by KJ Griffin
Chapter 31: Oxshott, Surrey: October 29: afternoon
Douglas Easterby listened to the crunch of gravel underneath the tires of his Aston Martin as his chauffeur circled the elaborate arc of the driveway, parking underneath the portico of his twelve-bedroom mansion.
But Easterby didn’t go straight inside the house. The sight of Maria, his Filipina housekeeper, sent him scurrying to the side of the house, head bent and shoulders uncharacteristically slouched inwards in Napoleonic angst. He felt a craving for solitude and made a quick friend of the rain. The heavy drops had slackened in pace and volume, settling for the anonymity of a steady English drizzle.
Easterby paused when he reached the rear of the house and looked across the lawn to a sculptured terrace flanking an impressive, swan-studded lake. The five-year-old Marcus had christened it ‘the goldfish pond’ on the day they had moved in, and the colonel shivered as he remembered the taste of the ‘good old days’: always summer in the garden, always large parties full of happy family, friends and admiring business associates, all heavily lubricated with the finest wines and champagnes, paid for by lavish BDS entertainment allowances.
Beyond the ‘goldfish pond’ the lawn sloped sharply downhill for a couple of hundred yards, before collapsing, exhausted, into a small copse of sycamore and ash trees, fudging the outer perimeter fencing with spiky autumnal branches.
Easterby knew he should have been pleased with the morning’s meeting. Contrary to all expectations, the board had backed him up, had decided to use the combined might of their media friends to launch a determined counterattack in the British press. They would set their own spin doctors to work, would expose Goss’s vicious past, downplay the extent of Easterby’s role in the Ramli decision-making process, call to attention the thousands of British jobs that depended on BDS’s operations in places like Ramliyya. The fuss would last for a couple of weeks, but after that they would all move on.
Yes, he should have felt better, but he didn’t. It was as though his guts had been sliced open by bayonet in the searing heat of that car park in Ramliyya, and now the cancer lying long-concealed inside was going to slop out in long, malodorous lengths all over his own, and his family’s good name.
And the cancer cut deeper than his business interests and his position at BDS. The horror of the car park still haunted him: the cloying, humid heat; Goss’s rabid shouting; and something far, far worse, something so ghastly that he no longer had any idea what it could have been. But whatever it was, it had left him with a whirlwind presentiment of imminent catastrophe. Goss had called the Furies down upon him and now they were circling around his sanity with wingbeats that sounded like the soft snick of metal through flesh.
Maria peeped out of the kitchen window and checked her watch. Nearly half an hour had passed since the colonel had returned and he was still sitting motionless out there on the terrace, his hair and suit soaked and matted to the flesh.
There had been two calls for him, one from his wife, Barbara, the other from an insistent man who would not leave a name. She had told them both that the colonel would be back inside any minute, but now she was no longer sure. Colonel Easterby had been acting very strange since he’d returned from this latest business trip and his picture had started appearing on the television news. She would have to go outside herself to get him.
‘Colonel! Colonel Easterby, sir!’ Maria pleaded, coming up unnoticed behind him on the terrace.
No answer. She touched the colonel’s arm lightly, expecting him to jump, but he seemed lost in a trance.
‘Colonel, come telephone, please! Barbara, she call you; also call one other man.’
Still no reaction. Maria moved round in front of Colonel Easterby, still clutching on to his arm. His eyes were set as rigidly as the rest of his body and were focused intently at a distance.
‘Call Marcus,’ he rasped barely audibly. ‘Tell Marcus I need to see him.’