Banks seemed nonplussed.
"Have you, er—?"
"Seen enough? Yes, thanks I'll call you. Don't hang around." His sudden grin was lascivious, filled with memory.
"And that's the end of that, too!" she laughed.
"Well done the character-acting, I mean!"
She waved her hand and accelerated away from Banks, hearing one of the security men call out something in a voice brimming with lewdness. The marina retreated in the driving mirrors, Banks becoming a stranded, tiny figure, the two security men ambling away, satisfied. She was sweating profusely, not merely because of the heat of the upholstery, not merely because they had been surprised. She felt dizzied with the success of her gambit, her personation of Banks' fictitious secretary.
Tanya, she thought, would have been her name. She was hotter than the car, the day. The station was there but there was no metro system.
Just the excavated tunnels.
Millions… absolutely millions of pounds ecus, rather unaccounted for. As she drove along a new stretch of dual carriage way raising the dust of disuse, the gaps in the jigsaw, the succession of unfinished, un started pieces of the urban regeneration project, struck more forcibly, imprinting themselves with the clarity of photographs on her memory. She was irritated and impatient that she would not be able to speak to Aubrey until he returned to London that evening. Because now she could not risk calling him at Uffingham, not with David there… David what are you up to?
Lunch was to be late, by David's request. He remained ensconced in the library with his coterie of the great and the possibly-not-good the two European Commissioners, Rogier and Laxton, the local Euro MR Campbell, Bryan Coulthard and Jean-Paul Bressier, chairman of Balzac-Stendhal, the French partners of Aero UK in the Skyliner project, who had arrived the previous afternoon. Which, as Aubrey reflected once more as he sat on a comfortably cushioned painted chair on the terrace of Uffingham, rather narrowed the field of suspicion. Whatever David was up to, it had to be connected with Aero UK and its disastrous recent experiences at the hands of MoD and the world's airlines. The whole gang of them had spent most of Sunday ensconced in the library.
Incommunicado.
He was engaged in a second small Scotch and in conversation with his old friend, Clive Winterborne; and in the immensely pleasurable activity, now that he was well into his old age, of watching other people labour under a hot sun. The giant marquee was only now being dismantled, falling to the ground an hour since with the erotic grace of a woman's clothing. Clive had held a party inside it for the estate workers and their families on the Sunday. There was a rowing boat on the lake, with the swans and ducks, and two figures patiently fishing out spent fireworks. Volunteers, under the direction of the head gardener, were combing the lawns for the same spent bodies and the detritus of Saturday's festivities. The vomit count was low, thank goodness, Clive had remarked, his eyes bright with success and his habitual kind sense of mischief. Broken glass tally minimal, he had added.
Inside the house, Clive's secretary and a small team of volunteers were item ising the expenditure, the pledges, the cheques and the cash. The grand auction had been a success, after the gambit of the fireworks had increased the general sense of well-being and generosity. Swallows swooped and sewed the air around the house's eaves as they sipped their drinks and tasted their ease in each other's company. An ease which all but disguised from Aubrey his suspicions of Clive's son.
In Clive's company, on a grand terrace behind a boastful stone balustrade and overlooking a lake and hazy parkland, it was difficult to think of fraud on a giant scale, the misappropriation of European Union funds by anyone, let alone David Winterborne.
"You're thoughtful," Clive murmured.
"Something wrong?"
Aubrey carefully shook his head.
"Just looking back over my long life," he replied.
"It seems I can't achieve the trick of doing so without evoking a touch of melancholy." Which was true, if not of the moment. An interrogator's ploy, he reminded himself, employing truth like a lockpick.
"You've never had that trouble," he added with a smile.
"No. My melancholic memories are quite specific, old friend — quite specific." The death of his beloved Eurasian wife, the death of his charming, feckless younger son in a car accident… perhaps other occasions of which Aubrey did not know.
Otherwise, Clive's army career and his later career in MIS were a catalogue of success and esteem, as was his subsequent role as squire of Uffingham.
Winterborne Straits had passed directly into David's hands while Clive continued his uninterrupted indifference to commerce.
And, in fifteen years, David had expanded it into Winterborne Holdings, breaking out of Singapore with the ferocity of an infantry assault, investing, acquiring, defeating competition, diversifying… creating a monstrous business behemoth.
Clive had whispered, soon after Aubrey's arrival, that David was assiduously seeking US citizenship to facilitate the further expansion of Winterborne Holdings. Under David's stewardship, a trading house in the East had become a tentacular conglomerate in the West, something uniquely twentieth — rather than nineteenth century.
Clive glanced at his watch.
"I've told David two is the latest I'm prepared to contemplate my lunch," he announced gruffly but without irritation.
"It's almost that now."
"So," Aubrey sighed, 'you're well pleased with Saturday's junket?"
"Didn't you enjoy the fireworks, Kenneth?" Winterborne replied archly.
"Splendid. Marian thought so, too."
"Ah, our shining girl."
"Indeed."
Aubrey felt uncomfortable beneath his panama hat, as if hotter within his oldfashioned cream flannel suit. The shining girl almost as much his own child and that of Clive as she was Giles' daughter troubled him; at least her suspicions did, plucking at his mental vision of things like a stye or mote. David's rapid, even cavalier expansion into aerospace, in Europe and the US alike, had exposed him to the banks and other lenders and investors. The recent history of Aerospace UK and its French counterpart Aubrey glanced towards the tall windows of the library threatened the various subcontracting businesses that Winterborne Holdings owned or controlled. The recession had afflicted his construction companies in every world market he had succeeded in penetrating. Winterborne Holdings, Aubrey had learned by a process of interrogation and compilation, was unsteady if not unstable; weaker than anyone liked, except its enemies.
The rowing boat had returned to the shore of the lake and was tied up at a pergolaed jetty, splashed with the pink climbing roses planted in ornamental urns that lined the small pier.
"Are you free for lunch on Thursday?" Clive asked.
"I'm up in town on some charity business. Shall we meet?"
"Naturally. I'll call Giles. Indeed, we can be his guests, since he so ungraciously failed to attend your fireworks party."
"Good idea." The lorry on to which the marquee supports had been loaded moved away along the drive and rounded the corner of the house.
Clive sighed, as if he had that moment rid himself of unwelcome guests.
"Regimental reunions are all very well—" '-but cannot be compared with fireworks!" Aubrey completed, chuckling.
"Giles probably had a precognition of Marian's encounter with George, our local party chairman," Clive added.
"From all I hear, he would have been mightily embarrassed—" He grinned, his hawklike features softening, their leatheriness warming.
"She really does take all life head-on, doesn't she?" His admiration was undisguised. Though I shall have to have a quiet word with her about the height of her profile. Central Office is, I have it on the best authority, gunning for her."