As the Crow Flies Read online

  Daniel began to relax for the first time once he could no longer see the Statue of Liberty from the stern of the ocean liner. Mrs. Trentham, however, remained constantly in his thoughts during the five-day journey. He couldn’t think of her as his grandmother and when the time came to disembark at Southampton he felt he needed several more questions answered by his mother before he would be ready to carry out his plan.

  As he walked down the gangplank and back onto English soil he noticed that the leaves on the trees had turned from green to gold in his absence. He intended to have solved the problem of Mrs. Trentham before they had fallen.

  His mother was there on the dockside waiting to greet him. Daniel had never been more happy to see her, giving her such a warm hug that she was unable to hide her surprise. On the drive back to London he learned the sad news that his other grandmother had died while he had been in America and although his mother had received several postcards she couldn’t remember the name of either of the professors he had said he was visiting so she had been unable to contact him to pass on the news. However, she had enjoyed receiving so many postcards.

  “There are some more still on their way, I suspect,” said Daniel, feeling guilty for the first time.

  “Will you have time to spend a few days with us before you return to Cambridge?”

  “Yes. I’m back a little earlier than I expected, so you could be stuck with me for a few weeks.”

  “Oh, your father will be pleased to hear that.”

  Daniel wondered how long it would be before he could hear anyone say “your father” without a vision of Guy Trentham forming in his mind.

  “What decision did you come to about raising the money for the new building?”

  “We’ve decided to go public,” said his mother. “In the end it was a case of simple arithmetic. The architect has completed the outline plan, and of course your father wants the best of everything, so I’m afraid the final cost is likely to be nearer a half a million pounds.”

  “And are you still able to keep fifty-one percent of the new company?”

  “Only just, because based on those figures it’s going to be tight. We could even end up having to pawn your great grandfather’s barrow.”

  “And the flats—any news of them?” Daniel was gazing out of the car window for his mother’s reaction in the reflection of the glass. She seemed to hesitate for a moment.

  “The owners are carrying out the council’s instructions and have already begun knocking down what remains of them.”

  “Does that mean Dad is going to be granted his planning permission?”

  “I hope so, but it now looks as if it might take a little longer than we’d originally thought as a local resident—a Mr. Simpson on behalf of the Save the Small Shops Federation—has lodged an objection to our scheme with the council. So please don’t ask about it when you see your father. The very mention of the flats brings him close to apoplexy.”

  “And I presume it’s Mrs. Trentham who is behind this Mr. Simpson?” was all Daniel wanted to say but simply asked, “And how’s the wicked Daphne?”

  “Still trying to get Clarissa married off to the right man, and Clarence into the right regiment.”

  “Nothing less than a royal duke for one and a commission in the Scots Guards for the other would be my guess.”

  “That’s about right,” agreed his mother. “She also expects Clarissa to produce a girl fairly quickly so she can marry her off to the future Prince of Wales.”

  “But Princess Elizabeth has only just announced her engagement.”

  “I am aware of that, but we all know how Daphne does like to plan ahead.”

  Daniel adhered to his mother’s wishes and made no mention of the flats when he discussed with Charlie the launching of the new company over dinner that night. He also noticed that a picture entitled Apples and Pears by an artist called Courbet had replaced the van Gogh that had hung in the hall. Something else he didn’t comment on.

  Daniel spent the following day at the planning department of the LCC (Inquiries) at County Hall. Although a clerk supplied him with all the relevant papers he was quick to point out, to Daniel’s frustration, that he could not remove any original documents from the building.

  In consequence he spent the morning repeatedly going over the papers, making verbatim notes of the relevant clauses and then committing them to memory so it wouldn’t prove necessary to carry anything around on paper. The last thing he wanted was for his parents to stumble by accident across any notes he had made. By five o’clock, when they locked the front door behind him, Daniel felt confident he could recall every relevant detail.

  He left County Hall, sat on a low parapet overlooking the Thames and repeated the salient facts to himself.

  Trumper’s, he had discovered, had applied to build a major department store that would encompass the entire block known as Chelsea Terrace. There would be two towers of twelve stories in height. Each tower would consist of eight hundred thousand square feet of floor space. On top of that would be a further five floors of offices and walkways that would span the two towers and join the twin structures together. Outline planning permission for the entire scheme had been granted by the LCC. However, an appeal had been lodged by a Mr. Martin Simpson of the Save the Small Shops Federation against the five floors that would bring together the two main structures over an empty site in the center of the Terrace. It didn’t take a great deal of hypothesizing to decide who was making sure Mr. Simpson was getting the necessary financial backing.

  At the same time Mrs. Trentham herself had been given outline planning permission to build a block of flats to be used specifically for low-rent accommodation. Daniel went over in his mind her detailed planning application which had showed that the flats would be built of rough-hewn concrete, with the minimum of internal or external facilities—the expression “jerry-built” immediately sprang to mind. It wasn’t hard for Daniel to work out that Mrs. Trentham’s purpose was to build the ugliest edifice the council would allow her to get away with, right in the middle of Charlie’s proposed palace.

  Daniel looked down to check his memory against the notes. He hadn’t forgotten anything, so he tore the crib sheet into tiny pieces and dropped them into a litter bin on the corner of Westminster Bridge, then returned home to the Little Boltons.

  Daniel’s next move was to telephone David Oldcrest, the resident law tutor at Trinity who specialized in town and country planning. His colleague spent over an hour explaining to Daniel that, what with appeals and counter-appeals that could go all the way up to the House of Lords, permission for such a building as Trumper Towers might not be granted for several years. By the time a decision had been made, Dr. Oldcrest reckoned that only the lawyers would have ended up making any money.

  Daniel thanked his friend, and having considered the problem he now faced came to the conclusion that the success or failure of Charlie’s ambitions rested entirely in the hands of Mrs. Trentham. That was unless he could…

  For the next couple of weeks he spent a considerable amount of his time in a telephone box on the corner of Chester Square, without ever once making a call. For the remainder of each day, he followed an immaculately dressed lady of obvious self-confidence and presence around the capital, trying not to be seen but often attempting to steal a glimpse of what she looked like, how she behaved and the kind of world she lived in.

  He quickly discovered that only three things appeared to be sacrosanct to the occupant of Number 19 Chester Square. First, there were the meetings with her lawyers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—which seemed to take place every two or three days, though not on a regular basis. Second came her bridge gatherings, which were always at two o’clock, three days a week: on Monday at 9 Cadogan Place, on Wednesday at 117 Sloane Avenue and on Friday at her own home in Chester Square. The same group of elderly women appeared to arrive at all three establishments. Third was the occasional visit to a seedy hotel in South Kensington where she sat in the darkest corne