‘He might. But I’d trust him on this. I don’t think he’s involved, and I think he’d want to know.’
Trust Ricardo? I wasn’t quite ready to do that.
‘What about going to the authorities?’ I suggested.
Isabel inhaled through her teeth. ‘Now that’s something Ricardo would never forgive. If you spoke to them without speaking to him first, he’d feel betrayed. And he’d be right. No, I think you should talk to him.’
‘Hm.’
‘What will you do?’ Isabel asked.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. And I would. But I was pretty sure now that the wisest thing would be to keep quiet, at least for the time being.
My fears about Martin Beldecos’s death and my own stabbing seemed more grounded. But I didn’t want to discuss them with Isabel. She might think it all a bit melodramatic, and while I could live with looking silly in front of Jamie, I didn’t want to appear paranoid in front of her.
But I did want to ask her about the man whom I was increasingly thinking of as my predecessor.
‘What was Martin Beldecos like?’
‘He was nice enough,’ said Isabel. ‘He was quiet, almost shy. Very dedicated to his work.’
‘He was American, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right. From Miami. He had worked for one of the branches of the big US banks there, which deal with Latin American private clients.’
‘And do you know what he actually did?’
‘Not precisely. I think technically he was employed by Dekker Trust. He spent half his time here, and half his time in the Caymans. He was working on some project for Eduardo, which he tried to keep confidential, but it obviously had something to do with Dekker Trust. He asked us all about clients of ours who had accounts there.’ Isabel paused. ‘It’s terrible what happened to him. He was only thirty.’
‘Any family?’ I asked.
‘Parents. And a brother and a sister, I think. They’re all in Miami. He wasn’t married or anything.’ She looked at me sharply. ‘And the same thing nearly happened to you.’
I nodded. Now she knew what I was thinking.
13
‘I’ve left the School of Russian Studies.’
A piece of overdone pork hovered on my fork. I shoved it in my mouth and chewed. And chewed. My mother was not a good cook.
‘Really, dear?’ she said, raising her eyebrows.
‘Good God! When was this?’ thundered my father.
‘About a month ago.’
The obvious question for most families would have been ‘Why didn’t you tell us sooner?’ But not in our family. I had long since stopped discussing anything important with them, and they had stopped expecting it.
We were sitting in the small square dining room in the flint cottage that my parents had bought in Norfolk after my father had retired. Even though it was the end of April, it was cold. When the wind came from the north or east, it was always cold; there wasn’t much between the cottage and the North Pole. Both my mother and I were wearing thick jerseys, and my father an old sports jacket.
I had inserted this remark into a pause in the conversation. Although it wasn’t really a conversation, more a monologue as my father droned through his staple topics: Europe, old friends from the City, Lady Thatcher (always with the ‘Lady’), and cricket. The subjects hadn’t changed much since my youth, although he had substituted Europe for the unions as his principal object of hatred. He would eat and talk at the same time, his large florid face bulging as he chewed. These conversations required no participation at all from my mother and me. I sometimes wondered whether they occurred when there was just the two of them. I concluded something much more depressing. Days, months, years of meals eaten in silence.
‘So, what are you going to do?’ my father demanded.
This was the bit I wasn’t looking forward to. I chewed some more, and finally managed to swallow the lump of pork, and felt it force its painful way down my throat.
‘I’m going to work for a company called Dekker Ward,’ I said.
‘Dekker Ward! Not the stockbroker?’ My father put down his fork, and broke into a huge grin. ‘Well done, my boy! Well done!’ And then, much to my embarrassment, he leaned over and shook my hand. ‘Know them well. Old Lord Kerton was a pal of mine. Must be near retirement age by now. They specialized in plantations, I think. Now there was plenty of money to be made there if you could get the timing right. Oh, yes. Plenty of money.’
‘I think the old Lord Kerton died, Father.’ He liked to be called Father. ‘It’s his son, Andrew, who’s chairman now.’
My father tucked into his burnt pig with renewed gusto. I had made his day. ‘Don’t remember a son. Probably still at school when I knew him. Sorry to hear about old Gerald, though.’ He took a gulp of the tap water in the glass in front of him. ‘Well, old man! Whatever made you finally do it?’
‘Money, Father. I needed the money.’
‘Well, you should make plenty of that. The City’s rolling in it, these days. A smart young man like you will make a fortune. Let me get a bottle of wine. We need to celebrate.’
My mother had been watching me all this time, wearing a slight frown. ‘Why?’ she mouthed.
‘I’m skint,’ I mouthed back. She nodded. She understood that. When we had lived in Surrey, we had lurched from having plenty of money to having very little. For a while I had thought it was my fault. I had gone to a local grammar school that had become independent. I had enjoyed it. The teachers were excellent, the rugby team won more often than it lost, I made some good, like-minded friends, and it got me into Oxford. But somehow I was made to feel guilty that I was there. It was to do with the fees. The termly demands for payment were met by frowns and barbed comments from my father. I was never quite sure why: he was a stockbroker, like many of the other boys’ fathers, fees should not have been a problem. I’m pretty sure now that my father’s distress was a result of inept stock-market speculation, but at the time he left me in no doubt that the family’s money worries were down to me.
He returned with a bottle of Argentine red. Very appropriate. He prattled on, talking a lot about the old colonial stocks in which Dekker Ward used to ply their trade.
After several minutes I decided to correct him mildly. ‘Actually, Father, they concentrate a lot on Latin America now. And they’re thinking of doing business in Russia. That’s why they want me.’
‘Oh, I see. Jolly good.’
My father talked on, about the deals he’d done, the people he knew, and he trotted out some aphorisms such as ‘Sell in May and go away,’ and ‘Never trust a man whose tie is lighter than the colour of his shirt.’ I studied the surface of the dining table, where the imprint of my school homework could still just be picked out. ‘Oct 197’ and ‘= 5X + 3’ were the most prominent marks.
After coffee, I asked my mother if I could look at her latest paintings. She smiled and led me to her studio. We left my father behind with the washing-up.
The studio was a large room that took up half the length of the cottage. It had big windows that provided plenty of natural light. But to walk in there was like walking into a hurricane.
Five years ago her pictures had been open landscapes of the Norfolk shoreline, in an impressionist style. Since then they had become steadily darker, wilder, swirls of cloud enveloping lonely figures on beaches that never ended. Individually they were highly unsettling. When surrounded by dozens of them at once the effect was downright frightening. The nearest thing I had felt to it was walking through the Edvard Munch exhibition at the National Gallery several years before.
My mother’s painting worried me. It was probably brilliant, but it had taken over her life.
‘Have you tried any more galleries, Mum?’ I asked.