Czytaj książkę: «Lingering Shadows»

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘SO, MY clever little brother has succeeded where our late father could not and has persuaded the Americans to cede manufacturing control of our medicines to us. And how did you manage that? By employing the same means you used to persuade our father to change his will in your favour?’

Beneath Wilhelm’s sneering contempt, Leo could hear the bitterness in his elder brother’s voice.

There was no point in reminding Wilhelm that he himself had been just as stunned, if not more so, to learn that their father had left outright control of the Hessler pharmaceutical corporation to him and not, as everyone had expected, to Wilhelm.

Leo relaxed his grip on the telephone receiver. He had flown in to Hamburg from New York earlier this morning and had gone straight to the Hessler Chemie offices from the airport, to report briefly to the board meeting he had had his assistant convene.

Wilhelm had not attended that meeting, but he had obviously heard what had happened.

Leo knew he had every right to be pleased with what he had achieved in New York, and every right to be annoyed with Wilhelm. Before he left his office to come home he had informed his assistant that he was not to be disturbed—by anyone.

So Wilhelm’s call was not welcome.

‘Father must have been out of his mind when he made that will,’ he heard Wilhelm claiming furiously now. ‘I was the one he wanted to take over from him. He always said so … I was always his favourite.’

Leo gritted his teeth, letting his brother’s vitriol pour viciously out of him.

His favourite. How many times when he was growing up had he heard those words from his brother? Leo wondered, when Wilhelm had finally hung up. How many times had he suffered the pain of paternal criticism and rejection, until he had finally realised that he had a right to define his own view of life; that there were other worlds, other values than those to which his father had laid claim?

He glanced tiredly at the telephone. He and Wilhelm had never really got on. There had always been rivalry and resentment between them; divisions which it had sometimes seemed to Leo their father had deliberately fostered. Wilhelm was obsessively, compulsively possessive. Perhaps it came from being the eldest child and from believing that he would always be an only child.

After all, with fourteen years between them, he had for the majority of his formative years been an only child. And certainly while he was growing up Leo had never been in any doubt as to who was their father’s favourite.

A weakling, his father had once called him as a child, although now, with his six-foot frame, Leo could hardly be regarded as weak. With his amber-gold eyes that matched the thick texture of his gold-brown hair, one of his lovers had once likened him to a lion. He possessed the same powerful fluidity of muscle and tone, she had said, the same sleek goldness, but, as she had also laughingly noted, without the lion’s desire to hunt and maim.

Certainly physically he took after his mother’s family, Leo acknowledged. Physically and, he sincerely hoped, mentally and emotionally as well. He wanted no part of any genetic heritage from his father. And no part of any material inheritance either?

He moved uncomfortably to the window, staring out towards the river. This was a quiet, affluent part of Hamburg, his tall, narrow and relatively small house squashed in between its much grander neighbours. It was an old house with creaking timbers and awkwardly shaped rooms.

Wilhelm had tried to get their father’s will overset on the grounds that he could only have made it if he had either gone insane or somehow Leo had blackmailed him into doing so.

The corporation’s lawyers had warned Wilhelm that it was a court case he could only lose, reminding him that right up until he had had his fatal heart attack their father had remained omnipotently in control of Hessler’s and his sanity.

Of course, it hadn’t helped that Leo had been the one to find him, collapsed on the floor of his study, but still alive … just. None of them had known he had a heart condition. He had kept it a secret. Leo had rung for an ambulance immediately, but seconds after he had replaced the receiver his father had suffered a second and fatal attack.

In those few seconds his father had spoken to him.

‘My son …’ he had said thickly. ‘My son.’

But there had been no love in the words. No love, only the same furious, bitter rejection Leo remembered so well from his childhood.

On the floor beside his father had been a small, battered locked deed box. The safe in the wall was unlocked, and the doctor had suggested that maybe the effort of removing the box from the safe had been what had triggered the first attack.

Leo wasn’t so sure. The box wasn’t heavy.

He turned round abruptly now. The box was still on his desk, where he had deposited it six weeks ago, intending to open it but somehow never being able to find the time.

Well, he had that time now, he reminded himself.

He looked at the box. This should have been Wilhelm’s task and not his.

Just as Hessler’s should have been Wilhelm’s … Just as their father’s love had always been Wilhelm’s. Or, rather, their father’s approval. He doubted if his father had ever loved anyone. He was simply not that kind of man. Why had he left control of Hessler Chemie to him, when for years he had been grooming Wilhelm to take his place? His new will had been dated shortly after their mother’s death.

Tiredly Leo reminded himself that there was no point in constantly asking himself questions he knew he could not answer.

He glanced at the deed box and frowned, his brain, freed briefly from the inevitable strain imposed upon it by his responsibility for Hessler’s, suddenly prodding him into a sharp awareness of the incongruity of the box’s shabbiness, of the fact that it had been on the floor alongside his father at the moment of his death.

Curiosity stirred inside him, curiosity and something else.

He walked over to his desk and touched the box reluctantly.

He had the keys. They had been in his father’s hand. He opened his desk drawer and removed them, looking at them with a frown. Like the box itself, they were worn and shabby and of poor workmanship, and hard to equate with the kind of man his father had been.

Still frowning, he reached for the box, and then hesitated, unwilling to touch it, to unlock it.

Grimly he reminded himself that he was exhibiting the very qualities his father had most detested in him: emotion, imagination, fear. Fear of what? Not of his father. He had lost that fear at the same time as he had forced himself to accept that, no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, nothing he did would ever earn his father’s love and praise.

There was nothing to be gained by going over the past, he reminded himself firmly. He was thirty-eight years old, an adult now, not a child.

He inserted the key into the box’s lock and turned it firmly, pushing back the lid.

The only thing the box contained was an envelope. Leo picked it up, tensing a little as he felt the old, worn, and somehow unpleasant texture of the paper.

He reached inside the unsealed envelope and removed its contents, placing them on the desk in front of him.

There was a notebook, and several newspaper cuttings printed in English. As he picked up the notebook he glanced at the headline of the top one. It was an article describing the work of some British servicemen in a German hospital. Glancing at the date, Leo saw that it had been written shortly after the Allies had entered Germany.

There was a photograph: a gaunt, emaciated man lying in bed, arms outstretched in supplication to the man leaning over him.

Leo felt his stomach muscles contract at the sight of the gaunt figure. A victim of one of the death camps, quite obviously; beside him in the next bed lay another man, who, according to the writer, had not been so fortunate. He was dead.

The dead man, the article continued, had confided to Private Carey before he died the names of certain German SS officers and undercover agents who had sanctioned the use of prisoners as guinea-pigs for medical experiments. Acting on this information, the Allies had then rounded up a number of these men and arrested them.

Grimly Leo looked away and then forced himself to look back again. When he picked up the small bundle of clippings his hand was trembling. He flicked back the first one and read through the others quickly.

They were all in English and they all related to a small British pharmaceutical company—Carey Chemicals. The name of the private in the first yellowing article, Leo noted absently.

They charted Carey Chemicals’ meteoric rise just after the war when it had patented the formula of a heart drug which had revolutionised the treatment available for people with heart problems, and they also charted the company’s decline.

Carey Chemicals … These clippings. What did they have to do with his father? Why had he collected them … kept them?

Leo frowned and picked up the notebook. His father had started Hessler Chemie after the war. The Allies had been keen to re-establish order in the chaos of post-war Germany, and because his father had had no part in the war or its atrocities—he had left Germany shortly after war had originally broken out, to live in neutral Switzerland—he had been allowed to return and establish his company. That company had produced a new drug, a tranquilliser which had helped to ease the suffering of many victims in the aftermath of the horrors of war.

Leo picked up the notebook and opened it. He had studied chemistry at university—his father’s choice and not his. He was, after all, a von Hessler, even if he did not look or behave like one, his father had told him sneeringly, and as such he must play his part in the corporation’s continued success.

Now, as he stared at the faded handwritten chemical equations and notes, Leo recognised immediately what they were.

What he was reading were the original notes for the tranquillising drug on which Hessler’s had been founded.

Leo looked closely at them. There were a variety of stories about how the notes had come into his father’s possession. The official version was that his father had been given them by a dying man whom he had visited at the request of the allied soldiers to whom he had been attached as a translator.

From time to time, far less flattering stories had surfaced, but by then Hessler’s had been too powerful for anyone really to challenge them or their founder.

As a teenager Leo had heard rumours that his father had secretly been employed as a spy for the SS, based in Switzerland but travelling throughout Germany and the Continent, and that because of this he had had access to the information produced by the laboratories of the notorious death camps.

Foolishly he had dared to challenge his father with what he had heard. His father had said nothing to him, neither denying nor verifying his challenge, but the next day Leo had discovered his mother in bed, her body so badly beaten that Leo had insisted, against her frantic pleas not to do so, on sending for their doctor.

He had never raised the subject of the rumours with his father again.

He turned the pages of the notebook and then tensed.

There was a second set of equations here, together with notes in the margins and a doctor’s signature—a doctor who, Leo was sure, had been tried for his part in a certain camp’s medical atrocities.

He read through them once quickly, and then a second time slowly and carefully while his heart turned over inside his chest and his body became heavy and cold with the weight of the knowledge descending on him.

These further pages showed detailed study and a formula proposed for a heart drug—a heart drug like the one that the British company Carey Chemicals had produced.

Like a dealer with a pack of cards, Leo slowly and carefully fanned out in front of him the separate newspaper clippings, and then above them he placed the notebook, his eyes bleak.

Had his father died trying to carry the deed box, or had he tried to reach it only after he had had his first attack, knowing what it contained and what it betrayed, knowing that it must be destroyed? Leo looked at the newspaper cuttings and the references to Private Carey. Was the young man’s rise in the field of pharmacy after the war linked at all to his father’s notes? Why had his father kept them in the first place? Were they a form of insurance against Carey, the medical-orderly-turned-blackmailer who knew the truth about the German’s secret SS dealings and had been paid off with that second formula?

But the man Carey had died several years before his father. The relevant newspaper notice was here. Why had his father not destroyed the contents of the box then, if they were as incriminating as Leo suspected?

Had Carey confided what he knew to someone else before he died: passed on the secret? It stated that the business was now being run by his son-in-law. Had he handed on to him more than just control of the business?

Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it was all merely coincidence. Every instinct he possessed howled in derision at the thought.

He knew, he thought, knew in his bones, in his soul that what he had in front of him was evidence of the man his father had actually been; that he was now closer to the essence of him, the true nature of him, than he had ever been during his lifetime.

No need now to question the animosity that had always existed between them, nor his own awareness of and aversion to that darkness he had always sensed within his father.

As a child he had feared that darkness; as an adult he had been shudderingly grateful that it was a genetic inheritance which had passed him by, just as his father had always despised him for his lack of it.

And yet his father had left him control of the corporation.

‘My son … My son …’

Those had been his last words to him and they had been full of bitterness and hatred.

Surely he could not deliberately have left this grim evidence for him to find; a final act of cruelty, a final reminder of the blood he carried in his veins?

No … Because how could he have known that Leo would be the one to find him? No, he had been trying to destroy the evidence, Leo was sure of it.

The evidence …

He looked down at the papers on the desk. Odd to think that they had the power, the potential to damage the mightiness of Hessler Chemie; that they could potentially be more powerful than ever his father had been.

Was he right? Were his father, working as a translator, and Carey, the medical orderly, linked by mutual greed in a tangled skein of murder, theft and blackmail—and worse?

The man who had died, the man who had confided to Carey the names of those men secretly working for the SS … had one of those names been his father’s? Had Carey recognised it … approached his father, threatening to expose him? Had his father bought him off with that second formula?

The links were tenuous; frail and perhaps unprovable, but they were still strong enough to rock Hessler’s, and still strong enough to fill Leo with such revulsion, such anguished pain and reflected guilt that he knew somehow he had to at least try to discover the truth.

Had things been different … had Wilhelm been different, this was a burden he could have shared with him.

Another thought struck him. Had his mother known the truth? Was that why she had stayed with his father, despite his physical and emotional abuse of her—because she had been too afraid to leave? Because she knew she could never reveal the truth knowing what it would do to her sons … to him?

Wilhelm had never been as close to her as he had. Like their father, Wilhelm had treated her with contempt and cruelty.

Slowly Leo picked up the newspaper cuttings. He glanced towards the fire and then looked at the papers in his hand.

His mouth grim, he replaced them in the envelope along with the notebook. Perhaps he should destroy them, but he knew that he would not do so, could not do so until he had discovered the truth. Or as much of it as there was left to discover. And somehow he must find a way of discovering it without implicating Hessler’s, not for his own sake and certainly not for his father’s, but for the sake of all those who worked for the corporation, all those who depended on it for their livelihood.

No, this was a problem he must deal with himself. Quietly … discreetly … secretly. He grimaced over that last word. It reminded him too much of his father.

Secretly.

It left an acrid, sour taste in his mouth and shadowed his soul with bleakness.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I MUST say I’m a little surprised by your attitude, Saul.’

The voice, the smile were benign, almost avuncular. They were also, as Saul knew quite well, a complete deceit.

He said nothing, simply waiting.

‘Of course I realise that Dan Harper is a friend of yours,’ Sir Alex Davidson commented kindly, and then when Saul remained silent he added less kindly and very smoothly, ‘After all, weren’t you sleeping with his wife at one time?’

Saul hadn’t been, but he let the comment pass. He knew enough of his boss’s tactics by now to know how much Sir Alex enjoyed the feeling that he had touched a raw nerve; that he had succeeded in slipping his knife into an unprotected and vulnerable organ.

‘However, business is business, and it was your responsibility to me to see that the take-over of Harper and Sons went through smoothly and discreetly, and not instead to warn Harper that we intended to buy him out and then to strip his company of its assets, and to close it down after dismissing its entire staff. Which, unless I am mistaken, is exactly what you did do.’

Now Saul did speak, simply saying calmly, ‘A rather dramatic interpretation of events.’

His eyes were cold. He was a very formidable-looking man despite the fact that he was twenty-five years his boss’s junior, despite the fact that he was merely an employee in the company Sir Alex headed and owned. An employee whom Sir Alex had been grooming to take his place.

‘But you did warn Harper what was in the wind.’

‘I didn’t warn him about anything,’ Saul responded in a clipped voice. ‘I simply pointed out to him what might possibly happen if he sold out.’

‘Semantics,’ Sir Alex accused. He wasn’t smiling now and his voice most certainly wasn’t kind. ‘Absolute loyalty, that’s what I demand from my employees, Saul, and most especially from you. You are my most trusted employee … I pay you extremely well.’

Under his breath Saul murmured cynically to himself, ‘Caveat emptor,’ but there was self-contempt in the words as well as cynicism.

Sir Alex was still talking and hadn’t heard him.

‘As I said, I was very disappointed. However, something more important has cropped up now. I want you to go to Cheshire. There’s a company there called Carey Chemicals. I want it.’

‘Carey Chemicals?’

‘Mm.’ Sir Alex picked some papers off his desk. ‘A small one-man-band company … or at least it was. The man in charge died fairly recently. The company is in trouble, sinking fast, and all too likely to go under. We are going to perform a rescue operation.’

‘Really? Why?’ Saul asked him sardonically.

Sir Alex looked at him and then asked acidly, ‘Before I tell you, can I take it that you don’t have a close friend or a mistress working for them?’

Saul gave him a cold close-mouthed stare, which for some reason made Sir Alex’s own gaze waver slightly.

‘All right,’ he said testily, even though Saul hadn’t said anything. ‘Carey’s is a drug-producing company; not that they have produced anything remotely profitable for the last few decades. The widow who has inherited the business is bound to want to sell out.’

‘And you want to buy.’

‘At the right price.’

‘Why?’ Saul asked him.

‘Because a little bird has told me that the government is making plans to offer very generous, and I mean very generous incentives to British-owned drug companies that are prepared to invest in drug research. In turn, if those companies succeed in producing a marketable drug they will repay the government’s generosity by providing the National Health Service with their drugs at a lower than market price.’

‘Thus wiping out the benefit to the company of the government’s financial incentives,’ Saul said drily.

‘Well, there would always be the profit from overseas sales,’ Sir Alex pointed out, ‘but, in essence, yes.’

‘So why are you interested?’ Saul asked him.

‘Because if the research does not produce a marketable drug, the government cannot claw back any of its investment.’

‘Ah, yes, I think I begin to understand,’ Saul said. ‘You buy the company, fund what on the surface looks like a genuine research department, with very generous assistance from the government, of course, but, as we know, with the complexities of modern company finance, a good accountant can quite easily lose large, if not vast sums of money by moving it from one company to the other, and, if ultimately the research fails to produce any marketable results, well …’

Sir Alex smiled at him.

‘I’m relieved to see that your recent attack of conscience and friendship hasn’t totally atrophied your brain, Saul. There are several other companies worth investigating, but none quite as perfect as Carey’s. It is a very shorn little lamb, so to speak, and I’m very much afraid that without our protection it could all too easily fall prey to the ravages of some hungry wolf.’

‘And you want me to find out as much as I can about how vulnerable this lamb is and how cheaply we can acquire it.’

‘Yes. You can be our wolf in sheep’s clothing. A role for which you’re admirably equipped.’

A wolf; was that how the other man saw him, a predator who enjoyed the terror, the mindless blind panic his appearance created in others? Saul wondered acidly.

As he took the executive lift down to the ground floor, a line from one of Byron’s poems came into his mind.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.

The words, like the visual images it conjured up, disturbed him. He had been suffering far too many of these disturbances recently, of these unfamiliar attacks of conscience.

Of conscience or of rebellion—which? The thought flitted across his mind and was quickly dismissed. He had work to do.

The receptionist watched him as he walked past her desk. She sighed faintly to herself. He was one of the sexiest men she had ever seen. All the girls who worked for the Davidson Corporation thought so, and yet he never exhibited any interest in any of them. There was an austerity about him, a remoteness, that challenged her.

He would be a good lover, too, you could see that from the way he moved. She wondered if his body hair was as thick and black as that on his head.

His eyes were the most extraordinary shade of pale blue, his face hard-boned, like his body. There was a hunger about him, an energy, an anger almost, that stirred a frisson of sexual anticipation in her body.

Saul walked out of the building into the early summer sunshine. Cheshire. His sister, Christie, lived there.

Perhaps it was time that he visited her.

He would ring her this evening. He would have to ring Karen as well. It was over five weeks since he had last seen his children. He had had to cancel his last access visit. He frowned, his body tensing. He doubted that either his daughter or his son minded not seeing him. But he minded like hell. They were his children, for God’s sake. He remembered his own father, how close they had been.

Too close, Christie had once told him. He had accused her of being jealous and she had laughed at him. Theirs had been a turbulent relationship. They were alike in so many ways and yet so very different in their outlooks on life, so very, very different.

Again he felt the shadow of the malaise which seemed to be clouding his life, confusing and disturbing him. He, who had always seen his life’s objectives so clearly. And he had achieved them, hadn’t he? He had succeeded, fulfilled his promises to his father. So why did he feel this emptiness, this fear that somehow he had omitted something, neglected something, this hesitancy about reaching out for the trophy that was now so nearly within his grasp?

In another few years Sir Alex would retire and Saul would take his place. It was what he had worked for … what he had planned for … what he had promised his father.

But was it what he wanted? He cursed under his breath. Why the hell did he have to have this attack of mid-life crisis now?

Saul strode out into the street, joining the crowds, joining them but not becoming a part of them, nor being absorbed by them. He wasn’t that kind of man. His contemporaries, his peers, envied him, he knew that, and why shouldn’t they? The financial Press praised him, acclaiming his astuteness, his shrewdness. In the years he had been with it he had taken the company Sir Alex had founded to the very top of its league.

If Sir Alex was the old-fashioned type of entrepreneur, a buccaneer almost, then Saul was the financial diplomat, the man who had turned the raw materials of Sir Alex’s company into the sleekly powerful thing it was today.

Through Saul its growth had been planned, controlled. When the recession came, Saul had been prepared, Saul had looked ahead, and where Saul went, others followed.

He was a pioneer, admired and envied, and now he was virtually throwing it all away, breaking his own rules, the rules laid down for him by his father.

Even he wasn’t sure why he had warned Dan Harper that Sir Alex wanted to take over his company. They were friends, it was true, but not close friends. Saul did not allow anyone to get close to him. Not any more.

Not men, nor women. Since the break-up of his marriage there had been women, relationships. Discreet, orderly, controlled relationships that threatened no one, and he had certainly not had an affair with Dan’s wife, despite Sir Alex’s comment.

There was no one at the moment, but he had a single-minded ability to dismiss sex from his life when he felt it necessary. He had never been driven by his appetites, nor controlled by them.

Sometimes, when watching a competitor greedily consuming the meal he was paying for, greedily consuming the bait he was putting down … greedily anticipating what advantages might accrue to him through his involvement with him, Saul was filled with a sharp sense of disgust for that greed, for that wanton waste when so many were without.

It was his Scots blood, he told himself sardonically. All those generations of strict Presbyterians and their moral outlook on life.

Sir Alex was testing him, he knew that. His boss was sometimes laughably easy to see through, even though Sir Alex believed himself to be a master of subtlety.

Normally he would never have given Saul such a routine task. Normally they employed agents, at a distance of course, on this kind of business, keeping their own identity secret until they were ready to move in for the kill.

His stomach twisted. He was forty years old, fitter than many men fifteen years his junior, no grey as yet touched his dark hair, and yet sometimes he felt immeasurably old; divorced, distanced somehow from reality, completely alone and alienated from the rest of the human race.

At other times he felt a deep sense of resentment, of anger, of somehow having been cheated of something, and yet he could not quantify what.

Why had he warned Dan about the take-over? Why had he felt so much distaste about the thought of destroying the small old-fashioned company that had passed from father to son for five generations? After all, he had done it before without any qualms. Why now … now, when Sir Alex had virtually promised him that he would soon be stepping down and that he, Saul, would be taking over the chairmanship?

He could still recoup the ground he had lost. Sir Alex’s speech today had confirmed that.

So why had he experienced that overwhelming impulse simply to walk away, to turn his back on Sir Alex and his own future?

There was a very deep and very intense anger inside him, he recognised, coupled with a fear of its overwhelming his self-control. Saul prized his self-control. It was his strongest weapon and now it seemed to be deserting him.

Cheshire. What the hell kind of game was Sir Alex playing, sending him out there? He loved manipulating people, pulling their strings and making them dance. Well, Saul had never responded to that kind of treatment. He might work for Sir Alex, but he had always made it clear that he would not be subservient to him. Sir Alex was the kind of man who could only respect someone he could not bully.

What exactly was he planning? Was it just because he wanted to buy out this drugs company at the lowest possible price that he was sending Saul to Cheshire, or was there an additional motive?

Saul wondered sardonically if, like one of his predecessors, he would return to London to find someone else sitting at his desk. And if he did, would he really care? Did he really care about anything any more? He cared about his children, he told himself. He cared that they rejected him, that they seemed to be more concerned with material possessions. Had he been like that? Josey was fifteen, Thomas nearly thirteen. They were very different in character, as different as he and Christie had been.

He and Karen had been divorced for nearly ten years and his children were strangers to him. Ten very busy years for him. Too busy for him to make time for his children?

The thought itched and stung like a burr under the skin. Just recently he had been asking himself questions, too many questions he could not answer, and why? Because he had woken up one morning and suddenly been sickened by himself, by his life. Why should he feel like that? He had always made his own decisions, his own choices.

From the past he heard Christie’s voice, harsh with passion, her young face angry with contempt as she slung at him, ‘You don’t do anything for yourself, do you, Saul? You just do things to please Dad. That’s why you’re his favourite.’

He had laughed at her, dismissing her outburst. He was a boy. It was only natural that he should be closer to his father … his favourite … or so he had thought then.

Christie … passionate, turbulent, aching for freedom, for full control over her own life even then.

And she hadn’t really changed.

Not that they saw much of one another these days. He had visited her a couple of times since she had moved to Cheshire … a disastrous pair of visits when he had reluctantly … very reluctantly been accompanied by his children.

Christie, as a busy GP, hadn’t been able to spare much time to spend with them, and Josey had been openly scornful of her aunt’s disorganised home life, of the fact that meals were invariably eaten in the kitchen, of the fact that Christie hardly ever wore make-up and certainly never bought designer clothes, unlike her own mother.

The only thing Josey had approved of about her aunt was the fact that she was a single parent. Women no longer needed men, Josey had told Saul challengingly, and he had wondered if what she meant was that children no longer needed fathers, especially fathers like him.

Of the two of them, Josey had always been the more antagonistic towards him. He was surprised how much that hurt him. He had far more important things to think about than his relationship with his daughter, an inner voice warned him, but another challenged quietly, what … what could be more important than his own children? And he stood still in the street as the impact of his own thoughts hit him, unaware of the curious looks of passers-by.

Perhaps a week or so away from London, from Sir Alex, was what he needed, he reflected as he started walking again. A breathing-space … a time to reflect.

But what was there to reflect on? he wondered impatiently, frowning at the unease he could feel. He didn’t like this dichotomy between what he knew he should feel and what he did actually feel. It was so out of character.

‘You have to be single-minded to succeed, Saul.’ That was what his father had always told him, his face shadowed by the disappointments of his own life, by the effects of his own inability to achieve the goals he had set himself.

Fate had been unkind to his father.

But it had been kind to him, he himself had seen to that, or so he had thought until recently.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DAVINA, I know you’re busy, but I wonder if you could spare me half an hour before you go home.’

Davina forced herself to smile.

‘Of course I can, Giles. Would five o’clock be all right?’

As soon as he had closed the office door behind him her smile disappeared. There had been many challenges for her to face in the three months since the death of her husband Gregory, and now it seemed that she was going to have to face another one.

She suspected that Giles Redwood was going to tell her that he wanted to leave. She couldn’t blame him. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and she knew quite well that the only reason Giles was still here was because he was too gentle, too kind-hearted to leave her completely in the lurch.

And because he loved her?

She winced, her mind shying away from the thought, not wanting to admit its existence.

She had always liked Giles, but it was only since Gregory’s death that she had become aware that he might have much stronger feelings for her. It disturbed her to have to acknowledge that she might have inadvertently played on those feelings in asking him to stay and to support her through the initial crisis of Gregory’s death.

She hadn’t meant to do so. Had, in fact, been motivated purely by panic, the panic of discovering that her father’s company wasn’t the thriving concern she had so foolishly believed, but was actually close to insolvency. That had shocked her more than Gregory’s death in many ways.

It had been Giles who had comforted her, who had told her that she must not blame herself for the lack of awareness of the company’s situation. And it was true that Gregory, and her father before him, had always refused to allow her to have anything to do with the company, to play any part in it.

But now she had no choice. Carey Chemicals was the largest local employer. If Carey’s closed, people would be put out of work; families, whole households would suffer. She could not allow that to happen.

Giles had told her gently that she might have no choice. He had been warning Gregory for some time, he had added uncomfortably, that they must make some kind of provision for the time when their most profitable patent ran out.

Gregory had refused to listen to him. Gregory had had his own obsessions and they had nothing to do with the time and care it took to research and develop new drugs.

Gregory had liked playing the money markets. And, in doing so, Gregory had lost the company many millions of pounds.

Davina felt sick every time she thought about it … every time she remembered her own blind, wilful acceptance of all the lies Gregory had told her. She ought to have questioned him more closely, to have insisted on knowing more about the company.

She ought to have done a great many things, she told herself tiredly, including ending her marriage.

What marriage? There had been no marriage for years. Ever since … Her mind skittered back from a dangerous precipice.

She had married at twenty. Now she was thirty-seven. For seventeen years she had stayed in an empty, sterile marriage, and why?

Out of love? Her mouth twisted. Out of duty, then … out of necessity … out of cowardice. Yes, definitely that, or rather out of fear, fear not so much of being alone—that would almost have been a pleasure—but fear of the unknown, a fear that, once on her own, she would prove her father’s and Gregory’s contempt of her to be a true estimation of her character; and so she had stayed, too afraid to leave the security of a marriage that was a sterile mockery of all a marriage should be, hiding from life within its dead, empty embrace.

But now Gregory was dead. Killed in a road accident, his body twisted in the wreckage of what had once been his expensive saloon car. There had been a woman with him.

A woman who was not known to Davina, but who she suspected was very well known to her husband.

He had been consistently unfaithful to her and she had turned a blind eye to it, as she had to so many other things, telling herself that she was better off than most and that if her marriage had not turned out as she had hoped then she was not alone in her disappointment.

And always at the back of her mind had been the knowledge that her father would never have permitted her to divorce Gregory.

And of course Gregory would never divorce her. How could he, when in effect she owned the company? On paper, that was. Her father had made sure that effective day-to-day control of the company’s affairs lay in Gregory’s hands, but then he had tied those hands by ensuring that the shares were in her name and that Gregory could never sell them.

Carey’s had meant a lot to her father. He had set up the company with his father shortly after the end of the war. Davina had never known her grandfather, he had died before she was born, but she had often wished she had.

It had been her mother who had told her the most about him. How he had had a reputation locally for making his own potions and cures, mainly for cattle ailments originally, but later for human ailments as well.

It had been his lifelong interest in such things that had led him to the discovery of the heart drug which had established the company right at the forefront of its competitors, although he himself had died shortly after the company had been established.

Her own father had been at medical school when war broke out. He had left to join up and had never completed his training.

As a girl, Davina had had dreams of following in her grandfather’s footsteps, but her father had very quickly squashed them. Girls did not become chemists, he had told her contemptuously. They married and produced children … sons. Davina could still remember the look he had given her mother as he spoke. Her parents’ marriage had not produced any sons … only one daughter. Davina.

And as for her own marriage … She frowned quickly. Giles would be coming back soon and she had no idea what she was going to say to him. His wife, Lucy, was one of her closest friends, or at least she had been. Recently Lucy had been behaving rather oddly towards her, and Giles had inadvertently let slip that it was partly because of Lucy that he still intended to leave Carey’s.

Not that she could blame him. After all, if the bank manager was right, Carey’s would not exist for much longer anyway. Unless she could find a buyer prepared to take it over and pump in enough money to save it.

It wasn’t for her own sake that she wanted to keep the company going, and it certainly wasn’t for her father’s.

Carey’s employed almost two hundred people, all of them local, and in a relatively sparsely populated country area that was a very large proportion of the working population.

More than half the workforce were women, and Davina had been dismayed to discover how poorly paid they were.

An economic necessity, Giles had told her. He had been unable to meet her eyes when he had added that Gregory had been able to maintain such a poor wage structure simply because they were the only major local employer.

Davina’s stomach clenched as she remembered the anger, the guilt she had felt on hearing this disclosure. No wonder so many of the women watched her with stony-faced dislike when she drove through the village. She suspected that they would not have believed that Gregory had kept her as short of money as he did them, but it was true.

She had been shocked to learn just how much money Gregory had in his private bank accounts, but, large though that sum was, it was nowhere near enough to save Carey’s.

As she had learned since his death, Gregory had run Carey’s as an autocrat whose word was law. No amount of representations to him from the unions had persuaded him to increase his workers’ wages, nor to provide them with anything other than the most basic of facilities.

Davina had been stunned when she had been shown the lavatories and wash-basins, the crude and unhygienic area that was supposed to be the canteen and rest-room.

Giles, who had escorted her around the company after Gregory’s death, had been sympathetic and understanding, but not even his presence had been able to lessen her shock, her sense of despair and guilt.

And there was nothing she could do to put things right. There was barely enough coming in to pay the wages.

He himself was not a financier, Giles had told her. He was in fact the company’s personnel manager, but even he had been able to see the financial danger the company was courting.

Gregory had refused to listen to him, just as he had refused to listen to anyone else who had tried to advise him, as Davina had learned.

Davina had no idea what on earth she was going to do to prevent the company from having to close down. Find a buyer, the bank had told her, or a backer. But how, and where? Her head ached with the constant tension and worry of suddenly finding herself with this kind of responsibility.

Only last week Giles had told her how much he admired her calm, her strength, but inwardly she felt neither calm nor strong. She was adept at hiding her feelings, though. She had had to be. Very early on in her marriage she had realised how much Gregory enjoyed hurting her. By then she had, of course, known how much of a mistake their marriage was. She had blamed herself, or rather her naïveté, for the failure of her marriage.

She had been a shy teenager, sent to a very small all-girls’ boarding-school when she was eleven years old, and then abruptly removed from it at fourteen when her mother died suddenly from a brain tumour.

At first she had been thrilled because her father had wanted her at home. She had always been much closer to her mother than she had to her father. Theirs had never been a physically close household, but in her grief and shock at her mother’s death she had gone up to him, wanting him to hold her.

Instead he had stepped back from her, rejecting her, his displeasure at her actions written on his face. Confused and hurt, knowing that she had angered him, Davina retreated into herself.

The rough and tumble of the local school confused and alarmed her. The other pupils made fun of her accent, the boys tugged painfully on her long plaits and even the girls ganged up against her, taunting and bullying her. She was an outsider, different, alien, and she was acutely aware of it.

She also soon discovered that her father had brought her home not because he wanted her company or because he loved her, but because he wanted someone to take over her mother’s role as housekeeper. And, while other girls spent their teenage years experimenting with make-up and boys, Davina spent hers anxiously ironing her father’s shirts, cooking his meals, cleaning his house, with what time she did have to spare spent on trying to keep up with her homework.

Of course, her schoolwork suffered. She was too proud, too defensive to try to explain to her teachers why she was always so tired, why she was always being accused of not concentrating on her lessons, and of course when her father read their end-of-term reports on her he was even more angry with her.

The dreams she had once had of emulating her grandfather, of exploring the world of natural medicines and remedies, died, stifled by her father’s contempt and her teachers’ irritation at her lack of progress.

‘Of course we all know, Davina, that you won’t have to work,’ one of her teachers had commented acidly one afternoon in front of the whole class, causing her fellow pupils to shuffle in their seats and turn to look at her, while her face had turned puce with shame and embarrassment. ‘Which is just as well, isn’t it? Because you certainly won’t be employable.’

One of the boys made a coarse comment that caused the others to laugh, and even though the teacher must have heard it she made no attempt to chastise him.

There were girls whom she could have been friends with, girls who, like her, seemed rather shy, but because she had come so late to the school they had already made their friends and formed their small protective groups, and Davina certainly did not have the self-confidence to break into them.

Everyone else at school looked different as well. The girls wore jeans or very short skirts, which were officially banned, but which were worn nevertheless. They had long straight hair and the more daring of them wore dark kohl lines around their eyes and pale pink lipstick.

Davina studied them with awed envy. Her father did not approve of make-up. The one time she had dared to spend her money on a soft pink lipstick he had told her to go upstairs and scrub her face clean.

At fifteen years old she knew that she still looked like a little girl, while her peers were already almost young women.

At sixteen she left school. There was no point in her staying on, her father told her grimly as he viewed her poor exam results.

Instead he paid for her to attend a private secretarial school in Chester so that she could learn to type and so do work for him at home when necessary.

And then just before her seventeenth birthday a small miracle occurred. Out of the blue one morning, while she was engaged on her bimonthly chore of polishing the heavy silver in the dining-room, a visitor arrived.

Davina heard the doorbell ring and went to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron as she did so. She was wearing a pleated skirt, which had originally been her mother’s and which was too wide and too long for her, and her own school jumper, which was too small and too tight.

It would never have occurred to her to ask her father for new clothes. He gave her a weekly housekeeping allowance, but she had to provide him with receipts for the meticulously kept accounts he went through with her every Friday evening.

As she opened the door Davina blinked in surprise at the girl she saw standing there. She was tall, and very slim, and a few years Davina’s senior. She was wearing a very, very short skirt; her long straight hair would have been the envy of the girls in Davina’s class at school and in addition to the kohl liner around her eyes she was wearing false eyelashes.

Her mouth was painted a perfect pale frothy pink, and as Davina stared at her she smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Hi, you must be Davina. Your dad sent me round with some stuff for you to type. I’m working for him while Moaning Martha is recuperating from her op. Honest to God, the instructions she gave me before she left …!’

The thick black eyelashes batted. She was, Davina recognised in awe, chewing gum. The thought of this girl working for her father, replacing Martha Hillary, her father’s fifty-odd-year-old secretary, was almost too much for Davina to take in.

‘I’m dying for a Coke. Not got any, I suppose?’

She was already stepping inside the house, while Davina apologised that all she could offer her was tea or coffee.

The thickly pan-sticked pale face contorted briefly, the long hair barely moving as she tossed her head. ‘OK, go on, then. I’ll make do with the coffee.

‘What on earth do you do all day, cooped up in this place?’ she demanded when Davina led her to the kitchen. ‘It would drive me crazy. That’s why I do temping. Just as soon as I can get a bit of money together, I’m off to London. That’s where it’s all happening.’

It was the start of a brief and wholly unexpected friendship.

Davina never knew why Mandy befriended her. Later on in her life she suspected that Mandy, beneath the outrageous clothes and make-up, had a very strong crusading and protective streak, for she could certainly think of no other logical reason why Mandy should have taken her under her wing.

Under Mandy’s tutelage and because she was equally afraid of disappointing her as she was of angering her father, she forced herself to do as Mandy urged and to ask—Mandy had told her to demand—her father to give her a personal allowance.

When he agreed Davina could only assume that either she had caught him in a moment of unfamiliar weakness or that he had been so shocked by her request that he had acceded to it without thinking.

When Mandy heard how much she was to get she had pulled another face.

‘Peanuts,’ she had said scoffingly. ‘You should have asked for at least twice as much. God, the typing you do alone would cost him hundreds if he sent it out to an agency.’

Several times a week Mandy would sneak out of Carey’s and come racing over in her bright red battered Mini, entertaining and alarming Davina with her tales of her hectic and tangled love-life.

She consistently tried to persuade Davina to go out with her at night, but Davina always refused. Although often she envied Mandy her confidence and her worldliness when Mandy described in graphic detail the more intimate side of her life, Davina found herself recoiling a little. She was an avid reader, a dreamer, a romantic, who cherished ideals of the kind of man she would eventually love and who would love her, and he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the descriptions Mandy gave her of her boyfriends and their sexual demands.

And then, just over six weeks after they had first met, Mandy announced that she was leaving Cheshire and going to London.

Davina mourned her going and missed her. Mandy had brought colour and warmth to her life. She was the first close friend she had ever had, and without her life seemed dull and flat.

Her father, who had never approved of the friendship, made no bones about the fact that he was glad she had gone, even though he complained that she had left before his actual secretary was well enough to return to work.

It was summer. Working in the garden, keeping the flowerbeds and the lawn in the immaculate state her father demanded, had tanned Davina’s body and firmed her muscles. She wasn’t very tall, her body slim and delicate, and she had shoulder-length mousy fair hair. She hated her hair. It was neither one thing nor the other, neither curly nor straight, but possessed of an unwanted wave, so fine and silky that it was constantly falling in her eyes. It was a hot summer and the sun had bleached it a little, giving it blonde highlights, which emphasised the fragility of her small face with its sombre grey eyes.

Davina had never thought of herself as being pretty. Pretty girls looked like Mandy or like the models in magazines, and she did not look like them, but one Saturday morning, as she was weeding the front garden, dressed in her shorts and the cotton top she had made herself on her mother’s sewing-machine, the paperboy abandoned his bike to stare admiringly at her and to tell her with a grin, ‘Great legs, babe.’

He was seventeen years old and modelled himself on his American TV heroes. Davina blushed deep pink and hurriedly tucked her legs out of sight.

But even though his comment had embarrassed her, it had also in some complex way pleased her.

Sometimes now at night she lay awake in bed, confused by what she was feeling, aching for someone she could talk to … for someone to love.

She had started playing tennis with the local vicar’s daughter, who was home from university for the holidays. They played together a couple of times a week.

Vicky Lane had a boyfriend, a fellow student, and the two of them were planning to spend a year backpacking once they finished university. As she listened to Vicky describing their plans, talking about the life they intended to live, Davina envied her. Compared with others, her life seemed so constricted, so dull and boring, but what could she do? She could not leave her father. How would he manage, and besides, how could she support herself? She had no skills. She could type and do some book-keeping; that was all.

She had tried to suggest to her father that maybe she could work at Carey’s, but he had been furious with her. Who was to take care of the house and of him? he had demanded. She was becoming selfish, spoiled, he had added, and guiltily she had abandoned the subject.

The village they lived in was small, with very few other people of her age. Most of them had left to work elsewhere and those who remained worked either for Carey’s or on their parents’ land.

There was a certain pattern to village life, a certain hierarchy into which Davina and her father did not really fit.

There were the farming families, established over many, many generations, whose positions had been created not just by wealth but also by the length of time their family names had been associated with the area.

Davina and her father were outside that hierarchy. There were older people in the village who remembered her grandfather and who still made disparaging remarks about her father, saying that he had got above himself, reminding themselves and others that his father had been nothing but the local apothecary … one of them, in fact.

Now Davina’s father was the wealthiest man in the area, and it was his wealth as well as her own shyness that isolated Davina.

Their house was outside the village, set in its own grounds, a large early Victorian building bought by her father when he married her mother, after the war, when such houses were cheap. When Davina’s father brought senior members of his staff home with him for dinner he expected them to be impressed by the house’s grandeur, and they were.

He had a keen eye for a bargain: the heavy old furniture, the Edwardian silver had all been sale-room bargains, and since it was Davina and not he who had to polish the carved wood and the intricately moulded silver he had no idea of the work entailed in keeping his home and his possessions as immaculate as he demanded.

He didn’t love her, Davina knew that. He had wanted a son, and she always felt somehow to blame for the fact that she was not that son. She also felt guilty in some way because her mother had died, as though in doing so her mother had proved that her father was right to despise her sex as weak and second-class. Somehow Davina felt as though it was up to her to justify her sex’s right to exist, but these were vague unadmitted thoughts and feelings that subconsciously shaped the way she behaved.

Yes, she had been very lonely in those years—and then she had met Gregory. Tall, good-looking, charming Gregory had been the ideal she had dreamed of secretly for so long.

A brief knock on the office door roused her from her thoughts. She wasn’t using Gregory’s office with its ostentation and luxury; somehow she hadn’t felt able to. The contrast between it and the rest of the building had not only shocked her, it had also almost made her feel physically ill.

In her father’s day Carey’s had been austere enough, but it had been kept scrupulously clean and well painted. Gregory had discouraged her from visiting Carey’s. And so the shock of discovering the conditions in which their employees were expected to work was something for which she had been totally unprepared.

And she was just as guilty as Gregory in that regard, guilty of taking the easy way out, of going along with what Gregory wanted because she didn’t want to argue with him.

She felt responsible; she was responsible, even though Giles had tried to comfort her and reassure her that she was not to blame.

Giles! That would be him outside the office now—a small square room at the rear of their premises without a window, just a chair, a desk and a telephone, but it was all she needed. There was no place, in a company on the verge of bankruptcy, for plush, expensive offices, for fax machines and computers that lay idle through lack of orders. She had asked Giles innocently about the fax machine in Gregory’s office the first time she visited it after his death. He had looked away uncomfortably and when she pressed him he had blurted out that he thought Gregory used it for his money-market dealings.

That had been the first she had known of her husband’s disastrous gambling in the world money markets.

She called out to Giles to come in and smiled warmly at him as he did so. Although he was almost six feet tall, Giles always seemed shorter because he had a slight stoop. His thick dark blond hair flopped endearingly over his forehead and he was always pushing it back. He was a quiet, studious-looking man who at forty still had a boyishness about him. There was something gentle and non-threatening about Giles that Davina found very appealing.

She wasn’t sure when she had first realised that Giles was attracted to her. Last Christmas at their annual Christmas party he had danced with her, and then, when she was in the kitchen stacking used glasses in the dishwasher, he had come to help her. He had kissed her before he and Lucy left. A brief enough embrace, but she had sensed the need in it … even though she had firmly denied to herself later that it had existed.

She liked Giles and of course it was flattering that he was attracted to her, but she was married to Gregory, and Giles was married to Lucy.

Only now Gregory was dead.

‘Giles—come and sit down.’ She patted the spare chair and smiled warmly at him.

He looked tired, and she felt guilty. He was their personnel manager and was not really equipped to take over the running of the company, but there was no one else. Gregory had always refused to allow anyone to share control of the company, and now Davina knew why: he hadn’t wanted anyone else to know how much money he was losing.

The sales director, their accountant, their chemist—all of them had reported directly to Gregory and had had no real power at all; the chemist had already left, telling Davina grimly that there was no point in his staying. The company was living on its past, he had told her, and Gregory had kept his department so starved of the money needed for research that their very existence was little more than a bad joke.

The sales director had said much the same thing, and their accountant was in reality treated as little more than an accounts clerk, dealing with the wages and day-to-day expenses.

The only person Davina had been able to turn to had been Giles, who at least knew something of how the company functioned.

She was learning, though, but what she was learning she did not like. The working conditions of her employees shamed her, as did their poor wages.

‘You look tired, Giles,’ she said sympathetically.

‘Davina, I’m sorry … I hate to let you down, but I’m going to have to hand in my notice.’

He had been rehearsing his speech all day, dreading making it, but last night Lucy had given him an ultimatum. ‘Leave Carey’s or I leave you,’ she had told him. She was given to making tempestuous threats, and at one time the volatility of her nature had entranced and amused him. She was so different from him, so alive and vital, but gradually he had begun to find her unpredictability a burden; to find that he was longing to go home to someone who was calm and relaxed, who wanted to listen to his problems rather than to unload upon him the avalanche of her own. Someone, in fact, like Davina.

Davina, who was always so calm and so kind. Davina, who had never once in anyone’s hearing criticised her husband, even though everyone knew that he had been unfaithful to her; Davina, whom, to his increasing despair and guilt, he was beginning to believe he loved.

‘Giles, there’s no need to apologise. I’m more than grateful to you for all that you’ve done. Without your support, your loyalty …’ Davina made a wry gesture. ‘I know what you think … what everyone thinks—that nothing can save Carey’s now, that we’re bound to go bankrupt.’

‘You could trade on for another six months or so, but that’s all,’ Giles told her.

‘I can’t give up yet, Giles,’ Davina told him. ‘And it isn’t for my sake. If Carey’s closes down so many families will suffer.’

Giles remained silent. What she was saying was true. Carey’s was the largest, virtually the only major local employer.

‘If you could just stay for a little while longer,’ Davina pleaded with him. ‘We could still find a backer … a buyer …’

Davina could see the indecision in his eyes. She hated having to do this, but what alternative did she have? Without Giles the company would have to close. She was doing all that she could, but there was so much she had to learn. If Giles left they would lose what little credibility they still had, and it was all too likely that the bank would insist on her closing down the company.

‘I know I shouldn’t ask,’ Davina continued. ‘You’ve got your own future to think of, yours and Lucy’s, but Carey’s needs you so much, Giles …’ She took a deep breath, and then looked directly at him and said quietly, ‘I need you so much.’

She saw the colour recede from his face and then flood painfully back into it. He moved as though he was about to get up and then settled back in his chair.

‘Davina …’

‘No, please don’t say anything now. Think about it. Talk it over with Lucy,’ Davina begged him. ‘Philip Taylor at the bank has promised to do what he can to help us find a buyer.’

The overhead light highlighted the delicacy of her face. She had lost weight since Gregory’s death, Giles thought and then wondered bitterly what it was about that kind of man that gave him a wife who was so devoted and loyal, so gracious and loving, while he …

He swallowed quickly. He must not think like that about Lucy. He loved her. He had been desperately in love with her when they married, and she had loved him … had wanted him. He flinched a little as he recognised the direction his thoughts were taking, shifting his weight slightly as his body was jolted into a sudden sharp and dangerous awareness of how alone he and Davina were, and how much he desired her. When he had kissed her last Christmas she had felt so light in his arms, so small. He had wanted desperately to go on kissing her … holding her.

‘Please, Giles,’ she repeated huskily now, and he knew that he couldn’t refuse her.

Lucy often said things she didn’t mean; often lost her temper and gave him ultimatums which within hours she had forgotten. In fact, he had been surprised that she actually cared what he did. Sometimes recently when she looked at him he felt almost as though she hated him, there was so much anger and bitterness in her eyes.

‘I’ll … I’ll think about it,’ Giles promised her.

Davina smiled her thanks at him.

Outwardly she might appear calm, but inwardly her stomach was churning; inwardly she felt full of despair and guilt. How could she be doing this to Giles, using him … using what he felt for her? But what alternative did she have? It wasn’t for her own sake. Owning Carey’s meant nothing to her. She felt no possessive pride of ownership in the company.

But what she did feel was a very powerful and strong sense of responsibility towards its employees, an awareness of how guilty she had been over too many years of turning a blind eye to what was going on.

She could have overridden Gregory’s refusal to let her come to Carey’s. She could have insisted on doing so, but she had, as always in her life, taken the easy way out.

Well, there was no easy way out now … not for the people who depended on Carey Chemicals’ survival for their living.

She was all right. She had the money her father had left her, money that had been left untouched since his death—a good deal of money, in her eyes, but Mr Taylor had explained patiently, almost a little condescendingly to her that, as far as Carey’s was concerned, it was little more than a drop in the ocean.

He had told her then the extent of the company’s overdraft, an overdraft secured by Carey Chemicals’ premises and land, and she had blenched at the extent of it.

The money had been lent to Gregory some years ago by his predecessor, he told her grimly. An advance that should never have been made and certainly would not have been made in today’s harsh financial climate.

That advance, together with Carey Chemicals’ profits, Gregory had used to fund his money-market gambling.

Why had he done it? He had always been a man who enjoyed taking risks; who craved their dangerous excitement. That was, after all, why he had died. He had been driving far too fast for the road conditions, the police had told her, and yet there had been no need. He had not been expected anywhere. No, it had been the thrill of driving at such an excessive speed that had excited him, and killed him and the woman with him, just as his greed and reckless addiction to danger was now killing Carey’s and threatening the livelihoods of everyone involved with it.

Davina stood up, and so did Giles.

They both walked to the door. Giles opened it for her. She thanked him, taking care not to stand too close to him, guiltily aware of the way his hand trembled slightly as he opened the door.

‘Give my love to Lucy,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages.’

She felt uncomfortably hypocritical for mentioning Lucy’s name, as though she had no knowledge of Giles’s feelings for her.

They left the building together, walking to their separate cars, Giles waiting while Davina unlocked and got into hers.

Carey’s was within easy walking distance of the village, its two-storeyed buildings surrounded by the lush Cheshire countryside. The site on which her grandfather and father had originally set up the business had once been occupied by a corn chandler’s. The original two-storeyed Cheshire brick mill was still there. It had a preservation order on it now, because of its age.

Face it: Carey’s doesn’t look like a profitable drug-producing company, Davina reflected as she drove off. She surveyed the jumble of buildings that housed the company, contrasting them with photographs she had seen of the premises of the huge multinationals that dominated the drugs market.

Carey’s, she had to admit, was an anomaly. But for her grandfather’s discovery of that heart drug, Carey’s would never have existed. At home she had his notebooks with his meticulous descriptions of the drugs and potions he had made up for his customers, human and animal. When he had been a young man there had been no National Health Service and very few ordinary people had been able to afford the fees of a doctor, so men like her grandfather had doctored them instead.

She thought it was a pity that her own father had been so reluctant to talk about his childhood and his parents. It had been her mother who had told her about her grandfather, and she had only known him for a couple of years, as he had died shortly after she and Davina’s father had married.

There was a portrait of Davina’s father in the room that was used as the boardroom, and Davina had always thought that there should have been one there of her grandfather as well.

There never would be now, of course. If she was lucky enough to find a buyer, the last thing they would want would be portraits of the original founders of the company.

She drove home, worrying about whether or not Giles would stay with the company, and trying to quell her guilt at the way she had manipulated him.

And then, even more guiltily, she found herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had married someone like Giles instead of Gregory.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT HAD been Davina’s father who had been responsible for Davina’s meeting Gregory.

Gregory had come to work for Carey’s as their technical salesman and her father had invited him to one of the dinners he occasionally gave for certain members of his staff.

Davina had been busy in the kitchen when everyone arrived. These dinners were always something of an ordeal for her. Her father was a perfectionist and Davina dreaded his disapproval if everything was not as he wished it to be.

She had spent virtually all week preparing for this dinner, shopping, cleaning, polishing the silver, washing, starching and then ironing the table linen. And picking flowers from the garden and then arranging them. Her father would never countenance wasting money on buying flowers.

He personally selected the menus he wished Davina to serve, and they were always complicated. Her father was a fussy eater, preferring small, delicately cooked dishes, but on these occasions he liked to impress with lavish cordon bleu meals.

Sticky and uncomfortable from the heat of the kitchen, praying frantically that she had correctly judged the timing and that the hot soufflé her father had insisted on for the first course would not deflate before everyone was seated, Davina heard the kitchen door open. Expecting to see her father walk in to tell her that she could serve the soufflé, she was astonished to see instead a very good-looking young man.

He smiled at her, a warm flashing smile that showed the whiteness of his teeth. His skin was tanned; his brown hair shone. He was tall and lean, and there was a warmth in his brown eyes as he smiled at her that made her face burn even more hotly than the heat from the kitchen.

‘Hello, I’m Gregory James,’ he said to her, introducing himself and holding out his hand.

Automatically Davina extended hers and only just stopped herself from gasping out loud at the frisson of sensation that struck her as he slowly curled his fingers around hers and shook her hand.

No one had ever affected her like this before. In her naïveté her skin flushed darker, her whole body trembling as she succumbed to his sexual magnetism.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Gregory told her smoothly as he released her hand.

For a moment Davina felt confused. There was something about the tone in which he delivered the apology that jarred on her, some falseness, some instinctive awareness of a mockery of her, as though he intended the words to have a double meaning, as though he was laughing at her for her reaction to him, but these feelings were so vague and unformed that they had vanished before she could really grasp them, leaving her to stammer a few incoherent words, while Gregory continued, ‘Your father was on his way to tell you that everyone is ready to eat, and I asked if I might deliver the message for him. And to see if there was anything I could do to help.’

To help? Davina gave him an unguarded startled look. Her father believed that it was a woman’s place to be subservient in every way to the males in the household, and the thought of any man offering her any kind of domestic help was a concept with which Davina was completely unfamiliar.

‘Thank you, but there’s really no need,’ she began breathlessly, but he stopped her, looking at her until she could no longer meet the intensity of his gaze as he said slowly,

‘Oh, yes, there is. There is every need. I’ve been wanting to meet you, Davina.’

He … this wonderful, good-looking man, had been wanting to meet her? She shook her head dizzily, wondering if she had fallen asleep and was having a dream, but no, it was real. He was real. She was so flustered that she could barely even breathe, never mind think of moving, and Gregory, watching her, allowed himself a small inner smile of satisfaction. Good. She was obviously as naïve and dumb as he had heard. He had met her. Now the rest should be easy.

Brought up by a widowed mother who had died while he was in his first year at university, Gregory had always bitterly resented the good fortune of others, a good fortune which had been denied to him. His mother was poor. He was clever and good-looking, but he learned early in life that that did not compensate for lack of wealth. Wealth was power, and power was what Gregory wanted. He had learned young to smile and say nothing when others taunted him or drew attention to his second-hand school uniform and the poverty of his possessions. His time would come. He would make sure that it came.

It was while he was at university that he realised how hard it was going to be for him to achieve his ambition. The best jobs, and with them the money and the power he craved, would not be offered to someone like him. They would go to others, youths with far fewer qualifications than he possessed, far less worthwhile degrees, but they had something more important than intelligence: they had family; they had position and power.

It had been a chance conversation he had overheard between two fellow graduates which had told him the path he must take through life. Both of them were unaware of his presence, and were discussing a third, absent friend.

‘You know, his sister’s getting married in June. He was telling me about it last week. She’s in the club. His family are furious. Apparently she’s been going around with some working-class type, who obviously knew which side his bread was buttered on. Now she’s pregnant, the family have no option but to let them marry, and they’ll have to support them, find him some sort of decent job. They’re furious about the whole thing, but, of course, they’re putting a brave face on it.’

‘Nice work if you can get it,’ the other man commented wryly. ‘Marrying a rich girl.’

Marrying a rich girl. Gregory mulled the thought over in his mind, letting it lie fallow for a short time before finally allowing it to take root.

The problem was that he did not know any rich girls. He knew girls … plenty of them. He was a good-looking young man who had grown up in an environment where teenagers had begun experimenting with sex well under the legal age limit, and he had learned early the basic mechanics of sex. To those over the years he had added a variety of refinements which so far had ensured him as much success as he needed or wanted with the opposite sex.

When he wished he could be ingratiatingly charming and well mannered, surface attributes that went no more than skin-deep, as those of his sexual partners who had not immediately taken the hint that he was tired of them had very quickly found out.

Gregory had no real warmth about him, no real kindness; as far as he was concerned, they were weaknesses he could not afford.

A rich wife. He bided his time. The doors to the homes of his fellow graduates, or at least those who could have introduced him to the lifestyle he craved, remained firmly closed to him. He got a job and then another, and finally a third with Carey’s.

He had chosen Carey’s out of three possible employers because he had learned from eavesdropping on a casual conversation while waiting to be interviewed that the man who owned Carey’s had only one child, an unmarried daughter.

Gregory had become very adept over the years at listening to other people’s conversations. He had discovered it was an extremely profitable way of learning things.

He had been at Carey’s now for six months. That was how long it had taken him to discreetly and cautiously bring himself to old man Carey’s eye, without offending or arousing the suspicions of his co-employees.

He had accepted the accolade of the dinner invitation for one purpose only, and that had been to meet this small, naïve girl with the flushed face and untidy hair. He had made enough discreet enquiries into Carey’s now to know just how rich Davina would one day be.

Physically she was not his type. He liked women with endless legs, generously curved bodies and with that look in their eyes which said they knew what life was all about.

Davina Carey was small and slight, her body girlish rather than sensual. Her eyes held naïveté and self-consciousness. And when they looked at him they also held awe and wonder.

As he accepted Davina’s disjointed dismissal and left the kitchen—after all, he had never intended actually to help her; that had simply been an opportune method of meeting her—he was smiling to himself.

Physically, as a woman, she might not appeal to him, but as a wife, a rich wife, she would be ideal.

Davina served the meal in a daze of gauzy unbelievable daydreams in which all manner of impossible things suddenly seemed dramatically possible.

Now, she told herself breathlessly as she cleared the plates from the main course, scraping them into the waste-bin before soaking them in hot water and then hurrying to serve the pudding, she knew why there had never been anyone else in her life: it had been because fate had already chosen Gregory for her. Because fate had known that he was there, that he existed; that he lived and breathed … even if she hadn’t.

Her body completely still, she stared out of the kitchen window, lost in her dreams, and then abruptly and painfully jolted herself back to reality by reminding herself that she was probably reading far too much into what he had said to her, in the way he had looked at her. Achingly she wished she had someone, a friend in whom she could confide, whose advice she could seek, with whom she could discuss the wonder and excitement of what had happened.

Gregory deliberately waited almost a week before getting in touch with her. A week was just long enough for her to have begun to lose hope, but nowhere near long enough for her to have even begun to forget about him.

He telephoned her, using his office telephone.

Davina had just returned from doing some shopping. She picked up the receiver and said the number, her heart shuddering to a frantic standstill of shock and pleasure when she heard Gregory’s voice.

So many times over the last six days she had mentally relived those moments when he had walked into the kitchen, the things he had said, the way he had looked, and, with each day that passed, so her belief in herself, in the message his eyes had silently given her, had diminished.

And now, just when she had been on the verge of giving up hope, of accepting that she had foolishly read far too much into what had happened, he had rung her.

And then as abruptly as her hopes had swung upwards they were dashed again as he said formally, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t rung before. I’ve been away on business. I just wanted to ring to thank you for a marvellous meal last week.’

He was merely ringing to thank her. A polite bread-and-butter telephone call, that was all, Davina acknowledged dully.

On the other end of the line Gregory smiled to himself. He could almost taste her disappointment.

He waited a few seconds and then added casually, ‘There’s a very good musical on at the Palace in Manchester at the moment. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I’ve been given some complimentary tickets and I was wondering if you’d care to see it with me. The tickets are for tomorrow evening. Rather short notice, I’m afraid.’

He was asking her out! Her. Like a rider on a roller-coaster, her hopes soared again. Both her hand and her voice were trembling as she thanked him and accepted the invitation, ignoring the small warning voice that reminded her that she would have to get her father’s approval and that tomorrow evening was his bridge evening and he would expect her to provide a supper for himself and his cronies, since it was his turn to host it.

Well satisfied with his progress, Gregory made arrangements to pick her up the following evening.

He didn’t live locally, but rented a small flat in Manchester, preferring to keep his work and his private lives apart. He had a company car, and one of the first things he had learned in his first job was how to ensure that his expenses claims covered his own personal motoring costs as well as the travelling he did for his employers.

Not that he overdid things. Gregory knew very well how to temper greed with caution. It was one of the things he was best at.

He was having a good day today. He picked up his paper and turned to the stocks and shares section. If he had one appetite that was not wholly under his own control, it was not, as with so many of his peers, sex; sex was something he enjoyed for the pleasure it gave him and the control over the women who enjoyed the benefits of his skill and experience. No, Gregory’s weakness was the thrill of tension and excitement that he got from gambling.

Not gambling as in betting on horses, or visiting casinos. No, Gregory’s gambling took the form of highly calculated risks in the buying and selling of stocks and shares.

Over the years Gregory had had some spectacular successes with this, his own private, very private game, and he had also suffered some heavy losses.

He frowned as he remembered the last one. It had all but wiped out the special fund he kept for his investments, and for a month or two he had had to live very meagrely indeed, but today he felt lucky. All the omens were good. He picked up the paper, studying it avidly.

For once fate seemed to be on Davina’s side. When her father came home that evening, before she could mention Gregory’s invitation, he said curtly to her, ‘I shall be going out tomorrow night.’

‘But it’s your bridge night,’ Davina interrupted him.

Her father’s mouth thinned with displeasure. ‘I wish you would allow me the courtesy of finishing my conversations, Davina, instead of interrupting me. Yes, it is my bridge night, but there has been a slight alteration in the arrangements. The Hudsons have decided to take a short holiday and visit their son next week, and because of this they have asked if the venue of tomorrow’s meeting can be changed from here to their house, since it would have been their turn to host everyone the week they will be away.’

As she prepared her father’s supper Davina hummed under her breath. She couldn’t believe her good fortune. She closed her eyes, giving in to the temptation to let her imagination recreate for her a mental image of Gregory James. Tall, good-looking, and with a look in his eyes that made her ache with excitement.

She still couldn’t entirely believe that he had actually asked her out.

She told her father about the invitation after he had eaten, picking her time carefully and cautiously, and then holding her breath as he frowned. ‘Gregory James, you say. Hmm. A very bright young man. Well-mannered, as well. Not like some these days.’

Very slowly and carefully Davina released her pent-up breath. Her father, it seemed, approved of Gregory. She could scarcely believe her luck.

It took her virtually all afternoon the next day to decide what to wear for her date. Outfit after outfit was discarded as she went through her wardrobe, wishing she had had the courage to buy something as daring as the outfits Mandy had worn with such panache, and then being forced to admit that her father would never have permitted her to wear such short skirts, nor such striking colours.

In the end she settled for a cream linen skirt teamed with a neat floral blouse. Over it she could wear the cream mohair jacket she had knitted for herself the previous winter.

As an irrational extravagance, the last time she had been to Chester she had bought herself a pair of new shoes. They were all the rage, beige patent, almost flatties, with tiny heels and a large gold-rimmed flat buckle on the front. They matched her outfit exactly and she was lucky enough to have small enough feet to wear such pale-coloured shoes.

She was ready far too soon, of course, her hair combed as straight as she could get it, a defiant touch of blue eyeshadow on her eyelids, pale pink lipstick on her mouth. She ached for the courage to line her eyes with the black kohl that everyone was wearing, but cringed from her father’s reaction should she do so. He didn’t approve of make-up of any kind, but she defiantly refused to give in completely.

Her father was still at home when Gregory arrived. To her surprise and delight, he actually invited Gregory into his study and offered him a glass of sherry.

Davina, of course, wasn’t included in the invitation, but she didn’t mind. She went upstairs and surreptitiously checked her appearance, staring anxiously into the mirror. If only her hair were thicker, straighter. She wondered if it would look any better if she coloured it lighter or if somehow she could cut herself a thicker fringe. She wished too that she were taller. All the girls in the magazines were tall, with endless, endless legs.

She sighed fretfully. There were so many things about herself she’d like to change if only she could. What on earth could a man like Gregory possibly see in her?

Downstairs in Alan Carey’s study, Gregory displayed the charm and good manners which so often had blinded people to his real nature. Alan Carey seemed as easy to deceive as all the rest.

It was a slow, careful courtship. Within weeks Gregory knew quite well that there was virtually nothing that Davina would not do for him, although it was not Davina who was important but her father. Davina was no use to him without her father’s money. And so, in effect, although it was Davina he took out and dated, it was actually her father to whom he was paying court.

For six months they exchanged nothing more than relatively chaste kisses. Only occasionally did Gregory assume a mock passion, for which he always apologised, claiming to Davina that it was his love for her that threatened his self-control.

Davina, with no experience of any kind to illuminate her sexual darkness, accepted what he said, and, if when she left him and was lying awake in bed her body ached rebelliously for an intimacy that had nothing to do with the kind of kisses Gregory gave her, she told herself severely that she was lucky to have someone who treated her with so much respect.

It was a time when, although the media might have given out an image of teenagers eagerly and freely enjoying what was termed ‘the sexual revolution’, in fact in country areas, away from the freedom of cities like London, where young people lived away from home and their parents’ watchful eyes, many of the old shibboleths still existed. And one of these was still that nice girls did not ‘do it’, or at least not until they were engaged, and then only very discreetly, so that it was something they discussed in nervous excited whispers, and only with other girls in the same situation.

So, while her body wantonly ached with a need whose fulfilment was only something Davina vaguely understood, her mind, her upbringing told her that it was right that Gregory should be so restrained with her, that it was out of love, out of respect for her; and she contented herself with rosy, breathlessly exciting daydreams of how different things would be if he actually asked her to marry him. Then there would be no need for restraint between them, then … She moved restlessly in her bed, turning over on to her stomach, her hand pressed against her lower body and then hastily, guiltily removed.

She had started waking up out of her sleep, brought abruptly from its depths by the intensity of the powerful rhythmic contractions of her body, shocked and disturbed by such a physical phenomenon, and yet at the same time delighted and awed by this glimpse of the pleasure it could afford her, naïvely assuming that, if her dreams of him could bring her so much pleasure, when Gregory did become her lover the pleasure would be even greater.

It was her father who announced that he had invited Gregory to spend Christmas Day with them, and, when after church on Christmas morning Gregory presented her with an engagement ring while her father looked on in approval, Davina was too thrilled with happiness and love to question the fact that her father had obviously known that Gregory was going to give her the ring before she had, or that Gregory had not actually asked her if she wished to become engaged to him.

The wedding date was set for the following summer. Davina was pleased that her father approved of Gregory; she was happier than she had ever believed possible.