Thomas’s client won the battle, in any case, and shortly afterwards the reasons for his interest in Phocas Motor Services became very clear. In addition to its long-term profitability, the company had another valuable asset — namely, a pension fund which had been so well managed and so shrewdly invested that it was, at this time, substantially overfunded. Before the takeover, the Phocas employees were about to have been offered — did they but know it — a year’s holiday from pension contributions, but one of the tycoon’s first decisions upon assuming control was to sack the present fund manager and appoint one of his own men in his place; and when his publishing, retailing and sporting empire collapsed around him like a house of cards less than a year later, the independent auditors brought in to clear up the mess were astonished at the speed and efficiency with which this pension fund had been emptied — not just depleted, but literally emptied — and the money siphoned off to be squandered in a futile attempt to postpone the collapse of various failed imprints, failed chainstores, failed football teams and a dozen other worthless adventures.
Even now, years later, legal manoeuvres to help the pensioners recover their money are still in progress. There is no solution in sight. Thomas Winshaw, whose bank handled every aspect of the flamboyant tycoon’s finances, continues to profess his amazement at the scale of the fraud, and to plead his own baffled ignorance.
Needless to say, I don’t believe him. And I should mention, perhaps, that I have a small personal interest in this case. Phocas Motor Services was the firm my father worked for. He was there for nearly thirty years, and retired just a few months after the pension scandal came to light. The money he had been saving all that time had vanished, and he was left to survive on a state pension, supplemented by a few extra pounds brought in by my mother, who had to return to part-time teaching. It wasn’t the retirement they’d been planning for.
There is no doubt, in my mind, that the stress brought on by this situation would have contributed to his heart attack.
Does this mean that Thomas was an accessory to my father’s murder?
December 1990
1
I lose count of the number of times Fiona and I contrived to go to bed together over the next few weeks: although a purist, I suppose, might take issue with my precise interpretation of the phrase ‘go to bed’. The procedure was something like this. She would come home from work — exhausted, like as not — and get into bed almost at once. Meanwhile I, in my kitchen, would be preparing some tasty morseclass="underline" nothing too substantial, because she didn’t have much of an appetite; some scrambled eggs or fish fingers would usually be enough, or sometimes I would just warm up a can of soup and serve it with bread rolls. Then I would take the tray of food across the hallway into her flat, and place it across her legs as she sat propped up against a bank of pillows. I would sit down beside her — technically on the bed, you see, rather than in it — and we would eat our little supper together, side by side, for all the world like a couple who’d been married for thirty years or more. And to cap it all, just to make the illusion complete, we would always turn the television on, and sit watching it for hours at a time, barely speaking a word.
I have always associated television with sickness. Not sickness of the soul, as some commentators would have it, but sickness of the body. It probably goes back to the time my father was lying in hospital, following the heart attack which was to finish him off in a matter of two or three weeks at the age of only sixty-one. I’d come up from London as soon as I heard the news and for the first time in many years I was staying under my parents’ roof. It was a peculiar experience, to be back in that newly unfamiliar house, in that suburb which was half-town and half-country, and many mornings were spent sitting at the desk in my old bedroom, looking out at the view which had once marked the full extent of my experience and aspiration, while my mother remained downstairs, trying to find housework to occupy herself or solemnly filling in one of the numerous magazine or newspaper crosswords to which she was by then addicted. But for the afternoons we had developed a little ritual, a ritual designed, I suppose, to keep the dread and the grief at a tolerable distance: and this was where the television set came into its own.
Although my parents lived on the outskirts of Birmingham, their lives tended to revolve around a quiescent, reasonably pretty market town which lay some six or seven miles from their home. It boasted one small hospital, to which my father had been admitted on the day of his attack: visiting hours were from two-thirty to three-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty to eight o’clock in the evening. This meant that the hours between our visits were the most tense and problematic of the day. We would emerge from the hospital into the visitors’ car park and the bright afternoon sunshine, and my mother, who had completely lost the capacity (although it had never before deserted her in the last twenty-five years) to plan her shopping more than a few hours in advance, would drive us both to the local supermarket to buy some packets of frozen food for our evening meal. While she was making this purchase I would get out of the car and wander down the almost deserted High Street — indeed, the only real shopping street — puzzled to think that I had once been unable to conceive of a metropolis more teeming or animated. I looked into the branch of Woolworth’s where I used to spend my long-saved pocket money on budget-priced records; into the newsagent’s where it was possible to buy — although I’d had no inkling of it at the time — only a fraction of the titles available in London; and into the town’s only bookshop, laid out on one thinly stocked floor about thirty feet square, which for years had seemed to me to resemble nothing less than a modern library of Alexandria. It was here, towards the end of my teens, that I used to linger for hours, staring at the covers of the latest paperbacks while Verity fumed and stamped her feet outside. The very sight of these books had never failed to fill me with wonder: they seemed to imply the existence of a distant world populated by beautiful, talented people and devoted to the most high-minded literary ideals (the same world, of course, into which chance would one day allow me to dip my own uncertain feet, only to find it as cold and unwelcoming as the pool which had numbed me into unassuageable tears on that fateful birthday).
After this, anyway, came the most important part of the ritual. We would get back to the house, make two cups of instant coffee, lay out a plate of digestive or Rich Tea biscuits and then, for half an hour, settle down in front of the television to watch a quiz show: a show of awesome frivolity and tameness which we none the less followed with idolatrous concentration, as though to miss even a few seconds of it were to render the whole experience meaningless.
There were two simple elements to this programme: a game involving numbers, where the contestants had to perform some basic mental arithmetic (I was quite good at this one, whereas my mother invariably got into a muddle and found herself beaten by the clock); and a lexical game, in which they vied with each other to see who could make the longer word out of nine randomly selected letters of the alphabet. My mother took it more seriously than I did, always making sure that she had pencil and paper to hand before sitting down to watch, and every so often she would actually beat the contestants: I can well remember her flush of triumph at making an eight-letter word, ‘wardrobe’, out of the letters R,E,B,G,A,R,W,O,D, when the best that the winner could manage was ‘badger’, for six points. She was euphoric for hours afterwards: it was the only time during those weeks that I saw the lines of care wiped smooth from her face. And I can only think it was for this reason that we used to make such strenuous efforts to get back to the television every day at four-thirty, even sometimes, when our shopping expedition had taken longer than expected, driving at fifty or sixty miles an hour through the suburban streets, fearful of missing the early stages of the game or the host’s foolish introduction, peppered with terrible puns and delivered with the beseeching smiles of an overgrown puppy. There was another reason, though, why my mother watched every afternoon, her eyes aglow with the faith of the true believer, and this was that she clung to the possibility that one day she might be granted a vision, a revelation of the Holy Grail after which all of the programme’s followers quested: a perfect nine-letter word to be formed out of those randomly selected letters. It would have made her the happiest woman in the world, I think, if only for a few instants; and the ironic thing is that it did happen once and she never knew it. The letters were O,Y,R,L,T,T,I,M and A, and I could see it straight away, but neither of the contestants got it and my mother was struggling, too — all that she found, in the end, was a feeble five-letter word, ‘trail’. At least, that’s what she said at the time, and it’s only now that I wonder if she saw it as well, the word ‘mortality’ spelled out by those nine random letters, but couldn’t bring herself to write down the truth of it on the back of her scribbled afternoon shopping list.