Decider Read online

  ‘We go home to bed,’ Roger said.

  He drove me and the boys good-naturedly down to the bus, but in fact he himself returned to the buildings and the tents to oversee the clearing up, the locking, and the security arrangements for the night.

  The boys ate supper and squabbled over a video. I read Carteret’s diaries, yawning. We all phoned Amanda.

  Carteret wrote:

  Lee persuaded me to go to an evening lecture on the effects of bombing on buildings. (The I.R.A. work, more than air-strikes.) Boring, really. Lee said sorry for wasting my time. He’s got a thing about tumbledown buildings. I tell him it won’t get him bonus points here. He says there’s life after college…

  ‘Dad,’ Neil said, interrupting.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I asked Henry the riddle.’

  ‘What riddle?’

  ‘Do you know a rabbit from a raceway?’

  I gazed in awe at my super-retentive small son. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said who wanted to know. I said you did, and he just laughed. He said if anyone knew the answer, you did.’

  I said, smiling, ‘It’s like the Mad Hatter’s riddle in Alice in Wonderland: “What’s the difference between a raven and a writing desk?” There’s no answer at all.’

  ‘That’s a silly riddle.’

  ‘I agree. I always thought so.’

  Neil, whose taste for Pinocchio had won the video fight (for perhaps the tenth time) returned his attention to the nose that grew longer with lying. Keith’s nose, I reckoned, would in chat line of fantasy make Cyrano de Bergerac a non-starter.

  Carteret’s diary:

  The ‘great’ Wilson Yarrow was there, asking questions to show off his own brilliance. Why the staff think he’s so marvellous is a mystery. He sucks up to them all the time. Lee will get himself chucked out for heresy if the staff hear his comments on Gropius. Better stop writing this and get on with my essay on political space.

  Pages and pages followed in a mixture of social events and progress on our courses: no more about Yarrow. I fast-forwarded in time to the partially ripped note-book and read onwards from the exclamation marks about the Epsilon prize. There seemed, for all my searching, to be only one further comment, though it was damning enough in its way.

  Carteret wrote:

  More rumours about Wilson Yarrow. He’s being allowed to complete his diploma! They’re saying someone else’s design was entered in his name for the Epsilon prize by mistake!! Then old Hammond says a brilliant talent like that shouldn’t be extinguished for one little lapse! How’s that for giving the game away? Discussed it with Lee. He says choice comes from inside. If someone chooses to cheat once, they’ll do it again. What about consequences, I asked? He said Wilson Yarrow hadn’t considered consequences because he’d acted on a belief that he would get away with it. No one seems to know – or they’re not telling – how the ‘mistake’ was spotted. The Epsilon has been declared void for this year. Why didn’t they give it to whoever’s design it was that won it?

  * Just heard a red hot rumour. The design was by Mies!!! Designed in 1925, but never built. Some mistake!!!

  I read on until my eyes ached over his handwriting but nowhere had Carteret confirmed or squashed the red-hot rumour.

  One long ago and disputed bit of cheating might be interesting, but even Marjorie wouldn’t consider Carteret’s old diaries a sufficient lever, all these years later, especially as no action had been taken at the time. To call Wilson Yarrow a cheat now would sail too close to slander.

  I couldn’t see any way that a dead ancient scandal, even if it were true, could have been used by Yarrow to persuade or coerce Conrad into giving him, alone, the commission for new stands.

  Sighing, I returned the diaries to their carrier bag, watched the last five minutes of Pinocchio and settled my brood for the night.

  On Tuesday morning, with pressing errands of their own to see to, the Gardners took me and the boys with them to Swindon, dumping us outside the launderette and arranging a rendezvous later at a hairdressing salon called Smiths.

  While almost our entire stock of clothes circled around washing and drying, we made forays to buy five pairs of trainers (difficult – and expensive – as, for the boys, the colours and shapes of the decorative flashing had to be right, though to my eyes the ‘Yuk, Dad’ shoes looked much the same), and after that (making a brief stop to buy a large bag of apples), I marched them relentlessly towards haircuts.

  Their total opposition to this plan vanished like fruit cake the second they stepped over the threshold of Smiths, as the person who greeted us first there was Penelope Faulds. Blonde, tall, young Penelope, slapping hands with my children and deconstructing my every vestige of maturity.

  Smiths, which I had expected somehow to be quiet and old fashioned because of its age, proved to have skipped a couple of generations and now presented a unisex front of street cred, blow-dries and rap music. Hair-styles in photographs on the walls looked like topiary. Chrome and multiple mirrors abounded. Young men in pigtails talked like Eastenders. I felt old there, and my children loved it.

  Penelope herself cut their hair, consulting with me first about Christopher’s instructions to have his head almost shaved, leaving only a bunch of his natural curls falling over his forehead. ‘Compromise,’ I begged her, ‘or his mother will slay me. It’s she who normally gets their hair cut.’

  She smiled deliciously. I desired her so radically that the pain made a nonsense of falling-in roofs. She cut Christopher’s hair short enough to please him, too short to my eyes. It was his hair, he said. Tell that to your mother, I told him.

  Toby, interestingly, asked for his cut to be ‘ordinary’: no statement of rebellion. Vaguely pleased, I watched Penelope fasten a gown round his throat and asked if her mother were anywhere about.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she said, pointing. ‘Go up. She said she was expecting you.’ She smiled. Hop, skip and jump, heart. ‘I won’t make your kids look freaks,’ she promised. ‘They’ve got lovely shaped heads.’

  I went upstairs reluctantly to find Perdita, and it was there, out of sight, that the old order persisted: the ladies with their hair in rollers, sitting under driers reading Good Housekeeping.

  Perdita, vibrant in black trousers, a bright pink shirt and a long rope of pearls, led me past the grandmotherly customers who watched a large man with a walking stick go by as if he’d come from a different species.

  ‘Never mind my old loves,’ Penelope teased me, beckoning me into a sheltered be-chintzed sanctum on the far side of the beautification. ‘Tanqueray do you?’

  I agreed a little faintly that it would, and she pressed into my hand a large glass holding lavish gin and little tonic with tinkling ice and a thick slice of lemon. Eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday morning. Ah, well.

  She closed the door between us and the old loves. ‘They have ears like bats for gossip,’ she said blithely. ‘What do you want to know?’

  I said tentatively, ‘Forsyth…?’

  ‘Sit down, dear,’ she commanded, sinking into a rose-printed armchair and waving me into its pair.

  She said, ‘I’ve thought all night about whether I should tell you these things. Well, half the night. Several hours. William always trusted me not to repeat what he told me, and I never have. But now… I don’t really know if he would say I should be silent for ever, but things are different now. Someone blew up his beloved racecourse, and you saved the race meeting yesterday and I think… I really do think that, like you said, you can’t finish the job for him unless you know what you’re up against, so, well, I don’t think he’d mind.’ She drank some gin. ‘I’ll tell you about Forsyth first, and then we’ll see.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  She sighed deeply and began, gathering ease and momentum gradually as she went along.

  ‘Forsyth,’ she said, ‘set out to defraud an insurance company, and the family had to come up with the whole payoff or visit him behind bars for God knows how
many years.’

  ‘I thought,’ I said slowly, ‘it might be something like that.’

  ‘William said…’ She paused, still a little inhibited; uncertain, despite her decision. ‘It seems odd to be telling you these things.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I wouldn’t say a word if he were alive, but I don’t care so much for his family. I often told him he ought to let them suffer properly for their criminal actions, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Keeping the Stratton name clean… a sort of obsession.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ she took a deep breath, ‘about a year ago, Forsyth borrowed a fortune from the bank, guaranteed by Ivan – his father – on the security of the garden centre, and he started buying and selling radio-controlled lawn mowers. Ivan’s no great businessman, but at least he listens to his manager and goes to Conrad or William… used to go, poor lamb… for advice, and has proper audits… but that know-it-all Forsyth, he went his own way and wouldn’t listen to anybody and he bought a huge warehouse on a mortgage and thousands of lawn mowers that were supposed to cut the grass while you sat and watched, but they were already going out-of-date when he signed a contract for them, and also they kept breaking down. The people who sold them to him must have been laughing themselves sick, William said. William said Forsyth talked about “cornering the market”, which no one can ever do, William said, in anything. It’s a short cut to bankruptcy. So there is Forsyth with this vast stock he has contracted to buy but can’t sell, paying a huge mortgage he can’t afford, with the bank bouncing his cheques and Ivan facing having to cover this enormous bank loan… and you can guess what happened.’ She paid attention to her drink.

  ‘A little fire?’ I suggested, swirling the ice round in my own glass.

  ‘Little! Half an acre of it. Warehouse, mowers, radio controls, all cinders. William said everyone took it for granted it was arson. The insurance company sent investigators. The police were all over the place. Forsyth went to pieces and confessed to William in private.’

  She paused, sighing.

  ‘So, what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No. It’s not a crime to set fire to your own property. William paid it all off. He didn’t claim the insurance. He paid off the warehouse mortgage with penalties and sold the land it had stood on. Paid off all the contracts for the rotten mowers, to avoid lawsuits. Repaid the money the bank had lent, plus all the interest, to save Ivan losing the garden centre to the guarantee. It all cost an enormous amount. William told all the family that they would each inherit a good deal less from him because of Forsyth’s business venture and criminal folly. None of them would speak to Forsyth after that. He whined to William about it and William told him it was Coventry or jail, and to be grateful. Forsyth said Keith had told him to burn the warehouse. Keith said Forsyth was lying. But William told me it was probably true. He said Keith always said you could get rid of things by burning them.’

  Like fences at open ditches, I thought. And grandstands, by blowing them up?

  ‘There!’ she said, as if surprised at herself for the ease of the telling, ‘I’ve told you! I can’t feel William standing at my shoulder telling me to shut up. In fact… it’s the other way round. I think he approves, dear, wherever he is.’

  I wasn’t going to question that feeling. I said, ‘At least Forsyth’s was a straightforward fraud. No rapes or drugs involved.’

  ‘Yes, dear, much harder to cover those up.’

  Some nuance in her voice, a quiet amusement, made me ask, ‘But not impossible?’

  ‘You’re encouraging me to be wicked!’

  Once started, however, she’d been enjoying the saga.

  ‘I won’t tell them,’ I said. ‘I’ll be like you, with William’s secrets.’

  I don’t know if she believed me. I don’t know that I meant what I said. It encouraged her, all the same, to go on.

  ‘Well… there was Hannah…’

  ‘What about her?’ I prompted, when she paused.

  ‘She grew up so bitter.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘No self-esteem, you see, dear.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Keith never let her forget she’d been abandoned by her mother. By Madeline, poor dear. Madeline used to cry and tell me she’d give anything for a miscarriage, but we were both young then and we didn’t know how to get her an abortion… you had to know someone in those days as you’d never get a family doctor to help you. No one would ever help a young married woman get rid of her first child. Keith got to hear she’d been asking about it and he flew into a terrible rage and knocked two of her teeth out.’ She drank deeply of gin at the memory. ‘William told me that Keith told Hannah her mother had wanted to abort her. Can you believe it? Keith had always been cruel, but saying that to your own daughter! He wanted Hannah to hate Madeline, and she did. William said he tried for Madeline’s sake to love Hannah and bring her up properly, but Keith was there, poisoning her mind, and she was never a sweet little girl, William said, but always sullen and spiteful.’

  ‘Poor Hannah.’

  ‘Anyway, she grew up very pretty in a sharp sort of way, but William said young men were put off when they got to know her and she felt more and more rejected and hated everybody, and then she fell for this gypsy and let him have sex with her.’ Perdita shrugged, sighing. ‘William said he wasn’t even a proper Romany, just a rough wanderer with a police record for thieving. William said he couldn’t understand Hannah, but it was low self-esteem, dear. Low self-esteem.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, she got pregnant, of course. And this gypsy, he knew a good thing when it was shoved under his nose. He turned up on Keith’s doorstep demanding money, else he’d go round the village telling everyone how he’d got Keith’s posh daughter in the family way, and Keith knocked him down and kicked him and burst one of his kidneys.’

  Hell, I thought, I’d been lucky.

  ‘Keith told William. Those three boys always loaded their troubles onto their father. William paid off the gypsy, and it cost ten times as much as the gypsy had been asking from Keith in the first place.’

  ‘Dire,’ I said.

  ‘So Jack was born, and he didn’t have much chance either of growing up decent. Hannah dotes on him. William, of course, paid and paid for his upbringing.’

  ‘William told you all this?’

  ‘Oh yes, dear. Not all at once, like I told you. In little bits. Sort of squeezed out of him, over the years. He would come to me very tired of them all, and unburden some of his thoughts, and we’d have a little gin and – if he felt like it, well, you know, dear – and he’d say he felt better, and go off home

  She sighed deeply for times past.

  ‘Conrad,’ she said surprisingly, ‘years ago, he got addicted to heroin.’

  ‘Can’t believe it!’

  Perdita nodded. ‘When he was young. Kids nowadays, they know they face terrible dangers all the time from drugs. When Conrad was twenty, he thought it a great adventure, William said. He was at university. He was with another young man, both of them injecting themselves, and his friend had too much, and died. William said there was a terrible stink, but he got Conrad out and hushed it all up and sent him to a very private and expensive clinic for treatment. He got Conrad to write him a letter describing his drug experiences, what he felt and saw when he was high. William didn’t show me what Conrad wrote, but he still had the letter. He said Conrad had been cured, and he was proud of him. Conrad didn’t go back to university, though. William kept him at home on the estate.’

  Ah, I thought, that was Marjorie’s hammer-lock. Even after so many years, Conrad wouldn’t want his youthful indiscretion made public.

  Perdita finished her gin and poured some more. ‘Freshen your glass?’ she asked me.

  ‘No, I’m fine. Do go on, I’m riveted.’

  She laughed, talking easily now. ‘When Keith was about that age, when he was youn
g and handsome and before all these really bad things, he spanked the daughter of one of the farm workers. Pulled down her knickers and spanked her. She hadn’t done anything wrong. He said he wanted to know what it felt like. William paid her father a fortune – for those days – to keep him from going to the police. It wasn’t a case of rape, though.’

  ‘Bad enough.’

  ‘Keith learned his lesson, William said. After that he only beat and raped his wives. You couldn’t get done for it, then.’

  The fun went out of her face abruptly, and no doubt out of mine.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘I loved Madeline, but it was all forty years ago. And she did get out, and marry again and have you. William said Keith never forgave her for despising him.’

  Perhaps because I couldn’t help having it on my mind, I said, ‘Keith said yesterday that he’s going to kill me. Forty years on, he’s trying to get even.’

  She stared. ‘Did he mean it?’

  ‘He meant it when he said it.’

  ‘But dear, you have to take him seriously. He’s a violent man. What are you going to do about it?’

  I saw that she was basically more interested than anxious, but then it wasn’t her life or death problem.

  ‘It’s the sight of me that enrages him,’ I said. ‘I could simply go away. Go home. Trust to luck he wouldn’t follow me.’

  ‘I must say, dear, you take it very calmly.’

  I’d spent my own semi-wakeful night thinking about it, but I answered her casually. ‘It’s probably because it seems so unreal. I mean, it’s not exactly routine to be discussing the possibility of one’s own murder.’

  ‘I do see that,’ she agreed. ‘So… are you going?’

  I couldn’t answer her, because I still didn’t know. I had the five children to consider, and for their sakes I thought I should avoid any further confrontations as much as possible. The manic quality of Keith’s hatred for me had been all too evident in the ferocity of his kicks and now he also had the justification for an attack – in his eyes – because of my involvement in the uncovering of Harold Quest and the delivery of Quest’s confession to Marjorie. I had thrown him at her feet: he would kill me for it. I did deep down believe he would try and, although I didn’t want to, I feared him.