Czytaj książkę: «Power Play»

2

The first member of the quartet received his letter at nine-fifteen exactly on Saturday.

Although Howell’s bank did not open for business on Saturdays, it was Richard Howell’s practice as its chairman and managing director, to spend a couple of hours there checking through the mail and attending to any small matters of business that might have been overlooked during the week.

It was only a half hour’s drive from the Chelsea mews flat he shared with his second wife to the small private car park that belonged to the bank. A uniformed commissionaire was there to let him in. Harry Rogers had been with the bank since the end of the Second World War, in which he had lost his right arm. He was due for retirement at the end of the year—something he wasn’t looking forward to, despite the generous pension he knew he would receive. He liked working at Howell’s. For one thing, it gave him something to boast about when he joined his pals at the Dog and Duck on Friday nights. There were very few people who didn’t recognise the Howell name; the merchant bank was famous for its meteoric expansion and profitability under the chairmanship of Richard Howell. It was regularly quoted in the financial press as an example to others of its kind; and those financial correspondents who in the early days had dubbed him as “reckless” and “lucky” now described him as “a man with diabolically keen financial insight; an innovator and a challenger.” Howell’s had been behind several of the more dazzling takeovers in the City in recent years, and the clients who came to them tended to stay.

At just turned thirty, Richard Howell still had the same relentless energy and drive he had when he first entered the bank, but now it was tempered by caution and a discreet amount of guile.

He was a man whose photograph regularly appeared both in the financial pages, and more latterly in those gossip columns that focused on media personalities, but very few people looking at those photographs would have recognised him in the street. No photograph could convey that restless, highly strung energy that became so evident when one met him face to face. He was not a particularly tall man; just a little over five foot ten, with a smooth cap of straight dark hair and the olive-tinged skin that was his Jewish heritage.

Several generations ago the Howells had anglicised their name and given up their Jewish faith; judiciously they had married into the lower and even sometimes upper echelons of the British aristocracy, but every now and again a Howell was born who looked remarkably like the Jacob Howell who had first founded their empire.

Richard Howell had the sculptured, pared-down face of an ascetic. His eyes were a very intense shade of blue, and they burned like the incessant fires of ambition that burned inside him. He knew quite well where it came from; this desire to build and go on building. His father and his grandfather had both been ambitious men in their different ways. It was unfortunate that in his father’s case that ambition had not led on to success but to death! But that was behind him now.

His first wife had accused him of being a workaholic, and he had denied it. Workaholics were driven purely by the pedestrian need to work; Richard wanted more; he was and always had been driven by a particular purpose, and yet now that that purpose had been achieved he couldn’t stop.

Inside his traditional striped shirt and Savile Row suit was a man who was basically a gambler. But unlike those men who must win and lose fortunes across the baize-covered tables of the world’s casinos, he had had the good fortune to be granted an entrée into the most exclusive of all the world’s gambling circles—the world of high finance.

Richard picked up the letter and studied the heading thoughtfully. Minesse Management. He knew of them, of course; there was talk in the City that it wouldn’t be long before they went public, but privately he doubted it. Pepper Minesse would never give up her empire to others, no matter how many millions going public might earn her.

Richard had seen her once, briefly, at a cocktail party he had attended with his second wife. There had been something elusively familiar about her, but though he searched his memory all night, he hadn’t been able to recognise what. It had annoyed him, because he prided himself on having a good memory for faces, and hers was so strikingly beautiful that he couldn’t imagine how, having seen it before, he could possibly have forgotten where. In fact, he could have sworn that he hadn’t, and yet…and yet that elusive, faint tug on his memory told him that somewhere he had. Linda, his second wife, worked for one of the independent television companies. Like him, she was career-orientated. Pepper Minesse had been at the party with one of her clients.

Richard Howell wasn’t a man who had a bias against successful women, and Pepper Minesse had intrigued him. She had built up her business from nothing and no one seemed to know anything about where she had come from or what she had been doing before she signed on her first client, other than that she had once worked for the American entrepreneur Victor Orlando. She was a woman who was skilled at appearing to be completely open and yet at the same time remaining conversely secretive about her past and her private life.

Richard tapped the envelope thoughtfully on his desk. It wasn’t all that unusual for him to receive correspondence from people he did not know; it happened all the time. Howell’s bank was known to be extremely discreet about dealing with its clients’ affairs.

He opened the letter and read it, then got out his diary. There was nothing booked in for Monday afternoon. He made a pencil note in it. The letter intrigued him. Pepper Minesse: he was looking forward to meeting her. It could be very…interesting.

He went through the rest of his mail and then his phone rang. He picked it up and heard the voice of his wife. They had arranged to spend the weekend with friends and she was just telephoning to remind him.

“I’ll be home in half an hour.” That would just give them time to make love before they set out. The adrenalin bounced round his veins, released by the intrigue and anticipation of Pepper’s letter. It was always like this—the merest hint of a new deal, a new game, always gave him a sexual boost.

Linda was the perfect wife for him; when he wanted sex she was both receptive and inventive; when he didn’t, she didn’t pester him. As far as he was concerned they had an ideal relationship. His first wife…He frowned, not wanting to think about Jessica. Linda had accused him once of wanting to pretend that his first marriage had never happened. She put it down to his Jewish blood and his inherited need to preserve old-fashioned values, and he hadn’t argued with her. How could he? His marriage to Jessica was something he couldn’t discuss with anyone, even now. He felt the beginnings of anger build up inside him, draining his physical desire, and checked them automatically. Jessica was in the past, and she was better left there.

Alex Barnett received his letter when the postman dropped it off halfway through Saturday morning. His wife Julia picked it up from the hall carpet and carried it through to the sunny sitting room at the back of the house where they breakfasted in leisurely relaxation on weekend mornings.

Alex looked quickly at her as she came in, dreading seeing the now familiar signs of the depression which so often seized her. This morning there was no sign of it. She was still buoyed up by the visit from the adoption authorities. He and Julia had everything that an ambitious couple could want. Everything, but for one thing…

At thirty, Alex Barnett was known as one of the most forward-thinking and successful men in his field. The computer age had still been at the toddler stage when he took over his father’s sewing machine factory. From sewing machines to computers had been quite a leap, but he had made it safely, and although the big boys tended to look askance at some of his innovations, he held a very generous share of the market.

In less than six weeks’ time he would hear from the Government whether they intended to accept his tender and install his terminals in British embassies throughout the world. The contract was far more important to him than he had allowed anyone else to know. Their sales had slipped slightly recently—not enough to cause concern, yet enough for him to realise that they badly needed the profits from this Government contract to finance new development.

That was the key to success in the computer world, and it was a young man’s business; at thirty, Alex already felt years older than most of his design staff.

“Anything interesting in the post?” he asked as Julia walked into the room.

They had bought the house four years ago when he first became successful. They had been spending a weekend in the Cotswolds, celebrating both their wedding anniversary and the success of his new computer. They had seen the house and the “For Sale” board, and both of them had known immediately that it was just what they were looking for.

They had always planned to have a family. Alex was an only one himself and so was Julia. Children were important to them both, and this was a house specifically designed for a family. It had large private gardens, surrounded by shrubbery, and a paddock large enough for a couple of ponies. The village was only ten minutes away by car, and there were enough good private schools locally for their children to attend as day pupils.

They had managed to buy the house at a good price, and Julia had given up her job to settle down to the business of renovating and furnishing it, and of course, getting pregnant.

Only she hadn’t; and since the news last month that the second in-vitro fertilisation attempt had failed, Julia had developed a brittle gaiety that scraped on Alex’s raw nerves like wire.

What made it worse, according to her, was that he could have children, but she could not be their mother. He had tried to reassure her that she was more important to him than any potential child they might or might not have, but she wasn’t willing to be reassured, so they had come back to the possibility of adoption; something they had discussed and eventually discounted in the early days after they had first discovered Julia couldn’t conceive.

But now they had tried every alternative avenue, and none of them had worked.

The strain of the last few years with their hopes and bitter disappointments had scarred them both, but Julia more so than Alex. She had pinned everything on the in-vitro fertilisation working, and when it had failed, nothing had been able to rouse her from her depression.

But now at last she seemed to be recovering slightly. She was smiling at him as she handed him the mail.

“There’s a letter from the adoption people. A social worker will be coming to interview us soon to find out if we’re suitable candidates to adopt.”

She paused beside his chair to read through the letter again. The sunlight caught her blonde hair and Alex reached up to push it back off her face. He had fallen in love with her the moment he saw her, and he still loved her. Her unhappiness was his, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to give her the child she so desperately wanted.

“Mm…what’s this?” she asked him, holding out a cream envelope. He took it from her, his eyebrows lifting slightly as he studied the insignia.

“Minesse Management—those are the people who sign up sports stars to endorse sports equipment and the like. It’s very big business.”

“Why are they writing to you?”

“I don’t know…perhaps they’re arranging some sort of pro-am tournament and they want us to participate.” Alex opened the letter, read it and then handed it to her.

“Well, it doesn’t tell you much at all, does it?” she commented.

“No, not really.”

“Will you go and see them?”

“I don’t see why not. Advertising is always useful, although of course it depends how much it’s going to cost. I’ll give them a ring on Monday morning and see what it’s all about…” Alex stretched back in his chair, his muscles tautening, then laughed as he saw the expression in Julia’s eyes. They had always had a good sex life, although neither of them had really enjoyed those years when they had had to make love to a timetable in the hope that Julia might conceive.

“I thought you were due to play a round of golf.”

“Perhaps I’d rather just play around?” he teased her, ducking out of the way as she flapped the newspaper threateningly in his direction and then grabbing her in his arms. Even without children they had so much, but Alex sensed that Julia would never give up; they had come too far down the road to go back.

But if they weren’t accepted by the adoption people? He shivered suddenly and looked into his wife’s face. She was thinner and there were tiny lines drawn on her skin by tension. She had invested so much hope in this test-tube thing; they both had, and he had feared that she might have a complete breakdown when their last attempt failed.

She was so fragile, so vulnerable; he could feel her bones through her skin. A wave of love and compassion washed through him. He buried his face in the smooth warmth of her throat and said gruffly, “Come on, let’s go to bed.”

They went upstairs hand in hand, Julia praying that he wouldn’t sense her reluctance. Since it had been confirmed that their final attempt to conceive via the in-vitro fertilisation method had failed she had completely lost interest in sex. Sex, like marriage, was ordained for the procreation of children; knowing that there would be no children robbed the act of its pleasure; of that glowing excitement she had felt in those early days when every act of love had been enough to make her climax wildly, elated by the knowledge that this joyous climactic act was the start of human life.

That joy had faded over the years, but she had still enjoyed sex; still welcomed Alex’s body within hers, but now suddenly there seemed no point any more. No matter how many times he made love to her she would not conceive his child.

Upstairs in their room as Alex took her in his arms she closed her eyes so that he couldn’t look into them and see her rejection.

Simon Herries, Member of Parliament for the Conservative constituency of Selwick, on the northern borders between England and Scotland, received his letter just before eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.

A long meeting with a select and powerful group of Conservative lobbyists the previous evening had kept him out of bed until three a.m. and in consequence, it was well into Saturday morning before he walked into the breakfast room of his Belgravia home in Chester Square. As was his habit, the first thing he did when he sat down was to glance through his mail.

The butler had brought the mail in earlier on a silver tray, and the thick cream envelope with the Minesse Management crest caught his attention straight away.

As a politician it was his business to know those companies and institutions who discreetly funded the Conservative Party machine, and he remembered at once that there had been an extremely respectable donation from Minesse at the end of the last financial year.

Conservative Members of Parliament, in the main a product of the English public school system, are trained almost from birth to adopt the “under” in preference to the “over” statement. It is a British tradition that some say started with Drake playing bowls while he watched the Spanish Armada advancing. The “respectable” donation had in fact been close to a million pounds.

Even so, Simon didn’t open the letter straight away, but eyed it cautiously. Caution was a prime requisite of politicians, and in politics, as in every other power-based structure, favours have to be paid for.

The unanticipated cream envelope disturbed him. It was unexpected, and he wasn’t a man who adjusted well to anything that did not fall within the strict controls he set around his life.

At thirty-two he was privately being tipped, in all the secret and powerful circles that really matter, as a future leader of the Tory party. He deliberately played down his chances, smiling ruefully, adopting the role of impressed but humble student, to the political barons who had taken him up.

He had known since coming down from Oxford that nothing but the ultimate seat of power would satisfy him, but he had learned while he was there to harness and control his ambitions. Overt ambition is still considered both suspicious and ungentlemanly by the British ruling classes. Simon Herries had everything in his favour; he came from a North Country family with aristocratic connections. It was well known in the corridors of Westminster that no one could be an MP without an additional source of income—left wing politicians were financed by their trade union; establishment right-wingers got theirs from private sources. It was from trusts set up by his wife’s family that Simon Herries received the income that enabled him to live in a style which very few of his colleagues could match. As well as the Belgravia house he also owned over a thousand acres of rich farmland and an Elizabethan manor house near Berwick. The Belgrave Square house had been bought on his marriage by his new in-laws. It was conservatively valued at half a million.

He picked up The Times and turned to the first leader, but his eye was drawn back to that cream envelope.

At eleven o’clock exactly, the butler pushed open the baize-covered door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house and brought in his breakfast. Fresh orange juice, squeezed from the Californian oranges that he preferred; two slices of wholemeal bread and a small pot of honey that came from one of his own farms; a pot of coffee made from the beans that were bought fresh every day, apart from Sunday, from Harrods Food Hall and which Simon drank black. He liked his life to be orderly, almost ritualistically so. When people commented on it, Simon said it was the result of his public school upbringing.

He was as careful about watching his weight as he was about everything else. Image was important; one didn’t wish to project the glossy, too well packaged look of one’s American colleagues, of course—the voters would find that insincere, but Simon would have been a fool not to take advantage of the fact that at six foot, with a well muscled athletic build which came from public school sports fields, and rowing for his college, he possessed an enviably commanding presence.

His hair was thick and dark blond. In the summer the sun added distinct highlights, and his skin tanned a healthy brown. He looked arrogantly aristocratic. Women liked him and voted for him and for his policies, men envied and admired his success. He was known in the popular press as the only MP with sex appeal. He pretended to find the description distasteful.

His wife was probably one of the few people who actually knew how much he relished it, and why!

She was away at the moment, visiting her family in Boston. She was a Calvert and could trace her family back to those first arrivals on the Mayflower. She had spent a post-graduate year at Oxford, after graduating from Radcliffe. Her cool Bostonian arrogance had amused Simon; just as it had amused him to take her back to his family’s ancient stronghold in the Border hills, and show her the documents that traced his lineage back to Duke William’s Normans.

Elizabeth in turn had invited him to Boston. Her parents had been impressed with him. Her father was a partner in the family bank, and it hadn’t taken Henry Calvert very long to discover that Simon Herries came from a family that was almost as clever and conservative with money as his own.

The wedding had made headlines in all the Society papers—discreet ones, of course; after all, there was Royalty present. Simon’s godmother was a Royal, and she had graciously consented to attend.

Of course the ceremony had had to take place at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Mrs Calvert had been torn between elation and disappointment. It would have been very pleasant indeed to have hosted a dinner in Boston for her future son-in-law’s godmother, but Simon had been adamant: the ceremony was to take place at St Margaret’s.

There was a piece in The Times lauding the new legislation he was pressing for to tighten up the laws regarding child abuse. He was building up a reputation for being a fierce campaigner for law and order and a return to a more strict moral climate. He was known among his peers, sometimes acidly, as the “Housewives’ Choice.” He smiled as he re-read the piece. There were an awful lot of housewives, and all of them had the right to vote.

His assistant would no doubt cut the piece out for him and clip it to his PR file. She was a twenty-three-year-old Cambridge Honours graduate, and Simon had been sleeping with her for the past three months. She was intelligent, but a little too intense. His mind shifted gear. It was probably just as well that the long vacation was coming up; it would help cool things down a little. He had no intention of getting too heavily involved.

Simon opened the envelope, slitting it carefully with a silver-handled knife, which had been given to his grandfather by the monarch.

The letter was brief and uninformative. It simply invited him to present himself at the offices of Minesse at three on Monday afternoon, to discuss something of mutual benefit.

It wasn’t such an unusual letter; and he checked in his diary to see if he had the afternoon free. He had, and he pencilled in the appointment and a note to ask his secretary to produce everything she could on Minesse and its founder Pepper Minesse. He had never met her, but she had the reputation of being a beautiful and very clever woman.

Miles French, barrister at law, and quite possibly soon to be Judge French, didn’t receive his letter until Monday morning.

He had spent his weekend with his latest lover. He was a man who liked to concentrate on one thing at a time, and when he was with a woman whose company he enjoyed, he didn’t like anything else to distract him. He and Rosemary Bennett had been lovers for almost six months, which was quite a long time as far as he was concerned. He liked beautiful women, but he also liked intelligent conversation, and his mind frequently grew bored before his body.

Rosemary was an editor on Vogue, and occasionally if she felt he was stepping out of line, she liked to punish him by exhibiting him in front of her fashion trade cronies.

A barrister was a rara avis indeed in their enclosed world; the men derided his Savile Row suits and white-collared starched shirts, while the women eyed him sideways, stripped off the suit and shirt, and wondered how much of a chance they would have of stealing him away from Rosemary Bennett.

He was six foot two with a body that was solid with muscle. He had black hair that curled slightly. His eyes were the colour of iced water, and Rosemary claimed that it gave her the most delicious frisson of dread when he looked at her in his “courtroom” manner. They suited one another. Both of them knew the rules; both of them knew exactly what they could and could not have from their relationship. Miles didn’t sleep with other women, but she knew that the moment she began to pall he would drop her and that there would be no court of appeal.

He picked up the letter along with several others as he opened the door of the flat he owned, conveniently close to his chambers. Along with the rest of his mail he dropped it on his desk before going upstairs to shower and change. He had no appointments for the day. He was a man who didn’t like to rush anything he did; a man who was patient and thorough, and to those who didn’t know him, surprisingly passionate. He had a dangerous temper, although it was slow to be aroused.

His phone rang as he stepped into the shower. He cursed and went into his bedroom to answer it, dripping water on to the carpet. His body was strongly made and taut with muscle from his bi-weekly games of squash at his club. His torso was shadowed with dark hair, silky fine and alluringly sensual to the female sex.

The phone call was from his clerk, and Miles answered the query, then rang off.

Once dressed, he went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. He had a daily woman who kept the apartment clean and sometimes shopped for him, but he preferred to be independent. He had never known either of his parents. As a very small baby he had been abandoned on the steps of a Glasgow children’s hospital, and had eventually ended up in a children’s home, where he had learned to value his privacy and independence.

He took his coffee with him into his study. It was a spacious room, the walls lined with bookshelves, and it was one of the reasons he had bought this particular apartment. He sat down at his desk and glanced through his mail, frowning slightly as he came to the Minesse envelope, his bottom lip jutting out slightly, a habitual gesture he wasn’t particularly aware of but which women found sexy. The name of the company was familiar to him, but as far as he knew he had no legal dealings with them, and in any case most of his dealings with clients were via the medium of a solicitor.

Miles opened the envelope and read the letter with a smile. Intriguing, and he would have known that it was a letter from a woman even without his knowledge of who headed Minesse Management. He couldn’t recall if he and Pepper Minesse had ever met, although he had heard about her. He wondered what on earth she could want, tossing several possibilities around in his mind. There was only one way to find out, and he had a free afternoon. Miles picked up the phone.

Pepper spent the weekend with friends who lived just outside Oxford. Philip and Mary Simms were the closest thing she had known to a family since the death of her grandmother when she was fifteen. She arrived just after eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, having timed her journey to avoid the traffic.

The bright early summer sunshine had tempted her to put the hood down on the Aston Martin, and her hair, left loose from its chignon, had been tousled by the wind. She was wearing a linen suit in a soft shade of olive green, the skirt cut short and straight, and the jacket fitting the contours of her breasts and waist. Underneath it she was wearing a cream silk blouse. As she stopped the car engine and swung her legs out on to the gravel drive she saw Oliver Simms disappearing round the side of the shabby Victorian semi.

She called to him, and he turned and waited for her, a grave-eyed boy of ten. He blushed slightly as she approached him, but the good manners instilled by his parents made him wait until she reached him.

“Hi, Oliver.”

Of all his parents’ friends, Pepper was his favourite. She didn’t try to ruffle his hair, or worse still, to kiss him, and she always remembered his birthdays and Christmas with presents that were exactly what he wanted, plus a small sum of money for his post office savings account. At the moment he was saving up for a new bike. His birthday fell in June and he was hoping that as a present his parents would make up the shortfall on his savings.

“Mum and Dad are in the garden,” he told Pepper.

He had arrived in his parents’ lives when his mother was just over forty and his father was eight years older, and in all the ten years of his short existence he had never for one moment doubted how much they had wanted him. He wasn’t spoiled in the sense of being indulged with material possessions—his father taught at the local comprehensive and the family were comfortably rather than well off, but there had never been a second in Oliver’s life when he had not known the security of being deeply loved.

He was a good-natured boy who had learned quite young to analyse and judge logically, and already he knew that although there might be times when he envied those of his school friends who possessed the latest computer, or the latest BMX, in reality many of them came from families where their parents led such busy lives that their fathers and sometimes their mothers were almost strangers to them.

Oliver knew that it was a struggle for his parents to send him to the exclusive prep school he attended, but no matter what sacrifices had to be made there always seemed to be just enough money for things like a new school uniform, and extras, like the skiing holiday he had had just after the New Year.

Once he had seen Pepper safely round into the back garden, he excused himself, telling her gravely, “I’m just off to cricket practice…I might make it on to the first junior team this year.”

Pepper watched him until he had disappeared then headed into the garden.

“Pepper, my dear! You’re early…”

“The traffic was in my favour for once.” Pepper kissed Mary’s cheek and allowed the older woman to hold her close. Mary Simms was the only person she ever allowed to embrace her in that way. Instinctively Pepper always held herself aloof and remote from others, but Mary was different. Without Mary…

“You’re looking very well, Mary—both of you are, in fact.”

There was no emotion in Pepper’s voice as she studied their faces. No one looking at her could guess how close were the bonds between them.

Mary Simms, who had grown up in a rambling old vicarage near Cambridge, populated by not only her parents but a collection of ancient aunts and uncles as well, had almost from birth been used to showing her affection freely and physically. It hurt her more than she could ever put into any words that Pepper had been denied the love she herself had known as a child, and with which she surrounded her husband and son.

Philip Simms greeted Pepper with his usual absent-minded bonhomie. Philip was a born teacher; he had the gift of communicating to his pupils the desire for knowledge. He had taught her so much…given her so much. Here in this shabby house she had….

“Did you see Oliver?” Mary’s voice cut through her thoughts.

Pepper smiled at her.

“Yes. He was just leaving. He said something about cricket practice.”

“Yes, he’s hoping to be chosen for the school’s junior team.” Love for her son and pride for his achievements shone out of her eyes as Mary talked.

Philip was carefully transplanting some young plants, and Pepper watched him. He was always so gentle and careful about everything he did, so endlessly patient and understanding.

“Come on inside, I’ll make us all a cup of coffee.”

The kitchen had changed very little since the first time Pepper had seen it; true, there was a new washing machine and fridge freezer and a new cooker, but the large cupboards on either side of the fireplace and the heavy pine dresser were just as Pepper remembered them from long ago. The china on the dresser had belonged to one of Mary’s aunts, as had much of their furniture. Money had never been of prime importance in the Simms’ lives, and for Pepper coming back was like crawling back into the security of the womb.

As Mary made the coffee they talked. Neither of them ever ceased to marvel at Pepper’s success; they were as proud of her as they were of Oliver, in some ways perhaps more so, but they didn’t totally understand her—how could they?

As she sat on one of the battered formica-covered stools Pepper wondered what Mary would say if she knew what she had done. For a moment her eyes clouded, but it was pointless trying to apply Mary’s code of ethics to her own actions. Her life, her emotions and reactions were so complex that neither Mary nor Philip could ever really understand what drove her.

They had been so upset when she first decided to leave Oxford, but neither of them had ever tried to dissuade her. She had spent nearly a year living in this house, cared for, cosseted and protected by its owners. They had sheltered her and given her something that she had never experienced before in her entire life. They were the only true good and Christian people that Pepper knew; and yet she knew many who would disparage and deride them for their simple lives and their lack of interest in wealth and success.

Coming here was something she needed almost as much as she needed revenge. She had to force herself to limit her visits. Once a month, Christmas, and birthdays…

She and Mary drank their coffee in the sort of silence that only exists between people who know one another well and are completely at ease with themselves and each other. Afterwards Pepper helped Mary to wash up and then prepare the lunch, simple domestic tasks that none of her executives or her staff would ever have imagined her doing, but no one else was ever allowed to see her like this, vulnerable and dependent.

After lunch they all went out into the garden, not to sit down and drowse in the early afternoon sun, but to attack the weeds that relentlessly threatened Philip’s flower beds. As they worked, he talked. He was concerned about one of his pupils. Listening to him, Pepper was flooded with love and humility. But for this man she would still be exactly what she had been at sixteen, an uncivilised, uneducated, little savage, who knew only the laws of her gypsy tribe, governed by emotion rather than logic.

She left shortly after five o’clock on Sunday, after afternoon tea on the lawn, eating Mary’s homemade scones and some of the jam she had made the previous summer. Oliver was there with a couple of friends, who studied her car with amused nonchalance. While she watched them Oliver had grinned at her, a conspiratorial, engaging grin that showed quite plainly the man he was going to be. Already in Oliver Pepper could see seeds of great personal charm; of intelligence and drive, and more.

All his life, wherever he went, whatever happened to him, he would have these years to look back on; the love of his parents, the security they had given him, and all his life he would benefit from those gifts, just as a seedling plant growing in good, enriched earth would grow stronger and hardier than one that had to struggle in poor soil.

Handicaps of any kind could be overcome, but they left scars like any other injury. Oliver would grow into adulthood without those scars.

Pepper got up and bent to hug and kiss Mary and then Philip. All of them walked over to her car.

“It’s Oliver’s school’s Open Day in three weeks’ time,” Philip told her. “Will you be able to come down for it?”

Pepper looked at Oliver who grinned bashfully at her.

“Well, since he’s my godson, I suppose I shall have to make the effort.”

She and Oliver exchanged smiles. She knew that she had struck exactly the right sort of note in front of his friends. They had all reached the stage where any display of adult emotion was deeply frowned upon.

She got into the car and turned the key in the ignition. Ahead lay London, and Monday morning.

Would they respond to her letters? Somehow she felt they would. She had dangled a bait none of them would be able to refuse. All of them, for their varying reasons, would expect to benefit from a connection with Minesse Management. Pepper smiled grimly to herself as she headed for the motorway—a brief twist of her lips that held more bitterness than amusement.