The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  “I imagine you’re retaining control.”

  “For the moment, anyway.”

  “You’ll be a rich man.”

  At this point I realised that the reason Gerry had wanted me to come down early was that he was going to ask me for money. No doubt this was what Bobo had been about to warn me of in the urinals at Bury.

  “Eventually,” I said. “If all goes well.”

  He grunted and seemed to fall into a reverie. The air in the narrow path between the trees was dense and still and swarming with insects.

  “Nan is insisting I cut myself loose from Michael,” he said. “It’s part of the deal.”

  I made some non-committal mutter.

  “He’ll be turning up for supper tonight,” he said. “She wants me to have it out with him then. Have you any views?”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Last time we spoke about it you seemed to have nothing but admiration for Michael.”

  “Things have changed.”

  We turned the corner and the South Lake stretched before us, dully reflecting the listless woods. Above its surface, in a layer dense enough to look like a band of dark smoke trapped there by the heavy atmosphere, swarmed the midges that had bred from it. The path looked totally uninviting, but Gerry wrenched up a couple of stalks of hog-parsley and gave one to me. We walked on, switching them around our faces.

  “Michael and I are not technically partners,” he said. “We are merely associates. There are companies we are co-directors of, but in theory we can separate at any time, by either of us expressing a wish to do so. In practice, of course, because we’ve worked closely together, it’s going to take time, which Nan is not prepared to give me.”

  “Have you already spoken to Michael about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What will his attitude be?”

  “He will try to prevent me leaving him.”

  “Can he do that? Can he do any more than make things difficult? If you are not even partners?”

  “I’m afraid so. To put it simply, I’ve discovered that some of the things Michael has encouraged me to do have not been legal. I’ve always relied, naturally enough, on Michael’s advice on legal matters, and he himself has always taken the line that it’s important to stay inside the law. The trouble is that the richest pickings are just in those areas where the law is obscure or uncertain, so it’s those areas we have tended to exploit. Until a few months ago I was perfectly happy about this, but I happened to fall in with an old ruffian in the East End who was an Essex supporter. These people tend to have a sentimental streak, which they use as a substitute for morals, and in his case it’s cricket. He’d seen me play a decent knock against the county some years back, and he made a point of taking me aside and telling me he didn’t like seeing a good lad getting into bad hands. I asked him what he meant, but all he’d say was that a bent lawyer was a bent lawyer … I don’t know. Nan had been telling me for months that Michael was using me. There’d been one or two other things I’d more or less shut my eyes to. And this old boy spoke with authority. He’s seen it all, as they say. Michael was away, sailing with Ben in the Med. I decided to read up on a particular detail of tax law about which Michael had assured me we were in the clear, and I discovered that we weren’t. I took counsel’s opinion, and he confirmed it. It wasn’t that Michael had been mistaken. He’d expressly misinformed me.”

  He paused for comment. As far as it went his story seemed possible, if not plausible. I recalled his difficulty in engaging his intellect with the convolutions of military bureaucracy. He might well have a similar blind spot about the technicalities of tax legislation.

  “Did you tackle Michael?” I said.

  “As I say, he was away. I checked the files, and discovered that a number of documents were missing, in particular a detailed memorandum from Michael on how to set up a trust structure to our advantage and what and what not to tell our official lawyers to that end. Without it there was nothing to show that the whole scheme was not my idea. I checked more extensively and found that the same thing had happened elsewhere. In fact on any point where we might be in trouble decisions which I knew to have been joint now appeared to have been made by me alone. All the crucial cheques had been signed by me. I also began to suspect that my apparent shares in a number of our major assets might be almost worthless.”

  “So if you try to leave him he can threaten to turn you over to the tax authorities? I’d have thought he’d be reluctant to do that. They’re bound to go over his own affairs extremely thoroughly. On the other hand, if you do leave him you will be … penniless?”

  “Good as.”

  “Have you told Nancy any of this?”

  “Most of it. Her line is that we should call his bluff. I actually know enough about his affairs to cause him serious trouble. Though it will be nothing to the trouble that I shall be in myself, it might still not be worth his while. What I would prefer, though, is to wait. Not to tackle Michael immediately, but to carry on as if I knew nothing, but meanwhile to play him at his own game, accumulating documentary evidence of his wrongdoing until I’m in a position to force him to play fair with me. I need, at the most, three months’ grace.”

  He stopped and paced broodingly along the path, as if that was as far as his thoughts had taken him. I walked beside him, dry-mouthed, appalled. The lake was a dismal grey sheet, blotched with blanket-weed. The tired leaves hung motionless. The air was heavy with electricity and dim with the pestilent midges. There seemed to be no end to the path. Gerry’s tone and demeanour were in keeping, those of one who is lost, and knows it. For myself, I had listened sick-hearted. Did he really expect me to help him? Perhaps he had told me the truth about Michael’s dealings with him, but surely not about his own naïveté and innocence. Michael might have led him step by step down the slope, each step seeming to follow logically from the one before, but surely there must have come a point, and far earlier than he had suggested, when he had looked around him and seen the pit he was in? If not the financial and legal trap into which Michael had coaxed him, then at least the moral repugnance of what he was doing?

  How had he come to this? All those talents, that easy buoyancy, soured into this squirming mess? It didn’t bear thinking of. Anyway, he was clearly about to ask for money, a loan of some kind, possibly a block of my shares which he could then use as collateral, either to convince Michael that he would not be in desperate financial straits if they parted, or else to persuade Nancy that they could afford to wait while he came to terms with Michael. Without thinking it through I decided to forestall him.

  “You want me to suggest some way of raising funds to see you over the gap?” I said.

  “Well, something like that, but …”

  “Before we discuss it I want you to explain something to me. A few months ago you asked me to help you find a call-girl. I told you to telephone Mrs Mudge. You later told me that she had not been able to help. Not long after that a young woman called Samantha Whitstable insinuated herself into a dinner party at the Seddons”, dressed as a man. She was asked to leave, but before she did so she gave Seddon her card. Next you asked us to the opera, saying you had spare tickets. You suggested I should bring Lucy, which I did, but it turned out we were seated separately from you. Miss Whitstable was in a box with a man who tried to keep out of sight, but whom Lucy recognised as her husband. The girl pointed us out to him. After the opera Lucy and I followed them to Greek Street, and you followed us. Some thugs tried to abduct the girl, and you intervened. We then went off to supper as though nothing had happened. You had told me the tickets were available because friends of Nancy’s had fallen through, but it became apparent that she was only reluctantly there, and very much gave the impression that you had made her come. Wait. Next day I telephoned Mrs Mudge, and she told me that the girl she’d suggested
to you was this same Samantha Whitstable. She said that you’d persuaded the girl to leave her agency, and implied that the fracas in Greek Street was an attempt on the part of her friends to take the girl back. Did you, by the way, know that something like that was going to happen? Was that why you followed us?”

  “No.”

  I waited while he paced on in silence. But for the single syllable I might have begun to feel that he hadn’t heard anything I had said. I pressed him again.

  “I want to know what on earth you thought you were up to with this scheme. I want to know whether it was your idea, or one of Michael’s you were carrying out on his behalf. And then I want to know why you should believe, after what you appear to have done, that I should either trust or help you in any way at all.”

  “Because you have to,” he said. “Like me, you have no other course of action, unpleasant though it may seem. I will answer your earlier question. When I followed you after the opera I had no idea that that woman was going to try and get the girl back. I just wanted to see that you didn’t get into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The attack could equally well have been on you, if it had been noticed that you were following the girl. She is now under the protection of a much larger and more ruthless organisation than anything Mrs Mudge can command. Now as to why you are forced to help me. You have to understand that Michael has two complementary drives. The first is to achieve total power over those he chooses to dominate. Second to revenge himself in any way he can on those who defy or remove themselves from his control. He doesn’t want to hurt them physically, but so to speak spiritually. He will go to almost any lengths to achieve this in certain cases. I tell you, unless you help me to reach a stage where he can himself be controlled by the threat of exposure of his affairs, he will in the end destroy Lucy.”

  “Lucy?” I said.

  “I didn’t at first realise it, but that is what the business with the Whitstable girl has been about,” he said.

  “But why Lucy?”

  He stopped and looked at me. The midges haloed his large face. He was sweating lightly.

  “You didn’t know?” he said.

  The next I remember was that I was sitting in the driving-seat of an unfamiliar car and looking in vain at the dashboard for somewhere to insert the ignition key. In front of me was a blank stone wall. Somebody was tapping at the window. It was Lady Vereker. The dream-like moment endured another few seconds, nonsensically ominous, and then the real world flooded back. I had had some kind of black-out. I could clearly remember Gerry and the swarming midges, but nothing after that. I was now in my own mind on my way to London, escaping, running desperately away, but had somehow wandered up to the stables and climbed into Lady Vereker’s car which she garaged in the coach-house when she was not using it for indoor riding. I seemed to have locked the door, but had no trouble finding the catch and opening it. I climbed out.

  Like many apparently scatty and irresponsible people Lady Vereker was rather good in a crisis. She didn’t bother me with questions but led me into her living room, shooed several affronted dogs off the sofa and shut them out, made me lie down, and telephoned Nancy. She then made me a cup of weak, sweet tea, which I was drinking by the time Harriet and Bobo arrived to take me back to the house. By then I had physically pretty well recovered, and my main thought was still to find my own car and leave.

  “What happened?” said Harriet. “Do you know?”

  “No. I was talking with Gerry by the lake, and I don’t remember anything after that till I was sitting in your mother’s car. Don’t worry. I’m all right now. I’ll just pack up and go.”

  “You’ll what?” said Bobo.

  “I’ve got to go back to London.”

  “Bloody nonsense,” said Bobo. “You’re not fit to drive, for a start. What happens if you have another black-out on the road?”

  “We’d much better put you to bed and get Dr Jericho out to have a look at you,” said Harriet.

  “It’s very …”

  “Balls,” said Bobo. “You can kill yourself and that’s your look-out, but if you kill some other poor sod in the accident, then we’ll be to blame for letting you go. You can give me your car-key, and any more of this bullshit and I’m going to lock you in and sleep on a mattress outside your door, and you won’t hear the last of that for a while.”

  They were perfectly right. I remembered the coronary-like sensation I had experienced on arrival. Though I might now feel I was up to the drive it would be irresponsible of me to attempt it. I thought of asking for someone to drive me in to Bury to catch a train, but decided that I’d prefer not to face the inevitable refusal.

  Just before the stable drive turned on to the circuit round East Lawn I paused. I’d have liked to ask Harriet alone, but there was no help.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to meet Gerry.”

  “He’s probably still with Nan in the Yellow Room,” said Harriet. “We’ll take you up the back stairs.”

  So we went round by the servants” entrance and climbed the worn steep flights. I went obediently to bed. The doctor came, a rubicund, short, grinning man who told me he could find nothing wrong. He said I had been overworking, and must rest, and forbade me to drive until I had been thoroughly examined by my own doctor. Supper was brought by a maid, but I ate very little. I didn’t feel like reading, so I lay in the darkening room with the windows wide and the curtains open, trying not to think and watching the blinks of sheet lightning, eerily thunderless, flickering behind the cloud-mass. At last, but without any sense of release, it started to rain.

  There was a tap at my door. I assumed it was the maid come for the tray, but when I called out Lucy slid in and came to the bedside. She tried to take my hand but I drew it away. She seemed to understand the gesture almost at once.

  “Gerry told you about me and Michael,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She turned and sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the window. The lightning glimmered across her face.

  “I should have told you myself,” she whispered. “Long ago. Long ago.”

  LUCY IX

  August 1956

  I haven’t much to say here, because Paul’s put most of it in. I think I really want to talk about Ben. The obvious question is why on earth did she agree to marry Michael, but it isn’t obvious to me. Or rather, it isn’t much of a question because it’s the answer that’s obvious. Michael could be extremely attractive, especially to risk-takers like Ben and me (he’d never have got anywhere with Harriet, for instance). He seemed dangerous, but worth it. Suppose he’d wanted to marry me, instead of just living with me for a bit, I’m sure he’d have gone about it differently and I think very likely I’d have said yes. But of course that wouldn’t have stopped him being perfectly foul afterwards. I don’t think he’d started being foul to Ben yet, apart from the odd little tweak and pinch just to keep her guessing, but he was going to be one day. One day he was going to tell her about me, I’m sure, but he was still saving that up, savouring it.

  So why did he marry her? Well, she was glamorous and interesting, for a start; the right sort of wife for someone like him to show around. And she was a challenge. The big thing in her life was dancing, and he could have the fun of showing her who was boss by not letting her. And then of course she was a way of getting at me.

  Gerry seems to have told Paul a lot of lies by the lake—no, not lies, but half-lies, all twisted and with things left out—but I’m sure he was right about one thing. Michael never forgave anybody. He was never going to forgive me. He might wait twenty years, but in the end he was going to see to it that he hurt me really badly, and the best way to do that was to hurt my family, to split us up and make us enemies of each other. And I think without us knowing it that was already starting to happen and we knew we had to stop it, and that was why
we all wanted to come together that week-end and make ourselves whole again.

  I know this doesn’t make sense when you think that with another part of our minds we—Nan and Harriet and me, that is—were trying to get Gerry to split up with Michael, which looked like as good a way as any of making Ben into an enemy, but there it is. People are like that. You want two opposite things at the same time, with different parts of you, so you think about one of them at a time and blank the other one out, and hope. Of course it doesn’t work, but you never learn.

  Anyway, I’m sure Ben felt like that. She was in terrific form, alive and funny and friendly and full of Paris gossip but so obviously happy to be home and ready to make things up with Nan after letting her down by getting married in a rush, and not saying anything about it being really Nan’s fault because of the letter she’d written. I can remember that Friday afternoon net as if it was yesterday, and Paul’s right, it really did feel as if we’d gone back at least ten years to when things were far, far easier and anything was possible and we weren’t trapped and hedged in by all the things we’d done and mistakes we’d made between. And that was a terrific shot. I can shut my eyes now and feel the swing of the bat, part of me, weightless as my own arms, and the sweetness of its smash into the ball at exactly the right moment to a millionth of a second, and the ball sailing away, and the glass breaking and Mr Chad saying exactly the same thing he always used to about us growing up …

  Oh dear, I’d like to stay talking about that for ever, but I’d better get on. I was back at Seddon Hall and dressing for dinner, nearly finished, when my house telephone rang and it was Rodrigo, the butler, saying there was an urgent message for me to call home. I did. Harriet answered and told me that Paul had had some kind of a stroke or heart-attack while he was talking to Gerry by the lake, only according to Gerry it wasn’t like that because he hadn’t fallen down or anything, he’d just rushed away and for some reason Gerry hadn’t followed to see he was alright and the next thing anyone knew he was in Mother’s car trying to drive himself to London and the doctor was coming and they thought I’d better know at once. I said I’d ring back and went through to tell Tommy. (Even when we used to sleep together we’d always had officially separate bedrooms and bathrooms and dressing-rooms with a little breakfast-room between them, though we practically never had breakfast there—by the way I can’t remember if I said when I was talking about the reasons for not breaking up completely with Tommy that one of them was the sheer luxury of being married to a terrifically rich, kind man.)