‘I know you would,’ Jill agreed. ‘And then there’s the other side of the family. You couldn’t call your uncle Tony a bad man – he’s more of a naughty schoolboy. And even Philip could turn out all right if he really decided to make the effort.’
How well she’d summed them up, I thought. Yet still – and totally unexpectedly – there was enough of the tribal instinct in me to bridle at anything which might sound remotely like criticism.
‘So what’s the problem?' I asked, more belligerently than I’d intended.
‘The problem is the situation,’ Jill said. ‘You’re all trapped in your grandfather’s net, and that can’t be healthy – even for him.’ She glanced down at her watch. ‘I’d better go, or I’ll miss my train.’
A sudden fear sudden swept over me – gripped me tightly with its iron claws, dug its icy cold nails deep into my very soul.
‘Don’t go!’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ Jill asked.
‘Don’t get on that train,’ I pleaded.
‘I have to. I’m expected in Cornwall in the morning.’
‘To hell with Cornwall! Stay here!’
She shook her head. ‘The children are depending on me, so I have to go.’ She broke out into a smile. ‘I tell you what, why don’t you come with me? We can always use an extra pair of hands, and I’m sure the organisers can find you a tent from somewhere.’
‘I’d like to,’ I said, ‘but—’
‘But what?’
‘I’ve promised Grandfather I’ll work for the company for a few weeks.’
‘He’s still trying to reel you in, isn’t he?’ Jill demanded. ‘He thinks that if you get a taste for the business, you’ll drop the idea of being a don, doesn’t he?’
‘It’s not like that,’ I protested. ‘He encouraged me to go to university.’
‘He values education,’ Jill retorted, ‘but he doesn’t set much store by independence.’ There was the sound of an approaching train in the distance. She turned her head towards it. ‘I’d better go.’
I half expected her to kiss me once more, but instead she picked up her suitcase and headed for the entrance. Watching her retreating back, I willed her to turn around, and just before the point at which she would have disappeared from sight, she finally did.
‘I love you,’ I told her.
‘I love you, too,’ she replied. ‘I always will.’
How often, I wonder, have I relived that scene in my mind?
A hundred times?
A thousand?
Perhaps neither of those guesses is anywhere near accurate.
Perhaps, at some level, it is never out of my mind.
That long, lingering kiss.
The way she swung the heavy suitcase, as if, in some way, that would make it seem lighter.
The almost hesitant way she turned for that final declaration of love.
There’s more.
The image of the train I secretly watched pull out of the station, knowing that she was inside it – and that it was taking her away from me.
The walk back to the car park, on legs which felt as if they had turned into lead.
The slow drive home to the family which my beloved Jill thought fed upon itself.
And all the time there was a voice in the corner of my brain whispering the same message over and over and over again: ‘You should have gone with her. You should have gone with her.’
It was a rasping voice, one which fell somewhere between sympathy and malicious glee – and it has never gone away.
Chapter Thirteen
It was bright and early in the morning on the day after I had arrived back in the village, when Owen Flint turned up at the headquarters of Mid-Cheshire Maintenance, the company that Grandfather had bought for my brother John.
It was an impressive set-up, he thought. The garage itself was both clean and orderly, and a dozen or so men in smart overalls were working purposefully on various vehicles. Whatever else could be said about John, he thought, it seemed he’d known how to run a business.
The Chief Inspector met Sam Weatherspoon, the foreman, in the office which overlooked the main work area and, like the rest of the installation, seemed to him to have been designed for efficiency.
‘What was John Conroy like as a boss?’ Flint asked, noting as he spoke that, though the foreman was probably no older than 35, he was already combing his hair in a way which showed he was worried about a bald spot.
‘He was a good boss,’ Weatherspoon said. ‘Quiet, but firm, that was Mr Conroy. You always knew where you were with him. We’re going to miss him.’
‘I was talking to his wife yesterday …’ Flint began.
‘Oh, her!’ the foreman snorted.
‘I take it you don’t get on,’ the chief inspector said mildly.
‘Putting it simply, she’s a right proper bitch. She tried to get me fired once, you know.’
‘And why would she have done that?’
Weatherspoon pulled a packet of Benson and Hedges out of his overalls, and offered them to Flint. The chief inspector shook his head and reached into his pocket for his reserve supply of Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts.
‘It was like this,’ Weatherspoon said, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette greedily. ‘She’s always had her own car serviced here. Well, she’s … she was … the boss’s wife, so we’ve always given her priority over all our other jobs, even if we’ve got a rush on. You’d have thought that would be enough to satisfy anybody, wouldn’t you? But it wouldn’t do for Madam.’
‘Why wouldn’t it do for her?’
‘Because she expects miracles – that’s why. Look, this one time, she brought her car in because the gears were slipping. I took it for a quick spin and it was obvious to me that the clutch was buggered. “So put a new one in,” she told me – like I was too stupid to work that out for myself. “I’ll do it as soon as I can get my hands on one,” I promised. She asked me how long that would be, and I said probably a couple of days. Well, that didn’t please her at all. Then she spotted one of the company’s cars we were working on. “Take the clutch out of that, and put it in my car,” she said.’
‘Same model?’ Flint asked.
‘Was it hell as like. The company provides its reps with Fords, and Madam’s was a Volvo. She needs a big car for her horsebox, you see.’
‘Rides, does she?’
‘Oh yes, she’s very big in the local hunt – or so they tell me. Anyway, I tried explaining to her that the clutch from the Ford just wouldn’t work – but she wasn’t interested in explanations. “You’re the grease monkey,” she said. “Find some way to make it work.” I told her it was impossible, and she marched right into Mr Conroy’s office and demanded her gave me my cards on the spot. Of course, he wouldn’t do it.’ Weatherspoon chuckled. ‘She was so furious with him that I bet he had to do without his “bit of the other” for at least a week.’
‘And now she’s probably your boss,’ Flint said. ‘That doesn’t exactly bode well for you, does it?’
‘She’ll never be the boss,’ Weatherspoon said. ‘I don’t know exactly what plans old Charlie Conroy had for the business when he passed on, but I do know he’ll never have let control fall into the hands of anybody who wasn’t a blood relative. So either Rob Conroy will be in charge or his cousin Philip will – or maybe it might even be both of them.’
‘So who do you think will actually be running Mid-Cheshire Maintenance?’ Flint asked.
‘I expect that will be me,’ Weatherspoon told him.
‘Will it indeed?’ Flint said musingly. ‘That’ll be a bit of a promotion for you, won’t it?’
‘It’ll mean more work,’ Weatherspoon said, ‘but I don’t think it will mean more pay – especially if Philip Conroy is chairman of the board.’
‘Let’s get back to the question I’d intended to ask when we started discussing Lydia Conroy,’ Flint suggested. ‘Did John Conroy have any business rivals?’
‘Hang abo
ut – are you asking me if one of the other garage owners might have bumped him off?’ Weatherspoon asked.
‘If that’s the way you want to interpret the question,’ Flint said neutrally.
‘There’s a few other garages round here do contract work,’ Weatherspoon said, ‘but they’re not real rivals. None of them is anywhere near big enough to handle the volume of work we do, you see. Anyway, if somebody wanted to steal all our business off us, there are better and quicker ways of doing that than by killing poor Mr Conroy.’
‘Like what, for example?
‘They might burn the place down.’
‘And all the Conroys would have to do is rebuild it.’
‘True, but that would take at least a month, even working at full pelt. And our customers couldn’t wait for a month, because they’ve got obligations to their customers, so they’d be forced to take their business elsewhere. And once you’ve lost a customer in this trade, you very rarely get him back.’
Yes, it all made sense, Flint thought, discarding the maintenance business as a possible motive for murder.
‘Now we’ve ruled out business rivals, can you think of anyone else who wouldn’t shed tears if they heard John Conroy had died?’ he asked.
Weatherspoon shook his head emphatically.
‘Not really.’
‘Did he have any habits which might have got him into trouble?’
‘No. Mr Conroy didn’t gamble, not even in the garage’s Grand National sweepstake. And as far as I know, he never chased other women.’
‘Boozing?’
‘He drank, but only in moderation.’
‘He must have knocked back a few when he was entertaining,’ Flint pointed out. ‘And as I understand it, he entertained a great deal.’
‘It was his wife who did the entertaining. And even at the parties, when everybody else was supping champagne cocktails like they were going out of style, Mr Conway never had more than a couple of beers – at least, that was true of the party I went to.’
‘You were invited to one of the parties?’ Flint asked incredulously.
‘Yes, it was well before the incident of the clutch, but it’s still amazing, isn’t it? Imagine me – a humble mechanic – rubbing shoulders with the crème de la crème of local society. The reason I was invited, I think, was that I was partially responsible for landing a big contract, and it was Mr Conroy’s way of showing his appreciation.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Not really,’ Weatherspoon admitted. ‘But the point is, neither did he. We were both like fish out of water.’
‘So you can’t think of anybody who’d wish him harm,’ Flint said, summing it up.
‘No, I don’t often say this about people, but he was a lovely man,’ Weatherspoon replied.
****
I had called on Grandmother soon after arriving in the village, but Jo Torlopp told me the old lady was exhausted, so it was not until around ten o’clock the next morning when I finally got to see her. She did not look as bad as I’d feared, but I knew that inside she was almost destroyed. Yet even in the midst of her grief, she did not fail to look at me with the questioning expression which all the family had in their eyes after not seeing me for some time – the expression which said “How’s he doing? Is he close to cracking up again?”
‘I’ve been thinking about your father,’ she said. ‘And about John, and your uncle Tony. I’ve been trying to work out what terrible thing one of them could have done to make someone hate him enough to want to kill him.’
‘You’d be far better off leaving that kind of thing to the police,’ I replied gently.
‘I can’t image Edward would – or could – do anything terrible. Or that anybody would notice if he did.’
‘Grandmother …’
‘Let’s be honest,’ my grandmother said, ‘your father wasn’t a man who stuck out in a crowd, was he?’
‘No, he wasn’t.’
‘I don’t think I could even describe him very clearly to someone who didn’t know him. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t short. He wasn’t ugly, but you couldn’t exactly have called him handsome, either. I know he loved you two boys, but I’m willing to wager he never put it into words.’
‘Not to me, anyway,’ I admitted.
‘No, he hardly ever showed his emotions,’ my grandmother continued, ‘though I did once catch him crying over the Verdi Requiem.’
I could believe that. He was like John in that respect – they both kept things bottled up.
‘Uncle Tony was quite different, though, wasn’t he?’ I said, attempting to shift her away from a subject which I was already finding uncomfortable.
‘Oh yes,’ Grandmother agreed. ‘While your father was doing his homework, Tony would be out scrumping apples from other people’s orchards – even though we had plenty of our own. Do you know that on his 15th birthday he was summonsed for riding a motor cycle without a licence?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I confessed.
‘It would have mortified your father, but your uncle Tony treated it like a badge of honour.’
‘Have you seen Philip?’ I asked.
‘Yes. He was at your grandfather’s funeral.’
‘I mean, has he been round here to see you?’
‘He’s been very busy,’ Grandmother said defensively.
‘I’m sure he has been,’ I agreed, but I was thinking, ‘The bastard! The selfish little swine.’
‘You’ve always been too hard on your cousin,’ my grandmother said, reading my thoughts. ‘He didn’t have it easy when he was growing up. Do you remember his mother?’
Did I remember Aunt Jane? Yes, I thought I did, though my memory was only an impressionistic and possibly romanticised recollection of a woman seen through the eyes of a child.
Aunt Jane was tall and quite thin. Her complexion had been almost unnaturally pale, though I assume now that was as a result of her make-up.
She had been a struggling actress before she married Uncle Tony, and, once she was established in the village, she threw herself into all the local amateur dramatic productions with an energy which left the rest of the cast exhausted.
‘They used to fight a lot, her and your uncle,’ my grandmother said.
I didn’t need reminding of that. Everyone in the village was aware of their stupendous rows – of the screaming and the flying crockery.
‘Why doesn’t his father do something about it?’ I can imagine the neighbours muttering after one of these rows had kept them awake well into the night. ‘I mean, it isn’t as if Charlie Conroy keeps his nose out of anything else the lad does.’
But that just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Grandfather tick. He was the boss in his own house, as Grandmother freely acknowledged, and Tony was the boss of his, so if he got himself into a mess he was the one who should deal with it.
‘Of course, it was different while she was pregnant – and even for a while after she gave birth to Philip,’ Grandmother said. ‘While she was carrying, you’d see your uncle Tony walking round the village with Jane on his arm, anxiously looking for any small potholes she might step into. In the pub, he’d be constantly adjusting the cushion at the back of her seat and asking her every five minutes if there was anything she needed. People who saw them smiled, and said that perhaps the marriage wasn’t such a bad thing after all. And you should have seen them with Philip. Talk about proud parents! They couldn’t wait to show him off to the whole world.’
‘It didn’t last though, did it?’ I asked.
Grandmother sighed. ‘No, it didn’t last. Jane wasn’t so much being the proud parent as she was acting the role of one. I’m not saying she didn’t believe it herself – a good actress always tries to immerse herself in her part – but she couldn’t have been entirely genuine or she’d never have behaved the way she did later.’
I was amazed to hear my grandmother talking like that – amazed that she even could. While Grandfather had been alive, she’d b
een no more than a passive adjunct to him. Now he was dead she seemed to have acquired an intelligent, analytical personality of her own.
‘Don’t be so surprised,’ she said, reading my thoughts again. ‘I’ve always had it in me – it’s just that it never seemed to be of much use before.’
‘Tell me more about Aunt Jane,’ I said, to mask my own confusion.
‘The trouble started again around the time Philip had his first birthday,’ my grandmother continued. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe it was a symptom of post-natal depression. Or perhaps it was the sight of the growing child which made Jane realise that she was growing older, too, and that if she was ever to achieve her ambitions she’d better get on with it. Whatever the reason, she calmly announced the fact that she’d applied for a job backstage at one of the Manchester theatres, and had been accepted.’
‘Uncle Tony couldn’t have been very pleased.’
‘He wasn’t. He said her job was to stay at home and look after the baby, and she said that there were plenty of licensed child-minders far better equipped to do the job than she was. He pointed out it would probably cost them more to pay the child-minder than she’d be earning in the theatre, and she said so what, they could easily afford it.’
Which, of course, they could because whatever else had been lacking in the family, we’d always had plenty of money.
‘But he let her take the job in the end, didn’t he?’ I asked.
‘What choice did he have? If he’d thrown her out of the house, there would have been a custody battle, and he’d have ended up losing Philip. Anyway, he gave into her, and soon she was completely wrapped up in this job of hers. She was only paid to work a 40-hour week, yet the theatre made so many demands on her time that she was almost never at home. That poor little baby started to think that the girl they paid to look after him was his mother. And even when she was home, she never seemed to have any time for Philip. It was always theatre, theatre, theatre with her.’
‘How did Uncle Tony take it?’
‘He hated what she was doing, but had more or less learned to live with it. Then your Aunt Jane made her next demand. She wanted to go on tour. She’d got a small part in one of the plays they were doing, and she was sure it was going to lead on to bigger things. Of course, the pay wasn’t much – certainly not enough to live on – but if your uncle would give her a few pounds a week … Well, your uncle Tony put his foot down. He wasn’t going to pay to have her missing for months at a time, he said. If she insisted on going on tour, she could pay for herself.’
The Vital Chain Page 11
