The Company

by Sally Spencer

  Did I remember Aunt Jane? Yes, I thought I did, though my memory was only an impressionistic – and possibly romanticized – 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 been 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 realize 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 childminders far better equipped to do the job than she was. He pointed out it would probably cost them more to pay the childminder 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 forty-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.’

  ‘And she couldn’t, could she?’

  ‘No. In her own right, she didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together, so she was forced to miss her big chance. Perhaps Tony hoped that with more free time on her hands, she’d devote a little of it to her son, but if he did, he must have been sadly disappointed. As far as Jane was concerned, Philip was a part of her life which was over. She’d carried him in her body for nine months, she’d fed him and changed him for a year, and now he was on his own. Your uncle Tony did his best to fill the gap, it was a rare day indeed when he wasn’t seen pushing the expensive pram around the village – but it just wasn’t the same. Well, things went on like that for several years, then …’

  ‘I know what happened next,’ I said.

  ‘Do you, indeed?’ my grandmother asked. ‘But you were only a child at the time.’

  Yes, I was only a child, but I’d been old enough to both witness and understand the last dramatic act in the Jane–Tony saga.

  I think I must have been around five and a half when it was played out.

  Uncle Tony and Aunt Jane had been invited round to our house for drinks – an invitation which, I suppose, was one of my father’s guilt-ridden attempts to get on better terms with a brother he had very little in common with.

  My mother – who was not a well woman, even then – had, by an almost superhuman effort, spent most of the day helping our housekeeper to produce a dazzling array of canapés, which were now spread out sumptuously on the coffee tables in the living room.

  My uncle and aunt were due to arrive at seven thirty, and John and I had been informed that we could stay up to greet them, but then we would have to go straight to bed. So we sat around in our dressing gowns and pyjamas and waited.

  And waited.

  Time passed. My mother glanced anxiously at my father. ‘I think it’s time the children were climbing the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,’ she said.

  ‘A few more minutes,’ my father pleaded. ‘After all, it is family.’

  I was drowsy by the time the front doorbell finally rang, but I heard my mother say, ‘Well, better late than never, I suppose. I just hope the snacks haven’t all dried out.’

  Rubbing my eyes, I accompanied my father and older brother to the door. We were halfway up the hall when the bell rang again, as if my uncle and aunt, having kept us waiting so long, were now impatient to be admitted.

  When my father opened the door, I saw that only Uncle Tony was standing there. He had one arm resting on the wall, and there was a glazed look in his eyes.

  ‘Are you alone?’ my father asked.

  ‘Damned right,’ my uncle slurred in response.

  ‘Is Jane not well?’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’

  I became aware of my mother standing behind us in the hall.

  ‘It’s time you boys went up to bed,’ she said.

  ‘But we haven’t said hello to Uncle Tony yet,’ I protested.

  ‘Now!’ my mother insisted.

  John turned and headed for the stairs, a
nd I reluctantly followed. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t listening to everything which was going on behind me.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ my father asked my uncle.

  ‘Wrong?’ Uncle Tony repeated. ‘Far from it. That woman’s been a cross I’ve had to carry for more years than I care to remember. And now she’s been lifted off my back.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ my father asked.

  ‘Meaning she’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes! Gone! Absconded! Disappeared into thin air!’

  My brother and I had climbed the stairs and reached the landing. Though we were now invisible to those below us, we could still clearly hear what was going on.

  I stopped.

  ‘We should go to bed,’ John whispered. ‘That’s what Mummy said.’

  ‘Well, I want to listen,’ I hissed back.

  ‘We could get into trouble.’

  ‘I don’t care!’

  ‘Well, I do.’

  ‘So go to bed.’

  ‘I will!’

  With one ear, I listened to the sound of my brother’s carpet-slippered feet walking along the landing, the click of his bedroom door, and the sigh of his bedsprings as he lay down. But the other ear was directed firmly towards the hallway.

  ‘When did this happen?’ my mother was asking, with evident concern in her voice.

  ‘This morning,’ my uncle Tony told her. ‘Jane and I haven’t had sex for over a year.’

  ‘Really, Tony,’ my mother said, with obvious embarrassment.

  ‘Not for over a year,’ my uncle said emphatically. ‘So there didn’t seem much point in sharing the same bed anymore.’

  ‘I don’t think this is helping,’ my mother told him.

  ‘The point is that when I woke up this morning, she wasn’t anywhere around the house,’ my uncle continued. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at first – the idle bitch rarely emerges before lunchtime anyway. But when I got home from the office, she still wasn’t in evidence, so I went up to her room to see if she was all right. Her wardrobe and dressing table were empty. There was no sign of the suitcases she’d bought for that ridiculous tour that I refused to let her go on. She’d clearly done a moonlight flit.’

  ‘Did she leave a note?’ my mother asked.

  My uncle laughed bitterly. ‘A note? Her? Oh, that would have been far too considerate.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tony,’ my father said.

  ‘Are you?’ Uncle Tony asked belligerently. ‘Well, I’m not. I’m well shot of her, if the truth be told. Christ, she’s made my life a misery – and she’s been no good for the boy. Well, now she’s gone, he and I will finally be able to get on with our lives.’

  ‘Why don’t you come inside and have a little something to eat, Tony?’ my mother suggested.

  ‘No thanks. Now I’ve broken the good news, I think I’ll be going.’

  ‘There are loads of snacks on the table, and you need something to line your stomach with,’ my mother insisted. ‘Besides, I’m not sure you should be alone tonight.’

  My uncle sighed. ‘All right, maybe I’ll come in for a few minutes,’ he conceded.

  There was the sound of footsteps, and the voices began to grow faint.

  ‘I expect you’ll find someone else in time,’ I heard my mother say.

  ‘Never!’ Uncle Tony replied emphatically. ‘Once bitten, twice shy. That’s going to be my motto from now on.’

  To a child as I was then, it seemed an impossibly long time before I saw Uncle Tony with a woman again, but looking back, I don’t suppose it could have been more than a few months. She was a busty blonde, and though I can’t remember her name, I do know she was introduced to me as ‘Auntie Something-or-other’. If I thought she was going to replace Aunt Jane, I was wrong. She was soon replaced by ‘Auntie Something-else’, then by a third, and a fourth, until it was plain even to John, Philip and me what was going on.

  ‘You’re thinking of all your uncle’s women, aren’t you?’ my grandmother said, surprising me again.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I admitted.

  ‘Well think about this, as well,’ Grandmother instructed me. ‘Philip might have had all those big expensive toys you were never given, and he might have been allowed to stay up long after you went to bed – but he never had a mother like you did.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said humbly.

  Grandmother narrowed her watery old eyes and gave me a look which seemed to pierce right through to my soul. ‘If you tried being easier on other people,’ she said, ‘you might just find yourself able to go easier on yourself.’

  On my way back to the house which had been my parents’ home but now, I supposed, belonged to me, I found myself thinking about Aunt Jane again.

  Where had she gone, and what had she done?

  As a child – knowing of her ambitions – I’d kept expecting to see her suddenly pop up on some television show or other, but she never did.

  Uncle Tony had said she’d disappeared into thin air, and that was exactly what had happened. There were no phone calls. No letters. Not even a postcard from some provincial rep, or a greeting card at Christmas. Tony and Philip never spoke of her, and so, in their company, neither did we. After a few years it was almost possible to believe that she had never existed – that Philip was some obnoxious fairy child who had landed, miraculously, on Uncle Tony’s doorstep.

  But people rarely vanish so completely. Though I never saw Aunt Jane again, the spectre of her existence did visit the village shortly after the car crash, while I was still lying in my hospital bed – but even if I’d been there at the time, I doubt I would have recognized it for what it was.

  FOURTEEN

  The Middleton Health Spa – the place where my sister-in-law Lydia claimed to have spent the night before her husband died – was, Sergeant Matthews discovered, a spacious late-Georgian building, surrounded by extensive landscaped grounds, and located in an almost ideal rural setting. High railings surrounded the property, but the big double gates at the edge of the driveway were open, and the gap they revealed was wide enough to drive a couple of tanks through.

  The person he had gone there to talk to was called Ellen Bannister. She was an attractive woman in her late twenties, and as Matthews studied her across the table of the small conference room which had been allocated for his use, he decided that she had intelligent eyes and would probably be a good witness.

  He switched on his tape recorder. ‘What’s the security like in this place, Miss Bannister?’ he asked.

  ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘How easy is it for people to come and go?’

  ‘In the daytime, it’s very easy indeed. You see, Middleton’s not so much a spa as a luxury hotel which offers top class spa facilities. And the health club has dozens of associate members who aren’t even staying at the hotel. So there’s loads of people arriving and leaving at all times during the day.’

  ‘What happens at night, when the spa has closed down?’

  ‘At night, things are controlled much more tightly. For a start, all entrances and exits are locked – except for the fire doors, of course.’

  ‘So it would still be possible to get out through one of the fire doors?’

  Miss Bannister shook her head. ‘Not without setting off the alarms, and I don’t remember that ever happening in the three years I’ve worked here.’

  ‘Could anybody get out of one of the windows?’

  ‘Why would they want to do that?’

  Well, for example, they might want to slip out and commit a murder, Matthews thought.

  But aloud, all he said was, ‘I don’t know – but let’s just say they did.’

  ‘None of the windows open,’ Miss Bannister said. She pointed to a grill, near the top of the wall. ‘The entire spa is air-conditioned.’

  ‘What other security is there?’

  ‘There’s always a man patrolling the grounds. We’ve had some trouble with vandals, you see. And,
of course, the main gate is locked.’

  ‘What happens if one of the guests decides that he or she would like to go off for a night on the town?’

  Miss Bannister grinned. ‘Not many of them do. It’s too many nights on the town that have brought them to Middleton in the first place.’

  ‘But if they do?’ Matthews persisted.

  ‘They come and see me – or whoever else is on duty at the main desk – and I buzz to let them out.’

  So it looked as if there would have been no way for Lydia Conroy to get to Bristol the night before the crash, he thought.

  Unless, of course, she had already left before the security measures were put in place!

  ‘Let’s get on to Mrs Conroy, now,’ Matthews said. ‘Do you remember her?’

  Miss Bannister nodded emphatically. ‘Oh yes, I remember her all right. I’d have remembered her even if the police hadn’t turned up.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘We normally only do a single shift, but sometimes things go wrong – staff get sick, et cetera, et cetera – and we have to double up, which is why I was still here when the uniformed sergeant and a woman PC came to the front desk and asked to see Mrs Conroy, because they had some bad news to break to her,’ Miss Bannister explained.

  Yes, it made sense they would have been there, Matthews thought. The South Wales police would have contacted the Cheshire police, who would have spoken to someone in the Conroy family. Then the Cheshire police would have contacted the Somerset police.

  ‘You told me you’d have remembered her even if the police hadn’t appeared on the scene,’ he said. ‘Was there any particular reason for that?’

  ‘Yes, there was,’ Miss Bannister replied. ‘She was one of those people who really go out of their way to make themselves unpleasant to the staff. You know the sort. If everything isn’t just as they want it, precisely when they want it, they’re screaming that the hotel is nothing but a disgrace.’

  ‘She was the same with the mechanics at Mid-Cheshire Maintenance,’ Flint would tell Matthews later. ‘She seems to have the gift of spreading sunshine wherever she goes.’

  ‘People like her expect you to be at their beck and call twenty-four hours a day,’ Miss Bannister continued. ‘Of course,’ she conceded, ‘we do offer that service in our brochure, but most of our clients have more consideration than to take advantage of it.’