I imagined my future. Playing bridge in exotic places – Nice, Hong Kong, Los Angeles. After the game was over, I would meet Sadie in a bar, and together we would walk into dinner. And I knew I would feel proud – so very, very proud. What man could not feel proud when he was beside such a beautiful woman?
I parked outside Hoxwold Station and saw my aunt to the train.
‘I’ll only be two days,’ she said through the open carriage window, ‘three at the most. You’ll be all right, won’t you?’
‘Of course I’ll be all right,’ I told her. ‘Before I came to live with you, I’d been looking after myself for years.’
My aunt smiled. Sadly, I thought.
‘Try to miss me just a little bit,’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean that I wouldn’t miss you when I said I’ll be all right,’ I protested. ‘I didn’t mean that at all.’
The guard blew his whistle. Aunt Sadie leant forward, and kissed me full on the lips.
‘And don’t go breaking any speed records on the way back home,’ she called as the train began to pull out of the station. ‘Remember, you haven’t been driving that long.’
****
I drove slowly along the country lanes back to Shelton Bourne, the top of the TR6 up, and a gentle breeze blowing through my hair. Crab apple and blue germander speedwell bloomed in the hedgerows. Starry-flowered greater stitchwort grew in clusters along the grassy banks. I pulled up and got out of the car. To my right lay a field of wheat, still a vivid pale green. To my left was a small wood, its floor carpeted with bluebells.
‘Nature …’ I said softly to myself, for no particular reason, ‘… beautiful, tranquil nature.’
A family of voles – a mother and four babies – emerged from the long grass. They scuttled around, confused to suddenly lose their protective covering, disorientated now that the springy ground had given way to unyielding gravel.
‘Go back where you belong,’ I told them silently. ‘Go back to what you feel comfortable in.’
They were given no chance to follow my wise, unspoken advice. One second the voles and I were alone on the lane, the next – in a brown flash – we had been joined by a creature which must often have filled the voles’ furry little nightmares.
How enormous the weasel must have seemed to the tiny creatures it towered over.
How powerful.
How invincible.
The mother vole could do nothing but squeak urgent messages of danger to her offspring. But she was too late – far too late. The weasel already had one baby in its mouth and was vigorously shaking it, while a second struggled ineffectually under its giant paw.
The survivors of the vole family scattered, disappearing into different parts of the vast, green jungle from which they had come. The weasel, content with its cull, made no attempt to follow. I climbed back into the TR6, and headed for the lovely village of Shelton Bourne.
****
I heard the roar of the monsters in the distance, but it was not until I’d almost reached the junction with the main road that I saw them. They moved as slowly as a funeral cortège, as inexorably as tanks trundling into battle. There were heavy dumper trucks, their headlights glinting malevolently. There were mighty bulldozers, worthy of the Juggernaut. There were pile-drivers, their huge steel pistons hanging in the air but ready, at a moment’s notice, to slam down and pulverise whatever lay in their path.
None of them stopped in order to let me into the lane of traffic, even though there was now a queue building up behind me. I was not surprised. I might as well have expected a river in full flood – or a glacier grinding its way forward – to stop for my convenience.
On and on the monstrous procession lumbered, until it had all finally passed. The rear-guard was a yellow JCB digger, its mechanical arm raised menacingly high in the air, like the head of an advancing Tyrannosaurus Rex.
How enormous that JCB seemed as it towered over me and my tiny vehicle, I thought.
How powerful.
How invincible.
The procession rumbled through the village – rattling windows, spitting mud on the white-washed cottages, crushing curb stones as it mounted the pavements which fringed Shelton Bourne’s narrow streets. The journey’s end, as I’d always known it would be, was the land in front of the almshouse – Sir Llewellyn Cypher’s toe-hold in the village.
When I’d passed the site on the way to Hoxwold only two hours earlier, it had been nothing but a piece of waste land, a place to walk dogs and pick early morning mushrooms. Now, it had been completely transformed. A high wire fence surrounded it as though it were a prison. Portable cabins squatted in one corner, with as much assurance as if they’d occupied the same spot for centuries. Where the sun had smiled kindly down on dew-tipped grass that morning, there was now a morass.
But horrifying as all these things were, it was the billboard which came as the greatest shock. It stood thirty feet high, and was a hundred feet long. At the top, it announced that the site was Phase One of the newest Cypher Shopping and Leisure Centre. Below, in colours garish enough to have pleased my old friend Pastor Ives, was an artist’s impression of what the finished complex would look like.
The artist was undoubtedly mad, I decided – or else the architect who commissioned him was. Nobody but a madman – and an inspired one at that – could ever have conceived such a surrealistic nightmare of concrete and bare metal.
Ground had already been broken by the monsters which had arrived earlier, and a foundation shaft – already several feet deep – gaped like an open wound in the centre of the site.
‘This simply can’t be happening!’ I said – although unless I was hallucinating, it undoubtedly was.
But it still made no sense. The picture on the billboard clearly indicated that the completed building would cover a much larger area than the land Cypher already owned. So the complex could not be completed unless he acquired the almshouse gardens – and he couldn’t do that.
‘Think it through,’ I ordered myself. ‘Treat it like a game of bridge, and consider all the options.’
Even if Cypher managed to take control of our company, he would inherit a binding agreement which said he couldn’t take possession of the cottages until the present tenants had died. And how long would he have to wait before that happened?
‘It’ll take ten years,’ Aunt Sadie had said. ‘Ten years at the most.’
Say it only took eight years.
Say six.
Say, for the sake of argument, a flu epidemic would wipe out all the OAPs the following winter.
Even if this last case proved true – and it was highly improbable that it would – then the arrival of the heavy plant was premature, because it would have to sit around for at least six months before it could do anything.
Unless …
The thought which had just come into my head was too horrible to contemplate – but impossible to ignore.
11
The clock in the waiting room of Crick, Gatsby & Brock, Solicitors and Commissioners of Oaths, ticked off another minute as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I wondered how much longer I could stand the strain – the sheer bloody tension – of not knowing for sure whether or not my suspicions were correct.
Martin Lord, who was sitting next to me, put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Try to relax, Rob.’
That was easy for him to say. He wasn’t carrying the burden of responsibility that I was.
The phone on the receptionist desk rang, making me jump.
‘Relax!’ my bridge partner repeated.
The receptionist replaced the phone.
‘Mr Crick will see you now,’ she said.
I wanted to run down the corridor which led to Crick’s office, but I forced myself to walk in step with Lord. We reached the right door, Lord knocked, and a plummy voice invited us to enter.
The man who stood up to greet us was small and rotund, with bobbles of cotton-wool h
air perched precariously behind his ears. He was obviously delighted to see Martin Lord, and pumped his hand vigorously.
‘How long has it been since we last got together, Martin?’ he asked.
‘Must be a good year,’ Lord said. ‘Perhaps even more than that, now I think about it.’
‘We must go out to dinner somewhere soon,’ Crick said, ‘maybe that nice little restaurant down by the river.’
‘I’d like that,’ Lord agreed.
And all the time this was going on, a voice in my head was silently screaming, ‘Cut the pleasantries, and let’s get down to what’s important!’
Crick invited us to sit down.
‘Now, what brings you here today, Martin?’ he asked.
‘It was really Mr Brock we wanted to talk to,’ Lord said, almost apologetically, ‘but your receptionist told us he’s no longer with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Crick agreed. ‘He resigned from the partnership – which between you and me and the gatepost was a good thing – and took a pukka job in London. So it looks like you’re stuck with me. How can I help you?’
Lord cleared his throat. ‘We’d like to see the papers relating to the sale of the almshouse cottages to Shelton Bourne plc’ he said.
Crick tugged at the bobble of hair above his right ear.
‘I’m not sure that’s possible,’ he said. ‘Strictly speaking, we should only show them to officers of the company.’
‘It’s very important,’ I said desperately.
Lord shot me a warning look. ‘Rob has been in on the whole business right from the start,’ he cajoled, ‘and he is the ward of the CEO.’
Crick hesitated for a second, and then said, ‘Well, since you used to be in the profession yourself, Martin, I suppose I could stretch a point.’
He stood up, walked over to an old-fashioned filing cabinet, and returned with a bright blue folder.
‘You don’t mind if I familiarise myself with it first, do you?’ he asked, sitting down again and opening the folder.
He started to read through the top document, gently pulling at his hair as he did so, but by the time he’d got half-way down the first page, the pull had become a firm tug.
‘Is anything wrong?’ I asked, my feeling of doom growing stronger and stronger by the second.
‘I don’t understand this,’ Crick told me. ‘I know Jack Brock had certain personal problems when he was drawing up these papers – money worries and so on – but even so, this really is a very careless piece of work.’
‘Careless?’
‘Yes. Even from what I’ve read so far, I can see you could drive a large horse and cart through the holes in this agreement, especially the clauses relating to the right of tenure.’
‘You mean, there’s nothing to stop Shelton Bourne plc evicting all its tenants tomorrow, if it feels like it?’
‘Exactly so. It really is a shocking piece of work. What can Brock have been thinking of when he drafted it?’
‘This new job that Mr Brock went to,’ I said. ‘Who was it with?’
‘It was some big multi-national company. I can’t actually recall its name at the moment.’
‘It wasn’t Cypher International, was it?’
‘Do you know, I rather think that it was … but how could you possibly have known that?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t too difficult to work out,’ I said. ‘Where else would Brock pick up his thirty pieces of silver after he betrayed us?’
****
The deed of covenant was a dead letter. Now the only thing which was keeping the old people in the almshouse from eviction was the fact that we still controlled the company – but we only controlled it by the skin of our teeth. List of shareholders in hand, I made a tour of the village.
I found Colonel and Mrs Todd of Benares House working in their garden. The Colonel seemed content with a little gentle hoeing, but his wife – a pith helmet crammed down firmly on her head – was attacking one of her shrubs as if it were a recalcitrant punkah-wallah.
‘We’d never sell our shares, would we, Memsahib?’ the Colonel asked his wife.
‘Never!’ the memsahib answered, making a fresh assault on the shrub.
There was an even more adamant response from Primrose Cottage. ‘It’s our duty to look after those poor old souls in the almshouse,’ said Mrs Blake, who would never see eighty again herself. ‘They’ll not be turned out onto the street – not in my lifetime. And I intend to live to a hundred.’
Everywhere I went, I got the same response – the shares were a sacred trust and would never be relinquished.
****
It was almost dark when I opened the gate and walked through the rose garden to the front door. I was exhausted – but also reassured. Aunt Sadie had been right all along – the people who’d sold their stock were lame ducks, the shareholders who were left were solid as rocks. There was no possible way that Cypher could get his hands on the extra three percent he needed to take control of the company.
I opened the front door.
‘I’m back,’ I called.
I was greeted by silence. Of course, I thought, as I felt a wave of disappointment sweep over me – with all the feverish activity I’d thrown myself into, I’d quite forgotten that Aunt Sadie would be in London for two or three days.
I made myself a cheese sandwich, but though I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, I was not hungry. The day had begun in disaster, and ended in triumph. I wanted to share that triumph with someone – and who else would I share it with but my beloved Aunt Sadie?
‘Try to miss me a little,’ she’d said, as she boarded the express train for London.
How could I not miss her? The air was filled with her perfume. The chair on which she normally sat looked achingly empty. At my feet lay the silk Persian rug on which she would stretch out, almost like a cat, whenever we lit the log fire. Everything which surrounded me was part of her – everything which surrounded me was part of us.
I wandered around the cottage distractedly for a while, and finally, more through boredom than through interest, I turned on the television.
The news had just started. I sat through two minor wars and one major famine before the news reader’s expression shifted from serious concern to mildly salacious interest.
‘Rumours persist that rock star “Cocky” Wadd has broken up with his long-time girlfriend, Olivia Anstruther-Ponsonby’ he said. ‘Tonight, Wadd was spotted dining at Filet Mekong, the fashionable French-Indochinese restaurant, with controversial film starlet Bazoom Bazooms, whose latest film, Take me, take me, Dolphin-baby! has still to receive a certificate.’
The newsreader’s image faded out, to be replaced by an exterior shot of the Filet Mekong. Wadd, a young man with long greasy hair which spilled over the shoulders of his expensive dinner jacket, was adopting an aggressive stance.
‘Why don’t you … you know … just piss off?’ he suggested.
The camera swung round to his companion, whose topography more than lived up to her name. Though I’d never heard of her before (we country mice lead such innocent lives!) it was immediately obvious to me that she was the perfect fusion of Hollywood glamour and pornography – the dumb blonde with a heart of gold and a turnstile on her bedroom door. In many ways, she reminded me of Glynis, the Welsh expert in threesomes.
‘Do you have any comment to make, Ms Bazooms?’ an off-camera voice asked the starlet.
Bazoom Bazooms wiggled. ‘Cocky and me are just good friends,’ she said. ‘My real true love is Moby.’
‘Moby?’
‘My dolphin.’
Behind her, a new couple emerged from the restaurant. They had obviously not been expecting a camera crew to be lurking outside, and for a moment, it had a paralysing effect on them. The man, who was wearing a long, flowing cloak, had hair which stuck up in small tufts over each ear, and a pointed, Mephistophelian beard. I’d seen him on television once before – the night he’d r
educed Cadbury Joyspear to a quivering jelly.
‘That’s Sir Llewellyn Cypher, the building tycoon,’ the reporter said excitedly. ‘But who’s that with him?’
Bazoom Bazooms forgotten, the camera zoomed in on this newer sensation. Cypher was now almost in close-up. And so was the woman with him. She was wearing a black dress which revealed her beautiful shoulders and the shape of her firm breasts. She lacked the blatant sexiness of Ms Bazooms, yet not one man in a thousand would have chosen the starlet over her. I recognised her, as I had recognised Cypher, though I’d never seen her on television before. Oh yes, I recognised her, all right. The quality of the camera work was so good that I could even tell that the brooch pinned to her dress was the most recent one I’d made her.
12
Aunt Sadie arrived with a stack of gift-wrapped parcels, most of them – as usual – for me.
‘I was rushed off my feet in London,’ she said, throwing her arms around me and kissing me on the cheek. ‘I’ve seen – oh, tons of people – and they promised they’ll do all they can to help us fight Cypher.’
I unwrapped her arms from around my neck.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ I told her.
Aunt Sadie backed away a little.
‘You saw me on the news, didn’t you?’ she asked dully.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
She shrugged. ‘There was a good chance you’d miss it. It was only shown once, and then Lew used his influence to have it stopped.’
‘How could you?’ I demanded bitterly. ‘What could possibly make you agree to sell your soul like that?’
‘Money,’ Aunt Sadie said. ‘Lots of it.’
‘And are you sleeping with him, as well?’
‘Yes,’ my aunt admitted. ‘But that means nothing to me – it’s just a sort of bonus I threw into the pot.’
‘It was you who told him about the shareholders’ weaknesses,’ I said, wondering why I’d not thought of it before. ‘Cypher got it all from you … Professor Smallridge and his crackpot Merrie England ideas, Dr Mulroon and his little boys, Sir Anthony Fitzsimmons’ gambling habit—’
A Conspiracy of Aunts Page 16