So baby Frances was born without a dad. I didn’t make a mistake there, by the way: his name is indeed spelled in the girlie manner, his birth having been registered by Auntie Ade’s then secretary, a dimwit who paid for the howler with her job. That’s why he was called Frank from the cradle. He grew up without even a surrogate father, my aunt being a firm believer in short-term relationships, sometimes as short as two or three hours. He was seven years younger than me, a lot when you’re a kid. I remember being mildly excited when Mum told Dawn and me about his birth, but he was a messy three year old when Auntie Ade finally brought him to Auchterarder for the official viewing, and so he registered with the pair of us as little more than the sticky thing on the kitchen floor.
After that introduction we all got on with our growing for a few more years, until eleven-year-old Frank was sent north for a summer holiday. I was eighteen by then, just finished school and getting myself ready to embark on my nursing degree, so the job of looking after our cousin fell mostly to my younger sister, but I did spend some time with him. With his Asiatic features, he was an attractive boy, small for his age but advanced in other areas, or so I judged from the way I caught him looking at Dawn in off-guard moments. He was polite, but self confident and glib-tongued, in the way that prep-school children can be.
I didn’t see him again for another seven years, when I stopped off in London to spend a few days with my aunt, before beginning a contract as a theatre sister at a hospital in Dubai. This time Frank was the one putting his schooldays behind him. . and how. He hadn’t stretched that much, being no taller than me, but his self-assurance had been boosted by a clutch of A levels, enough to win him entry to Cambridge to study economics. He had become a charismatic lad, and when he flashed me one of the looks he had given Dawn in his prepubescent days. . let’s just say it was my turn to be caught off guard.
There was something underlying it, though, something about him that I didn’t like. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but when the trouble erupted, I might have professed shock to my parents, but I can’t say I was surprised.
When it happened, Frank was twenty-six. I was in Glasgow with Oz, helping him get over Jan’s death as best I could and working in the investigations business we had set up together. His court case wasn’t hot news, but it made headlines big enough to embarrass Auntie Ade and my mum. Dad never said anything about it, but he keeps his own counsel most of the time.
Essentially, my cousin’s own ego tripped him up. He had come out of Cambridge with a good degree, a two-one, had done a couple of years as a political researcher in the House of Commons, then schmoozed himself into a job in a merchant bank. From what the papers said, backed up by the account Mum had from Auntie Ade, he had done a Nick Leeson; in other words he had traded without authority in high-risk markets. But unlike Leeson, he had been consistently successful.
So why hadn’t the bank regarded him as a hero, rather than a criminal? Simple answer: he had diverted a proportion of the profits he had generated into a personal account. When his unorthodoxy was discovered he had claimed that he had been risking his own money as well as the bank’s, drawing what he called ‘advances on salary and bonuses’ totalling just over eighty thousand pounds to fund his own short-term investments. Unfortunately for Frank, just as no senior officer had given his trading the okay, neither had anyone approved the advances. The bank, its auditors, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and ultimately twelve jurors all agreed that they had in fact been theft.
He might have got off with just the sack, and no prosecution, if he had coughed up all the money he had made before the police were brought in. The bank wasn’t thrilled about the publicity that prosecution was going to bring. But he wouldn’t: all he ever returned were the so-called advances, arguing that however he had come by his stake, the profits he had generated with it had been the result of his skill and, as such, were his. By that time they were also well hidden, in an untraceable offshore account.
He was sentenced to nine years, much more than Leeson’s six and a half, as a salutary example to other City slickers, I suppose. I felt a little sorry for him when I heard that, as the bank had made much more from his trading than the amount of the ‘advances’ for which he went to jail. The Parole Board may have had some sympathy too, for they sprang him after only five.
If anyone held a coming-out party for him I wasn’t invited, not least because I’d just emerged myself from a short spell as a guest of the Mountbatten-Windsor Hotel Group, the fall-out from an ill-judged plot against Oz. (I must stop talking about him, or you’ll get the impression that I still love him, that I remember every moment of the last night we spent together, in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, and that there hasn’t been a day since he died when I haven’t shed a mental tear for him. And I wouldn’t want you to get that impression.)
It’s not something I’m proud of, and nobody in my family will ever broadcast the fact that we had two members in the nick at the same time, but looking back I see that time as the start of the healing process that brought me to where I am today. I wasn’t thinking about Frank at that time, even though his mother was the only person who came to visit me in HM Prison, Cornton Vale. I’d forbidden my dad and my sister to come near the place, but I hadn’t thought to extend the ban to Auntie Ade, whom I hadn’t seen in years until my mum’s funeral a few months before. I held myself together pretty well in jail, but when she turned up I did lose it for a few minutes. We didn’t talk about my cousin at all; she didn’t mention him and I didn’t ask, being much too wrapped up in my own situation to be bothered about someone I barely knew.
Not long afterwards, I was out and getting on with my life, with every intention of being a fit and proper mother to my son, even if his father (I’m getting better: I didn’t mention his name) had obtained legal custody during my enforced absence. It wasn’t that easy, though: before long I found myself caught up in the fateful last adventure that led to New York, to that night in the Algonquin and, two days later, to my ‘death’.
Three
There’s one problem about an earthly paradise. After a year or two, it can become a little stale, a little. . what’s the word?. . yes, a little boring. (I suspect that’s also true about the Other Side, but I’m in no hurry to check it out, not least because I doubt that my CV would get me past the first interview. As Jim Steinman wrote, and Meat Loaf sang, beautifully, ‘Heaven Can Wait’.)
When we moved here Tom was in the process of becoming five, and looking after him was more or less a full-time job, but once he had started school in L’Escala, things started to change. I had time on my hands during the day, and my recent history indicates that when I’m in that situation I don’t always fill the hours as constructively as I might. That doesn’t mean I drink too much: if I over-indulge in anything, these days, it’s coffee. No, my tendency has been to get myself engrossed in projects, wild schemes that usually lead to disaster.
At first, my intentions were pretty good. I enrolled on distance courses in Spanish and Catalan, so that I could keep up with my son’s developing language skills, but I found pretty quickly that I had already progressed beyond the stage where they could do me much good. I looked into going back to nursing, part-time, and went so far as to enquire about job vacancies at the local primary-care clinic, but I bottled out when I saw a section on the application form that required me to declare criminal convictions. I thought about starting an estate agency, until I looked at a copy of the local Yellow Pages and found that there were almost fifty such businesses operating already in that one small town. I did a few afternoon waitress shifts in one of the four restaurants in the village, but that came to an abrupt end when a fat tourist groped me as I walked past his table and I buried a paella, still in its pan, in his face. (He shouted something from the floor, in French, about suing, until the proprietor called his bluff, and the police, and he legged it.)