Wheel of Fire

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘Our postman, Colin, he heard about it as soon as he started on his rounds. Called us on his mobile early yesterday morning, oh about a quarter to seven I think it was. Said he didn’t want us to find out on the news or anything like that. He knew it would be a dreadful shock for Jack and me, seeing as how long we worked for the Fairbrothers. Jack, even before we were wed. And it was a dreadful shock too. It may have ended badly, but we still feel like part of the family really. Saw young Bella and Freddie Fairbrother grow up. They played with our kids. Sir John was like an uncle to our boys …’

  Martha looked suddenly close to tears. She reached out and grasped her husband’s hand tightly.

  ‘How long exactly did you work for Sir John, Mrs Kivel?’ enquired Vogel.

  ‘Well, my Jack’s always worked for him, really, one way and another. And funnily enough it was twenty-nine year ago last Sunday that he asked us if we’d like to live in, be his caretaker and housekeeper like. Well, us was living with Jack’s parents at the time, couldn’t afford nothing other, I was pregnant with our second lad, Andy, and there wasn’t much room apart from anything else. It wasn’t ideal that was for sure. Sir John offered us The Gatehouse as our home. It had three bedrooms, a lovely garden, and we was surrounded by all that wonderful countryside. We were thrilled, weren’t we, Jack?’

  ‘We were,’ said Jack. ‘And we had a good life up there too. Busy, especially when Sir John was at home, Martha did a lot of the cooking and that. He liked to entertain at weekends. Sometimes he even got me serving the drinks. “C’mon, Jack,” he used to say, “butler duties tonight.”

  ‘“On your head be it, Sir John,” I’d say. We always had a bit of a laugh together, the boss and me. It’s how Martha says, we felt more like family than staff.’

  ‘So how did things go wrong?’

  ‘They didn’t really. Or didn’t seem to. As far as we was concerned anyway. The boss went up to London, like he did most weeks. I drove him to the station as usual, Tiverton Parkway, in his Bentley. He had one of those old Bentleys, said the new ones weren’t proper Bentleys at all. Typical of Sir John, that. Anyway, he seemed in good form. “You know what, Jack,” he said, “I’m thinking of sending you on a course mixing cocktails, then you’ll be a proper butler. What do you think of that?”

  ‘I said, “Not bleddy likely, the only thing I’m any good at mixing is our Martha’s Christmas puddings.” He laughed, then climbed on board the train, still chuckling. I always went on to the platform to see him off. Like you would with family, you see. That’s how it was. He leaned out the window and waved to me as the train pulled out of the station. Like he always did. And he was still chuckling. I can picture it now. That was the last time I ever saw him.’

  ‘Really? You’ve never even caught a glimpse of him since?’

  ‘A glimpse? Well yes, I suppose we both have.’ Martha interrupted. ‘Two or three times, but only in his car. Being driven by that George Grey.’

  Martha spat the last words out.

  ‘I was in Wellington one day in Tim Potter’s, the butchers, the traffic was queued back from the lights, I happened to glance out, and I saw Sir John’s car stopped in the street outside,’ she continued in a more normal tone of voice. ‘It was strange, really. There he was just a few feet away from me. And yet there was this huge distance between us, after all those years. I couldn’t see him clearly, just his shape, because the Bentley’s rear windows be tinted. I could see his white hair though. No mistaking that.’

  ‘OK, so, Jack, what happened after you put him on the train that last time?’ asked Vogel.

  ‘Well, it was a Monday morning,’ replied Jack Kivel. ‘He didn’t have a regular routine. He was his own boss after all. Sometimes he’d stay down for a week or two and not go back to London at all, and sometimes he’d stay in London and not make it back here for two or three weeks. But more often than not he spent the working week in London and his weekends here, so he’d travel up on an early train on Monday mornings. Anyway, two or three days later his secretary called and said Sir John wouldn’t be coming back that weekend or the weekend after. Well, that wasn’t particularly unusual, but I kept expecting to hear from him directly. He was always ringing me when he was away, asking me if I’d planted the new potatoes yet, or if the tree man had been, or some such thing. I didn’t hear though, so eventually I thought I’d better give him a ring, find out what was going on, like. I had his mobile number, of course. He just didn’t pick up.’

  Jack paused. He seemed uncomfortable, perhaps both moved and saddened by the story he and his wife were telling. His hands lay lightly clasped on his lap now, and every so often he unclasped them and rubbed his palms together. It looked to Vogel like an involuntary nervous gesture. After a few seconds Jack continued to speak.

  ‘Martha tried, too. He didn’t answer her either. And that was strange, because he’d always picked up to us before. We kept leaving messages. But no response at all. In the end Martha called Bella to ask if her father was all right. It was then that Bella told her they’d had a bust up, she wasn’t speaking to him and she didn’t give a fuck whether he was all right or not—’

  ‘Jack,’ interrupted Martha reprovingly.

  ‘I’m only saying what Bella said, dear, so they understand.’ Jack turned to face his wife. ‘Martha don’t hold with language like that, do you, Martha?’

  Martha shook her head.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said emphatically. ‘And Bella wasn’t brought up to use it, neither.’

  She switched her full attention to Vogel and Saslow again.

  ‘Anyway, just as us was getting really worried and wondering what the heck was going on, the secretary phones again and says Sir John’s solicitor would be down for the weekend.’ Martha related. ‘We was to get everything ready. Now, I could have sworn she said Sir John and his solicitor were coming. But maybe I just assumed that. It didn’t occur to either me or Jack that Sir John’s solicitor would come without Sir John. But he did. He arrived alone. And as soon as he was settled in, he said he’d like a word with us. He sat us down in the sitting room, poured us drinks, white wine for me, and a whisky for Jack, and said he had some difficult news.

  ‘Then he told us that, with great regret, Sir John had decided it was time for us to move on. Neither Jack nor I grasped exactly what he was saying at first. I didn’t anyway. Time to move on? What the heck did that mean? “I am afraid Sir John feels that he no longer has need of your services,” he went on, cool as you like. Jack looked at me and I looked at Jack. “You mean he’s bleddy well giving us the sack, after all these years?” Jack said. “Well, Sir John wouldn’t put it like that,” he said. “I bet he bleddy wouldn’t,” Jack said. “But that’s what it bleddy well amounts to, isn’t it?”

  ‘I know I started to cry. I couldn’t take it in really. I remember saying, But we live here, this is our home. Where are we going to live? It was then that he told us about the settlement. Basically, this cottage, and one hundred thousand pounds. Afterwards everybody said how generous that was. But we were just in shock. Blackdown Manor was our home for nearly thirty years. And Jack had always been Sir John’s right-hand man, from when he was only a lad, really. It was far more than a job, you see. Far more. For both of us. We looked after Sir John, and his family, proper looked after ’em. That’s how we saw it anyway.’

  For an awful moment Vogel thought Martha was going to burst into tears in front of him and Saslow. But she didn’t.

  ‘Us couldn’t believe it really,’ she continued. ‘All that time. And The Gatehouse. Didn’t matter that us was given another place. The Gatehouse was ours. Sir John let me do what I liked with it. Everything belonged to Sir John, of course. Even the furniture, although we were allowed to take what we liked when he chucked us out. But not a lot of it would fit in here anyway.’

  Vogel thought about the floral curtains, the pink wallpaper, the big chintzy sofa. So, they had been Mrs Kivel’s choice, just as he’d suspected. It somehow had never s
eemed likely that these would be the work of the Greys.

  ‘Not that we’re not happy here now,’ Martha Kivel continued. ‘Lovely little cottage. Sir John had it done up for us an’ all. And we only need the two bedrooms with the boys being married with their own families. But at the time, well, ’twas terrible. And then they tells us the settlement is conditional on us packing up and moving by the end of the month. We had sixteen days to get out. We agreed to it all, of course. Straightaway. Didn’t have any choice. And with what he gave us and what we’d put away all them years we were living rent free, well we’m not badly off. Jack still does a bit of gardening and a few odd jobs here and there, and I have a couple of ladies I clean for, and I makes cakes and puddings that they sell in the Cheese and Wine Shop down in Wellington, so we keep busy and have a bit extra coming in …’

  Vogel felt his eyes beginning to glaze over. Martha Kivel’s words came pouring out in a torrent with barely a pause for breath and little or no opportunity for interruption. She certainly had more to say for herself than her husband. It seemed she was not an unobservant woman though.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Vogel, you didn’t come here to listen to all that, did you,’ she said eventually.

  Vogel blinked rapidly behind his spectacles. He didn’t often lose control of an interview. He really needed to get this one back on course. Local gossip and background information were always useful of course, but there was a limit.

  ‘So, when did you hear that the Greys had moved in and taken over?’ asked Vogel.

  ‘Oh, only a couple of days after we left,’ said Jack Kivel.

  ‘We moved out on the Wednesday and they moved in on the Thursday,’ Martha interrupted, not for the first time. ‘That was the final straw really. Sir John must have had it planned well in advance, must have done. Colin the postie saw all the comings and goings. That hurt as much as anything. Like we was disposable. All that time being told we was family, living like family, we thought, with the Fairbrothers, and then we was out on our ear and this couple from London shunted in almost before we’d shut the door to our home behind us. Outsiders, they were. But then, that’s what we must always have been, really, we reckoned. The way we was treated.’

  ‘Did you ever hear anything about how the Greys were appointed?’ asked Saslow. ‘Whether or not Sir John knew them before he hired them, perhaps, or anything like that?’

  ‘Nope, us don’t know nothing about them Greys. Nor do us want to,’ said Martha vehemently.

  ‘So, when did you hear about Sir John’s illness?’ continued Saslow.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure us can tell ’ee that exactly,’ said Martha. ‘Must have been a couple of months or so after us was chucked out, I suppose. Obviously, Sir John was keeping it quiet. But that’s hard to do round here, very hard. There was nothing, then the word got out, and it just went around everywhere locally. Someone said there’d been a story in one of the papers. But we never saw it. Seemed to come on quite suddenly, his illness. We thought so, anyway. There was a few local tradesmen still went up there at first. And they saw him shuffling around on sticks, apparently. Didn’t speak to anybody and kept out the way. Proud man, Sir John. We could understand that. Course we could. But it hurt all the more, you see. We’d have taken care of him. And we wouldn’t have told nobody nothing. We never gossiped about the Fairbrothers, not even when Sir John suddenly decided to get rid of his first wife, Caroline, and move in that Italian trollop, Antonia.’

  ‘I take it you didn’t approve?’ said Vogel, this time unable to suppress his smile. Martha Kivel and Bella Fairbrother clearly had very similar opinions of Sir John’s second wife.

  ‘No, us didn’t,’ said Martha. ‘We thought Sir John had taken leave of his senses, to tell the truth. Brains in his trousers. We stuck by him, of course, and tried to make Antonia welcome. Never liked her though. And she didn’t last, thank God. They married as soon as he could get a divorce from Caroline, then she walked out on him four or five years later and took him for a pretty penny by all accounts. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened. We were just glad to see the back of her to tell the truth. I think Sir John would have liked Caroline back, but she’d found someone new and didn’t want anything more to do with him. He treated her very badly. Sad for the children though.’

  ‘But they stayed with Sir John at the manor, didn’t they?’ queried Saslow.

  ‘Yes, Sir John had somehow managed to arrange to have principle custody, which surprised us,’ Martha continued. ‘We’d never have thought Caroline would have let them go. I mean they spent a lot of time with their mum, of course, but it wasn’t like living with her. They didn’t just have to put up with the trollop, there was all this shuffling between their mum and dad. There were constant rows about it, too. Freddie was fifteen at the time, and Bella was thirteen. Difficult ages. I don’t think Freddie ever got over it. Reckon that’s what pushed him off the rails. I expect you knows about him being the wild one?’

  ‘Yes, although we might like to hear more about that another time,’ asked Vogel. ‘Meanwhile, can I ask, did you ever have any contact at all with Sir John after you were asked to leave? A phone call, or a letter perhaps?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Jack. ‘We were in touch with his solicitor for a bit, of course. But once we’d agreed to the settlement and signed all the papers to get this cottage made over to us and that, we never heard from any of ’em again. When we learned that Sir John was ill we tried to phone him. We thought, well, if he was poorly, maybe that explained things a bit. But his mobile didn’t even go to answer service any more. And when we called the house, the number had been changed. All the time we was living there we had the same number at Blackdown, but suddenly that had gone along with everything else.’

  ‘Did either of you have any idea if there was anything else that might have caused Sir John to cut himself off like that, apart from his illness?’ asked Vogel.

  Martha chimed in again, shaking her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘We wondered if it had affected his brain in some way, to tell the truth. Otherwise it just didn’t make sense to us, really, for him to behave how he did. I mean, if you’m ill you want your family and close friends around you, don’t you?’

  Vogel agreed that most people did want that. He finished his tea and a second piece of cake while Saslow tucked into a second bacon roll. Then the two officers thanked the Kivels and left.

  In the car Saslow turned to Vogel as she started the engine.

  ‘Bit of a riddle, isn’t it, boss?’ she commented.

  ‘It certainly is, Saslow,’ said Vogel.

  ‘I mean none of it adds up really, does it?’

  Vogel took off his spectacles and wiped them with his handkerchief. He was a man who still always carried a linen handkerchief. He didn’t like paper tissues. They left little bits all over your glasses.

  ‘Oh, it adds up all right,’ he replied. ‘These things always do. It’s just that we haven’t worked out the mathematics yet. That’s all.’

  TEN

  A sun-tanned man with sun-bleached hair, still handsome in a dissipated sort of way, sat outside a bar in Brisbane gazing out to sea. He had just lunched on Brisbane Bay bugs, a crustacean some thought every bit as delicious as lobster, and which Brisbanites, of course, thought even better. The man drew deeply on a cigarette. He’d decided some time ago that he was never going to give up now, so he might as well stop fretting about it and just enjoy. However, on that particular afternoon, he derived little pleasure from the sensation of acrid smoke filling his lungs.

  He had a freshly filled glass of pale Aussie beer, the amber nectar of his chosen country of residence, on the table before him. The beer was also giving him little pleasure. His mobile phone, switched to silent, was on the table next to the glass. He hoped the call he was expecting would come soon. And sure enough, before he was halfway through his beer, the phone buzzed and vibrated.

  He picked it up, hoping for an explanation that would put his mind at rest.<
br />
  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know what’s happened?’ asked his caller.

  ‘I know,’ replied the man. ‘I saw it online. Not made our papers yet. It was an accident surely? I mean, we only had to wait …’

  ‘Of course it was an accident. Nothing has changed. We can still go ahead with our plan.’

  ‘OK, what happens now?’

  ‘Well, we need you back here obviously, assuming you still want to be involved?’

  ‘Of course I do. I don’t have much choice, do I, if I’m going to protect my inheritance.’

  ‘Right, you should call your sister and tell her you’re on the way. Then you should contact the police where you are. They will put you in touch with the investigating team in the UK. As you are the heir, they will want to talk to you—’

  ‘Investigating team?’ interrupted the man. ‘I thought you said it was an accident. Why are the police involved? And why do they want to talk to me? I wasn’t even in the country.’

  ‘It’s just routine. You have nothing to worry about.’

  The voice was both confident and soothing.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, quite sure. But everything needs to be done properly, and with apparent transparency. We cannot afford any mistakes. I hope you understand that.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said the man.

  ‘I must stress that you need to be disciplined and vigilant in everything you do,’ said the disembodied voice. ‘You have made many mistakes in the past.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said the man. ‘But not anymore. I have too much to lose.’

  ‘We all do,’ said the voice, ending the call.

  Freddie Fairbrother wasn’t entirely reassured, but he was certainly not going to back out now. In any case, he had a history of believing what he wanted to believe, rather than facing up to any potentially undesirable reality.

  Freddie had led a fairly indolent life in Australia for almost two decades, enjoying the sun and the sea. And the beer. He didn’t do drugs any more, although he undoubtedly drank far too much. He had an easy smile and bright blue eyes. He was attractive to women and had enjoyed the company of a succession of girlfriends over the years. But none of his relationships ever lasted. In spite of the beer, he was muscularly slim and more than averagely fit for a man of his age, because he swam regularly, sailed, and scuba-dived. Freddie loved anything to do with the sea, but scuba diving was his true passion, largely because he had long ago been seduced by the Great Barrier Reef, that unique complex of almost 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for an extraordinary 1,400 miles just a short boat ride from the coast of Queensland.