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  Chapter 13

  Vera’s feelings were the exact opposite to those of Horace. To say she was unhappy would be the understatement of far more than a year. She’d never been so desperately miserable in her life and of course she blamed Horace. If he hadn’t gone off his head she wouldn’t have had to send her love child to stay with that dreadful Belinda. She had never liked the woman and even before the wedding she had told Albert he had fallen for a hard and bitter gold-digger who would treat him like dirt. But he’d ignored her warning and look where it had got him: he was completely under her thumb to the point where, he told her, Belinda made him take his shoes off before he entered the house when he came home from work to prevent him making the thick carpet dirty.

  By the time she had driven back through the evening rush-hour traffic – ‘crawled’ was a more precise word – accompanied by the shouts of furious drivers to ‘move on, you stupid bitch’, Vera was exhausted emotionally and physically. She dropped into a kitchen chair, put her head on the table and burst into tears. Finally she fell asleep, waking two hours later to find the sun had set and she was in darkness.

  Vera turned the light on and although she wondered whether she should go upstairs to check on Horace she decided against it. This was all his fault. If he hadn’t become an alcoholic none of this would have happened. He could go without his supper. He could go without his breakfast too for all she cared. Horrible, horrible man to have driven away her sweet boy.

  Vera wasn’t hungry herself but all the same she knew she had to keep her strength up. She opened a tin of baked beans and made some toast and having eaten them went upstairs to her room and bed.

  Just before she dropped off it did occur to her that the bedside lamp in Horace’s bedroom wasn’t on. Well, he was probably asleep. Whatever he was, she didn’t care. All her thoughts, such as they were, centred on her darling son.

  Chapter 14

  Vera need not have bothered. Esmond was having a wonderful time. Belinda had proved to be much more friendly than he had been led to expect.

  Soon after his arrival, Belinda had insisted that Esmond change out of his blue suit and into something more comfortable – and, quickly realising that casual clothes were evidently not part of Esmond’s wardrobe, she’d loaned him a pair of Albert’s tracksuit bottoms. They looked a trifle odd teamed with Esmond’s customary shirt and tie, but he had to admit that they were very comfortable indeed.

  Belinda had then shown him how to use the jacuzzi. Esmond had never seen a jacuzzi before and thought it looked very exciting, although he had been a little embarrassed by Aunt Belinda’s enthusiasm when she started to take her clothes off and get in to demonstrate how it worked properly, and he politely declined the invitation to join her in it.

  In fact, everything about the bungalow seemed both exciting and wonderfully modern to him. His bedroom had a television in it and even a small espresso machine for making coffee. And just outside, he could see a large kidney-shaped swimming pool. In short, Ponson Place was as luxurious as anything he’d ever seen and decked out with stuff which was quite unlike the dull furniture at 143 Selhurst Road.

  By the time Esmond came back to the sitting room with a still-rather-damp Belinda he had made up his mind that he was going to enjoy staying with the Ponsons. Uncle Albert had just poured himself a large Scotch.

  ‘Have a drink,’ he said. ‘What’s your poison?’

  Esmond hesitated. He’d never heard the expression before.

  ‘Poison?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you want to drink, lad?’

  ‘I think I’ll have a Coke.’

  ‘Haven’t got any. Try a good malt,’ said his uncle and, without waiting for an answer, handed Esmond a glass half filled with brown liquid from a bottle. It was labelled Glenmorangie. Esmond looked at the date on the front of the bottle. It was a very tattered label and said the contents were twenty years old.

  ‘Are you sure this is all right?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘Isn’t it long past its sell-by date?’

  ‘Past its sell-by date? Didn’t your dad ever teach you anything about whisky?’ Albert gurgled. ‘I mean, he drank enough of the stuff.’

  ‘Too much. That’s why he’s ill now.’

  Albert kept his opinion of the real cause of Horace Wiley’s illness to himself. Looking at Belinda making eyes at this gormless youth, he was beginning to understand his brother-in-law, and why a man who had previously been a relatively modest drinker had almost overnight taken to drinking to huge excess. More astonishingly still, he’d planned to kill, dismember and dissolve the bits and pieces of his son in nitric acid – which, gormless or not, seemed a bit harsh.

  As Esmond sipped the whisky and said that, actually, he didn’t terribly like the taste after all, Albert had a sudden insight: the stupid fellow was exactly the same as his father, or at least as his father had been as a young man. Albert had never understood why Vera had married such a staid and boring fellow. He’d told her she was completely daft at the time but then he’d never understood her either. As a teenager she was forever reading sloppy novels and Albert had never had any interest in books. The only ones that held his attention were those that contained debit and credit columns.

  Albert had left school as early as he could and, with that criminal ruthlessness that had so horrified Horace, had quickly made himself what he called ‘a tidy sum’. Exactly how much amounted to a ‘tidy sum’ was a closely kept secret which many would have been very keen to find out. The official version made for a modest claim but sufficient to satisfy the income tax men and to shut up those from Customs & Excise, although they continued to waste time trying to pin evasion on him. Even his accountant, chosen because he was renowned for his scrupulous honesty and integrity, had no idea what his client’s true income was – or how he managed to enjoy such a lavish lifestyle on the modest income he declared.

  When quizzed about his standard of living, Albert shamelessly confessed that he’d married for money and, oddly enough, there was more than a modicum of truth in the statement. Although, on closer inspection, Belinda’s ongoing income appeared to be nil, and what money she had in her private bank account had in reality been transferred from Albert’s.

  It was all most peculiar. But none of that mattered now. What currently occupied Albert’s devious mind was finding some way to use this young dummy, with his bank-manager-in-training looks and attire, to his advantage. He certainly wasn’t having him hanging round the house with Belinda in her present mood. She’d been behaving quite oddly lately – he’d half wondered if it could be the menopause, though knew she was far too young for that.

  No, if they were going to be stuck with the lad for some time, which it looked as though they were, he would put him to use somewhere in the business. But first he would see exactly what this nephew of his was made of, and teaching him a little about the pleasures of alcohol seemed an excellent place to start.

  Chapter 15

  In the kitchen, Belinda’s thoughts had nothing to do with toy boys. She was wondering why she had ever left home for this bungalow in Essexford where the country was so flat and life unutterably dull, where all that seemed to matter was money and all Albert’s friends were crooks.

  Belinda had had bouts of homesickness before but had overcome them by telling herself over and over again that she had everything a modern housewife could ever wish for and that she was secure for life. She had acted her part perfectly, but recently she had begun to see that it was no more than that: an act in a dull and in many ways tawdry, not to say sordid, play which had nothing to do with the person she really was. Unlike her awful sister-in-law, Vera Wiley, whose self, in so far as she had one, was a fantasy derived from her ghastly reading combined with sickening sentimentality and rank stupidity.

  What’s more, Belinda realised she had no authority in her marriage – a marriage which she now thoroughly regretted – and a loss of power she bitterly regretted too. But she preserved the ghastly decor she only pretended t
o like, made Albert take his shoes off when he came into their showcase of a house and generally acted the part of an autocrat. In fact, the trappings of the marriage – the modern furniture and the barely used but hugely expensive gadgets – were her only means of retaining some slight degree of self-respect and at the same time disguising her true feelings from Albert. At heart she longed to get away from the place and from his dreadful friends and to return to her true home, the house where she had grown up and where she was truly loved and respected.

  Belinda finished making the supper and went through to the sitting room. If anything were to confirm the dark thoughts she had been brooding on in the kitchen, it was the scene that greeted – a wholly inappropriate word – her: Esmond Wiley lay, quite literally, before her. Having been plied with half a dozen different varieties of whisky and a couple of lethal brandies for good measure by his uncle, he had vomited, first down the front of his shirt and tie and then, onto the carpet. Albert, who had also been hitting the bottle in anticipation of the scene his wife was bound to make when she entered, was slumped in his armchair giggling insanely at the havoc he had brought.

  ‘Couldn’t hold his liquor,’ said Albert, with a slur. ‘Teaching him the diff … the difference bet … between good malt whisky and your blended muck an … French … Frog brandy. An’ he couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take it.’

  He giggled again and reached for the bottle on the floor beside his chair. But Belinda was there before him, and in any case it was empty.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ she snapped before reaching to feel for Esmond’s pulse. It didn’t seem to be beating at all strongly. She straightened up and shook Albert who seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘You really are a bloody moron. I’m going to send for an ambulance.’

  Albert woke and goggled drunkenly at her.

  ‘Wha’ for? I don’ need a fuckin’ ambu … amblance,’ he managed to slur out.

  Belinda looked at him with loathing. Albert was a lot drunker than she’d seen him for a very long time.

  ‘You’ve gone too far this time. Getting the poor boy dead drunk, and I do mean dead, or will be soon.’ She paused to let this sink in. ‘He needs medical attention – and fast. If you don’t believe me go and feel his pulse.’

  Albert managed to get up but promptly fell back down on his knees – in Esmond’s vomit. He cursed and grabbed Esmond’s arm.

  ‘I can’t find his pulse,’ he whimpered. ‘He hasn’t got one.’

  For a moment, Belinda thought about pointing out that, of course, if Albert looked for it above his nephew’s elbow, he hadn’t, but she changed her mind. If she let the drunken swine believe he had killed Esmond, she would have him at her mercy. The thought of what Vera would do when she learnt that Albert had murdered her only son by forcing the lad to drink an enormous number of neat whiskies and brandies would put the fear of God Almighty up him.

  ‘That’s what I told you. I said you’d drunk him to death. Now what are you going to do? Vera will skin you alive. And slowly.’

  Albert groaned, and was sick himself. He shared Belinda’s opinion of Vera’s reaction. It didn’t bear trying to think about.

  Meanwhile, Belinda was thinking. She had had an extraordinary idea. It was the culmination of her silent soliloquy in the kitchen.

  ‘You’ll just have to drive him to the hospital,’ she said, laying the bait. ‘You can tell them you found him by the roadside. That way his mother won’t know you killed him.’

  Albert stared glassily up at her. ‘I didn’t kill him. He drank himself to death. He’s just like his bloody father. And I’m not driving anyone anywhere,’ he managed to slur out with difficulty. ‘I can’t barely get up, let alone drive. I’m miles over the limit. You wouldn’t want me to lose my licence, would you? You’ll have to take him. Go on, Belinda love, do it for me.’

  Belinda smiled. He’d swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. The idiot was going to lose a lot more than his licence by the time the night was over. Leaving Albert lying on the carpet, amid the regurgitated contents of both his and Esmond’s stomachs, she dragged her nephew through the kitchen to the garage and to Albert’s most precious car, the Aston Martin. After a short rest to draw breath, she heaved Vera Wiley’s most treasured possession into the front seat, adjusted the safety belt and pulled up the convertible’s hood.

  For a moment Belinda hesitated. Was there anything she needed to take with her? No, she had everything she needed, she decided – except money.

  She went back into the house and gently opened the door to the sitting room, glancing briefly at where Albert lay snoring on the floor, before shutting and locking it. Moving through to the bedroom, she dragged up a corner of the thick Dralon carpet and lifted the wooden board that covered the safe. A moment later, she had punched in the numbers on the keypad and removed the fifty thousand pounds in used notes hidden there by Albert. Finally, she reset the electronic lock to a different code so that he’d find it impossible to open the safe.

  Back in the kitchen, she put the kettle and a saucepan of milk on the stove and fetched two thermoses. Into one she ladled several tablespoons of coffee, and the other, Horlicks and a small sleeping pill. The latter was for Esmond should he wake from his drunken slumber. It didn’t seem likely but she was taking no chances.

  By the time Belinda drove out of the garage there was nothing to indicate that she had left the bungalow – and indeed Essex – for good. Beside her, Esmond Wiley, now wrapped in a blanket, remained dead to the world. He would almost certainly sleep through the night and awake with a hangover to beat all hangovers in a place beyond his wildest imaginings.

  So too would Albert. She’d put an open bottle of Chivas Regal on the floor beside him, knowing he’d almost certainly take a swig from it as a pick-me-up when he came round. She liked to think what he’d feel like in the morning. Too awful for words.

  Chapter 16

  In his hotel room, Horace was tipsy and happy. He’d celebrated successfully booking his passage with a first-rate dinner and more than one bottle of champagne. He was now lying on his bed trying to make up his mind where to go to after Latvia. He was reasonably confident that his roundabout route and various subterfuges would make tracing him unlikely, but knowing how determined Vera could be when she set her mind to something, taking in a couple more countries after Latvia was going to be vital.

  Horace needed to go to places where no one would think of looking for him. He’d already considered Finland only to dismiss it as too cold. Norway and Sweden were out too. As was Spain. What he’d seen of Benidorm on the box had put him off Spain for good and the Costa del Sol was rightly, in his opinion, known as the Costa del Crime because so many British crooks had villas there. Nor did France hold any attraction for him. It was too close to Britain for one thing, and for another, he was of a generation that had been brought up to dislike the French and to believe that extramarital sex was the main spare-time occupation of the entire population of that much-maligned country. Horace had had enough predatory sex imposed on him by Vera to last him a lifetime.

  In fact, no country in Europe attracted him. He needed somewhere entirely different from the England he knew and the life he had been forced to live since his marriage. Finally, unable to make a decision, he finished the champagne and fell asleep.

  Chapter 17

  Vera Wiley remained miserably awake. She had lost her love child to the Ponsons and, with unusual insight, she realised that they were bound to lead him into bad ways. It was all Horace’s fault. For the first time in her life, Vera lost her faith in the fantasy world of the romantic trash she had marinated her mind in for so many years. The only thing she could hope for was that Horace would come to his senses so that Esmond would be able to return home as soon as possible. In the meantime she would keep Horace on short rations and let him suffer. She hadn’t bothered to give him supper and she had half a mind to let him go without his breakfast too. He was going to learn not to drink himself into a nervous breakdow
n, and if he didn’t like it, he could divorce her. She wouldn’t care. She no longer had any illusions about him.

  Chapter 18

  Belinda Ponson had no sooner left the garage in the Aston Martin than she realised she had made a mistake in taking the car. It was far too conspicuous for her journey. So she drove to Albert’s second-hand car lot, grabbed the keys to a Ford from the office cupboard and, after a bit of a struggle, managed to transfer the still-comatose Esmond to the back seat. There were several similar cars in the lot and it was unlikely to be missed immediately. To confuse the situation still further, she then drove the Aston Martin to the hospital car park where she abandoned it, before walking back to the car lot.

  Esmond still lolled as she had left him. The time was ten forty-five and she had a long drive ahead of her. As she drove, she laid her plans. She would stick to side roads to avoid the CCTV cameras on the motorway, and go across country rather than direct. This would make the journey much longer, but it was worth it. Nobody, particularly Albert, must know where she’d gone. And so she drove through the night without tiring and kept well within the speed limit.

  It was just as the eastern sky was beginning to lighten and full dawn was soon to break that the old Ford breasted a long steep hill. Belinda cut the engine and sat still until it was possible to see the landscape far below. Its bleakness was entirely as she remembered it from her childhood holidays. She had been happy then and that sense of happiness now flooded back to her. Nothing had changed. In the distance she could make out the looming shape of Grope Hall. In her own way she was coming home.