Grace said nothing for some moments, reflecting. Bruno was the son he never knew he had. He had learned, only on her deathbed, that his long-missing wife, Sandy, had left him soon after discovering she was pregnant with this boy. He’d subsequently found out that, in those years after she’d left, she’d led a wayward life, joining first the Scientologists, then another cult in Germany. She got bigamously married to a rich guy, then they separated after just two years. Unbelievably, at some point she’d become a heroin addict, before getting clean and working to help addicts, first in Frankfurt and then Munich.
Grace wasn’t sure at what point it had all gone wrong for her, but from what Sandy had told him, she had drifted into a hedonistic lifestyle while in the company of the persuasive, charismatic cult leader, and she’d found it nearly impossible to pull herself out of it. He’d tried to get Bruno to talk about this time without much success, and he could only guess at what impact this peripatetic life with an unstable, erratic single parent had had on him.
And he was well aware that uprooting Bruno from his roots in Germany and bringing him to England at the age of ten was again disruptive for him. But he’d hoped that introducing him into a stable, loving and welcoming family environment might have helped him settle down. So far, it seemed not. Whatever Sandy — the woman he had once considered his soulmate — had instilled in their son, she’d left him with strange values and a seriously skewed moral compass.
‘I’d be happy to go and speak to Ted Hartwell. Maybe we’ve never explained Bruno’s background fully enough to him. What do you think?’
‘It’s worth a try. I’ll come with you. I’m sure there is good inside Bruno — maybe we just have to dig deeper to mine it out.’
‘I’ve got it in my diary that I’m taking him to school tomorrow, is that right?’
‘Please. I’ve got eight postmortems. I’ve got to be in at 7 a.m.’
‘No probs, I’ll take him and have a chat with him in the car.’
‘Good luck with that.’
He cocked his head. ‘Meaning?’
Cleo gave him a sleepy smile. ‘I do think he responds to you better than he does to me. But...’
He kissed her on the forehead, undressed, hanging up his suit and his tie, then went through into the bathroom and dumped his underwear and shirt in the laundry basket. He picked up the tube of toothpaste and, as the electric brush whirred, tried to focus back on the Paternoster case, but it was Bruno at the forefront of his mind.
And it was Bruno that kept him awake for much of the night. When he did lapse into brief sleep, he repeatedly dreamed of the boy and woke each time with a feeling of dread.
31
‘Success is all about being ahead of the curve.’
An appropriate metaphor for a dealer in performance cars that his bank manager had used, ‘Lanky’ Larry Olson rued.
‘But sometimes,’ his bank manager told him, turning him down for a further business loan, ‘you can be too far ahead of the curve. Ever heard the saying, “It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese?”’
Larry had come in early this morning to open up his small showroom with its big name, Sussex Sporting E-Cars. The location, in a mews off Church Road, wasn’t helping, because there was hardly any through traffic. He should have been bolder and gone for a prime site when he’d opened, but he had worried that the rent would have stretched him too much.
The gangly fifty-five-year-old was dressed as he was every day of his working life, in a sharp suit, shirt and sober tie. He had a mop of thinning fair hair turning to grey, big blue eyes, a winning smile, and was charm personified. His first wife had told him he could sell fridges to Eskimos. His second that he could sell guano to bats. His future third wife had told him, three years ago, that he was nuts to give up his lucrative job as the top salesman for Jim Spatchcock Honda.
But hey, when he’d hit fifty he’d seen Jim Spatchcock in the Sunday Times Rich List with a fortune of over £200 million from his chain of car dealerships around the UK. Sure, Larry knew he earned good money himself, but it was peanuts compared to that. With retirement looming too close for comfort, it was now or never if he was going to strike out and make his fortune.
The way forward, for sure, was in electric cars. He used his savings, remortgage money from his house and a decent bank loan to start this specialist business, trading in second-hand electric performance cars.
Except the business, which had started two years ago, wasn’t as of yet booming the way he had anticipated, and he was fast running out of cash — and credit.
As he stared around the shiny, brand-new-looking stock of cars in his showroom, he was reflecting on just how poor business had been during these past months. The words from a record made by his favourite-ever comedians, the late Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, came to mind.
Moore was interviewing Cook in his persona of the world’s most unsuccessful entrepreneur, Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, about his latest catastrophic venture, a restaurant serving only frogs and peaches, situated in a bog in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors. In response to the question about how business had been, Cook replied, ‘Business hasn’t been and there hasn’t been any business.’
Which was pretty much how he felt, Larry reflected.
So far he was surviving, just. But with the further loan he’d been hoping for now turned down, he needed to make some good sales — and quickly. And he had one very big prospect coming in this morning to test drive the most expensive car in the showroom. A top spec, two-year-old BMW i8 hybrid. New, it had cost close to £130,000. He’d managed to buy it at an auction of cars seized back by finance companies for a knock-down £37,000 and had it advertised at £89,500. If he got that price it would hand him a profit of more than £50,000, which would see him through for a good few months.
The potential customers, a young couple, Christopher Goodman and his fiancée, Sophia, had come in on Saturday and made a beeline for the car, both clambering in and sitting there, admiring it.
If there were two things, above all, Larry had learned in thirty-seven years as a car salesman, the first was that customers did not always end up buying the first car they sat in — mostly because they couldn’t afford it. And second, that it was usually the woman who made the decision on what car to buy.
He had left them alone for some while, then casually sauntered over, copy of the Argus in his hand, and knelt beside the passenger door so as not to intimidate them by looking down at them. ‘Hi!’ he said breezily. ‘I’m Larry. Are you Albion fans?’
Another of the things he’d learned was never to open a conversation talking about cars.
‘Not really,’ the young woman said, ‘but my fiancé is.’
‘What do you think of the latest signing?’ Olson asked, raising the paper, with the news being the headline item.
‘£14 million. A lot of money — let’s hope he does the magic, right?’ the guy said.
‘Oh yes. I’m right with you!’ Larry paused a moment. ‘If there’s anything in here you’d like to take a look at, just shout.’
‘We actually like this,’ the guy replied. ‘We’re getting married next month and we’re planning a motoring honeymoon through Europe — so we’re looking for something suitable.’
‘Congratulations!’ he said. ‘I’m Larry Olson, by the way.’
‘Chris Goodman, and this is my fiancée, Sophia.’
‘A delight to meet you, Chris and Sophia!’
This was definitely hopeful, he decided. ‘Are you looking to exchange anything?’ he asked, as the next step to drawing someone in.
‘We have a Lotus Elise, but we’re happy to sell that privately.’ Goodman held the wheel and fondled the gear shift, the smile on his face spreading. Then they both got out of the car and walked around it.