Vacuum (3 page)

‘How? I don't trade or own a club,' Harpur said.

‘He's got two daughters at school,' Jill said.

‘Well, yes,' Harpur said. ‘I think so.'

‘You know it,' Jill said. ‘You must have a dossier on him. But his daughters are not at John Locke Comp with us. Private: Corton House – a snob place. Ralph's rich.'

‘He's known as Panicking Ralph or Panicking Ralphy,' Hazel said, ‘owing to some yellowness far back.'

‘It's weird, really, isn't it, Dad?' Jill said.

‘What?' Harpur said.

‘Ralph Ember, a crook, two kids – girls – at a private school,' Jill said. ‘Mansel Shale, another crook, two kids – a boy and a girl – also at a private school, though a different one, and, of course, the boy dead now. Are crims the only ones who can afford private? Is this a hurtful question to a parent, such as you? It has to be asked, though. Is this a serious comment on the present state of things?'

‘Which things?' Harpur said.

‘Like the social picture in this country. Everyone hard up except the crooks,' Jill said.

‘You don't want private, do you?' Harpur said.

‘I'm just making a remark,' Jill said. ‘Would you be able to pay if we did?'

‘A hypothetical question,' Harpur replied.

‘What's that mean?' Jill said. ‘One you don't have to answer? There's a lot of them about.'

‘Ralph Ember runs a substances firm alongside Manse Shale's, doesn't he?' Hazel said. ‘And now alongside this new guy, I suppose, the heir.'

‘We don't believe Laurent meant it was Panicking who actually triggered,' Jill said, ‘but Laurent seemed to think Ralph had organized it, such as paying a hit man. That's what they're called in plays on the telly.'

‘They both wanted monopoly, didn't they, Dad – Panicking and Manse Shale?' Hazel said. ‘I've done it in Economics at school – businesses always fighting each other to destroy competition, so the winner can up prices, being the only one left with the goods. Perhaps Ralphy believes he can wipe out whoever succeeds Manse, too. Will there be more trouble? In capitalism, a company has to move forward just to stand still – referred to as a paradox, which means it's true but sounds the very opposite.'

‘We discussed why exactly Laurent used the term “twat”,' Jill said. ‘It seemed important.'

‘
If
he did,' Harpur said.

‘It's someone's last statement in this life,' Jill said. ‘He couldn't of prepared it, because he didn't know the shooting would happen. This word came out, like, automatic. It's his true, natural feelings. We got to give it attention. There are many hurtful words he could of selected, such as “slob” or “dickhead” or “louse”, but he picked “twat”. That isn't the sort of thing you'd expect to hear in a top-of-the-range Jaguar, which it was.'

‘“Couldn't
have
prepared it.” “Could
have
selected it.” “We
have
to give it attention.” None of it's certain,' Harpur said.

‘People say “twat” to mean someone who's vain but not much good at anything at all,' Jill replied. ‘Showy but useless. It's like “prat”, only stronger. So, maybe Laurent realized it was all a mess up – his mother shot by mistake, and himself going to get it next.'

‘That nickname – Panicking Ralph, or Panicking Ralphy,' Hazel said. ‘It makes him sound a complete write-off, doesn't it, Dad?'

‘And therefore he can be termed a “twat”,' Jill said.

‘All right, he might not have made a mistake with the gun himself, but because he's rubbish and drops into panics he picks the wrong man to do the job for him,' Hazel said. ‘It's the kind of error football managers make when they're getting too much pressure. Bad choices.'

‘Perhaps it really upset Laurent to think he was going to be killed by some jerk sent by another jerk,' Jill said. ‘A sort of insult, as well as a mistake. Nothing noble about it, such as facing fearful odds in warrior sagas. And that's why Laurent used that unpleasant word.'

‘A harsh protest,' Hazel said, ‘but, of course, not with any evidence. It was just a guess or a feeling by Laurent.'

‘We don't think Ralph Ember had any part in the shooting,' Harpur replied. ‘We've talked to him.'

‘And he said, “No, no, not me, guv,” did he?' Hazel asked, with a villain voice. ‘And you replied, “Oh, that's all right then, Ralph. Sorry, old chum. Just thought we'd ask.”'

‘Is he alibied?' Jill said.

‘That's the kind of question Dad is never going to answer,' Hazel said.

‘Who
was
behind it?' Jill said.

‘We're working on this,' Harpur said.

‘It's taking a time, isn't it?' Hazel said.

‘These things often do,' Harpur said.

‘Of course they do,' Jill said. Ultimately, she'd usually try to defend Harpur when Hazel got heavy.

¹
See
I Am Gold

THREE

T
he loyalty question troubled Ralph Ember's wife, Margaret. One reason it harassed her was that this shouldn't really
be
a question: she had married Ralph, had his children, and loyalty to him ought to be automatic. But, no, that was too simple. Obviously, marriages could come apart, marriages with children as much as those without. Life in the marriage could become intolerable for one or, perhaps, both spouses, and loyalty would have no place any longer.

Margaret's debate with herself wasn't to do with the usual causes of strain between husband and wife, though. Her anxieties were special. Because of the drugs business he ran, she knew Ralph might always be a target for competitors, for enemies. This was especially true now, after the Shale deaths. So, might Ralph's family be a vengeance target: herself and their two daughters? Several times during her marriage, she had suffered quite long spells of fear, but never fear as deep and unrelenting as this. It closed around her, offered not even a small sight of relief. She experienced it as a tirelessly hostile presence, standing a little back for the moment as a tease, but all the time ready to rip in.

There had been past periods when she believed the only way to rid herself of her dreads arising from Ralph's work was to take the children and leave him. She'd asked him to quit his work, and, of course, he'd refused. In fact, she had gone once,
¹
but returned after only days. She often wondered later whether that had been a stupid, craven decision. She'd had the guts to up and go, but not to stay gone and settle safe elsewhere. Idiotic? Surely it was the walkout itself that required the real nerve.
Cheers then, Ralph, it's been great, but  . . .

Yet her collapse had followed. And so shamefully soon. She longed to think this frailty was deeply unlike her. She'd always regarded herself as passably dogged and constant. But the memory of such jittery backtracking stuck and seemed to disable her now in this new situation, the Jaguar killings situation. She felt she might never be able to finalize a break from him. And wouldn't any second attempt to exit be  . . . well, idiotic on idiotic, pathetic, no matter how scared she was of staying with Ralph – and, as a necessary part of that, making their kids stay?

This responsibility battered her. Worries about them dominated. It hadn't been quite the same during her previous quit schemes: although the children were important then, yes, she'd had other strong motives, also. But these days she had to consider the death of Laurent Shale, didn't she? Although his stepmother had been killed at the same time, it was slaughter of the boy that produced Margaret Ember's worst worries. If Shale's uninvolved kid could be wiped out, how safe were her daughters, Venetia and Fay? Vengeance could be very thorough.

Just before she did a runner from Ralph last time, she'd gone to see that slippery, crude, know-all, rough-house cop Harpur for advice. Obviously, you'd be insane to trust any police detective more than fifteen per cent with your fingers crossed – if so much – but she'd hoped he would understand her stress. He knew about murder, and not just professionally: his wife had been knifed to death in a car park.
²
And he had two schoolgirl daughters himself. Although he'd been reasonably kind and apparently straightforward then, she drew back from consulting him again now. That would be part of the idiotic, pathetic display she must avoid. ‘
Oh, on one of your little scoots again, Mrs Ember?
' She had to guard the tatters of what she'd come to regard as her main, shaky self.

Some things her daughters said – no, not
said
, more like hinted at – about the car shooting stoked her alarm. They had obviously gathered babble fragments from the jungle-drums, and these disturbed them. The girls nagged Margaret with vague, roundabout inquiries that seemed based on some sort of information, accurate or not, but information they dodged disclosing. It was as if they blue-pencilled part of this gossip as too embarrassing or hurtful for their mother. Yet they couldn't leave it, forget it. To Margaret their badgering came across as the same question put repeatedly in changed words, like a cross-examination trick. It amounted to this: were their father and Mansel Shale violent enemies? Neither of the girls actually used the words ‘violent' or ‘enemies'. They went for ‘business rivals', ‘competitors', ‘opponents'.

Struggling to unearth what they were really talking about, Margaret came to sense they might have heard suggestions that the boy, Laurent, spoke to his sister in the back of the Jaguar just before he died, said something important but perhaps crude. Margaret could not have explained how she got to this notion, but it was where her daughters' questions seemed to point, and point constantly. Perhaps he'd attempted to account for the shooting, perhaps even accused someone. If so, she could possibly guess which someone, with or without guidance from her daughters. There must be all sorts of rumour about among local kids – buzz as they called it, though the girls didn't use that word either now: they obviously aimed to keep things believable and weighty. Margaret would have liked to listen in to some of the buzz; wrong age-group, though, by decades. She, too, wanted to know whether Ralph and Manse Shale might be violent enemies. This helped explain the dazing degree of her fear. Good God, was it conceivable that Ralph commissioned some thug to rake the Jaguar, hoping to kill Shale and not caring too much about anyone else hit; had actually planned to ambush the school run?

She could see why this idea had shocked and perplexed Venetia and Fay. After all, on the face of it, at least, Ralph and Mansel Shale had been business associates, virtually pals. They'd always respected each other's interest and seemed to believe in civilized cooperation. True, they were not partners. Their companies existed independently. But they both appeared to recognize the value of a good, positive understanding between them, unofficially and lovingly backed and blessed by Assistant Chief Constable Iles. Had this understanding suddenly splintered, despite him? She'd tried to get something from Ralph about the scene, approaching the subject from what she thought of as fairly mild, general queries, the kind of questions any wife might ask any husband – if the husband dealt drugs, that is. Of course, they'd discussed the shootings and Mansel Shale's withdrawal to the chairmanship of his company.

‘So there'll be someone new running Mansel's outfit,' she said. ‘Will he be able to manage?'

‘Manse must think so.'

‘But is he in a state to gauge things right?'

‘He knows his people – what they're capable of.'

‘It's all happened in such a rush.'

He began to sound irritated, as if she was hounding him. ‘We don't have to worry about it, Margaret, do we? It's a different company.'

‘Yes, I know, but—'

‘Not our concern,' Ember said. ‘We mourn the deaths, certainly. Who wouldn't? Terrible, terrible. What kind of person could act like that?'

‘Or hire someone to act like that.'

‘Yes, or hire someone to act like that. Degenerate. But the business consequences, as distinct from the personal, are another matter, private to Manse and his people.'

‘Are they, Ralph?'

‘How could it be otherwise?'

She knew something like collapse of the Ralph-Shale business pact had always been possible. The soft-soap terms to describe the relationship – ‘positive understanding', ‘virtual pals', ‘civilized cooperation', happy closeness as ‘business associates' – these cheery labels would do all right for the surface, for the obvious, but
only
for the surface and obvious. What their businesses were about was what all businesses were about: the need to make and inflate profits, the need to be still here, to survive. And, in the type of businesses they ran, the survival compulsion brought persistent, very special and acute pressures. Margaret had read somewhere lately that three-quarters of entrepreneurs failed – and Ralph loved to describe himself as an entrepreneur, his central ambition to bring seller and buyer together: particularly buyers who needed regular refills for their junkiness, and who had steady raw cash, got no matter how.

That three-quarters figure applied to normal, above-board, legal businesses. For the kind of outfits controlled by Ralph and Mansel Shale this failure rate would be much, much higher, because competition was rough and ferocious, expressed often by handguns or something bigger. Had Ralph decided that Manse Shale, his dear, virtual friend, his happy business associate, his sharer of positive understanding, was, in fact, a towering menace to Ralph's own career and should be toppled? And, if so, would Shale feel he had to answer back in a similar bloody style: that is, blast a child or two on the opposing side – Ralph's side?

They said Manse was broken by sorrow and had removed himself from all routine leadership tasks in his company. As chairman, though, he could still give orders. Some would argue that chairmen existed
only
to give orders, and draw pay. Between sessions with the Litany and anthems, Mansel might have time to whisper a few harsh, tit-for-tat instructions about Ralph and his family. So, Margaret yearned to bolt in good time from the hazard area with Venetia and Fay. She believed she owed them that, though they wouldn't understand.