Terry indicated one last question. “I’m using Cintel for a job in Warsaw. Their man there is called Malinowski do you know him? Is he all right?”
If Fergal was curious about Terry’s interest in Poland he gave no sign. “In my day Malinowski was a freelance,” he said. “Mixed Cintel work with journalism. But solid, I’d say. Yes, solid.”
After he had gone, Terry went and stood at the window that overlooked the Liffey, his habitual retreat in times of crisis or distraction. The sky was dark with unshed rain, the water had taken on a benign silvery sheen, and on O’Connell Bridge two garishly painted tourist coaches were caught in the traffic. His eye strayed to the south bank and the top storey of The Kavanagh. Built from the shell of a former bank headquarters appropriately the bank he himself used the project had consumed his life for over two years. He had been obsessed by the determination to get it finished on schedule. In the event it had opened only two weeks late, which was no mean achievement in boom-time Dublin. But already the struggle seemed remote, the obsession curious and the duty he now owed the place oppressive, like a marriage after the passion has died.
Restlessly he went back to his desk and scooped up the Cintel report. He went through it once again, but found nothing he hadn’t gleaned at the first two readings. Ben Galitza had been involved in protracted negotiations to buy some generators but the deal had collapsed for no apparent reason. One of the leading Warsaw-based speculators claimed to have been cheated over the lost deal but, coincidentally or not, he was locked in a power struggle with a rival for control of two vodka distilleries. Was this struggle connected? Who had ownership of the generators, or actively controlled them? Were they still for sale, or had they gone to another buyer?
Terry drafted a fax to Malinowski. He began with three questions:
Where are the generators? If they’ve been sold, who bought them? If not sold, why were they withdrawn from sale? He knew there was something else he should ask but uncharacteristically it took him some minutes before he pinned it down and added a fourth question. Has Galitza got involved in some other deal? And still he wasn’t ready to hand it to Bridget for transmission. There was something more, something obvious, which hovered stubbornly out of reach. He nursed several ideas and rejected them before it finally came to him. He grunted with satisfaction. He extended the last question to: Has Galitza got involved in some other totally separate deal? Or has he done a secret back-door deal for the generators?
For lunch he stayed at his desk and had a chicken salad with oil-free dressing and a glass of mineral water: part of a new regime to smarten up his waistline and his life. To the same end, he phoned Dinah and apologised for not having been in touch. She was sweet and understanding as ever; from her tone he might have dropped out of her life for two days rather than two weeks. He felt humbled by her seemingly endless capacity for forgiveness, and perhaps rather daunted by it too, though he quickly rejected this thought as negative and unworthy. No, he was lucky to have her, and it was high time he realised it. She would be good for him, he was mad not to grab her while he still had the chance. Feeling a little happier at this thought, he invited her down to Morne for Saturday evening with the understanding that she would stay on until Sunday night.
In the afternoon he chaired two meetings whose proceedings he first hurried along mercilessly then virtually ignored, so that no one was certain that the decisions he’d forced through with such despatch would survive the week.
It was a Thursday and, though Terry had decided to take a long weekend starting at four, he was till in his office at ten past, journeying back and forth through Fergal’s report in his mind, one minute tormented by the possibility that he had missed something, the next racked by the possibility that he had not.
Finally he snatched up the phone and called Bridget in. “Three years ago when I had dealings with Ben Galitza he had a girlfriend called Rebecca Child,” he told her. “We all went to the Curragh together.”
“I remember. It was the Derby,” Bridget confirmed.
“I need to speak to her. Can we find her number?”
“Do we have an address?”
“London, I would think.”
Bridget pursed her mouth. She liked a challenge but only when she thought she could pull it off.
Terry said, “I think she married.”
Bridget lifted one eyebrow. “Well, that narrows the field.” “There might be something in a British newspaper. If I remember, she married into a prominent Jewish family.”
Terry took the slow road to Morne because the main road would be busy and he liked the idea of driving Maeve in a leisurely fashion, with the radio on and Conn’s broad head blocking the rear-view mirror, just like a regular family. The rain that had been threatening all day finally came on at six but obligingly fell all at once, so that by the time they were entering the Slaney valley the clouds were evaporating fast and shafts of golden light were brushing the slopes of the Wicklow Mountains.
Maeve sat quietly for most of the journey, only stirring to change the radio station or take her homeopathic hay fever remedy and blow her nose, but as they approached Morne he noticed that her hands were clenched against her legs and she seemed to be holding her breath. “Dadda?” she whispered as he glanced across at her. Have you thought about.. .”
But her soft words were lost under the music. Hastily he reached forward to turn the radio off. “Say again, my darling.”
She hesitated, as though she had suddenly thought better of the idea, and he laid an encouraging hand over hers. “Have I thought.. .?” he prompted.
She took a deep breath. “Have you thought about .. . who might have done this thing to Catherine?”
Now what in heaven is all this about? he wondered. What on this earth is going through her head? Deliberately choosing to take the question at face value, he said, “It’ll be a habitual thief. Young, probably on drugs, undoubtedly from a deprived background. In fact, your average criminal.”
“You don’t think ... it was someone who was trying to harm her?”
“What? You mean, intentionally?” He swept this idea aside with a sharp exclamation. “No, I don’t! No! Goodness! Why would anyone want to do that?”
“Or Ben?”
“What do you mean EenT
“Setting out to harm Ben but ending up hurting Catherine instead.”
“No, my darling! There’s nothing to give an inkling of a thing like that. Goodness!” His laughter sounded unnatural. “No, it was this fella barging his way out, that’s all! In a panic at being discovered. A thief who found someone in his way!”
Maeve was frowning.
“No,” he hastened to reassure her again, ‘it was a truly terrible thing to happen, of course it was! But it was an accident, my darling girl. Just an accident. Now, don’t go thinking anything else. Don’t go worrying yourself.”
She looked down at her lap, she flexed her hands. He sensed some deep reservation.
“There’s no doubt about it, my darling. Cross my heart.”
Her eyes came up to his face.
He declared again, with a false laugh, “Cross my heart!”
He was aware of her watching him for some time before she nodded, just the once, very slowly.
He cried brightly, “Now, look we’re almost here!” They were entering the lane that twisted up through pastureland and tall hedgerows towards the groves of oak and beech that concealed Morne from the east. “Just look at this summer! Just look at the trees! Have you ever seen them so heavy and so green!” He laughed with a joy that was only a little forced. “I do so love this place! I do so love it here!”
“I loved Creagh,” Meave said in the voice of a child. “Why didn’t we stay at Creagh? Mamma had made it so fine.”
He kept a judicious silence. Creagh was the small house in an unprepossessing Dublin suburb that he and his late wife had bought in the first years of his success and subsequently built on to a couple of times with less than satisfactory results,
before giving up on the place and moving to Foxrock. If Maeve felt a sense of loss he felt sure it was not for the house itself but for her mamma, who had died of a thrombosis when Maeve was thirteen, and for the difficult motherless years of her adolescence.
“Creagh was a good house,” he said at last. “It did us well, no doubt about that. But you just wait until Morne’s finished. Wait until the garden’s planted and the decorating’s done. It will be the finest place you ever saw.”
“Oh, Dadda,” she said with a weary shake of her head, ‘but you’ll never finish it, will you?”
This accusation took him aback. “Good heavens, of course I will!”
“You’ve hardly started as it is.”
“The roof is insulated. And the windows all repaired.”
Maeve continued to shake her head. “You’ll never finish.”
He was still smarting at this curious and unwarranted remark when they turned in through the latticed iron gates of Morne.
With the demise of the rhododendrons the narrow winding drive had lost much of its capacity to tantalise and enthral; the house was now clearly visible over the inglorious tangle of roots and stumps. Yet, for Terry, it remained a stirring sight. Architecturally the house was nothing exceptional, indeed many would judge it excessively plain compared to the other landed houses in the neighbourhood. It was a two-storey oblong, two windows either side of the front door and five above, with a grey pebble-dash exterior and grey slate rdof, and at the back, a small wing, two-up two-down, while across a cobbled courtyard were a number of dark outhouses and stabling for four horses. For Terry, the excessive simplicity of the frontage was redeemed by the long sash windows that reached almost to the ground, and the pillared portico that guarded the glass-panelled door, and the flowering creepers that adorned the grey facade, the whole given life and grandeur by the frame of splendid trees, yew and cedar to the left, oak and beech to the right. The house had four bedrooms, including one in the wing, and two ancient bathrooms with large-bore plumbing that rattled and sang, and a kitchen that had been poorly modernised in the sixties. It was a modest house for a rich man, but grand enough for him.
Would he ever finish doing it up? Did he want to? Had Maeve touched on some unexpected truth? Standing in front of the house, he surveyed the unkempt garden, the nettles footing the courtyard wall, the brambles fanning out from behind the outhouses, the weeds peeping through the gravel on the drive, and tried to picture the place as it would be once he’d got to grips with it, and though he couldn’t quite visualise the flowers and shrubs that might come to be planted, he had no trouble in seeing the garden as an ordered place with neat beds and clipped hedges and smooth grass. It would happen in good time, once there was a plan.
“We’ll see!” he said to the garden in general. “We’ll see what Mrs.
Kent says!”
Inside, the house had a musty unused smell, and he was the first to admit that the paintwork was shabby, the walls peeling in odd corners, and one of the kitchen units was losing its door. But he’d held back on repainting, just as he’d held back on the curtains and carpets, until he’d decided how to tackle the house as a whole. This was reasonable surely? This didn’t imply a lack of will? The Langleys had left nothing behind, not a curtain, not a scrap of carpet, not a working light bulb. Having to start from scratch in this way it would have been easy to employ someone like Dinah, to give the place a ‘look’, but while he wasn’t bothered by the tar ting and titivating being visited on the Dublin house in the name of interior design, he baulked at the thought of imposing such ideas here, where such luxury and artificiality would be an affront. He wanted everything in the house to look natural and the word came to him timeless, and when he saw a way to achieve this, it would be done. If that was a sorry motive, he was guilty as charged.
So for the moment rugs covered odd sections of the floor boards, while the windows relied on shutters or cheap curtains. For furniture he’d bought a few antiques through a dealer employed on one of his hotels, he’d picked up an old pine table and chairs for the dining room from a shop in Cheltenham, and had chosen two new sofas and easy chairs to stand in the long living room which ran the depth of the house. The sofas and chairs weren’t right, he knew that. For one thing, they looked too modern; for another, they all matched, something you never saw in old houses. But, as with everything else, he wasn’t in a mind to do anything about them quite yet.
He might have been slow with the decorations, but he was quick to maintain the fabric, and while Maeve went to the kitchen to unpack the food he made a round of the place, inspecting stone, brick, pointing, slates, gutters, paths; anything that might be in need of the odd spot of repair.
This was an old routine; it had been his job as a kid, to fix everything at Morne. It had started when he was thirteen and Lizzie, alone for much of the time with one baby and another on the way, had needed someone to clear the snow. He’d resisted going, he’d found every excuse these were Anglos after all, and Mr. Langley the worst sort but he’d needed the money and it was only the once, he’d told himself, on account of the snow. Ten years later he was still turning up almost every Saturday, even after he’d established his own building company, and started the first of his pizza restaurants.
It had been Lizzie he’d kept coming back for, of course. Her talk, her reading, her encouragement, her joy in friendship, which, he understood much later, was underscored by the strains of her marriage. It was she who’d bribed Terry to go to school, who’d cajoled him to do his homework, who’d declared him capable of conquering the world, and at some level he must have believed her because here he was, somewhere near the top of the muck heap. Why had she chosen to have faith in him? Why had she bothered? She used to say it was the challenge, but really it was the goodness of her quiet and unassuming heart.
Nowadays the study was the one room at Morne where he felt a little less like a visitor. It was a small west-facing room in the back extension, looking on to the terrace and lawn, with the avenue of yews beyond, and pasture and woodland in the distance.
Two years ago when he’d first acquired the house, he’d installed a desk, a chair and a couple of side tables in here with the idea of making it his workroom, a study in the strict sense of the word. Then, finding that he was spending much of his time here, he’d had the chimney reopened and added armchairs on either side of the fireplace. In no time a television and books had followed and, though the room was cramped and the desk squeezed into one corner, it was at least a cosy space that he could call his own.
Now he opened a window to let in the evening air and poured himself a stiff Jameson’s while he picked up the messages that Bridget had left on his answering service. Her voice hummed with satisfaction when she announced that she had found a phone number for Rebecca Child, whose married name was Wiseman.
Terry settled himself at his desk and took several more sips of whiskey before dialling the number in London.
It rang for some time before an answering machine picked up with an announcement delivered by a cool female voice that he did not immediately recognise as Rebecca’s. He was just about to put the phone down with the idea of calling later when the tape was interrupted by a sharp “Hello?”
“Is this Rebecca Wiseman?”
“It is.”
“This is Terry Devlin.”
“Well, well!” she laughed. “Hello, Mr. Terry Devlin. Where are you Ireland?”
“I am.”
“Pity! Otherwise I’d say let’s meet for a drink!” The merriment in her voice, the slight blur to her words, made him suspect that she had started the party without him. “Now how are you, Terry?”
“I’m not complaining. And how are you, Rebecca?”
“Ahh.” The sound drew out into a lingering lament. “Married on the rebound, repenting in the lawyer’s office. I’m getting a divorce.”
He tried to think how long it had been since she married. Two years?
“I’m really sorry to hear
that.”
“I told myself I was doing the sensible thing, Terry, getting married. I told myself we had everything in common. Background, religion, interests. There was only one problem.”
“You didn’t love him?”
“No passion either. And at the end of the day, there’s got to be love or passion. If you don’t fancy someone, you can’t pretend. At least I can’t.”
“No sticking it out?”
“I wish. But we can’t all be good Catholics, Terry, not like you lot. For me, it’s a case of one life, one chance. I want another shot at it. All or nothing.”
“Well... I wish you the best of luck.”
“Not free yourself?” There was a raunchy note to her voice.
He laughed. “More trouble than I’m worth.”
“It was Ben,” she said in a voice suddenly drained of humour. “If he hadn’t dumped me quite so massively ... I wanted to show him, you know? I wanted him to realise I could find someone else, snap of the fingers, no problem at all. Oh She pulled up short. “You’ve heard about his wife?”
“I’ve heard.”
“Terrible.”
“Yes.”
“I only met her the once, you know.”
“Yes.”
He needed no reminding of that day; it was emblazoned on his memory
perhaps even more vividly than on Rebecca’s. It was the day of the
Irish Derby, the day that Ben had met
Catherine for the first time, and Rebecca had lost him. And, God save his soul, it had been Terry who’d introduced them.
“In fact it was Ben I was calling about,” Terry admitted.
“Ben? Oh for God’s sake, Terry I haven’t seen him since we bust up.”
“Ah. I thought maybe .. . You’re not in touch with anyone who knows him?”
“Hardly,” she scoffed. “I made our friends choose when we split up him or me. There was no fence-sitting, not the way I felt about things. No, if I hear about Ben at all nowadays -which I try not to it’s third-hand.”
Keep Me Close Page 13