Cold Light of Day

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_1e73b6da-3a5c-5659-aed4-f9e4f273d65f)

Gavin didn’t answer, didn’t look at Picton. He closed the gate, turned and went back to his car. As he moved off he glanced in the mirror and saw that Picton was still standing by the gate, shouting after him, but he couldn’t make out the words.

He frowned as he drove up the road. Until now he had considered Picton no more than a nuisance, he had laughed as he retailed the story of his encounters with Picton in the office. Now it seemed a good deal more serious, very far from a joke. The man’s not entirely rational, he thought with a faint edge of anxiety; he’ll go over the edge one day.

He dismissed the notion from his mind with a shake of his head and cast a glance at the day ahead. Friday, February 26th; the usual weekly meeting in the afternoon of the heads of the three Elliott Gilmore branches. He was himself in charge of the Cannonbridge office and his half-brother Howard, twelve years older, was in charge of Wychford, a smaller town ten miles to the west. The newest branch at Martleigh, a town smaller still, twenty-two miles to the north-east, had been open less than a year and was doing well, more than justifying its existence. The manager, promoted after long service in the Wychford office, had suffered from recurrent bouts of gastric trouble during the autumn and winter. He had at last gone into hospital for an operation and was at present in Majorca, convalescing. In his absence the branch was being managed by his number two, Stephen Roche, who had worked at the Cannonbridge office before going to Martleigh.

Yes, things were going pretty well; his father would surely have been pleased with the way he’d run things since he’d inherited. His youthful follies were all behind him now; time to think about settling down, raising a family, rearing a son to take over one day in his turn. The idea was deeply satisfying. Charlotte, he thought again, he’d have to go a long way to find someone more suitable than Charlotte. Just give it time, it would all come to hand. He began to hum a tune as he reached the outskirts of Cannonbridge.

In the breakfast-room at Claremont, a graceful Queen Anne dwelling a few miles to the west of Cannonbridge, Howard Elliott and his wife Judith were finishing breakfast. Judith was meticulously groomed and carefuny dressed; no unexpected caller would find her looking less than her best. She wore a beautifully cut housecoat of heavy French silk the colour of almond blossom; it gave her a delusive air of fragility.

She ate a little fruit and crispbread while Howard despatched porridge and cream, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade; the breakfast he had always eaten in his mother’s day, the breakfast he would have been astounded not to find presented to him punctually every morning. He read his newspaper as he ate, he kept his eyes on the paper as he pushed his cup across to Judith for more coffee. She refilled the cup and gave it back to him without speaking. She had learned very soon after her marriage that it was a waste of breath trying to talk to Howard over the breakfast table.

He picked up his cup and took a drink without raising his eyes from his newspaper. Judith gave him a long dispassionate look. He was forty-three years old, a tall, heavily-built man who looked his age and more. His youthful good looks had coarsened, his figure was slipping from control.

He was the only child of Matthew Elliott’s first marriage, which had ended twenty years ago in an acrimonious divorce. At the time Howard was working in the family firm; it had always been taken for granted that he would one day succeed his father. But Howard was deeply upset at what he saw as his father’s betrayal of his mother. He took his mother’s side over the divorce and quarrelled bitterly with his father. He left Elliott Gilmore and found a post with another firm of financial consultants in a neighbouring town. He never again exchanged so much as a word with his father.

Now he drank the last of his coffee and pushed back his chair. He folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm. He had lived at Claremont all his life, with his parents until their divorce and afterwards with his mother, until her death some two years ago. He had inherited nothing under his father’s will, but Claremont and its furnishings, its pictures and objets d’art, had all been left to him by his mother, together with the substantial investments on which she had lived; she had received a very generous settlement at the time of the divorce. Whatever reasons she had for feeling bitter towards her husband – and she had continued to feel bitter towards him until the end of her life – a niggardly settlement certainly wasn’t one of them.

Matthew had been a good husband to her but she had believed him to be a blameless one, totally loyal; she had regarded this as no more than her due. She was a woman without warmth of nature, preferring the word duty to the word love. After a few years of marriage she had finally closed the door of her bedroom on Matthew, intimating that with the approach of middle age – rather a distant approach as she wasn’t yet thirty-five at the time – they were now, as she put it, past all that sort of thing.

But Matthew, only a year or two over forty, was very far from past it, he was in fact all for it, and certainly didn’t intend going without it. He took care to be discreet in his adventures and no doubt the calm surface of his family life would have continued unruffled but that one day a couple of years later he fell suddenly and violently in love – something he hadn’t bargained for.

He set up his new lady, a dark-haired, ivory-skinned beauty, warm-hearted and loving, in a secluded, charming little house at a safe distance from Claremont. He spent as much time with her as he could contrive. After a year or two Gavin was born. They both loved the child but there was no question of marriage; Matthew had made that very clear at the beginning.

But one day chance took a hand and the liaison came to light. Matthew’s respectable, conventional family life blew up in his face. His wife offered him the immediate option of divorce or severing all contact, except for any necessary financial arrangement, with the dark-haired beauty and Gavin, by now eleven years old; she had no doubt which course he would choose.

All his business life Matthew had been faced with the necessity for making swift choices. This one took him thirty seconds. He chose divorce, to the outraged and vociferous astonishment of his wife. Immediately after the divorce he married his love. He sold the secluded little house and bought a larger property to the south of Cannonbridge, out of his ex-wife’s immediate sphere of social influence. There he lived happily with his new family until the death of the dark-haired beauty ten years later.

When Matthew followed her after another seven years, neither Howard nor his mother attended his funeral. Without Matthew’s solid existence to sustain her bitterness his first wife lost her vitality, her sense of focus on life, and slid quietly out of it twelve months after Matthew’s funeral.

As soon as was decently possible Howard cast about for a suitable bride, someone to step into his mother’s shoes, look after his creature comforts, see that his well-ordered, agreeable existence was in no way altered. Within a short time he found Judith, ten years his junior; he proposed to her without delay.

Shortly after the wedding his half-brother Gavin, anxious to heal the family breach and feeling that now, with all the principal adversaries dead, might be a propitious moment, approached Howard and asked if he would consider returning to Elliott Gilmore to run the Wychford branch. This was long-established, on a very sound and stable footing. After a good deal of thought Howard agreed; he had now been running the Wychford branch for eighteen months.

Now Judith stood up from the breakfast table and followed her husband into the hall. She was a little over average height, with a slim, well-formed figure. Her looks were very English; fair hair well cut and disciplined, gleaming from regular attention at the best local salon; a fine, smooth skin, regular features, clear, blue-grey eyes.

‘Friday today,’ Howard said, sufficiently fuelled by now to be able to greet the new day with speech. ‘I’ll be over at Cannonbridge this afternoon for the meeting.’ His lips brushed her cheek. ‘I should be home around six. Are you doing anything today?’

‘I’m out to lunch.’ She mentioned the name of a female cousin of hers, married with a family, living several miles away. ‘I’ll be back well before you.’ Something else that Judith had learned very soon after her marriage was that Howard detested coming home to an empty, silent house.

She opened the front door and stood watching as he went off to his car. He turned and raised his hand in a ritual wave. She gave him a wave in reply, closed the door and stood with her back against it, contemplating the day ahead.

The main offices of Elliott Gilmore occupied a central position in an elegant early-Victorian terrace of shops and offices in the principal business area of Cannonbridge. There was no Gilmore now in the firm; old Matthew had bought out his partner’s widow many years ago.

Gavin walked round from the car park and stood surveying the frontage. For some time he had been contemplating alterations and improvements to the main office. He had no intention of losing any of the period charm but it could be made a good deal more convenient and efficient, more economical to run.

Apart from occasional primping and decorating, the building was very much as it had been when Gavin first walked up the steps. Before his parents married he had had no idea what his father did for a living, apart from the vague information that he was engaged in business which compelled him to be away from home a good deal of the time.

One day shortly after his second marriage, Matthew took Gavin into Cannonbridge and in through the front door of Elliott Gilmore. He introduced him to the staff simply as ‘my son Gavin’. He was well aware that they had all read the newspapers, they’d heard all the gossip, all the echoes of that fierce uproar, but he was also well aware that they all depended on him for their living. There would be no sly looks, no amused nudges – or at least not inside the building.

Gavin had been profoundly impressed by the grand air of the establishment, the pillared entrance, the wide stretches of gleaming parquet, the tall windows and ornamental ceilings. Today, twenty years later, he still felt pleasure in all these features as he walked up the front steps and into the reception hall.

The offices were on two floors, with a third floor given over to stockrooms, and a basement that had once housed a gigantic boiler but was now virtually unused. No reason why the basement couldn’t be transformed into a stockroom and the third floor turned into an additional office, together with a staff rest-room and extra toilet facilities.

He walked slowly along the corridor to his office, pondering various possibilities. A few moments later there was a tap at the door and his secretary, Miss Tapsell, came in with the morning post. She was a short, stocky woman in her forties, resolutely settled into spinsterhood. She always looked neat and businesslike in a dark tailored suit and white blouse; her greying brown hair was parted in the centre and drawn smoothly back into a French pleat.

She had worked at Elliott Gilmore since leaving school. Gavin had first met her on the day his father brought him into the office. He had never known her in any other garb or with any other hairstyle, although the grey was a recent feature. She had been his father’s secretary and Gavin had been delighted to inherit her; she was loyal, hardworking and conscientious.

She had already been in the building for half an hour this morning, she always came in early. She was still bristling slightly from one of her set-tos with the office cleaner, a lady whom she suspected of skimping her work, arriving late and leaving early.

But none of this appeared on Miss Tapsell’s face now, as she came into Gavin’s office; her manner, as always, was calm and precise. She wouldn’t dream of troubling Mr Gavin with such a trifling matter, she would get it sorted out herself in good time.

When Gavin had dealt with the post he went through the agenda for the afternoon’s meeting with Miss Tapsell. ‘A couple of points I’d better mention to Roche first,’ he said when they had finished. ‘Give him time to mull them over before the meeting. Get him on the phone for me, will you?’

The town of Martleigh was a good deal smaller than Cannonbridge but prosperous enough, with more than one long-established and solidly-based local industry. The Martleigh branch of Elliott Gilmore occupied the ground floor of a newish office block near the town centre.

Stephen Roche sat at his desk, studying a file of papers. He was in his late thirties, no more than average height, with a strong, wiry build. He had a broad, unlined forehead, eyes of a clear pale amber, sharply intelligent.

He always got to his office early, was often the first to arrive. He stayed in lodgings in Martleigh during the week, returning at weekends to his house on the edge of Cannonbridge. When he had first been sent to Martleigh twelve months ago he had commuted daily from Cannonbridge; he found the journey, twenty-two miles each way, just about tolerable.

But within a couple of months extensive roadworks, long promised, often postponed, were finally begun along a sizable stretch of the carriageway, causing unpredictable and time-consuming delays morning and evening. After a few weeks of being late for appointments and tensing himself every afternoon for the drive home with its lengthy queues and maddening hold-ups, Roche decided to abandon the struggle and look for digs in Martleigh. ‘It won’t be for long,’ he told his wife. The Ministry officials were confident the traffic would be flowing normally long before Christmas.

But there was industrial trouble in the late summer, and then, when that had been at last resolved, a spell of severe weather, early and prolonged, in the autumn, with all the consequent delays and interruptions to schedules. It would probably now be Easter or even later before the giant machines clattered away for the last time.

Roche glanced up now from his papers and his gaze fell on the plain silver frame that held a photograph of his wife. It stood on his desk, a little to one side, next to the potted plant that his secretary kept assiduously fed and watered. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a young woman with an unsmiling look, large, well-set eyes, hair simply cut, with a slight wave, Roche frowned. His secretary must have moved the photograph when she attended to the plant; it was a little out of its usual place.

The phone rang suddenly on his desk. He picked up the receiver and heard Gavin Elliott’s voice. As he listened to the details of the afternoon’s agenda he stretched out a hand and replaced the photograph in its exact customary spot, where Annette’s eyes would meet his own whenever he glanced up from his work.

The Friday afternoon meeting finished a little earlier than usual. It was just after four when the three men in their dark suits came out of Gavin’s office, followed by Miss Tapsell who had as usual been taking notes.

Gavin would stay on at his desk for another hour or two but Howard was going straight home, and so was Stephen Roche. Both men always cleared up in their own branches on Friday morning; the traffic and the distances involved, particularly in Roche’s case, made it not worth returning there after the meeting. Gavin stood for a few moments chatting to the other two before turning back into his office.

Miss Tapsell glanced at the three of them as she went off along the corridor. Roche with his sharp eyes and long foxy muzzle; the two half-brothers, alike only in their height, inherited from their father. Howard had also inherited Matthew’s solid build and heavy shoulders, but he had his mother’s light brown hair, her blue eyes and regular features. Good-looking enough in his way, Miss Tapsell used to think years ago, though beginning now to let himself go.

Always the cautious one, Howard, always wanting everything in writing, everything hedged against, triply guaranteed. Beside him Gavin looked far more handsome, with his slim build, the striking colouring he had inherited from his mother. More adventurous than his half-brother, always prepared to take a reasonable risk, but still with sound business instincts.

The two men seemed to be getting on a good deal better than Miss Tapsell had dared hope when Howard first returned to the firm; there had been moments when she had feared it had been a bad mistake. She liked to think that Matthew would have been pleased to see them together in the firm at last, on such easy, friendly terms.

Gavin went back into his office and Howard and Roche went out through a rear door into the car park. Howard made some comment on the mild weather and then went off to his car, a sleek, expensive saloon. He raised a hand as he moved out, past Roche stepping into his own vehicle, small and neat, nippy in traffic.

Roche drove out into the side-street and headed for the eastern edge of town. His house, Greenlawn, was a detached Edwardian villa standing in a large secluded garden that gave the property an air of rural tranquillity.

The afternoon was still washed over with pale sunshine as Roche halted the car and got out to open the gate. He ran the car up the sloping drive and brought it to rest by the front door. He took a suitcase and hand-grip from the boot and let himself into the house. He stood in the hall for a moment, listening.

No sound inside the house, no stir of movement. Only the echoes of this false spring, with its summer-seeming sounds, the far-off slam of a car door, voices calling, the cries and laughter of children in some distant park, the muted bark of a dog, the hum of traffic from a trunk road half a mile away.

He went up the stairs and paused by the landing window. He set down his cases and stood looking out at the rear garden. At the far end, on the edge of the shrubbery, he could see the tall slender figure of his mother-in-law, Mrs Sparrey. She held a wooden trug, she was looking down at Annette who was on her knees close by, digging up a clump of some early-flowering plant. Annette levered up the plant and reached up to put it in the trug, no doubt for her mother to carry back to her own garden ten miles away.