you understand: his job gave him a head-start when it came to knowing if the company was in trouble; and Alex hadn’t been around.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I told Thomas, “Speak to Alex in the morning when you see him, and until then don’t worry.”’
‘But you knew it was bad?’
‘Never in forty years had the payroll not been met.’
The man went quiet, shaking his head again at the situation, before resuming seemingly from a different angle,
‘After letting the company go, I let my life in town go too. We had had the house in the country a long while, “lost down lanes and hidden by hedges,” as Alex’s mother used to say, God rest her. But I made it my base then, and gave up the house in town — I don’t know, I seemed to need the quiet I had never had before. I spent a year on the car, restoring it from scratch, taking it down to every nut and bolt. I hired a mechanic, the best you could find. He became the only person I would see for days.
‘I only want to explain to you how out of the loop I had become, Inspector. Of course I’d sensed for a while that Alex hadn’t been telling me everything. And I heard the rumours like everyone else. I read of him in the business pages, of his attempts to find partners and backers, investors and venture capitalists…’ he spat the phrase out like poisoned meat. ‘I ask you, what kind of job-title is that? What would such a person do for a living? Or want with a firm like ours for that matter, that builds things, that is as old as the hills?
‘But any attempt I made to ask Alex, he took as a sign I didn’t trust him running the plant. “Things are fine! Why shouldn’t they be?” he would snap at the most general enquiry. I know, I know, it is hard to fill a father’s shoes. Sometimes success is harder to pass on than failure — at least then you can only do better than your parents.
‘But still, I wasn’t that out of it not to know that for Mr Foy to be calling the office then we were in trouble. We have loans — I knew that much — and if we got into difficulties then the bank couldn’t hold out forever. No, Inspector, I am afraid as I sat there opposite Thomas eating my steak and new potatoes, that I suffered quite a strong premonition. I knew the firm was finished, and that if it wasn’t this month it would be next.’
‘But you didn’t say?’
‘No, I didn’t let on to Thomas; part through shock, part through wanting to keep a lid on things; but also because I didn’t know what on Earth I was able to do to help him. And even as I ate I realised one other thing: that there was only one person in the world I still could do anything for, and that if I was going to do it, it would have to be in these next few days.’
‘Isobel.’
‘I know what you see here, Inspector: a young girl and an old man? I know how you look at me, how you judge.’
‘I don’t judge you.’
‘Of course you do, you’re just trained not to show it.’
‘I don’t judge you because I know.’
‘What do you know? How can you?’
‘I know because Gail Marsh guessed; guessed that Isobel was your daughter.’
Grey watched thankfully as the man decided to concede the point, thus avoiding much embarrassment all round,
‘I worked with Gail for twenty years, hadn’t seen her for six, and she hasn’t changed a bit. And you tell me she knew all along?’
‘Well, suspected. And then when Isobel appeared in the office today…’
‘You can never tell a soul, it would destroy her parents.’
‘I hope not to have to.’
Anthony Aubrey leaned back in his chair, his brief silent beside him, whatever advice he had given evidently being followed,
‘Where can I begin? Christine Semple worked in the office — there were a lot more of us then, Inspector, fifteen or twenty at times: clerks, typists, tea ladies! She had been at the firm a while before anything happened between us, indeed had met Doug there and married him. Yes, we may have caught each other’s eye before then; but it wasn’t till her job changed and she moved along the office that we spend a lot of time working together.
‘What can I say? I’m not proud of it, although my wife had died long before then. I had an ear for office gossip, and so I knew Christine had had a reputation as a tiger on the tiles before she was married. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to settle down as she’d hoped? Either way, what happened happened very naturally, neither pressing the other.
‘There was wrong on both sides of course, but is it wrong when both people need it? And I so needed her wildness, I needed that look from across the office, promising me all I’d be getting that evening. We ran a system where I’d keep her for overtime after Doug’s shift had finished, and then quickly run her back where she’d tell Doug she’d been on the bus. We stole a couple of hours once or twice a week that way.’
The man’s voice, already thoughtful turned maudlin, as he concluded, ‘This will sound fanciful Inspector, but Christine was the love of my life. I’d had others of course, affairs, flings, tarts — no man is an island, and my dear wife was gone. But over the years I’ve wondered if those months with Christine weren’t the happiest I’d known since Alexander’s mother died?’
The man looked crumpled, but Grey needed him to keep going, prompting him, ‘So how did it end?’
But when Anthony Aubrey answered he seemed again to be going off track, ‘Christine had a religious upbringing. You might not have thought it, but it was always there, her faith, like an elastic which she pulled at and pulled at, testing its limits. And then this happened, and it snapped her right back.’
‘What happened?’
‘She fell pregnant, and she knew right away it was mine — don’t ask me how, I’m sure Doug was getting his share still. But she said a woman knew these things, and so that was that. Even before she told me though I knew something was up, and she never spoke to me warmly again.’
Aubrey was into full lamentation mode now, Grey feeling rather as if he were taking another kind of confession, and wondering if such personal stories were what police interview room recorders were there for, half wanting to pause the tape out of respect.
But Aubrey carried on, ‘A baby might have brought some couples together, and if Christine had chosen me I would have accepted Doug beating me to within an inch of my life, if only she had been the one bringing me round. But she chose him, and it ended everything between us. No one knew though. She left for her maternity, and never came back.’
‘It must have been tough.’
‘Harder than you can imagine.’
‘Did Doug know?’
Aubrey gave a hollow laugh, ‘Oh, she told him alright. She told him, babe in arms, the first time he came to visit her at the hospital! I hated her for that, more than for anything else, after he told me.’
‘You spoke to him?’
‘Doug turned up a week or two later, I found him sat in the office waiting to see me. God knows what it did to him to be told like that, at his proudest moment. I feared the worst; but all he said was that Christine wanted to be a full time mother now, and wouldn’t be coming back; and that to make up for her lost wages, he asked a hundred pounds a week more for himself, to cover the household bills.’
‘A fair bit in the Eighties. And you agreed?’
‘Of course! He could have named his price; and the way I was feeling right then I would have paid it without question. It wasn’t blackmail you see, but a way of putting things right, and I thanked him for offering the solution. The next week he came back to work, as regular as ever.’
‘And you got along?’
‘We were civil, would say Good Morning, nod, share the football scores. He made it easy for us to get along. And sometimes he would say in the canteen or as I was passing his machine how his daughter was doing, how she had painted a funny picture at school or had won a race at sports day; just little things, said in a way no one would twig, or that I could ever thank him for. He had won in a way you see: he had my daughter and the woman I loved. These things are never clear cut, Inspector.’
