Russell, the butler, announced lunch.
"Ah!" Aubrey chirruped brightly. Thank God' Something wrong?" David asked sharply, seeing the expression on his face.
Aubrey shook his head, perhaps too emphatically.
"No, no — dear boy. A little giddy spell hot sun, I expect." David appeared not quite to believe.
"Shall we go in?"
Aubrey pressed, mopping his brow not entirely in pretence.
"Is something wrong, Kenneth?" David insisted.
"No!" Aubrey snapped.
"Fine, fine…" He waved David towards his guests.
The heat of his body would not lessen, despite his effort of will. His thoughts, too, seemed heated. It was truly dreadful, dreadful, he realised. He glanced at Clive, whose expression was of concern. He smiled in a watery, assuring way and they walked together towards the house, away from the terrace and its now elusive and somehow darkened view of the lake's tranquillity. Clive took his elbow, as he had so often done, and Aubrey was grateful for the support. The group of confident men, their fraud probably already behind them, sauntered ahead of himself and his dear friend. It was utterly hateful to him, the knowledge he possessed and the frightening sense of what he must do with it… or how, for perhaps even deeper reasons, he must ensure that it remained hidden.
He must either help Marian destroy David Winterborne, and Clive into the bargain, or he must become an accessory after the fact of murder.
Vance's private jet waited on the tarmac, poised on the apron, nose towards the taxiway as if it had caught Barbara's mood of flight. A coroner's station wagon nuzzled beside it, and the metal casket which contained Vance was ceremoniously removed from its rear and loaded on to the airplane. Gant watched from a slight distance the results of Barbara's blackmail, string-pulling, desperation. Someone from the US Consulate in Helsinki stood with her now, watching the casket as if it contained the victim of some foreign war… Maybe it did, at that.
Barbara wanted out and the Consulate had smoothed her way to that object. There'd be a proper post-mortem examination in Phoenix.
The evening was clear, high and light cloud goldened by the lowering sun. A Finnan Boeing rose from the runway and almost at once caught the sun, gleamed like a star. Kerosene on the breeze.
Reluctantly, Gant walked towards the plane. The diplomat was shaking hands with Barbara with official solemnity. She was nodding mechanically until he released her hand. Once he had done so, she turned and climbed the three steps into the fuselage of the airplane that had been the small dream of Vance's early years, his first ambition. It was now what Barbara thought he should have gone on doing, making executive jets for rich men.
In the hospital corridor, she had said to the air: "Poppa, you should have gone on building toys for rich boys."
"He couldn't," Gant had replied.
Then he was wrong!" she had raged against his death. Then, like a frightened, lost child: "I want to get out of here."
He really didn't want to board the plane with her. She had already returned to the idea of sabotage and what he would do about it. It was not, yet, a plea or an effort at blackmail, but it would become so. And it had made him at once reluctant, recreating as it did a sense of obligation for the failure of their briefly shared past. She loaded him with guilt, with the sense that he needed to atone for something.
What he had so easily promised Burton seemed impossible to offer Barbara. If he agreed to go on with it for the sake of her devotion to the dead idol he could never exorcise, then he would have to complete it, it would have to be finished.
He boarded the plane behind her. The casket was stowed in the cargo compartment. He thought of the co-pilot's seat as an escape, but the eager grief of her features dissuaded him. He was unable to abandon her. So he sat across the narrow aisle from her and fastened his seatbelt. She seemed satisfied, though it was no more than a moment before she blurted:
"You will go on with it?"
I'll take it as far as I can," he replied levelly. At once in her eyes there was the sense of someone else who would have promised except he was dead.
"You don't owe him anything?" she asked scornfully.
The flight deck door opened, but Jimmy, Gant's successor as Vance's personal pilot, assessed the situation in a moment and retreated.
"Nothing," Gant felt impelled to reply.
"You were close to him. You believed, too."
Then we got divorced."
After a long silence, where her hands twisted together and untwisted repeatedly and her features appeared thinned by some wasting disease, she said:
"I turned Poppa against you. I wanted all his support, his love. I had to make you the bad guy."
"You must have wanted out very badly."
"I did. I couldn't live with you, Mitchell. There's no living with in your case. I'm sorry I had to do—"
"It doesn't matter."
And it didn't. It was like discovering that a teacher had marked down an exam paper in high school. How could you resent something so far in the past? They were, he realised, like two people in an Edward Hopper painting, almost devoid of colour and vitality, staring into the end of a situation in immobile helplessness, their bodies admitting it was long over.
"It doesn't matter," he repeated more gently.
Vance had done what Barbara had asked of him, played the role of the wounded and outraged father. He and Barbara had been the figures in the Hopper painting long before Vance had badmouthed him. And it was he, Gant, who had put them there. In that, Barbara was right.
He didn't think there were any amends to be made any longer. But there was, he recognised, a dispassionate anger, a need to satisfy his suspicions. He felt disquiet, even disbelief, at Vance's death, but more urgently he could not live with the sense that he had been duped.
Tell Jimmy to file a new flight plan to Oslo," he began. Her immediate sigh sounded almost sexual, climactic.
"Make a stopover. I'll look into this guy who posed as one of Alan's people. Maybe there'll be something—"
"Will it help?"
"It won't save the company. Who'd listen? Who'd want to listen?"
She could not hide her disappointment, her expression arranging itself in lines and planes that had so often expressed an easy, habitual contempt.
Then I need to be back in Phoenix as soon as possible," Barbara announced, rearranging her posture into an imitation of purpose. There are things to be closed out' She was dismissive of him, suddenly. He couldn't save jobs, stock prices, investment not even her father's reputation.
"You'll do what you have to. Just drop me off in Oslo."
"Do you think—?" she began, but the light faded from her eyes. To her, his surroundings were a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, patio anywhere they had quarrelled. He possessed no skill other than truculent, defeated argument.
"Hopeless, isn't it? You're right. Who would believe enough for it to matter?" Then, as if he were still wearing a last rag of the hero's uniform in which she had first seen him, she added: "I would like to know. For his sake."
"Whatever I know, you'll know."
He seemed about to add something, but the flight deck door opened again, distracting her. Gant watched her turn to Jimmy as if to the future.
"File the flight plan to Oslo, then on to the States," she ordered.
Jimmy glanced momentarily at Gant, who stared at his hands.
"Sure, Ms Vance. Won't be more than a few minutes, they're not too busy right now." He closed the door behind him.
Barbara settled back in her seat, ostentatiously taking a laptop from the empty seat beside her, frowning at once at the screen's response to her impatient touch. Gant watched a stranger, studying her as he might have studied a map of some place he had once visited but suspicious that he might only have dreamed the journey, the experience.