Connections (25 page)

“You may not have to. Once you threaten it, Fleur'll take the money to save her poor old parents,” Henry said, drawing on his cigar.

“OK. Right after Christmas, you'll call Grace and tell her what the deal is. And I'll tell Fleur. Grace ought to put enough pressure on Fleur to get her to take the money. It should work. We haven't got time now to fuck about. Fleur mustn't go back to that flat.” He sighed. “God Almighty, Henry. Women and children, eh? Can't live with them and can't live without them. Meanwhile that little prick Ben has a bit more time to do his work. If he succeeds, I won't need to threaten Grace. I'd be only too pleased if he never saw a penny of my money but he might still be the best way forward.”

A steward came up with a fax message and handed it to him. He read it and handed it to Henry Jones. “What I expected. Prothero on leave, my message forwarded to him. I expect he's off skiing. Get on the phone and get his number, Henry. He's not going to
enjoy himself on my time and the taxpayers' money, not after his recent cock-up.”

He looked up at the sky. “I can't take this much longer, Henry. I'm fucked if I'm going to wander round St Lucia looking at the arts and crafts and meeting people I'm not interested in. Make arrangements to fly back as soon as we get there.”

“Sophia has plans to lunch with the Duchess. She'd prefer it if you were there.”

“They'll manage. You come back with me, Henry. We've got to get hold of Prothero. This business is potentially nasty. My God,” said Dickie Jethro. “I tell you, Henry, I won't be happy until I know where Tallinn is. And my daughter's away from that flat.”

Fleur went through the day of the departure of the
Sea Queen Athena
feeling ill. She lay, limp and lethargic, drinking the soups and drinks brought her by Marie and taking the pills the doctor had prescribed. She tried to read and instead fell asleep a lot.

The following morning she woke feeling clear-headed and more ready to cope with life. Robin, she noted, had not rung her back to tell her about Grace's allowance from her father. She felt annoyed with them, and with Ben, too, because he'd left her alone at Braganza House. Admittedly she'd urged him to go, but he hadn't taken much urging. He could have insisted on staying with her. He must have thought it was a good idea to cultivate Jim Arnoldson with a view to raising money for their films. But what kind of a happy reunion was it, when one of the couple left only days after they'd come together again? She remembered him and Valentine Keith hovering round her sickbed talking about money, money, money. She thought of Dickie and Henry Jones and George Andriades and their endless daily business conferences. It was all men and money here, she thought, a Victorian world where the men dealt with big sums, the women were ornamental, made for man's comfort and the children were acquisitions, representing the future of the dynasty.

She jumped up and opened the drawer where Ben had left the money from Atlanta, which, in justice, really belonged to their creditors. Quite a sum, all in dollars. Half of it would get her back to Britain and pay her outstanding bills. If she took a bit more, the sum would keep her for a month while she completed her course, which she'd now be able to start on time. Ben would
be furious, her father disappointed, Sophia and Zoe would think badly of her, but Fleur didn't care. Her mother, for reasons she hadn't understood at the time, had pushed her into this trip, even recruited Jess to help. Perhaps she'd been a fool to let her mother and her best friend persuade her to do something she'd instinctively felt to be a bad idea, but then, she thought, your mother and best friend were normally people you trusted to have your interests at heart. It was the money, she decided. It had twisted everyone's responses. She couldn't in honesty even tell herself Ben was immune. You couldn't trust anybody, she thought, when big sums were floating about, enough to change people's lives and fulfil all their dreams. Look and learn, Fleur Stockley, she advised herself, and called the airport.

Flights which had brought in the holidaymakers were returning almost empty. There was no problem about getting a seat. She packed and parcelled up tips for the staff from Ben's store of money. She left a note for him saying, “Sorry – see you in London?” and a more apologetic letter to Zoe. Her final letter was to her father, rejecting his money and giving as a reason the excuse she'd already given him, that she wanted to make her own way in the world. She handed the tips and the letters to Marie, and got the chauffeur to take her to the airport.

In fact, as Dickie and Henry were landing, Fleur's plane was taking off for London.

She'd phoned Jess before she left Barbados and Jess was loyally at the airport to meet her with a car and an overcoat. Driving back in the grey and chilly gloom she said, “God, Fleur. Look at this dark and cold. What came over you?”

Fleur's story took them the best part of the way back to London. She had predicted Jess would denounce her and call her a fool but in the event she was surprisingly sympathetic. As they made their slow way through the Christmas traffic, she said, “It was badly handled, Fleur. It sounds as if they were trying to force a deal on you, you know, the kind of deal where it's a bit of a con, vital the other party signs up, and signs now, before they've had a chance to think it over. It's as if they were desperate – didn't you think it was weird?”

“Everything seemed weird at the time,” Fleur told her. “I suppose I thought it was the way people like that operated. You know – get Fleur to take the money, construct the merger, buy an island somewhere. Everything done fast. Plus, if you had a pound for every time Dickie Jethro's been turned down when he tried to give somebody money you wouldn't have enough for the parking meter. No one in that world does.”

“Mind you, though, Fleur. Your father's money would have solved some problems,” Jess said ruefully.

“I'll have to solve them myself, then,” she declared.

“Good,” said Jess, in a tone lacking conviction. She went on, “I'll tell you something, though. I was right. Debs Smith has sold Camera Shake. She's retained an interest – she hasn't said how much. But she did a classic boss thing, summoned all the staff to a meeting a few days ago and said, in essence, ‘Christmas is coming up, the firm's sold and you're all out of a job. Have a merry one and a happy New Year as well.'”

“Oh Jess,” said Fleur sympathetically.

“It may not be too bad. She took me and Jane Ray aside and said, ‘Don't despair.' She was trying to work something out for us with the new owners. She couldn't go into any details. Nothing was finalised.”

“It might be all right then?”

“Might be,” said Jess. “For me. Not for all of us, though. It's a hard world.”

“If I'd played along with my father we might have been able to set up—”

“If you'd played along,” Jess said bluntly, “Ben would have been part of the deal. In fact, because of your relationship, Ben would have been in charge. Somehow I don't think there'd have been room for me.”

“Where are you going?” Fleur asked suddenly. They had passed the turn-off that would have taken them to Cray Hill.

“I suppose you left your inexpensive but thoughtfully selected gifts back in Barbados.”

“I didn't like to bring them back,” Fleur told her.

“You'd better nip down to Covent Garden tomorrow and
get some more, because I'm taking you back to Highgate and tomorrow we, that's you, me and Adrian, are going off for Christmas Day chez Stadlen. I'm not dropping you off at that hovel you live in with only street people and junkies for company. You're expected to come with us and take part in the annual row about the Christmas tree. If it's Hanukkah we're celebrating, why the tree? If it's not Hanukkah but Christmas – why? The Stadlens are Jewish. Or are they? Or are some of them Jewish and others not? The tree's the focus of all this. Everyone's expected to contribute and make suggestions about it. If it's in the lounge it's too prominent for the older members of the family. If it's in the hall it manages to block two doorways. If it's upstairs the children feel estranged from their presents – or they have a go at them on the quiet. Last year it was on the back lawn with an extension cable run out for the lights. Then there was a fuss about it being dangerous to passing cats. One year one of my cousins, the Zionist, paid his little brother to fall on it accidentally on purpose. Your glamorous holiday's over, Fleur. You've missed the Christmas dinner ferried in by teams of servants in the sunshine. Get back to reality and people throwing themselves at the Christmas tree.”

“Thanks, Jess – you're an angel,” Fleur said. “They ought to put you on the tree.”

“Think there'll be repercussions from your escape?” Jess asked. “Or will they just scratch you off the guest list and forget about you?”

“I'm worried about Ben's reaction,” Fleur admitted.

“Yes,” was all Jess said.

“He might go back to the States. Particularly if Jim Arnoldson can put him in touch with some money.”

“Americans are a bit suspicious of handsome Englishmen with charm and Oxbridge degrees asking for money.”

“Ben has talent,” Fleur pointed out.

“Everybody's got talent,” Jess told her.

My goodness gracious me, William. I've only been here a couple of days and already I'm getting used to it. I suppose that if I stayed here I'd see the old bloke with his dog on the beach every day until, suddenly, one of them wouldn't be there. Sad, eh? I'm almost tempted to take root here and see it through. No, reluctantly I'll have to leave for my villa in the sun. There's worse to come.

We went to Africa. It went off OK. The tyrant we were helping out got returned with acclamation and the army didn't try to kill him that time. Though one of his troops told one of ours that they were planning to do it next year. He wanted us to stay on and offered us a lot of money, to be paid from some development fund they were expecting to receive. I turned him down.

We returned towards the middle of January but I couldn't face home so I took a service flat in Bayswater and only dropped into Twickenham now and again. No one noticed except that the kids had to ring the office to make their insatiable demands, copying their mother's strategy.

I also cut down the old lady's pay. That's to say, I didn't, only she always overspent herself and came to me to bail her out. I decided I had to stop doing this. The marriage was so flaky you couldn't have held it together with cement. I didn't like it, but there it was. And the divorce wasn't going to keep her in the style she was accustomed to, so she might as well get used to it. I suspected she was squirreling money away herself, knowing what was coming.

However, this isn't what you're interested in. Now funnily enough I was in a pub in Bayswater not too long after we got
back from Africa, having a drink with Goolies, when he told me a story.

Goolies started telling me about this man he knew, a retired SAS chap. Goolies' friend hailed from the East End criminal fraternity. When he left the army, he went back to his roots.

One day Goolies popped down to Poplar for a pint and the boy, Darren by name, told Goolies that his uncle, a man of standing in that part of the world, had been approached, in the very pub they were sitting in, by an agent of the Crown, unsuccessfully disguised as a businessman.

The stranger revealed that he wanted Darren's uncle to arrange to eliminate somebody. The target was under guard at the Savoy Hotel but that was not a problem as the security had been persuaded to evaporate when asked to do so.

Uncle Roger saw no objection to taking on what seemed a fundamentally simple job, so he said he had an ex-SAS man on the payroll, who with other experienced men would be able to take care of his problem, as long as the money was right. They would plan it now and get it done by the end of the week, half the money up front, half on satisfactory completion.

It ought to have been all right, even Goolies said it ought to have been all right. Darren checked the entrances and exits of the hotel and looked over the security in general. As long as the protectors of the potential victim of Uncle Roger's nasty accident did what they were supposed to and went away when Darren and his boys turned up, nothing could really go wrong. It ought to have been all right.

Darren and the other two got the tube to the Strand at about seven thirty one evening, wearing suits and carrying sports bags like office workers off to the gym together. They went into the hotel and spoke to the receptionist who called upstairs and let them go up. This had been planned in advance.

So up they went. A large man opened the door to the suite. This led through a short, narrow hallway to a large room, all white and gold with flowers, fruit, a trolley still standing there with dishes and covers on it.

Sitting in an easy chair, smoking and apparently reading a
book, was a tall, thin man in jeans, a collarless shirt and an expensive leather jacket. He was young, in his early twenties, with a very pale wide-cheekboned face – deadly pale – and big light blue eyes, slightly protuberant and almost colourless. His hair was so fair it was white and it hung down to his shoulders. “A good-looking guy,” Darren had told Goolies, “and my first thought was ‘rock star', but then I saw he was serious. A second later I realised he was trouble. That was when he looked at me and by then it was a split second too late.” The guard who'd let the group in had promptly left through the open door and gone off down the corridor somewhere. The second guard, as soon as they'd entered the suite, disappeared through the door into a bedroom. “We were three against one,” Darren had said, “and we took him by surprise. Should have been all right. Should have been – wasn't.
”