Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  I picked up my mobile phone to check my calendar app, and found to my joy that the article on refrigeration wasn’t needed for nearly three weeks. Ha! So I didn’t actually have to work on it today at all.

  Immediately I felt a sense of guilt. No wonder I was writing so many of my articles at the last minute these days, and doing it in a blind panic. I needed to get a grip. I couldn’t afford to let customers down, and there was a mortgage to pay on this house – far higher since Sandy had left, and only just within my current means.

  Yet three weeks was three weeks. The thought of doing something more interesting suddenly seemed irresistible.

  * * *

  A new thought occurred to me. I wandered out on to the landing, opened the hatch to the loft and climbed the ladder. The air was dry and dusty. I hadn’t been up here in several years – not since Sandy left. But I knew that somewhere there lurked a large collection of photographs inherited from my parents, and no doubt from their parents and grandparents, and it didn’t take me long to find it, stashed in a bulging cardboard packing case.

  It was hard to find any order amongst the contents. I pulled out battered albums, manila envelopes with large prints stuffed in them, yellow and pink paper sleeves with prints tucked into one side and negatives in the other. For a long time I rummaged fruitlessly.

  Then, almost by chance, I realised with a jolt that I’d found it – the picture I’d almost unconsciously held in my mind all these years, looking suprisingly similar to my memory of it: a dark-haired girl of roughly my age, captured in front of an expanse of bright green foliage and smiling cryptically at the camera.

  Was that a look of surprise? Coyness? Guile? Well, I thought I knew the answer to that. It was good spirits tempered with puzzlement. My family didn’t actually know her, and up to the day this picture was taken I’d scarcely even spoken to her. Despite this, she seemed quite willing to be photographed, though she must have been wondering why we would want to photograph her.

  My father, of course, would have assumed in his innocence that we young people must automatically be socialising with each other – joining in with whatever holiday activities were on offer. He could never have comprehended the shyness and self-doubt that almost prevented me from even speaking to this girl, let alone getting to know her. He simply pointed the camera and clicked – and there she was, printed into our family history book, but not into our lives.

  Back in my office I brushed the loft dust off my clothes and looked at the picture again. The colours were a bit faded, but the girl’s white top and blue shorts still stood out against the greenery.

  I stared at that cryptic smile. Could she have grown into the woman I saw at Euston? The hair colour was about right, but that didn’t necessarily signify anything. The shape of the face also seemed to fit, but I could have been fooling myself about that. I was probably making connections where there simply weren’t any – hoping to inject a bit of intrigue into my currently barren love life.

  Yet the photograph had already intensified my memories of that time. This was the face that sparked so much in terms of my adolescent emotional life. And rightly or wrongly, that woman at Euston had unquestionably reminded me of her.

  Experimentally I placed the picture on the mantelpiece, leaning it on the carriage clock that didn’t work. That would do for now. See if I still wanted to track her down tomorrow.

  See if I still thought this could possibly be the woman I’d seen at the station.

  1988

  It felt like a dream, Hawkins reflected: Simon leaning over the map, stabbing at different locations and looking up for acknowledgement; Frank gazing unseeing across the room and drumming his fingers on the corner of the table; Joey pacing back and forth, interrupting frequently; Darren staring pensively into his mug of tea. Did they all think this was really going to happen?

  Hawkins leaned on the windowsill, watching in disbelief. It felt like a scene from a film. The Lavender Hill Mob? The Italian Job? The Great Train Robbery? Hadn’t these people ever watched those films, and noticed what happened in the end? The bad guys always got caught, that’s what happened. And someone usually got killed. Why did they think this would end any differently?

  Simon wanted something from him. He was gesturing indignantly – “Aren’t you listening to this, you pillock? You’re the one who has to do the driving.” He nodded. Of course he was bloody well listening. He needed every last detail to be etched clearly on his brain.

  He glanced out through the window, across the grey stone wall at the edge of the farmyard and up the sweep of land beyond it. Rain was drizzling down relentlessly. It never seemed to stop raining here. Maybe that was a good sign – a reminder that life had to offer more than this. Wendy said it was raining in the West Country too. Well, with luck it wouldn’t be raining where they were going.

  He turned back to the room. Simon was still running through the plan. “We have to make sure they know we mean business from the start,” he was saying. Abruptly Target stepped forward from the back of the room and thrust both arms in front if him. All eyes turned to him, and with a dramatic flourish he racked the slide of an automatic pistol.

  The metallic clicking sound hung in the silence. He grinned at the assembled company. “These should make the point.”

  Chapter 7

  My report on my interview with Rick Ashton was due, and I hadn’t even started writing it yet. I’d postponed that refrigeration article yesterday, but this one wouldn’t wait.

  I pulled out my notes and read them through about five times. The longer I left it to work on tasks like this, the less I remembered about the actual occasion I was reporting on, and the more reliant I became on what I’d written down. I’d learned that lesson long ago, but too often failed to take account of it.

  Grasping for inspiration, I opened Rick’s company web site. An item in the Latest panel on the home page immediately caught my attention: “Vantage Express to negotiate new funding.” It sounded important, yet the story itself had little substance. Clearly Vantage didn’t want to reveal the details.

  I tried Googling the company instead, and quickly came up with various recent bits of industry analysis. Basically they all said the same thing: the company could be facing a cash flow crisis, and was trying to secure new capital investment.

  I stared sourly at the screen. A few years ago I would have been turning up stories like that myself, not reading them secondhand on other people’s web sites: evidence if any were needed that I was losing the plot.

  To make matters worse, it was now plain that Ashton had skated round this issue when I interviewed him the other day. He must have been rubbing his hands in glee when he realised I knew nothing about it.

  I reached for my phone and rang Ashton’s PR man, Darren McLeish.

  “What can you tell me about this new funding? Has the deal gone through yet?”

  “No, we’ve got several irons in the fire, and the press picked up on it. That’s why we went public with it. Normally we wouldn’t have announced anything until it was a done deal.”

  “I should have raised it with Rick the other day.”

  There was a pause. I could imagine him trying to keep the smile out of his voice. “Yes, we did wonder why you didn’t.” Quickly he added, “But you covered a lot of other ground between you, so I’m sure you’ll have got a good article out of it.”

  “Hopefully.”

  I disconnected, irritated by his transparently patronising attitude, and rang Jason Bright at the magazine.

  “I just wanted to check what sort of news coverage you’re giving to this restructuring deal at Vantage. I don’t want my interview piece to conflict with your information.”

  “No need to mention it in your article, except in passing. I got a statement from Rick Ashton myself this morning, and we’ll run a separate news item when the time comes. They’re nearly ready to go public, but probably not before we go to press.” He hesitated. “Rick said you didn’t discuss it with him
when you met up.”

  “No, well there were loads of other things going on at his company. It didn’t seem a priority.”

  This sounded so weak that I was cringing before I’d even finished saying it. Jason evidently thought so too, and said nothing for a moment. My excuse hung limply in the air. Finally he said, “OK, well it sounds as if you’ve got plenty of other stuff to write about. Bang your article over and we’ll see what we can make of it.”

  * * *

  I gazed at my laptop screen, feeling dejected. I couldn’t keep messing Jason Bright around like this. Pretty soon he would lose patience with me – and I would lose a large part of my income. What was the matter with me?

  I should start on the article immediately, but I also needed to cheer myself up. I opened Google on my laptop and typed in “Fairmile Hotel Falmouth”. This was the place where those events in my childhood had played out.

  It came up with twenty finds. There were references to the place in articles and blogs, and there was even a postcard of the building for sale on an auction site. However, I couldn’t find anything of any substance that had been written directly about it. It had closed twenty-three years ago and been demolished two years later, and somehow all this seemed to have happened in a time frame that search engines found uninteresting.

  I sat back, faintly disappointed. There was virtually nothing here that I hadn’t seen two years ago. I’d been hoping that new information might have materialised since then, but it appeared not.

  I looked again at the list of finds, and focused on the Facebook references. What if I tried contacting people who might have stayed at the hotel around the time we did?

  At first sight this didn’t look very promising. There were three finds, but they were just scene-setting comments in the person’s profile. However, one mention was moderately interesting. “Fond memories of Fairmile – launch pad for lifelong friendships”. Nicely resonant, I thought to myself. The woman who had posted this, one Linda Dysart, didn’t appear to be my woman, but she might be someone who knew her.

  So this could be it: the start of my campaign to find Trina and her parents. Up to now I’d merely been thinking about it; if I reached out and tried to contact this woman, I would be making the pursuit a reality.

  I glanced around the screen, wondering if there was any way to find an email address or other contact details for Linda Dysart. Apparently not – but I could send her a friend request. I hesitated a moment, then typed a short message to her. Might as well find out first if she’d accept the request. I clicked the button. I was on my way.

  There was a possible shortcut to all this, of course. I could tweet my enquiry, and see what that culled. My Twitter account still had a following of sorts, though interest had lapsed since my investigative articles had tailed off. But something held me back – perhaps a sense that such a solution would be almost too direct, too much of a frontal assault. What if I found these people? How would they feel about having their name and history plastered across the Twittersphere?

  No, I preferred to pursue the search on my own terms.

  I looked back down at my Rick Ashton notes. Reluctantly I closed the browser window and opened a new Word file. Time to get to work.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours later, my article was finished and on its way to Jason Bright, and I’d received a friend request from the woman I’d contacted on Facebook.

  I accepted immediately and uploaded a post. “I had a couple of holidays at the Fairmile Hotel outside Falmouth in the late 1980s,” I wrote. “You said you used to stay there. Did we ever meet? I’m trying to hook up with some of the other people who were guests at the same time.”

  I wondered how long she would take to react to this. It could be days. However, I should have realised from her extremely busy and active online presence that she would be more responsive than that. Within an hour a reply had appeared.

  “Hello Mike. I think I must have stayed there a few years before you. Did you ever meet Sabrina, Marie M, Danny Boy or Suzi K? I’ve stayed in touch with some of them ever since.”

  I replied, “None of the above, I don’t think. How about a girl called Trina?”

  After a while she came back with, “Afraid not. Must have been after our time. Does anyone else know the name?”

  For the time being no one did. Our asynchronous exchange faltered to a halt. I was wondering what else I could do to advance the search when my phone rang. It was Jason Bright.

  “Mike, I just wanted to say thanks for the Rick Ashton interview. It reads well.”

  He sounded sincere, but after my omission of the new funding development I was nervous. Guardedly I said, “Good.”

  “Yes, useful bit of background to this financial stuff. Fits in well.”

  I sensed that he had something else on his mind, so I waited.

  “The thing is, I wondered if you would fancy a trip to the West Country? I don’t really want to send any of my own guys all that way.”

  He was actually offering me more work. Trying not to sound over-eager I said, “Sounds good to me. What’s the deal?”

  “I need a feature article on those people near St Austell. Latimer Logistics? Take a camera with you.”

  “Expenses paid?”

  “The usual.” He hesitated. “Nice rounded piece? Lots of detail? No stone unturned?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  I disconnected and tossed my phone on to the desk. I couldn’t really blame Jason for telling me to do a good job, even though it rankled. In his shoes I probably wouldn’t have offered me this article in the first place. He’d given me a chance to redeem myself, and I should be grateful.

  However, my chagrin over this was easily outweighed by my amazement at the coincidence of this commission. Just as I was obsessing over events that had played out in Cornwall, I was actually being asked to go there. In my world, paid visits to the West Country were few and far between, so this was a remarkable piece of luck.

  I opened a map on my screen. St Austell was about fifteen miles short of Truro, the regional capital, and Falmouth was only a few miles further on from there. If I planned things right, I could pay a visit to the Fairmile, or what was left of it.

  I phoned the logistics company and made arrangements to see them the following week, then booked myself into a hotel in Truro for two nights. I sat back, feeling pleased with myself. I might not learn anything significant from going there, but at least it would make a change from my normal routine.

  As it turned out, I picked up my first clue about my missing family during the trip.

  Chapter 8

  Cornwall was further away from London than I remembered. The distance to St Austell turned out to be 270 miles via the motorway route – nearly as far as from London to Newcastle, which had always struck me as a seriously long way. To make matters worse, there were road works on the M4, and it took me well over two hours in my ageing Nissan to complete the first hundred miles past Bristol. At least I’d made an early start.

  Traffic on the M5 was much lighter once I’d cleared Weston, and the A30 dual carriageway across the moors from Exeter was eerily and gloriously empty. The holiday season was still a couple of months away, which no doubt helped. The broad undulating wooded vistas lifted my spirits. It was too long since I’d come back to this part of the country.

  Latimer Logistics had made its name working for the china clay trade, but had long since switched to general logistics, and now had a massive modern warehouse full of consumer goods.

  The Latimer team were friendly and cooperative. They showed me around their extensive site, and allowed me to photograph some of their lime green and blue trucks at the loading bay.

  Then they gave me a whistle-stop tour of their modern office complex. I was introduced in passing to various people in different departments without actually picking up their names – unsure as always in this situation whether to act like a visiting celebrity or a diffident guest.

  The only
person I remembered even vaguely afterwards was an attractive young woman in the marketing department. I warmed instantly to her wry smile. In another life, I thought to myself, I might have tried to find a reason to go back and seek her out.

  Eventually I sat down in the boardroom with a couple of the directors to talk, and by the end of the afternoon I had enough notes for an article of twice the length required.

  Finally I was able to slip away and drive on to Truro. The hotel radiated olde worlde charm, from its apparently genuine oak beams to the ingrained but not unpleasant smell of cooking – that sense of a million meals past. Its other-worldliness was strangely cheering. I felt almost as if I was on holiday.

  * * *

  I’d allowed myself the next day off, and after breakfast I drove the fifteen miles from Truro down to Falmouth. My plan was to find the site of the Fairmile Hotel, though this proved harder than I expected. I vaguely remembered the road to the hotel out of Falmouth, but when I found it, nothing about the landscape was even remotely familiar.

  After driving around fruitlessly for twenty minutes or so I pulled up outside a small suburban convenience store, and here I immediately struck lucky. The man at the checkout looked more than old enough to remember the hotel, and remarkably enough, did remember it. He took me over to the shop doorway and pointed along the road. “See that new housing estate up there? That’s where it was.”

  “Did you know the people who ran it?”

  “The Armitages? I knew them vaguely. Mrs Armitage sometimes came into the shop I used to own.” He shrugged philosophically. “That’s gone now too.”