Permissible Limits (58 page)

That night, I tracked Mr Grover down to a small country hotel near Shrewsbury. He was investigating a series of hot-air balloon accidents and I told him just enough to make it plain that I needed the bag back in a hurry. The tests he’d done on it had all been completed so there was no problem in releasing it. When he finally offered to get someone to fish it out and put it in a Jiffy bag, I said I had a better idea.

‘
I’ll
fly
up tomorrow and pick it up,’ I said. ‘Just tell me where to go.’

I flew up to Farnborough in the Moth next morning, alone this time. Mr Grover’s secretary met me at the foot of the control tower. She was carrying a black plastic dustbin liner, held slightly away from her body. The bin liner was heavier than I’d expected and I strapped it down in the front cockpit. When she offered me coffee in her office, I thanked her but said I had to get back.

An hour later I was downwind in the circuit at Sandown. It says a great deal about my state of mind that I’d overflown the strip twice. I was looking for a red Yak trainer. The last person on earth I wanted to meet was Harald Meyler. According to Dennis Wetherall, he was in the Ukraine but even accountants can - just sometimes - be wrong.

Once I’d landed, I taxied over to the hangar, pulled the Moth into wind, and shut down the engine. This was almost exactly the spot where Harald had first given me the bag. I remembered his face when he’d handed it over, that expression of stony regret when he’d told me to look in the side pocket. I’d found the American Express card myself. I’d turned it over, seen the name, drawn the inevitable conclusion. Only then had he stepped across and put his arms round me. I remembered with absolute clarity how grateful I’d felt for his sympathy and his rough compassion, and I remembered too the very next thing he’d said. He’d offered to fly at the funeral. In Adam’s Mustang.

I reached into the Moth’s front cockpit and released the harness. I held the bin liner gingerly, just like Mr Grover’s secretary, and when I upended it and shook the bag on to the grass, I stepped smartly back, as if it might explode.

It still felt damp to the touch when I picked it up. I turned it over and over, examining it from every angle, then I did what I’d been wanting to do since I’d sat in Dennis’s office, staring at the sales slip from Hurn Airport. I found the zip fastener and pulled it up and down. The fact that it ran smoothly, and then made a snug fit with the little tongue of metal on the other side, told me everything I
wanted
to
know.
The zip on Adam’s old bag had broken just before Christmas. One of the jobs I’d never got round to was mending it.

Chapter seventeen

That night, it took me
nearly
an hour to find the photograph album. Before I flew off to Florida, I’d had a giant sort-out, clearing the decks for what I wanted to be a brand-new start, and a lot of the treasures from my marriage had been boxed away in the little upstairs room we use for storage. Andrea had also been reorganising Mapledurcombe and it was gone eight before I laid hands on the battered cardboard box that held all the photographs.

I carried it downstairs to Adam’s office, clearing a space on the desk and making it plain to Andrea that I’d welcome a little privacy. I’d have preferred to have used the tiny snug where Adam and I had so often spent our evenings, but this - like every other room in the house - seemed to have been annexed by the guests.

The album went way back to Gander Creek. I leafed slowly through the carefully stuck-on snapshots, following the path we’d trodden from the Falklands, back to the UK, up to Aberdeen, and then finally down here to Mapledurcombe. This was a journey I’d promised myself I’d never retrace - too upsetting, too self-indulgent -but what came back to me time and time again was the simplicity of the love affair we’d turned into a marriage.

From photograph after photograph came the sound of laughter, and that glad embrace of life that had been both Adam’s strength and his weakness. His appetite for fun, for adventure, for getting things
done,
was limitless, while his patience for people or circumstances that got in his way was nonexistent. In this latter respect he was a bit like Harald, and I lingered over a particular shot I’d taken only last year.

They’d both been flying in the big Air Tattoo up at Fairford. Adam had just landed and taxied back to the flight line and Harald was up on the wing, squatting beside the open cockpit. It was a marvellous shot, full of sunshine and excitement and that special satisfaction pilots get from a nice display. At the time it seemed to me to capture exactly the bond between these two very different men - Adam passionate, disorganised, far too candid for his own good; Harald remote, obsessive, incredibly buttoned-down - but looking at it now I began to wonder. Harald, asI knew, never did anything without at least six ulterior motives. What really lay behind that rare smile he’d managed to conjure up for my camera?

The business with the bag was incredibly disturbing. At best, it meant that Harald had lied to me. He must have known that it wasn’t Adam’s holdall. Worse, given the tests that Mr Grover had carried out, he must have submerged the thing in saltwater and kept it there for days to get the right result. But what was the point in going to all this trouble? Why should he want to return something as grotesque and final as a replica of Adam’s old kit bag? And how come he’d managed to lay hands on Adam’s Amex card?

The answer, I imagined, was to convince me that my husband really was dead, and if I wanted to be benevolent I suppose it was just possible that he was trying to save me from myself. It was certainly true that the absence of a body had been extremely hard to accept. Maybe Harald believed that a lookalike bag - plus my husband’s credit card - was the next best thing.

Really?

I flicked through the rest of the album, not beginning to believe it. I knew Harald was a control freak. I knew he’d tried to lay hands first on our Mustang, then on me. But there were lengths, surely, to which even he wouldn’t go. Not unless there was something infinitely more sinister behind it.

I went back through the album, hunting for my favourite shot of Adam, and I was still gazing at it when Andrea walked in. The cup of tea in her right hand was nothing more than a pretext. Eternally nosy, she wanted to know what I was up to.

I
felt
guilty at once. I
’d
gone
solo
in
the
Mustang. I was
reborn. Mooning over curling snapshots belonged to the old Ellie.

‘
Just looking,’ I muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

Andrea took the bait at once. Hamish, her estranged husband, had just initiated divorce proceedings and our conversations more or less revolved around the series of bitter little tableaux that seemed to represent her marriage. How he’d never lifted a finger around the house. How he never wanted to share her passion for modern art. How he’d never cared a stuff about anything she did. I was still looking at Adam, his face turned back towards the camera, and as I listened to Andrea banging on, the conviction grew that I’d badly misjudged him. He hadn’t, after all, been unfaithful. He hadn’t gone galloping after some windsurfing sexbomb in a tight-fitting wetsuit. I’d been right to trust him, right to believe he loved me, and now was the time to make amends. I thought of Harald again, and the scene I’d made in the restaurant on Sanibel Island. Adam had been buying me a Spitfire, for God’s sake. Is that the kind of present you give a wife you’re bored to death with?

Andrea had got to the bit where she was about to instruct her own solicitor to counter-sue for adultery. I reached for my tea, interrupting her.

‘
I’m going over to Jersey for a while,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exactly how long.’

Andrea looked horrified.

‘
But Jamie’s so busy,’ she said at once. ‘I couldn’t possibly spare him.’

‘
Who said anything about Jamie?’

‘
You mean you’re going by yourself?’

‘
Yes, tomorrow.’

She looked at me for a long moment. When she bothers to take any notice of other people, Andrea can be much shrewder than she seems.

‘
You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?’

It was a good question. I put the tea down and then closed the photograph album.

‘
Not me, Andrea.’ I smiled at her. ‘Not yet.’

I was back on Jersey by lunchtime next day. I’d thrown enough clothes in the front of the Moth to last me for a week and I
booked
myself into the Bon Accueil, the little French-run hotel where Adam and I used to stay. The woman who ran it even gave me the room we always used, number
7
.
The sight of the double bed and the glimpse of geraniums behind the half-closed wooden shutters made me feel inexplicably better. Maybe Adam wouldn’t limit his visits to the back seat of the Mustang. Maybe he’d deign to join me here tonight.

I’d brought the snap of Michelle La Page over from Mapledurcombe and I propped it against the vase of flowers beside the bed. I’d no idea where the next few days would take me but I definitely knew where I intended to start. I’d hired a small Renault from the Budget desk at the airport and after lunch I drove back to St Ouen’s Bay. The high pressure was still with us, and when I got down to the windsurfing school the car park was nearly full. It was hot, way up in the high seventies, and I mingled with the students on the beach, hiding behind an enormous pair of sunglasses. Michelle was down by the water, rigging a board. A group of young kids were hanging on to her every word and I propped myself against a rock on the beach, watching from a distance, trying to work out what to do.

What I wanted was a specimen of her handwriting. Before I did anything else, I needed to be sure that the message on the back of the photograph had really come from her. But how could I lay hands on a sample of her script?

The afternoon wore on. Michelle and her group were afloat by now and I was impressed by her patience with the kids. Windsurfing was obviously harder than it looked and whenever one of them fell off - which was often - she was there in the water beside them, giving them a hand back on to the board, taking them through the manoeuvre again. Watching them, I couldn’t help thinking about Jamie and his pregnant ex-girlfriend. Was he serious about adoption? Should I be?

Around four, I went back to the car and found a pen and an old envelope in my bag. By the time I got back to the beach, Michelle and her kids were packing up. She supervised the de-rig and shepherded them up towards me. At first, when I intercepted her, she hadn’t got a clue who I was.

I took the glasses off.

‘
Ellie Bruce,’ I said. ‘Adam’s wife.’

The expression on her face said it all. The last thing she wanted was another confrontation. I told her I needed ten minutes of her time. Not necessarily here. And not necessarily now.

‘
Where, then?’

‘
You tell me. Wherever it suits.’

The kids had gathered round her. They stared up at me, openly curious.

‘
This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You have no right.’

‘
I agree.’

‘
So why don’t you -’

The kids began to stir. They could sense the aggression, the smell
of impending trouble.
I produced the envelope and the biro.

‘
Here,’ I said. ‘Give me an address.’

‘
An
address?
’

‘
Somewhere we can talk, tonight preferably. Doesn’t matter where. Cafe, pub, your home, wherever.’

Michelle looked dubious, then put her board down. She scribbled an address on the envelope and handed it back. Water from her wetsuit had blobbed the first line but the rest of it seemed pretty clear.

‘
It’s a pub,’ she said, ‘in the village up the road.’

‘
Eight o’clock?’

‘
Seven. And you’d better mean ten minutes because I’ve got to pick up my daughter at half past.’

I went back to my rock in the sun. When the kids had disappeared into the sand dunes, I retrieved the photo from the top pocket of my shirt. Side by side, I compared the two sets of handwriting, feeling the relief flooding through me. The message on the back of the photo couldn’t after all, have come from Michelle.