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Say You Never Met Me

Page 17

by Martin Yallop


  The hotel was posher and more expensive than George would have chosen had he been alone. He wished he could remember the reason for splashing out. His middle class, Home Counties upbringing had made him suspicious of extravagance but Susan had no such misgivings and had immediately made herself at home, borrowing the beauty gadgets he had forbidden her to pack from the hotel. With hindsight, he should have organised a car, too. The well-to-do holiday villas on the quiet roads of Le Touquet were set far apart and mostly deep in the scattered pine trees so distances were deceptive. It took nearly an hour to do a wide circuit so Susan could indulge her baffling but constant desire to look at other people’s properties. The town centre was nearer and, as well as the chic boutiques serving the well-heeled Parisians and habitués of the casino, there was a sprinkling of supermarkets, tourist shops, bakeries and, of course, this being France, restaurants. The fish soup restaurant and factory had been on the left of the main route to the main beach, tucked into an intersection. It was not as difficult to find as it sounded. The rich odour of boiling fish pervaded the area and once within fifty metres on a cooking day, locating the place was easy. Susan had been reluctant to try it but George was more adventurous and won the day. And it was wonderful. The rich, salmon-pink, smooth soup was as delicious as the surly waitress had said it would be. The product was so good that the staff could afford to be taciturn with customers and the management had no difficulty at all in applying their ‘cash only: no credit cards, Cartes Bleues or cheques’ payment policy. George and Susan ate there every day during their visit and packed a heavy, two-litre jar of the delicious soup on the little plane on the way back by the simple means of giving the young pilot a jar for herself.

  Much of the rest of the weekend had been spent on the beach. Well, George admitted to himself, not exactly the main beach. Between the town and the airport was a large area of largely unvisited, sandy dunes covered with tussocks of tough grass and sprinkled with occasional, stunted bushes. Paths led here and there but often got lost in soft sand that made walking arduous. Mainly at George’s instigation, they had spent an hour every day trudging through the dunes to find a sunny spot, sheltered from any wind and, as far as possible, also from prying eyes – the early symptoms of his current paranoia as well as a need for privacy to indulge his other need for intimacy. The local boulangerie furnished baguettes and tartes while the supermarket sold fruit, ripe cheeses and champagne. George would swim while Susan sunbathed then they would picnic and drink by now, warm champagne before making love on the sand warmed by the French summer sun. It was on their last day when Susan had been more that usually passionate that George rolled to one side to find himself face to face, at a distance of a few meters with a toddler who had apparently been watching them with puzzled concentration. Each held the other’s gaze for several long seconds until the child turned and slithered down the sandy bank of the dune, dragging a broken plastic bucket behind it. Thankfully Susan had not noticed.

  “George! How the hell are you, old chap? You’re looking very well, I must say! Got a drink I see. Good for you! Been here long?”

  George abandoned his rêverie with a slight shake of his head, like a sleeper reluctantly recalled from a pleasant dream. “Oh! Hi Maurice. Sorry, I was miles away there. How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. Ah!” The exclamation marked the appearance of a waiter who George thought looked disconcertingly like René from the TV series, ‘’Allo, ‘Allo!’ “Have you ordered? No? What are you having?”

  “I thought soupe de poisson and the Saint Pierre. I feel like fish today.”

  “That’s a ‘John Dory’, isn’t it? Ugly bugger but very tasty! Good idea. I’ll have the same. Oh! Hang on. Can you share a bottle with me, George? I don’t have any appointments this afternoon but I can’t drink a whole bottle.”

  “Good idea. How about the Fleurie? And some water too, please.” The waiter scribbled again on his pad and slipped away with a René-like sniff.

  “Well, the old place hasn’t changed much, has it?”

  “You’ve only been away a couple of months. Six! Is it? Heavens, time flies, eh?”

  “Certainly does. Look, can we talk a bit of shop before we eat. There are a couple of things I want your advice on. Probably involves a divorce, too.” George summarised his relationship with Susanna, her death and Susan’s apparently hostile attitude.

  “Mmm. I see. Well, I’m not the best person to help you with the divorce, especially if it might be confrontational. It’s not my field. I’ll hand you over to one of my partners who does family law. She’s very good. You’ll like her, too. Very understanding as well as efficient. Leave it with me. What do the police think about Susanna’s accident? Have they said they think it was deliberate? Are they treating it as unlawful killing, do you know?”

  “I haven’t asked the question outright but they seemed pretty suspicious last I heard. To be honest, Maurice, I’m trying to keep a bit of a low profile, what with the Susan issue and my rather sudden departure from the bank and everything. I got mugged, too, by the way, on my first day back in London. No big deal but the police caught him a couple of days later. I had to meet the young bloke the other day so he could formally apologise to me. He was all right, actually.”

  “Well, well. Immigration law, divorce and now the criminal justice system! You sound like a man who needs a good lawyer!”

  “Not to mention the business with the bank but to be honest, I’m hoping that will just blow over and the fewer people involved, the better. Better I hadn’t mentioned it, in fact.”

  The soupe arrived as George was pouring their second glass of Fleurie and conversation stopped.

  “Nearly forgot, George,” said Maurice as their bowls were cleared. “This came for you this morning. Delivered by hand by some lad, apparently, according to our receptionist.” He rummaged in his jacket pocket and produced a small package. George slipped his thumb under the flap.

  “Aha! It’s a tape. This will be from young Lance, my mugger. I told him to let me have a demo tape of his band, partly out of curiosity and partly to encourage him. I’ll play this when I get… home.” He became quieter. “I suppose that’s Croydon for a while. You’d better have the address and telephone number, Maurice although I don’t know how long I’m going to be there.”

  It had stopped raining by the time George left the cover of the market’s vaulted, glass roof. He passed the fruit and vegetable stall on the corner and set out to walk briskly back to London Bridge, now and then zigzagging or detouring on the wide pavements to avoid coming too close to the grubby-looking pigeons with their accusatorial eyes and revoltingly deformed feet. He remembered once buying a bunch of parsley from the stall and munching a few leaves to hide the garlic on his breath after a particularly pungent lunch nearby. Back in his office, he had put the rest of the bunch in some water in a jar to keep it fresh until he could take it home – it seemed a shame to waste it. The bunch had drawn an enquiry from a management trainee a couple of hours later and George had been unable to resist the temptation to tease a brilliantly qualified but provincially naïve youngster. “Yes, yes,” he had explained. “Parsley from the parsley shop in the market. You didn’t know there was a shop selling nothing but parsley? Well, of course it sells other herbs too, but mostly parsley. Big demand for parsley in the city, you know. There’s more than enough business to keep a small stall going. Does a good trade, dozens of different varieties of parsley. You should try it.” He never found out if the trainee had tried to find the parsley shop or had asked any passer-bye for directions but now, looking back, he felt a twinge of guilt at taking advantage of someone’s gullibility.

  He was struck again by the sense that he might again have become a spectre condemned to haunt scenes of his previous existence and relive its sights, sounds and emotions. He walked straight at a pair of approaching pedestrians but they parted before him, turning to look at him over their shoulders, curious at his behaviour. Clearly he was not in
visible and now, at his most exposed, too far out on to the bridge to turn back and with nowhere to hide, he saw someone he knew striding towards him.

  “George! Hello! What on earth are you doing here? They said you’d left the country!”

  “Hello, Alice. Fancy bumping into you.” The stream of bridge-crossing walkers checked, divided and flowed around them as they stood facing each other, not sure what to do or say. “How are you keeping? I take it you’ve got another job?”

  “I certainly have. I’m a VP now with… Er… are you still in touch with the bank?”

  “No, no. I left just after the tribunal and a bit suddenly. In fact, I’d rather the bank didn’t know I’m in the UK. Congratulations on the job. I always thought you would do well.”

  “Well, thanks to you, George… no, don’t protest. If you hadn’t stood up for me and supported me at the tribunal… well, I was pretty shaken up by everything that happened… I don’t need to tell you, I know… but, well… I got out with my head up and enough cash to be able to wait for the right job. With everything that was happening, I don’t feel I ever thanked you properly and cash is so impersonal.”

  “Well, I never thought I’d hear a banker say that but yes you did, Alice. You helped me out, too. Your case was the spur I needed to change my life and I did, so thank you! And I still feel awkward about the money. It’s come in very handy but I’m still not sure if I should have accepted it.”

  “Forget it George; it was the very least I could do, and you deserved it.” The exchange was followed by several seconds of awkward silence,

  “Well, I’d better get moving but please give me a ring, George. We should have a drink or lunch or something… some sort of celebration. Here’s my card. Give me a ring, eh?”

  “Sure, sure. I’ll definitely do that. Well, nice to see you again and remember, if you bump into anyone from the bank…Well, just say you never met me.”

  “Mum’s the word, George. Don’t worry. I’m not exactly their favourite person either. Be seeing you, Bye.”

  “Bye, Alice. Take care.”

  Chapter 29

  Sitting hunched over his pint of Guinness in Terminal One at Heathrow, George idly watched the remaining passengers drifting around below him. He had not realised that the flight to Larnaca was the last of the day and that when it had left Terminal One would be handed over to its night shift of building and shop-fitting contractors. Already, the departure lounge was noticeably more sparsely populated. The shops and snack bars were mostly starting to close with tired staff sweeping floors and clearing litter. Desultory shoppers drifted in and out and the staff seemed more pleased when they left without buying anything than when they made a purchase. He noticed two tall, attractive girls stowing their personal shoppers’ uniforms in a locker disguised as an advertising pod, chatting and smiling at the prospect of going home at the end of their shift. George had wanted bitter, not Guinness, but the bar had sold out. He suspected that it was more a matter of the bar staff not wanting to leave the table around which most of them now sat and make whatever expedition was necessary to change the barrel. Evidence of the activities of the contractors’ activities was found behind the door leading to the toilets. Housed in a sort of sophisticated, Portakabin block tacked on to the departure lounge, they were reached through green doors that opened silently long before they were reached – before the passenger had even turned the corner to be visible to whatever sort of magic eye controlled them. George had been startled not to find someone else approaching from the opposite direction, someone whose approach may have triggered the doors. Perhaps whoever had made the doors open had left through one of the emergency exit doors, all clearly marked with their green, illuminated signs. There’s always a green door, and green gets you out, he told himself. It was a slightly eerie experience, like being an extra in a haunted house movie. The faux-pub was called the ‘Tap and Spile’. George thought it a particularly ugly and depressing name, a ‘spile’ being some sort of bung, he surmised. The bar was high up in the roof of the terminal building amongst the cream-painted, steel girders and trusses. It was the sort of place that pigeons and sparrows might flock, perch and flutter. George shuddered.

  He was at Heathrow because he had leapt at Helen’s suggestion that he… well, someone… had better go to Cyprus and check out that end of the operation. Over the previous week he had been unsettled by several events and felt enormous relief at the prospect of leaving the UK. His accidental meeting with Alice had been the first unsettling event. Clearly it had been accidental but, in his heightened state of anxiety and worry about the growing control of him that his anxiety was acquiring, George could not free himself from the feeling of being pursued. There had been two telephone calls from the police about the additional Euros found on Lance and George was sure that they suspected something. There was a note in the voice of the sergeant that said ‘you haven’t heard the last of this’. A visit from a Swindon detective sergeant and his companion had been even more unsettling and had added to George’s sense of foreboding. In the absence of any better leads on the hit and run driver, the police had returned to interviewing the people they could associate with the event of that day. George had had difficulty explaining why he had used the name of Hawthorne in the Hotel California but given his real name to the police in Swindon. The excuse of wanting to avoid being traced in a purely marital matter was obviously causing suspicion even though he would have had to be exceptionally lucky with traffic and then driven like the devil to have been in Swindon at the time Susanna was killed. Nevertheless, George felt that the police were coming round to the conclusion that when the impossible and the inexplicable have been eliminated, the improbable must be the truth and an improbably quick journey was the most likely explanation. All they lacked was a motive and they had probed his relationship with Susanna in an effort to find one. He was warned to expect further enquiries. The two telephone conversations with Susan had added to George’s growing sense of being hunted. At first she had been less vitriolic and appeared mollified by George’s news that he had contacted a lawyer to arrange a divorce and that he would not contest a reasonable sharing of the proceeds of the sale of their house and joint investments. Probably, George assumed, she had remembered her gaffe during their conversation immediately following Susanna’s death and had decided to take a more wary line. However, as soon as the details began to be discussed, Susan’s attitude had hardened and she clearly expected to get enough of the spoils of their marriage to live in some comfort. When George had objected, she had told George sharply that he was fortunate she was being so easy on him.

  “Easy!” George had retorted angrily. “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war!” The conversation had ended acrimoniously and the ill feeling had still been between them when George screwed up his courage to ring her again the following day and say that she had better get herself a solicitor and then they could leave any haggling to the lawyers and spare themselves from further fruitless and upsetting arguments.

  As far as he could tell, Valerie was getting over Susanna’s death or at least, was coming to terms with it. George had almost had to bully Josie to get her to bring her mother to the telephone. Apparently she didn’t think Valerie would benefit from speaking to someone who had been her daughter’s lover and possibly even the indirect cause of her premature death. George had been indignant enough to insist on speaking to Valerie but had not found the experience very satisfying. She seemed to regard him as the architect, albeit unintentional, of her family tragedy and he did not expect to be invited to the funeral when eventually the police released the body. Predictably, Valerie had found out about the incident at Corfu airport and obviously thought George was responsible for Susanna’s having kept her in the dark. He could not bring himself to explain that he was now spending a lot of his time and some of his gradually dwindling funds on trying to track down the people-smuggling gang that seemed to be the most likely cause of her daughter’s death. She probably wo
uld not have understood anyway and he had not been expecting any thanks or encouragement.

  If he had been able to be completely honest with himself he would also have admitted that he felt reproached – he could not explained what by or why – by Lydia’s and Conrad’s unashamed adoration of each other. It did not seem quite right that, in the middle of all this, others should be so blissfully happy. He didn’t know how to deal with it and felt mildly embarrassed, and embarrassed by his embarrassment.

  He could not work out how Deborah had felt about his going to Cyprus. On the face of it she had been supportive but there had been something about her eyes when she looked at him that made him feel he was somehow betraying her. He pushed away the thought that he was running away from involvement by telling himself that he could not possibly start another serious relationship so soon after Susanna’s death or be so shallow as to get involved with another – yet another – girl until he had sorted out his marriage one way or another.

  The plan had emerged, more ‘popped up’, in the course of a long meeting with Helen. Deborah had described her clip-joint experiences in some detail and George had not been able to hide his surprise at how easily and how frequently so many men were separated from large amounts of money or how passively they acquiesced in their own humiliation. He supposed that he had a poor understanding of the psychology of blackmail. He had found himself wondering whether Deborah was not actually beginning to enjoy her work. Certainly, she showed professional pride at doing the job as well as possible. The sleazy ethos of the trade was having an almost hypnotic effect on her, he thought and he envisaged a time when the work she was doing would take her over completely. He told himself that he should be careful about getting too close to her then pulled himself up short. ‘Even before I fall in love, I’m preparing to leave her,’ he thought with distaste. The most startling thing she told them was about a girl called Jill who worked for a bank and who was one of the several part-time strippers who visited the club when a customer wanted a show. Apparently she worked a couple of nights a week to supplement her salary but George had not been sure it was ‘that’ Jill until Deborah said that the she had taken more than half an hour to come to the club even though she was only working in the next street when she got the telephone call. When George revealed that he thought that Jill had been a friend of Susanna, Deborah was delegated the task of getting to know her better and, if she felt safe in doing so, telling her about Susanna’s death and their suspicions that the sex trade was somehow behind it.

 

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