Thick and Fast

from strength to strength.

  It was not the time to look back into the past. Regret is for the weak. What’s done is done. That is what he wanted to say to Andrea, what he most urgently needed to get across to her. She was but a ghost of her former self, permanently undergoing therapy of one kind or another, surrounded by empty headed society women who thought the best thing for her was to drink gin and flirt with suntanned young men. Give her a boost. They were all full of quasi scientific theories – self harm, self esteem, self this and that. And a pill for each one. How he wished she would snap out of it and go back to being the woman he had first fallen for. But she had been trapped in time like a prehistoric insect in amber. Sydney’s death, the whole scene, still floated in the air and refused to go away. For her The End never appeared on the screen.

  Still, there was little more he could do about that now. They had been through years of treatment and professional help, to no avail to date, and he was getting used to things being that way. He could not worry about that forever, he was a busy man. Things had turned out that way and no amount of crying or heart wringing could change anything now. She should do what he had done; square up to the truth and come to terms with it. No blame, no punishment, no regrets. Just facts and assimilation. Then she would be able to carry on.

  Harvey was aware of the accusations made against him, knew too well that many thought he had been to blame for the tragedy. He had so much to win and so little to lose from Sydney’s abrupt departure that rumour was always going to paint him as the villain of the piece. That was legitimate, and only to be expected. People judged you with the evidence they had at hand, then added a few drops of personal opinion, shook it all up with likes and dislikes, and finally reached their lop-sided verdicts. But what others thought was irrelevant. The inquiry had found Mr. Ork to be the sole culprit, the only person responsible according to law. Case closed. Let the gossipers and speculators have their fun, it was of no consequence. Because the only person who knew the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth was himself.

  He had gone over events in his mind and drawn his own conclusions. Not in a moralistic way, and naturally without the slightest trace of sentimentality. Facts are unavoidable, past events immovable. There was little to be gained by trying to decide whether the decisions made or the steps taken were right or wrong. He was no clergyman, no philosopher. Anyway, in his experience the minute you set yourself up as a paradigm of integrity and decency you simultaneously opened the door to hypocrisy. Finger pointers all of them, and stone throwers if you gave them the chance. He had no truck with self appointed arbiters of virtue. To Harvey the whole idea of guilt was absurd. A person is faced with a choice, at a given moment, in unique circumstances. There is no delaying that election; it must be made on the spot. Once that decision has been made and the course of action defined, another choice will present itself. And so on and so on ad infinitum. It’s called living. Some moves will perhaps be seen, in hindsight, as errors. So be it. But there is no time to dwell on such theories. Life goes on in that manner until it doesn’t any more. To succeed you need to be fast, faster than the rest. To triumph you need to be the fastest. Moral considerations only slow you down.

  He admitted to himself, and only to himself, that he had deliberately created the conditions which would favour his ambitions. He had hunted and captured Andrea not only because she was attractive, which she undoubtedly was to his eyes, but because she held the key to a bright and fabulous future. Had she been just a pretty a face, he may still have married her, that was always possible. But the fact that she was heiress to the Haute fortune most certainly coloured his opinion of her. Frankly he had hounded Ambrose at first because the man was a fool, but later because he realised that a man of such limited capacity was malleable and could be useful, either for cleaning up shit or as a scapegoat if required. People of that nature are like tools to be used by their intellectual superiors. Not because they deserve such treatment, that again would be an inadmissible ethical judgement. No, it was purely a question of nature. Ambrose had to get by as best he could with what he had, and Harvey too. There was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to ask pardon for. And no hard feelings either. Just facts. And Sydney Junior? He had pretended to befriend that little brat, the spoilt, tantrumming son of his wife’s earlier love, because he had suspected that the hearsay would then work in his favour. Not the loving father figure, obviously, but at least no outward signs of enmity. He had not hated the boy, that was too passionate a word. But he had not grown to love him either. His death had been a shock, a terrible and tragic surprise. But once again, the idea of blame, of fault, was hardly of any use now. Events had unfolded, and the only thing that Harvey considered himself ‘guilty’ of was perhaps giving them a little nudge in the right direction. That letter? Foresight. The renovation of the pool area? Pure coincidence, but very handy.

  He had kicked Ambrose’s neatly laid out wires when he wasn’t looking because he was angry and needed to vent it on something or someone. One of them had dropped into the pool. Was it a live wire? He had no idea. Was it a possible danger? What isn’t? Why had he not mentioned this to the police, knowing that it could have saved Ambrose from blame and therefore from prison? It was called taking advantage of circumstances. Anyway, the alternative, a confession of guilt, would not have changed anything. Quite the contrary, it could have been devastating. He had let Sydney roam on his own, out of surveillance, because he had had enough of the little bastard. There were plenty of others to keep an eye on him. Did he think for a minute about the possibility of Sydney wanting to play with the water? Maybe. But that was not his concern. Had he consciously prepared the ground so that the little boy would fall neatly into his trap? Of course not. He was not a beast. Was he to be branded as inhuman, devoid of all sensitivity and feeling simply because he conceived the world as a sequence of events not always under his control? Did that mean he had never loved, or felt the pain of loss; did that make him immune to others’ suffering? Did it turn him into a deceitful, scheming, evil person who hardly deserved to live? He thought not. At worst he had inadvertently made the outcome move from possible to probable. But any manoeuvring on his part had been instinctive, not premeditated. He was comfortable with that. He was even more comfortable with the fact that he had been right and that Ambrose had turned out to be the perfect fall guy. Sydney’s death was a tragedy, and he could still feel his limp, wet body in his arms, still hear Pet’s screams, still see his wife slumped on the ground as if she had been struck by lightning. But life was full of nasty surprises and cruel twists. To survive strength was required, even more so in times of crisis. Collapsing in tears was understandable for a time, but in the long run solved nothing, changed nothing. Sydney’s turn had come; it was as simple as that. Perhaps Harvey had been part of his rueful demise. So be it. But that was now behind him, and he had other urgent matters to attend to.

  7

  The guns were kept in a glass fronted cabinet in a small lobby just off the billiard room. Joe Stein had told him that the cabinet was worth a fortune in itself as it was made of walnut or mahogany or something like that, and weighed a ton. Ambrose had often asked himself how one wood could be more expensive than another. Did they do it by weight? Or because it took them longer to cut down? Either way it was beautifully crafted, with lion-like feet and whorls and fluting wherever you looked. Inside the firearms were carefully laid out as if in a museum showcase. You almost expected to see a small label next to each piece with a little information and a date. There were a number of exquisitely decorated antiques, with brass or mother of pearl inlay, and though Ambrose had believed Mrs. Haute when she had told him that they had been used in real warfare by family ancestors, the truth was that they had been acquired over the years as an investment. There were also hunting guns, dull and serious, shotguns that Brendan and his son would sometimes carry v-shaped over their arms, more for show than anything else, as hunting was not allowed at Langley. There was a revolver, too, li
ke Bro had seen so often in detective films, and a tiny ladies' hand gun. But the one Ambrose wanted was the pick of the lot. Harvey's special. It was an exceptionally long-barreled shot gun, standing almost as tall as Petunia. Harvey had told Ambrose he had killed an elephant with that gun, and Ambrose had swallowed that too, of course. And a rhinoceros, a white one.

  Harvey’s shotgun, Harvey’s hunting gun. Except that he had never fired it in his life. It had been a present from one of his better clients, the reverence-demanding, stony-faced Greyson, given to him at the end of his first and last hunting expedition, a two day marathon that he had managed to complete without losing face. Because Harvey was not a hunting man, he found it all just a little too primitive, too close to his animal ancestry for his liking. He preferred to think that he was one step beyond the hunter-gatherer theory, and did not enjoy being reminded of his species’ unsophisticated origins. Still, if the signing of a lucrative contract depended on his humouring a cherished customer,