A Different War

by Craig Thomas

Just the excavated tunnels.

  Millions… absolutely millions of pounds ecus, rather unaccounted for. As she drove along a new stretch of dual carriage way raising the dust of disuse, the gaps in the jigsaw, the succession of unfinished, un started pieces of the urban regeneration project, struck more forcibly, imprinting themselves with the clarity of photographs on her memory. She was irritated and impatient that she would not be able to speak to Aubrey until he returned to London that evening. Because now she could not risk calling him at Uffingham, not with David there… David what are you up to?

  Lunch was to be late, by David's request. He remained ensconced in the library with his coterie of the great and the possibly-not-good the two European Commissioners, Rogier and Laxton, the local Euro MR Campbell, Bryan Coulthard and Jean-Paul Bressier, chairman of Balzac-Stendhal, the French partners of Aero UK in the Skyliner project, who had arrived the previous afternoon. Which, as Aubrey reflected once more as he sat on a comfortably cushioned painted chair on the terrace of Uffingham, rather narrowed the field of suspicion. Whatever David was up to, it had to be connected with Aero UK and its disastrous recent experiences at the hands of MoD and the world's airlines. The whole gang of them had spent most of Sunday ensconced in the library.

  Incommunicado.

  He was engaged in a second small Scotch and in conversation with his old friend, Clive Winterborne; and in the immensely pleasurable activity, now that he was well into his old age, of watching other people labour under a hot sun. The giant marquee was only now being dismantled, falling to the ground an hour since with the erotic grace of a woman's clothing. Clive had held a party inside it for the estate workers and their families on the Sunday. There was a rowing boat on the lake, with the swans and ducks, and two figures patiently fishing out spent fireworks. Volunteers, under the direction of the head gardener, were combing the lawns for the same spent bodies and the detritus of Saturday's festivities. The vomit count was low, thank goodness, Clive had remarked, his eyes bright with success and his habitual kind sense of mischief. Broken glass tally minimal, he had added.

  Inside the house, Clive's secretary and a small team of volunteers were item ising the expenditure, the pledges, the cheques and the cash. The grand auction had been a success, after the gambit of the fireworks had increased the general sense of well-being and generosity. Swallows swooped and sewed the air around the house's eaves as they sipped their drinks and tasted their ease in each other's company. An ease which all but disguised from Aubrey his suspicions of Clive's son.

  In Clive's company, on a grand terrace behind a boastful stone balustrade and overlooking a lake and hazy parkland, it was difficult to think of fraud on a giant scale, the misappropriation of European Union funds by anyone, let alone David Winterborne.

  "You're thoughtful," Clive murmured.

  "Something wrong?"

  Aubrey carefully shook his head.

  "Just looking back over my long life," he replied.

  "It seems I can't achieve the trick of doing so without evoking a touch of melancholy." Which was true, if not of the moment. An interrogator's ploy, he reminded himself, employing truth like a lockpick.

  "You've never had that trouble," he added with a smile.

  "No. My melancholic memories are quite specific, old friend — quite specific." The death of his beloved Eurasian wife, the death of his charming, feckless younger son in a car accident… perhaps other occasions of which Aubrey did not know.

  Otherwise, Clive's army career and his later career in MIS were a catalogue of success and esteem, as was his subsequent role as squire of Uffingham.

  Winterborne Straits had passed directly into David's hands while Clive continued his uninterrupted indifference to commerce.

  And, in fifteen years, David had expanded it into Winterborne Holdings, breaking out of Singapore with the ferocity of an infantry assault, investing, acquiring, defeating competition, diversifying… creating a monstrous business behemoth.

  Clive had whispered, soon after Aubrey's arrival, that David was assiduously seeking US citizenship to facilitate the further expansion of Winterborne Holdings. Under David's stewardship, a trading house in the East had become a tentacular conglomerate in the West, something uniquely twentieth — rather than nineteenth century.

  Clive glanced at his watch.

  "I've told David two is the latest I'm prepared to contemplate my lunch," he announced gruffly but without irritation.

  "It's almost that now."

  "So," Aubrey sighed, 'you're well pleased with Saturday's junket?"

  "Didn't you enjoy the fireworks, Kenneth?" Winterborne replied archly.

  "Splendid. Marian thought so, too."

  "Ah, our shining girl."

  "Indeed."

  Aubrey felt uncomfortable beneath his panama hat, as if hotter within his oldfashioned cream flannel suit. The shining girl almost as much his own child and that of Clive as she was Giles' daughter troubled him; at least her suspicions did, plucking at his mental vision of things like a stye or mote. David's rapid, even cavalier expansion into aerospace, in Europe and the US alike, had exposed him to the banks and other lenders and investors. The recent history of Aerospace UK and its French counterpart Aubrey glanced towards the tall windows of the library threatened the various subcontracting businesses that Winterborne Holdings owned or controlled. The recession had afflicted his construction companies in every world market he had succeeded in penetrating. Winterborne Holdings, Aubrey had learned by a process of interrogation and compilation, was unsteady if not unstable; weaker than anyone liked, except its enemies.

  The rowing boat had returned to the shore of the lake and was tied up at a pergolaed jetty, splashed with the pink climbing roses planted in ornamental urns that lined the small pier.

  "Are you free for lunch on Thursday?" Clive asked.

  "I'm up in town on some charity business. Shall we meet?"

  "Naturally. I'll call Giles. Indeed, we can be his guests, since he so ungraciously failed to attend your fireworks party."

  "Good idea." The lorry on to which the marquee supports had been loaded moved away along the drive and rounded the corner of the house.

  Clive sighed, as if he had that moment rid himself of unwelcome guests.

  "Regimental reunions are all very well—" '-but cannot be compared with fireworks!" Aubrey completed, chuckling.

  "Giles probably had a precognition of Marian's encounter with George, our local party chairman," Clive added.

  "From all I hear, he would have been mightily embarrassed—" He grinned, his hawklike features softening, their leatheriness warming.

  "She really does take all life head-on, doesn't she?" His admiration was undisguised. Though I shall have to have a quiet word with her about the height of her profile. Central Office is, I have it on the best authority, gunning for her."

  They'll never manage her de selection

  "Of course not. She could gain re-election in this constituency with an illegitimate child being breast-fed on the hustings!" When their laugher had diminished, Winterborne added more gravely: "But it's this sometimes needless upsetting of people, her urge to trample on pretensions they have cultivated as carefully as rare orchids. Even someone with lights as dim as those possessed by dear George often knows when he's being patronised or mocked. It doesn't achieve anything so why does she go in for it with such enthusiasm?" He threw his hands in the air in mock despair.

  "Just consider the inordinate amount of time she must spend with the dim, the venal, the unprincipled and the boring," Aubrey observed, enjoying their patrician dialogue.

  "When she returns from the Mother of Parliaments, that choicest Palace of Westminster, you can't really blame her for bridling at a great deal more of the same."

  "I ask only for a little common sense," Winterborne offered with a smile.

  "Ah, our dear Marian was born not so much with common sense but with an ethical sense a more combustible property altogether."

  "Ex
actly. It could blow her sky-high some fine day and I would hate that to happen."

  "Quite," Aubrey murmured, masking his features with the whisky tumbler.

  Clive glanced away towards the library windows and the door again thankfully.

  For Marian was engaged in one of her explosive experiments. Light the blue touch paper and retire. It served as a warning against Marian's curiosity as much as against the combustibility of fireworks. Her notion of the kind of fraud in which David could be involved if it bore fruit would indeed undermine her as well as David and Clive, and blow them all at the moon. Did she understand how dangerous her enquiries were… to her past, her sense of well-being, to some of the scaffolding of her personality?

  He knew Marian well enough to experience a slight, unnerved nausea which he could not blame on the sun's strength or the second whisky.

  More immediately, there was a very real personal danger in her pursuing her investigation. Which was why he had told her little of what he had discovered since their last meeting. To have stilled her ardent intelligence would have been beyond him. He would have had to lie to her, and she would have known it. Nevertheless, she had little idea how close his own suspicions now were to those she held.

  And that weakened him, in front of Clive, because the truth would destroy their friendship, would alienate Marian and her father from Clive and Uffingham.

  Marian, given free rein, would pull the whole edifice of their various relationships down. Aubrey's concern perhaps his sole concern was how he might mitigate the blow.

  His nerves were startled as David and his guests emerged from the door on to the terrace, blinking in the sunlight like conspirators. Clive waved a lazy arm, then stood up, calling out: "At last, gentlemen! Not a single healthy appetite among you, by the look of it!" The butler, as at a given signal, emerged to take their drinks order.

  "Champagne, I think, Russell," Aubrey heard David announce.

  "Not premature, I feel." He was smiling broadly, confidently. It was like sunlight after cloud, a sense of better weather; how could there be any villainy here?

  Easily… In Aubrey's perspective remained something Marian's eager moral nose had scented then forgotten Fraser worked for David, or at least he probably did, and there was a young man being buried in Somerset whom Fraser had probably killed.

  "Champagne, Kenneth?" David called to him. He rose with an awkward hurry, waggling his hand in refusal.

  "Not after Scotch, dear boy thank you."

  David shrugged, his mood undisturbed. There was an ease among the group of men that had not been Aubrey's sense of them previously. There had been strain, an edginess. Perhaps Bressier, the chairman of the French aerospace company, had brought saving news? There was now tentative, and accumulating, interest in the Skyliner, albeit they were practically giving the aircraft away with boxes of cereal in their leasing arrangements. So someone had informed him at the Club, a leading economic journalist. Whatever had occurred, there was now the scent of relief, even success.

  "Beautiful day, Kenneth," David announced, raising his champagne flute in an ironic toast. The swans glided on the still, glittering lake as if nothing could ever disturb them.

  "Absolutely. I gather your self-satisfaction quotient is higher today than yesterday," he murmured, watching the swans glide in and out of focus amid the gleam of the water.

  "Ah trust you to notice," David replied carefully.

  "I can admit to you, Kenneth, that things haven't been good the past few weeks and months. Culminating in the helicopter fiasco," he added with deep vehemence.

  "But Aero UK and BalzacStendhal have adopted my leasing policy and the planes are beginning to move out of the two factories. Once they're flying well, who knows?"

  "Indeed who knows?"

  "Come and meet everyone most of them you already know, I should imagine."

  "Some, certainly."

  Aubrey shook hands with Rogier and Bressier, addressing them in his correct but fluent French. In their own language, he could detect more easily and certainly their relief, a certain new lightness of mood.

  Bryan Coulthard was bluffly, openly confident. Laxton, with all the assiduity of someone who learned nothing and forgot less, especially every petty enmity of his long and undistinguished career, was patronising; amused at Aubrey's old-fashioned suit and his remittance-man status at Uffingham. As a mere house guest of Clive, he did not merit the rank accorded to those who came to do business with David. Laxton glowed with the fleshiness of seized opportunities in Brussels, though drink seemed to be re mapping his features as a chart of his veins. He perspired freely, but even that seemed suggestive of confidence.

  Aubrey murmured of mutual acquaintances and recent deaths and the importance of Europe with Laxton, much to the amusement of Clive over the man's padded shoulder. A little business with Coulthard, whose replies suggested that he had emerged into a clearing. There was minimal sense of the pressure of creditors, of the stock market…

  Shares in Aero UK had climbed back slightly with news of Skyliners being leased. Aubrey, in his selfish wish to dissuade Marian and avoid the conflagration the truth would bring, began to feel more comfortable, affable even towards Laxton. If the necessity for villainy had ceased, if whatever they had been doing was an episode now closed, then perhaps, just perhaps, Marian would be satisfied with knowledge without action.

  He found himself once more beside Rogier, who leaned deferentially over him.

  The man was well over six feet, still slim, groomed, narrow-featured, the gold framed spectacles and bow tie making him seem more academic than his reputation suggested, less the skilful politician; a form of disguise, then. Europe, of course, moved from strength to strength, and Aubrey did not demur, largely indifferent as he was to Europhilia and Europhobia alike. He anticipated that the bureaucrats would, as bureaucrats always manage to do in situations where they do not possess the freedom to do wrong, make an unholy, scrappy mess of federalism. He nodded and smiled and allowed the Euro-blandishments to vanish beyond his ears, towards the lake.

  Then he said, as a sense of ennui assailed him, and almost to deflect the conversation: "I imagine the suicide of that young man in your department was most embarrassing, Commissioner? I didn't know him personally, but a friend of mine did…"

  Rogier's features were blanched. Aubrey made a huge effort of will to render his own face bland.

  The real truth of the thing was murder and this man knew it for what it was and all possibility of dissuading Marian vanished in that hard light. Lloyd had been murdered by Fraser on David Winterborne's direct order, in all probability.

  Russell, the butler, announced lunch.

  "Ah!" Aubrey chirruped brightly. Thank God' Something wrong?" David asked sharply, seeing the expression on his face.

  Aubrey shook his head, perhaps too emphatically.

  "No, no — dear boy. A little giddy spell hot sun, I expect." David appeared not quite to believe.

  "Shall we go in?"

  Aubrey pressed, mopping his brow not entirely in pretence.

  "Is something wrong, Kenneth?" David insisted.

  "No!" Aubrey snapped.

  "Fine, fine…" He waved David towards his guests.

  The heat of his body would not lessen, despite his effort of will. His thoughts, too, seemed heated. It was truly dreadful, dreadful, he realised. He glanced at Clive, whose expression was of concern. He smiled in a watery, assuring way and they walked together towards the house, away from the terrace and its now elusive and somehow darkened view of the lake's tranquillity. Clive took his elbow, as he had so often done, and Aubrey was grateful for the support. The group of confident men, their fraud probably already behind them, sauntered ahead of himself and his dear friend. It was utterly hateful to him, the knowledge he possessed and the frightening sense of what he must do with it… or how, for perhaps even deeper reasons, he must ensure that it remained hidden.

  He must either help Marian destroy David Winterborne, and
Clive into the bargain, or he must become an accessory after the fact of murder.

  Vance's private jet waited on the tarmac, poised on the apron, nose towards the taxiway as if it had caught Barbara's mood of flight. A coroner's station wagon nuzzled beside it, and the metal casket which contained Vance was ceremoniously removed from its rear and loaded on to the airplane. Gant watched from a slight distance the results of Barbara's blackmail, string-pulling, desperation. Someone from the US Consulate in Helsinki stood with her now, watching the casket as if it contained the victim of some foreign war… Maybe it did, at that.

  Barbara wanted out and the Consulate had smoothed her way to that object. There'd be a proper post-mortem examination in Phoenix.

  The evening was clear, high and light cloud goldened by the lowering sun. A Finnan Boeing rose from the runway and almost at once caught the sun, gleamed like a star. Kerosene on the breeze.

  Reluctantly, Gant walked towards the plane. The diplomat was shaking hands with Barbara with official solemnity. She was nodding mechanically until he released her hand. Once he had done so, she turned and climbed the three steps into the fuselage of the airplane that had been the small dream of Vance's early years, his first ambition. It was now what Barbara thought he should have gone on doing, making executive jets for rich men.

  In the hospital corridor, she had said to the air: "Poppa, you should have gone on building toys for rich boys."

  "He couldn't," Gant had replied.

  Then he was wrong!" she had raged against his death. Then, like a frightened, lost child: "I want to get out of here."

  He really didn't want to board the plane with her. She had already returned to the idea of sabotage and what he would do about it. It was not, yet, a plea or an effort at blackmail, but it would become so. And it had made him at once reluctant, recreating as it did a sense of obligation for the failure of their briefly shared past. She loaded him with guilt, with the sense that he needed to atone for something.

  What he had so easily promised Burton seemed impossible to offer Barbara. If he agreed to go on with it for the sake of her devotion to the dead idol he could never exorcise, then he would have to complete it, it would have to be finished.