When she had put down the phone, Cathy wrote a letter to her friend Bella, retailing some of the latest gossip about other old schoolfriends and all about her father’s forthcoming visit. At the back of her mind she kept thinking about that weird phonecall, though. Who was Anya? And who was the girl who made the call? The voice had seemed familiar but she couldn’t place the accent. It hadn’t been an American voice, or a British one. Russian?
She had visited Russia several times and knew a few Russians, and the voice hadn’t had the right intonation. East European, she thought later that morning – yes, it had been an East European voice. Her father had taken her to East Europe several times: to Poland, Hungary, both countries she had adored, and only two years ago to East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell. Her father had worked in the diplomatic service in East Europe; she had lived in Czechoslovakia with her parents as a small baby, she had been told, although she didn’t remember it. On their tour of East Europe, however, her father had chosen not to revisit the Czech Republic, although Prague was the city Cathy most longed to see.
Lots of her friends had been there. It was where American students headed in their thousands, the new Mecca, taking the place of Paris in the Twenties, when Americans saw that city as a soul city. Now it was Prague they rushed to, coming home babbling reverently of the incredibly ornate baroque architecture with its curling lines and gilding and cherubs in profusion, at the cobbled streets and art nouveau buildings, of sitting out at night drinking cheap wine out of pewter carafes in street cafés with paper tablecloths, talking about art and sex and poetry and sex and politics, and sex, while they listened with one ear to street musicians from the latest pop songs to latest pop songs to Mozart or medieval plain chant.
Cathy had felt she was being deprived, left out of a central experience of her peers; she had been furious with her father at the time, but he had pleaded lack of time.
‘I prefer Hungary and Poland. We’ll go there some other time.’
One day I’ll get there, she thought. I’ll ask Paul to take me. We could do a quick trip in the spring – that would probably be a great time of year to go. Spring is lovely in Europe, so much warmer than it is in the States.
That thought gave her a sudden visitation of childhoods at Easton in the snow; the sparkle of icy sunlight on a trackless white vista glimpsed from her bedroom window on winter mornings, woods decked out by crisp white snow which scrunched underfoot as you walked through it, and when you looked back you saw lines of footsteps following you, your own betraying imprint.
Icicles hung from branches, there was a polished gleam of frozen blue-grey lakes, through the trees. The lake surface was scratched and powdered by ducks, orange-beaked with black webbed feet, landing and taking off under a bright blue sky. If the ice seemed strong enough she was allowed to skate, wheeling and spinning on the lake, the steel runners on her skates cutting like diamond through the surface with a satisfying sound she could still hear.
She felt a homesick yearning at the memory. It was never that cold here. The English always made her laugh, complaining if a flake or two of snow came floating down the sky, stopping the buses and trains in their tracks, sending a collective shiver of dismay and incredulity through the whole of Britain – but then they had never felt the iron grip of a New England winter. What would they do if they woke up morning after morning to sub-zero temperatures and arctic blizzards and had to trek to work between head-high banks of snow? She had learnt to love it, and the mild green winters of England were too tame by comparison. Maybe instead of going to Prague she would get Paul to take her to Easton this winter? Then, frowning, she thought, I wonder why Dad doesn’t like Prague? He has never talked much about his time there, has he? If you bring the subject up he’s very slippery and evasive.
But then Dad was always secretive. She adored him, always had, but now and then she wondered if the man she knew was the whole man, and how much of him was hidden, like an iceberg in northern seas, beneath the surface.
Paul could be secretive, too – were all men so reluctant to talk about their past lives, before you met them? Paul said little about his home in France, his family, his childhood. He had been born in a remote village in the Auvergne, his parents were long dead and he had been an only child. He had no family left there. She kept badgering him to take her there, so that she could see where he had grown up, but Paul was reluctant – he hated the place, he said, all there was to see was a church and one dusty village street. He had spent his time there simply longing to get away.
In London, Paul Brougham spent the day in meetings. One of his companies was having trouble with shareholders who weren’t happy with the annual profits forecast. Of course, they had no clue that it could have been much worse – Paul and Freddy had carefully moved figures around, shifted money between companies, done a clever cosmetics job on the final figure. At the shareholders’ meeting that morning Paul got a rough ride. One or two of the shareholders were hard to shake off, asked far too many shrewd questions, but he managed to talk his way through the problems, promising better results the following year and a firm dividend, which was all the majority of those present wanted to hear.
Halfway through a long, complaining speech from one of the leading shareholders, Freddy leaned over and whispered in Paul’s ear, ‘Back row, third along . . . in tweeds . . . I know him, he’s with Salmond.’
Paul looked down at the pad in front of him, scribbled one word in capitals, NAME? Under cover of doing that he glanced through his drooping lashes at the back row. The man’s face meant nothing to him but he did not doubt Freddy for an instant.
Freddy wrote on the pad, ‘Bennett, accountant.’ He picked up the thick print-out of shareholders’ names which lay on the table, skimmed through it and stopped, pointing at the name he had been looking for. Bennett was a minor shareholder; he had held shares for only a few months.
Paul nodded, tore off the top sheet of his pad and pushed it into his pocket. So, Salmond had someone planted among the shareholders of this particular company? Was that repeated over all his companies?
He murmured to Freddy, turning his head away so that nobody in the hall could lipread what he said, ‘When you get back to the office, check all our companies to see how many of them have shareholders who might be planted by Salmond.’
Freddy nodded, frowning. Paul saw the alarm in his eyes. Freddy was constantly afraid that Nemesis would catch up with them.
‘Stop worrying,’ Paul told him affectionately.
Freddy sighed. ‘Wish I could.’
Paul rushed off from the shareholders’ meeting to a private meeting with the chairman of a company he was considering acquiring. Their negotiations had been going as merrily as a wedding bell until the news of Salmond’s take-over bid got out, and now the other board was in a state of panic. Before the lunch, which took place in Paul’s boardroom, with his private staff serving an elegant, sophisticated meal, Freddy produced a list of suspected Salmond plants among the shareholders of all the Brougham companies, which he gave privately to Paul.
‘You see? Salmond is dangerous. We’re in trouble.’
Giving him a reckless, dancing grin, Paul said, ‘We’ll chop him off at the knees, don’t worry. He isn’t going to win. We are.’
Telling yourself you’re going to win makes it far more likely that you will; he had known that from the start of his career, but Freddy had never had that clear-sighted confidence, and he didn’t have it now.
He turned that arrogant, assured smile on the chairman he was hoping to convince, and Freddy watched him with his usual mix of admiration and uneasiness. Paul always had won his battles – but Freddy was more worried than he had ever been before.
Later that afternoon, sitting at the boardroom table in wintry sunlight, Freddy still watched him with that same uncertainty. What was he thinking as he smiled at the Frenchwoman he had had an affair with last year? Freddy could never read Paul’s expressions.
He had never liked Chan
tal Rousseau himself; she never bothered to be charming to him – she had concentrated all her allure on Paul. Had she been in love with him? Or had she just hoped to marry him? She was certainly lovely – hair like midnight, eyes as dark as coals, and a figure that promised hot nights. But there was a secrecy in her, a touch of malice, a glitter of feline spite that Freddy found unpleasant.
‘We’ve done well for you and your investors over the past few years, Chantal, so I hope you’ll be sticking with us,’ Paul said softly, smiling into her eyes.
She smiled back. ‘I can’t give a cast-iron guarantee, Paul, you realize that? Not yet, anyway. I have to consult our board fully and see how high Salmond is prepared to go.’
The sunlight gleamed on her pale throat, and Paul was suddenly reminded of last night, of Cathy arching over him, her hair brushing his eyes, her breasts touching him. His body seemed to be boneless suddenly, he was melting with desire and tenderness.
Chantal Rousseau watched him intently, saw his throat move as he swallowed, his tongue touch his lower lip as if it was ash-dry.
At that second his secretary took a phone call and turned to whisper to him, ‘Senator Gowrie, sir. He insists on talking to you.’
Paul looked round the table. ‘Sorry, this won’t take long.’ He took the phone. ‘Hello, Senator, anything wrong?’
‘Hi, Paul, hope I’m not interrupting anything important, but . . . I’ve been thinking. The security at your place is really tight, isn’t it? I know your men have checked the estate over, but I think it might be wisest if I sent some men down now, before I arrive.’
Irritated, Paul said, ‘That might alarm Cathy. Don’t worry, nobody is going to get in or out of Arbory without the alarms going off. Keep to our arrangement, Don. Don’t worry so much, this is England, not the States. I don’t want Cathy getting into a panic. Sorry, sir, but I’m in the middle of a board meeting, I must get on . . . see you soon.’
He hung up and looked around the table. ‘Now, where were we?’
‘Yes, where were we?’ Chantal Rousseau asked.
One of the board said gloomily, ‘I get the impression Salmond has been planning this for months. He isn’t in any hurry to make a kill because he’s so damned sure he’s going to get us. When he has enough of a share base, he’ll offer some sort of share-for-share deal, rather than offering cash. He may have a good cash-flow, but I imagine he’d rather make a paper deal. It would make sense.’
‘We have to convince our shareholders it isn’t in their long-term interest to accept whatever he offers,’ Paul said. Why hadn’t he seen this coming long ago? But he knew why – because he had been too obsessed with Cathy to think of anything else. For years he had been steering his ship between dangerous rocks and getting away with it – but the voice of a siren had drawn him on to a fatal shore and he had a terrible feeling that he might never get off it again.
Sophie was so tired out by the long flight that she went to bed early that night and slept heavily. Next morning Steve and she had breakfast together downstairs in the hotel café; Sophie just had orange juice, coffee, rolls and a thin spreading of black cherry jam, which to her delight turned out to be from her own country, a Czech brand which she knew well, with thick real fruit embedded in every spoonful.
‘Try it! It’s delicious,’ she urged Steve, who looked amused, but took some with his toast.
‘Not bad,’ he agreed, picked up the small pot and read the name of the company, the address in the Czech Republic. ‘I could taste the fruit and it was thick stuff, not the thin tasteless stuff you sometimes get in these hotels.’
‘My mother makes her own jam, from fruit she grows herself – apples and blackberries . . . it’s even better than this!’
‘My mother makes her own preserves, too – we have rows of fruit bushes and fruit trees at the far end of the yard and every autumn my mother is busy in the kitchen filling jars and stacking the shelves in the pantry with them. She’s a terrific cook. When I was a kid I loved sandwiches made with a mix of jelly and peanut butter.’
She made an incredulous face. ‘Sounds weird. Peanut butter AND jam? Ugh.’
‘Well, I have to say I haven’t eaten it in years. I’d probably hate it now – our tastebuds change over the years, don’t they? Along with everything else.’
He picked up the notes she had made for him on the various English politicians who would be seeing Don Gowrie today. ‘What are you going to do today? Are you coming along with us? You’re invited to the dinner tonight, you’ll see Gowrie then, but if you want to hang about waiting for him to come out of meetings, you’re welcome to come with us.’
She shook her head. ‘I thought I might go around London. I enjoyed my time here and there are lots of places I want to see again. Unless you need me?’
‘No, I guess I don’t need you.’ He frowned at her, though. ‘Sophie, don’t get any crazy ideas, will you? Don’t do anything stupid. Remember, somebody tried to kill you in New York – keep an eye out for anyone following you, stay out of the subways, take taxis – I’ll give you some British money to pay for them, they can go on our expense sheet, don’t worry. I don’t want to hear you’ve been pushed under a London bus! Do your sight-seeing and shopping, whatever, but for God’s sake keep out of trouble.’
The camera crew appeared in the doorway, gesturing urgently, and Steve sighed. ‘Got to run. Now, be good, won’t you? Be sensible!’
‘OK, Steve,’ she meekly said, but she did not intend to be sensible. She couldn’t stay here in London, even though it might be safer not to go alone. Whatever her head might say, her heart spoke a different language. She had to get to Arbory House as soon as physically possible. She kept hearing Anya’s voice echoing in her head.
Her whole body was shivering with the realization that for the first time she had finally heard her sister speak. It was like hearing the tomb gape open and the angels singing.
She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it didn’t matter, anyway. She had loved that voice – so warm and confident, full of life and certainty – she had listened to it, and been so choked that she couldn’t say any of the things she wanted so desperately to say. All she could do was whisper, ‘Is that you, Anya?’ At that instant she had believed, somehow, that her sister would instinctively recognize her own real name and answer, would sense, too, that it was her own flesh and blood on the other end of the line.
But Anya had just sounded startled and puzzled. Sophie had been so upset that she had hung up. That had been stupid. What on earth must Anya have thought? Shouldering into her coat, she buttoned it up with ice-cold, trembling fingers. She was not sitting around in a hotel bedroom or waiting for Steve to come with her. She had come here to see her sister, and she didn’t care about the dangers she might be risking – come hell or high water she was going to see Anya and ask her to come and see their mother before she died.
There was a taxi rank right outside the main entrance of the hotel. Sophie headed for it, told the driver to take her to the main-line station from where she could get a train to Buckinghamshire.
He stared at her, scratching his chin. ‘Now is that St Pancras or Euston?’
‘I don’t know, I thought you would.’
‘Well, hop in and we’ll find you the right station.’
As they drove off he started talking on his mobile phone, checking with his base office which station she would want. Sophie listened, not noticing the taxi that took off immediately after her own, or the black car parked on the other side of the road which pulled out and slotted into the traffic behind that. She got out of the taxi ten minutes later and paid the driver before walking into the busy, echoing main-line terminal, quite unaware that she was being followed.
7
Paul Brougham liked to hear the wind howling like a banshee outside the double-glazed windows of his sixtieth-floor office above the gun-metal waters of the Thames. It made it impossible for him to forget the power of nature which the grey London streets spreadin
g in all directions shut out. Without the wind, up here it was easy to feel godlike, floating among the clouds high up above the earthbound common humanity. His offices were deeply carpeted, elegantly designed, air-conditioned, his private lift shot him up to this level in seconds. From the floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall he looked down on cars like toys and people like ants. Only the threat of the wind tugging at the walls and windows, trying to wrench them up and toss them away, reminded him that he, too, was human, and could be blown away. Paul had a superstitious streak; he was afraid of hubris, of losing touch with reality and being destroyed by it.
That morning, though, he was too absorbed in work; absorbed – and humming with the energy of someone under threat. Adrenalin was running high inside him. Salmond was on his tail and he had to shake him off somehow. He still didn’t quite know how.
Running his eye down a balance sheet, he listened intently to his chief accountant. He could have sung Freddy’s song for him; there was nothing Paul did not know about the financial status of his companies, but sometimes when he listened to Freddy’s slow, careful expositions it helped to clear his mind and show him a way through a tangled problem.
‘I’m sorry, but it can’t be done,’ Freddy Levinson ended. He was a thin, grey-haired, stooping man with the expression of a solemn heron fishing in muddy waters, which they frequently had during the twenty-odd years they had worked together.
They had met in 1972 when they both worked for a printing firm in Buckinghamshire which owned a small handful of magazines and local newspapers. The chairman and managing director, William Wood, had inherited the company from his father. A methodical, unadventurous man, trained by his father to follow in his footsteps, Wood had run his company exactly as his father had ordained.
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