Fall From Grace (30 page)
‘Yes, I’m Tiffany,’ she answered. ‘Jake’s wife.’
She emphasised the word ‘wife’ as if she was slapping him across the face with it.
‘Any news on Jake?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You heard anything?’
‘No,’ said Paul.
‘Mind you, I don’t know who he’d contact first,’ said Tiffany. ‘You or me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Suppose it depends on which one of us he was into at that particular moment.’
‘You should be sitting down,’ said Paul, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk.
‘I’d rather stand, thank you.’
‘Tiffany, for fuck’s sake you shouldn’t be standing for too long and neither should you get yourself upset.’
Tiffany put her hand on her hip. The affected drama of the move almost made Paul burst out laughing.
‘You’ve got a sodding nerve. If you didn’t want me upset then you shouldn’t have been sleeping with my husband!’
Paul’s momentary flash of humour was quickly replaced by anger. ‘I was going out with Jake for nearly four years before he married you.’
‘Really?’ she scoffed.
‘Yes, really, and instead of being a grown up and telling me he didn’t want me anymore he just stopped contacting me for months. I was going out of my mind with worry when he was building his little love nest with you so if anybody’s got a right to be upset it’s me!’
‘So you say,’ she said dismissively.
‘Yes, I say! So sit down and we’ll talk but I’m not taking a lecture from you, Tiffany, because I don’t deserve it.’
Tiffany waited a moment and then she did sit down. Her back was aching. Her legs were too and she really shouldn’t have worn these shoes. The heels were too high considering the bump she was already balancing.
‘How long before the baby is due?’
‘I’m seven months gone,’ she said. ‘Do you love him, Paul?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Paul.
‘Well at least you’re being honest.’
‘It’s the only way to be,’ said Paul, ‘no point pretending now.’
‘When I read about your friendship with him in the paper I just put two and two together. It was a shock but then so much has been a shock lately. I never expected my husband to be into men as well as women, but I had no idea he was working for a gangster either. Then when the police said they were looking for him in connection with Glenn Barber’s murder I just didn’t know what to do.’
Tiffany started sobbing and Paul couldn’t help going round and putting his arm round her.
‘I’ve moved back in with my Mum since we found out,’ said Tiffany, between sobs. ‘Why has Jake done this to me?’ she cried.
‘He hasn’t done it to you,’ said Paul in measured tones. Her self-obsession was annoying him. ‘He’s done it to himself.’
‘But I’m the one who’s got to live with it.’
‘Don’t you think he has too?’
‘I don’t know what he thinks and I’m not sure I care anymore.’
‘He should’ve held on,’ said Paul. ‘We could’ve put into his defence everything about the traumas he went through in Afghanistan. That’s where he changed, Tiffany. That’s what we need to understand.’
‘But he’s a murderer,’ she wailed. ‘He murdered Glenn Barber.’
‘I know but the lawyers could’ve argued mitigating circumstances, Tiffany, that’s what I’m saying.’
‘I’m too ashamed to face anyone I know,’ she said. ‘That’s another reason why I moved back in with my Mum.’
Oh so it’s back to being all about you, thought Paul. ‘I don’t see why.’
‘But what am I going to tell the baby?’ she pleaded. ‘How can I tell it that it’s father is a murderer?’
‘You don’t tell the baby that,’ said Paul who was struck by the weirdness of a situation where he was sitting here trying to reason with the wife of the man he loved. ‘You tell the baby that it’s father was a heroic soldier for his country but that his experiences led him to do some bad things.’
‘My Mum never wanted me to marry him but I loved him, Paul.’
Tiffany cried her heart out on Paul’s shoulder although he didn’t feel that disposed towards her. He didn’t like thinking it but she was clearly too thick to have been able to cope with someone as complex as Jake had become.
‘Look, Tiffany, you’ve got to focus on the future for yourself and the baby now.’
‘And how am I going to do that?’
‘I’ll make sure you’ve got enough money and I’ll make sure you’ve got everything you need for the baby.’
‘You’d have taken Jake off me if you’d had half the chance.’
‘Tiffany, either accept my help or don’t accept it,’ said Paul who was tired of trying to get through to this child. Jake was out there somewhere and what with that and everything else that was on his mind he really didn’t have time to indulge someone who should’ve been able to at least try and save Jake.
‘But you would’ve taken him off me,’ said Tiffany. ‘Don’t lie. You would’ve done if you could have.’
*
Louise Cooper tried her best to convince all the girls she worked with in the travel agent’s on the edge of Bury town centre that she wasn’t a gold digger. But they all knew that she was. The thing was that although she’d grown up on one of the town’s council estates, her family had been given a taste of the good life through her father’s £200,000 lottery win but her parents had splashed it around like the proverbial confetti and now, five years later, it had all but gone. They were back living on benefits and Louise badly needed her roots doing. But that was something else. She’d grown used to going to the top hair designer in Manchester and now she couldn’t contemplate going anywhere else. It was all part of the image she’d built up around herself. So she had to save up and though she’d been at the travel agents a while she wasn’t paid that much. She’d been passed over for promotion twice in the time she’d been there and though she would protest till the cows came home that she was quite happy out on the desk serving the customers, the reason why she hadn’t been promoted was that she lacked the ability for a supervisory or management position. She was thick. Exceptionally pretty on the outside, thanks to some very expensive make-up that she now struggled to keep on buying, but on the inside she was like a house with no furniture in it, a table laid but no food in the bare cupboards. Her accent was so affected it made her workmates cringe at times and she could always be heard above all other noise wherever she was. She knew they laughed at her behind her back. When her family had money she couldn’t have cared less. These days she’d been getting more sensitive about it.
Her current boyfriend was called Raymond. He wasn’t just in fine furnishings. He owned a chain of furniture shops across Northern England and they went to all the right places to eat and drink. He’d told her that he hadn’t had sex with his wife for five years and explained the existence of his two-year old daughter by having given in to his wife on her birthday once. Still, he gave her a good time in fancy places before she had to open her legs and try and keep up with his voracious appetite. She’d never known anything like it. He could keep it going for hours. She always told the girls at work all the details the next day whether they wanted to know or not.
But at least Raymond was helping her get over Justin. That really had been traumatic for her. She’d had to break up with him just days before their wedding when she’d woken up one morning and realised that she just didn’t love him anymore. It was the morning after he’d told her his business was about to collapse and that he’d have to declare himself bankrupt, meaning that he’d probably lose his six-bedroom detached with electric gates in Altrincham where Louise had made herself very comfortable. But of course that was just a coincidence and nothing to do with her feelings having changed at all. The girls in the office had seen through it all though. One of them now went out with Justin. She was helping him re-build his life and didn’t care whether or not he owned his own business. She just loved him and wanted to make him happy.
Louise liked to sit at the front desk just inside the window and often came in early to reserve her place. But this morning when she looked up and locked eyes with the man standing on the street looking in, she wished she hadn’t. In a split second she saw him produce his gun and fire it through the window, killing her instantly with a volley of bullets.
EIGHTEEN
The closer Paul got to Gatley Hall, the more nauseous he felt. He’d driven down the A34 out of Manchester city centre many times to go and see his friends Alan and Richard in Cheadle but this time his destination was rather different. He’d finally given in to all the calls and he was on his way to validate his own history, his own bloodline. He was going to see a grandmother he never knew he had, a woman who was nothing more than an evil criminal. He was still fielding calls from the press who’d tried to interview him at work and who’d turned up outside his house at all hours. It was starting to become a nightmare, especially once they had broken the story about how his grandmother and her Nazi boyfriend weren’t going to answer for their crimes.
When he got to the Hall he looked up at an edifice to everything he hated about the class system. There was even a fucking Union Jack flying above the front door. He wasn’t against that per se but he detested the way the flag had been hijacked by the far right and it was such hypocrisy for his grandmother to fly it considering everything she’d done against the country. He took a deep breath. He could hear his bowels. They were angry. But then he told himself off. He had nothing to be ashamed of. Those who should be ashamed were already inside this glorified prison.
He was greeted at the door by a member of his grandmother’s staff and led through to where she was waiting for him.
‘Well now,’ said Eleanor as she looked him up and down, ‘here you are then. You finally responded to my calls.’
Paul took a deep breath. It made his skin crawl to think that he was related to this woman who wouldn’t know shame if her life depended on it.
‘I didn’t want to but my father brought me up to show due respect.’
‘Then he brought you up well.’
‘You should be grateful to him.’
‘Yes, well, we have important matters to discuss but firstly, I had my staff prepare us some drinks,’ said Eleanor, waving her hand across the tray of drinks on the table in front of her. ‘I understand you’re partial to a gin and tonic?’
This was weird, thought Paul. She was his grandmother but she was also an unreconstructed fascist who harbours Nazi war criminals. She was a woman who’d screwed up the lives of his mother, his father, and himself. He hadn’t known quite what to expect but apart from her frailty, what struck Paul was the menace in her eyes. They were the coldest and most disturbing pair of eyes he’d ever seen.
‘Do you think I’ve come here to talk about good times over a drink?’
‘Oh God, you’re going to be tiresome,’ said Eleanor, ‘your mother was the same.’
‘I buried my mother yesterday.’
‘Well you had good weather for it.’
‘You didn’t bother to turn up to your own daughter’s funeral!’
‘I had other things to do.’
‘That was more important? I don’t think so’
‘Look, having a conscience has never been one of my failings, Paul,’ said Eleanor.
‘Never a truer word spoken,’ Paul spat back.
‘Alright,’ said Eleanor. ‘If that’s how you want it. Look Paul, when it came to your mother, I neglected her when she was a child. I was selfish and I saw her as an irritating distraction from whatever I wanted to do. She and Ronald took to each other even though of course he wasn’t her father. But I let them get on with it. There was nothing in it for me in playing happy families.’
‘My God, it’s true what they say. You really are heartless.’
‘Then when she was grown up and we might’ve had things to talk about, it was too late. We didn’t know each other and we didn’t like each other. When she met your father I could see how happy and in love she was but I didn’t believe in love across the social classes and I still don’t.’
‘So you were happy to use someone of the lower classes to further your cause of fascism but your daughter mustn’t marry him?’
‘Your way of putting it.’
‘You destroyed my parents’ happiness and my chances of growing up with my own family!’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, stop being so dramatic.’
‘You let an innocent man hang for a murder you’d committed,’ said Paul.
Eleanor paused. ‘Wilfred Jenkins… if there’d been a scandal then it would’ve destroyed any chance I had of facilitating a deal with Hitler to bring an end to the war.’
‘But you’d have done that without any regard at all for the Poles, the Belgians, the Dutch, the French, the Norwegians. I’ve read all about how the British aristocracy wanted Chamberlain to sell out the continent to protect the empire.’