The Company

by Sally Spencer

  Hawkins, as I would discover later, was a solid, middle-aged bobby, not given to imaginative leaps of intuition, so it was not surprising that it was the detective from South Wales, not the one from Cheshire, who suggested that they should attend my grandfather’s funeral.

  It was an impressive turnout, I’m told. Grandfather had been a firm but popular employer, and as well as friends and local dignitaries, each of his tangled web of business holdings sent a number of representatives, so the church was full to bursting.

  I am trying to imagine what impression the surviving members of my family made on Owen Flint. He would have seen my grandmother, small and frail, suddenly cast out on to a sea of loneliness after well over half a century of Grandfather’s protection. He would have noticed my cousin Philip, thin and blond, with eyes which suggested more sensitivity than his hard soul could ever muster. And he would have seen Lydia, my sister-in-law, with her pageboy haircut covered by a large dark hat, and her pale green eyes hidden behind dark glasses.

  Perhaps he asked the unimaginative Inspector Hawkins a few questions.

  ‘Where’s Rob Conroy’s mother?’

  ‘She died a couple of years ago. Cancer, I think it was. By all accounts, she’d never been very strong.’

  ‘What about Philip Conroy’s wife?’

  ‘He doesn’t have one. He likes to play the field, just like his father, Tony, did.’

  ‘And Tony’s wife – Philip’s mother?’

  ‘Oh, she ran away from home years ago, when Philip was no more than a kid.’

  This conversation, as I say, is only guesswork on my part. But one thing I do know for sure. As they were laying my grandfather’s coffin in the ground, Owen caught sight of a shock of red hair which he had last seen driving away in a Golf GT in Bristol.

  Flint waited by the church gate until most of the mourners had left. One of the last to go was the woman with the red hair, and when she saw Flint standing by the lychgate, she looked straight through him.

  The chief inspector bided his time until she had drawn level with him, then said, ‘Might I have a word, miss?’

  She turned. ‘Are you talking to me?’

  ‘Yes. Does that surprise you?’

  The woman opened her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes, and lit one up.

  ‘Does it surprise me?’ she said. ‘No, I suppose it doesn’t. But if we’re going to talk, I’d rather do it with a glass of something in my hand. Going to funerals always makes me feel thirsty.’

  ‘There’s a pub over there,’ Owen Flint said, pointing towards the George and Dragon.

  ‘So there is,’ the woman agreed.

  They walked across the road and entered the pub by the side door. As he would have expected in a village like this one, the bar was all horse brasses and bare oak beams.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ Owen asked.

  Marie glanced at the shelves behind the counter. ‘A Bush Mills whiskey with water,’ she said. ‘Better make it a double – and go easy on the water.’

  ‘So you’re not intending to drive any more today?’ Owen Flint said.

  Marie grimaced. ‘I forgot, for a moment, that you were the Filth,’ she said. ‘Better make it an orange juice.’

  Owen ordered a pint of bitter for himself and took the two drinks over to the table where Marie was already lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of her first.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I know, then you can tell me what I want to know,’ he said. ‘Your name’s Marie O’Hara, you’re a private investigator, and you live in Oxford. Correct?’

  Marie smiled. ‘I thought I’d pulled off too quickly for you to take my number,’ she said. ‘Obviously, I was wrong.’

  ‘So my first question is, do you know Rob Conroy?’

  Marie took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘Yes, I know him.’

  ‘How long? And how well?’

  ‘We’ve known each other for more than two years.’

  ‘I need more than that,’ Flint said.

  Marie thought about it.

  ‘We spend a lot of time in each other’s company,’ she said finally.

  ‘Are you saying you’re lovers?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not a crime, you know.’

  ‘The answer’s still no.’

  ‘So you’re just good friends?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Flint took a thoughtful sip of his pint. ‘Why are you here today?’ he asked.

  ‘It was Rob’s grandfather they were burying. I thought I’d come and pay my respects.’

  ‘Did Rob ask you to come?’

  ‘No, I haven’t been in contact with him since the accident.’

  ‘I see,’ Flint said meaningfully. ‘You haven’t been to see him, but you’ve come to one of his relative’s funerals. How well did you know his family?’

  ‘I’ve never met any of them.’

  ‘Some people would say you’re acting rather strangely.’

  Marie shrugged. ‘Some people have always said that. Some people think I’m completely crazy to be chasing bad debts when I could have a nice comfortable office job.’

  ‘Is that what you were doing in Bristol?’ Flint asked. ‘Chasing down some bad debts?’

  ‘I was certainly there on behalf of a client,’ Marie said evasively.

  ‘And you just happened to be in the area around the Mountjoy Hotel at the same time I was?’

  Another shrug. ‘I was in Bristol on business, and I thought, on impulse, that I’d go and have a look at the hotel where they spent the night before the crash. I saw you in the lobby. It was obvious you were policemen, and highly likely you were investigating the case, so – on impulse again – I followed you to the pub. Then, when I realized you’d spotted me, I thought it would save explanations all round if I got out of there as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Murder investigations are jobs for the police,’ Flint warned her.

  ‘So why aren’t you investigating the murder, instead of wasting your time talking to me?’

  ‘If I find you’re getting in my way, Miss O’Hara, I’ll stamp on you,’ Flint said. ‘Might not be a very nice way to put it, but that’s exactly what I’ll do.’

  Marie knocked back her orange juice and stood up. ‘I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  Flint’s eyes followed her to the door – and they were not the only ones to do so. She was a very attractive woman, the chief inspector decided – a very sexy woman.

  He wondered if she’d lied when she’d said she wasn’t sleeping with me. And if she hadn’t lied, why she wasn’t sleeping with me, when all the signs seemed to be that we were very close.

  It was a question I’d often asked myself, during so many long, lonely nights.

  SEVEN

  During my conversation with Owen Flint the previous evening, I thought I was giving him a fairly accurate (though edited) sketch of my family, but as the hours passed, I began to be more and more dissatisfied with my performance. What I’d actually given him, it now seemed to me, was not only sketchy, but flat. It had been like describing a train by doing no more than listing its destinations and the times it ran.

  My comments on my cousin Philip were a good case in point. I’d explained all about his mother and his father’s girlfriends. I’d stated – though not fully explained – that I considered him a selfish, thoroughly unlikeable individual. Yet I’d breathed no life into the skeleton I’d presented – I’d failed totally to flesh out the bones. And it would have been such an easy thing to do. To sum up Philip – perhaps to sum up all the grandchildren of Charlie Conroy – I need only have mentioned the incident with the shrew.

  Philip and I were six, and my brother John was seven, when it happened. We were all destined for public school, but at that point we attended the local primary, mainly, I think, because that was what Grandfather – who had risen through the ranks in the army – wished us to do.

 
Our school life wasn’t a happy experience. We were the grandsons of Charles Conroy, and the other children, whose fathers worked on farms and in factories, treated us with wariness at best and hostility at worst. The result was that, whether we liked it or not – and even then I didn’t – we were thrust into each other’s company.

  That particular summer, we all had a passion for collecting living things. Screw-top jars of caterpillars sat proudly on our bedroom dressers. Baby rabbits, found abandoned in the woods, would be taken home amidst excited talk of watching them grow, even though we probably secretly knew that without their mothers to look after them, they would almost certainly die. When one of us had a budgerigar, the others must have one too. The purchase of a white mouse for one necessitated the same for the remaining two. So it was not surprising that when we were walking the fields one day, and Philip saw the startled shrew break cover from its grassy hiding place, his first instinct was to dive at it.

  He caught it neatly between his two cupped hands, then climbed carefully back to his feet. Only when he was standing again did he open the hands a little, for us to see his prize. The shrew was making no attempt to escape. Instead, it was lying on its back and writhing.

  ‘Give it to me,’ I said.

  ‘I caught it,’ Philip said aggressively. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘I only want to look at it,’ I told him. ‘You can have it back in a minute.’

  ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I promised, making the approved gesture with my index finger.

  Reluctantly, my cousin transferred the small bundle from his hands to mine. I can still remember how its hot, furry little body felt as it nestled in my palm, can still picture the look of uncomprehending terror on its tiny face.

  ‘I want it back now,’ Philip said.

  But I hadn’t finished with it yet.

  ‘I think you’ve hurt it,’ I told him. ‘I think you’ve broken its back legs.’

  ‘Didn’t mean to,’ Philip said petulantly.

  I knelt down and placed the tiny creature on the ground. It tried to run, but only its front legs were working, so it did no more than paw the ground.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked my cousin.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Philip replied.

  ‘We could take it home with us,’ John suggested, speaking for the first time.

  I shook my head. ‘I think it’s like racehorses,’ I said. ‘I think once their legs are broken, they’re finished. We’ll have to kill it.’

  ‘We can’t!’ John said, with a hint of anguish in his voice.

  I sighed. My brother may have been the oldest of the three of us, but he was no leader, and I realized it even then.

  ‘We have to put it out of its misery,’ I told him.

  John sighed too, then looked around him, located a large stone, and handed it to Philip.

  ‘All right, you do it,’ he said.

  Hands firmly by his sides, Philip took a step backwards. ‘Why me?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because you were the one who hurt it.’

  Philip shook his head. ‘I’m not doing it. Why don’t we just leave it here?’

  ‘Because it’s in pain,’ I explained.

  ‘Not my fault,’ Philip muttered. ‘Didn’t ask it to be here, did I?’

  I looked down at the tiny creature once more, and for a moment, I was tempted to do as my cousin suggested. Then I saw it make another futile attempt to run away and knew I would be doing it no favours.

  ‘Why don’t we all do it?’ I said.

  ‘You’re talking rubbish now,’ Philip retorted.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I countered. ‘If we all get a stone and hit it at the same time, we’ll never know which one of us has killed it.’

  I looked up at my brother for support, and he reluctantly nodded. I turned to my cousin, who shrugged his shoulders. ‘All right,’ he agreed.

  The next two stones were more difficult to find than the one John had uncovered, but a couple of minutes search provided us with the instruments of death we needed.

  Philip examined my stone, and then the one he was holding in his own hand. ‘Mine’s bigger than yours,’ he complained.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So you’ll be able to say I did it, because I’d got the bigger stone.’

  I held mine out. ‘We’ll swap.’

  ‘OK,’ said Philip, as if he was doing me a favour.

  We all knelt down beside the shrew.

  ‘I’m going to count to three,’ I said, ‘and then we’ll all hit it. One … two … three.’

  I brought my stone down as hard as I could. My brother did the same and managed to trap two of my fingers between my stone and his. I yelped with pain and jumped back. My fingers were on fire. I stuck them in my mouth and sucked furiously.

  ‘That should fix it,’ I heard my cousin say in the background.

  Almost forgetting my own agony, I looked down at the tiny, battered body on the ground, and realized that the shrew must have gone through more suffering than I could even begin to imagine.

  ‘It’s nearly teatime,’ Philip said, almost cheerfully. ‘Shall we go home, now?’

  ‘What about him?’ John asked, looking down at the shrew.

  ‘What about him?’ Philip reiterated. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we bury him or something?’

  ‘Don’t talk wet,’ Philip said scornfully. ‘It won’t make any difference to him now.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to bury him,’ John said, with a more decisive tone in his voice than I think I’d ever heard before. ‘I’m going to bury him, and you’re going to wait until I’ve finished.’

  He picked the dead shrew up – showing no signs of squeamishness – and walked over to the edge of the field, where there was bare earth. Once there, he laid the small corpse gently on the ground, and using his hands, clawed out a shallow grave. When the burial was over, he stood up and wiped his hands on his short pants.

  ‘Better be getting home,’ he said, as if he had put the incident completely behind him.

  But he hadn’t, because though he tried to hide it, I could see that he was fighting back the tears.

  On the way to the village, I thought over the enormity of what I had done. Though I told myself I’d had no choice, I had killed one of God’s creatures – for I was sure it was my stone which had struck the lethal blow.

  Would the Almighty ever forgive me? I wondered.

  Would I ever be able to forgive myself?

  I’d felt guilty before, of course – when I’d broken a window in the garden shed, when I’d told a lie about why I was late for school – but this was the first attack of the real thing. It was to be far from the last.

  The incident of the shrew, might, I suppose, have brought us closer together. After all, we did share in its extermination, though I am not sure, even to this day, that Philip did actually hit it as John and I had. Yet far from achieving that aim, it seemed to drive us further apart, so that in the end even John gave up trying to hold the gang together. Looking back on it now, I think the reason for the split was that our instincts grasped what we might never have realized on any intellectual level – that our different approaches to the death demonstrated quite clearly that we would never be compatible.

  Then again, it may have been much less complicated than that. It may have simply been that, as we approached the village, I noticed that Philip was whistling.

  EIGHT

  Flint turned off the High Street and walked up the dirt track towards the house which, until three days earlier, Uncle Tony had shared with his son, and which, once the legal formalities were over, would belong to my cousin Philip outright.

  A furniture van was parked outside the house, and while two workmen were loading a solid mahogany desk into the back of it, another pair were carrying a smoked glass and tubular steel table towards the front door.

  A grey-haired woman – Mrs Roberts, who h
ad been Uncle Tony’s housekeeper ever since Aunt Jane disappeared – was supervising the operation and gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘Police,’ he said, showing her his warrant card. ‘I’d like to talk to Mr Conroy.’

  ‘I’ll see if he’s up to it,’ Mrs Roberts said, and then added, severely, ‘Mister Philip’s been through a devastating experience, you know.’

  But not so devastating that it prevented him from ordering new office furniture, Flint thought, looking at the van.

  Mrs Roberts disappeared into the house and re-emerged about a minute later.

  ‘If you’ll follow me,’ she said.

  She led him into the large lounge, which had a picture window with a clear view of the rolling fields and the mere.

  Philip had changed out of his mourning suit into an expensive casual jacket and trousers. He was looking out of the window, but as Flint entered the room, he turned around and walked towards him.

  They shook hands, then Philip said crisply, ‘I have a great deal to get through today, so I’d be grateful if you could make this as brief as possible.’

  ‘Of course,’ Flint agreed.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Philip said, waving towards the deep leather armchairs. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  Flint shook his head. ‘No, thank you, sir.’

  ‘Is that because you’re on duty, because if it is, I can assure you …’

  ‘No, it’s not because I’m on duty – it’s because I don’t want a drink,’ Flint said.

  Philip shrugged, and while Flint was taking his seat, walked over to the drinks cabinet, and poured himself a generous scotch.

  ‘So how can I help you?’ he asked, returning to the centre of the room, but not sitting down.

  ‘We could start by you telling me what your whereabouts were on the night before the crash,’ Flint said pleasantly.

  My cousin coloured. ‘Are you accusing me of killing my own father?’ he demanded angrily.

  ‘Not at all, sir,’ Flint replied. ‘I’m just trying to eliminate you from the frame.’

  ‘I was at the office until eight o’clock, as several witnesses will confirm,’ Philip said.

  ‘And after that?’