Four Warned Read online

  Contents

  Never Stop on the Motorway

  The Queen’s Birthday Telegram1

  Stuck on You1

  Don’t Drink the Water

  Never Stop on the Motorway

  (from Twelve Red Herrings)

  Diana had been hoping to get away by five o’clock, so she could be at the farm in time for dinner. She tried not to show her true feelings when at 4.37 p.m. her deputy, Phil Haskins, gave her a complex twelve-page document that needed her sign-off before it could be sent out to the client. Haskins reminded her that they had lost two similar contracts that week.

  It was always the same on a Friday. The phones would go quiet in the middle of the afternoon. Then, just as she thought she could slip away, some paperwork would land on her desk. One glance at this document and Diana knew there would be no chance of leaving before six.

  The demands of being a single parent as well as a director of a small but thriving City firm meant there were few moments left in any day to relax. So when it came to the one weekend in four that her children James and Caroline spent with her ex-husband, Diana would try to leave the office a little earlier than usual to avoid getting caught up in the weekend traffic.

  She read through the first page of the contract slowly and made a couple of changes, aware that any mistake made in haste on a Friday night could be regretted in the weeks to come. She glanced at the clock on her desk as she signed the final page of the document. It was just flicking over to 5.51 p.m.

  Diana gathered up her bag and walked purposefully towards the door, dropping the document on Phil’s desk without bothering to wish him a good weekend. She suspected that the paperwork had been on his desk since nine o’clock that morning, but that holding onto it until late afternoon was his only means of revenge now that she had been made head of department. Once she was safely in the lift, she pressed the button for the basement car park, working out that the delay would probably add an extra hour to her journey.

  She stepped out of the lift, walked over to her Audi estate car, unlocked the door and threw her bag onto the back seat. When she drove up onto the street, the stream of twilight traffic was just about keeping pace with the pinstriped people on the pavements who, like worker ants, were hurrying towards the nearest hole in the ground.

  She flicked on the radio for the six o’clock news. The chimes of Big Ben rang out, before spokesmen from each of the three main political parties gave their views on the European election results. John Major was refusing to comment on his future. The Conservative Party’s explanation for its poor showing was that only thirty-six per cent of the country had bothered to go to the polls. Diana felt guilty – she was among the sixty-four per cent who had failed to vote.

  The newscaster moved on to say that the situation in Bosnia was still desperate, and that the UN was threatening dire action if the Serbs – and their leader, Radovan Karadzik – didn’t come to an agreement with the other warring parties. Diana’s mind began to drift – such a threat was hardly news any longer. She thought that if she turned on the radio in a year’s time they would probably be repeating the story word for word.

  As her car crawled round Russell Square, she began to think about the weekend ahead. It had been over a year since John had told her that he had met another woman and wanted a divorce. She still wondered why, after seven years of marriage, she hadn’t been more shocked – or at least angry – at his betrayal. Since her appointment as a company director, she had to admit they had spent less and less time together. And perhaps she had become numbed by the fact that a third of the married couples in Britain were now divorced or separated. Her parents had been unable to hide their disappointment, but then they had been married for forty-two years.

  The divorce had been friendly enough, as John, who earned less than she did – one of their problems, perhaps – had given in to most of her demands. She had kept the flat in south west London, the Audi estate and the children, to whom John was allowed access one weekend in four. He would have picked them up from school earlier that afternoon, and, as usual, he would return them to the flat in Putney around seven on Sunday evening.

  Diana would go to almost any lengths to avoid being left on her own in the flat when they weren’t around. Although she regularly grumbled about being landed with the job of bringing up two children without a father, she missed them greatly the moment they were out of sight.

  She hadn’t taken a lover and she didn’t sleep around. None of the senior staff at the office had ever gone further than asking her out to lunch. Perhaps because only three of them were unmarried – and not without reason. The one person she might have considered having a relationship with had made it very clear that he only wanted to spend the night with her, not the days.

  In any case, Diana had decided long ago that if she was to be taken seriously as the company’s first female director, an office affair – however casual or short-lived – could only end in tears. Men are so vain, she thought. A woman only had to make one mistake and she was immediately labelled as loose. Then every other man in the office either smirks behind your back, or treats your thigh like the arm of his chair.

  Diana groaned as she came to a halt at yet another red light. In twenty minutes she had only covered a couple of miles. She opened the glove box on the passenger side and fumbled in the dark for a cassette. She found one and pressed it into the slot, hoping it would be Pavarotti. Instead, she was greeted by the forceful tones of Gloria Gaynor assuring her ‘I will survive’. She smiled and thought about her friend Daniel, as the light changed to green.

  She and Daniel had read Economics together at Bristol University in the early 1980s. They had been friends but never lovers. Then Daniel met Rachael, who was a year below them, and from that moment he had never looked at another woman. They married the day he graduated, and after they returned from their honeymoon Daniel took over the management of his father’s farm in Bedfordshire.

  Three children had followed soon after each other, and Diana had been proud when she was asked to be godmother to Sophie, the eldest. Daniel and Rachael had now been married for twelve years, and Diana felt confident that they wouldn’t be disappointing their parents with any suggestion of a divorce. Although they thought she led an exciting and fulfilling life in the City, Diana often envied their gentle and uncomplicated lives.

  She was often asked to spend the weekend with them in the country. But for every two or three invitations Daniel gave, she only accepted one – not because she wouldn’t have liked to join them more, but because since her divorce she had no desire to take advantage of their kindness.

  Although she enjoyed her work, it had been a bloody week. Two contracts had fallen through, her son James had been dropped from the school football team, and Caroline had never stopped telling her that her father didn’t mind her watching television when she ought to be doing her homework.

  Another traffic light changed to red.

  It took Diana nearly an hour to travel the seven miles out of the city, and when she reached the first dual carriageway, she glanced up at the A1 sign. It was more out of habit than to seek guidance, because she knew every yard of the road from her office to the farm. She tried to increase her speed, but it was quite impossible, as both lanes stayed stubbornly crowded.

  ‘Damn.’ She had forgotten to get them a present, even a decent bottle of claret. ‘Damn,’ she said again. Daniel and Rachael always did the giving. She began to wonder if she could pick something up on the way, then remembered there was nothing but service stations between here and the farm. She couldn’t turn up with yet another box of chocolates they’d never eat. When she reached the roundabout that led onto the A1, she managed to push the car over fifty for the first time. She began to relax, letting her m