Читать книгу Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 18

Max’s first set-back of the day came when he walked into the poky little room that housed the chambers’ two secretaries and their equipment to discover that Charlotte wasn’t there.

‘She’s at the dentist,’ Wendy told him in her nervous little-girl whisper that always aroused in him the desire to torment her by pretending he couldn’t hear her. He knew that she felt intimidated by him and that she disliked and resented him, just as he knew that she was too nervous and fearful to dare to complain when he arrived in the office at ten to five in the afternoon with more than half an hour’s ‘urgent’ typing for her to do.

Charlotte would never have stood for such bullying tactics and it amused Max to witness the skilful way she always managed to pass on the main burden of the work to Wendy and yet at the same time give the impression that she was the one who was the more efficient and hard-working of the pair.

Charlotte and he were in many ways, he suspected, two of a kind, which was why they tended to treat one another with a certain amount of healthy respect. Like him, he imagined that Charlotte had chosen to work at Gray’s Inn because, of the four Inns of Court, Gray’s was the one with the reputation of providing the best social life, and he already knew that there was no way that Charlotte would provide him with the information he wanted without requiring some form of payment in kind.

‘Well, when she comes back, tell her I want to see her, will you?’ he asked Wendy.

She had flushed a painful shade of unflattering pink when he walked into the room and now her whole face and throat were dyed an unpleasant shade of puce. She was more than likely still a virgin, he reflected—and very likely to stay that way.

In his own office, his desk was piled high with work, none of which was likely to earn him anything more than a meagre few hundred pounds. Once he had his tenancy all that, of course, would soon change. Once he had it. He glanced at his watch. How long did it take to visit the dentist, for God’s sake, if indeed that was where Charlotte was?

He sat down and reached for the first file, studying the note pinned to it impatiently. Another no-hoper. My God, why the hell did these people bother? He glanced contemptuously at the letter of instruction from the acting solicitor, formally requesting counsel’s opinion as to the feasibility of their client’s claim. A five-year-old could see that there was no claim. No claim, which meant no case, which meant no fees.

He reached for the next file.

In the end it was almost lunch-time before Charlotte came sauntering into his office, her hair and make-up glamorously immaculate as always, the skirt of her suit just that little bit too short, the jacket just that little bit too fitted for a woman who took her career seriously.

‘You wanted to see me?’

The glossy red lips pouted provocatively as she stood in front of him, making sure he got the full benefit of the long length of her legs and the full curve of her breasts, Max observed, leaning back in his chair, hands crossed behind his head as he looked her lazily up and down.

‘I always enjoy seeing you, Charlotte,’ he assured her mockingly.

The look she gave him suggested that he stop wasting her time.

‘You know it’s the annual dinner dance the month after next,’ he commented, watching as Charlotte eyed him warily.

The annual dinner dance was an external prestigious event with tickets strictly limited, supposedly on a first-come first-served basis, but in reality available only to preselected applicants.

For the first time this year, Max had managed to obtain two tickets, illegitimately, of course, through the good offices of the wife of a certain junior judge who just happened to be on the selection committee and with whom Max had had a judiciously planned flirtation, which had resulted in the then bedazzled lady in question getting his name onto the requisite list.

Charlotte, unless she was invited to the affair by a ticket holder, would have no chance of attending, a fact that they both knew, just as they both knew how beneficial it would be to her in her quest for the right husband if she could be present. There was no limit to the kind of contacts and opportunities an enterprising girl like Charlotte could find at such an event.

‘Is it?’ Charlotte now countered with deliberate vagueness.

Max allowed himself an indulgent smile. ‘I’ve got two tickets for it and as yet no partner.’ He paused. If anything, Charlotte looked even more wary.

‘I need some help … some information …’ Max told her quietly. This was the risky bit. The unprotected leap from one position of strength and safety to another. There was no guarantee—as yet—that Charlotte would take the bait he was offering. She could choose to expose him instead, and if she did …

‘What information?’ she asked him carefully.

Max allowed himself to start to relax.

‘Nothing too unreasonable,’ he assured her easily. ‘Just a name …’

‘A name … what name?’ Charlotte demanded, her eyebrows lifting.

‘Not what, whose,’ Max corrected her loftily.

This was the second hazard; even if she had access to the information he wanted, she might decide not to give it to him, and again he was risking potential exposure.

He paused for a second and then, reminding himself of how much was at risk, told her bluntly, ‘There’s another applicant for the upcoming vacant tenancy—a woman. I need to know her name.’

‘Only the tenants on the tenants’ committee have access to that kind of information,’ she reminded Max.

‘The tenants and the chambers clerk,’ Max agreed smoothly, ‘but at some stage an appointment has to be made … letters have to be written.’

‘Laura deals with all that kind of correspondence,’ Charlotte informed him.

Max raised his eyebrows.

‘All right, I’ll do what I can,’ Charlotte agreed, ‘but I’m not promising anything.’

‘Neither am I,’ Max warned her smoothly.

They exchanged looks.

‘I’ll have to wait until Laura leaves this evening.’

‘Excellent. You’ll be able to do some extra typing for me then, won’t you?’ Max remarked.

Charlotte gave him a warning look and asked mock-sweetly, ‘These tickets, do they include the dinner or are they just for the dance afterwards?’

‘They include everything,’ Max assured her, ‘the dance, the dinner and the pre-dinner cocktail party. I hope you’ve got a suitable dress.’

Charlotte smiled at him.

It was a pity in a way, Max mused after Charlotte had gone. He had worked hard for those tickets, damned hard, far too hard to have wasted a ticket on someone like Charlotte under normal circumstances, but then these were not normal circumstances, and in view of what he ultimately stood to gain, some sacrifices had to be made.

The practice’s cases might not involve the huge sums of money she was used to dealing with but they were certainly far more interesting, Olivia decided after she had finished reading through the tangled history of one of them. A land dispute had sprung up between two brothers, both of whom claimed to have rights over a piece of land left by their uncle. Both men were already relatively wealthy local farmers but this piece of fiercely disputed land also contained a stream, and it was access to the stream that was the real cause of the dispute. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that at some stage the course of the stream had been altered, diverted, as one brother claimed, so that it now ran through the other brother’s land instead of running in its original course on his land.

Olivia had spent most of the morning poring over old maps and deeds, which in itself was an unfamiliar enough task to her to be intensely absorbing, but trying to read the fine old-fashioned writing was beginning to make her eyes ache. Then she remembered seeing a small magnifying glass on her uncle’s desk.

He had already left for his first appointment, but his office door was open and she could see the magnifying glass beside some papers. She went inside and walked over to get it. As she reached out to pick the glass up, her attention was caught by the open wallet of bank statements on the desk. They were her father’s, she realised, and her uncle had presumably been going through them because they were folded back to show the month of February. One item on the statement was ringed in red, and without intending to do so, Olivia found she was studying it, her heartbeat registering her shock when she discovered that the circled item related to a credit to her father’s account of almost a quarter of a million pounds.

Her father was not the kind of man who had ever managed to accumulate large sums of money. As a family they lived well, very well in fact, but both her parents in different ways tended to be financially extravagant; they were not savers or investors, which meant that her father either must have been given the money or …

Her heart thumping heavily, Olivia sat down in her uncle’s chair and pulled the statements towards her. The money had been deposited by credit transfer. From her grandfather perhaps? Olivia knew that there had been occasions in the past when her father had had to apply to Ben for a ‘loan’ but she, perhaps naïvely, had always assumed that the sums her father had borrowed had been for much smaller amounts.

She flicked forward through the statements and then stopped abruptly as she came to another credit entry—easy enough to find since the bulk of the statement entries were for withdrawals, withdrawals that ran to sums far in excess of her father’s drawings from the practice.

This time the credit was smaller, one hundred thousand pounds, and it was dated very recently, only days before her father’s heart attack, in fact. More slowly this time, Olivia turned back to the first statement and started to go carefully through them all.

By the time she had finished, she felt ice-cold and her hands were shaking so much she could hardly turn the statements. By her rough calculations, in the past five years her father’s account had been credited with close on two million pounds. Where had he got such a vast sum of money? What had he spent it on? So far as she could see, it had been absorbed by her parents’ day-to-day living expenses, by extravagance and overspending to a catastrophic degree. Yes, she could see where the money had gone, but where had it come from?

She had a nauseous feeling that she already knew, if not the exact source of the money, then at least the type of source it was most likely to have come from. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to steady herself.

‘Oh, Dad, how could you …?’ she whispered shakily.

Her glance fell on a file that had been tucked underneath the statements. It looked very like the one Olivia had seen her uncle holding in her father’s study the previous evening. Reluctantly she picked it up and glanced at the name. JEMIMA HARDING—TRUST FUND.

Her fingers were trembling so much she could hardly open it. She knew the Harding family, who lived in Haslewich. They had originally been local landowners; some of their land had been sequestered for use as an American army base during the war, and more recently the same land had been sold off along with the land the Hardings still owned close to a huge multinational chemical and drug conglomerate, which had its British headquarters several miles outside town.

That sale had made Jemima Harding a millionairess. It had also enabled her only son to buy the fast sports car in which he had met his death and, so local rumour said, brought about the split between her and her husband that had ultimately led to their very acrimonious divorce and her reverting to her maiden name of Harding.

She was an old woman now, in her late eighties, Olivia reckoned, living in a residential home.

She was also one of her father’s clients; he was her sole executor and held power of attorney over her financial affairs. Was that where the money had come from? Olivia wondered bleakly. Had her father used those powers to transfer money from Jemima’s account into his own? It would have been easy enough for him to do and easy enough to keep hidden—just so long as Jemima remained alive and no one questioned what was happening to her estate.

The cold, icy calm of deep shock had fallen over her. She was distantly aware of neatly placing the file where she had found it along with the statements, of getting up and even remembering to collect the magnifying glass she had originally come for before walking back to her father’s office. But once there she felt her legs starting to buckle beneath her and her whole body starting to shake so much that she was forced to cling to the back of a chair, unable to move, unable to do anything other than stand there shivering violently and trying to force her emotions to accept what her brain insisted they had to know.

Her father had stolen money from someone else. Her father had defrauded someone who trusted him. Her father was no different from the thief who broke in during the night, the con man who deceived vulnerable old folk out of their savings and pensions. Her father …

She swallowed uneasily. Uncle Jon … had he known …? Had he guessed? Was that why …? Her head started to pound. The temptation to run back to Jon’s office and go through the statements again, to convince herself that she was wrong, that she had misread the evidence, misunderstood what she had seen, was so strong she had to forcibly prevent herself from moving.

Her father …

‘Has he been under any unusual stress?’ the specialist had asked them and she had wondered guiltily then if she ought to mention her mother’s ‘problem’ but had decided not to do so since she was not sure whether her father was aware of it. The stress caused by that knowledge would have been bad enough, but this …

How on earth had he managed to live with himself, knowing what he had done not once, but regularly, consistently, over a period of five years? How could he have done it?

Abruptly, achingly, Olivia longed for Caspar. And not just for him, but the means of escape he could have provided from the appalling dilemma she now faced. If only she had never seen those statements, opened that file. If only she was now safely on her way to London with Caspar.

It shocked her that she, who had always privately thought of herself as strong and independent, should, the moment she was tested, become so mortally afraid and vulnerable, and even worse than that, a moral coward who, instead of facing up to what she had discovered, simply wanted to run and hide herself away from it, preferably in the safe sanctuary of Caspar’s arms.

Caspar. She looked at her watch. It still wasn’t too late for her to catch him before he left, she decided feverishly. If she drove straight to the airport, there was still time before his flight took off for London.

She couldn’t tell him about her father, of course. Caspar would never, never understand that kind of deceit and dishonesty—a violation rather than a straightforward theft—so much worse somehow coming from a person who was, after all, in such a great position of trust. But still, she needed him. Needed the loving warmth of his arms, the security he provided, and the escape …

She had already pulled on her jacket and picked up her handbag without being aware of doing so. As she hurried through the downstairs foyer, she told the receptionist quickly, ‘I’m … I’m just going to the airport to see a friend.’

Oh dear God, why had she looked at those statements? Why hadn’t she simply turned the other way? What was happening to her and to her life? Why did she have to discover these things about her parents that she would much rather have not had to know? Not even the silent threat of the police video cameras was enough to prevent her from speeding as she drove towards the airport, overtaking other vehicles with an uncharacteristic recklessness, terrified that she would somehow miss seeing Caspar. She had to see him … she had to …

The airport had changed since her last visit, expanded into a vast complex that had her gritting her teeth as she hunted frantically for a parking space and then abandoned her car half in and half out of it. She locked the door and started to run towards the departures lounge, praying that Caspar would not already have been called through for his flight.

The escalator taking her down into the departures lounge was packed and she fidgeted nervously as it progressed slowly, tortuously, into the hall itself. Suddenly she caught sight of Caspar’s familiar back and froze.

The urge to call out to him, even though she knew he wouldn’t hear, was so strong that she had to bite the inside of her mouth to stop from doing it. He was, she realised, talking to someone. He moved and she was able to see who it was.

Hillary.

The shock rocketed all the way through her body—the sudden sickening sensation of the blood draining from her head inducing a feeling of faintness, the nauseous lurch of her stomach, the weak shakiness of her legs.

Hillary. What was she doing with Caspar?

As Olivia watched them, Hillary reached up and whispered something in Caspar’s ear. He turned to smile at her and Olivia’s heart turned over inside her chest. Hillary moved her head and started to kiss Caspar, her body moving subtly closer to his. Caspar had his hand on her shoulder.

Olivia thought for a moment that she was actually going to faint. Disbelief, anguish and hot, furious anger all combined to produce a pain like nothing she had ever previously experienced.

Was this why he had ended their relationship? Not, as he had accused her, because he doubted the strength of her feelings but because his own for her had changed. Because he no longer loved her, wanted her. Because of Hillary. Hillary who, like him, was an American. Hillary who, like him, thought nothing of the ties and responsibilities of being part of a family, the duties … Hillary who could walk away from her children and her husband just as he could walk away from her. But if he thought that in Hillary he had found someone who would put him first, he was very, very wrong, Olivia decided savagely. Hillary was the kind of woman who would never put anyone other than herself first.

She was down in the departures lounge now but she didn’t waste any time in going over to Caspar. Instead she headed straight for the exit.

Caspar. Her lover. Her refuge … her sanctuary … She started to laugh bitterly.

‘… and you needn’t worry about work, David, because Olivia is going to stay on and help out at the office and—’

‘No!’

Tiggy looked nervously at Jon, appealing silently to him for help as David interrupted her. Jon had offered to wait outside whilst she went in to see her husband alone, but Tiggy had begged him to go with her.

She was uncomfortable and ill at ease when she was with David, Jon had noticed, but then he suspected that very few people would have not found the battery of technical equipment that had originally surrounded his brother when he was in the intensive care unit intimidating and they had been warned that David must not become upset or overexcited, which he quite plainly was now.

‘It’s all right, David,’ he soothed his brother as he discreetly rang for the nurse, mentally cursing himself for not having warned Tiggy not to mention the fact that Olivia was helping out at the practice.

Ten minutes later after the nurse had shown them out of David’s room, having first firmly reassured a tearful Tiggy that David was not about to suffer a second heart attack but that he did need to ‘rest’, Tiggy flung herself into Jon’s arms.

‘Oh, Jon, I’m so frightened,’ she wept. ‘They keep saying that David will soon be able to come home, but I’m afraid that if he does …’

‘Don’t upset yourself,’ Jon comforted her. ‘I’m sure the doctors won’t allow David to leave here until they’re sure he’s well enough to do so.’

‘He just doesn’t seem the same any more,’ Tiggy persisted weepily. ‘Why was he so angry about Olivia?’

‘He’s probably upset at the thought of her disrupting her own career plans,’ Jon fibbed. ‘Don’t let it upset you. That won’t do either you or David any good.’

‘Oh, Jon, you’re so understanding. Jenny is so lucky to have you,’ Tiggy sighed as she nestled close to him. ‘I used to tell David that he should watch his weight. You’re much much fitter….’ She lifted her head from his shoulder and reached up to touch his hair, telling him coyly, ‘Why don’t you try a different haircut, something more modern. It would suit you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Jon replied, laughing, recalling the hairstyles favoured by his younger son and his friends. Even so, it was flattering to receive Tiggy’s compliments and her interest. Jenny would certainly never have said anything like that to him, but then Jenny had never been the type to think of flattering a man.

‘Oh, Jon—’ Tiggy’s mouth trembled pitifully as she tried to smile ‘—will you think me very dreadful if I say that recently I’ve been feeling that I married the wrong brother?’

Jon had to swallow hard as he hugged her. She aroused in him the same kind of emotions he had felt on first holding each of his newborn children. Only with Tiggy there was an extra ingredient, a sensuality, a sexuality—a charge that left him feeling both elated and ashamed.

Jenny was his wife and Tiggy was David’s and what worse kind of betrayal could there be than for him to covet his twin’s wife?

‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ Tiggy was whispering to him. ‘Can’t we go somewhere …?’

‘I really ought to get back to the office …’ Jon began, but Tiggy clung tightly to his arm.

‘We could have lunch. Everyone has to have a lunch-hour. Please, Jon,’ she pleaded, ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’

As his plane started to climb into the surprisingly blue Manchester sky, Caspar stared bleakly through the window. Only now could he acknowledge that, illogical though it was, a part of him had gone on expecting, hoping, right until the last call for his flight to London, that Olivia would appear.

And yet so strong was the hold of the angry, jealous child within him that even knowing that, he had not been able to allow himself to walk over to a telephone and call her.

If she had loved him enough, then she would automatically have put him, his needs, his desires, his wishes, first; so rang the stubborn child’s voice within him.

Only she had not … did not. Think how you would feel in her shoes, how you would behave; how you would react, given that kind of ultimatum, the analytical adult voice of his grown-up self demanded. Would you give in to that kind of emotional blackmail?

Would you want a relationship with the kind of person who wielded it?

Tiredly he pushed his hand into his hair. It would probably never have worked anyway; Olivia would have needed to retrain to be able to work back home. Lawyers there did not command the same kind of respect from the community that they did in Britain. The whole system was different, more political, more hard-nosed, and Olivia, despite her academic intelligence and ability, had a certain feminine softness about her that he—and, he suspected, other men, too—found subconsciously alluring. Because men liked women to be vulnerable?

He moved irritably in his seat. She might be softhearted but she sure as hell could be stubborn, as well. Yet in her shoes wouldn’t he want to prove the doubting Thomases amongst her own family wrong, to prove that she could do the job as well and indeed better than any of them? Wouldn’t that have been a challenge he’d have found impossible to resist? So why expect Olivia to resist it?

She had caught him off guard last night. He had never had any intention of having dinner with Hillary. It had been obvious virtually from the first moment they had met that she was looking for a way to justify leaving her marriage and someone to support her in that decision. As a fellow American and someone like her who was outside the family, it was only natural that she should turn to him, but in listening to her, there was no doubt that he had placed himself in a highly invidious position. Olivia had already made it plain that she supported Saul, but by the time he had run into Hillary last night, he had been almost glad of an opportunity to widen the rift between Olivia and himself. Well, he had certainly found it and meeting Hillary by chance at the airport this morning had not been particularly welcome.

It was just as well that her family lived out on the West Coast, making any future contact between them highly unlikely. He still had a few days before he actually left the country, he comforted himself as his plane started to circle Heathrow. Time enough yet for Olivia to contact him … or for him to contact her.

There was no going back now, Olivia acknowledged, no, not even if she wanted to. What she had seen at the airport had convinced her of that. Their quarrel, the reasons for it, the events leading up to it, she could understand if she divorced herself from her own emotions and studied the situation dispassionately. This didn’t mean to say that she felt she was in any way in the wrong, simply that there were realistically strong arguments for both Caspar and herself to feel aggrieved and angry, but the speed with which Caspar had quite obviously replaced her in his life—and in his bed, too, judging from the way Hillary had been draping herself all over him—no, that could not be forgiven or understood. That was treachery, betrayal on a grand scale. As a family, they seemed destined to suffer badly from it, both as the betrayed and the betrayer, she reflected soberly as she drove back to the office.

Well, she knew what she had to do. There was no avoiding the issue now, no escape, no cowardly walking away…. And the first person she’d have to tackle had to be her uncle Jon, and after that … Her hands were shaking as she locked the door of her car.

Haslewich was a small town and her grandfather a very upright and proud man. She dared not think what it would do to him when word got round about what her father had done. The whole family would be affected by it, each and every one of them tainted by it. The bile rose in her throat, sour tasting and heavy.

Jon was in his office when Olivia walked in. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said without preamble.

‘What is it?’ he asked her after he had waved her into a chair. ‘Have you changed your mind, decided to go to America with Caspar after all? If you have, don’t worry—’

‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Olivia interrupted him quietly. ‘I wanted to, but I discovered that I’d left it too late.’

When she didn’t elaborate Jon shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

‘It’s all right, Uncle Jon,’ Olivia told him gently, ‘I know now why you didn’t want me working here.’

She could see Jon physically stiffening as she spoke and she could see, as well, the way his glance strayed betrayingly to the place on his desk where he had left those incriminating bank statements. He had put them away now as well as the file.

‘I know what Dad’s been doing,’ Olivia pressed on firmly. ‘About the money he’s taken, stolen from Jemima Harding’s trust fund. When did you find out what was going on?’

For a moment she thought that he was going to attempt to deny the whole thing. He took a deep breath, paused and then walked over to the window before saying tiredly, ‘I’ve been suspicious for a while, but stupidly, I suppose, with hindsight … I didn’t want to … I thought that perhaps … You mustn’t judge your father too harshly, Olivia,’ he told her. ‘God knows what kind of pressure he must have been under. I only wish …’ He stopped and shook his head.

‘Oh, Uncle Jon, how could he?’ Olivia demanded, suddenly giving way to her emotions, too wound up to keep still she started to pace the floor. ‘How could he do something like that …?’

‘I don’t think he ever meant things to go so far,’ Jon tried to comfort her. ‘I imagine that he just meant to borrow the money at first, that he fully intended to pay it back, but as things stood—’

‘He couldn’t do it and so instead he just borrowed more,’ Olivia interrupted bitterly. ‘Only he wasn’t borrowing it at all, was he, Uncle Jon? He was stealing it,’ she retorted sharply. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

Jon winced as he listened to her. He felt so guilty—as much to blame as David himself. He should never have allowed David to have so much control over such a vulnerable client, especially not when he knew … But that was all in the past and he had sworn as David’s brother, his twin, sworn on the Bible to his father that the one unfortunate mistake of David’s—that small silly bit of foolishness when David was in London—was something that would never again be mentioned between them. David had escaped a formal charge then because no one, least of all the important client he had been involved with, wanted it to become public knowledge that a junior, as yet unqualified barrister, had almost got away with swindling him out of a considerable sum of money.

Instead the whole affair had been hushed up. David hadn’t actually spent any of the money; that had been repaid. He had been dismissed from chambers and David himself had sworn tearfully to both his father and to Jon himself that he would never be tempted to do such an idiotic thing again. It had simply been the pressure of the way he was living, the crowd he was running with, the fact that Tiggy was pregnant, that had led him into such temptation in the first place. He had never really intended to steal the money, simply to use it, borrow it, until his allowance came through, that was all.

Ben, of course, had to believe him, accept his excuses and his remorse, because to do otherwise would have meant that he had to accept that David was not what he had always so proudly believed him to be. And Jon had accepted the vow of silence imposed on him by Ben because, well, because David was his brother and he had grown used to always shielding and protecting him, helping to maintain the fiction that he was the character their father had established for his favourite son. Who was really to blame if David found maintaining the burden of that character too difficult? David or Ben? And who, after all, was he to sit in judgement on the brother he had been brought up to revere?

Over the years he had done his best to be careful about exposing David to any kind of temptation, but then he had perhaps started to become overconfident, to relax a little too much. He had avoided seeing what was happening because he hadn’t wanted to see it, and because of that laxness …

The burden of the way he had turned his back on his responsibility, the way he had let not just David but Ben, as well, and yes, Olivia and all the others down, too, weighed unbearably heavily on his shoulders.

David had, of course, escaped from his burden of responsibility just as he always escaped or downright avoided it; after all, Jon wasn’t going to take the risk of accusing him now with fraud when to do so could bring on a second and potentially fatal heart attack. But Jon did not like admitting to such thoughts and so he quickly pushed them to the back of his mind. They were not the kind of thoughts he had been brought up to harbour about his brother.

‘Uncle Jon, what are we going to do?’ Olivia asked him huskily. ‘There’s no way that the money can be repaid and even if it could …’ She spread her hands helplessly. ‘He’s guilty of theft … and fraud … and of professional misconduct of the worst possible kind.’

As he listened to his niece and heard the anguish in her voice, Jon forbore to remind her that her father had never qualified either as a barrister or a solicitor and therefore the question of professional misconduct at least did not arise, or at least not in the sense that she meant.

‘It will kill Gramps,’ she whispered, ‘and this …’ She lifted her hand to indicate their surroundings. ‘No one will … It could destroy all of us … the whole family.’

Jon couldn’t deny it. Who would want to hire a firm of solicitors in which one of the partners had been convicted of fraud? The Crighton name, of which his father was so chauvinistically proud, would be ruined. There was nowhere so comfortable and safe as a small town, and nowhere so cruel once you had broken its moral laws, transgressed its ethical boundaries. And the legal world was in many ways very similar to a small town; gossip spread fast and lethally through it. Only the fact that the only other person apart from the client to know about David’s earlier transgression had been felled by a stroke within days of having confronted David had prevented the news of that transgression from spreading. Jon was sure of it.

But this time the truth couldn’t be hidden. Jemima Harding was eighty-nine and in poor health; she couldn’t live for ever and sooner or later—probably sooner—someone was going to start questioning the disappearance of that two million pounds from her accounts.

‘There isn’t anything we can do,’ Jon told her heavily, and for the first time as she looked into his eyes Olivia saw just how great a burden her father had placed on his twin brother.

‘Someone will have to tell Jemima Harding … and the bank … and—’

‘Yes,’ Jon agreed. ‘I’ve already made an appointment to see her accountants,’ he said quietly. ‘I know the senior partner reasonably well.’

They looked at one another in heavy silence. Jon had no other option open to him, Olivia realised. If he withheld the fact that he knew of David’s fraud and did not act upon it, technically he would be as guilty as her father, just as she would be herself.

‘Would you like me to come with you … when you see the accountant?’ she offered.

Jon gave her a ruefully tender smile. ‘No,’ he replied gently. ‘It would be best if no one other than ourselves knew that we’ve had this conversation. In fact, it would be best if we had not had it,’ he added firmly.

‘Oh, Uncle Jon.’ Olivia shook her head as she went over and hugged him swiftly. ‘You always put other people first. You always want to protect them.’

As he returned her embrace, Jon reflected guiltily that she was wrong. He hadn’t thought about protecting Jenny last night when he’d been holding Tiggy in his arms. Why had he done it? He didn’t know what was happening to him. Increasingly over the past few months he had discovered aspects of his character that bewildered and sometimes shocked him. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing an unfamiliar reflection, turning a corner of a well-known street and seeing a totally unknown view, an experience that was both unsettling and alarming.

Lying in bed at night next to Jenny, unable to sleep, he sometimes found himself worrying, questioning where they were going, and even more disturbing, why they should bother going on at all.

Their children would soon no longer really need them. Their marriage. Their lives together had become predictable and routine. But where once he had actually found its steadiness and sameness a comforting security, just recently it had felt more like a prison. He was fifty years old and it was as though he had suddenly woken up to the reality of life itself and seen for the first time how much he had missed out on. Realised how many times he had not done things. The chaotic turmoil of his own thoughts left him feeling confused and agitated; the intensity of his emotions—new emotions many of them—shocked him.

It was almost six months since he had first begun to suspect what David was doing, from a chance remark by their bank manager that David and Tiggy were very fortunate to inherit such a substantial fund of money from her parents. Since he knew that Tiggy’s parents were both still alive and lived in comfortable but very modest circumstances on the South coast, his suspicions had immediately been alerted.

He had tried to discuss the subject with David, but typically his brother had fobbed him off, initially avoiding the issue and then claiming that their bank manager must have misunderstood.

But Jon had not believed him. He closed his eyes briefly. The knowledge that he doubted his brother’s word, his probity, his honesty, had caused him many sleepless nights as he swung from feeling guilty at his own suspicions to fearing that they might be true, his pain, misery, anger and hopelessness accompanying the sense of loss and loneliness.

For the first time in his life, he was forced to confront the truth. David, his brother, his twin, was a liar and a thief. The anger that had filled him, the sense of betrayal and resentment, had been like a flood-tide sweeping through his emotions and his beliefs, destroying whole segments of the person he had always thought himself as being, leaving him stranded in a no man’s land of confusion and doubt, knowing only that now he had a desperate need to sever himself from the role of his brother’s most loyal supporter.

In place of the loyalty and love he had been taught to feel for David, he now felt a huge weight of unexpressed and inexpressible anger, not just against David and his father, he acknowledged tiredly, but against virtually everyone, including himself.

Only Tiggy with her vulnerability, her helplessness, her neediness, seemed able to reach the old tender emotions and ready compassion that had once been the benchmark of his whole personality. A part of him longed, yearned, to be able to tell Jenny how he felt, to be able to share his confusion, his anger, his sense of self-loss and pain with her, but he was afraid to do so, fearing not just her judgement of him but also his being forced to judge himself.

In the final analysis, no matter what his criminal actions, David was still his brother and he was betraying him by revealing what he had done and, more importantly in his own heart, by being unable any longer to go on loving him.

He glanced at his watch and told Olivia quietly, ‘It’s gone six. You go. Your mother doesn’t like being left on her own.’

‘She’s probably gone shopping,’ Olivia said, trying to smile, but then, as she realised where the money had come from for her mother’s compulsive shopping trips, her face crumpled.

Why … why … why hadn’t she gone with Caspar as they had planned? If she had … if she had, nothing would have changed, except that Jon would have been left to carry the burden of her father’s dishonesty by himself, she reminded herself sternly. The least she could do as her father’s daughter, her parents’ daughter, was to be here to share that burden with him.

As he watched Olivia leave, Jon acknowledged sombrely that whilst he had no clear idea yet what exactly it was he wanted to do with the rest of his life, he knew that it could no longer continue as it had. More than anything else, he needed time and space to think. Time away from Jenny’s sad, reproachful eyes and from the knowledge that lay between them. Perhaps with hindsight, it would have been better for them not to have married in the first place. Which was the more cowardly act? To stay in a marriage simply because it was there or to admit the truth and face up to reality, as he had been forced to admit the truth about David.

There was an estate agent’s on the opposite side of the square. He had noticed absently when passing it that one window was devoted to properties to let….