Five Siblings at 23, page 10
Charlie had grown fond of Carol over the years. She had dutifully, perhaps even lovingly, fulfilled every promise she had made to Susan. She had raised Lizzie as her own, but also made sure Lizzie remained an important person in the lives of her older siblings. ‘I’d best go in then,’ he said.
Carol nodded, ‘I’ll bring my car around.’
Charlie had only been inside The Bell once when he was about seven or eight years old. His parents had taken him for a New Year’s Eve party, and he had a vague memory of it being small and dark and crowded, with people smoking, laughing, and spilling drinks all around him. The building had been much smaller back then, just a bar and some tables and chairs. In the intervening years, it had been expanded to provide a large carvery restaurant at the rear. As he walked through the door, he realised there was not a single part of the pub that was as he remembered.
He could hear people talking at the back of the building, the restaurant clearly doing a busy lunchtime trade. But the bar area was mostly empty, apart from a slightly portly blonde man slumped over the bar, talking earnestly to one of the bar staff about something that seemed terribly important, at least to him. Charlie groaned as he realised it was Peter.
The woman behind the bar was undoubtedly attractive, slender with a pretty face, small features, and shoulder length red hair. She was exactly the sort of person Charlie knew his dad would feel a need to impress. But the woman, Charlie judged, was probably in her early fifties and was staring at his rambling, mostly incoherent father with a tired expression that suggested too many years of dealing with drunkards.
He approached his father briskly and slapped him gently on the shoulder. ‘Dad,’ he said assertively, ‘Carol’s outside. She’s going to give you a lift back to The Lodge.’
Without looking to see who was speaking to him, Peter raised a finger in the air. ‘Attitude!’ he said loudly, ‘Attitude.’
‘Oh, be quiet, you old fool,’ Charlie replied, immediately irritated. He looked at the woman behind the bar. ‘Sorry, has he been a real pain?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about it, darling,’ she said, her voice smooth and deep. She reached over and squeezed Charlie’s arm, an act he found somewhat overfamiliar. ‘I’ve had to deal with much worse. But I can’t serve him when he’s like this. And he was happy to give us a contact number, for someone to call. So, no harm done.’
‘Well, I am sorry,’ he replied. ‘I’ll just get him home.’
The door to the pub swung open, and Carol appeared, gesturing to Charlie that her car was just outside.
‘I feel like I know your father very well,’ the woman continued, her tone unexpectedly cheerful. ‘He said he lives in one of those big houses on the seafront, overlooking the estuary. And that his son is a famous property developer. Are you him? He said you’d been in the local papers.’
Charlie rolled his eyes. Of course, he thought, that’s exactly the sort of thing his dad would tell a woman he was trying to impress. He would brag about his big house overlooking the sea. He probably even told her its market value. And then he would brag about a son who had a fancy-sounding job without admitting that the same son had almost nothing to do with him. With that, Charlie pushed Peter’s shoulder more forcibly. ‘Dad, get up,’ he said, his patience quickly running out. ‘I am taking you home.’
With that, Peter turned and looked at his son and seemed to recognise him, and then he smiled. ‘This is him, Angel,’ he said and looked at the woman behind the bar. ‘This is my son. I told you. The queer one who does up houses.’
‘Oh, Dad, I swear to god….’ Charlie muttered under his breath, and then he looked to the woman behind the bar. ‘Sorry about calling you angel. He gets a little over-familiar when he’s had a few.’
‘Oh no, that’s my name, darling,’ the woman replied and pointed to her name badge.
‘Oh,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s… unusual.’
‘Well, I was christened Abigail, but I’m always doing kind things for other people. Makes my day if I can do nice things for other people. It gives me real pleasure. And after a while, other people just started calling me Angel, so I stuck with it.’
Charlie realised that in a very short space of time, he had grown to dislike Angel very much.
‘Angel,’ Peter said, ‘like she fell from heaven.’ He raised his hands as though praying to God.
Charlie’s patience was at an end. He leaned forward and whispered angrily into his father’s ear. ‘You are absolutely shaming yourself,’ he said. ‘What do you think mum would say if she could see you like this. Drunk, again, in another pub, making a scene. She would be ashamed of you.’
Peter turned his head and stared Charlie in the face as though suddenly sober and aware. ‘Oh, son, I could tell you a few things about your sainted mother,’ he said, his voice filled with contempt. His eyes rolled, and then he focussed on the figure over Charlie’s shoulder. Carol. And he grimaced at her. ‘Couldn’t I, Carol? I could tell Charlie a few home truths about Saint Susan.’
Carol, angry, shook her head. ‘Shut your fucking mouth, Peter.’
But Peter was clearly gleaning some enjoyment from the moment. He grasped Charlie’s shoulder, levered himself up, and began to speak. Even though he was speaking directly to his son, he maintained his eye contact with Carol as though daring her to intervene. ‘So, let me tell you, Charlie, about one night at The Lodge. When I arrived home after working away in Norwich.’
In a flash, Carol shot forward, her arm outstretched, screaming. She brought her hand crashing down against Peter’s face, and a loud slap echoed around the empty bar. Peter, liquid squirting from his mouth, flew from the bar stool, falling backwards, his feet above his head. He landed on the sticky, carpeted floor with a loud thud. And there he stayed.
‘Oy, that’s it. All of you out,’ Angel shouted. ‘Out now, or I’m calling the police.’
Charlie, shocked by Carol’s actions, bent down and heaved his father back to his feet. With Peter’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, Charlie led him from the pub.
He and Carol managed to get Peter home. They lay him out on the couch in the sitting room, with a washing-up basin on the floor next to him, in case he was sick. And then they retreated to the kitchen. Charlie made them both a coffee, and they sat together at the breakfast bar.
There was an awkwardness between them, Carol was embarrassed by her actions, and Charlie was perplexed by them. But before he could ask Carol if she could explain what had just happened, she spoke.
‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I don’t care how drunk your dad is, but he is not going to speak badly of your mother. Whatever crap he was coming up with, he will never speak badly of Susan in front of me.’
Charlie could tell she was still very upset, more upset than he had seen her in a long time. ‘That’s OK,’ he replied, and then he attempted to reduce the tension with some humour. ‘I’ve wanted to give him a good slap on more than one occasion. Let’s be honest, who hasn’t?’
Carol sipped her coffee and seemed genuinely regretful for what had happened. ‘I know he’s always been a drinker, but he’s really spiralling out of control,’ she said. ‘I think, when your mum was alive, she helped him keep a lid on it. But now, he has too much freedom. Your mum’s gone. If he wants to drink himself to death, there’s no one to stop him.’
Most of Charlie’s childhood memories of his father involved the stink of beer or whiskey. He had not known, as a kid, what those smells were or what they meant. But as a grown man, so many of his childhood memories had taken on a completely different context. And he wondered if, perhaps, his father’s drinking had been one of the reasons Susan had turned a blind eye to whatever sort of relationship had developed between Peter and Carol, that she had, on some level, felt it gave her a break from her efforts to manage Peter’s drinking.
‘Mum used to find empty bottles,’ he said. ‘In the guttering above the back door. Mostly whiskey, sometimes cheap brandy. But mostly whiskey. I think he had a little routine. He would hide the empties up there, and when mum was out of the house, he would put them into a carrier bag and drive to the shops on the pretext of getting groceries, where he’d pile all the empties into the bottle bank in the car park at the supermarket.
‘But mum cottoned on, at some point, and started to dispose of the bottles for him. She didn’t say anything. But you could tell how anxious he would get when he would hang around the back door, and he could see the gutters were clear when he knew there should be empty bottles there.’
Carol placed her mug on the breakfast bar and groaned, ‘There was one night he was supposed to be having dinner with Tyler and Lizzie. I’d cooked a lasagne or something, one of Susan’s recipes. I can't remember which. But it was something I knew he liked. He was sitting there in my lounge at six o’clock on a Tuesday evening. And he had a dozen cans of lager on the floor next to him, his drinks for the night. I just wanted one dinner with Peter and the kids, where he was in the room, not slurring his words or telling everyone how much he loved them.
‘So, I asked him, said to him, that if he loved the kids at all, he would have one night, one single night, where he wouldn’t drink. And you know what he said? He said he loved the drink more. He looked me in the eyes and told me that alcohol was more important. If he had to make a choice, he would always choose the drink.’
It was a story Charlie had not heard before. He couldn’t pretend to be surprised, but he still felt terribly sad for Carol. Because in the middle of the strange life she had carved out for herself, he knew how badly she wanted Peter to be a good father to her children. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You deserve better.’
Affectionately, Carol squeezed his arm. ‘Oh, it’s not about me, Charlie. It's about you kids. You all deserve better than this.’
In the five years since Susan had died, Charlie had never found the right moment to have a conversation with Carol about her relationship with his father, and there was still so much that did not make sense. Tyler had shared with him many happy stories of life at Carol’s house when he was a kid. He’d painted a colourful picture of warmth, laughter, and fun. But what Charlie had found most unexpected was that Peter had hardly featured in those stories. His visits to see Tyler had been infrequent and the only times he had stayed over was when he’d passed out on Carol’s couch.
But there was another detail Tyler had shared about his childhood, something Charlie knew might be considered small, inconsequential, but a detail that had stuck in his head, for some reason. Tyler had always spoken with great fondness of his Auntie Susan and how often she had visited for meals, movies, or games nights. And as he heard Carol describe Peter’s failure to show up for Tyler, he wondered if his mother had tried to compensate, to be there for Tyler in a way she knew her husband never would.
And then Charlie could feel it again, that familiar niggling at the back of his mind, a need to know more, to understand exactly how Carol’s relationship with Peter had begun, how his mother had found out, and how the three of them had made the whole complex situation work for so many years. But it didn’t feel like it was the right time. For Charlie, for some reason, it never felt the right time. And so he just quietly sipped his coffee and decided to leave his questions for another day.
CHAPTER 18
Vicki and Mandy sat together in a small, dark office, a rarely used part of the building directly beneath the purple palace. It was where the IT team had set up Mandy’s surveillance area as part of her plan to discover whether one of the store managers was trying to take advantage of a junior employee.
The entire operation had been quickly arranged by Mandy, an urgent and highly confidential response to what she considered to be a serious staff safety issue and Vicki felt she had certainly pulled out all the stops.
Neil Croker’s office had been fitted with a hidden camera, placed behind his desk with a clear view of his computer screen. The camera fed directly to the computer monitor in front of Mandy and Vicki. Vicki knew she should not be in the room, but Mandy had agreed that her presence was something she would simply omit to mention if she needed to file a report.
The video feed showed an empty office, the only thing of note was Neil’s screensaver, a rotating montage of photographs of his wife and two young children, an uncomfortable reminder for both Vicki and Mandy of how much was at stake. If they were wrong, then all was well and good in the world. But if they were right, Neil’s career was over, and Mandy would likely have to hand information over to the police should Billy wish to press charges. And that would likely rob two children of their father for several months if not years.
Much of the success of the operation was dependent on Billy and whether he was able to give a believable performance. Vicki had told him what to do; he would have to seek out Neil in the store, thank him again for putting him in touch with Caroline, and claim that he had finally sent her the videos.
Mandy suspected that if Neil was, indeed, a sexual predator, he would not wait until he got home that night to view Billy’s videos. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. He would have an impossible urge to view them straight away, even if that meant taking a risk by viewing them on his work computer.
As they sat and watched the empty office on the video screen, Vicki’s mobile phone vibrated in her hand. She lifted it up and flipped it open. On the small screen, there was an SMS message from Billy which simply stated: ‘I just told him’.
‘Billy?’ Mandy asked.
‘Yes, he’s done his bit,’ Vicki replied. ‘I guess we just have to sit and wait to see-’
Before she could finish her sentence, there was a sound from the computer. They both looked at the screen and saw that Neil had entered his office. His movement was odd. He seemed furtive, perhaps even slightly panicked. He spent a moment peering through a crack in the door to see if anyone was in the lobby outside, and then he quietly closed the door and locked it.
He hurried over to his computer and sat down, clearly excited, his breathing so heavy it was clearly audible. He typed in his password and then immediately opened his browser window. He appeared to click on a bookmark on the main browser bar, which took him to the login page for an email account.
‘Oh,’ Vicki said, ‘that’s Hotmail. Caroline uses Hotmail for her emails.’
Mandy raised her hand, an indication they both needed to be silent. She leaned closer to the screen so she could hear clearly what happened next. And after a few moments, Billy’s clear, deep voice filled the air.
‘Hello, Caroline. This is William Fletcher. I’m afraid my webcam isn’t working at the moment. Until I get it fixed, I thought I would send you an audio file of me reading some classics, which I hope will do for now. I thought I would begin with Tom Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie.’
‘Oh, what?’ Neil said loudly, angrily. He closed down the audio file, ‘Absolute bloody waste of my time. What the hell are you playing at, Billy?’
Without speaking, Mandy stood and left the room. Alone in front of the monitor, Vicki watched as Neil logged out of his email account and closed the browser window. He stood and began to pace around the room, looking perplexed and frustrated. Vicki wondered what was going on in his head. Why had he responded with anger toward Billy, she wondered; did Neil actually feel entitled to naked videos of her brother?
And then it was all over. There was a knock at the door. Neil quietly unlocked it, and Mandy entered the office, flanked by two of the store’s uniformed security guards. Neil started saying something about not understanding how the door had become locked, his voice trembling, clearly terrified that he had been rumbled.
‘Neil, I am suspending you with immediate effect,’ she said, her voice calm but firm. ‘You will be escorted from the premises, and you will not be allowed back. I have evidence that you have committed gross misconduct, and I will be submitting a formal report with the recommendation you be dismissed.’
Vicki noticed that Neil was gazing towards his computer and that he was unable to see the screen. She wondered if he was trying to remember if he had logged out of his fake email account, closed the browser window, or locked the screen.
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he said, trying to sound strong, but his rebuttal came out high-pitched, the shock of being caught.
‘You also need to know that Billy Fletcher is aware of your actions and may consider reporting you to the police,’ Mandy continued. ‘If that is the case, we will fully cooperate with any criminal investigation.’
With that, Neil dropped his head. His entire world had just collapsed on top of him as he realised just how much trouble he was in. ‘I was just… I was just trying to help him…’ he said quietly, hoping to find some way to lessen the impact of his behaviour.
But Mandy was having none of it. ‘You need to leave, now,’ she said and gestured towards the security guards. ‘Keith and Jodie will see you out. You are not to speak to any staff on your way out of the building. You are not to make any attempts to contact any members of staff during the course of our investigation, and, in particular, you are not to contact Billy Fletcher. Is that clear?’
Without looking up, Neil grunted his assent as he was escorted from the room. Once they were gone, the door opened once more, and a smartly dressed young woman entered Neil’s office. ‘All done?’ she asked.
‘Yes, all done,’ Mandy replied. ‘Thank you so much for everything you did and for your discretion.’
The young woman nodded, ‘No problem. The camera feed has been digitally recorded, so I can give you access to that file. And my colleagues and I will review Mr Croker’s hard drive and internet history. I will give you a full report on that, too.’
The young woman left, leaving Mandy alone in the room. Forgetting Vicki could still see her, she perched on the corner of the desk and put her hands over her face as though she were about to cry. Vicki suddenly felt she was intruding on a private moment, so she switched off the computer screen.
She understood how conflicted Mandy was and knew what she was thinking, not of Neil and how he had just ruined his career and probably his entire life. Mandy was thinking of his family, his wife and kids and what this would mean for them, the financial impact, the emotional repercussions, the shame. Vicki wondered what Neil’s wife would do, whether she would leave him or stand by his side regardless and tell everyone the accusations were a lie, a mistake, or a conspiracy against her husband.
