by Penny Jordan
‘I trained as a surgeon because I wanted to help other people. Tom’s gone, but that’s still there…’
And Jake had known that she was subtly trying to tell him that it was time he turned his back on the past and went on with his own life.
But he wasn’t Annie; he didn’t have her skills, nor her ability to accept. For him life could not go on until he had come to terms with his need to avenge Beth’s death.
And so he allowed Annie to bully him and mother him, not really caring one way or the other where he was or what he did, only that somehow he had to find a way to reach out past his disabilities to search out and destroy those who had hurt Beth.
Annie, he recognised, was a crusader, a woman fiercely loyal to those she cared for, fiercely determined on his behalf that he must find a way to free himself from the past.
He was too drained to resent her interference as he might have done at another time, and so he gave in and let her think that the serenity of her Swiss mountains was an opiate, making him forget his determination to avenge Beth and to complete his original mission. Outwardly calm, inwardly he was already thinking… planning…
He was grateful to Annie, he knew she was doing her best to help, but her way… her acceptance… they were not for him. He needed more, and he intended to have it.
PART FOUR
Silver
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SILVER paused at the entrance to the dining-room of Blake’s Hotel, smiling grimly to herself.
The letters of introduction she had provided herself with had proved extremely useful. She had been in London for just under a week, making Anouska Hempel’s luxurious London hotel her headquarters, until such time as she was ready to move into her own apartment.
Her letters of introduction, half a dozen discreet recommendations from members of the very rich and very wealthy aristocrats worldwide who had known her father, and about whom she knew more than enough to convince the most dedicated of sceptics, had had the desired effect.
London society was more than willing to open its door to her; their enquiries had revealed only as much about her as Silver wanted them to know: that she was rich; that she was widowed and that she was well born. Already she was beginning to receive invitations to certain prestigious society events.
She had chosen to stay at Blake’s Hotel for a specific reason, that reason being the fact that Charles lunched his latest mistress there two or three times a week.
Throughout her time in Switzerland, Silver had received meticulously detailed reports of every aspect of Charles’s life. She knew these reports almost off by heart; they contained every fine detail of Charles’s life from the moment of her disappearance.
As she turned away from the door, and headed back to her room to change for lunch, she reflected briefly on the contents of those reports.
Once he had surfaced from his initial euphoria over her death and the fact that he would inherit from her, Charles must have found it quite a shock to discover that, not only could he not assume the title until she had been missing for a full seven years, but also that he couldn’t have access in any kind of way to any of the huge fortune her father had built up.
Even if he had been able to draw on the bank accounts he would have found them empty, and he would also have found that the late Earl’s bankers in Switzerland would have been remarkably unhelpful about providing him with any kind of explanation for the disappearance of such vast sums of money.
Silver knew that Charles had been advised to close up Rothwell, at least until such time as she was officially declared dead. The cost of running Rothwell and the estate had always been vast. The land did not produce sufficient income to pay the staff’s wages, nor to maintain Rothwell to the high standards of perfection her father had always demanded. The fresh flowers alone that filled Rothwell’s rooms created a bill that ran into many thousands of pounds per year. The insurance on Rothwell’s vast amount of rare paintings, furniture, carpets and objets d’art cost tens of thousands more, and the salaries for the staff—for her father had always believed in paying well—had run into the hundreds of thousands.
Had Charles had access to the income generated from the leases and rents of the London properties, he might have been able to manage, just… but he did not.
Against all advice, he had insisted not only on moving into Rothwell, but on living there in a far more lavish style than her father had ever adopted.
Before Geraldine Frances had been missing for a year, Charles had been having financial problems. She had read in her reports of his intention to sell Castle Kilrayne, and had smiled grimly to herself, knowing that it was impossible for Charles to dispose of one single asset that belonged to the earldom, until such time as she could legally be pronounced dead.
Four months later Charles had married the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of Britain’s wealthiest industrialists, a man whose fortune ran into tens of millions of pounds.
George Lewis had been totally against the marriage, but Catherine, his adored only child, had been pregnant. Charles loved her and she loved him, she had pleaded with her father, and so, very much against his better judgement, George Lewis had had to accept the marriage, knowing it would break his daughter’s heart if Charles deserted her.
He waited until after the ceremony to announce to Charles that he might have got his daughter, but he wasn’t getting his money.
Charles was furious. His one purpose in seducing and marrying Catherine Lewis had been to gain access to her father’s wealth. He had no love for her whatsoever; she was young, and pretty, but she was also timid and shy, and adored him so totally that he felt nothing but contempt for her.
She had been acceptable as his wife when he’d thought that in marrying her he would be financially supported by his father-in-law, but once George Lewis made it plain that he wasn’t going to provide Charles with a penny, Catherine ceased to become an asset and instead became a burden.
Charles told her cruelly that her father’s money was the only thing that had made him want to marry her, and that had he not been so desperately in need of that money there was no way he would have married a woman so far beneath him socially.
Although legally he could not adopt the title of earl, Charles did so whenever he could. Rothwell and its earldom, which he had so intensely longed for all his life, now that it was his was also more of a burden than an asset, but he refused to acknowledge as much.
Always jealous of James, he spent money he did not have, lavishly and desperately, but those people who had admired and venerated his uncle turned their backs on Charles, and that goaded him beyond all bearing.
He started blaming Catherine for the fact that there were certain social events, certain functions to which he was never invited.
The doors which had opened so warmly and willingly to James remained firmly closed against him. Desperate for money, Charles began surreptitiously increasing the price of the drugs he was supplying, jealously noting how small his own percentage was when compared with the vast profit made by others. It wouldn’t do any harm to hold back some of the money he was supposed to hand over to his supplier, and he would repay it once his father-in-law was persuaded to part with some of his wealth.
Only George Lewis proved to be obstinate, and Charles found that he was ‘borrowing’ more and more from his ‘employers’.
The day of reckoning would have to come, but he pushed it to the back of his mind… He needed that money and he needed it now.
It was all Geraldine Frances’s fault… Why the hell couldn’t she have overdosed or cut her throat and left him with a body? Then he wouldn’t be having these problems.
Catherine was five months into her pregnancy when she discovered that Charles was having an affair.
Charles, in fact, had never stopped having affairs; he had just been far more careful about making sure Catherine didn’t get to hear about them.
Now he didn’t care. When she faced him in her bedroom at Rothwell,
her face white and strained, her small, slender body swollen with their child, he laughed at her.
If she wanted his fidelity then her father could damn well pay for it, he told her ruthlessly; until that time he would live his life how he pleased.
As he made to walk past her Catherine clung to him, begging him to tell her that he loved her.
Charles didn’t love her; in fact, he was coming close to hating her almost as much as he had once hated Geraldine Frances. He pushed her away so savagely that she fell to the floor.
At the sight of her lying there weeping, something inside Charles snapped, her helplessness, her dependence on him, his own feeling of being trapped in a marriage that had not brought him what he wanted welled up inside him so that he reacted immediately to her vulnerability, punching her with his fist, not once but over and over again as she cried and screamed, finding a savage sexual pleasure in the sound and sight of her in pain, and a physical relief from his own tension.
When he left her she was unconscious, but he didn’t care. He drove straight to London where he spent the night with his mistress.
When he returned to Rothwell Catherine was gone, but George Lewis was waiting for him.
His daughter, he told Charles, was in hospital recovering not just from the beating he’d given her, but from the miscarriage of her child.
The moment she was well enough his daughter would be suing him for divorce, George Lewis told him.
When accused by George of beating his wife and causing a miscarriage, Charles denied it. He had wanted a child… a son… He needed that son for Rothwell. He refused to admit that he had attacked Catherine and said instead that she was to blame for what had happened… that she was responsible for the death of their child. George Lewis was furious.
He left vowing that Charles would not get away with what he had done to his daughter, but in his heart of hearts he knew there was little he could do. Catherine, shocked and distraught though she was, was refusing to divorce Charles on the grounds of physical cruelty, or to bring charges against him, and George had no wish to drag his only child through the trauma of such a potentially high-profile divorce case. Bitter though it made him, there was nothing he could do.
Affably Charles informed his father-in-law that the only way he would agree to a discreet divorce would be if George Lewis paid him substantially to do so.
George Lewis was outraged, but as his solicitor pointed out to him there was little he could do about that either. Catherine, still traumatised by Charles’s brutality, had made it plain that she had no intention of going back to him; she was, her doctors warned George, on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. The only way he could free her from her marriage was by giving way to Charles’s outrageous demands. It wasn’t the money so much as the fact that Charles was getting away scot-free but George knew he couldn’t make the truth public without hurting his daughter.
A sum of money was agreed upon, half to be paid when the discreet divorce proceedings commenced and the other half when they were finalised.
George Lewis wondered how long it would be before Charles was looking for another victim… another potentially rich wife…
Yes, Silver knew all this from her reports on Charles, but there was something she did not know… something that the careful gleaning of her information had not revealed.
Charles’s ‘employers’, the suppliers of the drugs that brought him in his only real source of income, were also concerned with Charles’s affairs.
They were not, as he imagined, unaware of his misuse of their funds, and in an anonymous building in a run-down, unfashionable part of London two people were sitting either side of a table debating on what course of action they should take.
‘I say we should treat him just as we would any other pusher who cheats on us. It keeps the rest in order, after all. If they thought someone else had got away with it…’
‘I’m not talking about letting him get away with it,’ the other corrected. ‘Of course we must punish him… but there are other ways… he’s very valuable to us…’
‘Someone else could take over his business…’
‘Not as successfully. Think about it… when he inherits the earldom…’
‘When…’
‘To all intents and purposes it’s his now, but I’m not talking purely about the fact that he’s one of our most productive suppliers. He owns a castle… it’s in Ireland… on the coast. It’s lonely and remote and the locals there have a long history of doing the odd bit of smuggling… who’s going to be suspicious if the Earl of Rethwell buys himself a high-powered fishing-boat for the use of his friends and guests?’
‘You think he’ll agree?’
There was a small silence and then a grin. ‘He isn’t going to have much choice… Not if we make sure he has enough rope to hang himself on now. That’s why I’m suggesting we turn a blind eye to what’s going on at the moment… of course, if it gets out of hand…’
‘I’ll have to put it to el presidente. He may not wish…’
‘He does, I’ve already checked. Come on, you know we’ve been looking for a way to bring in large supplies safely and economically… We’ve got the market for it here. My pushers are among the best there are. I choose them very carefully. There isn’t a school within a fifty-mile radius of London I’m not supplying; there isn’t a college or a university where my people aren’t on hand.’
Another silence and then a grudging, ‘Yes, you’ve built up a good organisation here, but I think you overreach yourself. I have already told el presidente what I think, and that is that there should be another appointed to this country to share the burden with you… With two of you here… one to take care of the suppliers and the other in charge of the importation…’
‘There is no need… I can handle both ends. Haven’t I proved that already…? Who was it who tipped you off about that agent, Fitton? Your people were completely deceived…’
‘He is not important now. When el presidente took over the organisation from his cousin, Ortuga, Fitton was injured… blinded. He is no danger to us now…’
‘No, but he could have been if I had not seen the danger and alerted you. Leave Charles to me. He will be more valuable to us yet, I assure you…’
‘Take care you do not bite off more than you can chew, my friend…’
He stood up, glancing at his watch. ‘My flight leaves in two hours and I must not delay. Remember, just as you care for your people as though they were your children, so el presidente cares for you. He values you highly…’
‘I am grateful to him…’
They left the building separately and went their different ways.
Upstairs in her room Silver checked her appearance. Until she had made contact with Charles she intended to stay here at Blake’s, despite the fact that she had an elegant and very expensive apartment waiting for her in Knightsbridge; the interior designer had presented her with a bill that ran into six figures and she had paid it without even inspecting the work. She had chosen Caroline Coleman to carry out the refurbishing of the apartment’s interior, having discovered, again from her agents’ discreet enquiries, that she had been chosen to work on the new home of one of the Royal couples, and that being able to claim her as the designer of her apartment would add an extra lustre to her new persona.
Her brief to the designers had been to create an environment for a woman with a very sensual appetite; a rich woman who was female rather than feminine, subtle rather than clever, indulgent rather than intelligent; and she had purposefully chosen a designer who was well known for completing her commissions right down to supplying fresh-cut flowers, food in the fridge and magazines on all the tables, small touches that made a place looked lived-in and permanent.
All the clothes she had bought in Paris had been picked to reinforce the image she had chosen for herself; and she had been clever, buying not just new season’s stock, but scouring the second-hand shops for clothes from one and even two seasons back
; things that she could produce as ‘old favourite’ clothes for the woman who had led the kind of life she was purported to have led.
She would have had a governess as a boarding school would be too risky. It would have had to be one of the better-known ones, in order to establish her, and she didn’t want to run the risk of meeting someone whom she might have been supposed to have known. Besides, a governess hinted at a sheltered, almost mysterious upbringing, with overtones of Continental royalty.
Heads turned discreetly as she walked into the dining-room.
She was wearing a Chanel outfit, stark black warmed with pink, the skirt of her suit very straight and short, ending just above the knee.
Beneath the jacket she was wearing a black silk camisole, but beneath the skirt only sheer black seamless tights.
The maître d’ had long ago perfected the art of establishing the importance or otherwise of his diners, and she subdued a bitter smile as she was immediately shown to a small but very high-profile table, where she was seated with the maximum of attention and bravura.
The hat, which she had chosen deliberately, almost totally concealed her hair. She was lucky in being tall enough to carry off its wide brim, and she was well aware of the sharp looks of envy she was receiving from the other women diners, especially the woman seated with Charles.
She had seen them the moment she walked into the room, although no one watching her would have known that either of them meant anything to her. Her dismissive glance had swept over them with the same careless indifference with which she had surveyed the other diners.
Outwardly indifferent, inwardly she was shocked by the changes in Charles’s appearance; when had the lean tautness of his jaw become puffy… when had the smooth golden flesh of his face become discoloured by the unpleasant purple flush of the heavy drinker? When had the body she remembered as hard and lean started to betray the beginnings of disintegration?
Helplessly she compared the unhealthy slackness of Charles’s muscles with the taut fitness of Jake’s body, and then shivered imperceptibly, infuriated that Jake’s memory should dare to intrude now, when it surely had no place in her life… no excuse for being there. Jake was the past… a moment out of time which had come perilously close to getting out of hand; but that was all behind her now. She was facing the future… her future, and she intended to mould it to the form she wanted it to take.