Old Sins (103 page)

‘What is it, Jane? Having trouble with your new word processor?’

‘No, Mr Winterbourne. I’ve just phoned Mr Wilburn’s office in San Francisco. There’s some hysterical girl on the phone who says he’s dead. Apparently he had a car crash last night. And before you ask, there’s no family at all that we can talk to. What on earth do we do now?’

Miami and Nassau, 1985

MILES THOUGHT MIAMI
was just about the most awful place he had ever been to in his life. It made the early days in Nassau look like paradise. Even the relief of getting old Marcia off his
back, with Bill Wilburn’s totally unexpected help – God, why hadn’t he asked him before – didn’t make life seem much better.

At first sight the beach had looked all right, and there was at least the suspicion of surf rolling in on to it; but he discovered very quickly that it was nothing but a huge, man-made people-park, covered in a lot of what seemed to him very old people and an endless procession of film crews. It had no soul like the beaches of California, no shape to it, and no land behind it, just mile after mile of high-rise buildings. He liked the south end better, Old Miami as it was called, with its little colony of deco hotels and buildings, but it was still basically part of what seemed to him the same nightmare, just concrete and more concrete, straight lines and endless streets. What he couldn’t understand was how proud and pleased everybody seemed to be with the place. The number of tourists, they kept telling him, was rising every year, every month; at least five million last year. There were the most incredible number of new roads being built, and all kinds of new developments, like Bayside, the waterfront development, and then there were all the wonderful things like the Seaquarium and the Metrozoo, and had he been to Everglades and the Tropical Garden and . . .

Miles smiled his lovely smile and said, no, not yet, but he was certainly looking forward to it. Then he got his head down at the bank, took the cheapest room he could find, and immediately set about saving his fare back to Nassau.

It was Mrs de Launay who saw the advertisement.

‘Look at this,’ she said to her husband excitedly. ‘Someone wants to contact Miles. At least I suppose it’s him.’

‘Must be,’ he said. ‘There can’t be many Miles Wilburns about. I wonder if Marcia has seen this.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Should I show it to her, do you think?’

‘Well of course you should. Don’t ask such absurd questions, Alicia. It could be important.’

Alicia was shy. ‘But she might think I was interfering. She might already have seen it. I don’t like to.’

‘All right.’ He shrugged. ‘Have it your own way.’

‘Oh, well – maybe I should.’

She went to Marcia’s house later that day. Marcia was sitting doing her needlepoint; Dorothy was asleep upstairs.

‘Forgive me for interfering in your business, Marcia, but I wondered if you’d seen this?’

‘What’s that, Alicia?’

‘It’s an advertisement in the paper. For Miles to get in touch with some solicitors in England.’

‘Well, for heavens’ sakes,’ said Marcia. ‘Let me see. Good heavens. I wonder what that can be about.’

‘Usually they’re about money, Marcia. Legacies. You know. Someone might have left him a lot of money.’

‘I doubt it. No one in that family has a penny to their name.’

‘Well, you never know. Don’t you think you should at least tell Dorothy – Mrs Kelly.’

‘Yes, I expect you’re right, Alicia. Thank you for letting me know. Now, would you like some tea?’

Marcia thought hard about the advertisement after Alicia had gone. It might well be that the boy had come into some money. But so what? It was very nice without him, and he would probably come back if he didn’t have to work in the bank in Miami, and start hanging round the house all day. And if it was a lot of money, then he would probably move away, and take Dotty with him. He was genuinely very fond of her and he had often said that one day he would make a new home for them both. Marcia didn’t want Dotty going away. Not now. She felt proprietorial towards her. She felt she was hers to look after; she couldn’t imagine life without her. And there was certainly no way Miles would put any of his money her way. She would end up lonely, and poorer than she was now. Once the house in Malibu was sold, then she and Dotty would be very well off.

No, there was absolutely nothing to be gained by letting Miles see this advertisement. She put it with all the letters under her bed. It was a good thing Larissa didn’t have a curious disposition.

Mason McCall saw the advertisement too. He thought about it for a long time and then decided to put it where he felt it belonged: in the trash. There was nothing wrong with Miles, in fact he liked him, but he knew that he and Candy wanted to get
married and right now she was much too young. Also right now there was no way it could happen; the boy had a job at last which was something in his favour, but it certainly wasn’t going to provide enough to keep a wife, and the two of them were just going to have to wait.

Advertisements of this kind usually meant money and money in this case would mean wedding bells and Mason had no desire to hear them.

There was no chance of Candy seeing the advertisement, she never looked at a paper, her idea of a really heavy read was the latest Revlon ad in
Glamour
, Miles might see it himself and there was nothing Mason could do to prevent that, but he certainly wasn’t going to go out of his way to put it under his nose.

Mason tore the paper into small shreds and went down to the pool to look for Candy and see if he could cheer her up, offer to take her out to one of the islands for a day or two, or buy her a few new frocks. She was missing Miles badly.

Billy de Launay saw the advertisement too, in the
Washington Post.
Now this was really interesting. This might explain why Miles hadn’t heard from the old guy. He’d snuffed it. This was an English solicitor, after all. And it also looked like Miles might actually be going to get some money. That was what these kinds of advertisement usually meant. Lucky old sod.

Billy sighed. It was a shame Miles was such a lousy correspondent. He never heard from him these days, although he continued to send him the odd note whenever something particularly interesting or exciting happened to him. Oh, well, they could catch up on everything when he went home for his summer vacation.

Billy hoped Miles would see the advertisement. It would be awful if he missed it. He never read the papers, except maybe the headlines. He tore it out and wrote off to Miles that night, enclosing it and demanding an invitation to the blow-out he hoped Miles would be hosting if it meant what he thought it did.

He mailed it to the house in Nassau, not knowing Miles’ address in Miami. Marcia filed it carefully with the others.

Father Kennedy read the advertisement in the
Los Angeles Times.
He always studied those kind of columns closely in the extremely forlorn hope that one of his flock might have come into some kind of a legacy, however small. They never did and it would really have done them little good if they had as it would have been converted into alcohol in no time at all. But God moved in a very mysterious way indeed, in his experience, and it was still worth keeping an eye open. He wondered what had happened. It looked as if Mr Dashwood might have died and left Miles some money. Maybe there’d been some kind of making up. Well, that was nice; but Father Kennedy had always felt it very sad that after all his efforts on the boy’s behalf, poor Dashwood had received very nearly no thanks at all.

He imagined Miles was sure to see it, Mrs Kelly certainly would, she was a great one for reading the papers. Strange she had never answered his letters; she had promised to write, even suggested he took a vacation in Nassau one day. Oh, well, promises were cheap. Father Kennedy was used by now to the vagaries of human nature. He thought it would do no harm to forward a copy of the paper on to Miles. He just might miss it, and that would be a dreadful thing. He sat down that night and wrote a long letter to Mrs Kelly, enclosing the clipping. He really hoped she would reply; he would like to see her again.

Marcia looked at the envelope with the Los Angeles postmark, guessed its contents and put it with the others. She was beginning to wonder if she was doing the right thing. Whoever was looking for Miles seemed to want to find him pretty badly.

In her house in East Hampton, Long Island, Mrs Holden Taylor Jr was reading the
New York Times
over breakfast as she always did, before embarking on the hectic day of tennis, lunching, shopping and menu planning that lay ahead of her. She skimmed through the law reports (Holden liked her to know what was going on in his world) and she was looking idly at the Public Notice column when a name sprang out at her. A name that caught her sharply somewhere in the region of her heart, a name that spelt sunshine and beaches and old cars and smoking grass and glorious wonderful sex, the kind that Holden simply never quite managed, however hard they both
tried to pretend that he did. Miles! Miles Wilburn. Just reading the name, she saw him as suddenly and clearly as if he was standing there, those amazing dark dark blue eyes, the heart-catching smile, the long flowing blond hair – well, that was probably cut short now – heard his voice, soft and lazy and slow. Miles. She would never forget him ever. They said you never did forget your first love. They seemed to be right. So what had happened? Had someone died and left Miles some money, and as it was an English solicitor’s address in the paper, would it be Hugo Dashwood? It seemed very likely. That was very good of him, when Miles had always been so hostile and often rude to him.

Oh God, what would she give to see Miles just once more. Joanna shook herself. She hadn’t even thought about him for years, well not seriously, and now here she was like a bitch on heat just because she’d read his name in the paper. Pull yourself together, Joanna, she said, and get to planning that menu. It was an important dinner party on Saturday; she had had to invite some incredibly high-powered woman in advertising that Holden had met somewhere. Just thinking about her made Joanna nervous. Apparently she wasn’t just brilliantly clever and had her own agency, she was amazingly beautiful too. Camilla North, she was called, she was in her mid forties and looked just about thirty. And she rode to hounds side-saddle. Oh, God, what on earth could she serve up on the plate of such a paragon?

Joanna covered the table with recipe books and temporarily forgot all about Miles Wilburn.

New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, 1985

ANDREW BLACKWORTH WAS
on his way to San Francisco. He had not initially been over-enthusiastic about the idea, indeed had suggested to Roz that one of his contacts in the States might be
able at least initially to follow up the Bill Wilburn trail, but she had looked at him, her green eyes snapping with fury, and said that she was retaining him personally at great expense, and that she did not want any inexperienced fool of a stringer following this trail.

He had not been to San Francisco before and he found it greatly to his liking. He was not a sun lover, and he had visited and hated California; to his enchantment on arrival (just before midday) this city was grey and misty, damply chill. He remembered a quotation from Oscar Wilde: ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco.’ This was the kind of summer he liked.

His cab driver, taking him into the town through the oddly European suburban streets with their clapboard houses in faded colours, said this was a day he had to see the bridge; Andrew, fearing a cliché, allowed him to take him there, and looked in awe at the great red spires rising out of the grey mist.

‘Kind of pretty, isn’t it?’ said the driver. ‘You from England?’

Andrew said he was.

‘The English usually get disappointed when they fly in here. Where’s the sunshine, they say. But then they see this and they change their minds. Later on it’ll clear.’ He turned the cab and drove back into town through the Golden Gate Park; Bill Wilburn’s office was in the centre, just east of Chinatown, in a small dingy street, a barrier closing the fiercely steep hill behind it to all but pedestrians.

‘You have a nice day now,’ said the cab driver cheerfully, dumping Andrew’s case on the sidewalk, ‘and mind you take a cable car ride. Nob and Telegraph are the best.’

Andrew said he would and walked into the building.

Wilburn’s office occupied a large room taking up most of the ground floor; his secretary Cynthia, still weepy, but impeccably dressed and coiffed, and enjoying the drama, was rather desperately trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff of Bill’s twenty-five-year-old collection of papers and files.

‘Good morning,’ said Andrew in his impeccable BBC accent. ‘I’m Andrew Blackworth.’ Cynthia looked at him.

‘I just don’t know where to begin,’ she said helplessly, from her position kneeling in front of a filing cabinet, ‘it all seems so old.’

Andrew gave her his most charming smile.

‘It must,’ he said, ‘to you. Here, let me see if I can help.’

‘That would be real nice of you to help me.’ She looked at him. ‘Sorry, why did you say you were here?’

‘I didn’t. I’m here because I’m a private detective from England and we’re trying to trace a relative of Mr Wilburn’s. A young man. Miles Wilburn. Mr Wilburn contacted us just before he died.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, pleased to be able to show that she had some inside knowledge. ‘Him. I’d forgotten him. Yeah, I had to type a letter about him.’

‘Was this the letter?’

He showed her a photocopy.

‘Yeah.’

‘But you didn’t know anything about him?’

‘Nope. Nothing.’

‘Mr Wilburn didn’t tell you anything, talk to you about him at all?’

‘Nope. Until that day I never heard of him. Never heard about him again either. No, that’s not true, Mr Wilburn said he was going to visit him for a few days. A couple of weeks ago.’

‘Was that in LA?’