On the grapevine, she’d heard that he’d gone out with two or three other girls, but nothing serious, nothing that lasted. Give her another chance, and he wouldn’t regret it. The prospect of seeing him again made her knees weak. What happened at the barbecue today might change her life forever.
Her flat was carved out of a converted loft space in the town centre. There was a sweet shop at street level, and a watch repairer’s on the first floor. The landlord, a local businessman, was one of Gray Elstone’s clients. When she’d complained about being fed up at home, Gray said the chap owed him a favour, and offered to have a word. The flat was tiny, with barely enough room for her clothes, let alone all her books, but the rent was next to nothing. She was saving a fortune on petrol, now she no longer had to commute back and forth from Holmrook.
Did Gray’s kindness have an ulterior motive? Soaping herself in the shower, she imagined her boss lurking outside, summoning up the nerve to part the plastic curtain and get an eyeful. He was thirty-eight, and had never married. If he’d had a girlfriend, nobody knew about it. People pulled his leg, calling him a Gray bachelor, and worse. Yet he was interested in women, not men, she was sure of it. More than once in the office, she’d caught him sneaking a glance at her when he thought she was preoccupied with her work. Three times in the past month, he’d invited her for a quick drink after work. Different pub each time, as if he didn’t want to be seen to be making a habit of it. But he’d kept his hands to himself, and hadn’t so much as brushed against her ‘unintentionally’, far less ventured a peck on the cheek when she said she really must be going. Perhaps he simply wanted to be friendly.
Amber said he was a dirty old man, but that was Amber for you. Gray was impossibly ancient as far as she was concerned. They’d talked about him last night, after their trip to the Film Club at the Roxy. A Danish movie, all subtitles and full-frontal nudity. Amber lied about her age to get in, but it wasn’t worth the effort. After five minutes Amber started yawning and saying she preferred the real thing. Half an hour in, Joanna surrendered to the inevitable, and followed her friend to the pub round the corner. Amber told the leering barman she was nineteen, and he was happy to take the size of her boobs as corroboration. ‘Of course your creepy old boss wants to get inside your knickers,’ Amber had said. ‘Who wouldn’t?’
That was one of the things Joanna liked about Amber. It was impossible not to feel like an ugly sister, squashed next to her on the plush banquette. Quite apart from their very different looks, they hadn’t much in common. Amber wasn’t interested in history or reading, and turned up her neat little nose when Joanna extolled the virtues of Pride and Prejudice. But Amber was fun to be with, and generous with her compliments. She never missed an opportunity to boost Joanna’s ego. Might her kindness have an ulterior motive, did she reckon that sticking close to Joanna somehow brought her closer to Nigel? Each time the thought slipped into Joanna’s mind, she swatted it away, as if fending off a wasp about to sting.
‘Gray is a respectable professional man. He’s a chartered accountant, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Honestly, Jo, you have no idea what men are like.’
Amber had slept with three boys, and had shared the gory details with Joanna. She certainly wasn’t backward in coming forward, but she was too young for Nigel. He was a real man.
‘Gray is kind. Look at how he sorted out my flat. How many bosses would do that for a member of staff?’
‘Wants you at his beck and call,’ Amber diagnosed, taking a slurp of shandy. ‘No chance of throwing a sickie and taking the day off to soak up the sun when the office is so close the head honcho can pop in at lunchtime for a so-called welfare visit. Trust me, Jo, it’s your body he’s after.’
Joanna giggled. ‘I don’t think so.’
Would it be so terrible if Amber were right? Suppose things didn’t work out with Nigel, suppose he wasn’t willing to try again? Her mother’s mantra was that a girl couldn’t hang around forever. Gray Elstone was no Piers Brosnan, but looks weren’t everything. He had good manners, and a nice house, with the mortgage paid off.
‘Mum reckons he’s pervy.’
‘She didn’t say so!’ Joanna was startled. Mrs Whiteley seemed too polite to talk like that.
‘Not in so many words. But the way his tongue hangs out when he’s watching her and thinks no one’s looking, well … all I’m saying is, if he touches you or anything, you don’t have to stand for it. Take him to an industrial tribunal. He’d cough up thousands to keep his name out of the papers.’
‘He’s not like that. Really.’
‘Oh well, don’t say I didn’t tip you off. All set for tomorrow, then?’ Amber had allocated enough time to trashing Gray, and was ready to return to her favourite topic. ‘You’re sure Nigel will be there?’
Joanna didn’t want to mention the conversation she’d had with him. Best keep her cards close to her chest. ‘According to Dad, he will.’
A disingenuous answer, but plausible. Nigel’s father and Joanna’s were old mates. They’d played in the same football team for years, and after age took its toll and they were no longer able to run or tackle, they’d stood in the cold and rain, cheering Nigel on. The Whiteleys lived five minutes away from the Footits, and the two families were always in and out of each other’s houses. After Linda Whiteley lost her long battle with breast cancer, Mum took pity on Ted and his boy, and they often came round for meals or a trip to the chippie. Both Joanna and Nigel were only children, and for years she’d acted like his older sister, though barely twelve months separated them. When he didn’t make the grade as a footballer, and was forced to take a job in Malcolm Whiteley’s company, it hit him hard. Working for his uncle, he’d said in a rare moment of self-revelation, felt like a punishment for failure. She’d become a shoulder to cry on. And eventually, something more.
Amber fiddled with a beer mat. ‘I was afraid my dad wouldn’t let Nigel come.’
‘Why? It’s Nigel’s dad he fell out with, not Nigel.’
‘He’s a pig-headed old bugger. I keep saying he ought to let bygones be bygones and make it up with Uncle Ted before it’s too late. But he’s not going to blink, those were his very words. I said it’s not about blinking, it’s about common humanity, but he simply won’t listen.’
‘You never told me what Ted did to make him so angry.’
Amber gave her a meaningful look. ‘It’s all to do with Mum.’
‘You don’t mean he and she …?’ Joanna was agog with shock and excitement.
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ Amber’s teeth flashed. ‘There was nothing in it. Far as I know, anyway. Uncle Ted was just flirting, and she probably gave him too much encouragement. Dad went apeshit. He can’t bear anyone so much as giving her a second glance.’
‘Must be hard for your mum. It’s not her fault she’s so lovely.’
Joanna wondered what it felt like, to look so good that you drove a rich man wild with jealousy. Lysette Whiteley was the most gorgeous older woman she knew. Not that she knew her very well, but whenever their paths crossed, she seemed pleasant and kind, never more so than after the accident. Every time they met, she asked how Joanna was getting on, and sympathised about how awful the car crash must have been. Very ladylike, Amber’s mum, no airs and graces. Yet to hear Amber after they’d had a row, you’d think her mother was a cross between Margaret Thatcher and the bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction.
Anyway, the barbecue was guaranteed to be fantastic. Amber’s Mum and Dad would be on their best behaviour, and so would Gray. She knew from the invoices that Malcolm Whiteley was Elstone and Company’s most valuable client, and she didn’t mind Gray offering the services of his secretary (correction, PA – he’d written the new job title into her contract after her last pay rise) as an extra pair of hands. Robbie Dean would be there too, unfortunately, but she’d put behind her the way he’d behaved at Seascale that night. All she cared about was spending the afternoon with Nigel.
‘You two had a
row?’ Amber demanded as she tipped her breakfast things into the dishwasher. ‘I mean, you’ve not spoken a word to each other all morning.’
‘All morning?’ Her father strove for jollity, but the shadows under his eyes told a different story. Despite the time he’d spent in the sun this summer, his skin looked sallow. No wonder his doctor was worried. She hoped he wasn’t going to have a coronary or something, and leave her on her own with Lysette. ‘Give us a chance, it’s barely nine o’clock.’
‘I’m the lawyer, better leave the quibbles to me.’ She wasn’t a lawyer, of course, but the plan was for her to study law at York or Leeds. This was her father’s idea; he liked to say he’d never known a solicitor to starve. Mum’s idea of humour was to trot out the line that Amber was ideally suited to becoming a lawyer, given how much she loved an argument.
‘Nothing to fret about.’ Malcolm patted her head, as if she were still nine years old. Anyone else, and she’d have smacked his face. ‘We’re suffering a bout of pre-barbecue stress, that’s all. Big day for us, princess. Lots of important guests, we need to make sure they all have a great time.’
He’d coated himself with after shave, but up close, the stench of last night’s booze was unmistakable. Lately, he’d been drinking too much, and on his own too.
‘Even those scumbags who bought your company?’
‘Even them. Don’t forget, they paid through the nose for the privilege.’
The breakfast kitchen stretched from the front of the house to the back. French windows gave on to a paved area, and the pink, cream, and yellow blooms of the rose garden. A large, fiercely trimmed lawn sloped down toward the summer house, and a low hedge surrounding the lily pond. Robbie Dean stood on the grass, putting up a green canvas gazebo.
Deano was stripped to waist, muscles rippling. He spotted her, and raised a hand. Was that a smirk on his face? Yes, she was still in her pyjamas. Deano fancied her, she felt sure, but he wasn’t her type. She turned away to face her father.
‘Weren’t they threatening to take you to cleaners?’
Her father bit into the last piece of toast. ‘No fear. Gray is on top of the situation. Worst case scenario, we botched the small print of the deal. A breach of the warranties and indemnities, just a technicality. Nothing to lose sleep over.’
Amber didn’t have a clue what warranties and indemnities were, but she was certain he was fibbing. She’d persuaded Joanna to indulge in some industrial espionage, borrowing a key without Gray’s permission, and sneaking the confidential takeover file out of a locked filing cabinet. Jo reported that Gray had consulted some pricey barrister in London whose advice was stuffed with dire warnings about fraud and tax penalties. Whatever this meant, now wasn’t the moment to make an issue of it. If the new company chairman, that slimy greaseball Morkel, so much as touched her arm, she’d scream the place down, and insist on her father calling the police. Serve the scumbag right. In her mind, she pictured Nigel rushing to comfort her.
‘What are you wearing this afternoon?’ her mother asked.
‘In this weather?’ A sweet smile. ‘I thought the crop top and those shorts I bought in Aruba.’
Her mother winced, but kept her mouth shut. Amber had made a bet with herself that she would be spared the stop-dressing-like-a-hooker lecture. Neither of her parents could afford to waste energy on an argument, with so much still to do. Especially when they were so keen, so pathetically keen, to pretend they were the perfect family.
How come no one saw through the bullshit? For no one did, not even Jo. Since selling the business, Dad had reinvented himself as a member of the idle rich, spoilt for choice between playing golf and quaffing champagne, with the lovely Lysette as his adoring soulmate, a devoted wife and doting mother. Depressing to think people were so gullible. Everyone except her. And Nigel, of course.
‘You’re looking very … um … summery this morning, Joanna.’
Gray Elstone held open the door of his Honda Legend with an old-fashioned courtesy Joanna rather liked. His compliment was awkward, but so was Gray. Six feet three, hopelessly uncoordinated and possessing an Adam’s apple with a mind of its own.
His clumsiness and shambling gait matched his ham-fisted way with words. A numbers man, he found comfort in balance sheets and profit and loss accounts. Whenever conversation veered toward stuff that normal people talked about, like pop music and fashion, he became twitchy and inept, and started chewing his mangled fingernails. Joanna arranged herself carefully on the passenger seat, making sure she wasn’t showing too much leg. Gray needed to keep his eye on the road. To be involved in another accident would be too much for her to bear.
‘Thanks, Mr Elstone. Lovely morning for it.’
‘Gray, please.’ He wagged his finger playfully, to the bemusement of a woman crossing the road in front of them. ‘Now, now, what have I told you?’
‘Sorry, Gray.’ She bestowed a brilliant smile on him, and tightened the seat belt. ‘So we’re heading for the cash and carry first?’
‘That’s right.’ They moved out into the line of traffic waiting for the lights to change. ‘Save our host and hostess a job, eh?’
Malcolm Whiteley had delegated the food shopping to them. Amber found it hilarious that Gray tolerated acting as his client’s dogsbody. Anybody else would be embarrassed, she said, especially when her Dad was semi-retired, and Gray worked at full pelt. Joanna didn’t see it the same way. Malcolm’s fees had paid for this big brute of a car, and for a chunk of Gray’s new detached house. When your key client asked you to jump, the only question you asked was, ‘How high?’
Although the takeover was done and dusted, Malcolm remained a key client. He still rang up every five minutes. The potential litigation with the new owners of the company was causing both men a lot of grief. The difference was, Gray charged handsomely for the time he spent dealing with it. Things weren’t as one-sided as Amber imagined. Malcolm had made Gray rich. In return for financial security, bending the knee to the guy who held the purse strings was a small price to pay.
‘Deano looks as though he’s working up a thirst. I’d better ask him if he wants a coffee. Or something.’
Lysette had moved to the window, her gaze lingering on Robbie Dean’s bare chest. An act of deliberate provocation. Malcolm couldn’t detect any clue that she was in the mood to kiss and make up. Had she spent the night working out how to hit back at him, and opted for a campaign of taunts and humiliation?
Fists clenched behind his back, he said, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’
Surely Deano would never make a move on Lysette? Since the death of that girl he’d been seeing, he didn’t seem to have anyone special, but Lysette was way out of his league. Lately, she’d pretended to take an interest in him, but this was a blind, Malcolm would stake his life on it. The more he mulled things over, the more certain he was that Lysette was diverting attention away from the man she was really screwing. Scott Durham, it had to be. She liked to think of herself as artistic. Creative, a free spirit. Load of bollocks.
Malcolm marvelled at his own self-control. He could feel – actually feel, without so much as looking in a mirror – a vein throbbing at the side of his head. In the face of endless provocation, it was a miracle he kept so calm. How many other men had to cope with this amount of shit?
Lysette had spent the night in the spare room, and he’d collapsed on to the bed before he had time to undress. Lysette would have called it a drunken stupor. She could be bitchy when she was in a bad mood.
Amber padded upstairs to put some clothes on. About time too, though she didn’t intend to wear that many clothes by the sound of it. Lysette kept shooting herself in the foot, making a fuss about Amber’s tarty dress sense. Kids liked to shock their parents, and Amber was addicted to making them squirm. Hence the piercings on nose and lip. What had happened to the little girl who used to sit on his knee, and tell him how much she loved him?
Where had it all gone wrong? All those years spent slogging his guts out, working
round the clock, building his firm to secure their future. It wasn’t easy money, hiring out skips. After expanding into waste management, he’d taken plenty of shortcuts to make sure work kept coming through the door. Kill or be killed, that was the choice when you worked in waste.
Lysette poured coffee into a decorated gardener’s mug, adding heaped spoonfuls of sugar. Neither of them uttered a word. She opened the glazed door and strode out on to the patio.
‘Here, get this inside you!’ She held aloft a mug emblazoned with the legend Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Shed.
Sweetness and light. If only people knew. Shit, was that a tremor in his hands? Not the effects of the booze, he was certain, just one more symptom of the stress he was battling. Better steady his nerves. A quick swig of whisky was all he needed, while his wife – his wife! – was outside, flirting with Deano. A bloke with a young woman’s death on his conscience, for God’s sake.
The loaded trolley had a mind of its own. As Gray Elstone wheeled his shopping outside, he almost collided with two people coming in to the cash and carry, a man and a young boy who skipped out of his way at the last moment, nimble as dancers.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ Gray gasped. ‘Oh, it’s you, Scott.’
Of course. Joanna recognised the man now. A client of Gray’s with no idea about finance, one of those hapless sole traders who dumped a barrow-load of receipts and scribbled apologies for records at the office a week before the deadline for filing his tax return, and expected his accountant to wave a magic wand, and turn the mess into something coherent and credible that wouldn’t tempt the Revenue into launching an investigation. Unlike the second hand car dealers and window cleaners Gray acted for, at least Scott Durham could plead artistic temperament as an excuse. He made a living flogging watercolours, tourist fodder with innumerable different perspectives on Wastwater and Windermere.
The Dungeon House (Lake District Mysteries) Page 2