Vogel and Saslow were together in Wellington police station attempting to collate all the varied strands of information, when Vogel received a call from Bella Fairbrother to tell him her brother had been in touch, that he had contacted the police in Australia, and that he would be flying home as soon as possible.
Vogel was intrigued. This was not quite what Bella had led him to expect. And he had already tried several times, without success, to call the number she had given him for her brother.
‘Were you surprised to hear from him, Miss Fairbrother?’ he asked.
Vogel thought there was the briefest of pauses.
‘Of course not, detective inspector,’ Bella replied. ‘You said it, he was sure to hear the news sooner or later. And he is family. In spite of everything.’
‘You told me you wouldn’t bet on your brother getting in touch, even when he learned of your father’s death. That he was not like other men. Those were your words, Miss Fairbrother.’
This time there was definitely a pause.
‘Yes, well, that still holds good, Mr Vogel. My brother clearly is, and always has been, totally unpredictable.’
‘I see. And did he perhaps express an interest in what the situation is concerning the bank and the family trust, following the death of your father?’ queried Vogel.
‘Well yes, of course he did. I was not able to give him a sensible answer, though. I am still desperately trying to unravel everything.’
‘Is the number he called from the same one that you gave me?’
‘I think so, yes. But Freddie told me he was going to be on the next available flight. I gave him your details, and he said he would call as soon as he landed.’
Vogel grunted unenthusiastically as he ended the call. He still had that sense of not being properly in control of this investigation.
Saslow glanced at him enquiringly.
‘Looks like the prodigal son is returning,’ Vogel muttered.
‘Freddie Fairbrother?’
Vogel nodded.
‘That’s a bit of a turn up for the books, after being estranged for all this time, isn’t it?’
‘Not when a share in one of the most famous banks in the world and the possibility of inheriting billions is at stake.’
‘But isn’t he supposed to be a sort of a hippy character, not interested in possessions or personal wealth and all that sort of stuff?’
‘Have you never noticed what happens to hippies as they get older, Saslow?’ asked Vogel, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. ‘They turn into everybody else.’
Eleven
As soon as she had finished her telephone conversation with Vogel, Bella Fairbrother set off for Blackdown Manor in her metallic grey Mercedes sports car.
On the way, using her hands-free system, she tried, for the umpteenth time since learning of the terrible fire, to call a certain phone number. There was one person she really needed to talk to concerning what had happened. Yet again there was no reply. She hadn’t really expected there to be. She was, it seemed, for the time being at any rate, on her own.
She headed onto the M5, coming off at the Wellington turning, and drove for a few miles along the A38 towards Exeter before swinging a left and meandering her way through a network of country lanes up into the Blackdown Hills towards the old manor where she and her brother had been brought up.
Even the drive felt strangely uncomfortable that day. Bella Fairbrother was not by any stretch of the imagination a sentimental woman. But as she swung the little Merc carefully around a succession of blind corners screened on either side by the prohibitively tall banks topped with hedges, which lined the vast majority of the rural roads and lanes of Devon and West Somerset, she felt that sinking feeling in her stomach which always came when she was apprehensive about something.
Not only was her father no longer going to be at the manor to greet her, as he’d always been before their mutually agreed estrangement the previous year, nor the Kivel family, of whom she had only the happiest of memories, but even the house was not going to be there anymore.
The old manor had been built in a commanding position and stood high amongst the hills from which it got its name, almost level with Culmstock Beacon, one of the line of ancient fire beacons, dating back to Tudor England, which were lit to send news of the arrival of the Spanish Armada all the way from the tip of Cornwall to London. Although its immediate privacy was, by and large, well-protected by the high banks and hedges, Blackdown could be seen in the distance from more than one vantage point, if you knew where they were. Bella wanted to prepare herself before actually approaching the house. So she pulled her little car to a halt in a gateway, set back from a section of narrow road, a mile or so from the house as the crow flies.
She stepped out, made her way to the gate, and looked out across the fields. She had, of course, known what to expect. She had even seen some TV news coverage. Nonetheless the spectacle before her came as a terrible shock. It was a long time since she’d gazed across the hills from this gateway, probably dating back to childhood days when she and her brother, and sometimes the Kivel boys, had ridden their ponies along the country lanes and across the fields that her father had owned.
At first, she thought she may have stopped in the wrong place. But she hadn’t, of course. It was just that the tall chimneys and the towering Tudor façade of Blackdown Manor simply no longer existed. All she could see was a near flattened ruin, from this distance just a pile of rubble with only the occasional piece of wall still standing.
She gasped. To her annoyance she felt tears forming in her eyes. She wiped them briskly away. Bella Fairbrother had spent her entire adult life, and most of her childhood come to that, refusing to display any sign of weakness. After all, surely one of the latest crop of Fairbrother siblings had to have inherited at least a little of the grit and determination of their much-lauded ancestors, who had created and nurtured one of the greatest private banks in the world? It had never, from early childhood, looked as if that sibling might be Freddie; although Bella had loved her brother dearly back then, and for years just hadn’t noticed. But one of the things that had made her eventually come close to despising him, was the weakness she had seen develop in him as he grew from a likeable happy-go-lucky child into a deeply disturbed and self-indulgent young man. A weakness, in her opinion both then and now, that had led to his problems with drugs and drink and taken him along a path ultimately making it impossible for him to remain the heir apparent to his father and a future chairman of Fairbrother International.
Yet Bella and her big brother had been close. They’d been great chums as children. And for a moment she could see a picture flashing before her of the young Bella and Freddie cantering across the fields which stretched in front of her, on their childhood ponies, she totally fearless and in the lead as usual, even though she was the youngest, Freddie bringing up the rear, quite content to hold back and merely follow. Her pony had been a feisty little grey and his a bigger, but gentler, roan. Both of them splendid equine specimens, of course. The Fairbrother children always had the best that money could buy. However during their teenage years they also had a mother who’d been more or less forced to live miles away from them, whom they saw only intermittently; a father who was absent from their lives more often than he was present; and a fiery stepmother who regarded both her stepchildren as an inconvenience and made no secret of it. Until, of course, Freddie had become a devastatingly handsome twenty-year-old. But she preferred not to think about that.
Bella didn’t know exactly what had turned her brother into the man he was, barely like any Fairbrother she had known or heard of, nor herself into the woman she was, once described by the Financial Times as ‘arguably the most ruthless and able woman the City has ever known’. And, like most high-achieving women, she somewhat resented such descriptions on the grounds that men in the same kind of roles were unlikely ever to be described in that way. Their ability would be taken for granted because of the positions they held; as would their capacity to operate with whatever ruthlessness might be required in order for them to fulfil their professional obligations. She did know that she had felt obliged to take on a role in life which, when she’d been that child galloping without a care in the world over her family’s land, she could not have imagined becoming her destiny.