Betrayal (11 page)

He unlocked his office and led the way to his desk.

‘This isn’t to do with the buyout then?’ he drawled, sinking into his high-backed leather chair.

‘Of course it is!’ I said tightly, avoiding the strategically low-seated guest chair opposite his desk and fetching a higher one from the conference area.

‘And you really don’t feel you want anyone else here?’

Recognising this as a no-win question, I ignored it and demanded, ‘What’s this problem about the leasing agreement for the Hartford properties?’

But he was still playing games. ‘I need coffee,’ he announced languidly, casting around as if this might cause a cup to appear out of nowhere.

I growled, ‘Forget the coffee. I’ve only got fifteen minutes.’

Suddenly he laughed, a rich chuckle that rumbled on after he had stopped smiling. ‘Hugh,’ he scolded. ‘Always in such a rush.’

‘Too damned right!’

He regarded me with something approaching affection, though it could just as easily have been pity, and then, this show of indulgence having served its purpose, which was to wind me up, he got down to business.

‘Is there a problem?’ he murmured.

‘You know damn well there is. It was agreed that we could
lease
all the properties from Cumberland. There was never any talk of buying!’

‘Oh?’ He affected puzzlement. ‘Wasn’t there? Are you sure you aren’t thinking of the earlier discussions? At the first merger talks perhaps?’

I was never sure why Howard liked to call the takeover a merger. Because he had instigated the deal perhaps. Or because it boosted his view of his own standing on the main board. ‘You know perfectly well which discussions I’m talking about, Howard,’ I said, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me lose my temper. ‘When the outline buyout terms were agreed. In August.’

Howard grimaced elegantly. ‘I don’t think anything was actually
decided
, Hugh.’ He made a show of testing this recollection against his memory. ‘No,’ he murmured, ‘I’m sure I’m right in saying Cumberland didn’t commit itself to a leasing arrangement.’

‘It was agreed in principle, Howard!’

‘It was just one
option
, Hugh.’

‘More than an option, Howard! A commitment!’

His face took on an expression of forbearance wearing thin. ‘Whatever your recollection, Hugh, the situation is that Cumberland cannot possibly agree to a leasing agreement. In a buyout you expect the customer to
buy
. Cumberland doesn’t want the Hartford properties left on its books. It wants to dispose of them.
Not
unreasonable in the circumstances.’

‘Unreasonable if you’ve made a commitment.’

‘Hugh – a commitment is something in writing, something agreed by one’s lawyers.’

‘For Cumberland, maybe.’

‘Come – for anyone, surely.’

‘So do I take it the matter’s no longer open to negotiation?’ I said stiffly.

‘On the price?’ he asked, deliberately choosing to misunderstand.

‘On the option to lease!’

He sighed with a sort of paternal irritation. ‘I thought I’d made it clear, Hugh. Didn’t I make it clear?’ He spread his hands questioningly. ‘Leasing is not an option.’

Despite my intention to remain calm, I heard my resentment break through. ‘Cumberland are reneging, then? I just want to be quite clear.’

‘Hugh, I strongly object to that. There’s no question of reneging. How can there be when we never agreed anything?’

‘You realise this could sabotage the entire buyout?’

‘Oh?’ He was suddenly a picture of imitation concern. ‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, I really am. I know how hard you’ve been working on it.’

‘Come on, don’t tell me you didn’t realise!’ I said bitterly .

‘Realise?’ The shrug was hopelessly exaggerated. Such a bloody bad actor. But then overplaying the scene was all part of the satisfaction for him. ‘How could I realise, Hugh?’

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.

‘Surely the additional cash won’t be that hard to find?’

He was fishing, he wanted to know just how far we had got with the banks, but I was damned if I was going to give him that sort of information. ‘It’s not the money, Howard, it’s the timing, as you well know! The Cumberland board have had the outline agreement for six weeks –
six weeks
– and they suddenly decide on this
now
. That’s as close to sabotage as you can get!’

‘Well, I’m sorry but Cumberland can hardly be blamed if you’ve rushed things at
your
end, Hugh. The proposal had to be evaluated very carefully. You couldn’t expect us to do it overnight. I’m sorry if you’re going to have to go back and renegotiate with the banks, but that’s hardly our problem, is it?’

Looking at him, a suspicion formed in my mind. It came to me that Howard himself had engineered this whole situation, that, for some reasons of his own, he wanted my bid to fail.

I stood up. I fully intended to leave with my pride intact, but my anger got the better of me. ‘Sleeping all right, are you, Howard?’

‘Oh, come on, Hugh,’ he said with the injured air of someone fending off an unprovoked attack. ‘That’s always been your trouble, you know – taking things personally.’

‘With you, I don’t know any other way to take them.’

‘Business is business, Hugh. You’ve never been able to grasp that, have you?’

The morning tailback began just beyond Heathrow. As I joined the haze of shuffling traffic, I thought back over the years of my partnership with Howard. Though I’d never harboured too many illusions about him, while I’d seen him instigate some pretty ruthless manoeuvres in his time, I’d always liked to think there were certain limits beyond which he wouldn’t go, that the sixty years during which our two families had jointly owned and run HartWell counted for something – a remnant of loyalty, perhaps, a fragment of sympathy – and that he would draw the line at actively plotting against me.

I liked to think such fine noble thoughts because if I didn’t I began to contemplate walking away from the whole miserable business and going to live a hermit’s life in France. I’d had such thoughts before, in early summer when the full extent of the crisis at HartWell was becoming clear, when I realised that Howard had engineered the takeover behind my back, when I began to appreciate just how completely I had let the real control slip from my grasp. Then I was dogged by a sense of worthlessness and futility: my mid-life crisis. An absurdly frivolous term for the doubt that had taken to descending on me without warning, turning my thinking inside out, making me question things that at my age did not bear questioning. Despairing of the present, clutching at the past, harbouring visions of what might have been. Hungry for escape and solace; ripe for the idea of Sylvie.

Fumbling with the radio, I turned on the eight-thirty headlines, knowing that there would be nothing about Sylvie, yet needing to hear it for myself. An exercise in reassurance. Or paranoia.

The traffic did not ease and I reached the three-room office suite in Hammersmith five minutes before Julia and I were due to leave for the meeting with the Chartered Bank. I had rented this place as a temporary London base while we negotiated the buyout. It wasn’t so much an office as a space from which I made calls and sent letters. All the meetings – and there were up to three a day – took place at the City offices of the various bankers, lawyers and accountants acting for us or for Cumberland. Very occasionally meetings were held at Hartford itself, four hours’ drive to the south-west.

Before Julia could collar me, I phoned Moncrieff to check what I already knew, that we had no legal remedy against Cumberland for reneging on the leasing agreement. I followed this with a swift call to Pollinger at Zircon to alert him to the fact that we would be asking for more money. He warned me that unless I was prepared to give Zircon a bigger slice of the equity then the most I could expect from them would be a quarter of the extra million.

Julia put her head round the door. ‘I know I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help overhearing. That bastard!’ I didn’t need to ask who she was referring to. So far as Julia was concerned, Howard had rat status.

‘It would have been a board decision, Julia.’

‘Yes, but who proposed the idea?’

‘No point in worrying about that now.’

‘That’s what you always say.’ Instantly she made a disclaiming wave of the hand. ‘Sorry.
Sorry
. What I meant was,
I
wouldn’t be half as forgiving. You’re too nice, that’s your trouble.’

‘It’s nothing to do with being
nice
,’ I grimaced, smarting at the compliment. ‘It’s a question of being realistic.’

Julia conceded this with a dubious face, and looked at her watch. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘One more call,’ I bargained.

My bank manager was a bland insubstantial character named Elliott. With the various personal loans I had been forced to negotiate, I had got to see quite a lot of him over the last two years. He did not sound surprised that I was asking for money again.

‘This mortgage would be additional to your existing building society mortgage?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Five hundred thousand is rather a large sum for a mortgage, Mr Wellesley. That sort of sum would usually come into the range of a business loan, subject to business rates.’

‘But you’ll consider it?’

‘This would be in addition to the loan on the country property?’

‘That’s right.’

A pause. ‘So on the Chelsea house, the new mortgage would take the loan up to ninety per cent of its value?’

‘That would be on a conservative valuation. But – yes.’

‘Well – I’ll look into it,’ he said cautiously. ‘But, Mr Wellesley, are you quite sure you want to put your home at stake?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have considered what would happen if your business were to fail?’

‘Yes,’ I said testily .

‘And your wife – she’s happy with the arrangement?’

‘I realise she’ll have to agree to it,’ I said. ‘I’m aware of the law.’

‘Very well. I’ll come back to you as soon as I can.’

Julia appeared in the doorway wearing her we-really-have-to-leave face, but I held up a delaying hand and, when she had frowned her disapproval and disappeared, I called Ginny, only to get the answering machine. I told the tape I should be home by eight. It was only after I’d rung off that it occurred to me that Ginny might have flu after all and be lying ill in bed. She was prone to catch all the nastier bugs and to suffer them badly. Convalescence, with its inactivity, always depressed her, and it was then that I became acutely aware of how isolated she was without children. During the five or so years when we had actively discussed our childlessness and gone through various fertility investigations I had once or twice mentioned adoption, but she had brimmed with dark resentment at the idea, as though it were an admission of defeat or an allotment of blame, and I hadn’t brought up the subject again. Now we never talked about children at all.

Julia came in briskly. ‘We really have to go.’ She tipped her head to one side and cast me a sharp glance. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Don’t you start.’

‘You look awful again.’

‘What do you mean
again
?’ I grabbed my briefcase and sprang to my feet. ‘You’re as bad as my old nanny. I’m fine.’

But I can’t have sounded too convincing because as we headed for the door she demanded, ‘When did you last eat?’ Interpreting my silence correctly, s he announced that she would get some sandwiches on the way.

Hurrying down the stairs I tried to concentrate on the crucial meeting ahead. I dreaded pitching to bankers, it was like reasoning with wet dough. They were malleable enough, you felt things were shaping up, but at the end of the day you were never quite sure what you had ended up with.

We emerged fast into the lobby. Through the doors I could see Tony, the driver Julia regularly hired to take us into the City, standing at the bottom of the steps beside his Rover. Two men crossed in front of the Rover and came up the steps towards the entrance. I swung the door back for Julia just as the first of the visitors pushed through the opposite door. I registered a crumpled raincoat, sparse greying hair, a thin mouth in a fleshy face. The second man was younger, taller and fitter. I wasn’t sure what it was about them – the white shirts, the well-worn clothes, their air of purpose – but, coloured by the events of the previous day, my imagination momentarily cast them as policemen.

I hurried on towards the car.

Tony had the rear door open and I was just about to duck in when a voice called, ‘Mr Wellesley?’

I straightened up and looked round. Julia said sharply, ‘Can I help you?’ and turned to intercept the approaching men.

The one with grey hair ignored her and continued towards me with the rolling gait of someone with a hip problem. Digging into his breast pocket, he produced a card mounted in a leather case and, holding it up at eye level so there was no possibility of my missing it, announced himself as Detective Inspector Henderson.

‘You are Mr Hugh William Wellesley?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to ask you to accompany me to Exeter, sir, to help us with our inquiries into the death of Sylvie Mathieson.’

I felt a draining in my stomach. ‘But yesterday – I saw your man Reith. I told him everything.’

‘We’d be grateful for more details, sir,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘And a statement, if you don’t mind.’

I spread my hands helplessly, I opened my mouth a couple of times to speak, I felt a sudden heat. ‘I’ll be glad to help in any way I can – of course,’ I said at last. ‘But I’m on my way to a vital meeting and I’m already late.’ I glanced towards Julia as if for support and met her startled gaze.

‘The matter is rather important, sir.’

Disbelief and mounting alarm made me exclaim, ‘So is
this!
You don’t understand, Inspector – I
have
to get to this meeting!’

Henderson pondered this with the air of someone who has heard a lot of excuses in his time, but my incredulity and panic must have made some sort of impression because after a show of consideration, he agreed to wait. I told him my meeting would take one and a half hours. We settled on two.