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unconventionally dressed: that there was more to Graham Marshall than met the eye.
    Except, of course, he couldn’t really tell his colleagues about the murder. It had to be his secret.
    But it was a secret from which he drew strength. When Robert Benham was at his most patronising, when Merrily at her most precious, or Lilian at her most demanding, Graham Marshall would say to himself: ‘What you don’t realise is that I am a murderer, that I have taken human life.’
    And the thought gave him a sense of power.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    â€˜And I bought the paddock too, because you could easily land a helicopter there.’
    Graham laughed indulgently at the fancy, then realised from his host’s face that Robert Benham wasn’t joking. He didn’t joke. When he said he’d bought the paddock adjacent to his cottage as a helipad, that was exactly why he had bought it. And for someone who had become Head of Personnel at Crasoco by the age of thirty-four, the idea of owning a helicopter was not fanciful.
    With sudden clarity Graham realised the truth that had only been hinted at hitherto – that Robert Benham’s ambition and potential did not stop at Crasoco, that Head of Personnel there was only another step on a staircase that would lead through many companies, ever onward and upward. Robert Benham was destined to lead the sort of life in which helicopters were necessary, the life of a real ‘success’. Even in ambition his new boss outstripped him. Graham felt diminished and parochial.
    He searched for some comfort, as he always did when threatened, in his opponent’s failings. Everyone has an Achilles’ heel – a flaw of character, an awkward mannerism, a past failure, an ill-chosen mate, an unsuitable home – that can alleviate the pang of envy.
    But in the case of Robert Benham, Graham could not find it. Certainly, judged on an absolute scale, the young man had moral shortcomings, but these were not of a kind to solace his rival. Rather the reverse, for Graham recognised his own qualities of efficiency and ruthlessness reflected with more intense concentration. Robert Benham shared his approach to life, but was better at it.
    Benham’s mannerisms, too, were hard to fault. The inadequacies which Graham had immediately identified on their first encounter had been proved by success to be more than adequate to the challenges they faced. What Eric Marshall would have described as ‘a common accent’ and ‘lack of social graces’ had proved positive advantages. Benham had been preferred over Graham for being, amongst other things, ‘more in touch with the work force’. And Robert’s strong regional identity only increased the sense of rootlessness Graham had felt since his parents’ deaths.
    As to past failures, there seemed unfortunately to be no blots on the Benham curriculum vitae.
    Nor did his choice of accommodation let him down. Graham was prepared to take the Dolphin Square flat on trust; though he had not seen it, the address was sufficient to make him bitterly nostalgic for his own lost life in Kensington and Chelsea.
    And what he was seeing at Stoughton denied him the opportunity of superiority. As the weekend approached, he had prepared a small armoury of pejoratives to describe the cottage. ‘Pokey’, ‘run-down’, ‘draughty’, ‘primitive’ and ‘damp’ vied with ‘tarted-up’, ‘precious’, ‘chocolate-box’ and ‘poncy’ as his imagination shifted.
    But the reality of the place blunted his weapons. The thatched roof, neat white paint and Tudor beams seen as Robert’s Scirocco drew up outside on the Friday evening had given hope for ‘chocolate-box’, but this had been denied by the building’s imposing proportions. ‘Primitive’ was rendered inapplicable by the neat Calor gas tank and the bright blue burglar alarm affixed under the