Kingdom Come. Deborah Levy

Чтение книги онлайн.

       4

       The Resistance Movement

      ‘AS YOU CAN SEE, Mr Pearson, the bulk of your father’s estate goes to the pilots’ benevolent fund. Unfair to you, perhaps, and rather too final for my taste.’ With a resigned gesture, Geoffrey Fairfax let the cover of the antique wooden box-file fall like a coffin lid. ‘But in a good cause – the widows of pilots who died in aircraft accidents. After forty years he must have known a good many. Whatever consolation that is to you.’

      ‘A lot. He did the right thing.’ I finished my whisky and carefully centred the empty glass on its coaster. To myself I thought: a first rebuff from the old man, a warning from beyond the grave. ‘I won’t contest the will.’

      ‘Good. I was sure of that when I first saw you. The flat is yours, of course.’ Fairfax treated me to a sly smile. ‘People can be surprisingly high-minded when it comes to making their wills. Doctors bequeath their bodies to anatomy schools, even though they know they’ll be cut into tripes. Wives forgive philandering husbands. I’m glad your father didn’t change his will.’

      ‘Did he say he might?’

      ‘No. Your father was never impulsive. Except towards the end, perhaps … I really can’t say.’

      I waited for Fairfax to continue, aware that I was watching a well-rehearsed performance by one of the last actor-managers in Brooklands. Grieving but avaricious relatives were his main audience, and he clearly relished every moment. Looking around his oak-panelled office, I wondered how his cavalier ways fitted into the new Brooklands. Conveyancing office blocks in a fast-food economy of automated cash tills and shopping malls was not Geoffrey Fairfax’s thing. He belonged to a world before the coming of the M25.

      Framed photographs on a side table showed him as a half-colonel in the Territorial Army, and on horseback at an outing of the local hunt, before the foxes of west Surrey abandoned their ancestral farmland and took off for a better world of filling-station forecourts and executive housing patios. Like a lot of directors of old-style companies I had known, Fairfax was arrogant, vaguely threatening, and inefficient. One of the papers from my father’s box-file had floated to the floor at his feet, but he ignored it, trusting that the cleaner would return it to his desk. And if she stuffed it into the waste-paper basket, who would know or care? His pink-faced intelligence had a malicious edge. He sat behind his desk in his clubman’s armchair, head barely visible so that his clients were forced to strain to see him.

      For a large man in his fifties he had shown quick reflexes when he rescued me from the riot at the police station, propelling me with a firm hand to the rear entrance of the car park, where a roofed pathway led to the section house and a side street off the main road. He sat me in the passenger seat of his Range Rover, and watched the crowd disperse through his wing mirror. He drove pugnaciously, almost running down two elderly women who were slow to get out of his way. Geoffrey Fairfax was an example of a rare species, the middle-class thug. There was a strain of brutality that had little to do with punch-ups on the rugby field and much more to do with teaching the natives a lesson.

      ‘My father …?’ I reminded him. ‘You were about to say?’

      ‘A remarkable man. To tell the truth, we hadn’t seen him at the club for a few months. Sadly, he seemed to have changed. He made some new friends, rather unusual company …’

      ‘Who, exactly?’

      ‘Hard to say. I wouldn’t have thought they were really his type, but there you are. He used to be keen on bridge, liked amusing the ladies, played a wristy game of squash.’ Fairfax pressed his hands against the lid of the box-file, as if concerned that my father’s ghost might escape from its casket. ‘Terrible business, I hope they find whoever was responsible.’

      ‘I thought they had.’ I sat forward, picking up an odd note in the solicitors voice. ‘This fellow the police brought in, the local misfit or mental case …?’

      ‘Duncan Christie? Misfit, yes. Mental case, no. Two hours in a police van can be quite an assault course. He goes before the magistrate tomorrow.’

      ‘He looked deranged to me. I take it he’s guilty?’

      ‘It does seem like it. But let’s wait and see. Calm yourself, Mr Pearson. I assume Christie will be sent for trial and almost certainly convicted. Curiously enough, we used to represent him.’

      ‘Isn’t that a little odd? A firm like yours, dealing with mental cases?’

      ‘Not at all. We couldn’t survive without them. Christie kept us busy for years. Public mischief cases, antisocial behaviour orders, attempts by various busybodies to have him sectioned. One of my junior partners acted for him when he sued the Metro-Centre.’

      ‘Christie hated it.’

      ‘Who doesn’t? It’s a monstrosity.’ Fairfax’s voice had deepened, as if he was berating a parade ground of slacking troopers. ‘The day they broke the first sod any number of people feared what it might do. We were right. This used to be a rather pleasant corner of Surrey. Everything has changed, we might as well be living СКАЧАТЬ