Freddy was his accountant, Paul ran the office in the printing works, but neither of them had been allowed to initiate anything. Wood did not want any innovations, thank you, he said, the first time Paul went to him with an idea for an improvement in production. He wanted a job well done; safe, not sorry, was his business motto.
In 1973 Wood had a heart attack and died. His childless, middle-aged widow had been distraught. She had never taken any interest in the business, she had simply obeyed her husband and done as he wished; now she had no idea what to do. Paul went to see her after the funeral and had no trouble at all persuading her to let him take over her husband’s job. Mrs Wood, who was a well-preserved woman in her late fifties with a conservative dress sense, silvered blonde hair and a good figure, was very grateful to have someone to trust and rely on as she always had her husband. She handed over full control to Paul, and happily sank back into domestic oblivion, resuming her busy life of coffee-mornings, flower-arranging, lunches with her friends, charity work and shopping.
Paul waited a year, then went to see Mrs Wood with an excellent set of accounts, audited by the man who had always audited her husband’s books, a rather dull but famously honest local accountant.
‘We are doing very well, Mr Brougham,’ she delightedly said, looking only at the final profit because she did not understand accounts. ‘Well done. You must give yourself a rise!’
‘I think we could do better, Mrs Wood,’ he said, and began to explain his plans for expansion of the company, but she stopped him, shaking her head.
‘Please don’t explain figures to me, Mr Brougham, I never understand them.’
He eyed her indulgently. ‘Well, briefly, then, I can make you far more money, if you’ll trust me.’
She trusted him; she was not a clever woman in many ways, but in one sense she was very shrewd. She understood human nature and she instinctively trusted Paul, and was right to do so.
He began his new regime at once; using the company as collateral he borrowed money and began to expand.
It made Freddy’s head spin to look back down the years to the beginning. Their growth had been phenomenal; at almost every stage Freddy had said, ‘It can’t be done, Paul!’ and been proved wrong. They often had no cash in hand, and yet the business kept growing. Paul was a magician, a juggler. Even Freddy was never quite sure how he did what he did. The quickness of the hand deceived the eye. The small company had grown into a bigger one almost at once, then even bigger. Mrs Wood had died five years after her husband. She had no relatives at all, and left her shares to Paul, who had gone on to acquire most of the other shares. Now he headed a cleverly interwoven web of related companies which, together, made Paul one of the most powerful men in the media business, but with an American media company muscling in on their territory Freddy was afraid it was all going to come apart for them.
‘If we shed some of the local newspaper chains, we could raise money to improve our cash flow immediately,’ Paul suggested.
Until now, he had always refused to sell, had only wanted to acquire, even though that policy had meant that they often had to juggle accounts, moving them from one company to another on paper and giving Freddy nightmares.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Do I look as if I’m joking?’
Freddy glanced over the balance sheets again, scratching his chin. ‘Well, I’d better go over these again and see what I think we’ll be able to raise. But we’ll have to do this quietly, or we’ll start an avalanche. We don’t want people to suspect we’re having problems.’
‘They already do, Freddy, don’t be stupid. Everybody’s aware of Salmond breathing down our necks. Well, I want a lighter ship, and I want it fast.’
Salmond will think he’s got us on the run, if you start selling off bits of the company,’ protested Freddy.
‘He isn’t the target – our shareholders are. I want them to realize we’re moving heaven and earth to stop him. They must be reassured that we’re working hard for them. As for Salmond himself, we’ll hope to make him edgy. We don’t want him to think he’s going to have a walk-over, do we? I always believe in attacking back hard if you come under attack.’
The phone rang. Paul picked it up and snapped, ‘I thought I told you no phonecalls?’ Then his face changed. ‘Yes, put her through.’ Looking at Freddy he said, ‘My wife. OK, Freddy, get me an assessment of what we could raise and what you suggest we sell.’
Paul had been one of the most eligible bachelors in London for years. Every gossip columnist had been on his trail with stories about the various women in his life; but he had not seemed interested in getting married until he met Cathy Gowrie. Beautiful, intelligent, a good twenty years his junior, she was not only the daughter of a prominent American senator but she would inherit an enormous fortune one day.
‘Jammy bastard!’ had said a man who had once lost out in a boardroom battle with Paul, glaring at Freddy. ‘If I believed in the Devil I’d think Brougham had sold his soul to him. He never puts a foot wrong, does he? Money just showers into his lap. How does he do it, eh?’
Freddy had smiled and shaken his head without commenting. He rarely told anyone anything – that was one of the facets of his character that made him so valuable to Paul. He could be trusted implicitly; he was discreet and, Paul said, as clever as a bag full of ferrets.
Women, though, had envied Cathy Gowrie. The daughter of one of Paul’s titled directors said to Freddy furiously, ‘I’d kill for him, it’s no secret – and I tell you, Freddy, I could kill her, walking in and snatching him from under all our noses. She’s too young for him. He needs someone of his own age, not someone young enough to be his daughter.’
As for Chantal Rousseau’s reaction, she was better at hiding her feelings, but Freddy suspected she was still brooding over being dumped after Paul met Cathy.
Freddy had never really understood Paul, in spite of knowing him for years, and knowing him better than almost everyone else in the world. Watching him walking a tightrope made Freddy feel sick. He had some glimpses into what made Paul tick as far as business was concerned, but what made him tick where women were concerned was another matter.
But one thing Freddy was certain of – however brilliant a catch she might be, Paul had married Cathy solely because he was in love with her. Every time Freddy saw them together he was certain of that, and he envied him. Freddy had never felt the sort of sexual passion he could see between the two of them. It seemed to burn the air; the way they looked at each other made Freddy blush.
Any day now he expected to hear that Cathy was going to have a baby. Freddy had no wife or child. He had been married but his wife had left him for another man and Freddy hadn’t felt like repeating the experiment, although he was beginning to wish he had a child. He was often very lonely. He didn’t envy Paul his money, his power or his wife. But he would envy him the children Cathy would, no doubt, soon start to give him. What sort of father would Paul make? Indulgent, tender, caring, no doubt – but how much time would he ever spend with his family? He might be deeply in love with Cathy, but he still spent the giant’s share of his time at work; nothing had changed that. He didn’t know how lucky he was, thought Freddy, sighing. The lucky ones never did.
Don Gowrie was in a meeting when the message came through. His secretary, in the conference room they had been given for a temporary office, took the call on her mobile phone. The voice at the other end was guarded, cryptic.
‘Target on the move, by train. Heading for Buckinghamshire. We’re right behind. Instructions still the same?’
‘Until you’re told different. Just stay in place. But whatever you do, don’t lose her. Advise when she arrives.’
She couldn’t interrupt the senator’s discussions; the message would have to wait but he was going to get a shock when he heard where the girl was heading.
The meeting broke up half an hour later; Gowrie saw the British politicians to the door, shaking hands with each other vigorously, making fi
rm eye contact, smiling, remembering their first names.
‘Good to talk, John. See you again soon.’ He turned the smile on the next man. ‘A very useful exchange of views, Michael.’
His secretary hovered discreetly, watching the afternoon sunlight illuminate the faint beginning of stubble on his jaw, the shadow weariness under his eyes. In that light he looked his age, but Emily Sanderson felt the usual prickle of sensual excitement as she stared at the beautiful, strong hands moving so confidently. In a year he might be the most powerful man in the world, but in secret, in bed, she could make him groan and tremble, go on his knees and beg. The very thought of that made her shudder with pleasure. There was no aphrodisiac like power.
Before she met him she had had a couple of relationships, neither of them very satisfying. Emily was very clear-sighted, even about herself; she knew she wasn’t beautiful and her personality wasn’t the sort that made men flock around her the way they did around some women.
It didn’t bother her. She was ambitious and for that she needed independence, a freedom only earning her own money could give her. She didn’t want to marry and become some man’s unpaid slave. If she had had money to start with she might have gone in for politics herself, but she came from the wrong side of the tracks, quite literally, since her father had worked on the railway and the family had lived in a wood-frame shack down the line from the station where he worked. He was a large man with hard fists; he used them on his wife and child when he was angry and they did not get out of his way fast enough. They were Baptists, their home was always spotlessly clean, but cold and comfortless, and they believed in the Puritan work ethic. Emily helped her mother in the house from her earliest years. Although she was clever and her teachers begged her parents to let the girl go to college, they sharply said they couldn’t afford to keep her. Did the school think they were rich folks? So Emily got her first job aged sixteen working in the booking office of the local railway station.
She was allowed to take night-school classes in bookkeeping, typing and shorthand. She stayed in that first job a year, saving every cent left over after she paid her parents the sum they demanded for her keep. She never bought new clothes or make-up or perfume, none of the things her ex-schoolfriends found so necessary when they left school and started to earn their own money. At the end of the year she vanished, taking nothing with her because she had nothing worth taking.
In her bedroom she left a letter for her parents saying she wouldn’t be back. She never had been. She didn’t even know if they were still alive, and she didn’t care. She had shed them with all the tedium and unhappiness of her early years, putting it behind her and trying to forget. She had already decided to head for Washington, the centre of power, where around half the population worked for government; Washington was a one-industry town and she wanted to get to where the power lay.
She had enough money to pay for a month’s rent in a cheap boarding house, but she got a job the day after she arrived, working in a typing pool, joined the civil service, and within three years had her own tiny apartment and was earning good money.
For years she had hidden her sensuality behind the persona her work demanded: the sensible, capable, down-to-earth secretary who kept an office running smoothly and could be relied on, could be trusted absolutely. She made few friends, none of them close. She was too busy working. She had moved steadily up the career ladder until she got this job, when she was just twenty-four. She wanted Don Gowrie from the minute she saw him. He was the man she had been looking for – ambitious, clever and shrewd, a man headed for the top. She made it her business to know everything about him, his background, his wife’s delicate health, his pride in his daughter Cathy, and his other women, the secret ones nobody knew about.
A secretary often knew more than a wife ever did about a man’s secrets; within a very short time Emily had been familiar with all his expenses, business and personal, and knew he sometimes paid for the visits into a private apartment he kept in Washington and which few people, including Emily, ever visited.
She had dedicated her whole life to Don Gowrie from the start; she slowly became obsessed with him. She loved his looks, his deep, firm voice, the elegance of his clothes; he was always charming and courteous. He was what she knew her mother would have called ‘a real gentleman’. As if her mother knew anything about it!
But he had never seemed to notice her as a woman, until one night, some eight years ago, when they were away from Washington, travelling the rural routes so that Don could meet local politicians, make speeches, make friends. In backwoods Missouri the senator’s car had broken down and they had to spend a night in a cheap motel, just the two of them. There was nowhere to eat but a local cheap diner where they had huge steaks, fries and beer. Don ordered Budweiser for them both, and told her that the beer had first been brewed in Czechoslovakia, in a town called Budweiss, that when America began making European beers, one of those they chose to brew was a version of Budweiser.
‘How do you know all that?’ she had asked and he told her, then, about his years in the diplomatic, his time in East Europe.
It was the first personal conversation they had ever had; they had sat on in the diner, drinking beer, for a long time, then he drove back to the motel and walked her to her room, following her inside, letting the door slam behind him.
She remembered the way her legs had started to shake when he bent and kissed her mouth hard. This was how all her fantasies about him had started; she couldn’t believe they were coming true at last.
As he lifted his head a moment later she stepped away from him a little, and he flushed, thinking she was rejecting him.
‘Sorry,’ he had said. ‘I’m a little drunk, I guess,’ and began to turn back to the door only to stop dead, his lips parted in a silent intake of air as he saw her take off her glasses and drop them on a little table before beginning to undo her silk shirt.
She could still remember the heat inside her, the fast beating of a sensual drum in her veins. She hadn’t hurried, she had kept her eyes fixed on him, stripping slowly, with ritual movements, as if to music, dropping her clothes on the floor, lifting a languid hand to release her hair from the neat chignon, letting it flow down over her shoulders.
She had worn it long, in those days; she had changed her hairstyle to mislead people into believing her indifferent to men. That first night Don had stared, pupils wide and shiny, as if he was hypnotized by the body she unveiled for him – her round, firm breasts and smooth hips, her long legs and the dark curly hair between her thighs.
She had heard his thick breathing quicken as she put a hand out to his shirt and began to unbutton it. Neither of them said a word. He let her undress him; he let her make all the moves now. When she had stripped him they stood there, face to face, in silence, until she put her hands on his bare shoulders and pushed him down on to his knees.
Grabbing his hair, she thrust his head forward until his face was buried in the dark bush he hadn’t been able to stop staring at. While his tongue probed her she stroked his hair, her bare thighs brushing his face, huskily groaning, ‘Yes, there . . . good . . . that’s good . . .’
When she had been aroused to the right pitch, she grabbed him by the shoulders again and pushed him backwards on to the floor. She remembered his incredulous face staring up at her as she mounted him, her hot, moist body sucking him into it; the high-pitched cry he gave as she began fiercely riding him, driving herself up to a frenzy of pleasure. Don had helplessly writhed under her, abandoned to her. The violent explosion of passion was brief and shattering. Afterwards she remembered they had lain on the floor like fish out of water, gasping and shuddering.
Only afterwards did she realize that she had hit upon his own secret fantasies, the first woman who ever had, but maybe he had never admitted them openly even to himself? Don, like her, had had a Puritan upbringing. He found it hard to admit what he wanted, needed. He had been as conservative in his sexual encounters as he was in the rest o
f his life. That night she had been so aroused that she had driven for her own satisfaction and in dominating him had discovered what turned him on. From that moment on, she had the whip-hand in their relationship. As the years went by Don had become addicted to what she did to him in bed.
Watching him with these British politicians now, her mouth was dry. She fought to keep her expression cool, but triumph glittered like jagged glass behind her eyes.
He was hers; when he was president she would rule him and, through him, the whole of America, the whole of the world. The very fact that her dominion would be a secret made it all the more satisfying. She didn’t want anyone to know. She relished the shadowy nature of her power.
As the last man left and they were alone in the conference room, he turned towards her at last, one brow lifting in enquiry. Quietly she gave him the message and saw all the colour drain from his face.
‘She mustn’t reach Cathy,’ he muttered. ‘Why in God’s name is she still alive? She must not reach Cathy.’
Sophie had never been to this part of England before. She had a difficult journey, having to change trains and wait for over an hour before a local stopping train arrived to take her to her final destination. It had been a very slow train too; now she stood on the platform of a small local railway station in Buckinghamshire, in cool early afternoon sunlight, and listened as the train vanished down the lines and silence returned; a silence which gradually filled with other little sounds she had not heard at first. Birds called in the fields on either side of the station; from the bare, black-boughed trees, from the dark green hollies, the tangled hedges of blackthorn. The wind blew in the trees, bent the grasses in the fields, made the station sign rattle. Another passenger had got out here, a woman in a black leather jacket and trousers, who was ahead of her, vanishing out of the station.
Walking in Darkness Page 19