The Company

by Sally Spencer

  When it was finally time to go, Grandfather hoisted himself slowly to his feet and gave Jill a kiss. ‘It’s been a delight to meet you,’ he said, ‘and you’re welcome to visit us any time.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Jill told him, and from the sideways glances they both gave me, I knew the meeting had been a great success.

  Afterwards – when it was all over – I looked back on the two weeks Jill stayed with us as the golden period of my life. The weather helped – it was one of those idyllic summers which is not too hot and not too cold, when the air smells so fresh and the breezes are caressingly gentle. But it was Jill who made those days for me, just as I knew she would make my life for me. We walked in the woods. We swam in the mere. Sometimes we seemed to be continually talking, and at others we said nothing much at all. It didn’t matter what we did, or where we went. We were together, and that was the only important thing.

  At the end of her holiday, I delivered her to the same station from which I had picked her up just two, brief, wonderful weeks before. We didn’t speak much in the car. We were both, I think, contemplating the future – the short-term one before the university year began again, and the longer one which stretched into the vague distance.

  The short-term future was very clearly laid out. I was to work for my father for a few weeks, to compensate somewhat for the cost of putting me through an expensive education. Jill, for her part, had accepted a job supervising under-privileged kids on an adventure holiday in Cornwall.

  But after that? In the long term? That seemed clearly laid out, too. Though we had not discussed it, we both understood that as soon as we had completed our degrees, we would get married. And though we would not have children right away, they would be the perfect seal on the love we felt for each other.

  I parked my father’s modest Allegro in front of the station and took Jill’s case out of the boot.

  ‘I can handle it, Robbie,’ she told me.

  I laughed. ‘But I don’t want you to handle it. I’ll carry it for you.’

  ‘I want to say goodbye now,’ she told me, and I could see the tears forming in her eyes. ‘No long, drawn-out farewells. Just a clean break.’

  ‘But only for a few weeks,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Only for a few weeks.’

  We kissed, and though both of us were reluctant to let go, she finally broke away.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve struck out on your own,’ she said seriously.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re doing an English degree. I’m glad you want to become an academic.’

  I smiled. ‘What made you say that just now?’

  She gave a shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just … Your family’s not the right place for you, Robbie.’

  I should have been expecting that, I suppose – I had been expecting it before she arrived – but the two idyllic weeks we’d spent together had lulled me into a false sense of security.

  ‘You don’t like them,’ I said, sounding almost hurt.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she protested. ‘Your grandparents are lovely.’

  ‘What about my parents?’

  ‘I don’t feel I really got to know them,’ Jill admitted. ‘They mean well, but maybe because your mother isn’t in the best of health, they live in their own little world – very much a nation of two.’

  Jill wasn’t wrong, I thought. My mother’s health had started to deteriorate when John and I were very small, and my father, who loved her as much as she loved him, had focussed most of his emotional concern on her.

  It wasn’t that he never showed his two sons any affection, but, as Jill had said, so much of it was being absorbed by Mother that he very rarely had much to spread around. In a way, I suppose, my mother and father abdicated from parenthood with my mother’s first illness, and it was Grandmother and Grandfather who took up the slack.

  ‘I like John, too,’ Jill continued. ‘He’s a little strange, partly, I think, because he can’t really accept himself for who he really is, but he’s got a good heart and he’d die for you, without a second’s hesitation.’

  ‘I’d do the same for him,’ I said.

  ‘I know you would,’ Jill agreed. ‘And then there’s the other side of the family. You couldn’t call your uncle Tony a bad man – he’s more of a naughty schoolboy. And even Philip could turn out all right if he really decided to make the effort.’

  How well she’d summed them up, I thought. Yet still – and totally unexpectedly – there was enough of the tribal instinct in me to bridle at anything which might sound remotely like criticism.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ I asked, more belligerently than I’d intended.

  ‘The problem is the situation,’ Jill said. ‘You’re all trapped in your grandfather’s net, and that can’t be healthy – even for him.’ She glanced down at her watch. ‘I’d better go, or I’ll miss my train.’

  A sudden fear swept over me – gripped me tightly with its iron claws, dug its icy cold nails deep into my very soul.

  ‘Don’t go!’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jill asked.

  ‘Don’t get on that train,’ I pleaded.

  ‘I have to. I’m expected in Cornwall in the morning.’

  ‘To hell with Cornwall! Stay here!’

  She shook her head. ‘The children are depending on me, so I have to go.’ She broke out into a smile. ‘I tell you what, why don’t you come with me? We can always use an extra pair of hands, and I’m sure the organizers can find you a tent from somewhere.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ I said, ‘but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I’ve promised Grandfather I’ll work for the company for a few weeks.’

  ‘He’s still trying to reel you in, isn’t he?’ Jill demanded. ‘He thinks that if you get a taste for the business, you’ll drop the idea of being a don, doesn’t he?’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I protested. ‘He encouraged me to go to university.’

  ‘He values education,’ Jill retorted, ‘but he doesn’t set much store by independence.’ There was the sound of an approaching train in the distance. She turned her head towards it. ‘I’d better go.’

  I half-expected her to kiss me once more, but instead she picked up her suitcase and headed for the entrance. Watching her retreating back, I willed her to turn around, and just before the point at which she would have disappeared from sight, she finally did.

  ‘I love you,’ I told her.

  ‘I love you, too,’ she replied. ‘I always will.’

  How often, I wonder, have I relived that scene in my mind?

  A hundred times?

  A thousand?

  Perhaps neither of those guesses is anywhere near accurate.

  Perhaps, at some level, it is never out of my mind.

  That long, lingering kiss.

  The way she swung the heavy suitcase, as if, in some way, that would make it seem lighter.

  The almost hesitant way she turned for that final declaration of love.

  There’s more.

  The image of the train I secretly watched pull out of the station, knowing that she was inside it – and that it was taking her away from me.

  The walk back to the car park, on legs which felt as if they had turned into lead.

  The slow drive home to the family which my beloved Jill thought fed upon itself.

  And all the time there was a voice in the corner of my brain whispering the same message over and over and over again.

  ‘You should have gone with her. You should have gone with her.’

  It was a rasping voice, one which fell somewhere between sympathy and malicious glee – and it has never gone away.

  THIRTEEN

  It was bright and early in the morning, on the day after I had arrived back in the village, when Owen Flint turned up at the headquarters of Mid-Cheshire Maintenance, the company that Grandfather had bought for my brother John.

&nbs
p; It was an impressive set-up, he thought. The garage itself was both clean and orderly, and a dozen or so men in smart overalls were working purposefully on various vehicles. Whatever else could be said about John, he thought, it seemed he’d known how to run a business.

  The chief inspector met Sam Weatherspoon, the foreman, in the office which overlooked the main work area and, like the rest of the installation, seemed to him to have been designed for efficiency.

  ‘What was John Conroy like as a boss?’ Flint asked, noting as he spoke that, though the foreman was probably no older than thirty-five, he was already combing his hair in a way which showed he was worried about a bald spot.

  ‘He was a good boss,’ Weatherspoon said. ‘Quiet, but firm, that was Mr Conroy. You always knew where you were with him. We’re going to miss him.’

  ‘I was talking to his wife yesterday …’ Flint began.

  ‘Oh, her!’ the foreman snorted.

  ‘I take it you don’t get on,’ the chief inspector said mildly.

  ‘Putting it simply, she’s a right proper bitch. She tried to get me fired once, you know.’

  ‘And why would she have done that?’

  Weatherspoon pulled a packet of Benson and Hedges out of his overalls and offered them to Flint. The chief inspector shook his head and reached into his pocket for his reserve supply of Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts.

  ‘It was like this,’ Weatherspoon said, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette greedily. ‘She’s always had her own car serviced here. Well, she’s – she was – the boss’s wife, so we’ve always given her priority over all our other jobs, even if we’ve got a rush on. You’d have thought that would be enough to satisfy anybody, wouldn’t you? But it wouldn’t do for Madam.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it do for her?’

  ‘Because she expects miracles – that’s why. Look, this one time, she brought her car in because the gears were slipping. I took it for a quick spin, and it was obvious to me that the clutch was buggered. “So put a new one in,” she told me – like I was too stupid to work that out for myself. “I’ll do it as soon as I can get my hands on one,” I promised. She asked me how long that would be, and I said probably a couple of days. Well, that didn’t please her at all. Then she spotted one of the company’s cars we were working on. “Take the clutch out of that, and put it in my car,” she said.’

  ‘Same model?’ Flint asked.

  ‘Was it hell as like. The company provides its reps with Fords, and Madam’s was a Volvo. She needs a big car for her horsebox, you see.’

  ‘Rides, does she?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s very big in the local hunt – or so they tell me. Anyway, I tried explaining to her that the clutch from the Ford just wouldn’t work – but she wasn’t interested in explanations. “You’re the grease monkey,” she said. “Find some way to make it work.” I told her it was impossible, and she marched right into Mr Conroy’s office and demanded he gave me my cards on the spot. Of course, he wouldn’t do it.’ Weatherspoon chuckled. ‘She was so furious with him that I bet he had to do without his “bit of the other” for at least a week.’

  ‘And now she’s probably your boss,’ Flint said. ‘That doesn’t exactly bode well for you, does it?’

  ‘She’ll never be the boss,’ Weatherspoon said. ‘I don’t know exactly what plans old Charlie Conroy had for the business when he passed on, but I do know he’ll never have let control fall into the hands of anybody who wasn’t a blood relative. So either Rob Conroy will be in charge or his cousin, Philip, will – or maybe it might even be both of them.’

  ‘So who do you think will actually be running Mid-Cheshire Maintenance?’ Flint asked.

  ‘I expect that will be me,’ Weatherspoon told him.

  ‘Will it indeed?’ Flint said musingly. ‘That’ll be a bit of a promotion for you, won’t it?’

  ‘It’ll mean more work,’ Weatherspoon said, ‘but I don’t think it will mean more pay – especially if Philip Conroy is chairman of the board.’

  ‘Let’s get back to the question I’d intended to ask when we started discussing Lydia Conroy,’ Flint suggested. ‘Did John Conroy have any business rivals?’

  ‘Hang about – are you asking me if one of the other garage owners might have bumped him off?’ Weatherspoon asked.

  ‘If that’s the way you want to interpret the question,’ Flint said neutrally.

  ‘There’s a few other garages round here do contract work,’ Weatherspoon said, ‘but they’re not real rivals. None of them is anywhere near big enough to handle the volume of work we do, you see. Anyway, if somebody wanted to steal all our business off us, there are better and quicker ways of doing that than by killing poor Mr Conroy.’

  ‘Like what, for example?

  ‘They might burn the place down.’

  ‘And all the Conroys would have to do is rebuild it.’

  ‘True, but that would take at least a month, even working at full pelt. And our customers couldn’t wait for a month, because they’ve got obligations to their customers, so they’d be forced to take their business elsewhere. And once you’ve lost a customer in this trade, you very rarely get him back.’

  Yes, it all made sense, Flint thought, discarding the maintenance business as a possible motive for murder.

  ‘Now we’ve ruled out business rivals, can you think of anyone else who wouldn’t shed tears if they heard John Conroy had died?’ he asked.

  Weatherspoon shook his head emphatically.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Did he have any habits which might have got him into trouble?’

  ‘No. Mr Conroy didn’t gamble, not even in the garage’s Grand National sweepstake. And as far as I know, he never chased other women.’

  ‘Boozing?’

  ‘He drank, but only in moderation.’

  ‘He must have knocked back a few when he was entertaining,’ Flint pointed out. ‘And as I understand it, he entertained a great deal.’

  ‘It was his wife who did the entertaining. And even at the parties, when everybody else was supping champagne cocktails like they were going out of style, Mr Conroy never had more than a couple of beers – at least, that was true of the party I went to.’

  ‘You were invited to one of the parties?’ Flint asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes, it was well before the incident of the clutch, but it’s still amazing, isn’t it? Imagine me – a humble mechanic – rubbing shoulders with the crème de la crème of local society. The reason I was invited, I think, was that I was partially responsible for landing a big contract, and it was Mr Conroy’s way of showing his appreciation.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Not really,’ Weatherspoon admitted. ‘But the point is, neither did he. We were both like fish out of water.’

  ‘So you can’t think of anybody who’d wish him harm,’ Flint said, summing it up.

  ‘No, I don’t often say this about people, but he was a lovely man,’ Weatherspoon replied.

  I had called on Grandmother soon after arriving in the village, but Jo Torlopp told me the old lady was exhausted, so it was not until around ten o’clock the next morning when I finally got to see her. She did not look as bad as I’d feared, but I knew that inside she was almost destroyed. Yet even in the midst of her grief, she did not fail to look at me with the questioning expression which all the family had in their eyes after not seeing me for some time – the expression which said, ‘How’s he doing? Is he close to cracking up again?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your father,’ she said. ‘And about John, and your uncle Tony. I’ve been trying to work out what terrible thing one of them could have done to make someone hate him enough to want to kill him.’

  ‘You’d be far better off leaving that kind of thing to the police,’ I replied gently.

  ‘I can’t imagine Edward would – or could – do anything terrible. Or that anybody would notice if he did.’

  ‘Grandmother …’

  ‘Let’s be
honest,’ my grandmother said, ‘your father wasn’t a man who stuck out in a crowd, was he?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think I could even describe him very clearly to someone who didn’t know him. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t short. He wasn’t ugly, but you couldn’t exactly have called him handsome, either. I know he loved you two boys, but I’m willing to wager he never put it into words.’

  ‘Not to me, anyway,’ I admitted.

  ‘No, he hardly ever showed his emotions,’ my grandmother continued, ‘though I did once catch him crying over the Verdi “Requiem”.’

  I could believe that. He was like John in that respect – they both kept things bottled up.

  ‘Uncle Tony was quite different, though, wasn’t he?’ I said, attempting to shift her away from a subject which I was already finding uncomfortable.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Grandmother agreed. ‘While your father was doing his homework, Tony would be out scrumping apples from other people’s orchards – even though we had plenty of our own. Do you know that on his fifteenth birthday he was summonsed for riding a motorcycle without a license?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I confessed.

  ‘It would have mortified your father, but your uncle Tony treated it like a badge of honour.’

  ‘Have you seen Philip?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. He was at your grandfather’s funeral.’

  ‘I mean, has he been round here to see you?’

  ‘He’s been very busy,’ Grandmother said defensively.

  ‘I’m sure he has been,’ I agreed, but I was thinking, The bastard! The selfish little swine.

  ‘You’ve always been too hard on your cousin,’ my grandmother said, reading my thoughts. ‘He didn’t have it easy when he was growing up. Do you remember his mother?’