Murder... Now and Then (37 page)

‘No, Dave. What if you got into a fight?'

He knew the risks. But he needed a job. He needed regular money. He needed space, and a garden for the kids to play in. He needed to stop having rows with Jackie, and he needed his authority back. He couldn't tell her not to pay that kind of money for a pair of trainers, because it was her money.

‘Don't work for them, Dave,' she pleaded. ‘Not yet. We can manage a little while longer – promise me you won't. Not yet. Not unless you absolutely have to.'

He sighed. ‘All right' he said. But he would have to. Sooner or later. He would have to get money from somewhere.

The door opened and his youngest appeared. ‘Why are you shouting?' she asked, slightly tearful.

Jackie smiled. ‘ Your dad sat on that thing,' she said, pointing. ‘He hurt his bum.'

She made her laugh, when a moment before she had been worried, and a little afraid. Bannister wished she could do the same for him, as Jackie swept her up and took her back upstairs. She was a good girl, Jackie, and all he ever did these days was shout at her for spending her own money. Bannister felt tears of rage at the world and its injustice prick his eyes, and he reached over and picked up the paper again.

Maybe he could work out what all those initials meant. Maybe he could do the bloody job, once he knew what it was.

‘This man Max Scott is a friend of yours, I believe,' said Holyoak, towelling himself off, taking a breather as Rule moved the speed up on the jogging machine, and began to run.

It was a nice little set-up that Rule had, he thought. Get them fit, keep them fit. Check up on their heart, their blood pressure, their cholesterol levels, eyesight teeth, the lot. One stop health clinic. A healthy executive is a wealthy executive. One jump ahead of the competition; on top of stress, on top of the job. A ten-thousand-mile service for the executive's most important asset – his health. They paid through the nose for it because it gave them an edge.

‘Yes,' said Rule, perspiration running from his temple down the side of his face.

‘What sort of man is he?'

‘Honest,' said Rule. ‘Reliable. But I'd be lying if I said hard working – Max does as much work as is necessary to get the job done. But he's straight. And likeable.'

‘I hear he plays around with women,' said Holyoak.

He had taken full advantage of Rule's set-up at the clinic; Rule had been impressed by his physical fitness. Just because you were in your fifties was no reason to go to seed. Holyoak just worked harder than ever, and then relaxed by pushing himself to his limits in the gym. Like Scott he neither drank nor smoked. Unlike Scott, he didn't play around with women.

Rule slowed the speed to walking pace, and mopped his brow with his sweat band. ‘I wonder where you heard that,' he said.

‘I was speaking to Mrs Driver last night,' said Holyoak. ‘I asked her the same question I just asked you. She said much the same things – except that she said he was reliable up to a point. The point being the opposite sex, where she seemed to believe he had very little willpower, and could easily get side-tracked.'

Rule stepped off, and Holyoak got on, moving up through the speeds until he was running as fast as the machine would allow him to. ‘Well?' he said. ‘Does he play around with women?'

Rule was out of breath; Holyoak waited for his reply. ‘He used to,' said Rule. ‘Not any more, I don't think.'

Holyoak's feet pounded on the moving belt as he spoke. ‘I'm thinking of making him general manager,' he said. ‘Mrs Driver doesn't agree.'

‘No,' said Rule. ‘She wouldn't. But I'd say he'd be the obvious choice, if Tim Driver doesn't want to carry on.'

‘Driver hates it. He wants to write about art, but he didn't think he could leave while his mother owned the business.'

‘That's what's really bugging Zelda,' said Rule. ‘Not Max. She doesn't understand why Tim isn't more like his father.'

Holyoak nodded. ‘I thought as much,' he said, still less breathless than Rule, despite running as he spoke. ‘But be straight with me, Charles – are women a weakness as far as Scott's concerned?'

He could see that Rule was being torn between truth and loyalty under the guise of towelling off. He looked up at Holyoak. ‘ I suppose I'd have to say yes,' he said. ‘ I think he would say yes, if you were to ask him himself.' He sat back on the windowledge. ‘He doesn't chase women,' he said. ‘He attracts them. And he … well, I was going to say that he found that difficult to resist, but I don't honestly think he ever tried to resist. But that was a long time ago. He's married now – he thinks the world of Catherine.'

‘But he was married before, wasn't he? Didn't his wife get herself—'

‘Yes,' said Rule quickly, cutting him off. ‘But no one who knows Max believes that he had anything at all to do with that except possibly Zelda. Max was at Catherine's flat in London when it happened – it all got sorted out.'

‘At her flat?' Holyoak said. ‘ What was he doing there?'

Rule looked at him a little uncertainly. ‘Well – he was there about work, I think, but everyone thinks the worst, of course. She needed a reference, or something.'

Holyoak frowned as he thought about that. He had said he was at Catherine's flat that night? It might be worth getting to know Scott a little better. It never hurt to know as much as possible about your employees. ‘All of which does rather bear Mrs Driver out,' he said, keeping his breathing strong.

Rule shrugged. ‘I wouldn't let it put you off making him general manager,' he said. ‘He kept that business going for Zelda – Tim on his own would have been worse than useless. And he'll do a good job for you too.'

Holyoak slowed the machine, and stepped off, manfully still controlling his breathing so that Rule would continue to feel inferior. ‘Thanks,' he said. ‘ You've been very helpful.'

‘It's ridiculous! said Lloyd. ‘I told her so!'

Judy raised her eyebrows. ‘Lloyd – telling a seventeen-year-old girl that what she wants to do is ridiculous simply guarantees that she'll want to do it!'

‘Oh, and you'd know, of course, having so many teenage children of your own!'

He was being unfair; he knew he was. Judy was trying to get everyone out of what promised to be a real mess, but they had had this conversation over and over again in the last two months, and it had got them nowhere.

‘I
was
a seventeen-year-old girl, which is more than you've ever been.'

Lloyd sank down into his leather armchair, acknowledging the truth of that, but failing to see where this endless argument was going to get any of them.

Judy came over to him, and knelt down, her hand on his knee. ‘It won't take long for it to dawn on her that she doesn't need anyone's permission,' she said. ‘And that
is
dangerous.'

‘So I should just let her go off with my blessing, is that what you're saying? Let her take her chances? Hope that she doesn't end up sleeping in a shop doorway or walking the streets?'

Judy sighed. ‘Lloyd, take it from me. Seventeen-year-old girls do not aim to be street-walkers. They want to go to London because they think they'll get a fantastic job and be able to buy clothes and make-up and go to pop concerts all the time. It isn't like that, but you can't tell them that.'

‘So what do you tell them?' He got up again, and walked round the room in an effort to work off the frustration. He had seen them – so had Judy. Little girls hard-bitten before they hit their twenties. They weren't waifs and strays; they weren't some subspecies. They were ordinary young girls who had found themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and thought that they could see a way out. What they did have in common, most of them, was that they came from broken homes.

‘You don't tell them it's ridiculous,' Judy said.

‘But it is! And this new man of Barbara's is just complicating everything!'

‘Oh, Lloyd! You can't—'

‘I'm not saying she shouldn't have a new man!' he said, cutting off her protests. He wasn't. He was pleased that Barbara had someone else; it took the edge off his guilt a little. ‘I'm saying it complicates things,' he said. ‘Barbara's talking about marriage, you know. And I know that she'll be very careful and do everything right but—' He broke off, and shrugged a little, because what he had been going to say wasn't strictly true. He had been going to say that Linda resented this man, and he knew that she didn't, not really. She liked him. She was using him as an excuse, that was all, but it wasn't terribly convincing.

A tiny part of him wanted to believe that she did resent him. Because Lloyd was afraid that he had already forfeited his daughter's love, and the manifestation of a possible stepfather had rattled him.

‘It does complicate things,' he said, this time being painfully honest with himself. ‘ I lose my temper with her because I'm afraid I'm losing her.'

Judy smiled, and came up to him, kissing him lightly on the lips. ‘I know all about that,' she said.

He sighed. Did other people have all this trouble with women? Did it give them some sort of satisfaction to keep a man guessing? Judy liked living in two flats. He didn't. It always made him wonder if she really felt as strongly about him as he did about her.

‘And you're not losing her any more than you're losing me,' she said. ‘ Just because people want independence doesn't mean they don't love you any more.'

‘Independence! What sort of independence is she going to have trying to make ends meet in London, for God's sake?'

‘Lloyd – if you don't want your worst scenario to come true, you have to calm down and look at the problem. Because if you don't, then before you know it, she could actually have run away to London – and that's the last thing anyone wants.'

‘So what am I supposed to do?'

Judy's brown eyes looked frankly into his. ‘She wants to go to London,' she said. ‘I think you should let her.'

‘Oh, sure,' he said, breaking away from her. ‘Just let her. Let her go to London and share a flat with God knows who doing God knows what with God knows whom. Let her find out that you can't get a job for love nor money, and that you get kicked out of flats when you don't pay the rent. Let her—'

‘If you could stop talking for once in your life and listen, it might help!'

She had raised her voice; the sheer surprise of it stopped Lloyd in mid-sentence. They had had rows – my God, had they had rows. Rows about one another, not about a third party. And never once, during any of them, had Judy shouted. He could yell himself hoarse, but she never yelled back. He was startled into listening to her.

‘I think I have an idea,' she said, her voice back to its usual even tone. ‘ If you'd like to hear it.'

For the first time in three months, Anna Worthing was doing something which she really understood, for which she was eminently qualified, and was doing it with her customary skill.

Max lay back, breathing deeply. After a few moments of silence, she told him how wonderful it had been, with considerably more conviction than she had ever felt with anyone else. After groping for weeks through an alien jungle of marketing strategies and product identification, she was finally operating in her own field of expertise; that was wonderful in itself. Her satisfaction was that of a job done well, but she had of course allowed Max to think that he had brought it about.

It had startled her when Victor had told her to get Max Scott into bed. She hadn't asked why; she knew better than to do that. But it did seem a little odd. And she had thought it might be difficult; she had been working with Max for three months, and he had never shown the slightest interest in her, not in that way. He was friendly, and helpful – he had even listened to her problems with work, and saved her from making a fool of herself more times than she cared to think about. But he'd never made a pass or anything like one; she had thought that he might not respond if she made the running.

She looked round the beige and white bedroom, wondering if Victor had put a camera in this one. His wife had been living here until Christmas, and he had said that he would be using it himself from time to time, so she had assumed that it would be fly-on-the-wall free. But presumably he wanted to have something on Max for some reason, and the guest flat in the Amsterdam office had had a camera recording the proceedings. Some of Victor's guests were still regretting their few hours of illicit pleasure with her. He had employed others now and again, when she wouldn't do, but mostly it was alimony-grabbing wives of whom the businessmen were afraid.

She hoped Max wouldn't regret it, but obviously he would, somehow, because he seemed to have nothing to offer Victor, which was the only other reason for her favours being bestowed. She liked Max; he was always there when you needed him, somehow. He didn't let people down. The words she had thought made her shiver slightly; she lived in dread of letting Victor down, of finding herself back down there on the street hustling a living.

‘Are you cold?' Max asked, putting his arm round her, drawing her into the warmth of his body.

‘Goose walked over my grave,' she said.

He kissed her. ‘You're not still worrying about the meeting, are you?' he asked. ‘Just tell them that you don't speak their jargon, and they had better tell you what they mean in plain English, or they're off the project.' He smiled. ‘It's amazing what an effect that has on them,' he said.

She hadn't thought about the meeting; the sheer relief of being back on familiar ground had driven all thoughts of Holyoak UK's image in the market place out of her mind.

She had devised all manner of strategies to hook Max, but as it turned out, it hadn't been difficult at all; the opportunity had presented itself. She had had a real problem with a letter from one of the firms which were competing to give Holyoak UK a corporate identity, of which she had barely understood a word, except the fact that their task was difficult, given the wide diversity of goods and services provided by Holyoak International; tomorrow, she would have to attend a meeting to discuss their proposals, and she had panicked.