by Will Smith
‘Really? You received this letter on Friday …’
‘Saturday.’
‘… then waited till Monday morning to do anything about it.’
‘This is the first opportunity I had.’
‘No. The first opportunity would have been when I arrived at half past eight. You waited to see if the boy turned up first. Because then you could have dismissed this for what it is – embarrassing nonsense best forgotten.’
Le Brocq handed the letter back to Colin and opened the door. Colin stepped out as the waiting boy was ushered in.
‘I just had a call from Duncan Labey’s parents,’ wheezed Mrs Bisson from her doorway. ‘They came back from a weekend away this morning and it didn’t look like he’d been at home. They want to check he’s here.’
‘He’s not,’ said Colin.
‘Not in front of …’ Le Brocq gestured to Duval. He then addressed the boy. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I hit someone with a ruler in Miss Hamon’s class, sir.’
‘Right. That was obviously an extremely foolish thing to do. You’ll come in this Saturday afternoon for detention.’
‘I was defending her honour.’
‘You can come in the Saturday after as well for that cheek. Now get back to your class.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We need to speak to the parents, and we need to call the police,’ said Colin, once the boy had gone.
‘Will you kindly refrain from telling me how to run my school? This is an internal matter, and will be dealt with as such.’
‘It’s not internal. We have a pupil who has run away from home.’
‘Please return to your class.’
Le Brocq withdrew to his office and slammed the door. Mrs Bisson stared disapprovingly at Colin. ‘You’ll never make head of department with that attitude,’ she said.
He wondered what conversation she thought she was commenting on.
He headed back through the quadrangle, where the Edwardian extension, on a smaller scale than the main building, offered an attempt at architectural consistency, before the separate arts block threw in the towel, skulking alone with its faded sixties minimalism.
He was boiling over with frustration at Le Brocq’s response, which was even more lamentable than his own. As he approached he could hear that chaos had enveloped his class. Before he reached the door, Blampied sprang out of the adjacent room in a rage.
‘It’s all right, I’ll deal with them,’ said Colin, quickening his pace.
‘Would you mind? How can I tell my class to keep quiet when your lot are jumping round like the damned Beastie Boys?’
‘I’m sorry, okay? I was checking on Duncan Labey. He’s still absent.’
‘Right. Is there a law against illness on the mainland? Because over here we let pupils recover in their own time.’
Colin stepped in closer. This time Blampied was without his shades, so Colin could see him blink away something: doubt, fear, guilt, he wasn’t sure. ‘His parents rang. He’s not at home, and he’s not here. So where is he?’
‘Somewhere. It’s not a big island. Nine miles by five, if memory serves correctly. So he’ll show up. Now, how about you show up to class, and do your job?’
‘I intend to. And, unlike some people’s round here, my job doesn’t stop when the bell goes.’
‘Right now, you’re not doing your job at all.’
Blampied stalked back in. Colin was about to enter his own class when he spotted Duval behind a pillar opposite the door. ‘You should be back in Miss Hamon’s class,’ he said, as he passed him.
‘What’s going on between you two?’ leered the boy.
‘Are you looking to come in every Saturday from now till Christmas?’ asked Colin, his blood fully up.
‘Why? Oh, you thought I was talking about you and Miss Hamon,’ said Duval, with mock affront. ‘I meant you and Mr Blampied.’
‘Come on, Duval, why are you doing this? Have you become so institutionalised that you can’t cope with life outside detention?’
‘Or you and the head. Mind you, I know what his problem is. He doesn’t like the idea of one of the golden Labey boys falling from grace.’
‘Whatever you heard from outside that office is private.’
‘I didn’t hear anything from the office, sir. But I hear other things round the school. I heard squeaky Duncan Labey sold his halo for some ganja from Mickey Rouain.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘A guy who sells ganja and other stuff. I’ve never met him.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because this place likes to blame all its problems on me. And there are worse things going on than ruler fights. You should speak to him too.’
‘Who?’
Duval nodded at Blampied, who was staring through the glass of his door with a look of exasperation at the continued disruption. Colin waved him off and turned back to Duval, but the boy had made himself scarce. Blampied re-emerged.
‘Do I have to speak to Mr Le Brocq about your lack of control?’
‘However you like to do things on the Island,’ retorted Colin, and burst into his class with a fury of which his lawless pupils had not believed him capable.
7
ROB
Tuesday, 13 October 1987
Christophe put down the phone and allowed his eyes, if not his mouth, to smile. His eyes were his great asset: they took in more than most people’s, and let a great deal less out. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, then it was as though his were fitted with mirrored glass: they let people see themselves as they wished to be seen, while concealing his own agendas.
His office was opposite Reception, and he turned off the light before opening the blinds enough to observe. He could see Rebecca, Louise’s replacement, giving the bell a polish before carefully using Sellotape to remove the lily stamens threatening to fall where a guest might lean when signing in or out. Very impressive that she chose to attend to such minutiae at a quiet moment when most in her position would have stared blankly across the foyer or glanced through a concealed magazine. But it meant he would have to upbraid that morning’s cleaner, whom he knew without having to check the roster was Juanita. It was unusual for her to be so lax. He opened the door a crack and could hear from the Hoovers that the dining room was being cleaned after breakfast and, from the squeak of a wheel at the top of the stairs to his right, that the cleaning cart was making its way down the first-floor corridor. Not that in either case there was a great deal of cleaning to do, the current occupancy being frankly minimal. But what he had just learnt on his phone call might change that.
His eyes narrowed as he caught the glint of what he suspected was a sliver of cellophane from a cigarette packet. Just as he was about to stride out and stand with his toe pointing towards it while glaring at Rebecca, she came out from behind the desk to retrieve it. On a certain level he regretted having had to fire Louise: she’d had a certain brio to which he had responded, even as she had ramped up her price. But realistically she could have no place in his current sphere. Rebecca would work out perfectly, provided his boss could stop himself rubbing up against her, which Christophe was fairly certain he could. The two men were natural compartmentalisers. He was about to step out and congratulate Rebecca on her attentiveness when she turned to greet whoever was walking towards her down the corridor that ran alongside his office.
‘Good morning, gentlemen. Have a nice day.’ She beamed as the two men from NatWest hove into view. She was ignored by the larger man, whose double-breasted jacket wafted around his distended belly as he waddled at an angle, bowed down by his oversized briefcase.
The second man, a skeletal figure who always refused tea or coffee in favour of water, responded in a whiny tone. ‘Why would I try otherwise?’
Rebecca laughed along, but as Christophe slid out of his office door, once the men had passed, he saw her face register ‘Prick’. She looked startled to have been caught in this act of priv
ate insubordination. Christophe let the moment hang. He liked to use silence as a weapon, but he was also momentarily distracted by Rob’s absence. The men had been with him for nearly an hour and it was unusual for his boss to leave guests to find their own way out. He preferred to glide across the foyer in the manner of a king escorting visiting dignitaries to the boundaries of his lands.
‘Miss Pallot. You appear to have cleaned the bell and trimmed the flowers.’ Rebecca smiled. She had fallen for his feint.
‘I would, however, prefer you keep smiling even after the guests have departed, no matter how onerous they may be.’
‘Yes, Monsieur Fournier.’ She nodded, chastened.
‘Tell Juanita I need to speak to her, once I have finished with Monsieur de la Haye.’
Christophe headed down the corridor to Rob’s office, which, in another unusual occurrence, had been left half open.
‘Monsieur de la Haye?’
Rob was staring out of the window of his office, but his gaze didn’t reach the sand, the rocks, the sea or the boats on the horizon, his focus stopped at the glass, its rainbow smears of detergent and flecks of dried salt. Two high tides a day that, with the help of wind, would send up spray as the waves pounded the sea wall below. That was why he paid a window cleaner. Fucking Porko was taking the piss. Were the windows in the restaurant as dirty? No wonder no one was coming, no wonder he was fucked. It was the bloody window cleaner’s fault.
Christophe stepped inside and shut the door behind him. ‘I have some news that may be of interest.’
‘Have I won the lottery?’
‘Potentially. I have just heard from a contact at Tourism. The Queen is due to visit next year.’
‘Yeah, I heard something about that. She always stays at the L’Horizon.’
Christophe frowned. ‘Your father has a good relationship with the Bailiff. Surely he could persuade him to advise the Palace that there is now a superior establishment to the L’Horizon.’
‘No …’
‘Or at the very least that there is no finer place in the Island to dine. If she were to eat here for one of the official dinners then maybe it would lead to a future stay. The publicity we would get from a visit, even just for a meal, would be invaluable.’
Rob slid a fan of accounts across his desk. ‘Have a gander. There may not be a hotel by the time she turns up.’
Christophe scanned the columns. As manager he was aware of the day-to-day running costs, but the figures concerning the long-term loans and commercial mortgage were new and horrendously bleak.
‘As you can see, I’m fucked.’
‘That has to be an exaggeration. To my mind. It has just been a slower start than anticipated.’
‘That’s only half of it. They’re looking at the whole picture. I’m building a fucking house, Christophe.’
‘I understood it was a renovation.’
‘Well, the walls have stayed. Some of them. Others were either structurally unsound or my wife didn’t like where they were. There was no running water. These people were real Jersiaise. Proper English-as-a-second-language-don’t-marry-outside-the-parish types. Spoke Jersey French better than English. Electricity was from some generator powered by cowshit. I’m not kidding. I’m building a bloody house. From scratch. And it keeps changing. Bathroom’s where the kitchen was going to be because … I don’t fucking know.’
Rob continued to stare out of the window.
Christophe began, ‘Costs often escalate—’
‘Last night I agreed to a changing room for the swimming-pool. Christ knows why people can’t change in the bedrooms, or in one of the summer houses. She gets a changing room, and I get to keep my tree, the one in the driveway. And you know why I agreed to this? Because I needed to leave in a hurry, and didn’t want to get into an argument. Oh, yeah, I am quite the businessman.’
‘These figures are far from catastrophic.’
‘I was relying on the profits from the hotel to pay off the loans I’ve taken out to pay the builders, the architects and the structural engineers. I’m not even thinking about the mortgage on the property. And it turns out the income from this place isn’t even paying off the interest on the money I owe for redesigning it.’
‘We reopened late in the season and most people book ahead. It will pick up from the spring.’
‘That’s the hotel. The restaurant should be full all year. It was supposed to soak up any losses. Why aren’t people coming?’
‘We may be outpricing ourselves for the local market.’
‘This Island shits money, Christophe. Why aren’t they spending it in my Cordon Bleu sea-view restaurant? I mean, where else is there? This is the best food in the best location. It’s the place to fucking be.’
‘It takes time to build a clientele …’
‘Should I not have been in the adverts?’
‘No.’
‘Stop being so bloody diplomatic – you’re coming across as more Swiss than French. What the hell do I do?’
‘Some offers on the food and the accommodation would attract—’
‘Wait-wait-wait – cut the prices? When we’re losing money? No, that’s batshit. Plus, this is the dog’s bollocks. Do they have offers at the Ritz or the Waldorf? I say we go the other way, charge people a damn entrance fee—’
‘That would be unorthodox, and would choke off the numbers even further.’
‘How can we get them to spend more at the bar? That wasn’t too bad in the summer, but not according to these figures! I mean, what the fuck? You oversee the bar staff. Are they just serving tap water?’
‘We have to match our expenses to the demand.’
‘Meaning?’
‘At first glance, I would advocate a programme of outwardly indiscernible belt-tightening. Both here and, if I may say so, in your private finances. No one will be aware of it.’
‘Private finances? Right. First up, I need ten grand by Friday. Cash. As you can see, I don’t have it.’
‘For the house?’
‘No. For our recently departed employee.’
‘I thought the compensation was agreed.’
‘No. She turned up at my house on Saturday. Handily, just in time to clock the situation with me and Emma. Threatened to blow the whole thing open. Her and me, me and Emma. And, amazingly, it’s not the worst thing to happen to me in the last twenty-four hours. Right now, it’s pretty much bottom of my list. Have you got a gun? Would you shoot me? If this is a bad dream, I’ll wake up, and if it’s not, I’ll be dead. Win-win.’
‘She is blackmailing you?’
‘I prefer to think she’s providing a service, in exchange for a fee.’
‘The service being?’
‘Not sex – don’t look at me like that. Silence. The service is silence.’
‘Did you meet her last night? Was that what I provided cover for?’
Rob nodded. He’d felt increasingly relaxed leading up to his summit with Louise: they would meet with cooler heads, and laugh it off. He was not going to pay, of that he was certain. Not because he couldn’t, but because he baulked at being forced retrospectively to pay for sex. Himself, the Casanova of the Channel Isles, being held to ransom by one of his conquests? It was a bewildering phenomenon. She was a conquest damn it, claimed and subjugated. Failure to quash this singular revolt would be a mojo-threatening dent to his self-esteem. She would be crushed with charm.
The first ratchet of unforeseen pressure had been finding Sally at home preparing supper at seven on Monday evening. His practised flair for dissemblance meant he expressed seamless delight at her unexpected presence: she was supposed to be at the theatre with her mother, who had been taken ill with a stomach bug. ‘Poor thing, give her my best,’ Rob cooed, while hoping the inconsiderate old cow shat herself inside out. He made much of the bonus of an evening with just the two of them, then snuck off to make an undetected call to Christophe. This prompted a call back that he had made sure Sally answered, which led in turn to him r
ushing to the hotel to deal with an unforeseen and too-complicated-to-explain emergency, and agreeing to the changing room to abate the relentless campaign against his beloved oak.
He had driven to Bouley Bay in the least conspicuous vehicle in his portfolio, the Mini Moke. It had been bought on a whim, the nearest thing to a beach buggy, but in two years it had clocked up barely a hundred miles. A moderately observant acquaintance, let alone your standard-issue Island busybody, would have spotted the Porsche or the Morgan, the former with its giveaway ‘J007’ number plate, and the latter with the Jersey flag painted on the bonnet. As it was, a thick sea fog blanketed the end of Bouley Bay pier, a squat granite spar sheltering a small harbour, where he took the space furthest from land, next to the sprawl of buoys, nets and lobster pots cluttering the tip. Fog clears, though, and it would not have been an unknown coincidence for him to find himself parked alongside a colleague, cousin, relative of a neighbour, or some other agent of doom, who might, at some later and inconvenient moment, potentially pull at the threads of the swiftly woven alibi he had presented to his wife.
Luckily, his instinct that his set were unlikely to be frequenting a north-coast pub on a Monday night was proved right, and his equilibrium was partially restored. Under the sickly glow of the street lamps the other cars revealed themselves to be three Fiestas with the white on red ‘H’ for hire car, grockle-mobiles, as he called them, plus a purple Volvo and a beige Capri. The vehicles outside the Black Dog, which sat at the bottom of the hill two hundred yards from the base of the pier, were similarly unknown. He suspected Louise thought he would be on edge coming back to the scene of their crime, but on walking in, he couldn’t think of a better location. He’d never normally come here, so the staff wouldn’t know him and neither would the regulars. This was bandit country. He and his mates had only popped in after watching the Hill Climb because there was literally nowhere else to drink. Unless you wanted to knock at one of the cottages set back from the road and see if they had any home-brewed cider.
His main stress on walking over to sit opposite her in the corner booth was the damage the sticky carpet was doing to the soles of his Gucci loafers. Her demeanour was, thankfully, less deranged than it had been two days ago. She looked beautiful, corkscrew curls and dimples, with a glow that brought back exactly why he’d broken his ‘never in the Island’ rule. Her calm stoked his hopes for an amicable resolution based on flattery, while disallowing the possibility of a second fuck. Not that he didn’t want one: on the contrary, he found all that stern pride a massive turn-on, and would love to bring it low. No, he didn’t want to give any hint that an ongoing affair was possible. In the forty-eight hours since she had turned up on his doorstep, Rob’s ego had de-emphasised the fact he’d had her sacked, and inflated a spurious fantasy that located the primary source of her rage as jealousy at the discovery of his wife and regular mistress.