Fault Line - Retail (26 page)

‘He is?’

‘Dead as can be. Murdered, in point of fact. Shot dead in a hotel room in Naples. It happened the same day as Francis’s heart attack. Quite a coincidence, eh?’

I frowned, hoping to look baffled as well as shocked. ‘That’s … extraordinary.’

‘It is, isn’t it? The Naples police don’t seem to have made any connection between the two events. I suppose there’s no reason why they should. But naturally they informed the British consulate, who contacted Strake’s next of kin: a sister in Plymouth. He’d been living with her in recent months, apparently. There was a letter from her waiting for me when I got back. She felt I ought to know he was dead on account of the pension he’d have been due from Wren’s if he’d made it to sixty-five. Thoughtful of her. I had the impression she wasn’t altogether surprised someone had murdered her brother. I can’t say I was, either. He was a dodgy character, however you look at it. But where and when he was murdered
did
surprise me. As it does you, I imagine.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Or not.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s occurred to me, you see, that you may have been aware Strake was in Naples and that he had some dealings with Francis – his old CO, I believe – in the days leading up to their … coincidental deaths.’

‘Me? No, I—’

‘Please don’t say any more.’ Lashley’s smile broadened still further. ‘I don’t want you to confirm or deny anything, Jonathan. Whatever transpired has been satisfactorily resolved, I’m glad to say. There’s been no scandal of any kind. Most importantly, Vivien hasn’t been caught up in any police inquiries. And Francis can rest in peace. Now, how exactly all that was managed, I don’t know. But I’m impressed it was. Truly I am.’

‘I’m not sure I understand, sir.’

‘No? Well, it doesn’t matter. Incidentally, I haven’t told Vivien about Strake. There seems no need to trouble her with that. Have you heard from her since you left Rome?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘She’s gone back there, in case you’re wondering. I’m not sure how long she’ll stay. But I doubt we’ll be seeing much of her down here this summer.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Yes. It is, isn’t it?’ Lashley’s contented expression rather suggested the reverse. Perhaps he found life at Nanstrassoe more harmonious without her. His point of view and mine were a long way apart, despite his implications to the contrary. ‘We must do our best to keep cheerful in her absence, Jonathan. A bottle of wine with our lunch should help. Where’s that waitress?’

I should have been able to enjoy the rest of the meal. The food was good and the wine the finest the White Hart had to offer. But I was weighed down by doubts, regrets and dilemmas, quite a few of which I’d brought on myself. I missed Vivien with a fierce ache. I couldn’t gauge how much of the truth Lashley had discovered or deduced or simply guessed. I was beset by the hopeless wish that
Francis
was still alive, Vivien and I were still lovers and the Mediterranean sun was still shining on all of us.

But it wasn’t. The Cornish sky was more often grey than blue. Francis was dead. Vivien was lost to me. And the only member of the Wren clan who wanted to have anything to do with me was Greville Lashley. He urged me to give serious consideration to a career in the china clay industry and offered to smooth my path. ‘CCC is just the start, Jonathan. I have plans. Big plans. You can be part of them. It’s a golden opportunity. You should take it. You really should.’

I barely listened at the time. Though, strangely, over the years, the sound of his voice that day has grown in my memory. I had no reason to think so much of my future was bound up in his words. But it was. Oh yes. It surely was.

I knew I wouldn’t find it quick or easy to recover from the rift with Vivien. As it turned out, it took me most of the rest of the year. I had to start by accepting there was no way back for us. Thoughts of her with the Hon. Roger Normington didn’t help me do that, of course. Nor did my habit of comparing any girl I met with her (unfavourably). My housemates in Walworth soon tired of my lovelorn despondency and tried to snap me out of it with sarcasm. They achieved only fleeting success.

A disastrous trip to Cambridge one Saturday in late November finally broke the spell. I went with some cock-eyed notion of calling on Vivien at Girton and seeing surprise turn to joy on her face when she answered the door to me. A notion was all it remained, however. I decided to work up some Dutch courage in a city-centre pub, overdid it hopelessly and arrived at the college almost too drunk – but not quite – to know how badly any encounter with her was likely to go.

I never made it beyond the porters’ lodge. Whether Miss Foster really had gone away for the weekend, as I was told, wasn’t entirely clear. Maybe the story was designed to do her
and
me a favour.

On the way back to the station, I passed the Fitzwilliam Museum and saw a girl going in who I was momentarily convinced
was
Vivien. She wasn’t, of course, which was fortunate, given the state I was in. Vivien probably had gone away for the weekend. To Lincolnshire, it occurred to me. To the ancestral pile of Viscount Horncastle.

I took a wrong turning after leaving the Fitzwilliam and found myself blundering along a path beside the Cam, south of the centre. The light was failing and an icy wind was blowing. It began to rain, then to sleet. I couldn’t remember feeling colder or more wretched in my life.

I reached the station eventually, after a gigantic detour. Waiting there for the London train over two black coffees and several cigarettes, I came to the conclusion that enough was enough. Chasing something I’d previously turned my back on was as crazy as it was pitiful. It had to stop. And I had to start again.

Starting again didn’t involve forgetting, of course. And other issues were left unresolved besides my feelings for Vivien. It was as impossible not to wonder how Countess Covelli had reacted to the letter I’d sent her as it was not to ask myself who had really paid Strake to follow Oliver, or who, come to that, had been on my tail before I’d left for Capri that summer. They were mysteries I eventually reconciled myself to living with. They were questions I had no way of answering. And that, I came to accept, was how they were likely to stay.

2010

TWENTY-TWO

I’D NEVER ACTUALLY
stayed at the White Hart before. Waking the morning after my arrival in St Austell, I looked down from the window of my room at the early risers of the town hurrying along Church Street; then across, through the trees, at the tower of Holy Trinity. The years since Oliver Foster’s funeral seemed to roll away as I looked. How could it be more than four decades ago? It wasn’t possible, surely. So much time couldn’t feel like so little.

But it could. And it did. This was my first visit to St Austell since my mother had moved to Lytham to live with my aunt, a year or so after my father’s death. Someone else was growing up now in the house I’d grown up in. Wren & Co.’s old premises in East Hill had been demolished to make way for a supermarket. Nanstrassoe House had gone too, replaced by a cul-de-sac of up-market dwellings called Nanstrassoe Close. Even the General Wolfe, I’d been dismayed to discover the previous evening, had closed down. Nothing seemed to be as I remembered it. Yet what I remembered felt more real to me than the scene I looked out on that morning. The passage of time and the changes it had brought had made me a stranger.

My old school and Cornish China Clays’ sixties office block were still standing on the hill above the town, however. All that had changed there was signage. The grammar had been subsumed within Poltair Comprehensive long since and CCC now styled itself Intercontinental Kaolins (Cornwall). But its days were numbered,
according
to rumours I’d heard during my brief stopover in Augusta. It faced downsizing as Cornish production declined. Smaller premises were being sought for a smaller workforce.

It was certainly obvious that the offices on Tregonissey Road were larger than they any longer needed to be. The car park was a long way short of full when I arrived for my ten o’clock appointment with Pete Newlove and a whole wing appeared to be unoccupied. The weather was suitably nostalgic, though. A soft rain on the heavy side of drizzle was falling from a pewter-grey sky. It had never rained quite like that anywhere else I’d been in all the years of my absence.

The lean, long-haired, droopy-moustached accounts clerk I’d first met at Wren & Co. in the summer of 1968 was now a paunchy, balding man in his early sixties whose post as Resources Manager (St Austell) entitled him to a large office overlooking the town, a six-foot desk and a high-backed leather swivel-chair that squeaked like a trapped mouse at every move.

‘Long time no see, Jon,’ was his predictable if accurate greeting. It had to be fifteen years or more since we’d last set eyes on each other. ‘Still in harness, then?’

‘Not for much longer, Pete. I’m on my way out.’

‘Yeah? I wouldn’t be too sure. You once lost a fiver to me betting you wouldn’t work for CCC after university. Strikes me you just can’t let go.’

‘I’m letting go. You can bank on that.’

He smiled. ‘If you say so.’

‘Anyway, what’s your excuse for still being here?’

‘They keep paying me, Jon. Simple as that. Though maybe I should say
you
keep paying me, considering how close you are to the centre of things these days.’

‘The only thing I’m close to is retirement. I’ve handed in my notice. This little damage limitation exercise is my last assignment.’

‘Really? Sorry to hear that.’

‘Why? It comes to us all.’

‘I didn’t mean I’m sorry you’re retiring. I mean I’m sorry you’re
going
out on a bum note. Damage limitation, did you say? Poisoned chalice, I’d call it.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Don’t you know? Oh, before I forget …’ He ferreted in a drawer, pulled out a car key with an IK-insignia fob attached and slid it across the desk to me. ‘Beaumont’s PA said we should allocate some transport to you. Freelander near the main entrance is yours for the duration.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

I took the key, wondering how long I’d have to wait for him to expand on his ‘poisoned chalice’ remark. He wrapped a rubber band round his finger, then unwrapped it, then stared out through the window at the grey sprawl of St Austell. Finally, and to my surprise, he took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, flipped up the top and offered it to me.

‘Smoke?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve given up.’

He sighed. ‘Naturally.’

‘Also, I must have passed at least half a dozen NO SMOKING signs on my way up here.’

‘Yeah. I know.’ He put the cigarettes away, satisfied, apparently, to have made some kind of point. ‘And I actually obey them. It’s pitiful, really. That old pension’s quite a tyrant.’

‘You could start drawing it any time you wanted.’

‘True. But to live on it I’d have to cut back on the booze, the fags and the gee-gees. I don’t fancy that.’

‘You’ll have to sooner or later.’

‘Yeah. Just like we’ll have to get to the point sooner or later, so, why don’t we? Doctor Fay Whitworth. You’ve met her?’

‘I had lunch with her in Bristol yesterday.’

‘Right. So I don’t need to fill you in. I’m sure she did that. Smart woman. And I don’t just mean clever. I thought my luck was in when she showed up here, you know. Clever, attractive, single lady, in need of company and, er, evening entertainment … Don’t look at me like that. A bloke can dream, can’t he? Anyway, this dream
turned
into a nightmare. Missing records. Can you believe it? Missing bloody records from fifty years ago. I mean, who the hell cares?’

‘Doctor Whitworth, Pete. And therefore the people you and I both work for.’

‘OK.’ He held up his hands. ‘Point taken. No excuses will do. Somebody’s filleted the Wren and Co. files and it’s all my fault.’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘Not yet you aren’t. But when you put your report in to Beaumont, what’ll you say then?’

‘Depends what I find out while I’m here.’

‘Sweet FA. That’s what you’ll find out. Those files could have been raided any time since the sixties, maybe
in
the sixties. Remember Oliver Foster? Maybe that’s what he was up to in the basement over at East Hill.’

‘I don’t think so. All Wren and Co. documents would have been checked and collated when they were moved here after the takeover in sixty-eight. It has to have happened since then.’

‘Which still gives us forty-two years to play with. I bet no one’s looked at the stuff in all that time. Why would they?’

‘Someone has looked, though, haven’t they, Pete? That’s the whole point. And you’ve just asked the right question:
why
?’

‘Search me.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it won’t come to that.’

He laughed. ‘Very funny.’

‘I should probably start by looking at the files as they presently are.’

‘That won’t tell you anything.’

‘Even so …’

‘OK.’ He levered himself out of the chair. ‘Let’s step down into the dungeons. Then you can do all the looking you like.’

The basement was a vast, strip-lit concrete cavern, resonant with the hum of the building’s boiler. It had been fitted out with lockable wired-off cages, housing different sections of CCC records, along with redundant furniture, office equipment and
assorted
junk that should have been disposed of many years previously and probably would have been if the size of the basement hadn’t made it so easy to stow everything away out of sight. There were typewriters galore, rusty filing cabinets, broken-backed chairs, wobbly-legged tables, bundles of maps, stacks of catalogues and piles and piles of paper.

‘There are probably a few fossilized members of staff down here somewhere,’ Pete joked as he led the way along the passage between the cages. ‘File and forget should be the company’s motto. What would that be in Latin?’

He rambled on in a similar vein until we reached our destination: the Wren & Co. cage. The box-files Fay Whitworth had consulted stood on open metal shelving, neatly labelled as she’d described. Some loose files and leather-bound minute books lay on a small table next to the shelving unit, disarranged as if Fay had merely stepped out for a coffee before resuming her researches. But her researches, of course, were not going to be resumed, unless I discovered what had become of the missing records.