by Tony Salter
‘Do you know where they’re sending me?’ I said.
‘Not a hundred per cent yet,’ he said, ‘but it’s looking like Downview.’
‘You’ll make arrangements?’ I asked.
‘I’m already on it,’ he said. ‘You’ll be looked after.’
‘Good. Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Simon, looking over to the door and lowering his voice. Official visits were supposed to be privileged and eavesdropping was illegal, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. ‘You asked me to keep an eye on the girl’s father.’
‘I did. Is there a problem?’
‘He sent an email to Sam’s father, Rupert, yesterday. Joe’s dying of cancer, apparently. Doesn’t seem to think he’s got anything to lose any more. Probably feels braver after your sentencing.’
‘Shit. He was always a weak link. What did he say? Did he mention me?’
‘Not in the email. But he’s told him about Fabiola, which is bad enough. He also asked Rupert to come and see him, and I’m pretty sure he’ll tell him everything when they meet.’
‘That can’t happen.’
‘But …’
‘… it can’t happen.’
‘Understood,’ he said, looking at his shoes. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘You remember David Wilson, the security consultant we worked with a few years ago? When we had the issue with Nicki’s adopted father?’
‘Not so easy to forget.’
‘Have you still got his details?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, call him and explain the situation. He’ll know how to stop Joe blabbing. Do it straight away and tell him what I just said.’
‘OK,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll call him as soon as I’m out. And I’ll start chasing the appeal.’
‘Good. But before you do that, email Nicki Taylor the letter I drafted. Even if we keep Joe quiet, Rupert will tell Sam he has a sister. It’s only a matter of time before they contact Nicki directly. I need to keep ahead of them – to control the narrative.’
‘That makes total sense. I’ll get it done.’
‘Of course it makes sense, Simon. I wasn’t asking for your bloody blessing. Just make sure it happens. Then give it a couple of days and tell Nicki Taylor to come and visit me.’
He got up and turned to leave. ‘One last thing,’ I said. He turned back, and I stared at him until he was forced to look down and away. ‘Lay off the sauce, Simon. I mean it.’
Is It True?
Joe was living in a small village just outside Brighton and Dad picked me up on the way. We’d arranged to be there at eleven-thirty after Joe’s morning sleep while his home care nurses were out for a few hours.
Unsurprisingly, traffic wasn’t co-operating and we ended up sitting in a jam on the M23 going nowhere fast.
It could have been worse. The sun was shining; we had the roof down on Dad’s Mini and a great playlist. We left a message for Joe and then there was nothing to do but wait.
‘I never did tell you how Julie seduced your poor innocent son, did I?’
‘You know you didn’t,’ said Dad. ‘Is this just phase two of the wind up?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘If you want to hear it, I’ll tell you now. It’s definitely going in my book, anyway.’
‘We’ve nothing better to do,’ he said. ‘But go light on the gory details, eh.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘Right. Let’s give you a bit of context. I’d been working at Pulsar for about four months and was beginning to get the hang of the routines. Julie travelled non-stop and I’d usually tag along. Most of the time she was busy and I ended up kicking my heels. Julie would send for me at any time day or night – whenever she had a free moment – and we would talk about the company. The most fascinating part was looking back at the twenties and learning how close the world was to collapsing.’
‘I remember,’ said my dad. ‘And I read your Pulsar book.’
‘Of course you do,’ I said. ‘Anyway. Sometimes we would go out for dinner, usually in groups, but occasionally just me and Julie. On that particular night, there were six of us. Julie was about to kick off a massive fundraising and had invited the two founder partners of GB Capital, the largest venture capital fund in the US. It wasn’t only a dinner invitation; she’d flown them and their wives to Kanazawa in Japan, the town which has more Michelin stars per square metre than anywhere else.
‘We were eating at the Suginoi Ryotei which had recently earned its third star, after slumming it with only two stars for decades. The building was old – Meiji era – and, from our second floor dining room, we looked out onto the river and the rows of cherry trees lining its banks. They were in full bloom, of course. Julie left nothing to chance.
‘It wasn’t hard to figure out that the dinner was important for Julie and that I was expected to shine. The food was amazing – a multi-course Kaiseki dinner – and the exotic delicacies kept on coming, each tiny plate accompanied by its own perfectly matched, thimble-sized cup of sake.
‘I hadn’t met any venture capitalists before and no-one had warned me that most of them are pompous, self-satisfied gits. Luckily the guys from GB Capital were an exception – not up themselves at all – and we had a real laugh. It turned out that the pair had met each other on the Harvard rowing team and one of their wives had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, so we had loads to talk about.
‘When they eventually stopped bringing us food and drink I remember being surprised that I didn’t feel bloated or drunk, even though we must have been through thirty courses or more. Although I felt good, I was definitely ready for my bed and I think we all felt the same.
‘We’d taken all four rooms at a beautiful ryokan – a Japanese inn – just up the road. It was very traditional, proper beds were not an option, and the down-stuffed duvets and futons gave a totally new perspective to crashing on the floor. I can’t actually remember what the ryokan was called or how we made it back, so I might have been a little more pissed than I thought.
‘After we’d said goodnight to her guests, I could tell she was happy. I was becoming familiar with the charm aura she projected when she needed to, and I’d seen her turn it on or off like there was a physical switch in her pocket. I’m not saying I was immune to that controlled charm, but this was something different. Maybe she’d had a sake too many? Maybe the fundraising was more important than I knew? Whatever the reason, Julie was genuinely excited, skipping up the narrow wooden stairs like a young girl.’
I picked up my phone. ‘I’m gonna read you the next bit from the draft chapter of my book. Less embarrassing that way,’
Dad nodded, grinning like an idiot and probably feeling as awkward as me. Although we were good friends as well as father and son, I wondered if telling him this story was crossing some sort of invisible line.
‘OK. I walked Sonja to her room – Sonja is Julie, right?’
‘I’d never have guessed,’ he said.
‘Right. So. I walked Sonja to her room, and she turned to face me. That look! Her eyes were deep burning pools of black oil, swirling in spirals and speckled with flakes of gold. Then, after she closed the door, I crossed the hallway to my own room, head spinning. There was no way I was getting to sleep in a hurry.
I don’t know how long I’d been staring at the ceiling, watching the moon shadows play on the wooden beams, when I heard a soft rustling from the corridor outside. I sat up, ears straining to pick out the sounds. There was nothing for a few seconds until I heard the mouse-quiet squeak of wood on wood.
I watched breathless as Sonja slid open the paper shoji doors and stood in the entranceway, the moonlight limning her hair and picking out the sharp folds and soft curves of her kimono. It was as though she was etched onto ink-black lacquer.
‘Are you awake,’ she said, her whispered words cutting through the silence.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘Me neither,’ she said, and stepp
ed into the room.
There was just enough light for me to see as she slipped the kimono over her shoulders and let it fall …’
I took a deep breath and turned to my dad.
‘And that, dear father, is how your poor innocent son was seduced by the arch bitch, Julie Martin.’
He looked at me and snorted with laughter. ‘Sounds like a Mills and Boon novel,’ he said. ‘You don’t think you’re overcooking it a tad? Limning? Really?’
‘Work in progress,’ I said. ‘Seriously, you think it’s too much?’
Dad nodded, raised his eyebrows and grinned
‘OK. Maybe I’ll tone it down a bit,’ I said. ‘In the book I describe what happened next. Should I go on?’
‘Whoah. No thanks,’ he said. ‘That’d be way too much information.’ The traffic had eventually started to move and he turned back to the road. ‘You’re seriously going ahead with the book thing?’
‘Why not? I’m going to make all the characters fictional, but it’s a great story. I might as well write it?’
‘I’d have thought you’d be wanting to forget that entire episode,’ he said.
‘That’s never happening, Dad. I think writing about it may help. If it doesn’t, I can always just put it in a drawer and move on. Anyway, at the rate I’m going, it’ll be years before I’ve even got a first draft.’
It was after twelve by the time we arrived at The White Barn. We’d needed to reverse a hundred yards back up the single track lane because of a delivery van which didn’t help. I hated being late for anything and this wasn’t exactly a normal visit. I could hear my pulse pounding insistently behind my ear.
My dad had been an estate agent all his life. He wasn’t smarmy or untrustworthy or anything like that, but he’d picked up a few bad habits. One of these was a compulsion to value every house he saw. As we got out of the car, super agent Rupert leapt into action:
‘Mid-seventeenth century, four bedrooms, maybe five, commutable to London or Brighton, about half an acre of gardens, very charming building and location, must be worth at least two million euros.’
‘Very clever,’ I said. ‘Is this really the right time to be playing your valuation games? We’re late and I’m stressed out enough as it is.’
‘Not a game,’ he said. ‘Answer me this. How does a divorced schoolteacher who hasn’t had a proper job for years get to live here?’
‘You checked up on him?’
‘Of course I checked up on him,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you?’
I suddenly felt like a teenager again, perpetually impetuous and often regretting it.
‘No,’ I said, mumbling and looking down at my shoes. ‘Probably should have though.’
‘Never mind,’ he said, as we walked up the rose-lined path. It was all very twee and English country garden. ‘The thing is that he doesn’t own it.’
‘So he’s renting then? What’s the big deal?’
‘Probably nothing, although I couldn’t find a rental agreement on the national database and he couldn’t afford this place on a teacher’s pension, anyway. The house is registered to a blind trust in the Caymans. Something doesn’t smell right.’
‘OK. OK,’ I said. ‘You’ve made your point, but you could have bloody told me all of this in the car. Anyway, it doesn’t change anything. We’re here now. Let’s go in. I hate being late.’
‘All right. Keep your hair on,’ he said, stepping forward and pressing the doorbell. I heard the buzzer echo down the hall, but there were no other sounds.
‘Try again,’ I said. ‘He might be asleep.’
We tried ringing and knocking for ten minutes with no response and I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was someone’s idea of a sick joke.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘There’s no-one here.’
‘Hang on,’ said my dad. ‘We’ve come all this way, we should try round the back first. You wait here.’
Dad was in his element. I watched as he strode across the lawn to the side gate, his confident strides making it appear as though he was the owner. More estate agent habits I supposed. After he’d pushed through the gate and disappeared, I felt exposed and out of place, as though I was about to be caught doing something illegal. I looked up the lane, but there was no sign of life.
I stood by the porch for what seemed like an age, shuffling from one foot to another, until I heard someone fiddling with the latch on the front door. This was it. He was in. In a few minutes, this man was going to give me a sister.
The door opened and my heart sank as I saw Dad standing there alone in the low, black-beamed hallway. ‘Very strange,’ he said. ‘There’s no-one here. The lock on the back door was broken, so I walked straight in.’
I pushed past him. ‘Joe,’ I shouted. ‘Joe Taylor. Anyone at home?’
‘He’s not here,’ said my dad. ‘You were right. We’ve wasted our time. Let’s go home.’ He turned to the open doorway.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s had some sort of medical crisis. A heart attack or something. Have you checked upstairs?’
Dad shook his head and I started up the narrow stairs. The ceilings were even lower on the first floor and we both had to watch our heads. For some reason, neither of us spoke. Dad pointed towards the front of the house, shrugged and opened the nearest door. I turned and moved down the corridor which angled around to the right. The house had an unloved feel about it; there were paintings where there were supposed to be paintings, knick-knacks sitting on a desk in an alcove, nothing out of the ordinary. I just had the feeling that they’d been put there by an interior decorator. No-one cared about them.
I reached the end and opened the final door. Nothing to see, another unused guest room looking as though the only guests it remembered were the cleaners who visited once a month.
‘Sam!’ I heard Dad’s voice echo down the narrow passage. ‘Sam! Come here. Now!’
I ran back to where my father was framed by an open doorway, facing into the room and slumped sideways against the door. I looked over his shoulder and saw a middle-aged man stretched out on a single bed, eyes open and staring at the ceiling.
‘Is he…?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘But not for long.’ He turned to face me. ‘His body’s still warm.’
When the police arrived, we were standing in the front garden. I’d been afraid that we would be stuck waiting around for hours, but the whole process was very relaxed and informal. The two young policewomen checked our IDs, took contact details and brief statements – why we were there and how we’d found the body – and then told us that we could go.
They told us they’d spoken to Joe’s doctor; apparently the cancer had been very advanced and the doctor wasn’t surprised to hear that he’d died in his sleep. Apparently, if the police needed to ask any more questions, we would do that at our local police station.
Neither of us had much to say as we drove down the narrow lanes. Joe had told my father that Nicki didn’t know anything about his secrets. If she didn’t know, had they died with him? Maybe there were some documents which could help? I had a gut feeling that there wouldn’t be and, in any case, how would we access them?
‘So, what do we do?’ I said, as we reached the M23. ‘Nicki knows nothing about me or her real mother. She’s just lost her father. Are we going to track her down and drop those bombshells? I don’t see that going down well.’
‘Such bad timing,’ said Dad. ‘I’m sure he had something important to tell us. If he’d been able to hang on just a little longer …’
‘It is what it is,’ I said. ‘Nothing we do is going to change that. What about Nicki?’
‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘We can’t simply rock up and dump this on her. Especially not now. Shall we see what Daz and Liz have got to say about it. You were planning on telling them about her at dinner tonight, weren’t you?’
‘That was the plan,’ I said. ‘And I agree. Let’s talk about something else for now. I can’t
really think straight at the moment.’
Uncle Daz and Liz were an odd couple to say the least. The committed anarchist and psychiatric nurse and the retired detective superintendent. No stranger than Daz becoming good friends with my grandmother I supposed. Everyone loved Daz.
They were pretending to be just good friends and the rest of us had, by unspoken consent, decided to play along with the charade. Why they bothered was beyond me – it could have been because Liz was a few years older than him, or maybe because they felt sorry for me and my dad for being such sad loners without partners.
It was Liz’s birthday and we were meeting around the corner from her flat. Red Pepper on Formosa Street was a great little Italian trattoria which served the best pizza in London. Always overbooked and generally overpriced, it had been a Little Venice institution through three generations of the Citterio family. The legend was that since the restaurant opened in nineteen sixty-four there hadn’t been a single service without at least one family member on duty.
Giving statements and talking to the police had delayed us enough to ensure that we hit rush hour on our way back to London; sitting in the car had started to become a bit old by the time we finally found a parking space in Little Venice. Dad had been brought up properly and, once he knew we were going to be late, he’d called the restaurant and ordered a bottle of champagne for Daz and Liz with his compliments. Maybe he was an estate agent slimeball after all?
Daz squeezed the last two half glasses out of the bottle as we sat down. At least he and Liz seemed happy.
‘OK Sammy Boy,’ said Daz, after we’d toasted the birthday girl. ‘You’ve been mumbling about some sort of secret since last week. and now you and Rupert roll up half an hour late and looking very sheepish.’ He turned to my dad. ‘Thanks for the fizz by the way. Much appreciated.’ And then his focus was back on me. ‘Time to share, Sam.’
I let Dad start by explaining about the email from Joe. Uncle Daz didn’t react as I’d expected.