Wheel of Fire

Eleven

As soon as she had finished her telephone conversation with Vogel, Bella Fairbrother set off for Blackdown Manor in her metallic grey Mercedes sports car.

On the way, using her hands-free system, she tried, for the umpteenth time since learning of the terrible fire, to call a certain phone number. There was one person she really needed to talk to concerning what had happened. Yet again there was no reply. She hadn’t really expected there to be. She was, it seemed, for the time being at any rate, on her own.

She headed onto the M5, coming off at the Wellington turning, and drove for a few miles along the A38 towards Exeter before swinging a left and meandering her way through a network of country lanes up into the Blackdown Hills towards the old manor where she and her brother had been brought up.

Even the drive felt strangely uncomfortable that day. Bella Fairbrother was not by any stretch of the imagination a sentimental woman. But as she swung the little Merc carefully around a succession of blind corners screened on either side by the prohibitively tall banks topped with hedges, which lined the vast majority of the rural roads and lanes of Devon and West Somerset, she felt that sinking feeling in her stomach which always came when she was apprehensive about something.

Not only was her father no longer going to be at the manor to greet her, as he’d always been before their mutually agreed estrangement the previous year, nor the Kivel family, of whom she had only the happiest of memories, but even the house was not going to be there anymore.

The old manor had been built in a commanding position and stood high amongst the hills from which it got its name, almost level with Culmstock Beacon, one of the line of ancient fire beacons, dating back to Tudor England, which were lit to send news of the arrival of the Spanish Armada all the way from the tip of Cornwall to London. Although its immediate privacy was, by and large, well-protected by the high banks and hedges, Blackdown could be seen in the distance from more than one vantage point, if you knew where they were. Bella wanted to prepare herself before actually approaching the house. So she pulled her little car to a halt in a gateway, set back from a section of narrow road, a mile or so from the house as the crow flies.

She stepped out, made her way to the gate, and looked out across the fields. She had, of course, known what to expect. She had even seen some TV news coverage. Nonetheless the spectacle before her came as a terrible shock. It was a long time since she’d gazed across the hills from this gateway, probably dating back to childhood days when she and her brother, and sometimes the Kivel boys, had ridden their ponies along the country lanes and across the fields that her father had owned.

At first, she thought she may have stopped in the wrong place. But she hadn’t, of course. It was just that the tall chimneys and the towering Tudor façade of Blackdown Manor simply no longer existed. All she could see was a near flattened ruin, from this distance just a pile of rubble with only the occasional piece of wall still standing.

She gasped. To her annoyance she felt tears forming in her eyes. She wiped them briskly away. Bella Fairbrother had spent her entire adult life, and most of her childhood come to that, refusing to display any sign of weakness. After all, surely one of the latest crop of Fairbrother siblings had to have inherited at least a little of the grit and determination of their much-lauded ancestors, who had created and nurtured one of the greatest private banks in the world? It had never, from early childhood, looked as if that sibling might be Freddie; although Bella had loved her brother dearly back then, and for years just hadn’t noticed. But one of the things that had made her eventually come close to despising him, was the weakness she had seen develop in him as he grew from a likeable happy-go-lucky child into a deeply disturbed and self-indulgent young man. A weakness, in her opinion both then and now, that had led to his problems with drugs and drink and taken him along a path ultimately making it impossible for him to remain the heir apparent to his father and a future chairman of Fairbrother International.

Yet Bella and her big brother had been close. They’d been great chums as children. And for a moment she could see a picture flashing before her of the young Bella and Freddie cantering across the fields which stretched in front of her, on their childhood ponies, she totally fearless and in the lead as usual, even though she was the youngest, Freddie bringing up the rear, quite content to hold back and merely follow. Her pony had been a feisty little grey and his a bigger, but gentler, roan. Both of them splendid equine specimens, of course. The Fairbrother children always had the best that money could buy. However during their teenage years they also had a mother who’d been more or less forced to live miles away from them, whom they saw only intermittently; a father who was absent from their lives more often than he was present; and a fiery stepmother who regarded both her stepchildren as an inconvenience and made no secret of it. Until, of course, Freddie had become a devastatingly handsome twenty-year-old. But she preferred not to think about that.

Bella didn’t know exactly what had turned her brother into the man he was, barely like any Fairbrother she had known or heard of, nor herself into the woman she was, once described by the Financial Times as ‘arguably the most ruthless and able woman the City has ever known’. And, like most high-achieving women, she somewhat resented such descriptions on the grounds that men in the same kind of roles were unlikely ever to be described in that way. Their ability would be taken for granted because of the positions they held; as would their capacity to operate with whatever ruthlessness might be required in order for them to fulfil their professional obligations. She did know that she had felt obliged to take on a role in life which, when she’d been that child galloping without a care in the world over her family’s land, she could not have imagined becoming her destiny.

Throughout the history of their famous bank there had always been a male Fairbrother at the helm. Indeed, rather the way the British royal family had historically been obliged to always produce an heir and a spare in order to ensure the continuation of the line of succession, so Fairbrother men had always been obliged to continue their line in order to maintain control of the family bank. Only the Fairbrother traditions remained rather more archaic than that of the royals. England had a proud history of great queens, and, since changes to the law in 2013, even the order of succession to the throne was no longer gender dependent. The Fairbrothers, on the other hand, had never allowed a woman chairman, nor had Bella’s father ever seemed able to grasp the concept of her becoming the first, regardless of her ultimately showing herself more than capable — in stark contrast to her low-achieving brother.

Bella sighed. After just a few seconds more, she shook herself out of her reverie, climbed back into her car, switched on the engine and proceeded on the last short leg of her journey to view close up the devastation of her family home. It had to be done. Bella Fairbrother considered it her responsibility to evaluate the damage, then take whatever action might be required. And Bella never shirked responsibility.

However, it was starkly apparent that virtually nothing could possibly remain of the treasures she had taken for granted as a child. The Chippendale furniture, the collection of nineteenth-century watercolours, the family portraits and, of course, above all, the Gainsborough. Tough and disciplined as she undoubtedly was, Bella found herself that morning almost overwhelmed by an immense sense of loss. The home she had known as a child, and the father she had known and loved throughout her growing up there, could never be retrieved.

A huge part of her life was over. All she could do was move on to the next stage. And she knew what her mission was now. She had no doubt at all. She must save the bank. At all costs. The bank could not, and would not, be lost. The financial stability of Fairbrother International must be restored. Nothing else really mattered.

Meanwhile, as Bella had assured Vogel, Freddie Fairbrother was on his way to the UK. He had booked himself onto a British Airways flight to London Heathrow, straight after presenting himself at an Australian police station.

Freddie settled into his first-class pod and accepted the glass of champagne and dish of nibbles offered promptly by attentive cabin crew. He was determined to enjoy the journey, whatever difficulties he might have to face upon arrival.

Freddie still had a considerable cash flow problem. His allowance from the family business certainly wouldn’t stretch to first-class air travel. But that was all going to change soon. He’d raked up every dollar he had to make this trip, and paid for the first-class fair on a credit card taken right up to the limit. But he wasn’t worried about any of that. Why should he be?

He had begun to feel a certain resentment that he couldn’t afford to travel whenever, and in whatever style, he desired, drive a better motor car, and maybe, just maybe, live in a house that wasn’t made of wood. Now all that was going to change.

Those feelings had developed within him gradually. Had that fateful telephone call making a series of quite extraordinary suggestions come to him ten, or maybe even six or seven years ago, instead of six months, Freddie would just have laughed. He genuinely wouldn’t have considered it to be anything other than a joke. It was, in fact, only relatively recently that Freddie had started giving anything at all much attention. Of course, through almost all of his late teens and his twenties, and into his thirties, he had existed in a foggy cloud comprised more or less equally of marijuana smoke and alcohol fumes.

It was only as he entered his forties that Freddie had, albeit only occasionally, started to ponder not only his future but also the futility of his present.

Clearly there could be no going back, and Freddie hadn’t been able to see any way of moving forward which might offer the kind of change he wanted. If he wanted it. Indeed, he’d had no idea really what he wanted. That had always been Freddie’s biggest problem. So, he’d stayed just how he was. An ageing beach bum idling and drinking his days away. He’d rarely been actively unhappy. But he had come to wonder, just occasionally, what might have been.

Then the call had come, bringing with it his destiny. Or that’s how Freddie saw it. A whole new future lay before him. He’d seen at once what it could be, and for perhaps the first time in his life found that he knew what he wanted. He’d been given a quite unexpected, and rather extraordinary, second chance to regain the life he had been born for. All he had to do was reach out and grab it. And that was exactly what Freddie had done. He was going to be a Fairbrother again.

The aircraft took off and a male flight attendant, almost certainly gay, refilled his glass and treated him to a beaming smile. Freddie smiled back, his charming smile, the lazy one which started merely as a twitch of the lips and grew wider, narrowing the dimples at either side of his mouth until they were just creases.

Freddie had once woken from a drink and drug-induced stupor to find himself in bed with two men. It had always annoyed him that he could remember virtually nothing of what had actually happened. He wasn’t gay, of course. A little bit, maybe, because there had been one or two other men. Maybe more. Freddie supposed it would seem stupid to most people if he told them that by the time it got to going to bed time, he had sometimes barely known the difference. In any case, there had been many occasions when he had chosen a chunk of good Colombian black and a decent bottle of brandy over either sex.

But those days were well behind him now. Freddie had changed, just as, ironically under the circumstances, his father had told him he would.

‘It happens to us all,’ Sir John had said, despairingly sending him off on his travels. ‘You’ll want what everyone else has, eventually. Maybe even a wife and family.’

Freddie had laughed in his face. Particularly in view of the conduct of Sir John’s own dissolute second wife. He had despised his father in those days. Many young men and women, in their teens and maybe early twenties, turn against the values of their parents. For Freddie, it had been far more than that. Sir John Fairbrother ran one of the world’s most important private banks. As had his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. The young Freddie had loathed everything Sir John stood for, and everything Fairbrother’s represented. The gulf between father and son was about as great as it could be. Freddie was embarrassed by Sir John. Sir John was embarrassed by Freddie. And appalled by his wanton behaviour.

Freddie could hardly remember, now, whether he walked out on his father to live his hippy lifestyle, or whether his father insisted that he go. In any case the past didn’t matter anymore. Only the future.

He ate a delicious steak washed down with a fine claret, and contemplated, as airline travellers unused to regular first-class travel are inclined to, on the extraordinary difference between first and pig class. There couldn’t be many greater contrasts in life, Freddie thought. Heaven and hell were contained within one improbable piece of human engineering hurtling through the skies at 600 miles an hour.

After a couple of decent brandies, enjoyed whilst he watched a movie, he stretched out on his comfortable flat bed and slept through the rest of the first leg of his journey, all the way to Singapore.

After another meal, more champagne and more brandy, he slept through most of the next leg too, and arrived at Heathrow feeling remarkably fresh.

It was almost two decades since he had stepped foot on British soil. More than nineteen years since his father had effectively disowned him and denied him his inheritance, telling him he’d allocate him an adequate and permanent living allowance, but would be cutting him out of his will.

However, Freddie remained his father’s eldest child and his only son. He thought he might even consider marrying himself, and producing a son. It would, after all, be expected of him now.

He walked tall through Heathrow airport. He was unshaven, and his hair was uncombed. His eyes looked a tad bleary, the only-to-be expected result of a heavy alcohol-induced sleep combined with the inevitable jet lag of trans-continental travel. He was dressed in his customary faded blue jeans, a well-worn bomber jacket over an unironed shirt.

None the less, he was a Fairbrother. The oldest surviving male of the line. And he was back to claim his inheritance.