In Search of Love, Money & Revenge

by Hilary Bailey

  The man was interested. ‘Is that a fact?’ he asked.

  ‘A rumour,’ Banks said. ‘Probably nothing to it.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said the man he was speaking to, but he sounded pleased. Banks silently put his name on the mental blacklist of enemies he kept in his head, a list headed by Les Dowell. Then he rang his contact, Gerald Rafferty, at the Department of the Environment.

  That same morning Julian Vane was making a late breakfast for himself and his lover at Tamsin’s small house in Islington. He looked from the kitchen window at the flowers in pots on the paved area at the back of the house. He pushed down the plunger in the cafetière and put it on a tray. There were brioches he’d just bought from the French bakery on the corner. As Tamsin did not have to get to the advertising agency for which she worked until two, this morning was like a Sunday, or better, because their Sunday mornings so often involved jumping up and dashing off in the car to visit friends, or jumping up and clearing up because friends were visiting them.

  In her chintzy bedroom, where even now Tamsin’s old teddy, Uncle Ned, sat on a corner shelf under a vase of dried flowers and grasses, Tamsin lay in bed. Julian put the tray into her hands, stripped off jeans and T-shirt and hopped in beside her in his boxer shorts.

  Tamsin poured. ‘Though it’s never quite the same as breakfast in France,’ remarked Julian taking his green cup and saucer. ‘Why not? It’s one of the great unsolved mysteries.’

  ‘I suppose everything else smells of home,’ Tamsin said. ‘Listen, Julian, they’re really nagging me about holidays. I’ve got to take some soon. Gilly’s hinting I’m trying to look as if I don’t want a holiday, just to impress—’

  ‘You know I’m just hanging on for the final go-ahead on the Savernake project.’

  ‘But you can’t make any difference,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better just to go away and relax? You could keep in touch by phone.’

  ‘That’s what people always say until they’re stuck somewhere with a strike at the telephone exchange or tricky atmospheric conditions. I’m sorry, Tamsin, but I’m slightly anxious about this Savernake affair. We’ve invested a lot of time and money in it. Ten people worked night and day to get to this point, three are still sitting in an expensive office, drawing their pay, waiting for the starter’s gun. I know it’s hard on you, but you yourself said if we went before it was all tied up we weren’t likely to have a very good time. I was very grateful you saw it like that.’

  She smoothed his soft hair as he sat beside her against the padded, corn-coloured bedhead. He slid down a little and looked up at her, the lines on his face relaxing. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Tamsin smiled. ‘Of course we’ll wait. Think how wonderful it’ll be when everything’s signed and we can go away peacefully.’

  ‘Mm,’ he muttered.

  ‘If only Bernard Fellows hadn’t died,’ die sighed. ‘He could have kept that Tokyo bank man sweet. Half the uncertainties come from his death.’ She paused. ‘I do wish the Fellowses would come to dinner.’

  Nigel and Jasmine had turned down an invitation on the grounds that the family bereavement was too recent and had avoided fixing a later date to meet. Julian thought privately that Tamsin was ambitious to entertain them more for social than business reasons, but in this he was mistaken. Tamsin did want to entertain the rich and successful, but her sharp nose told her there was something to find out. When it emerged a little later that after Sir Bernard’s death Savernake’s Japanese backer had withdrawn, and that the board of Samco was sharply divided about increasing its investment in the project, she hastened to remind Julian of the instinct which had led her to want to get Nigel Fellows on her sofa, brandy in hand, for a gentle probing chat. She tactfully did not point out that her uncle had backed Julian’s company, expanded chiefly to handle the huge Savernake plan, or that less backing would have been necessary if Julian’s wife Annie had not been sitting, still undivorced, in the unsold house at Rutherford Street.

  Julian, leaning into her contentedly, could not see Tamsin’s hard and thoughtful eyes staring in the direction of the battered Uncle Ned on his special shelf.

  A so-called friend at the agency had, as someone always will, drawn her attention to the restaurant column of Harper’s & Queen, where the Arcadia was described by the food columnist as having a surprisingly excellent cuisine, considering its location in one of London’s more louche areas. The restaurant was presided over, the writer had suggested archly, by two beauties, one with a PhD in history.

  Tamsin had disguised her irritation about the progress of the Arcadia and made sure Harper’s didn’t appear in the house, but the article disquieted her. Julian’s account of Annie as mousy, high-minded, studious, and, above all, as otherworldly as Mother Teresa, had satisfied her at first. Now she’d learned to know Julian better, she knew him for a gifted somewhat lazy man, disinclined to trouble and worry. He’d been later to feel any concern about developments in the Savernake project than she had. Annie’s and Vanessa’s restaurant was evidently thriving and Tamsin began to wonder if Annie’s efforts in Julian’s firm had not been a lot more useful than he’d ever suggested. It crossed her mind, also, that she, Tamsin, had found herself giving Julian a lot of help, raising money for him, keeping up his spirits, warning him of trouble ahead. She was starting to feel creeping doubts. Julian was talented, she told herself, as she buttered him another piece of brioche and playfully fed it to him. But as his smiling mouth opened, like a child’s, her heart sank a little within her. It wasn’t only the Savernake Village project she hoped would work out.

  On an Algarve beach Geoff Doyle, bikini-clad Cindy lying beside him, counted the minutes until lunchtime when he could go back to the hotel and take the phone call from Sam Abbott he dearly hoped would come. Cindy was a strict holidaymaker, sun, sea and sex were what she’d come for; sun, sea and sex were what she intended to get, and if she didn’t get the first two, Geoff didn’t get much of the latter, or, if he did, it was not very enjoyable. The eight days of their holiday so far had been punctuated by Cindy’s little moans of ‘Geoff. Try to relax. That’s what we’re here for,’ ‘Geoff – don’t start making phone calls now,’ ‘Geoff – I’m here, remember.’ As a result, his nerves weren’t improving. He phoned Sam Abbott every day, reluctantly allowed to do so at convenient moments by Cindy, but he couldn’t always get through, or Sam couldn’t get back to him. Sam, too, had heard about the withdrawal of the Tokyo bank and Samco’s reluctance to invest further. In addition he was close to sources in Kenton and what he’d heard about the local protest movements was disturbing. Yesterday Geoff had asked Sam to get from Joe Banks an account of progress, or lack of it, and a view of the future, and it was this call he eagerly awaited. He lay staring at the cloudless blue sky and listening to the buzz of the other holidaymakers, resting under sunshades or, like Cindy, oiled and fully extended under the hot sun. ‘Pre-lunch drink?’ he enquired.

  ‘Ugh? Oh, Geoff, I was asleep,’ she said in reproach.

  ‘Sorry, Cindy,’ he said. ‘Didn’t realise. Still, how about a little aperitivo?’

  ‘You’re always rushing back to that hotel,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me – Dad’s due to phone up.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m going back.’

  ‘You can’t leave me here,’ she said.

  ‘No harm will come,’ he assured her, though as he spoke he reconsidered his move since everywhere they went every male over twelve and under seventy was aware of Cindy’s blonde beauty.

  Aware of his hesitation, she replied, ‘Oh, all right, you go. I’ll come later,’ and stretched out luxuriously.

  Geoff wandered up the beach, turning once to see if Cindy was now surrounded by tall tanned men in bathing trunks, commenting on the weather and the beach, inviting her back to the villa but she wasn’t. He went on, reached the hotel and waited for Sam Abbott to ring. He’d sensed that Abbott was nervous now and wondered what the price had been for his services via Kenton planning department on b
ehalf of Savernake Developments. He’d used his position before, Geoff thought, otherwise where did the extension, the new car, the patio with built-in barbecue come from?

  Geoff ordered a drink and sat down among the potted plants in the lounge. Abbott had told him the Kenton Post was writing editorials against the scheme. ‘Puts you and your ex-wife on opposite sides of the camp, I suppose,’ he’d said. ‘You should have a word with her, Geoff. After all, you’ve still got some rights.’

  ‘Too right,’ Geoff had responded stoutly, but he was far from confident that he any longer had influence over Vanessa. He’d learned of the write-up about the Arcadia in Harper’s & Queen from Cindy who’d read it in her private dentist’s waiting room. Although Geoff put the Arcadia’s success down to the other woman involved, the snooty bitch Annie, seeing Vanessa’s name in print, and described as a beauty, stirred in him some involuntary respect. Geoff hadn’t given much thought to Vanessa’s future when he walked out. He’d vaguely assumed that she would get Alec into a nursery and go back to work as an audio typist – tough, but that was life – and that somehow, whether he ever decided to return or not, for a time she’d go on sitting there, waiting. She’d never have much money. He’d be able to keep her in line.

  Now she had her name in a magazine and a boyfriend who was a newspaper reporter and a stirrer. What’s more she still had Joanne and Alec. Meanwhile, here he sat in a hotel he couldn’t afford with Cindy moaning half the time and her dad in the pub, probably, not bothering to phone. Geoff Doyle was not a happy man; he ordered a second drink, a large one, and waited.

  Two days later, the police raided the Savernake Estate; and two days after that they did it again. The result of the raids was the uncovering of a flat in Savernake House full of stolen washing machines, several residents who were not the legal tenants, a three-year-old child who had been locked in a wardrobe overnight as a punishment and a teenager with half a pound of marijuana on the ground floor of Rodwell House. It was not, in police terms, a good result for a week-long surveillance of an inner city housing estate, followed by two early-morning raids involving twenty policemen. There were upholdable complaints made by three seemingly innocent families who had had doors perfunctorily knocked on, then rapidly kicked in by the police before dawn, one of them being old Mrs Walters. The general view in Kenton was that in order to justify these serious raids the police ought to have found a big drug-dealing operation or a nest of IRA bombers, not just a few stolen washing machines, a child in a wardrobe and a comparatively small amount of marijuana. Mrs Walters was on South East News, shaken but shrewdly maintaining what plenty of other people in Kenton thought, that the raid was connected with the appeal to the Department of the Environment to allow a second vote on the future of the estate; if Savernake could have been proved to be a nest of villains and degenerates then the incentive to clear it and get it into respectable hands would be greater.

  Joe Banks caught the local news in his detached house in Leadham Common. His wife was away and his daughter, who had come over to clean up and cook a meal for him, found him with his head buried in his hands. ‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ she said as she put his meal of steak, mushrooms, tomatoes and chips on the table. ‘Come on, it’ll get cold.’

  Banks, reluctant to forfeit her goodwill, poured himself a whisky and took it to the table. His daughter sat down at the other end. ‘You’re drinking not eating,’ she complained.

  ‘Stupid idiots,’ he mumbled. ‘I told them. Don’t let it be said I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘What?’ she asked, a chip in her fingers.

  ‘Nothing,’ returned her father shortly.

  The row about the abortive police raid on the Savernake Estate would soon blow over as such things did, but, as such things do, it would leave behind the familiar faint aroma of urban corruption, a compound of money, crime, unattributable orders from on high, unadmittable friendships, and favours given and received.

  He’d already had Charles Head, general manager of the Savernake Village project, on the phone, reproaching him in a call Banks suspected was taped. Head blamed him for having originated the notion of a police raid during their first discussions of the project. It was true that at one point Banks had said, ‘A good police raid will always shift a few tenants, the ones who oughtn’t to be there, anyway, and the ones who won’t be, once the law catches up with them. A raid like that usually turns up some villains – it’s good PR.’

  Later, some instinct had told him a police raid on Savernake would be a bad idea, but by that time the ambitious, striped-shirted Head was pressing him to act. ‘Come on, Joe,’ he’d said. ‘You told me a police raid would have an effect.’

  ‘I expect so,’ Banks admitted. ‘A raid’s bound to flush out a few malefactors. But—’

  ‘What’s the harm then?’ Head had demanded. ‘Even getting a few tenants out would be a plus.’

  Banks hesitated. ‘It could turn against us.’

  ‘Can you do it?’ asked Head. His voice was firm. ‘You said a word or two with the Chief Super and it was as good as done.’

  ‘If,’ Banks said heavily, ‘he considers it wouldn’t lead to more trouble.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If it’s seen as persecution, or being prompted by other considerations—’ began Banks.

  ‘Oh, come on, Joe,’ reproached Head. ‘If there are a load of villains on the housing estate and the coppers arrest a few and put them where they ought to be, and we can put pressure on the situation and get them out for good and all, what’s the harm? Society loses a few villains, we get hold of a few flats.’

  Against his better judgement, Banks agreed to have a word with the Chief Superintendent. Now he regretted it.

  He cut a mushroom on his plate into halves, then quarters. He ate one of the quarters. He’d spoken to the Superintendent, a fellow mason: the two raids had taken place. They’d gained two, possibly three flats. But the press had somehow been keener on Mrs Walters as an elderly widow who’d had her door kicked in before dawn than they’d been about the child discovered in the wardrobe, much as their attention had been drawn to it by the police PRO. Joe’s instinct told him that this reluctance by the popular press to focus on the depravity of Savernake residents was a straw in the wind; an indication that times were changing, sympathies altering. Of course the Department of the Environment would deny the appeal for a new vote. Their decision would finally put the estate and the park into the hands of Savernake Developments, bringing seven million much-needed pounds to Kenton’s public purse, but this consideration did not cheer Banks as much as it should. Everything was going according to plan, but he still felt uneasy … And if it all went wrong he’d lose credibility, might never lead the council again.

  At the other end of the table his daughter had finished her meal and said sharply, ‘Dad. If you’re not going to eat that I’m taking it home for the dog. Now, do you want some apple pie?’

  ‘I’ll just have a cup of tea, thanks,’ said Joe absent-mindedly.

  ‘We vowed we’d get love, money and revenge,’ Vanessa said. She and Ben, Annie and Tom had taken Monday, usually quiet, off, leaving the restaurant in the hands of Abigail, now re-employed since the restaurant was becoming so much more successful. They’d gone out for an expensive West End meal, to check the competition and give Melanie a treat because she had to go home. They were now drinking Armagnac in the bar under potted palms,

  ‘You’ve got the love,’ Tom said boldly, kissing Annie’s cheek. Annie gave him a stare, but said nothing.

  ‘And the restaurant’s making a profit,’ Vanessa said. ‘At least, it has for a few weeks. But revenge is thin on the ground. Now, if the Department of the Environment had allowed another vote by the Savernake tenants and the estate sale was blocked, then that would have put Geoff and Julian in trouble. But the Department’s gone along with the sale, and Geoff and Julian are going to make a bomb out of it. Still, never mind revenge – who needs it?’

  �
�It’s the last cherry on the cake, sometimes,’ Ben claimed. ‘Come on – let’s admit it. Who really feels upset when someone who wronged them falls flat on their face in the mud? It might not be the only thing in life, but it can be fun. There’s a child in all of us, who enjoys the school bully turning up on crutches.’

  ‘True,’ said Tom.

  ‘And then there’s Melanie,’ Annie said. ‘She’s got to go back home tomorrow.’ All the faces at the table sobered, except Melanie’s.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ she stated. They stared. ‘I’m not,’ she insisted.

  Earlier, Melanie had been sitting in the corner beside the kitchen at the Arcadia, looking blankly at her grapefruit. There was only one other table occupied in the restaurant, where a couple were quarrelling in low voices. Edward had sneaked off. Abigail was sorting out the freezer in the kitchen and her partner smoking by the dustbins in the yard. David Pickering, driven off by Tom earlier in the week, had just rung Melanie and told her she had to get the four-twenty to York next day, or else.

  ‘Or else what?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Or else the police’ll take you back,’ he’d told her. ‘And after them, you’ll have me to deal with. I’m in charge now, not your soft-headed mother – and she needs you at home.’

  She still thought Geoff Doyle, his employer, had put him up to all this, as a gesture of spite against Vanessa, but there was nothing she could do. On impulse she jumped up, put her head round the door and spoke to Abigail’s back. ‘I’m just going out for five minutes.’ Abigail didn’t hear. Melanie ran past the snack bar and rang Madame Katarina’s bell. ‘It’s Melanie!’ she called into the grille on the doorpost. Upstairs she burst out, ‘Please, Madame Katarina, tell me if I’m ever going to get back here. What’s going to happen to me?’

  Madame Katarina took pity on her and sat down at her small table with the fringed cloth. She asked Melanie to shuffle a pack of cards.