by J M Gregson
All his resentment, not just of the complacent man in front of him but of the harsh industrial climate in which good men and a good business were cast upon the rocks, came pouring out in the phrases. Keane, with the moral ground shifting fast beneath his feet, retreated into the politics of power. ‘Read the terms of our agreement. The partners have a right to a minimum of thirty thousand a year. I shall be taking mine. You can do what you damn well like. Sack another couple of men, if you need to.’
He turned upon his heel and walked without pause out of Hampson’s room, through the curious upturned faces of the outer office, out into the coolness of the car park, to the wide driver’s door of his Jaguar. This wasn’t what he had intended. He had meant to look at the books with Chris, to discuss what action they might take to improve things, to work out what might be the best working role for himself in the coming year. Confronted with the personal opposition of one man, he had lost his cool and gone over the top, as he would never have done in a party matter.
As he drove out of the car park, he saw Chris Hampson’s white, infuriated face at the window of his office.
*
Raymond Keane was glad to turn between the familiar high gateposts of the Gloucestershire house where he had grown up. As the car moved between the banks of rhododendrons, along the curving gravelled drive where coaches and horses had once driven, he felt for the first time protected from a world which had turned hostile with his partner’s outburst.
His mother’s face lit up when she saw him, as only a mother’s will. ‘You look tired. You’ve been working yourself too hard, as usual, I expect,’ she said.
He was reminded of those years long gone, when he came home from Eton to parents anxious for news of his boyish excitements in the term that had gone. After his row with Hampson, it was a real relief to relax in the totally uncritical ambience of his mother’s house.
‘This place is too big for me, you know,’ she said, repeating the thought she raised now almost every time she saw him. ‘I should move to somewhere smaller. But nowhere smaller seems to have the privacy I’m used to here.’
‘Nor the elegance, Mum,’ he grinned. He stuck to the form of address which had been fashionable years ago in his boyhood, and she loved it. We are always children to our parents, and they like anything which seems to arrest the advance of the years and confirm that notion. ‘You’ve got this place just as you want it; it would take you years to lick anything else into shape.’
‘I miss your father at this time of year. He always enjoyed playing the country squire at Christmas.’ Raymond’s father, a jovial landowner who had kept up an old tradition of London philandering, had died seven years earlier. His mother was now seventy-six, but still vigorous in mind and body. ‘It’s a pity you can’t be home for Christmas yourself.’
For the first time, he regretted that it could not be so. He felt an unexpected desire to nestle for a while in this cosy, predictable world, where his status was assured and his privacy would be respected. He had told his mother months ago that he would be spending Christmas with Zoe: he had promised Zoe that they would spend Christmas in the cottage together. He said, ‘It is a pity, yes, Mum. But I’m staying here tonight, so we’ll have a full day just to ourselves. And we shall be here on New Year’s Day, you know.’
‘Yes. I shall look forward to seeing Zoe again,’ said his mother briskly. She was far too proud of her independence to indulge in any outburst of self-pity or recrimination. ‘I expect I shall enjoy my Christmas with Katherine and the children, anyway.’
Raymond grinned. His mother must be the only person left alive who did not call his elder sister Kate. ‘Of course you will, Mum. We both know how much.’ The unruliness of her four grandchildren was a secret between mother and son, the source of much rueful laughter and a string of awful stories.
It united them in easy, humorous reminiscence. By the time they had finished the roast beef she had prepared for him, they had agreed that with the help of the daily cleaner and the twice-weekly gardener, she could manage in the old house for the foreseeable future.
He rang Zoe that evening, but she was not at home. When he rang a second time at ten o’clock, there was still no reply. He left a message on the answerphone. ‘I expect you’ve had to work late. I’ll be at the cottage on Christmas Eve as we arranged. I should be there by five at the latest—probably rather earlier than that. Looking forward to seeing you then. All my love.’ He had grown used to these machines by now, but they were still impersonal. He wished he could have spoken to Zoe; he pictured her, cool, efficient and infinitely desirable in her ward sister’s uniform.
Beside the phone in her flat, a grim-faced Zoe played his message back twice, then erased the tape. Then she left her half-empty cup of tea on the sink and went and poured herself a stiff whisky. It was dangerous, drinking alone, they said, and she had seen the results often enough. She did not drink much at any time, and never alone. But she had never had to plan anything like this before.
*
In the damp darkness beside Raymond Keane’s empty cottage, Joe Walsh decided that the owner was not coming tonight, and stole softly away. It did not really matter; he had only come out here on the off chance. And the man would be down here for Christmas, whatever happened: he was sure of that. There was no need to hurry.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The weather was turning cold at last. It had been unseasonably mild for several days, but now the wind was from the east, light but chilling: straight from Siberia, the weathermen said. Children waiting impatiently for Christmas were put into scarves and balaclavas; the bookies had shortened their odds against snow on the twenty-fifth.
On Christmas Eve, Raymond Keane drove the forty miles from his mother’s large house to his isolated cottage. It was a dry cold: there was no danger of ice on the roads yet. But he drove slowly, enjoying the freedom of having no formal schedule. For a man used to the straitjacket of a strict timetable, it was a holiday in itself to be able to leave when he fancied and arrive at whatever time was congenial. He was almost glad now that he had not arranged any definite time to meet Zoe at the cottage, though her failure to respond to his calls still puzzled him.
The last leaves had fallen from the forest trees as he drove through the southern Cotswolds. The green of the fields was a muted, winter green; tomorrow they would be white. Although the occasional beech hedge still lined the lanes with russet, the colour in this December landscape was mostly that introduced by man, and confined to the gardens around the villages.
The pyracanthas and cotoneasters were still well berried against the mellow buff stone of the older houses. But the brightest berries of all were on the holly; he had never seen such an abundant crop, reminding him of the festival at hand. A quiet Christmas in a Cotswold cottage: it was almost an English cliché, as one of his colleagues from an urban northern constituency had reminded him when he mentioned his plans for the recess.
He realized as he skirted Gloucester that his chosen route would take him past the end of the road where Moira Yates lived with her watchful brother. Almost before he knew he had done it, he took the alternative road, a slightly longer route which avoided the outlying suburb where Yates lived. He had concluded that particular chapter in his life: there was no way he was going to risk opening its pages again.
Keane smiled a little at his own superstition in avoiding the area. But there was a logic to it, after all. There was no chance that a woman with agoraphobia would be abroad, but it was just feasible that he might have seen that protective brother, or that faithful spaniel of a lover who sat so abjectly at Moira’s feet. There was no sense in inviting the possibility of such embarrassment. That Sunday-afternoon visit to the house had been quite enough mortification for him.
The wind had dropped when he got out of the warm car beside the cottage. The long, low bulk of the thatched building loomed above him, a darker shape against the blue-black of the sky behind it. No light within it; Zoe was not here yet, then. He pa
used for a moment before he went inside, savouring the absolute silence of the country night after the incessant hum of life in London. The stars he could see above the treeline were brilliant as new-cut diamonds against the heavens; there was no moon as yet. It was already freezing; there would be ice on the puddles before the night was out.
He switched on the lights in the lounge and the kitchen, turned on the water at the stopcock under the sink, set the boiler throbbing, listened for a moment to the pump forcing the water round the radiators. The sounds of the house coming alive were curiously comforting to him. It would be warm by the time Zoe arrived. For a moment he indulged himself with images of the bedroom. The duvet would have its own attractions in this weather. And tomorrow, Christmas Day, he would light a fire, and sit with her in the comfort of the warm house, watching the flames which had been so necessary to the former owners of this quiet place, which were to modern man no more than an added luxury, a novelty in a world of domestic comfort.
He plugged in the television set in the corner of the long beamed lounge: checking the news was an occupational tic for a politician. There was little of it. Snow in the Scottish glens; colder weather moving rapidly south. The roads were already packed with people journeying home for the Christmas break. A girl had gone missing after hitching a lift on the M4 three days previously. The police thought there was ‘serious cause for concern’. Raymond smiled grimly: that was public-speak for, ‘We think she may well be dead.’ Otherwise, there was no news; the pictures of the snow might have been taken from the Decembers of other years.
When he had had a drink, he’d bring in his holdall from the car, and put Zoe’s present, which the shop had wrapped so carefully for him, in the corner where the tree was to go. He must get the tree out from the garage, and string the lights upon it; women liked the trimmings of Christmas.
It would take the thick old walls of the cottage some hours to warm up. Raymond, sitting on the sofa in his car coat, still felt the cold of the room around him. Somewhere in the house, there was a small but efficient fan heater. It had been put away when it was not required during the summer. At first he could not remember where: it was curious how it took you time to adjust to the geography of a second home, even when all the furnishings around you were familiar. He remembered, once he mustered his concentration. The heater was beside his desk in the small study along the hall.
As he rose to retrieve it, every light in the house went off.
A fuse. Perhaps something to do with the lights being put on all together and suddenly after a period of disuse, he surmised vaguely. Well, he knew where the fuse-box was. In the old walk-in pantry off the kitchen, where it had been sited when he had the house rewired. There were candles there, too, and a torch, if he remembered right. Power cuts were not the rarity in Gloucestershire that they were in London; they usually had two or three during the winter. So be prepared, as he had learned long ago in the boy scouts.
He fumbled his way to the door, his fingers clawing his way along the uneven plaster between the ancient oak framing. It was curious how monstrously bulbous it felt, when you were proceeding totally by feel. It took him quite a long time to find his way along the hall he had thought so familiar to the door of the kitchen. The pump seemed to have gone off too, for there was no sound now of circulating water. But the pilot light gave him a tiny illumination; with eyes beginning to adjust now to the darkness, he could pick out the white doors of fridge and oven as his landmarks. He found the dark wooden door of the pantry quite quickly, fumbled open the old wooden catch on its door, and pushed it inwards.
He was reaching up to the mains switch when the cord tightened around his neck. He had both hands clawing at it in less than a second, but he still had no chance to utter the cry which rose into his throat. The sound died there, as the thin cord cut into his flesh and the wood at its ends twisted and twisted behind his neck.
Raymond Keane died quickly, his hands flailing for a moment towards the invisible ceiling of the pantry, his assailant twisting the awful pressure about his neck ever tighter as he sank to his knees, feeling his own weight hastening him into oblivion. He was conscious of a brief wonderment that this should be happening to him, of a blinding, explosive light in his head.
Then he slumped dead upon the stone floor of the small room. His assailant breathed heavily for a moment, checked that there was no movement in the pulse in the neck. Then the hand which had lately dropped the cord upon the unsuspecting throat reached up unhurriedly to the mains switch it had switched off less than two minutes earlier.
CHAPTER NINE
Christmas night in the Cotswolds. Behind the closed doors of family celebrations, there is merrymaking of different sorts.
Detective Sergeant Bert Hook has put away his Open University books for the day. The boys have got bicycles for Christmas, but it is dark now, and Eleanor can rest, for the bikes are back in the garage and their riders safely back at the family hearth. The boys are watching an ancient Morecambe and Wise show replayed on television as their last treat of the day. Once they are gone, Bert will open the port he so thoughtfully purchased for his wife.
*
Ten miles away in his unusually boisterous bungalow, Superintendent John Lambert, who set out several hours ago to play the jolly grandfather, has long since forgotten that this is all an act. He is reading the same chapter of Winnie the Pooh for the third time to a six-year-old boy, who falls asleep before it is over. Lambert’s daughter Jacky watches her father with affection whilst she chats with her mother, diverting her concern for a whole hour from the second breast-cancer scan which has shadowed Christine Lambert’s Christmas.
*
By nine o’clock, small children throughout the country are either asleep or getting fractious. But in the childless house of Dermot Yates, it has been a strange day. Various relatives have visited, but most have stayed only for short periods, as if they were visiting someone in hospital. And that is not an inappropriate comparison, for Moira Yates has for most of the day had an abstracted air, carrying on surface conversations perfectly sensibly, yet giving the impression that her mind is elsewhere, in some secret world which only she can visit. It is behaviour common to many people with her ailment, says the doctor. By the middle of the afternoon, she is looking very tired, and retires to her room to rest for an hour.
*
They ate at six, as planned. Dermot cooked the turkey and set the table for Christmas dinner for three; for Gerald Sangster sat down to the meal with them, as Moira had requested he should. Wine was drunk and crackers pulled; the chef was complimented; the three made routine, harmless jokes; in short, they pretended hard that this was a normal Christmas.
Dermot found himself wishing that someone would drink too much, become noisy, even rude. Anything to break the mould of good behaviour. It was all so decorous that it was false. He felt that all of them knew that, but none of them knew how to fracture the spell. Or rather, the one person who could have changed things chose not to. Moira, the one of whom they were both so careful, from whom they took their cues, was the only one of the trio who might have changed this strange atmosphere. If she realized that she had that power, she must have chosen not to use it.
*
Chris Hampson, at home with his wife and grown-up children, hugged the troubles of Gloucester Electronics to himself and tried hard to be seasonably jolly. At ten o’clock, the children drove away to their own homes, and he found himself suddenly very tired. He plodded steadily through the day’s mountain of washing up, the steady physical labour an escape from the things he did not want to discuss with his wife. She was tired but happy after the labours of the day; she did not seem to notice his preoccupation. Returning carefully correct replies to her talk about the small triumphs of her table, the small problems of their children, he felt like an expert, defensive, table-tennis player.
*
Only Joe Walsh had spent the day alone. Or almost alone. The retriever, who had crept in from the boisterous
house next door to the quiet he knew he would find here, put a sleepy head obstinately on his knee as the hands of the clock crept towards the end of what for Joe was the longest day of all. The brown eyes looked up into the gaunt face, the tail wagged brief appreciation as the hand moved almost reluctantly to caress the soft fur of the tawny head. Joe stared unseeingly at the television set which had droned for hours at the other side of the room. ‘Good lad, Chester!’ he said softly to the dog.
It was a relief to him to find he could still give affection when it was asked for. But dogs made no demand for words or effort. Presently he opened the door and said reluctantly, ‘Better go home now, Chester.’ He watched from his back door as the animal loped away over the white frost of his neglected rear garden and slipped through the hole it had fashioned in his hedge.
*
Raymond Keane’s mother enjoyed the evening, once her boisterous grandchildren were out of the way. It was half past eleven before she said to her daughter, ‘That Raymond has forgotten to ring us, you know. And he promised!’
‘Give him a ring yourself, Mum, if you like. And wish him a Happy Christmas from us.’ Kate grinned secretly at her husband as the old lady went to the phone. If Kate knew her brother, he would be in bed with the delectable Zoe by now. But not asleep. Well, serve him right for not ringing his mum on Christmas Day if he was interrupted in flagrante delicto.
Old Mrs Keane let the phone ring in the cottage a dozen times before she gave up, her face filled with disappointment. ‘I expect they’re out with friends,’ she said. ‘He might not have been able to ring.’
*
By two a.m. on Boxing Day, the vast majority of Christmas revellers were sleeping heavily in their beds. The temperature outside their houses was now well below freezing, and still dropping steadily. The Cotswold ground was frozen hard, the frost thick as a dusting of snow at the sides of the deserted lanes.