The Ties That Bind (20 page)

‘Poor Sandy,’ he said.

A couple of foreign language students came chattering into the cafe. Marcelle looked at them like they were spies and dropped her voice even further. ‘So next time she tells you how much she loves local news, remember that she would give
anything
to be working on the nationals. Despite what she says, she still thinks Brighton is a poor substitute for London. The capital’s not the be-all and end-all.’ Luke warmed to Marcelle for this flare of defensive pride in his newly adopted city. ‘And she clings to that archive because if that doesn’t work out either, what’s she got to show for her life? She’s stuck up and she’s bitter and she blames Grand for it, because it’s easier than admitting she couldn’t play with the big boys.’ She sighed. ‘Look, you don’t need to raise the subject again if you’re not going to chase this story. But if you do go back to her, be gentle with her.’

Behind them, the coffee machine hissed and spluttered, cutting short the conversation. Luke let the new facts settle but they wouldn’t lie straight. Something about what Marcelle had told him was discordant with what he’d seen in Sandy’s eyes. It wasn’t bitterness or anger that he’d seen but fear, pure distilled fear. There was more to this than Marcelle was letting on. He looked at the librarian, wide-eyed and ingenuous again after the catharsis of gossip, sipping her tea. No, that wasn’t right. There was more to it than she
knew
.

Chapter 29

A security camera whirred and pivoted as it followed Luke up the driveway. Vaughan was a bulwark in the open front door, arms folded, face set. Luke expected him to smile, or step aside, or even just to acknowledge him; but he remained motionless, and his confidence faltered the closer he got. Vaughan waited until the first breath of Luke’s stammered request to enter before stepping aside with a smirk.
Wanker
, thought Luke, as he crossed the threshold. It was a classic school-bully move, an effective assertion of power without a bruise to show or words to repeat to the teacher. He knew why Vaughan was doing it. He disapproved of Luke’s presence in his master’s house – in his master’s life – but voicing that disapproval, contradicting Grand’s judgement, was more than his job was worth.

Those interior walls not papered with flock were lined with wood, giving Luke the impression of being in a giant sauna. In the vast sitting room, shiny with brown veneer, a wall unit was formed around a central cubbyhole the size of a microwave oven, clearly intended to house a television. It was far too small for a contemporary set, and the huge flat screen parked in the corner of the room looked incongruous and somehow temporary. A strangely undomestic smell hung in the air; a mixture of cleaning products and also a vague hospital whiff that kept popping up between waves of air-freshener and made Luke wonder again exactly what Grand’s medical needs were.

‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ Grand said from an L-shaped sofa that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an airport lounge. He raised his stick in a proprietorial gesture, undermined by the way it shook in his hand.

‘Come through to the office.’

Luke waded after Grand through a mustard shagpile carpet that only a professional cleaner would have had the patience to maintain. It spoke of a life without a wife, without children or pets. His breathing seemed easier up here, away from the dark confines of Temperance Place. Perhaps it was the confidence of being on his home turf, or maybe he was just freshly medicated.

The office, at the end of a short corridor, had the footprint of a three-bedroomed house. Patio doors gave onto a back garden the size of a park. Beyond a wide terrace the tip of a diving board declared a swimming pool. A huge, state-of-the-art computer screen, almost as large as the television, sat on a hideous smoked glass table with chrome legs. On a high shelf, four security monitors rotated lifeless, blue-grey images from around the property.

At the far end of the room was a table accommodating a huge model of a block of flats. Even from here Luke could see the little model trees and people dotted at its base.

‘Black Rock Heights,’ said Grand, following his gaze. ‘My first big property. I was going to get a little model made up of all of them but I’d have had to build a whole town in the back garden.’

‘It’s impressive,’ said Luke, meaning all of it, meaning everything. He was almost humming with anticipation.

‘I know. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Come here. I want you to look at my numbers.’ The humming stopped. No interpretation of the word ‘numbers’ arrived at the photographs or artefacts that he had been hoping to see.

The reason for the outsized screen became apparent as Grand pulled up a spreadsheet and then zoomed in until the digits were big enough for him to see. Some people – Jem, for instance – had a head for this kind of thing and could detect patterns in seemingly random sets of figures. Luke’s brain did not work that way.

‘You brought me here to show me your
accounts
?’

‘Why, what else were you expecting?’

‘What about some of your old boxing belts or something? Or any old photos? Of you and Jacky Nye when you were in business together, may be?’

Grand prickled. ‘I don’t keep anything from them days.’

It took all Luke’s courage to nod towards the model of Black Rock Heights.

‘That’s not them days. That’s
after
.’

He must mean after the murder of Jacky Nye. Somehow they had leapfrogged from the ragamuffin charm of Grand’s wartime childhood to his present philanthropic incarnation, bypassing the years at the heart of the story.

‘I brung you up here to show you my books. Pull up a chair, sit your arse down.’ Grand spoke as if it were the fifth and final time of asking. Reluctantly Luke did as he was told. Lines and rows of numbers spread meaninglessly before his eyes.

‘Spectacular, isn’t it?’ said Grand wistfully. ‘It starts off with graft; that’s how you get your capital. Then comes the investment stage and that’s about having common sense and balls in the right measure. But then comes the final stage, where the numbers start to grow on their own, like bacteria. Hang on, here.’ He tapped with his pen on the screen at a column of figures, decimal point leaping to the right. When Grand finally shut the page down, Luke realised that he had not mentioned one of the causes he raised money for and wondered how much of the charity work was done out of genuine philanthropy and how much was ego. The old greed, the acquisitive mania Luke had glimpsed in their first interview, remained undiminished.

‘That’s brilliant, thank you. I think I’ve got the gist,’ said Luke. ‘Maybe we can move on to —’ but Grand continued to speak over him in the foreign language of limited companies, charitable status and gift aid.

Luke gave up and zoned out. The monitors above their heads refreshed their screens and he saw a camera pointlessly trained on the swimming pool: it was empty of water, its peeling paintwork and missing tiles suggesting it had not been filled for some years.

Keen as he had been to set foot inside the old man’s mansion, he felt things were moving backwards. He would not suggest another visit to Dyke Road until he had more to go on, perhaps until after he had his confession. Temperance Place was hardly neutral territory but there Luke felt he could assert himself a little more. Grand might have taken a while to warm up in the little dark cottage, but there had not been the sense, as there was now, that Luke was being toyed with. It was as though, even in death, Kathleen kept him on his best behaviour.

‘Have you never wanted to share all this with anyone?’ As soon as Luke had spoken he realised the impertinence and kicked himself. This place was turning him into an idiot, making him act as though he
wanted
to be thrown out.

‘What are you getting at?’ Grand growled.

Luke took a deep breath.

‘You never wanted to bring Kathleen to live here with you? I know you were very good to her but while the house in Temperance Place is . . .’ He faltered, at a loss how politely to say to a man of Grand’s temperament and history that he had kept his beloved in a hovel for four decades. ‘Very charming, you had all the mod cons up here.’

‘Kathleen didn’t trust mod cons,’ said Grand. ‘The number of times I offered to do her kitchen up nice for her, no expense spared, but she wasn’t having any of it. She couldn’t be bought. Not like most.’

‘Space, then. Fresh air. You never thought to bring her up here to live?’

It was the first time he had seen Grand laugh. The perfect white tiles of his exposed dentures had the menace of a shark bite. ‘Kathleen living in sin? That’s a good one.’

The flash of humour had emboldened Luke. ‘As your wife, then? She obviously meant the world to you.’

Grand’s mouth formed a minus sign that rendered his whole face unreadable. Silence fell and settled. It was like watching a teetering skittle, wondering which way it was going to fall. The longer it lasted, the more Luke suspected that it was deliberate, that Grand wrung real enjoyment out of it.

‘It wouldn’t have been possible,’ came the careful reply.

‘Why not? Neither of you were ever divorced. The Catholic Church allows widowed people to marry. I think it encourages it.’

He braced himself for the sharp rejoinder, expecting to be told to mind his own business or worse, but the response surprised him.

‘Not if you think about what marriage means,’ said Grand obliquely. ‘What it actually
entails
, it wouldn’t have been possible.’

Luke’s mind whirled. What the hell did that mean? Had his early assumption that Grand was gay been on the money after all? He wasn’t picking up on anything, but still . . .

‘Look, we’re not talking about Kathleen today,’ said Grand, and the subject was slammed closed in Luke’s face. ‘Here, I’ll show you a new list. This is the money I just give away out of my own pocket. I’ve probably donated more to charity as a percentage of my worth than anyone else in Sussex, anyone in England, maybe. You can look that up, can’t you? You’ll want to put that in my book.’

My book
. Luke saw for the first time the discrepancy in the way they viewed it. He reflected with displeasure that Grand’s impression was of Luke as his amanuensis, his trained scribe, taking dictation, writing what was effectively an autobiography. Clearly he had not made his intentions plain enough to Grand at the beginning, when he had been so desperate to ensure his co-operation that he had dealt only in promise and flattery.

The truth of course was that while Grand was the primary source, there were other voices to include. He had to go back to Sandy Quick again for a start, to fill in the gaps in Marcelle’s version of events. Luke steeled himself for a long tussle for control of this book. They both wanted to be the snake charmer, but one of them must be the snake.

Chapter 30

Luke thought about all the difficult interviews he’d done in his career and tried to identify which techniques had served him best. He replayed the conversations that had gone wrong and those that had flowed like water, and considered all the psychological tricks he had at his disposal. Then he went to the posh supermarket on Church Street and bought a very expensive bottle of pink gin.

Sandy’s front door, side-on to the beach, offered no shelter from the wind that whisked the sea into the atmosphere. Salt coated Luke’s lips and swelled his hair to twice its usual size. There was a knocking sound close by and he thought he saw the fire escape swaying loose against the side of the house. He wouldn’t trust it to support his big toe, let alone his full weight. It seemed that, in the event of a fire, Sandy had given more thought to preserving her archives than she had to human safety.

He knocked, then shouted through the letterbox.

‘Sandy, it’s Luke Considine, from the other day.’ She was in, he was sure: light from the front room cast a dim glow into the hallway, and a dark shadow moved slowly along it. ‘I’ve come to apologise to you, for being so insensitive last time. We didn’t leave it very well and I don’t want it to end on that note. I bring 40% proof spirits as a peace offering. I’m not going to pursue the Joss Grand case.’ (He was getting so convincing, he’d start to believe it himself if he wasn’t careful.) ‘I’m working on another story instead, something completely different. Look, Marcelle up at the Pavilion told me what happened with you and him. If I’d known about your history with him, I wouldn’t have been so insensitive.’

The shadow moved swiftly now, and the door swung open in seconds this time, as though she had opened all the locks at once. Sandy bundled him over the threshold as angrily as she had previously ushered him out of the house. ‘For God’s sake, you can’t go shouting things like that on the doorstep.’

Her face was stiff with fear again. He felt pity and intrigue in equal measure.

‘I’m sorry, Sandy,’ said Luke again, then held out the bottle. She snatched it from his hand. Once again, she was dressed as though for a night out, thick makeup and a fitted dress, even if her tights were laddered and her perfume stale.

‘I’m only letting you stay because I need to know exactly what Marcelle told you,’ she said, pressing herself against the wall of filing cabinets and letting Luke squeeze his way past her. ‘Make yourself useful. There’s tonic water in the fridge and ice in the freezer.’ She bustled into the sitting room and arranged the cuttings that covered every flat surface into little piles. Luke looked for glasses and opened a kitchen cupboard to find not the expected glassware or crockery but a box file stuffed with press cuttings from Academy Awards ceremonies dating back to 1970. By the time he had gathered everything they needed, the bottle was open in her hand and a gloss on her lips said she’d already taken a generous swig. Luke poured the first drink in front of her, a single half-inch in the bottom of the glass. When she turned away to locate and light a cigarette, he put triple that measure in the other glass, topped it up with tonic and handed it to her. Sandy downed it in one and held out her glass for an immediate refill.