Due Diligence (2 page)

3

A
fter giving my driver his instructions, I turn and mount the steps to my home. These moments, a hand in one pocket, grappling for the keys, are usually the most dismal of my day. There’s no-one to greet me on the far side of the door — I know that — yet I still get this surge of expectation, as if my mind hasn’t convinced my heart that they’re gone. And today? Turning the key, I shoulder the door wide open. Home in Belgravia. Daniel is dead, my wife has left me, and here I am at 9.00 a.m. returned to my big, empty home.

Mid-morning, and I still wander the house like a wraith. In the bedroom I brush past Theresa’s dressing table, moving a small mahogany box out of place. Carefully I push it back with my finger. Back into the line of her combs and hair-clips; everything in order, all just as she left it when she took Annie down to Hampshire two months ago.

Then I resume my aimless wandering, room‘to corridor, corridor to room, stalked everywhere by a feeling of dread. At last I stop outside Annie's door. Then I reach, and the door opens. Warm winter sunlight pours in through the window, slanting across the giant panda by the cupboard, and the doll’s house upended in the corner. Above the bed, a mobile of smiling moons and silver stars begins to turn. I should leave, I think. But I cross to the bed and sit studying the cartoon elephants stencilled in neat rows on the wall.

Daniel. What has happened? I bow my head and the memories rise. I see him as a schoolboy, sitting on the riverbank and laughing. I see him in the attic at Boddington, jumping from the table and teaching me how to fly. And older now, going up to receive the maths prize at Speech Day, the headmaster shaking his hand. The trip we made to Italy that last summer of university; seeing him off at the station when he went to Sandhurst, and watching him walk through the door of my ofice the day he joined Carltons. I see him in the only way I will ever see him again, in the random light of memories that must fade with the years and grow dim.

I lie down. There are stars and bright smiling moons just above me. It should be night. I rest my cheek on the pillow. Dear God. Dear God, this is not how I thought it would be.

Later, Celia calls.

‘Raef,’ she says tearfully. ‘Will you come round?’ And when she starts to cry, I close my eyes. ‘Raef?’

‘I'll be there in half an hour.’

4

C
elia presses her face‘to my chest, and I wrap my arms round her shoulders.

‘The police,’ she says, then she falters, and I walk her inside.

It’s been ten years since Daniel brought Celia to my house and announced his engagement. She was vivacious then, always smiling, but the years between have drawn heavy lines on her face. Marriage to Daniel has aged her. As we enter the sitting room she wipes the backs of her hands over her eyes. Everything here is just as it always is, neat and newly cleaned; and there’s a faint smell of wax on the air. She slumps into the sofa.

‘He was shot,’ she says. She looks straight ahead, eyes fixed, and it occurs to me she might still be in shock. But when I ask if I can get her a drink, she shakes her head. ‘Why would someone shoot him?’

‘I don’t know, Celia.’

‘The bank?’ she wonders, wiping her eyes again. ‘Why?’

I can’t bring myself to face her. I ask what she’s heard from the police.

‘They said they’d talk to me later. They had a policewoman bring me home after I saw Daniel.’ I glance down the hall. ‘Gone,’ she says. ‘I sent her away.' She gestures for me to sit. ‘He said he’d be late,’ she tells me, meaning Daniel. ‘That’s what he always said. I wasn’t worried when he didn’t come back. He said it was no wives. Was that true?’

Not true at all, as I think Celia sees from my expression.

‘Theresa didn’t come either,’ I remark lamely.

‘Right.’ She looks absolutely wretched. ‘I got a call at five this morning. I thought it was Daniel but it wasn’t.’

‘The police?’

‘They came and got me. I had to identify him.' Tears come to her eyes again but she holds them back. She explains that Daniel’s body was found on St Paul’s Walk. His wallet, it seems, was still in his jacket.

‘So he wasn’t mugged?’

‘They don’t think so.’

‘Who found him?’

‘Some policemen. I heard them talking at the morgue. They said they thought Daniel was a tramp, drunk or something. They tried to wake him up.’

She stares into space. When she starts to tremble I go and sit by her, an arm around her shoulders.

I never thought I’d feel close to Celia, not when I first met her. But after my marriage to Theresa, all four of us became close friends; we even took holidays together before Celia’s first child, my godson Martin, was born. And as Daniel’s peccadilloes have become too brazen to ignore, I’ve found my fondness for Celia turning to admiration and respect. Now she leans forward, her face in her hands, and I feel as close to her as I’ve ever felt to anyone.

‘How do I tell the boys?’ she whispers. Her two sons, they’re up at Eton, and for one horrible moment I think she’s asking me to break the news to them. But then she says, ‘I’ll have to go out and see them later.’

When I ask if she wants me to speak with Daniel's lawyers, she looks surprised. ‘Daniel’s will,’ I explain. ‘I’m an executor.’

She seems relieved, and agrees that I should. She doesn’t want to be seen reading the will over Daniel’s unburied body. Then I ask if there’s anything else I can do, and she pushes her hair back and holds it there. Her face is red now and twisted with pain.

‘Who would want to kill him?’

‘I don’t know, Celia.’

She shakes her head and fixes her eyes on mine. Beneath her pain there is a real perplexity. Her lips tremble: she is on the verge of tears again. ‘Why?’ is all that she says.

5

C
ocktails at my father’s flat in St James’s. One of the catering staff ushers me in and I take a glass from a passing tray and look around. Not as many here as I’d expected; maybe not even thirty, and a good few of those I don’t recognize. If I could be anywhere else at this moment, I would be; but I have a duty to fulfil, to the bank, and to my father.

Charles Aldridge nods to me from near the fireplace. ‘We missed you,’ he says when I wander over. ‘Thought you wouldn’t make it.’

This, it seems, is my invitation to mention Daniel. But I let the opportunity pass, asking after my father instead.

‘Edward?’ Charles looks around. ‘Haven’t seen him for a while. Quite shaken up by the news.’

Ignoring this second opening to unburden myself, I sip the champagne. Charles Aldridge handles our family’s legal affairs, and has done for as long as I can remember. He also sits on the Carlton Brothers Board. He gave up practising as a barrister some years ago, when he turned sixty, but he has retained his obliquely probing manner. Normally it doesn’t trouble me, but right now it irks. Picking up the signal, he gestures around the room.

‘Into the fray?’

I ask him how it's looking, and he runs a hand up through his thick mane of silver hair. ‘Not good. There isn’t much chance of twisting arms if they aren’t here.’

‘Where’s the Chairman?’

‘Couldn’t make it.’

‘The other Committee members?’

'Two.’ He nods across the room. ‘The other five couldn’t make it either.’

This is really not good. Tomorrow the Treasury Select Committee sits in public to ask questions about three recent privatizations, one of which was handled by Carlton Brothers. The signs are that we’ll be singled out for particular attention. In Westminster and Whitehall the knives are out for my father.

When my grandfather died, my father became chairman of the bank and took up the family seat in the House of Lords: but unlike my grandfather, who attended the House rarely, my father has become increasingly active in Westminster. He now sits on several parliamentary committees dealing with the Ministry of Defence. When Carlton Brothers were in the running for a certain privatization, there were rumblings from our competitors in the City about unfair advantage, rumblings that were seized on by the Opposition. A suggestion came through from the Cabinet that my father might like to downgrade his role at the bank to non-executive chairman. My father bridled, but complied; and Carlton Brothers was subsequently awarded the privatization.

But now his enemies have re-emerged. If the Select Committee focuses on Carlton Brothers tomorrow, there’ll be ample opportunity to smear the non- executive chairman. And then my father will never get the junior Ministry of Defence Procurement post that he has been promised. In fact he’ll be lucky to retain his current committee seats: his political career, to all intents and purposes, will be over.

‘Another?’ Sir Charles offers to take my glass, so I down the last of the champagne and he goes to fetch more. The chatter from the guests is quite loud, they must have been-here a good while. How many of them, I wonder, know about Daniel? More than a few, judging by the sympathetic and rather awkward looks I’m getting. Soon the condolences will begin, but for the time being I gaze fixedly into the middle distance, holding them off.

The end of my father’s political career is not by any means our worst problem here; because if the Select Committee launches an assault on him tomorrow it will rebound on the bank. It’s too late for him to resign the chairmanship now — that would simply be a tacit concession of defeat. An attack on him will hurt Carltons, no question. But worse, Vance thinks it will harm the Meyers bid. And what that means for us we know only too well. Tonight was to be our last-ditch effort at containment, but most of those we were to threaten and cajole haven’t come. The day seems set to finish as it began: another disaster.

‘You needn’t have come over, Raef.’ Mary Needham. She touches my arm. ‘Edward’s in his study.’ Frail but formidable, that’s how Theresa describes her. A widow, Mary’s been a frequent guest at Boddington, our Gloucestershire estate, lately. She’s my father’s first female companion since my mother passed away. A good woman, and I won’t be sorry if, as he’s hinted, he finally marries her. She says it again.‘You needn’t have come.’

‘I look that bad?’

‘My dear’ — she rests her hand on my arm — ‘You look awful.’

‘What have I missed?’

‘Here?’ Her change of tack is masterly: she scans the room. ‘Not the most inspiring collection.’ She begins putting names to those faces I don’t know. Charles Aldridge returns with my glass and completes the picture: a maestro of the influence game, he knows everyone. It seems we’ve ended up with several make-weight MPs and their wives, a scattering of industrialists, plus wives, a handful of bureaucrats — Treasury and Department of Trade — unaccompanied; and in the far comer of the room a cluster of my father’s friends from the Ministry of Defence.

‘Not quite the turnout we’d hoped,’ Charles remarks dryly, a knuckle resting on his chin. ‘Still. Do what we can.’ Undaunted, he moves off to mingle.

Mary touches my sleeve. ‘Edward,’ she says, and when I follow her gaze I see my father in the doorway of his study, watching me.

It is time to face the dreadful moment.

The study door closed and locked, he sits behind his desk and gestures to a chair. When he looks up, I see the puffiness around his red-rimmed eyes. My heart lurches. ‘Terrible business,’ he says, and his eyes flicker down again and he studies the desk in silence. Even the reflection of his grief for Daniel is painful. Looking around at the leather-bound books, I wait for him to regather his composure. ‘John called,’ he remarks finally. ‘Apparently the police were at the bank asking questions.’

‘Daniel was shot.’

‘Yes. Do they know any more? I've tried to phone you.’

‘I went to see Celia.’

‘All day?’

‘I went for a walk.’

His look becomes searching. This afternoon I walked for hours down by the river, past Chelsea; walked and remembered. We must have been nine years old when Daniel spent his first summer down at Boddington. We were school-friends, and that holiday turned into an extended exploration of the estate. My parents had given me a spaniel pup, Sergeant, at the start of summer, he went with us everywhere. We swam down at the weir and played in the barns, plunging like stuntmen from the loft onto broken bales of hay. We’d rise early to go and watch the dairymen, and then the gamekeeper took us on his rounds, checking crow-traps and shooting squirrels. And then something happened. One afternoon my mother sent me to fetch Daniel back to the house for tea; he’d gone down to the river to play, and when I got down there I heard splashing. So I knelt in the grass and crept forward, meaning to scare him as I crested the rise. But he wasn’t playing. I saw him crouched on his haunches at the water’s edge, a long forked-stick in his hand. He was using the stick to fend Sergeant away from the safety of the bank. Sergeant was drowning.

Hey.

As I scrambled down the bank, he dropped the stick.

He was dirty, Daniel said.

Sergeant clambered, whimpering, onto the bank.

Was not.

Was so, Daniel said.

And he looked at me then in a way I’ve never forgotten, burning with some inner rage, and yet, behind it all, deeply remorseful. I picked up Sergeant and scrambled up the bank, with Daniel at my heels.

You won’t tell, he said.

Nearer the house, I put Sergeant down. He was shivering, but he wasn’t going to die. Daniel crouched, and tickled Sergeant's ear.

We'll say he fell, he said.

I didn't understand it all then. But he was nine years old, his father was dead, and for some reason his mother didn’t want him with her over summer. Did I sense even then how much he wanted what I had, the warm affection of a family? But if I did, why in the world, when we went inside, did I calmly explain to my mother that Daniel had just tried to drown Sergeant in the river?

‘Are you all right, Raef?’ I look up, returned suddenly to the present. ‘I called Stephen,’ my father says. Stephen Vance. ‘He seems to think it won’t derail the Meyers bid.’