Grace Smith Investigates

by Liz Evans

  The frown crinkled his large brown eyes again. ‘What shall I write on it, do you think? She said we weren’t to tell anyone about this being her fiftieth birthday. But if I don’t say Happy Birthday she won’t know what it’s for, will she?’

  I assured him Happy Birthday would be fine just so long as he didn’t say which birthday it was. ‘I think the party’s a bit of a giveaway anyway, Patrick.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tongue protruding again, he formed careful round strokes. ‘Mummy didn’t want a party, but Gran made her have it.’

  ‘I heard. Where is your mum, Patrick? And your dad?’

  ‘They’ve gone to London. Mummy said she hadn’t got anything to wear for her party. Which is a lie. Because she’s got loads of clothes. More than anybody. Absolutely millions and millions ...’

  ‘Yeah, right ... Has Bone gone with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is she around?’

  ‘Don’t know. Gran, where’s Bone?’

  I turned. Joan Reiss was coming along the top corridor with two vases of flowers in her hands. ‘I have no idea, Patrick. And I do wish you’d use her proper name. Eleanora is so much prettier than Bone.’

  ‘She’s not pretty. She’s a sister. Look, I’ve finished. Grace helped me.’

  ‘That’s very nice, dear. I’m sure Mummy will be pleased. Shall I ask one of the workmen to carry the vacuum cleaner upstairs, Grace, or can you manage?’

  There was nothing subtle about Joan Reiss. She handed me the vases with instructions to put them in the back bedroom once I’d polished it.

  ‘I’ll bring you some others for the bathrooms as soon I can get to the flowerbeds to cut them.’

  The chaos downstairs had taken on an organised pattern. The workmen I’d followed in were erecting a small open-sided pavilion at the bottom of the garden. Others were dotting tables over the upper section of the lawns and placing squat Japanese lanterns amongst the flowerbeds.

  The French windows in the dining room had been wedged open to allow the caterers to lug boxes and crates in through the back en route for the kitchen. The dining table itself had been joined by several others. The prawn-arranger from the kitchen was carefully placing bowls of water containing floating flowers and candles at precise points along the snowy-white tablecloths.

  I collected my vacuum cleaner and lugged it upstairs again. After twenty minutes of noisy vacuuming, spraying and sploshing, I locked myself in the Bridgemans’ en suite bathroom and read a copy of Hello! that was lying on the bath side until I heard Amelia’s voice coming up the stairs.

  ‘And we got the most fabulous dress for you. You’ll love it.’

  Leaping up, I dumped pine disinfectant down the loo and unlocked the door.

  ‘Hi! Just finished.’

  I waggled sprays and cloths at the trio on the landing. Amelia was burrowing under layers of tissue paper. She shook out a dress. ‘Isn’t that just perfect?’

  The shadow over Bone’s face darkened. ‘God. It’s gross. I wouldn’t be seen dead in it.’

  It was an ankle-length creation in white and blue that would have been at home in a Jane Austen movie. On another girl it would probably have looked quite good. But Bone was no more a floaty voile and ribbon person than I was.

  ‘Don’t be so ungrateful. It’s cost Daddy an absolute fortune.’

  ‘Big deal.’

  ‘Please. Wear it for me. It is my birthday.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t mentioning the big Five-O.’

  ‘Don’t spoil your mother’s day, please, chicken.’

  ‘Oh, all right ...’ Snatching the dress, Bone stomped off. Stretching on tiptoe, Amelia smacked a lipsticky kiss on her husband’s cheek. ‘Thank you, sweetie. You are wonderful with them. I suppose it’s because they just adore their daddy.’

  Stephen looked vaguely embarrassed by this endorsement. ‘I’ll ... er ... grab a shower in the other bathroom.’

  ‘Fine.’ Amelia wriggled away into the main bedroom, calling back over her shoulder for me to bring the rest of her goodies.

  ‘Stephen has bought me the most divine dress ... Would you like to see?’

  I was aware of Stephen’s puzzlement. He wasn’t entirely sure I was there to see him. With a none-too-subtle eyebrow wriggle he indicated we should talk downstairs.

  ‘I’d love to see the dress, Mrs Bridgeman. I’ll just take my cleaning stuff back down.’

  ‘Oh, leave it in the hall. Here ...’ She jiggled the dress box eagerly, her face alight, like a small kid at Christmas. ‘There! What do you think?’

  It was full-length cream silk, low at the neck and slit at the sides. Very stylish but not exactly garden-party attire.

  ‘It’s very ... em ...’

  ‘Isn’t it just ...’ Amelia agreed. ‘But you know what they say about having it and flaunting it.’ Flicking the dress on to a hanger, she hung it behind the door and started peeling off the suit she’d been wearing, casually dropping clothes on to the carpet.

  Stephen was still hovering in an indecisive limbo. Amelia dismissed him with another kiss and an instruction to dress in the spare bathroom as well. ‘If you don’t mind, sweetie? Oh - and I’ll need my diamonds from the safe. The drop ear-rings and the necklace. You are a darling ...’

  He was thrust back on the landing.

  ‘I’ll get tidied up, shall I, Mrs Bridgeman?’

  ‘Call me Amelia. Ghastly name, isn’t it? Sounds like someone’s maiden aunt ... but everyone hates their names, don’t they? How did you get called Grace ...?’

  Whilst she chattered, Amelia had been peeling off. With no apparent embarrassment, she dropped her bra and knickers on the carpet and strode over to the dressing table stark naked. ‘I’m going to make this my signature scent this evening. Stephen bought me the entire collection. He’s such a generous sweetie. What do you think?’

  She unstopped a fluted glass bottle and thrust it under my nose.

  I couldn’t resist it. ‘Fabulous ...’

  I’ll say one thing for Amelia; she could take a joke against herself.

  With a giggle, she resealed the bottle and asked if I could open the rest. ‘Only I’ve just had my nails manicured.’ Twisting a towel around her hair, she ran a bath, added a long string of glutinous oil from the ranks of Ali Baba-shaped bottles lined up along the bath surround, and sank into a pit of steam, froth and scented air.

  ‘Mmm ... blisssssss ...’

  The noise from downstairs was slackening, indicating that the catering arrangements were in place and the guests weren’t yet. It was as good a time as any for a quiet word with Stephen ... particularly if the word was ‘liar’.

  CHAPTER 29

  Except I couldn’t find him. The other bathrooms were empty and the only response I got from the bedrooms was ‘Get lost’ shouted from behind Bone’s door.

  The study doors were locked. I wandered on. The full buffet table looked terrific. Wall-to-wall designer food flanked by rows of champagne bottles. Joan and the prawn- arranger hurried in from the terrace as I helped myself.

  ‘Oh, good ... This is Grace. They’re short of waitresses. I said you’d be happy to help out. I’ll pay you the cleaning rate, if that’s acceptable?’

  ‘Mmm ...’ I nodded vigorously, teeth clamped over a couple of vol-au-vents and a slice of peppered ham.

  ‘Good. Splendid. I must go and change.’

  She left. The prawn-arranger fixed me with a nasty stare and informed me that the first rule of working for her company was you didn’t eat the food.

  I swallowed hard. ‘That bad, eh? Don’t worry, they won’t notice once they’ve knocked back a few bottles of the sparkly.’

  Stephen and I finally crossed paths in the front hall.

  ‘We need to talk, Steve ... at least I get to talk, and then you get to answer ...’

  ‘I don’t think I care for your tone, Grace.’

  ‘I don’t care for your story. I’ve been checking it out, and it sucks.’

  ‘Not
here. Come on.’

  He urged me down the cellar steps. I tried again at the bottom.

  ‘Kristen ...’

  ‘Hang on ...’ Taking my arm, he pulled me around and under the stairway until we were facing the security-coded door I’d noticed before.

  The door responded to his tapping out the numbered sequence with a gentle sigh and a hiss of released locks. It swung back to reveal a short, narrow room lined with wine racks.

  ‘Neat ...’

  ‘Thank you. I designed it myself. It keeps the bottles at optimum temperature.’

  ‘They valuable then?’

  ‘Extremely so in some cases. It’s a hobby of mine. Now, you were saying you had some doubts about the veracity of my story?’

  I laid it on thick, making Vetch sound like some kind of world authority on government contracts. ‘There’s no way you’re going to be permanently embarrassed by a few stray files, so what’s the real agenda here, Stephen?’

  He looked at me coolly. Reaching over, he twisted a dusty bottle a fraction of a turn. ‘Do you know, Grace, I don’t believe I care to be called a liar by someone I’m paying. Is there any reason I should take you seriously?’

  ‘Just the one. Kristen Keats has been dead for over a year.’ I spelt out the situation and had the pleasure of seeing the smug self-assurance draining away.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said when I’d brought him up to date. ‘I knew I should never have trusted the little bitch. What the hell am I going to do?’

  ‘Tell me the truth for a start. What did Kristen - or rather Julie-Frances - really nick?’

  ‘Information. I’ve told you.’

  ‘But ...?’

  The but was simple - if you happened to have a degree in (very) advanced electronics. I didn’t. With difficulty I managed to grasp that Stephen had invented the equivalent of the holy grail when it came to nodes.

  ‘Imagine,’ he explained, his face shining with enthusiasm, ‘coming home to your flat. The lights come on automatically as you move from room to room. The temperature is ideally suited to your personal preferences because the computer has learnt to understand what you require. The video has recorded that historical documentary you wanted to see even though you didn’t programme it to do so. It’s learnt your habits, you see. The supermarket has delivered an order you didn’t place, because your refrigerator has detected what’s running out and has automatically dialled the market’s computer. Your electricity and gas meter readings have been sent to a remote terminal and the bill automatically paid from your bank account. How does that sound?’

  ‘Like I could be seriously broke in a week.’

  ‘It’s the future, Grace.’

  ‘It sounds more like something out of Star Trek.'

  ‘No. It’s not. The technology has been available for some time. There are already some buildings where it has been incorporated.’

  ‘So what’s so special about your baby?’

  ‘The beauty of my design is that it can be produced at a tenth of the normal cost and yet works at ten times the speed. The key is to have the node installed as the building is constructed. That way everything else has to be compatible with my Sumata. Once you’re in - you’re in. And everyone else has to work a hundred times as hard to dislodge you.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. So why the secrecy? I mean, wouldn’t you have more chance of selling this little gem if you told someone about it?’

  ‘I did. I sold it to ... well, never mind who ... a foreign manufacturer had agreed to produce it ...’

  ‘And you get ...?’

  ‘Cash up front, plus a fixed percentage of sales.’

  ‘So far I can’t see the problem.’

  ‘The problem, Ms Smith, is that all my work is based on research and design funded by the government. Not to mention Bertram’s.’

  ‘Bertram’s?’

  ‘The company who had the contract originally.’

  ‘I know who they are. What have they got to do with this?’ He gave me a look I’d last seen when I’d failed to master shoelace-tying after my mother’s fourth demonstration.

  ‘They did the base designs ... in fact, they did rather more than that. Their designer was brilliant. He must have known what he had. He’d gone far beyond the original specification. I couldn’t believe it when I started unravelling his notes.’

  ‘Is this the bloke who had a breakdown?’

  ‘Yes. That was a piece of luck for me. As he became more unbalanced, he seems to have grown more and more secretive. I’m sure no one at Bertram’s had any idea what he was working on towards the end. They’d obviously just bundled everything up and sent it to Wexton’s once the contract was transferred. It took us weeks just to catalogue everything.’

  ‘And then you realised you’d hit a goldmine and started ripping off the government?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that. At first it was just an experiment almost ... to see if Bertram’s designer really had come up with what I suspected. It was still very rough ... I had to put in a lot of my own thoughts ...’ He moved restlessly along the racks, twisting bottles and leaving fingerprints in the dusty coatings. ‘It was exciting. I started off in design, you know ... I wasn’t sure I still had it ... and then when I saw everything coming together ... after years of negotiating payment terms and delivery dates and fawning over idiots who don’t care about quality providing they can shave half a per cent off the price ...’

  ‘Didn’t the rest of the staff think it a bit odd? A managing director getting his hands dirty?’

  ‘We were pushed at the time. Several contracts had hit snags complicated enough to tie up the other design staff. They saw it as the MD leaping in to do a bit of fire-fighting.’ Stephen had come to a rest against the narrow section of brick wall between the racks. He was examining the seal on an oddly shaped bottle. ‘This came from Waterloo.’

  ‘Got a good off-licence up there, have they?’

  ‘I was speaking of the battle, Ms Smith.’

  ‘I was being facetious, Mr Bridgeman. You were telling me about building this Sumata with your own fair hands.’

  ‘Hardly. The work is theoretical. It’s done on the computer.’

  ‘And Kristen - or rather Julie-Frances - cracked your little scam?’

  ‘It was not a scam ... it was an important piece of research’

  ‘Which you had no right to sell?’

  ‘Yes I did! The intellectual property rights in all our designs are retained by Wexton’s. That’s standard commercial practice.’

  This prevarication - not to mention all the big words - was really beginning to get up my nose.

  ‘Look - you made it. You own it. You sold it. End of story. Where’s the big deal?’

  Stephen thrust a hand through his hair in a gesture of exasperation. ‘I’ve just told you, haven’t I? Think of it as a car. Bertram’s produced the sub-frame - at the government’s expense. Wexton’s added the engine, the wheels and the upholstery - ditto at the government’s expense. And then I put in the stereo system, the sun roof and central locking system out of my own pocket.’

  I finally got it. ‘So if you want to sell the car, you’ve got to pay the government some kind of fee for their bit?’

  ‘A royalty payment - yes. But even that isn’t the worst of it. I could have lived with that. It’s the time factor. Do you know why most inventions succeed? Because they were first. Because they hustled, got in people’s faces, grabbed the market by the throat. So when people went to buy they automatically thought of that product name; not because it was any better, but because it was the name they knew and what the hell, everyone else had it, so it must be good - right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ I knew zilch about marketing, but I knew not to interrupt a fanatic in mid-spout. People have been blown up for less.

  ‘If I’d have taken this to the government, do you know what they’d have done? They’d have passed it to a committee. Who’d have spawned a sub-committee. Who would have bega
t a quango. Jesus ...’ He paced a few steps between the racks. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like dealing with these people. They’ve got no interest in actually selling anything. Their only motivation is to preserve their own little empires. So they call meetings; and issue minutes; and refer the matter for “expert” opinion. Expert - that’s a joke. And in the meantime a competitor, someone in a country not blessed with a civil service whose sole role in life is to add sandbags to the trade barriers ...’

  He was well gone. Sticking two fingers in the corners of my mouth, I let rip with a whistle that rattled my tonsils. At least it had the desired result. He shut up.

  ‘OK,’ I panted. ‘I get the message. So when did Kristen, or rather Julie-Frances, get it?’

  ‘Soon after she arrived. I was running something through one of the computers. She started chatting, looking at what I was doing. Do you want to hear something laughable? The reason I employed Kristen was because her CV was barely adequate. The contracts we were working on didn’t require any special skills. Just someone to read off results and log them accurately. A super-drone effectively. No initiative, no special spark up here ...’ He tapped his cranium. ‘Just someone to churn the bread-and-butter stuff out ... I didn’t bother to hide what was on the screen because I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell she’d understand it.’

  ‘Not a smart move, Stephen.’

  ‘You’re telling me. She even managed to get into my private computer files when I wasn’t in the office. She came to the house just before Christmas and told me she knew what I’d been doing and how much did I think her discretion was worth?’

  ‘What did she think it was worth?’

  ‘A lot more than I was prepared to pay.’

  I was suddenly glad I was the one at the door end of the wine cellar. Stephen must have read the question in my eyes.

  ‘No. I did not shut her mouth for good. In the end we came to a mutual agreement. She took twenty percent of the front payment, plus five percent of my share of each royalty. And a fat fee from the manufacturer for supervising the testing for the first few months’ production.’