Chapter 4: Hide and Seek

Remorse

It has taken me four and a half years in charge of a group of expensive homes for the elderly to understand the meaning of some important words. I was only eighteen when I took control, and I was criticised for being too young and inexperienced for the task. I freely admit to the charge of youth, but it is now clear that I had all the experience I needed if I had been able to organise it properly. Growing up and getting examination grades good enough to win a university place put all the tools I needed into my hands, but I was unpractised in their use on real life problems. I also let myself be convinced that my age was a key factor rather than a minor inconvenience affecting others more than it did me.

Miss Marple, the renowned literary detective brought to life by Agatha Christie, solved international mysteries by drawing comparisons with minor upsets in a quiet English village. At first, I was awed to find myself at large, operating in the wider world where my decisions affected the lives of real people rather than my grade in an exam. It wasn’t until my failings were exposed and I reacted that I discovered that I’m really not at all bad at being Chief Executive.

I must admit that the discovery was made by mistake – my mistake. I planned changes to the organisation based on careful observation of our performance. That plan has now been implemented and it still looks sound. Where I went wrong was to interweave a plot for revenge on my detractors into the business plan. Once I set things in motion, I could not stop the juggernaut and my improvements in the operation and efficiency of the Black Sheep homes will always be marred by the hurt I inflicted.

It makes it harder still that some of the people damaged bear no guilt either for past inefficiencies or for criticising me. Even if my targeting had been more accurate, I had unleashed a riposte that far exceeded the hurt I had suffered at their hands. I had been blinkered and I was now aware of a much wider perspective. In concentrating on keeping the homes running well I had overlooked good and bad going on beyond my limited peripheral vision.

I am left with a number of things that urgently have to be put right and I’m busily sorting out the order in which I tackle them. My clients, who remained visible while I was at my most blinkered, have not suffered more than absolutely necessary. Four of them will have to be re-housed while essential building work is done but I have provided a luxury coach that will be their home from home.

To ensure that the reconstruction is well done as quickly as possible, I have talked Richard McTurk into taking control. He fitted out the coach and he is an experienced engineer seeking new challenges. He was the first person I added to the company on my own initiative. Up until that point I had made use of the staff I inherited from my Great Uncle Henry who had built the chain of homes before his death almost five years ago. The homes had started life as very exclusive brothels and Henry told me that he had converted them to luxury retirement homes after the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies ruined the business of paying for discreet sexual encounters.

I no longer believed that explanation, without some serious reservations. I now think that something happened to make Henry aware that the young women he provided for his rich customers were often damaged by the work they did. Many of the staff in the six homes he established have a troubled background often associated with contact with the sex industry.

My chief critic, Jenny, was beaten by her father before starting a career as a dominatrix. Henry had taken her on but had parked her at the reception desk in the Glasgow home. I now believed that he would have worked towards her rehabilitation if he had lived. She had qualified as an accountant, and I gave her the chance to join the board in that capacity. It proved to be too big a step. Henry would have handled things better, and it was incumbent on me to recover my error before he starts haunting me again.

The widening of my vision brought into view people he had recruited that I hadn’t even properly noticed: for instance, our cordon bleu chef Pierre. I first met him when he came into Henry’s room to discuss changing the menu. He is average height but is every inch the chef from his white, stovepipe hat to his white canvas shoes. He speaks with a slight French accent, but his only memorable feature is his hands that illustrate and reinforce in gesture what he is saying. I began to go through the personnel records looking for evidence that any member of staff had been damaged in some way early in his or her live.

“Who would have thought that Great Uncle Henry, the rich but disgraceful member of our family, would turn out to be Robin Hood?” my wife Kirsty said when I showed her the results of my research.

She is six months pregnant with our first child and she has taken time off work to oversee the decoration and furnishing of the house we have bought in Balfron. Kirsty and I are distantly related members of a large and close family. The bond between members owes more to envy than love and respect – we’re not so much in each other’s hearts as at their throats! My branch of the family has spread along the Clyde over the years living in homes from Bowling to Whiteinch. Kirsty’s lot have dared to invade Bearsden and Helensburgh. Both branches consider our choice of Balfron for our home as rather radical.

We have paid to have the garden landscaped by a scion of the local nobility, but I suffered the consequences of winning an argument with my wife. There is a wee burn runs through the property cutting off a small part of our acre of ground. Kirsty wanted this fragment to be landscaped with the rest, but I fought for a wilderness area for the kids when we fill the house with them. A house full of children is my idea and, although Kirsty has not totally ruled it out, she wants to keep her options open until she has given birth to our first child.

“Think big!” I told her.

“When you start bearing the children you can think as big as you like! I’ll give you this one” she said, putting her distended bely, “But if you want more you’d better get a uterus implant.”

Dick McTurk says women don’t understand how sensitive we men really are.

She pictured a summer house shaded by maturing trees where us old folk would sit of an evening watching the weans do improving things like tennis and croquet. My idea was that the area would be an adult-free paradise only limited by the imagination of the kids. The price of my victory is that I must do the essential clearing that Billy, our landscape gardener, has decreed. I haven’t worked so hard since I left school!

Everybody agrees that I need the exercise, even my dad, who considers jumping up to celebrate a goal on the television as a major work-out. Actually, I enjoy the work and find it very relaxing. That doesn’t mean that I miss an opportunity to stop sawing and snipping. When Tomas, the driver of the luxury coach, arrived in a truck I downed tools and went to stand beside him surveying a load of twisted scrap metal filling the trailer he was towing.

“There is a plinth awaiting the arrival of this very fine work of art,” he informed me – it was the first I had heard about a plinth!

Tomas is an Egyptian who speaks textbook English without a trace of accent. The landscaper had gone for the day, but I remembered him putting in a lump of sandstone to carry a big flower pot, I assumed. On inspection, the block of stone had two threaded studs sticking out and there were two corresponding holes in the rusty mass of metal in the trailer. Tomas and I struggled to raise the monstrosity and fix it with a couple of nuts that had been tied to it.

When we stood back it was clear that we had acquired a piece of sculpture. It was a sort of open work version of Rodin’s ‘Kiss’ made from rusty iron – very impressive actually! Never afraid of being obvious, I asked Tomas where it came from.

“This fine piece of work is from the hand of Faith McTurk, daughter of our mutual friend Richard McTurk.”

When I was being shown round our coach in a dressing gown two girls wolf whistled. I dismissed them as office girls but one of them was Faith who has clearly got considerable artistic talent and the other was an apprentice engineer on day release from university. I must stop making casual assumptions about people.

Tomas had to hurry back to the coach, now home to four clients of the Glasgow nursing home. It had not been as easy as I expected to get the three ladies and one gentleman to shift out of their permanent suites. The three ladies were most obstinate. They were quite excited by the idea of a mobile home until they discovered that there was no room for La Bouchard, the client that had led the war on my reputation.

“We know you mean well, Kenneth son, but it’s all for one and one for all. If she stays, we stay.”

I had a moment of sympathy with the Cardinal’s guards. Fortunately, La Bouchard refused to have anything to do with me or anything I had a hand in. She went off to another nursing home without telling the three old girls that had stood shoulder to shoulder with her. The first they knew about it was when she dropped in to say goodbye. So much for the spirit of the Musketeers!

Stephen Green was reluctant until I made it clear that his nurse Agnes would be with him. There are four staff berths on the coach.

Agnes was an interesting case for me to study. She had been through a traumatic experience when she had just qualified as a nurse. She suffered a serious sexual assault in the hospital grounds. Her attacker was a hospital orderly she had talked to occasionally when they were both on duty. She quite liked him and had even thought that they might date when she knew him better. He was too impatient to woo her and resorted to force instead.

When Henry employed her, she was afraid to go out but the worst thing was that she no longer trusted her judgement of men; she had been assaulted by a guy she was starting to fancy. The solution Henry chose still seems bizarre even although there is clear proof that it has worked.

Stephen Green is sixty something with both legs amputated as a result of a lifetime of cigarette smoking. He is a gentle, kindly man but he can’t stop himself putting his hand up the skirt of any girl that comes close enough. Henry appointed Agnes as Stephen’s nurse. I would have expected her to have hysterics the first time he let his hand wander. Instead, they have become great friends. When I arrived in the home, they combined to play a joke on me that involved Agnes pretending that she had let Stephen take off her knickers! Don’t ask!

I needed to figure out how Henry knew that his plan would work. This is by no means an academic interest: Jenny won’t start growing again until she accepts her responsibility for her actions. I can’t even imagine the trauma of thrashing and being thrashed, and she may never be able to accept any guilt for that part of her life but I have the idea that I may turn her involvement in the poor treatment meted out to me to her ultimate advantage.

My second independent appointment is a young solicitor, Ruth Elphinstone, and I can leave most of the routine work in her hands. She is giving me the space to deal with the staff problems while the refurbishment of the Glasgow home keeps me from the minutiae of caring for old people every day. Doctor James stayed on until our last client was on board the charabanc, as our luxury bus is nicknamed. Now he has retired to Arrochar where neither stream nor loch will be safe from his rod.

Karen is my first concern at present. She is now our head nurse but in her youth, she was mixed up with some seedy people. After her father died suddenly, she worked as a prostitute to pay for her training as a nurse. She was one of Uncle Henry’s girls when he transformed his brothels into nursing homes, and he brought her into his fold. Karen is no angel and I’m sure she enjoyed a lot of the things that happened, but she was too deeply involved to be able to get clear without Henry’s help. She has repaid him over and over for the faith he showed.

Not all the people he helped have managed to stay clear of their past. I’ve been studying the annual accounts of our property company and I’m certain that Mr Galbraith, the managing director, is no longer committed to Black Sheep enterprises. He’s an alcoholic and was on the verge of prosecution for fraud when my uncle saved him. Transferring the buildings occupied by the homes to the companies running them has reduced his influence but I want time to study his operation in depth before I move against him.

During my blinkered period, Kirsty and I got out of sympathy with each other. She wasn’t too happy about the elitist nature of our clients, and I was more defensive of them than they deserved. I can now admit that some of our guests led fairly dubious lives to make the fortune they need to stay in our homes. Kirsty is reconciled to them because much of their ill-gotten gains is going to rehabilitate those who have been damaged by contact with uncaring money-grubbers like them.

I have been going over in my mind how to approach Karen. She gave me so much help in the early days and she only ever blamed me for things that I now realise I got wrong. In fact, she is being punished for my sins. Whatever I do to help Jenny will have to meet with Karen’s enthusiastic approval, and I’m not very happy about approaching her with a half-baked scheme. I’ll offer a sort of plea bargain: I won’t insist that Jenny must have had some pleasure or satisfaction from birching the bare behinds of grown men if she’ll admit that she treated me grossly unfairly. You don’t have to tell me that the plan still needs a lot of work.

“Just get on with it, Kenny,” my darling wife told me when I asked for advice. “Karen’s going to be pissed off with you however cleverly you sweeten your approach. Try to remember what she’s been through in her life. She’ll give you a hearing.”

We were sitting in our bedroom on the two living room armchairs that were making access to the wardrobe almost impossible. Living with our parents while the house was being decorated had been a trial for both of us, so we moved in as soon as the decorators had finished our bedroom and the staircase: Kirsty was no longer as mobile as she was a couple of months ago. We are still having to eat out because the kitchen floor had not been tiled and we only had a toaster and an electric kettle to supply our basic needs.

Karen had a bit of a soft spot for me, and I thought she would listen to what I have to say as Kirsty believed. Tomorrow I would phone and plead for an interview. I moved the chairs about so that Kirsty could get to the bathroom then I clambered over them to join her in bed. We grinned at each other; the flat in Glasgow had been too complete and this was roughing it the way newly-weds should.

I was still using an office in Dick McTurk’s factory unit and there was a message light pulsing on the answering machine when I got in. Almost everyone used my mobile phone to contact me but the landline in the office had been set up to divert calls from my office in the Glasgow home.

“This is Maître Grasse. I’m in Glasgow at the Hilton Hotel and I need to see you as soon as possible. I cannot enough stress how important this is.”

The lapse in syntax was an indication of how disturbed this precise Swiss advocate was. He and I had met when we discovered Henry’s Swiss bank account and he continued to act for Kirsy and me. I had been going to join the folk from the charabanc for lunch at the Duck Bay Marina on Loch Lomond side, but Maître Grasse was not a man to demand attention unless there was something very serious in the offing.

I cancelled my afternoon schedule and drove into town fifteen minutes after I heard his summons. He was waiting for me in the bar with a troubled look on his face as he rose to greet me. I was beginning to be seriously concerned. Surely Swiss banks don’t go bust? Even if they do, my business would not suffer seriously: our property company held all the deeds and most of our liquid assets are in the Cayman Islands.

He was being thoroughly Swiss, insisting on ordering fresh coffee before he settled me at the table, opened his briefcase and removed his spectacles to read the paper he extracted.

“How well do you know Pierre Lachaise?”

Pierre Lachaise

I took a moment to reply. Our chef has always been a bit of an enigma to me. He is friendly enough, smiling when we meet but he has no close friends amongst the staff, and he doesn’t seem to go out very often. I wouldn’t even have known that he makes models if a package of headless match sticks hadn’t burst at reception when it was delivered. Maître Grasse waited patiently for me to reply.

“His confidential cv has several unique features.”

I watched him closely as I spoke and thought that I could detect a trace of alarm in his eyes.

“I’ve been studying the confidential personnel files recently. On the inside cover a typed copy of the cv is pasted with private observations added by Henry in red ink. Pierre’s cv is written entirely in red ink. The other files go back at least as far as secondary school, but Pierre’s begins with his meeting Henry in Switzerland.”

He smiled with obvious relief when I assured him that the file contained no information about the circumstances of the meeting. Henry wrote: ‘Met Pierre – just the chef I’ve been looking for!’ After he had recovered from his stroke, Henry spent about six weeks at a clinic in Switzerland and he had returned there for a week every autumn: he had just come home from his annual visit when I met him for the first time.

Pierre told me that he had been working in London immediately before he joined us and that his papers had been destroyed in the fire that ravaged the restaurant and his flat on the floor above. Now I was wondering if that was true: he started working for Black Sheep shortly after Henry got back from the clinic and now I was being questioned about him by a Swiss lawyer who had flown to Glasgow specially to see me.

The happier Maître Grasse was with my replies the more uneasy I became. Most of our other staff had been damaged in some way by people like our guests. The nature of the hurt was outlined in the red ink additions to their life histories. There was no hint that Pierre had been damaged and certainly no indication of a cause and yet an important lawyer was here to speak on his behalf. I deduced that my recent actions had stirred a previously stagnant pool, and it would pay me to listen carefully to what the Maître might say.

“I understand you’ve been making some changes to your organisation. Do you think Henry would approve?” He held his hand up in supplication. “It is probably not for me to say but I’m an old man and we allow ourselves certain liberties. You are, after all, very young.”

“I will continue to work towards Henry’s goal, but my methods will take into account changes in circumstances. It is not a crime to be young nor is age an excuse for making uninformed judgements, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”

Being young is neither a crime nor an illness and I was no longer prepared to be patronised because of my date of birth. I thought he might look outraged, but he was amused.

“May I call you Kenneth? I’m Helmut. Do you know what Henry was doing with the homes?”

“I believe so. He was taking money from rich clients to restore dignity and pride to people who had been robbed of them. I assume that Pierre has been a victim, but I have no way of knowing what happened to him. My guess is that your visit is to decide on whether to leave our chef or remove him to an environment where he will get more help.”

“He called us, you know. He’s always had an emergency number, but this is the first time he’s used it since Henry took him from my office and installed him as your chef. He thinks your changes will put him in danger.”

“Without knowing the direction from which that danger threatens, Helmut, I cannot offer any comment on Pierre’s fears.”

“And I need to know the nature and extent of the changes, Kenneth, before I can decide on Pierre’s future.”

My ideas are not secret, and I could have taken Helmut to Dick McTurk’s office and shown him the plans but I was still uneasy about the mystery surrounding Pierre. Some of the other members of staff have done shameful things in their past including spending time in prison. I had no right to demand to know about Pierre but I wasn’t prepared to accept less than Henry was told when he agreed to bring the chef into our community. To know all may be to forgive all but I had a duty to keep matches away from a known arsonist, as you might say.

Helmut had perfected the diversionary tactic of busying himself with something else, so by the time I had thought this through he had arranged for fresh coffee to be brought.

“I’m rather surprised to find that your plans are secret, Kenneth. From what Pierre said they are common knowledge amongst your staff.”

“I think we will have to ask your client where he obtained the information that led to his panic.”

“There is no question of panic,” Helmut began but I interrupted.

“Pierre has been with Black Sheep for about fifteen years without once calling the emergency number. I cannot find any other word but ‘panic’ to describe his response to a rumour that he didn’t seek to confirm with me!”

Helmut sat very quietly for several minutes after my outburst. The bar was filling up with customers, mainly women but with small groups of men in business suits dotted here and there. Two women gave me a most unfriendly stare as they went past so I guessed that Helmut and I were sitting at ‘their table’. Finally, he put the papers back into his briefcase, put on his glasses and sighed.

“Where will we find Pierre?”

I drove across the Kingston Bridge and took the motorway past the airport before crossing back over the Clyde at Erskine. Helmut talked about previous visits he had made to Scotland with his family, and I told him about our new home in Balfron. The atmosphere between us was guarded until I mentioned that Kirsty is pregnant. From then on, we both relaxed and talked about our families.

The charabanc was parked on the lay bye formed by a loop of the old road, about a hundred metres from the Duck Bay Marina. I parked behind the coach, and we tried the door to find it locked. When I explained that I had been planning to join the party for lunch he invited himself and we walked into the restaurant where Tomas was holding forth to my four clients.

He was first to notice us, and he competed with the waitresses to add two more place settings for us. Before the fuss had subsided, Pierre came out of the door into the kitchen accompanied by a chef with whom he was on the best possible terms. It was the first time I had seen our chef out of his kitchen whites. He looked relaxed and happy.

He looked a little disconcerted to see Helmut and me together, but he quickly recovered introducing his fellow chef and recommending what we should eat. The three old ladies accepted a second sweet sherry while we waited to eat and became quite giggly. Helmut was induced to try a pint of Scottish beer and made some savagely witty comparisons with Swiss beer. Pierre was sharing a bottle of wine with Stephen Green while Tomas and I drank water.

Agnes and Pat, the other nurse travelling with the coach had opted out of the trip so they could shop and do the laundry. I had the fleeting thought that I should check Pat’s file to see what pitfalls might be hidden in her past.

After lunch Helmut and Pierre wandered off deep in conversation while the rest of us enjoyed the mild weather to go onto the decking to feed the ducks. Tomas is already a firm favourite with the clients, I was pleased to see. Stephen adroitly handed over the chore of pushing his wheelchair to me and we soon outdistanced the ladies with their Egyptian friend. He had clearly studied Loch Lomond as I heard him giving his auditors a string of facts. The overall length of the loch and its greatest depth were winning him awed gasps from the ladies.

“Out with it, Kenneth. Pierre’s been jittery since we joined the charabanc and now he’s off in deep consultation with a German. What’s going on?”

“I wish I knew, and I wish I could talk about it if I did know. There is some big mystery, that’s clear enough. Do you remember when Henry brought Pierre back with him? And, by the way, Helmut’s Swiss.”

“Give me a day or two. It must be fifteen years since he came.”

It began to get a little chilly, so we made our way back to the charabanc. The ladies insisted on showing it off to Helmut who teased them about having a man in their bedroom. I had a word with Tomas about where we might locate a washing machine and tumble dryer – neither Dick nor I had given a thought to laundry facilities when we designed the layout.

On the way back to the Hilton I told Helmut my plans for the future of Black Sheep enterprises – but only after he had told me that Pierre would talk to me about his past and his future! I waited while he settled his account and then took him to the airport. He wanted me to drop him off at the departures entrance, but I insisted on parking and coming in to wait with him.

Following his example, I got him comfortably settled with a cognac before I asked him any questions.

“When Henry last visited Switzerland he and I hadn’t met, but when Kirsty and I opened his safe deposit box about six months later, we were named in his Will.”

“His courier brought the papers,” Helmut laughed.

“Only a very special courier would be able to open the box and replace papers with a new set containing my name. I don’t suppose you can tell me who it was, but can you say whether she – or he, of course – still works for me?”

He started to speak once or twice but thought better of it and then his flight was called. There was the usual flurry of checking coats and bags as he prepared to depart.

“She does still work for you,” he said as we shook hands. Then, when he was almost out of earshot, he turned and grinned: “Or he, of course!”

That evening Kirsty and I speculated on Pierre’s past. We kept agreeing to stop since we had absolutely no facts to work on but after a moment or two of silence one or other of us would start again: “You don’t think he could have been” – a bank robber, a betrayed foreign spy, a murderer, an alien from a colony on Mars. Well, all right, we didn’t actually wonder about him being an alien, but we had him tried and convicted of almost everything else.

We were exhausted when we got to bed. Speculation is a lot more tiring than sawing up old timber in our new wilderness area, take my word for it!

Witness Protection

The next morning, I drove to Arrochar where the charabanc had settled for the night. The clients were visiting Doctor James and he appeared to be grateful for the visit. I thought he might have been sick of the sight of us, but he was most hospitable. I managed to get a quick word with him about Pierre.

“I don’t know anything. He keeps very fit. I think he’s only consulted me once since I finished dressing the bullet wound in his leg that he had when Henry brought him to Glasgow.”

That was all I had time for before Stephen came sidling up to try to overhear our conversation. I asked Pierre if he could spare a couple of hours to solve a problem with our new kitchen in Balfron and he jumped into the Fiesta beside me. He had designed the wonderfully compact kitchen in the charabanc and Kirsty had persuaded him to design our kitchen/diner. The house had been pretty well restored before the previous owners ran out of money with just the kitchen and the downstairs loo to be completed.

Pierre seemed rather relieved than anything else when I asked if he would talk to Kirsty and me together. The persona I developed to cope with the criticism hurled at me is proving to be a disadvantage when I’m talking to the other ninety-nine per cent of humanity!

Our kitchen is complete but not operational since the floor is tiled but the future contents of cupboards are still lying in boxes covering every surface. It only needed Kirsty to say that she didn’t know where to put things for Pierre to take charge. He stood in the preparation area and thought through the preparation and cooking of different meals. He involved Kirsty, asking her how she cooked various dishes and changing the location of items in cupboards as a result. She admitted that until she had a flat at university she had only ever cooked when her mum was ill – at death’s door, was how she phrased it.

Pierre was really interested in her experiences, and he gave her a tutorial on how to set up an efficient cooking area. He reached towards cupboards and drawers for imaginary tools and ingredients. I left them to it while they were still deciding the particular shelf on which to keep salt and pepper; they argued like old friends, and I thought that I had never seen him so happy.

I did some paperwork in my study until I was called back though for lunch. All the work surfaces had been cleared with the discarded boxes in a heap at the backdoor. The only evidence of cooking was a single frying pan in Pierre’s left hand and a wooden spatula in his right. As I sat down, he decanted an omelette onto a plate in front of me and I raised my fork watched intently by two pairs of eyes.