Late of the Payroll

‘Thomas Long was just about the last person I hired before stepping down as head of the company. He was fresh out of the sixth-form, and his dad had had a word of course. I always gave factory families a chance.’

  Grey thought Anthony Aubrey looked awful, sat across from him in the interview room a little after the appointed hour. An afternoon of salvaging what he could from his life’s work had obviously taken its toll; but there was no putting this conversation off. The man continued,

  ‘I got to know him well those last few months, not that he ever gave very much away. We worked closely during the changeover, and by the time Alex was properly in charge Tom was running half of the office.

  ‘He was a very quick learner, Inspector: you would show him a task on Monday, and by Friday he was the authority on it. Only he had this awful initial uncertainty, an embarrassment at his own clumsiness when he had yet to master something new; but after that he could be trusted with it implicitly. He was a boss’s dream, he made delegation so easy, he took on work like a sponge. I wonder now if he didn’t have such a deep insecurity that with every new task he took on he felt himself a little less dispensable? Perhaps I gave him too much work? Who knows.

  ‘And he was so shy with it you wouldn’t believe! After a while I gave up trying to encourage him in the social side of things. His father was a quiet one too, unshowy, loving his home life. But at least he had Lily, and a bit of a life outside the factory – you could always twist his arm to come for one pint on the Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend. I don’t think I ever saw Thomas touch a drop.’

  ‘And what about after you’d retired?’

  ‘Work kept us in touch for a while: they still needed the odd signature from me, and Thomas would bring me up to speed with what was going on at the old place. I even bought him lunch at the Club a couple of times, but it was wasted on him really, he was no gourmet, and he was never sure how to behave in restaurants. I think he would rather have had a plate of his mother’s cooking any day of the week. But I enjoyed our meetings, and as I say, it reassured me to know he was on top of things.’

  ‘But you hadn’t been there a while?’

  ‘No. As I became less involved our meetings tailed off. Friendships do, don’t you notice, Inspector? Not through anyone’s doing. It is just the nature of these things.

  ‘Until this week...’

  ‘Until this week... when Thomas called me out of the blue.’

  ‘This was on Monday evening?’

  Aubrey shook his head, but only in disbelief, ‘I knew straight away that something was wrong. He asked to speak to me as soon as possible, that night even. He sounded scared, I didn’t like it, so I said to hold on, that I’d drive into town and meet him at the Club. Once I got there, no sooner were we sat down than he came out with it: that the payroll wasn’t going through this month, that he couldn’t make it work. And it got worse... he told me that the bank manager had already called him, had laid it out to him straight that the money wasn’t there.

  ‘Once he started there was no stopping him, and Tom told me everything, shaking and almost in tears: How Alex had been away all afternoon, had hardly been in the office at all recently, leaving him with no one there to turn to; how staff had been leaving and not being replaced, the office becoming like a ghost town full of empty rooms. And he told me how Alex had been out more and more lately chasing new contracts, talking down the staff’s concerns and putting his faith in his business contacts, saying how this meeting or that deal that would make it all alright, and to leave it to him and not to worry.

  ‘Tom even told me how a couple of the lads had already been asking him for their payslips early; and how they’d caught him off guard and he told them, told them everything! He said how he’d needed to tell someone – that he’d had nowhere to go with the pressure.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said not to worry, that their gossip would be forgotten once everyone was paid.’

  ‘You knew better though?’

  ‘I think Thomas knew it too.’

  ‘That you were days from disaster?’

  ‘I reckon he had been scared of something like this happening for months. It was a Hellish situation for him, you understand: his job gave him a head-start when it came to knowing if the company was in trouble; and Alex hadn’t been around.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I told Thomas, “Speak to Alex in the morning when you see him, and until then don’t worry.”’

  ‘But you knew it was bad?’

  ‘Never in forty years had the payroll not been met.’

  The man went quiet, shaking his head again at the situation, before resuming seemingly from a different angle,

  ‘After letting the company go, I let my life in town go too. We had had the house in the country a long while, “lost down lanes and hidden by hedges,” as Alex’s mother used to say, God rest her. But I made it my base then, and gave up the house in town – I don’t know, I seemed to need the quiet I had never had before. I spent a year on the car, restoring it from scratch, taking it down to every nut and bolt. I hired a mechanic, the best you could find. He became the only person I would see for days.

  ‘I only want to explain to you how out of the loop I had become, Inspector. Of course I’d sensed for a while that Alex hadn’t been telling me everything. And I heard the rumours like everyone else. I read of him in the business pages, of his attempts to find partners and backers, investors and venture capitalists...’ he spat the phrase out like poisoned meat. ‘I ask you, what kind of job-title is that? What would such a person do for a living? Or want with a firm like ours for that matter, that builds things, that is as old as the hills?

  ‘But any attempt I made to ask Alex, he took as a sign I didn’t trust him running the plant. “Things are fine! Why shouldn’t they be?” he would snap at the most general enquiry. I know, I know, it is hard to fill a father’s shoes. Sometimes success is harder to pass on than failure – at least then you can only do better than your parents.

  ‘But still, I wasn’t that out of it not to know that for Mr Foy to be calling the office then we were in trouble. We have loans – I knew that much – and if we got into difficulties then the bank couldn’t hold out forever. No, Inspector, I am afraid as I sat there opposite Thomas eating my steak and new potatoes, that I suffered quite a strong premonition. I knew the firm was finished, and that if it wasn’t this month it would be next.’

  ‘But you didn’t say?’

  ‘No, I didn’t let on to Thomas; part through shock, part through wanting to keep a lid on things; but also because I didn’t know what on Earth I was able to do to help him. And even as I ate I realised one other thing: that there was only one person in the world I still could do anything for, and that if I was going to do it, it would have to be in these next few days.’

  ‘Isobel.’

  ‘I know what you see here, Inspector: a young girl and an old man? I know how you look at me, how you judge.’

  ‘I don’t judge you.’

  ‘Of course you do, you’re just trained not to show it.’

  ‘I don’t judge you because I know.’

  ‘What do you know? How can you?’

  ‘I know because Gail Marsh guessed; guessed that Isobel was your daughter.’

  Grey watched thankfully as the man decided to concede the point, thus avoiding much embarrassment all round,

  ‘I worked with Gail for twenty years, hadn’t seen her for six, and she hasn’t changed a bit. And you tell me she knew all along?’

  ‘Well, suspected. And then when Isobel appeared in the office today...’

  ‘You can never tell a soul, it would destroy her parents.’

  ‘I hope not to have to.’

  Anthony Aubrey leaned back in his chair, his brief silent beside him, whatever advice he had given evidently being followed,

  ‘Where can I begin? Christine Semple worked in the office – there were a lot more of us then, Inspector, fifteen or
twenty at times: clerks, typists, tea ladies! She had been at the firm a while before anything happened between us, indeed had met Doug there and married him. Yes, we may have caught each other’s eye before then; but it wasn’t till her job changed and she moved along the office that we spend a lot of time working together.

  ‘What can I say? I’m not proud of it, although my wife had died long before then. I had an ear for office gossip, and so I knew Christine had had a reputation as a tiger on the tiles before she was married. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to settle down as she’d hoped? Either way, what happened happened very naturally, neither pressing the other.

  ‘There was wrong on both sides of course, but is it wrong when both people need it? And I so needed her wildness, I needed that look from across the office, promising me all I’d be getting that evening. We ran a system where I’d keep her for overtime after Doug’s shift had finished, and then quickly run her back where she’d tell Doug she’d been on the bus. We stole a couple of hours once or twice a week that way.’

  The man’s voice, already thoughtful turned maudlin, as he concluded, ‘This will sound fanciful Inspector, but Christine was the love of my life. I’d had others of course, affairs, flings, tarts – no man is an island, and my dear wife was gone. But over the years I’ve wondered if those months with Christine weren’t the happiest I’d known since Alexander’s mother died?’

  The man looked crumpled, but Grey needed him to keep going, prompting him, ‘So how did it end?’

  But when Anthony Aubrey answered he seemed again to be going off track, ‘Christine had a religious upbringing. You might not have thought it, but it was always there, her faith, like an elastic which she pulled at and pulled at, testing its limits. And then this happened, and it snapped her right back.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She fell pregnant, and she knew right away it was mine – don’t ask me how, I’m sure Doug was getting his share still. But she said a woman knew these things, and so that was that. Even before she told me though I knew something was up, and she never spoke to me warmly again.’

  Aubrey was into full lamentation mode now, Grey feeling rather as if he were taking another kind of confession, and wondering if such personal stories were what police interview room recorders were there for, half wanting to pause the tape out of respect.

  But Aubrey carried on, ‘A baby might have brought some couples together, and if Christine had chosen me I would have accepted Doug beating me to within an inch of my life, if only she had been the one bringing me round. But she chose him, and it ended everything between us. No one knew though. She left for her maternity, and never came back.’

  ‘It must have been tough.’

  ‘Harder than you can imagine.’

  ‘Did Doug know?’

  Aubrey gave a hollow laugh, ‘Oh, she told him alright. She told him, babe in arms, the first time he came to visit her at the hospital! I hated her for that, more than for anything else, after he told me.’

  ‘You spoke to him?’

  ‘Doug turned up a week or two later, I found him sat in the office waiting to see me. God knows what it did to him to be told like that, at his proudest moment. I feared the worst; but all he said was that Christine wanted to be a full time mother now, and wouldn’t be coming back; and that to make up for her lost wages, he asked a hundred pounds a week more for himself, to cover the household bills.’

  ‘A fair bit in the Eighties. And you agreed?’

  ‘Of course! He could have named his price; and the way I was feeling right then I would have paid it without question. It wasn’t blackmail you see, but a way of putting things right, and I thanked him for offering the solution. The next week he came back to work, as regular as ever.’

  ‘And you got along?’

  ‘We were civil, would say Good Morning, nod, share the football scores. He made it easy for us to get along. And sometimes he would say in the canteen or as I was passing his machine how his daughter was doing, how she had painted a funny picture at school or had won a race at sports day; just little things, said in a way no one would twig, or that I could ever thank him for. He had won in a way you see: he had my daughter and the woman I loved. These things are never clear cut, Inspector.’

  The room was silent, before he offered in explanation, ‘It was the physical reality of holding the baby, you see, why Christine told Doug like she did. Some instinct told her that she had to start being truthful now, that the wellbeing of the baby depended on her being surrounded by honesty, however harshly told... or so she tried to explain to me later, I never got it.’

  ‘You spoke to her too?’

  ‘I only saw her that one last time, my Christine, but she wasn’t the same woman. I went to the house when I knew Doug would be on shift – I shouldn’t have gone, it could have killed him if he’d seen me. She had this aura about her like the newly converted, only one who took no joy in being born again. I thought at the time that she seemed like a woman taking vows to join a nunnery, though that would be slanderous against the nuns! I think she hated who she’d been, and hated me too for loving that side of her. It was zealotry, Inspector. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t stay long. A shame, so much went unsaid...

  ‘And that was that, I saw neither her or her daughter again; until Isobel had grown up, and she came and found me out, and at last we became friends.’

  Chapter 36 – Meanwhile, Next Door...