Betrayal Read Free Page B

what on earth was happening to me and whether this was just frayed nerves or a form of delayed shock. Whatever, the loss of control frightened me, and I was unnerved by the thought that it might happen again.
    By the time George returned with a roll of kitchen paper, I was staring bleakly at the pool of coffee, trying to suppress visions of dark water and Sylvie’s flesh, mutilated and cold.
    ‘Do you want something to eat?’ George asked when he had finished clearing up. ‘A sandwich? Biscuits?’
    ‘Thanks, no.’
    He peered at me. ‘You look as though you need something. If you don’t mind my saying so.’
    I shook my head and jumped to my feet. ‘We’d better go.’
    As we made our way towards the factory floor George’s secretary hailed me from her office. ‘Mr Hugh, a message from Dr Wellesley. He’ll be free from twelve-thirty.’
    ‘Hugh or Mr Wellesley,’ I corrected her halfheartedly, having largely abandoned the hope that the long-serving staff would drop their archaic terms of address. ‘My brother will be at home, will he?’
    ‘Yes. And there was an enquiry from a Detective Inspector Henderson. No details. Just could you call him?’
    She gave me a slip of paper with a number. The area code was Exeter. ‘Thank you.’
    I glanced at the number again, then, stuffing it into my pocket, walked quickly away. George caught up and started singing the praises of some training scheme, but I was hardly listening. I was wondering what questions the police would ask me. I had no doubt it was Sylvie they wanted to talk to me about, it could hardly be anything else. We must have been seen together, on the pontoon perhaps, or the boat. Such things did not go unnoticed in a small community like Dittisham. Ever since Sylvie’s death I had been telling myself that this summons would come, yet now it had materialised I felt oddly shaken.
    We reached the batching plant and I managed to ask the warehousemen some sensible questions about the new forklift and the revised storage bay layout. The route George and I took through the factory had been laid down since the beginning of time. After a circuit of the storage bay which took us past pallets of silica, lead oxide, litharge and potassium, we inspected the computerised batch mixer, then, after a few minutes with the batch quality control staff, we went through to the heat of the blowing room.
    The dull roar of the furnaces still stirred me in some atavistic way. The transmutation of the dry amalgam into clear lava still seemed like some mysterious alchemy. The groups of schoolchildren and visitors who toured the factory on the overhead walkways lingered longest over the blowers as they ballooned and moulded the cooling lava into shape, or beside the cutters as they chased the designs into the glass, waiting in nervous delight for them to make an error and abandon the goblet, tumbler or bowl to the reprocessing bin with a crash of splintering glass. But for me the fascination had always lain here, in the unimaginable heat, in the impenetrable trembling magma that seemed incapable of any transformation, let alone the miraculous metamorphosis into a material both dense and transparent, both complex and flawless.
    Bill, our senior master blower, raised his eyebrows in greeting. Many years ago when I had worked here in my university vacations, sweeping floors and wheeling bins, Bill had tried to teach me to blow the simplest shape. My best effort sat at home somewhere, a far-from-round object of uneven thickness with a trail of bubbles up one side.
    The factory buzzer cut our tour short at the grinding and polishing area. Following George towards the canteen, the ideas for my speech, such as they were, seemed to scatter, and I wished I’d made more time to prepare.
    As the staff gathered I greeted as many as I could by name. A few had been at Hartford for thirty years or more; some twenty; a good number for more than ten. There were two entire families – father, sons,