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Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition first published in 2000
Copyright © Harry Bingham 2000
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006513544
Ebook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN 9780007440993
Version: 2016-07-22
Dedication
Dedicated to
my beloved wife, N.
‘Who think the same thoughts without need of speech And babble the same speech without need of meaning’
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Beginning: Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998
Leeds, Yorkshire, 1959
Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998
Summer 1998
Autumn 1998
Winter 1998–99
Spring 1999
Summer 1999
Autumn 1999
Winter 1999–2000
Spring 2000
Summer 2000
Autumn 2000
Winter 2000–2001
Spring 2001
Summer 2001
The Ending
Epilogue
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
The Beginning Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998
There are a million ways to torment your kids, but from beyond the grave Bernard Gradley had found a new one.
Technically, of course, he was within his rights. Every legal aspect had been considered, the document drafted and redrafted under Gradley’s dictatorial eye. Augustus Earle had resisted every change. He knew the difference between right and wrong, and he fought to preserve the family’s disintegrating rights. But Gradley was unforgiving. He demanded a document ‘watertight as a Scotsman’s wallet’ and wouldn’t rest until he had it. And once he did, he signed it, then put it away from him for ever, a document hard and mean as the dead man’s heart.
Earle pitied the family. The mother, who had for so long defended her kids from their father’s severity, had done nothing to merit this. And if the kids weren’t perfect, their punishment would far outweigh their faults.
They would come in hope. Their father had built a mighty fortune, and isn’t wealth supposed to pass down the generations more reliably than genes? Well, hope might bring them, but other emotions would send them away. Grief, sorrow, anger, rage.
The clock readied itself to strike twelve noon. The family would be here any minute. With tension mounting in the pit of his stomach, Earle patted the documents nervously into line, beneath his desk lamp: the will and the letter, heavy as a curse and more certain.
Leeds, Yorkshire, 1959
You don’t find too many saints on a construction site, but Bernard Gradley was in a class of his own. It wasn’t just the night of the accident that he’d ‘borrowed’ one of the site’s dumper trucks for a private job, it had been pretty much every night for the past eight months, cash in hand every time. Plus it turned out that Gradley had three pieces of heavy equipment as well as numerous cement mixers and the like ‘on lease’ to local building firms. Given how hard he worked by day and the extent of his extra-curricular activities at night, it was hardly surprising that he dozed off once when he shouldn’t. He was found in the morning, badly concussed, wandering the site. The dumper truck, wheels still spinning, was lying upside down on the remains of the site engineer’s cabin. With his foreman’s insults boiling in his ears, Gradley left the site for ever, saved from prosecution only by the company’s embarrassment at its own negligence.
Gradley was seventeen years of age. His father was dead, his mother alcoholic, his numerous brothers and sisters all of school age, his job prospects all but annihilated by the accident and its aftermath. It was, as he told his children later, the morning when his career took flight.
Before even returning to his lodgings to bathe his head, he walked to the centre of town to make some purchases: a suit and tie, white shirt and decent shoes, a briefcase, some stationery, and, costing as much as everything else together, a pair of binoculars with lenses hand-ground in East Germany.
His routine was quick to develop. On the first day he would get up, put on his dust-stained working clothes and set out on foot to do the round of construction sites in the area. His first move was to find himself a vantage point from which he could watch the activity on site. He took no notes and drew no pictures, but his eyes, glued to the binoculars, never left the scene. He spent several hours in that way, sometimes a whole day if the site was large. Finally, and only when he had seen enough, did he make his way to the nearest working man’s café or pub.
There he ordered food and drink and unfolded a copy of the Racing Post on the table in front of him. As he always took care to arrive at peak hours, however, there was no chance of him being left alone for long, and with an air of reluctance he’d put away his paper and begin to engage in the talk swirling all around him.
Posing as an unemployed labourer seeking work, he probed for the information he needed. What equipment did they use? What worked well, what didn’t? What were the foremen like? The site engineer? The construction manager? How many people were on the site altogether? Were they ahead of schedule or behind? He took care never to look inquisitive. He avoided direct questions, cracked a lot of jokes, slagged off bosses in general, told tall stories about bits of equipment he’d worked with in the past, encouraged even shy men to open up about their jobs, to complain about the idiocies they were forced to endure. He bought oceans of tea, laughed inordinately, and forgot nothing.
The next morning he returned to the site unrecognisable. This time he wore his suit and tie, his hair shone with Brylcreem and his shoes looked as if their owner had never heard of builders’ dust. He sought out the construction manager whom he already knew by description and usually also by sight. His pitch was simple. From his briefcase he took out a sheet of paper entitled ‘Site Costings: Current’. On it he had written carefully in pencil a complete list of the workforce and equipment employed on the site. By each item on the list were three columns showing the number of units, the cost per unit, and the total cost. He spent some time explaining rather elaborately that of course such an analysis was only illustrative and no doubt the manager had his site much better arranged than ‘the chaos typical around here’. The manager would look away, agree that the site was better managed than that, but encourage Gradley to continue ‘just supposing that things were that bad, but only for the sake of argument, mind’. At that point, Gradley knew he was home and dry, but still he took his time.
He talked about different construction routines, analysed them with equipment and without, and costed them out to show how the labour saving more than paid for the extra cost of the equipment. Every time he started, he hesitated, saying “Course, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, it’s obviously second nature to someone like yourself.’ Each time, however, he could be coaxed back into his patter, knowing that every routine he analysed was used on site and in most cases was even more inefficient than those he described. Eventually, and only after protestations, he pulled out a second sheet of paper from his case. This one was entitled ‘Site Costings: Potential’. There was the same list, and the same three columns. But this time the workforce was dramatically smaller, the need for construction equipment much bigger, and the total site costs a full third lower than they had been. Beneath the total was a number neatly written in pencil and underlined twice, labelled ‘Percentage Saving’.
The closer he came to landing his fish, the slower he wound the reel. ‘I feel like a complete bloody fool teaching my grandmother to suck eggs,’ he’d say, ‘I should be getting you to teach me my business instead.’ He got the site manager to walk with him around the site, making sure the manager watched every activity with new eyes whilst not appearing to see a single thing himself. Instead, he told stories about mythical site managers fired for incompetence when their bosses saw how ineptly things were being run, and others who had been promoted and given company cars for finishing impossible projects under budget and ahead of schedule. He larded his talk with things he had heard in the café the day before: the things the workers complained about, the ridicule they directed at their bosses, the petty cheating which goes on everywhere.
As the time for leaving drew near, Gradley almost seemed to forget that he had introduced himself as a construction equipment rental agent. He needed the site manager to bring his attention back to the equipment available, the pieces of machinery needed to bring the site’s costs from the first list to the second. Once they did get stuck in though, it was amazing how quickly the site’s equipment needs grew. No point in having just one bulldozer when a second could be used to clear the rubble. No purpose in using just one mechanical hoist when there were workers enough to be busy with two. Whenever the manager suggested another piece of kit, Gradley would pause with a little frown, before exclaiming: ‘Bloody brilliant! I would never have thought a site like this would need one of those, but you’re absolutely right. Bloody visionary, you are. Just like that sod I was telling you about who was promoted twice in two years just when everyone thought he was going to be fired for being pissed morning, noon and night. Mind you, while you’re at it, you may as well have another of them to cover the north end. No point in skimping.’
And by the time Bernard Gradley left the site, smiling at the workers who had entertained him the day before and who would be losing their jobs within a matter of weeks, he swung in his briefcase a lengthy order for construction equipment not a single item of which did he possess.
The next stage was easier. The construction industry has always been one of boom and bust, and while one firm is so busy with orders that no customer is attended to properly, another firm only a short distance away may be laying workers off and leaving equipment idle for want of work. Gradley had a knack for finding companies of the second sort. For them it was a godsend to have Gradley appear off the street and offer to take their surplus gear for long enough to tide them over until the next burst of activity. The rates he offered were not great, of course, nothing in fact compared with what he charged his own customers, but anything was better than nothing.
The business did well. The sixties was a time of renewal and change, and nobody benefited more than the construction industry. Slums were cleared. New tower blocks and housing developments rose in their place. Go-go businesses heady with twenty years of unbroken peace and growth built glitzy new headquarters of glass and cement. Even Britain’s creaking manufacturers, like geriatrics in the sun, forgot their weaknesses and spent money on factories and warehouses. Gradley Plant Hire Limited, as the company was called, took on staff and expanded from Leeds out into Yorkshire, and from Yorkshire out into the counties beyond.
As the business grew and strengthened, Gradley found the time to marry, have kids, to divorce acrimoniously when the marriage went bad. He was a rich man now, worth thirty million by some accounts, forty or more by others. His business wasn’t just successful, it was one of the biggest of its kind in the country, so strong it no longer depended on him, its father, for its prosperity. Instead of making him happy, the fact left him discontented. He longed for the old days, back when it had been just him, no money, and ambition as big as the sky. A man of some leisure now, he experimented with buying racehorses but had no luck. He then discovered motoring and began to build up a collection of cars, all British.
The hobby killed him. One day in mid-July, he was driving at speed when he suffered a minor heart attack. The attack itself was not fatal but he briefly lost consciousness. At a bend in the road the car carried straight on. It bounced off a stone wall into a tree. Gradley died instantly.
All that remained now was to divide up his fortune.
Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998
1
The sweep of tyres, the jerk of a handbrake, a clatter of car doors, then a knock at the door. The family arrived, swept into his room and now waited, silently, eager for money.
‘Welcome,’ said Earle. ‘Welcome to you all.’
It was a poor welcome he had to give. There were five of them, of whom Earle recognised only the mother, Helen Gradley, a nervous, pale woman, mid-fifties but a decade older in appearance. As Bernard’s divorce solicitor, Earle had threatened her with every trick in the book to win a favourable settlement. In theory, Helen had been the party at fault. She’d had an affair and admitted as much. Hers wasn’t such a great crime, not when her husband’s relationship with his business was more passionate, more permanent and more exclusive than anything she had done. But Bernard hadn’t seen it like that, of course. He’d wanted to give her ‘what she deserves – nothing’. He threatened a custody battle, on grounds that Earle was obliged to fabricate, and the friendless woman gave way. She got the kids, he kept the money. She settled for a small London house and an allowance which would terminate once the youngest child, Josephine, reached eighteen.
In the years after the divorce, Gradley had thrown money at his kids, hoping to win them from their mother. They were to be indulged, she to be kept poor. The strategy had worked up to a point. The kids, especially the three sons, George, Zachary and Matthew, had taken the money and been spoiled by it. They had grown used to their life of fast cars, jet travel, nice flats in the right parts of London. Their mother’s house in Kilburn struck them as grotty, too embarrassing to show their friends. But if Gradley had wanted to win their love, he’d failed entirely. His sons loved the cheques, but despised the chequebook. They knew the gifts were motivated more by bitterness than by love, and Gradley himself couldn’t help but resent his own generosity. He reminded his kids of how useless they were, how indolent. He told them repeatedly how he had made his fortune, conjuring an empire from the desert sand.
And now the emperor was dead, what was left but to divide the empire? The five inheritors – the tense mother, the stony-faced sons, the grave and serious daughter – waited in silence.
‘Welcome,’ said Earle again, ‘though I can only regret the sad occasion which has brought us together.’ He felt the tension again, more strongly this time. Why? He alone knew what the will contained. He alone was unaffected. His voice rose a little as he continued. ‘You know, of course, why we’re here. The deceased, Bernard Gradley, told me that none of you had any knowledge of his will. Perhaps I should begin by confirming that this is indeed the case.’
He looked around, but he already knew the answer. The hungry faces of the three sons and their mother’s agitation told him. They knew nothing and wanted everything.
‘While it would be wrong of me to speak ill of the dead, especially when the deceased has been such an important client of this firm’s,’ Earle paused. His words sounded crass and for a moment he was stuck. He had a weak voice which became high, almost falsetto, when he was nervous. He fought to regain his control, to drop back an octave. ‘While, er, it would be wrong to do so, this will, I’m afraid, is not a document which, er, was a pleasant one to draft. And, er –’ He tailed off, his voice trailing into a squeak.
‘D’you want me to read it?’ drawled one of the sons, dark and lean, frightening somehow.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Earle sharply, and – thank goodness – deeply. The challenge got him restarted. ‘You may read the will yourself in due course and you may well wish to show it to your own legal advisers. In summary, however, the desires of the deceased are as follows. His mother, Mrs Victoria Gradley, will receive a sum of three hundred thousand pounds to be held in trust on her behalf by certain trustees. His brothers and sisters will each receive, on top of certain small personal bequests, the sum of one hundred thousand pounds.’
Earle’s listeners registered these facts tersely, hungering for what was to come. In their minds, their father’s company was already sold, the money counted and divided. A few hundred thousand quid to their granny, aunts and uncles wasn’t much to give up. They shifted forward. The punch line was drawing near.
‘The residual estate is hard to value,’ Earle continued. ‘The principal asset, of course, is the one hundred percent ownership of Gradley Plant Hire Limited, though there will naturally be a considerable liability in the form of inheritance tax. We have estimated the residual estate to be worth some thirty to thirty-five million pounds after payment of tax. Out of this sum, you, Mrs Gradley,’ and he nodded at Helen, whose nervousness had grown rounder and harder with each passing minute, ‘you will receive a sum of five thousand pounds per annum payable until your death. I am sorry, I am very sorry, that I was not able to prevail on my client to be more generous.’
Helen Gradley was white faced, but otherwise blank. There was shock, certainly, but Earle guessed that none of them had expected Gradley to be generous towards his ex-wife. The real issue was how the money was to be divided amongst the kids. Helen didn’t need the money herself, just so long as the kids were fairly treated. Nobody said anything, all of them willing Earle to continue.
‘And as for you,’ Earle said, looking at the four children, the flinty men and the expressionless girl. ‘As for you, Mr Gradley expressly required me to read the following letter.’
Earle picked up the letter which lay by the will and broke open the seal. Gradley’s writing was clear and heavy. Earle read slowly and distinctly, master of his voice once more:
To my children,
I’m dead now, proud of some things, ashamed of others. I’m proudest of my business, of course. I loved Gradley Plant Hire. I gave it everything and it rewarded me for it. With my business, things worked just as they were meant to. You lot think profit is just another name for money, but you’re wrong. Profit means health. It means rosy cheeks and a happy smile. Gradley Plant Hire was a bouncing baby and its father loved it.
With you lot, things were never so simple. I wanted to teach you about life. I wanted to teach you about work and pride and discipline. I wanted you all to love my business the way I did.
And I failed, didn’t I? God knows what you lot really think, but I swear to you I only ever saw you think about the business when you wanted to cadge money from me. My eldest son George is the crown prince of idleness; Zack’s a bloody philosopher; and Matthew and Josie will probably drop out just as soon as they’ve got anything to drop from. If I tell you that I wanted to be a good dad to you, you probably won’t believe me, but for what it’s worth, I swear to you I did. I still don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know if it was your fault or mine. But don’t accuse me of not wanting things to work out better, because I did, I really did.
Maybe it doesn’t matter now. You’re not here to worry about our family failures, you’re here to see how much I’ve left you. Well, I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, so I’ve come up with a way of giving each of you what you most want.
Josephine first. I had the most trouble with you. You never minded spending my money on clothes and parties, but you never really wanted to be rich, did you? Being nice to people was more your thing. Swotting away at school and do-gooding. I thought of getting you a truckload of designer clothes, but of course they’d all have been the wrong colour or too bloody short or too bloody long. If it came from me there was always a problem, wasn’t there? Then I had a brainwave. You remember how you used to come into my office when you were little? You used to tidy my pens and play at being my secretary. You didn’t grumble about my business then. You didn’t want to try to change me from what I am. You know what I think now? I think that was the last time we were ever happy together, like a dad and his little girl are meant to be.