Fault Line - Retail (45 page)

FORTY

BY THE TIME
we were on the bypass, heading west, I’d gone a long way to convincing myself I was worrying unnecessarily. Whatever secret Oliver had teased out of Wren’s files, it was still safe from us. Keeping it that way had to be Adam’s priority, given the lengths he’d already gone to to suppress it. So the likelihood was that he’d put the records conclusively out of our reach before even thinking of going after Vivien. Maybe he’d destroy them this time, though why he hadn’t before I couldn’t imagine.

That wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t imagine. The secret itself remained unguessable, despite Oliver’s note on the memo in my pocket.
A bargain for GL, not Wren’s!!!
GL was Greville Lashley, of course, but he’d sent me in search of the missing records in the first place, so it could hardly be him Adam was protecting. Who, then? Who and – after all these years – why?

Pete’s thoughts had evidently been running along the same lines as mine. ‘I’m not sure about this, Jon. Adam may be pretty crazy, but he’s got the records and we haven’t. Won’t he—’

‘Concentrate on finding somewhere else to hide them?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I was just coming to that conclusion myself. I don’t think he’s gone to Lannerwrack.’

‘Panic over, then?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Do you still want to go there anyway?’

‘Yes. I’ll try to persuade Vivien to leave with us. It’s not safe for her to stay there any more. If it ever was.’

‘Right. I’ll enjoy seeing how you manage that.’

But I’d already decided to talk to Vivien alone. It was going to be a difficult enough conversation without Pete as an audience. I told him to stop the car at the entrance to the site and wait for me there. He protested, but his heart wasn’t in it. I suspected he was glad to be spared the outside chance of another encounter with Adam, armed and dangerous. That was a small part of my reasoning as well. Whatever was going on in Adam’s troubled mind, it wasn’t Pete’s responsibility to sort it out. Somehow, though, it had become mine.

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ I said as I prepared to get out of the car. ‘Adam won’t have come here.’

‘I hope we’re right about that, Jon.’

‘Me too. If anything does happen …’

‘Like what?’

‘Just anything.’ I looked towards him in the darkness and sensed him looking at me. ‘Call the police and stay put. Don’t follow me. OK?’

‘You’re the boss. Don’t be long, hey? I’ve only got a few fags left.’

‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

I walked away from the car, along the curving approach road to the dryers. Their towers loomed ahead, black and bulky against the milky moonlit sky. I heard the crunch of grit beneath my shoes and the rustle of the wind in the hedges bordering the fields to either side. I had the torch with me, but there was no need to use it. I knew the route well enough to find my way.

I saw light gleaming in the caravan windows as I entered the wide, black expanse of the yard. All was quiet and normal. I felt more certain than ever that Adam hadn’t come here. I made my way past the Beetle to the caravan. The curtains were closed, but they were thin enough to show a shadow of movement within. Vivien was evidently still up and about. I could hear the faint burble of a radio.

I knocked on the door. Instantly, the radio was switched off. But there was no other response. I knocked again and called out: ‘Vivien, it’s me – Jonathan.’

‘Jonathan?’

‘Yes. Can I come in?’

There was a long wait, but eventually she opened the door.

I’d seen her only three days before, but somehow I’d still managed to forget how different she was from the Vivien lodged in my mind. She frowned at me. ‘What are you doing here at this hour?’ she asked.

‘I found something I wanted to show you. And … something’s happened I need to … tell you about.’

‘What?’

I took the memo out of my pocket and passed it to her. ‘The note in green: is that Oliver’s handwriting?’

She put on a pair of glasses that were hanging round her neck and moved back into the light to read the note. She gasped in surprise. ‘Yes. Oliver wrote this.’

‘Can I come in now?’

‘Oh, yes. You better had.’

She took another pace back as I stepped up into the doorway. At that moment, there was a sharp crack from somewhere behind me and a ping of impact on the roof of the caravan. It was a gunshot. The certainty of that rammed into my thoughts along with the sickening realization that I’d misread Adam totally. He was here. He’d been here all the time, waiting for my arrival to confirm his belief that Vivien and I were allied against him.

A second shot followed the first almost instantly. This one drilled a hole in the window to my right. I leapt forward into the caravan, pulling the door shut behind me. ‘Get down,’ I shouted to Vivien. She ignored me, darting back to throw a switch that plunged us into darkness, then forward to lock the door.

‘
Down!
’

Now, at last, she dropped to her knees beside me. ‘What’s happening?’ she panted, her face close to mine. ‘Who’s out there?’

‘Adam. I learnt this evening that he stole the records.’

‘
Adam?
’

‘In his mind, we’re his enemies, you and I. God knows what it’s all about. I didn’t think he’d come here. I only wanted to—’

A third shot shattered the rest of the window and ploughed into the farther wall of the caravan. ‘Has he gone mad? For God’s sake, Jonathan, why is he doing this?’

‘I think he has gone mad, yes. Something’s pushed him over the edge.’ Pete must have heard the shots. He’d already be on the phone to the police. But how long would it take them to arrive? ‘I’m sorry, Vivien. I don’t know what to do. There’s no reasoning with him.’

‘Are there more notes in the files like this?’

‘Probably. I never got the chance to check. Adam took them with him.’

‘Oliver really was on to something, then.’ I had the bizarre sense that she was smiling. ‘He wasn’t deluded after all.’

‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t help us now.’

‘Yes, it does. It means—’

‘
Come out
,’ Adam bellowed from no more than a few yards beyond the door. ‘
Come out and face me
.’

To my astonishment, Vivien started to get up. I pulled her back down. ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered.

‘I’m not afraid of him.’

‘Well, you should be.’

‘Maybe so. But I’ve lost too much over the years to hang on to fear, Jonathan. I don’t have any left.’

‘
Are you coming out or not?
’

‘Pete Newlove’s waiting for me at the site entrance, Vivien. He’ll have heard the shots and called the police. They’ll be here soon.’

‘Not soon enough, I suspect.’

‘You can’t go out there.’

‘Adam’s always hated me. I’ve never really understood why. Perhaps this is my chance to find out.’

‘
I’m not going to wait for ever
.’

Vivien tried to pull away from me again, but I held her fast. ‘I won’t let you go.’

‘There was a time I longed to hear you say that. But that time is past.’

‘He means to kill us.’

‘I’ll take my chances. What do I have to live for, anyway?’

‘For God’s—’ I broke off, my attention seized by unexpected sounds outside the caravan: a metallic clunk, followed by the splashing of something liquid against the door and along the wall. ‘What’s that?’ A whiff of petrol through the smashed window supplied an answer even as I asked the question. ‘My God, he’s going to try and burn us out.’

‘I won’t wait for him to do that.’

‘Neither will I.’ It occurred to me that a fire was Adam’s crazed notion of how he could make our deaths look like the work of an unknown arsonist. The fact that there were ample clues to lead the police to him probably hadn’t crossed his mind. No matter. He’d just given us our best chance of escape. He couldn’t hold a gun, let alone aim it, while he was sloshing petrol out of a jerry can. ‘Stay behind me.’

I scrambled to my feet, certain that I had to act fast if I was to get the better of him. I pushed Vivien back, unlocked the door, flung it open and jumped out, turning as I did so in the direction the splashes had been coming from.

I landed awkwardly and, steadying myself, saw Adam as a dark shape ahead of me. He looked to be holding the jerry can with both hands. Petrol vapour caught in my nostrils. There was a tang of tobacco smoke as well. He’d lit a cigar, no doubt intending to use it to ignite the petrol. The tip of it glowed as he looked towards me.

I charged him without further thought – and no idea of where the gun might be. He tried to dodge me, but, drunk and impeded by the jerry can as he was, he was too slow. I took him in the chest and down we went. He grunted as we hit the ground and the cigar fell from his mouth. Exactly where the jerry can ended up I couldn’t tell, but I could hear the rest of the petrol gurgling out of it.

I pinned Adam down with my forearm across his throat and cast around with my free hand in search of the gun. ‘Fuck you,’ he gasped. Then there was a whoosh as the cigar set the spreading
pool
of petrol alight. Flames billowed up to my left and, an instant later, they were on us. Adam’s trousers must have been soaked in petrol. His legs were on fire and so were mine. I rolled off him and, looking back, saw Vivien standing in the doorway of the caravan as a tentacle of flame began to run along its base.

‘Get out of there,’ I shouted.

But all she did was retreat inside. I sat up and began thrashing at my legs in a vain attempt to put out the flames. Adam was moving too, heaving himself slowly up, apparently oblivious to the flames curling around him. I could smell flesh burning, though whether his or mine I wasn’t sure. There was smoke coming from the caravan as well now – an acrid, choking ribbon of it.

Suddenly, Vivien reappeared. She jumped out of the caravan, cradling a bundle in her arms, and rushed towards me. It was a blanket. She dropped it over my legs and beat down on it. The flames went out. But she didn’t stop beating.

Then I heard a weird, half-despairing, half-exultant shriek. Vivien’s face registered her shock at what she saw behind me. I turned and saw it too.

Adam was on his feet, his clothes ablaze. But he didn’t seem to care about that. He’d wrestled the gun out of his pocket and was trying to point it at us. But the flames on his sleeve were dazzling him and obstructing his aim. He cocked his head one way, then the other, in an effort to focus on his target.

At that moment, light flooded over him, swamping the shadows cast by the flames. It was coming from the headlamps of a car speeding along the approach road towards us. I knew the police couldn’t have arrived so quickly. It had to be Pete. He must have seen the fire and decided he couldn’t just sit where he was and wait for them to turn up.

Adam stared towards the light, as if fascinated by it. His mouth sagged open. And his face registered pain for the first time: a wide, wincing grimace of agony. I’m not sure he could see us any more. He said something, but I couldn’t make out the words. He fired the gun. Two shots whistled off into the night a long way wide of us.

‘Drop the gun, Adam,’ Vivien cried. ‘We can help you.’

But he was past helping – way past. He gaped in apparent surprise at the bubbling flesh on his wrist and arm and must have recognized, deep within himself, the finality of the moment. He thrust the barrel of the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

FORTY-ONE

I SPENT THE
night in hospital after being treated for the burns to my legs and hands, while the police and the Fire Brigade busied themselves at Lannerwrack and began their painstaking inquiries into what had happened. I answered their questions as best I could, but the truth was that none of us could properly explain why Adam had acted as he had.

The memory kept recurring to me of Adam as a five-year-old, firing his cap-gun at Oliver one Sunday morning at Nanstrassoe House. There’d been hatred in him even then, though I’d done my best to ignore it. Advantages had been showered on him through his life, but they could never erase the central flaw in his character: in his mind, the world had always been set against him.

That wasn’t enough to explain the behaviour that had led to his death, of course. The cause of his self-destructive frenzy was to be found, if it was to be found anywhere, in the decades old files of Walter Wren & Co. he’d gone to such lengths to keep from us. The police discovered them in his Lotus, parked in the lane that ran along the far western boundary of the Lannerwrack site. He’d cut a hole in the fence and gone in from there.

The files were impounded as evidence, though soon enough the police did the obvious thing and asked Fay Whitworth to come down and examine them. Nobody from Intercontinental Kaolins was to be allowed a look before she delivered her verdict. Rumours about what she might discover spread freely from St Austell to
Augusta.
All I could tell Presley Beaumont was that we wouldn’t have to wait long to learn the worst.

Meanwhile, there was Adam’s funeral to be arranged. But none of his relatives seemed in any hurry to take charge. When I called his father to break the news of his death, I was obliged to do it by answerphone message. According to Beaumont, the old man never took calls directly any more. Evidently, he didn’t respond to messages directly either. Jacqueline phoned me from Georgia to report that Greville simply wasn’t fit to travel. It was ‘difficult’ for her to come to Cornwall herself and impossible for Michelle, who was committed to competing in an equestrian tournament in Uruguay. She suggested Vivien could do whatever had to be done.

But Vivien wasn’t in any state to deal with the administrative complexities of sudden death. She’d lost most of her possessions in the fire, including Oliver’s photograph album, her most cherished memento of him. Homeless and to a large degree helpless, she didn’t put up any resistance when Pete persuaded his sister, a kindly soul, to take her in. That left me to deal with the coroner and the undertaker and the family solicitor. My various attempts to talk to Vivien about what had happened – and to thank her for coming to my rescue that night – all ended with her gazing past me and shaking her head and saying simply, ‘It doesn’t matter.’