‘How do you think,’ replied Freddie Fairbrother laconically. ‘Can I come up?’
‘What do you mean, come up? Where are you?’
‘I’m downstairs, Bella, speaking from the phone at reception.’
‘I don’t believe it. You’ve got a cheek after all this time. You could at least have let me know you were coming. OK. C’mon up. Room twenty-four.’
‘Trust me, you’re going to be pleased to see me.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Bella, who couldn’t actually have been less sure. She remained in some trepidation for the two or three minutes until Freddie knocked on her room door.
The man who stood in the corridor was older and, if anything, thinner. His sun-bleached white-blonde hair was certainly thinner, and he had a tan like old leather. He was wearing faded jeans, a slightly crumpled shirt beneath a well-worn leather bomber jacket; the same clothes, in fact, that he had worn for the flight from Australia. And they looked like that, too. All the same Freddie managed to remain vaguely attractive, in a frazzled sort of way.
He smiled his laconic smile. Familiar even after so long. It was the same old Freddie.
‘Christ, you look rough, sis,’ he said, by way of greeting.
She smiled back, a strained little smile. As children they had always indulged in rough banter, casually throwing insults at each other. But there had been a great affection between them all those years ago, until it had been pretty much destroyed by their massively bitter falling out. And Bella would never forget that awful time, as she was quite sure her brother wouldn’t, in spite of what she had always regarded as his carefully cultivated air of laissez faire.
That was history, of course. But could there now be any sort of future for either of them? In the last twenty-four hours Bella had more or less decided there could not be.
Nonetheless she stood back to usher her brother into her room.
‘I haven’t got my war-paint on, and, of course, there’s the little matter of twenty years having passed since we last saw each other,’ she said. ‘Oh, and you don’t look so hot yourself, by the way.’
Freddie was still smiling. ‘I came more or less straight here from the airport,’ he said. ‘But I did stop to be given this. By a courier.’
He held up the calfskin briefcase he was carrying, offering it to Bella. She took it from him, glancing at him questioningly. Although she had a pretty good idea what he was going to tell her.
‘It contains, amongst other things, our father’s will,’ said Freddie.
‘I see. And, I assume you already know the crux of that will?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, go on then.’
‘Pretty much as was agreed beforehand. Our father’s shareholding is split between us, sixty per cent to you and forty per cent to me, with the proviso that neither of us can sell those shares for a minimum of a twenty-year period. There are letters in there—’ he waved a hand at the briefcase — ‘from our father expressing his wish to the board that you are appointed chairman and chief executive. His wish, as you know, was that I should take no real active part, but that I should be appointed to the board more or less to enhance the Fairbrother presence and ensure Fairbrother family interests. There is also, I was told, everything in that briefcase that you will need to sort out the trust funds and rescue the bank.’
Bella shook her head in amazement, already beginning to feel as despairing of her brother’s lack of grasp of reality as she always had.
‘Just like that?’ she queried.
‘Well, it was always the plan, wasn’t it?’
‘It may have been better had our father trusted me a little more when he was running the bank, don’t you think?’ she asked. ‘And, the plan, Freddie, seems to have gone a little array, do you not think?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Freddie, three people have died, all of them probably murdered, that wasn’t part of any plan I agreed to. I assume you have some conception of that.’
‘Yes, but Bella, the old man only had months to live anyway, at the most. And George Grey had his own reasons for starting the fire. If he did start it...’
‘Of course, he bloody started it. And you really think that was his own idea, do you?’
‘Yes, I do. Of course, I do. It certainly had nothing to do with me, that was for sure.’
Bella found she was beginning to feel angry. She had to make a real effort to keep her voice level.
‘Freddie, I should have expected this from you,’ she said. ‘You always have believed only what you want to believe, and behaved exactly how you wanted to behave. Nothing has ever had anything to do with you, and nothing is ever your fault. You may have spent twenty years lotus eating, but you haven’t changed a bit, have you?’
Freddie shrugged. ‘Look, you get what you want, Bella, you get to run the show, and I get what I want, to live as if I run the show. I won’t interfere. You know that. I don’t see what the problem is.’
‘You never did, Freddie. Not even when you shagged your own father’s wife. Your stepmother, for God’s sake. You saw no problem, at all, did you?’
‘Ah, I might have guessed you’d bring that up. I was stoned. She was drunk. Shit happens. And Pa would probably never even have known about it if you hadn’t told him.’
‘That wasn’t the bloody point, Freddie. You were always stoned. And Antonia was always a slag. I didn’t care about her, but I cared a lot about you, whether you believe that or not. I did it for your own good, Freddie. I wanted you to get cleaned up.’
‘Yes, but it didn’t turn out that way, did it. Pa chucked us both out, me and Antonia. And he threatened to shop me to the police for dealing drugs unless I agreed to be banished to the Antipodean. But now, Bella, I am the prodigal son. Pa wanted me back in the fold. And you need me to help carry the board. You’re the whiz kid businesswoman. You know I’m speaking the truth.’
‘What I know, Freddie, is that this whole wretched scheme has spiralled out of control. I’m not countenancing murder. Triple murder. I just can’t. I have my daughter to consider.’
‘Oh come on, Bella, don’t claim the moral high ground, not with me. You’ve never been bloody Mother Theresa, that’s for sure. Now you have everything you’ve ever wanted within your grasp. All you need do is reach out for it. Just let’s stick to the plan, and we’ll all come out of it smelling of roses, you’ll see.’
‘Freddie, I’m not sure that I can stick to the plan. And you should listen to me. We’re already in very big trouble. I don’t intend to let it get any worse.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll thank me for it one day.’
‘Like I thanked you for shopping me to our father?’
‘I know we used to ship our convicts to Australia, but I think modern Australia was probably preferable to jail, however modern, don’t you?’
Freddie was studying her anxiously. ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, sis. What are you up to? What are you going to do?’
‘I have an appointment later today to meet the detective inspector in charge of the police investigation. The murder investigation, Freddie. That is what I’m up to. He’s in London. I’m driving back to my place and meeting him there. Why don’t you come with me? If we leave now, you’d have time to have a shower and even grab some sleep before he comes. Freddie, we need to get out of this. None of it was our idea. You and I may both be able to avoid prosecution if we speak up now.’
‘Bella, we aren’t going to be prosecuted. We haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Oh, I think we have, Freddie. We may not be guilty of murder, but we are certainly guilty of a conspiracy which has led to murder.’