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Laura helped her grandmother up the stone steps and through the lobby of the Clarendon Hotel, where the heavy swing doors were held open for them by the uniformed porter. Joyce had looked pale and stressed, Laura thought, when she had collected her from the tiny bungalow in the shadow of Bradfield's most notorious tower blocks, officially named the Heights but since as long as Laura could remember, jeeringly and not inaccurately, dubbed Wuthering both by the locals who lived there and the majority who were thankful they didn't. Joyce had dressed carefully in her smartest navy blue suit but her efforts could not disguise her increasing frailty and the massive effort she had to make to walk with her single stick.
Laura spotted her father as soon as they entered the lobby. Under cover of helping Joyce off with her coat, she assessed the short, dapper, smartly suited man standing by the bar,
drumming his fingers impatiently on the dark mahogany and chatting to the motherly woman on the other side of the counter. It was almost two years since she had seen Jack Ackroyd and he had put on a little weight in the meantime. Life in the sun evidently suited him: his hair had thinned and the family red had turned to silver but his skin was tanned and glowing and his smile as self-satisfied as she remembered it. He had survived one heart-attack, which had provoked the sale of his business and his retirement to the golf courses of Portugal, but today at least he appeared to be rejuvenated, excitement in every inch of him.
Laura had never been able to pin down the precise point at which she and her father had found themselves on opposing sides in the family war but it was almost as far back as she could remember. He had appeared to treat her mother, a kindly woman who hated conflict, abominably from as long ago as Laura could recall and by the time she had been sent away to boarding school to, in her father's words, knock the rough edges off her, she had already been telling her mother, in a tight angry whisper, to leave him. But that was something her mother would never contemplate and in some ways Laura had been relieved to find herself removed from the battlefield at the age of eleven, at least during term-time.
The person she had missed most when she left home, of course, was the grandmother she so resembled both physically and in temperament, and she realised now that her banishment to blandest southern England for her schooling was as much a ploy to remove her from Joyce's influence as to curb her increasing involvement in the conflict at home. She had infuriated her father further by insisting on returning to Bradfield to go to the local university, instead of trying for the Oxford place that her father coveted for her. She had not followed Joyce as far down the socialist road as her
combative grandmother had wished, but nor had she been overwhelmed with enthusiasm for her father's ruthless business instincts. Both accused her of fence-sitting even now, and she had to acknowledge her own scepticism, uncomfortable at times, but an attribute quite useful for a journalist. But every time she saw Jack again she knew that her heart, if not her head, was still with Joyce who had marched her unprotesting as a child to stuff leaflets through the letterboxes of Bradfield's grimmest estates. Nothing much had changed out there, she thought, except that the warriors ready to do battle for the dispossessed seemed thinner on the ground these days and their voices muffled by the greater contentment which had swept the country. Which did not mean that the warriors did not have a point.
“Dad,” she said, advancing across the bar's thick carpet and leaning down slightly to peck him on the cheek. He had bitterly resented the moment when his daughter had grown taller than he was. “How are you? How's Mum?” Laura asked.
“In fine fettle, as it goes, both of us,” Jack said. “The old ticker seems to be bearing up whatever that expensive quack at the Infirmary predicted. He'd have had me six foot under by now.”
He looked past his daughter, who as usual had turned every other male head in the bar, to where his mother was approaching more slowly, leaning heavily on her stick.
“Now then, Mother?” he said. “Still not ready to move out to warmer climes?”
“Jack,” Joyce said, without much warmth. “They'll put me in a box first.”
“Aye, I reckon they will that,” her son said, his smile freezing and bright blue eyes turning cold. He turned to Laura. “She'll still not be helped, then?”
“Not a lot,” Laura said with a wicked smile. Her grandmother's fierce independence was something she could understand even if, on occasion, it gave her sleepless nights.
“Pot of tea do you then?” Jack asked. “You'll not be wanting anything stronger just yet, will you?” Without waiting for an answer he led the way to the adjoining lounge where a congregation of Bradfield's decreasing band of blue rinse matrons who had resisted white flight to Harrogate were indulging in tea and cream cakes. An empty table set with tea-cups and a plate of sandwiches had evidently been reserved for Jack but as the waiter bustled up and the two women made themselves comfortable Jack glanced at his watch.
“I've an unexpected meeting at five thirty,” he said. “But we've time for a chat.”
“This is just a business trip, then?” Laura asked.
“Aye, just a couple of days, all being well. You know one of the big mills is in trouble, terminal trouble from what I hear, if some beggar doesn't put a rescue package together.”
“And you're involved in the rescue package? For Earnshaws?” Laura said incredulously.
“Aye, well, summat like that,” Jack said, tapping the side of his nose ostentatiously. “And don't you go mentioning that to anyone at that rag of yours either. That's strictly confidential, that is.”
“There's hundreds of jobs threatened if they close that mill,” Joyce said sharply.
“I dare say,” Jack said. “But that goes for you too, Mother. I don't want you tipping off your union mates that summat's in the wind. Not a word to anyone, right?”
“Most of my union mates are long dead,” Joyce said bitterly. “And the young ones don't seem to have the faintest idea how to take the bosses on and win.”
“That's not what I hear about Earnshaws,” Jack said. “Any road, never mind about business for now. If anything comes of what I'm here to talk about you'll be the first to know, Laura. How'll that do?”
“Fine,” she said without much enthusiasm. Like her grandmother, she seriously doubted that anything Jack would be associated with was likely to benefit the workers even fractionally more than it would benefit Jack Ackroyd.
“You and Frank Earnshaw go way back, don't you?” Joyce said, still prickly with suspicion.
“I rented space from him in that white elephant of a mill years ago, when I was getting started.” Jack said. “It's been on its last legs for as long as I can remember.”
“How's that wife of yours?” Joyce said, changing the subject and shifting her position awkwardly in her chair. Laura guessed that her arthritis was painful but knew she would never complain. She had also suspected for years that Joyce had never fully approved of her daughter-in-law, a woman who seldom answered back and the last person to cope with a man as overbearing as Jack Ackroyd.
“She's very fit,” Jack said. “She sent her love to you both and wants to know when you're coming out to see us. A trip would do you the world of good, Mother. It's still in the sixties in the afternoons, at this time of the year, and a nice breeze off the Atlantic. And what about you Laura? Still seeing that copper of yours, are you? Bring him with you, if you like.”
Laura nodded, bending to sip her tea to hide her annoyance.
“Anything in it, then?” Jack persisted, oblivious to the rising tension around the tea table. “Is he going to wed you, or not? He seems to be taking his time about it.”
“I'll send you an invitation to the wedding, if and when,” Laura said through gritted teeth, her cheeks flaming.
“Like that is it?” Jack blundered on, with a meaningful look in Joyce's direction. “I've said before you could do better for yourself than a bloody detective. After all the money I laid out on your posh education.”
Laura got to her feet abruptly, almost spilling her tea.
“He's an Oxford graduate, you idiot,” she hissed as she made her way to the cloakroom, watched by a dozen pairs of censorious eyes as the duennas of the Clarendon lounge paused to take in the scene, forks of creamy confections halfway to their pursed crimson lips. With the heavy door shut behind her, Laura splashed her face with cold water and attempted a smile at her reflection in the mirror. Why do I let him wind me up like that? she wondered. She combed her unruly curls and more coolly contemplated the undoubted fact that Michael Thackeray was taking an unconscionable time to marry her. His moves towards a divorce at last gave her grounds for hope, but that was not something she intended to share with Jack. The irony was, she thought ruefully, that when Michael had met her father the two men had got on quite amicably, had possibly even liked each other. She was probably, an impediment to a beautiful friendship.
“Bloody men,” she said, not realising that she had spoken aloud until someone emerging from a cubicle behind her spoke.
“Bloody right,” the woman said, manoeuvring her endowments more comfortably inside her skin-tight Lycra dress and moving to the mirror to effect repairs to an already camouflage-thick maquillage. She seemed as out of place as a clown at a funeral in the rather stuffy environs of the Clarendon but by no means fazed by her surroundings. “Never give âem an inch without t'cash up front, I say,” this unexpected adviser offered.
“A wedding ring would be nice,” Laura said, throwing caution to the winds.
“Oh, that,” the primping woman said, fluffing out her big blonde hair and contorting herself to inspect her stocking seams. “Not worth the paper they're written on these days, marriage lines. A pre-nuptial contract's worth having though. Pins the beggars down, that does.”
“I'll bear it in mind,” Laura said with a grin, quite cheered at the thought of persuading Michael to sign away half his worldly goods, which consisted largely of a collection of jazz and blues recordings, and some scruffy furniture which she would not give house-room to, before she consented to become his wife.
“Must dash,” her companion said, cramming her make-up back into her tiny black handbag. “It does no harm to keep them waiting, but not so's they get bored.” And with that she swept out of the cloakroom in a haze of a heavy perfume that Laura knew Michael would hate.
When she went slowly back to the lounge, she found Jack and Joyce chatting reasonably amiably over their buttered scones. Joyce glanced at Laura, sharp-eyed, but relaxed when she saw that her granddaughter had evidently calmed down.
“Jack wants to take us both out for a meal tomorrow night,” Joyce said. “That'd be nice.”
“Bring your copper along, an'all,” Jack said magnanimously.
“I'll call you,” Laura said noncommittally.
Her father shrugged and glanced at the door.
“I can see the colleagues I'm meeting, so I'll love you and leave you. Give us a bell in the morning and I'll book us a table in the carvery,” he said, getting to his feet. Laura and Joyce watched him thread his way through the tea tables and join two smartly dressed men in the lobby, one white and one Asian.
“What's he up to?” Joyce asked.
“I've no idea, but I shouldn't think it'll necessarily do Earnshaws mill any good,” Laura said. “Come on, have another cup of tea as he's paying. And then I'll run you home.”
While the Ackroyd family was taking tea in the Clarendon lounge, a fair-haired young man with the beginnings of a paunch and an air of sleepy superiority was downing his third consecutive double malt and leaning against the mahogany and brass bar next door at an increasingly acute angle.
“I mean, it's obvious that these people won't move into the twenty-first century, isn't it?” Matthew Earnshaw asked the comfortable woman in a black dress who was carefully polishing already gleaming glasses on the other side of the counter. “They're hardly out of the bloody middle ages, are they?”
“I wouldn't know about that, sir,” the barmaid said with well-rehearsed neutrality. “I take people as I find them. You have to, in this job.”
“I know, but let's say someone wanted to modernise the Clarendon, and let's face it, it could do with a make-over. Wouldn't you be pleased about that?”
“I suppose it would depend on whether I'd still have a job or not, sir, wouldn't it. They don't vote for Christmas, don't turkeys, do they?”
“God, I despair of this bloody country,” Earnshaw muttered pushing his empty glass over the counter. “Give me another, will you? I don't know where my bloody brother is. He promised he'd be here at four and it's twenty-five past bloody five now. I'm going to be driving home through the blasted rush hour.”
“Do you think you should, sir? If you're driving, I mean?” The barmaid's voice was as deferential as ever as she stood
with the bottle of Glenmorangie poised and made her point, but the young man flushed with anger.
“Are you fucking refusing to serve me?” he asked.
“No sir, just wondering ⦔
“The same again,” Earnshaw said flatly, looking round the bar where the scattering of customers were glancing curiously in his direction. He drained his fresh drink quickly.
“If my brother Simon comes in looking for me tell him to call me on my mobile,” he said to the barmaid. “He's had his switched off all day, the silly bastard. Can't contact him.”
Concentrating hard to keep his gait steady he made his way to the door, where he passed a group of three men coming the other way. He nodded vaguely at the one who gave him a nod of recognition as they passed. In his present state he could not for the life of him recall who the tall grey-haired man in the designer suit was, still less his companions, a heavily built Asian and a small silver-haired man with acute blue eyes.
“Who's that?” Jack Ackroyd asked when they were out of earshot.
“That's Matthew Earnshaw, Frank's younger lad, pissed as usual,” the tall man said. “He's one of the problems that company's up against. I tell you, if it weren't for him they might not be in the terminal mess they're in. Still it's no skin off our nose.”
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Matthew Earnshaw arrived at his father's house unscathed more than an hour later, the erratic driving of his BMW safely masked by the heavy traffic which had kept his speed down to a crawl for most of the ten mile journey to Broadley. He pulled up in a scatter of gravel on the drive outside the heavy stone Victorian mansion where he and his brother had been brought up. He pressed the doorbell persistently and
pushed past the Phillipina housekeeper who opened it for him without a word, storming into the sitting room where his parents were drinking sherry.
“He didn't fucking turn up,” he announced with a scowl.
“Language, Matthew,” his mother said reprovingly but his father, grey-suited and showing signs of the anxiety which seemed to have creased his face deeply around the eyes and forehead was more interested in his son's message than the manner of its delivery.
“Didn't he call you?” he asked sharply.
“His mobile's switched off. I haven't heard from him since we made the arrangement to meet on Sunday. I know he's got some girl he's not letting on about, but this is ridiculous.” Matthew crossed to the sideboard on the far side of the room and poured himself a large Scotch without ice or water. “You get the feeling he enjoys buggering us about,” he said, lowering himself carefully onto the sofa beside his mother. “Making us sweat.”
“I'm sure that's not true,” Christine Earnshaw said placatingly. “He must be busy.”
“The bloody university's on vacation. Why should he be busy?” her husband asked. “He knows what we're trying to do and how important his input is. He knows we need to talk to him.”
“You should have bought him out when he decided to go all eco â¦eco â¦fucking green on us,” Matthew said. “You can bet your life he'll be as obstructive as he can as long as he can and then where will we be? This week's bloody crucial and he knows that. But if he really wants to get up our noses, he and Grandad between them can stop us dead, you know that. It'd be just like the pair of them to do it deliberately, out of spite.”
“I'm sure Simon can be persuaded to go along with our
plans, or at the very least sell us his shares so that we can outvote your grandfather,” Frank said, though without total conviction. “Even now he doesn't want to be involved directly in the company any more he'll not want to see it wrecked. He'll lose as heavily as the rest of us if we go belly up.”
“I wouldn't put it past him,” Matthew mumbled, “Though last time I saw him he seemed to be worried about money, and that was a bloody first for him.” His words were beginning to slur now. His mother looked at him anxiously.
“You'll stay for a meal?” she asked.
“I suppose so,” Matthew said ungraciously. He lived another ten miles out of industrial Yorkshire in the rolling Dales, where he and his now divorced wife had bought and renovated an old stone farmhouse. Since Lizzie's precipitate and acrimonious departure he had lived there alone.
“I'll tell Juanita,” Christine said, leaving the room to discuss the meal with the housekeeper.
When she had gone, Frank Earnshaw looked angrily at his older son.
“Where the hell is he?” he asked. “Did he say he was going away when you spoke to him on Sunday?”
“Nope,” Matthew said, his eyes heavy with sleep now. “I told you, he's being very mysterious about some woman he's taken up with. Perhaps he's with her. He doesn't confide. You know that.”
With good reason, Frank Earnshaw thought. Not only had Simon given up his management role at the mill to go back to university to study for a postgraduate degree in environmental science, but he had made it very clear on more than one occasion that one of the reasons for his change of direction was the increasing impossibility of working with his older, more volatile and increasingly drunken brother.
“I wouldn't put it past your grandfather to try to collar him to put his side of the argument before we talk to him,” Frank said, but his son's eyes were shut now and before long he was snoring softly in the comfortable sofa across which he could now sprawl, mouth open and a thin trickle of saliva running from one corner and down his chin.
It was more than two hours later, after an uncomfortable meal at which both parents had attempted unsuccessfully to limit the amount of wine Matthew consumed, that Frank Earnshaw was surprised to pick up the phone and hear a female voice asking for his younger son.
“Simon doesn't live here,” Frank said, a shade more sharply than he intended. “I've not seen him for weeks.”
“He was supposed to call me yesterday,” the woman said. “I've been trying to get him ever since.”
“Who is this?” Frank said. “Do I know you.”
“No. It doesn't matter. I'll keep trying his mobile.”
“Who was that?” Matthew asked.
“Some woman trying to find Simon,” Frank said. “The girlfriend, d'you think?”
Matthew took the portable receiver out of his hand and quickly punched in 1471 but he soon switched off again with a shrug.
“Number withheld,” he said. “Where the hell is Simon?” he asked no one in particular. “It's bloody typical of him to go missing just when he's actually needed for once.”
“Missing?” his mother said sharply. “Do you really think he's missing? Could he have had an accident, do you think?” She hesitated. “He gave me a key to his flat, in case of emergencies ⦔
Frank Earnshaw stood up as if he had made a decision to take charge of the situation.
“In that case, I think I'll go down to his flat and have a look
round,” he said. “I reckon this might be an emergency You'd better come with me, Matthew. I'll drive. You're in no fit state.”
Within the hour the two men were standing in the small flat Simon Earnshaw now called home. It was the bottom half of a Victorian terrace house, close to the university where he was now studying.
“How can he go back to living like this?” Matthew said disgustedly, drawing a toe across the worn carpet which looked none too clean. “A bloody student hovel all over again.”
“You both made your own decisions,” Frank said mildly, privately thinking that Simon's choices, disappointing as he had found them at first, were in many ways preferable to the fast-lane lifestyle Matthew attempted to sustain. “If he wants to live on his savings, that's his business. He earned his money while he was at the mill. I've no complaints.”
“What you mean is, I don't,” Matthew muttered angrily. “Earn it, I mean.”
“You can work that one out for yourself, Matthew,” his father said. He crossed the room to where an answerphone was winking. There were three messages, all from the same young woman he had spoken to earlier in the evening, each sounding more anxious than the one before. She had not identified herself, but the soft and intimate “It's me” told Simon Earnshaw's father and brother clearly enough that this was someone special in his life.
“There's something not right,” Frank Earnshaw said, as he switched off the woman's voice, which by that morning had been pleading for Simon to get in touch. “I'm going to call the police.”
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Laura Ackroyd picked at a couple of lettuce leaves and
watched Michael Thackeray tuck with gusto into the steak and chips she had just cooked him. It was the sort of food she suspected he still preferred in spite of her long-standing efforts to tempt him with all sorts of dishes from the Mediterranean, India and points south, east and west. After sandwiches and scones with her father, she was not hungry and had made herself a salad which the good Yorkshireman across the table from her would have dismissed as rabbit food if she had offered him the same.
“So what's he up to then, your dad?” Thackeray asked through a mouthful of chips and brown sauce.
“Some money-making scheme,” Laura said, not wanting to break Jack's confidence and mention Earnshaws. “He kept various interests here when he went abroad. I'm not sure how he fixes it with the Inland Revenue, but I know every time I go and visit he's poring over his investment portfolio.”
“He can only spend a limited amount of time in the UK if he wants to avoid tax,” Thackeray said.
“Oh, knowing my father, I'm sure he wants to do that,” Laura said wryly. “He's one of those Tories always ready to moan about the quality of public services but never prepared to pay his whack to fund them. He drives Joyce crazy”
“You must drive him crazy too,” Thackeray said mildly. “I've never known such an ill-matched family in some ways, but you're all Ackroyds to the tips of your fingers â pig-headed through three generations. Do you think if we ⦔
Laura's heart lurched uncomfortably.
“If we what?”
“Oh, nothing,” Thackeray said quickly. He finished his steak thoughtfully and pushed the plate away with a satisfied grunt.
“That was good,” he said.
“How did I get involved with a man who doesn't know his
mozzarella from his focaccia?” Laura asked. “Do you want anything else? Apple pie and custard or jam rolypoly?” For a second Thackeray's eyes lit up until he realised she was teasing.
“You know that wouldn't do my waistline any good,” he admitted reluctantly. “Your trouble is, you spent too long down in the effete south.”
“Ha, you've obviously never experienced boarding school food or you wouldn't say that,” she said. “Funnily enough, it was my father who got me interested in good food. He tried to seduce me away from Joyce's puritan habits by taking me to good restaurants when I was home for the holidays. And I have to confess, I loved it. Will you come to dinner with him tomorrow? I can guarantee the food'll be good, and if it's the Clarendon, pretty traditional too.”
“If I can get away in time,” Thackeray said. “I like your father. Which reminds me, I must go and see mine.” He was suddenly sombre.
“Ah,” Laura said softly. “About the divorce? Will he be very opposed, after all this time?”