to be able to greet the new day with speech. ‘I’ll be over at Cannonbridge this afternoon for the meeting.’ His lips brushed her cheek. ‘I should be home around six. Are you doing anything today?’
‘I’m out to lunch.’ She mentioned the name of a female cousin of hers, married with a family, living several miles away. ‘I’ll be back well before you.’ Something else that Judith had learned very soon after her marriage was that Howard detested coming home to an empty, silent house.
She opened the front door and stood watching as he went off to his car. He turned and raised his hand in a ritual wave. She gave him a wave in reply, closed the door and stood with her back against it, contemplating the day ahead.
The main offices of Elliott Gilmore occupied a central position in an elegant early-Victorian terrace of shops and offices in the principal business area of Cannonbridge. There was no Gilmore now in the firm; old Matthew had bought out his partner’s widow many years ago.
Gavin walked round from the car park and stood surveying the frontage. For some time he had been contemplating alterations and improvements to the main office. He had no intention of losing any of the period charm but it could be made a good deal more convenient and efficient, more economical to run.
Apart from occasional primping and decorating, the building was very much as it had been when Gavin first walked up the steps. Before his parents married he had had no idea what his father did for a living, apart from the vague information that he was engaged in business which compelled him to be away from home a good deal of the time.
One day shortly after his second marriage, Matthew took Gavin into Cannonbridge and in through the front door of Elliott Gilmore. He introduced him to the staff simply as ‘my son Gavin’. He was well aware that they had all read the newspapers, they’d heard all the gossip, all the echoes of that fierce uproar, but he was also well aware that they all depended on him for their living. There would be no sly looks, no amused nudges – or at least not inside the building.
Gavin had been profoundly impressed by the grand air of the establishment, the pillared entrance, the wide stretches of gleaming parquet, the tall windows and ornamental ceilings. Today, twenty years later, he still felt pleasure in all these features as he walked up the front steps and into the reception hall.
The offices were on two floors, with a third floor given over to stockrooms, and a basement that had once housed a gigantic boiler but was now virtually unused. No reason why the basement couldn’t be transformed into a stockroom and the third floor turned into an additional office, together with a staff rest-room and extra toilet facilities.
He walked slowly along the corridor to his office, pondering various possibilities. A few moments later there was a tap at the door and his secretary, Miss Tapsell, came in with the morning post. She was a short, stocky woman in her forties, resolutely settled into spinsterhood. She always looked neat and businesslike in a dark tailored suit and white blouse; her greying brown hair was parted in the centre and drawn smoothly back into a French pleat.
She had worked at Elliott Gilmore since leaving school. Gavin had first met her on the day his father brought him into the office. He had never known her in any other garb or with any other hairstyle, although the grey was a recent feature. She had been his father’s secretary and Gavin had been delighted to inherit her; she was loyal, hardworking and conscientious.
She had already been in the building for half an hour this morning, she always came in early. She was still bristling slightly from one of her set-tos with the office cleaner, a lady whom she suspected of skimping her work, arriving late and leaving early.
But none of this appeared on Miss Tapsell’s face now, as she came into Gavin’s office; her manner, as always, was calm and precise. She wouldn’t dream of troubling Mr Gavin with such a trifling matter, she would get it sorted out herself in good time.
When Gavin had dealt with the post he went through the agenda for the afternoon’s meeting with Miss Tapsell. ‘A couple of points I’d better mention to Roche first,’ he said when they had finished. ‘Give him time to mull them over before the meeting. Get him on the phone for me, will you?’
The town of Martleigh was a good deal smaller than Cannonbridge but prosperous enough, with more than one long-established and solidly-based local industry. The Martleigh branch of Elliott Gilmore occupied the ground floor of a newish office block near the town centre.
Stephen Roche sat at his desk, studying a file of papers. He was in his late thirties, no more than average height, with a strong, wiry build. He had a broad, unlined forehead, eyes of a clear pale amber, sharply intelligent.
He always got to his office early, was often the first to arrive. He stayed in lodgings in Martleigh during the week, returning at weekends to his house on the edge of Cannonbridge. When he had first been sent to Martleigh twelve months ago he had commuted daily from Cannonbridge; he found the journey, twenty-two miles each way, just about tolerable.
But within a couple of months extensive roadworks, long promised, often postponed, were finally begun along a sizable stretch of the carriageway, causing unpredictable and time-consuming delays morning and evening. After a few weeks of being late for appointments and tensing himself every afternoon for the drive home with its lengthy queues and maddening hold-ups, Roche decided to abandon the struggle and look for digs in Martleigh. ‘It won’t be for long,’ he told his wife. The Ministry officials were confident the traffic would be flowing normally long before Christmas.
But there was industrial trouble in the late summer, and then, when that had been at last resolved, a spell of severe weather, early and prolonged, in the autumn, with all the consequent delays and interruptions to schedules. It would probably now be Easter or even later before the giant machines clattered away for the last time.
Roche glanced up now from his papers and his gaze fell on the plain silver frame that held a photograph of his wife. It stood on his desk, a little to one side, next to the potted plant that his secretary kept assiduously fed and watered. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a young woman with an unsmiling look, large, well-set eyes, hair simply cut, with a slight wave, Roche frowned. His secretary must have moved the photograph when she attended to the plant; it was a little out of its usual place.
The phone rang suddenly on his desk. He picked up the receiver and heard Gavin Elliott’s voice. As he listened to the details of the afternoon’s agenda he stretched out a hand and replaced the photograph in its exact customary spot, where Annette’s eyes would meet his own whenever he glanced up from his work.
The Friday afternoon meeting finished a little earlier than usual. It was just after four when the three men in their dark suits came out of Gavin’s office, followed by Miss Tapsell who had as usual been taking notes.
Gavin would stay on at his desk for another hour or two but Howard was going straight home, and so was Stephen Roche. Both men always cleared up in their own branches on Friday morning; the traffic and the distances involved, particularly in Roche’s case, made it not worth returning there after the meeting. Gavin stood for a few moments chatting to the other two before turning back into his office.
Miss Tapsell glanced at the three of them as she went off along the corridor. Roche with his sharp eyes and long foxy muzzle; the two half-brothers, alike only in their height, inherited from their father. Howard had also inherited Matthew’s solid build and heavy shoulders, but he had his mother’s light brown hair, her blue eyes and regular features. Good-looking enough in his way, Miss Tapsell used to think years ago, though beginning now to let himself go.
Always the cautious one, Howard, always wanting everything in writing, everything hedged against,
