Connections (11 page)

We parted without cordiality. Underneath, I had begun to note, Pugh was uneasy, not just because of his lack of success in finding the three, but, I guessed, because he knew he had too little information about what he was doing and was therefore scared of
it. It meant he couldn't calculate his possible exposure if things went wrong. He was right to be afraid, as it happened.

So far so good, William. That was five years ago. At that point I'd done my duty, broken no laws and I thought that was the end of it.

Fleur saw a tall man of about thirty, clean-shaven, in an apparently expensive suit, shirt and dark tie. With the stairs leading up to her flat just ahead of her she pulled up, calculating she'd do better to run back into the street, across to the pub if necessary, rather than upstairs, where he might corner her on the balcony. She couldn't be sure Dominic would answer his door if she banged on it in a panic and the other residents might be reluctant to open up after dark. The man who had accosted her, spruce and speaking in a calm educated tone, didn't look like a mugger, but she still felt nervous of this individual who had been hanging about in the shadows waiting for her. He might be an angry creditor of Verity's. So, poised to run and watching to see that the distance between them didn't narrow, she said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“My name's Valentine Keith,” he told her. “As a matter of fact I'm a kind of cousin, your father's uncle's son. Dickie's been looking for you. Dickie Jethro.”

As she went from alarm to utter astonishment, Fleur's knees gave. She held on to the bottom of the iron railing beside the stairs and said, “What?”

When her mother and Robin Carew-Stockley had been married for six years, and she had been, as Grace informed her, officially adopted by her stepfather, Grace told her who her father was. She had vague memories of being told something about this before, when she'd been very small and still living in Yorkshire with her grandmother. Grace had told Fleur she'd been a dancer – she had been in the
corps de ballet
of the Royal Ballet, Fleur found out later – and had fallen in love with a man who in the end did not
want to marry her. So, she'd told the young Fleur, she'd come to live with Grandma and had her baby – Fleur.

This story had seemed to Fleur at the time rather like a fairytale, though it left her feeling hollow and rather sad. She had barely understood what Grace was telling her and more or less forgotten about it. Grace and Robin had married. Later, they had moved to Kent. She had missed her grandmother and the old house, but adapted to the new life and from then on had taken it for granted that Grace was her mother and Robin her father.

One day they sat her down to fill in the gaps. There might have been a reason why they picked this particular moment, but if there was, she had forgotten what it was. That was when Grace told her about her dancing career, which Fleur already knew something about from the mounted photographs of a slim young woman in white tulle hanging on the wall of the landing upstairs. She told Fleur that at nineteen she had met Fleur's father and how, when she announced herself to be pregnant, he had insisted she have an abortion. When she'd refused, he'd become very angry and told her that if she went ahead and had the baby he would never see her again. A promise, Grace told her, that he'd kept.

“I'm sorry, Fleur,” Robin had gently told her. “But remember. You are our daughter, Grace's and mine, and that's what counts.”

Fleur had then asked the obvious question. “Who is he? What's his name?”

Grace had flinched, then answered, “His name was Richard Jethro. He was a banker.”

Naïvely, Fleur had asked, “Is he dead?” and Grace had replied, “Not as far as I know.” This answer, Fleur later realised, had not been a lie, but couldn't have been described as absolutely true.

At that moment she'd imagined her real father to be like Mr Thorne, the balding middle-aged manager of the local bank used by Grace and Robin. She tried to imagine Grace – young, slim, in her tutu in some graceful balletic position as in the photographs – falling in love with Mr Thorne, and felt confused. However, the conversation seemed to have ended. Robin said briskly, “Come on – you'll be late for your piano lesson,” and
she stood up, picked up her music case and followed him out of the room. Later she regretted this obedience, thinking she ought to have stood still and refused to go without more details, some answers to the questions that began to enter her mind even as she stumbled through her piece at the piano in Miss Middleton's cottage. But Grace and Robin, as if colluding, consciously or unconsciously, hadn't given her enough time and she understood then, as children do, that they did not want the subject referred to again.

Fleur went away to school and it was there, when she was fourteen, one dull Sunday afternoon in winter, that she had come across a picture of her father and his family in the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper. Photographed with a pretty, upper-class wife, Lady Pansy – daughter, the article said, of Lord Fox – on a sofa in a well-appointed drawing-room, Richard Jethro was a stocky man with a shock of black hair, direct hazel eyes, a square face and a long firm mouth. Fleur, sitting in a chair by her window overlooking the playing fields, where enthusiasts were playing hockey in the biting wind, was startled to notice that although in most respects she did not at all resemble the man said to be her father, her large hazel eyes and clearly marked, arched eyebrows were exactly like Richard Jethro's.

On either side of the couple on the couch were two children, the boy about ten, the girl a little younger. Her father had his arm round the boy. Feeling quite weak and strange, she read the accompanying article.

Her father, the Chief Executive Officer of the investments department of a City of London merchant bank, had, she read, recently become a partner at another, that of Fox, Strauss and Smith. It would henceforth be known as Strauss Jethro Smith, although the Fox family tradition, which dated back to the early nineteenth century, would not be broken, as Jethro hoped that his son, Lord Fox's grandson, would take over from him eventually.

His children, Fleur noted, were called Robert and Hazel. She gazed at the two faces, both seeming a little bemused, and thought, Those are my half-brother and -sister. Once upon a time she'd
appealed to Grace and Robin for a brother or sister. It looked now as if for the last ten years of her life, without knowing it, she'd had them. She read on – there'd been a divorce from an Italian actress, apparently, before he'd married his present wife.

Fleur gazed at the picture. There they were, her father and her brother and sister, all completely unknown to her, sitting there as if she didn't exist. Did he ever think about her, she wondered? Would it be all right to find out where he lived and go and see him?

When Jess, with whom she shared her room, came in, she told her in confidence and Jess, like best friends everywhere, went and told everybody else. Fleur had an uncomfortable few weeks with the others coming up to her and saying, “Guess what? I've just found out my father's Prince Charles” – or Arthur Scargill or Elvis. There was a scheme for building a marble pigsty for the school's two pigs in which her father would invest. Elaborate plans after the style of Pugin were drawn. Fleur pretended to take this well, but felt bad inside. Mercifully the holidays came along and next term the matter was forgotten. Fleur never told her parents she had seen the article but thereafter kept an eye out for Jethro's name in the papers. There was a knighthood, another divorce, another marriage.

Jess, after the initial betrayal, very seldom mentioned Dickie Jethro again until Ben disappeared and Verity was collapsing. Then she said, “Your father – your real father – could get you out of this easily.” Fleur had told her sourly, “Funny – before he left Ben started hinting about recapitalising the firm with Richard Jethro's help and advice. I said I'd never met the man in my life – he'd never even sent me a birthday card. I didn't want to see him, especially to ask for money, and anyway, I thought it was unlikely he'd help. Ben told me he understood, but I don't think he did – well, by that time he was more desperate than I knew.”

“So that's that,” Jess had said, discouraged.

Much of all this went very quickly through Fleur's head as she clung to the metal handrail. Her impulse was to flee. She said to Valentine Keith, “Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. Excuse me – I've got to go.” She started rapidly up the stairs towards her flat.

He bounded after her, saying breathlessly, “Fleur – Sir Richard wants to see you.”

“He's too late,” she told him, gaining the landing and moving quickly to her flat door. Her key was in the lock when, approaching fast, he said, “From the look of this place I'm surprised you're rejecting the attention of a very wealthy father.”

Fleur, having opened her door, swung round. “Who sends a deputy to hang round the garages at night to find me?”

She went in and was closing the door when his foot came in between the door frame and the door. Through the crack he said, “Sir Richard's in Budapest. That's why he asked me to contact you.”

“Well, you have. Now, take your foot out of the door and clear off.”

“Fleur—”

“I'll call the police,” she threatened.

Dominic came out of his door on the right at almost the same moment that Doug Simmons emerged on the left-hand side.

“What's happening?” Dominic said to Valentine Keith as Fleur opened her door.

“I've just been trying to talk to Fleur,” Valentine said.

“It looks as if she doesn't want to talk to you,” said Dominic. “You all right, Fleur?”

“Yes,” she said.

Dominic looked at Valentine, who said to Fleur, “I'm going.” He put his hand in his jacket – Dominic froze – then handed her his card.

“Ring me when you've had time to think,” he told her, then turned and walked back to the staircase.

Dominic and Doug Simmons hung over the railing watching him leave. From the doorway Fleur heard Dominic say dreamily to Doug, “Listen to that – lovely sound,” and Doug Simmons reply, “Beautiful engineering. Silver Seraph, isn't it? That'd set you back a bit.”

“A hundred and fifty-five grand,” said Dominic.

“And that's without the extras,” returned Doug.

“I'd give a lot to drive one of them, just once,” said Doug Simmons.

“I know what you mean,” agreed Dominic.

“Well, don't mind me,” Fleur said indignantly, going in and shutting the door. He could have been a murderer – anything – she thought furiously, and her alleged defenders were now standing around lusting after his vehicle. She had little doubt her accoster had been who he said he was, a messenger from her father; but why, after all these years? Why, now she'd gone to ground in Adelaide House and was harder to find than she'd ever been, had he suddenly decided to seek her out? What did he want?

When Dominic banged on her door, calling, “Fleur—Fleur–are you all right?” she had half a mind not to let him in, but decided that was unfair. He and Doug had come out to see if anything was wrong, after all, and it was childish to sulk just because something more interesting and beautiful, the Rolls Royce, had come along.

He took her in his arms. “You're upset. You're shaking. Who was that?”

“An unwanted relation,” she told him.

“What you need is a nice sleep in bed,” he said persuasively and before long they were both in bed, and not sleeping. Dominic was a generous lover, but this time she felt something wild in his lovemaking and knew that he was exorcising some of the grief and horror he felt about Vanessa's death.

Afterwards he muttered, “Thanks, love,” and she murmured back, “Never mind, Dom. Never mind.” Then she asked, “When you ran across the road – the phone call – are you dealing drugs?”

“You a policeman?”

“No, but—”

“The bloke we're working for in Islington won't pay. And Joe and me are off the dole now. All we've got is this flat – and the council might not let us stay on. We've got to pay the rent. More important, how are you going to pay the mortgage?”

“I've asked my parents.”

“That's the difference,” he said. “You've got parents. I'll be knocking out a small quantity of dope until Joe and me get straight again. I wouldn't deal in anything else.” He put his arm round her. “Don't worry about it.”

“I'm not,” she said.

He looked lazily at his watch and jumped out of bed. Startled, Fleur said, “What is it?”

“I've got to go and meet a man.”

“Oh – great,” she said.

“We've all got our secrets,” he said. “There's this mysterious relation of yours.”

“What do you mean?”

He had dressed and was sitting on the bed putting on his shoes. “You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to,” he said, “and I don't have to tell you. Isn't that the best way?” And, kissing her fondly, he was gone.

Fleur heard the door bang and lay there knowing she ought to be reproaching herself for having anything to do with Dominic – again. He'd rushed in, fucked her and dashed off to do a drugs deal. Was that what she wanted out of life?

She thought dreamily of Ben. They'd had so many plans, things had been so good. They worked so hard, making deals, flashing about, going to parties, coming in late at night, Ben with a bottle of champagne under his arm, on top of the world, she thought. Then they'd plunged, plummeted down. Oh Ben, she thought, sadly, oh Ben … She was asleep.

Next morning at eight the doorbell rang and there was Dominic outside, looking bright and eager to please, with a teapot and a pint of milk. Jason was beside him, wagging his tail. She let them both in. He poured out some tea and handed her a cup. “So what were you doing last night?” she asked him.