed to have at best two very small windowboxes, and which was apparently filled entirely with pensioners and Germans), trying not to succumb to a creeping depression, and then walked through the grey, small-town streets, to meet Alan Ferrers’ friend Andy Beeston.
Beeston worked in the Jersey office of an accountant’s called Crosland and Laing; Gray’s sense of disorientation increased as he passed Kensington Place, Charing Cross, Broad Street, found large plush branches of Chase Manhattan, Coopers and Lybrand, Coutts, nestled close to boulangeries, pâtisseries and most bizarrely, an Indian restaurant called La Balti. St Helier, which he had imagined somehow to be cross between Cannes and the City of London, seemed to resemble more closely Reading overrun by seagulls. Office buildings apart, the only obvious luxury were the off-licences, which were glittering and plush, like Duty Frees. Which, he supposed, they precisely were.
Then he arrived at Crosland and Laing and found Jersey’s other face. The receptionist was glossy, well dressed, efficient; Beeston was young, charming, Sloane speaking. He had booked a table at a restaurant called the Central Bistro which would have been at ease in Kensington; it was packed, and he seemed to know everybody there. Gray ordered moules, sea bass in white wine and garlic sauce, and at Beeston’s suggestion a bottle of Australian Chardonnay, and felt better.
‘So what are you looking for exactly?’ said Beeston.
Gray looked at him over a mouthful of moules. ‘Let’s just say I want confirmation of the identity of someone behind a trust.’
‘Based here? The trust, I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any idea at all of the name of the trust?’
‘No.’
‘Or the firm that conducts its business?’
‘No.’
‘Is there a company that fronts it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Beeston grinned.
‘Needles in haystacks be easy compared to that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Do you know how many registered companies there are in Jersey?’
Gray said he didn’t.
‘Thirty-five thousand. And of course the trusts aren’t registered at all. No way of tracing them whatsoever. You’ll need a few years, I’d say. Still it’s quite nice here, I’m sure you’ll settle down.’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘All my life. We mostly have. We jump ship every now and again, usually after qualifying, but then we come back. It’s a bit claustrophobic, Jersey, and it’s been described as eighty thousand alcoholics clinging to a rock, but it’s a pretty good lifestyle. I’ve got a ten-minute commute, a very nice house, a boat, I pay twenty per cent flat-rate tax, and crime is virtually non-existent. What more could you ask?’
Gray thought quite a lot, but smiled politely and didn’t say so.
‘Now how can I help?’ said Beeston. ‘Any friend of Alan’s and all that.’
‘I don’t know quite,’ said Gray. ‘If you were me, where would you start?’
Beeston looked at him and grinned again. ‘No idea. This is a very – shall I say careful? – community. The business one, at least. We’re about ten thousand strong, and we look after our own. And our clients. Hallo darling, how are you?’
A very pretty girl had come over to their table; she was tall, dark haired, well dressed in a slightly flashy, ’eighties way, in a red silk suit and just too many gold chains. She smiled at Beeston.
‘I’m fine. Just had a very good lunch, bought for me by my boss. He thought I might be going to leave him.’
‘And are you?’
‘Probably.’ She smiled again.
‘Shelley, meet Graydon Townsend, journalist from London. Graydon, Shelley Balleine.’
‘Hallo,’ said Shelley. Her nose wrinkled up rather sweetly when she smiled, Gray noticed, and she had very pretty, small, even teeth. He smiled at her, shook her hand. It had a couple too many rings on it, but it was warm and soft and closed round his immediately. She was sexy as well as pretty.
‘Welcome to Jersey. What are you doing here? Not another exposé of our tax laws and loopholes, I hope. We’re getting pretty jumpy about all that.’
‘No,’ said Graydon, ‘not exactly.’
‘So?’
‘Shelley, join us,’ said Beeston. ‘Glass of wine? Or should you get back, earn that lunch?’
‘Oh, no. No rush. I’d love some wine, thanks.’ She sat down next to Graydon; she smelt good. ‘What are you here for, then?’
‘Looking for someone behind a trust,’ said Beeston. ‘No idea who, what, or what it’s called. Really easy. It’s all right,’ he added to Gray, ‘Shelley is very discreet. She has to be, the way she carries on.’
‘Shut up,’ said Shelley mildly, slapping him gently on the shoulder.
‘Sorry.’
‘What’s he done?’ she said to Gray, looking at him curiously. ‘This person?’
‘Oh – not a lot. He’s just interesting.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she said, ‘if you want us to help. We like a bit of excitement in our lives, don’t we, Andy?’
‘Well,’ said Gray, cautiously, ‘this person, who shall remain very nameless, has been buying a lot of shares. Through the trust.’
‘Why shouldn’t he?’
‘No reason, except they’re in his own company.’
‘Uh-huh. Bit more interesting. And you know for a fact it’s based here? The trust?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I should think it’s almost certainly dealing through a company. Wouldn’t you, Andy?’
‘Probably. If it’s – what shall we say, complex? – in any way. The more tortuous the chain the better.’
‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ said Shelley, sipping her wine, looking at Gray thoughtfully through her large, melting brown eyes, ‘if it isn’t, you’ll never find it anyway. So you’d better put your faith in that one and find the company. If you can’t, you might as well go home.’
‘And how do I find the company? Or rather its whereabouts.’
‘Well, you go to a place called Cyril le Marquand House,’ said Shelley, ‘and look it up. If the company exists, it’ll be there. With its registered address and directors and so on. Then all you’ve got to do is find out if there’s a trust behind it. Which is totally privileged information. Blood out of a stone is easy by comparison.’
‘Thanks,’ said Gray, smiling at her. ‘Well, I’ve obviously got a really easy time ahead. Where is this Cyril le Whatsit House?’
‘Le Marquand. Right on the other side of town, I’m afraid,’ said Shelley, ‘take you at least five minutes to walk there. I’ll come with you, point you in the right direction.’
Tricia was sitting at her desk, sorting out some data Gray had asked her to get on the Docklands, when she got a call from the Sergeant. The Sergeant manned the front reception desk at the News on Sunday and its sister paper the News Daily. He was not actually a sergeant at all, having seen his last days of active service in Suez in the 1950s as a corporal, and the limp he suffered from was not due to a war injury as he led everyone to believe, but to an altercation with a lawnmower ten years previously. The limp was also not quite as severe as it seemed (as those who had observed him playing snooker in the Pig and Whistle when he had had a few could testify), but it contributed to the widely held impression that he had been injured serving King and Country, and over the years had helped him get several jobs in several reception areas. He had been at the News offices now for ten years and was very popular, being respectful to the men a
nd only mildly flirtatious with the women, not so much as to offend any feminist sensibilities, but enough to make them pleased to see him at the beginning (or indeed end) of a bad day. He had a very sure instinct with women, knowing precisely whom to address as Miss So-and-so and who by their Christian names; Tricia was definitely Christian name material.
‘Mr Townsend’s not up there, is he, Trish?’
‘No. No, he’s away.’
‘For how long?’
‘Oh – till about Thursday.’
‘Right. Well, I’ll tell the gentleman that. Or do you want to speak to him?’
‘Well, who is it, Sergeant?’
‘Name of Channing, Tricia. Mr Channing.’
‘Ah. Well, yes, perhaps I’d better speak to him.’
She waited. A voice came on the phone; it sounded angry.
‘Is Mr Townsend there?’
‘Er, no.’
‘Well, where is he?’
‘He’s away.’
‘Oh really? Are you quite sure about that?’
‘Yes, I’m quite sure,’ said Tricia briskly. ‘I’m his personal assistant and – ’
‘Can you tell me where it is, this trip?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t, no. He’s on holiday.’
Gray had told her always to say that, just in case someone about whom he was writing decided to try and find him. Especially if it were a delicate matter. Which this almost certainly was.
‘Well, will you just tell him to keep his rather unpleasant nose out of my affairs. He’ll know what that’s about. Oh and you might tell him I have some very good lawyers. He’ll know what that’s about as well.’
The Dilemma Page 60
