Her stillness and silence surprised him. Had she taken in what he had been saying? He repeated, very gently, that her friend, Paul, was dead. Still she said nothing, her eyes fixed on his. He was puzzled by the absence of any reaction, so for a time he too sat in silence, holding both her small hands in his. Was her silence due to shock? Or was it fear of a future without the friend who had guided and protected her? Then he began again.
‘I know how close Paul was to you and how dear you were to him. You will miss him grievously and so shall we, but sadly we have to accept that he has gone, and you and Michael and I must carry on as best we can. We shall no longer have the advantage of his inspiration and leadership but I promise that Michael and I will do everything in our power to help and support you. We must not allow this terrible tragedy to stop us from winning for you what is rightfully yours.’
He was pleased with this little speech. He studied her face, her beautiful, dark face, and looked into her hazel eyes, still quite free of tears. He dropped his eyes to the flimsy dressing-gown above her nightdress barely covering her shoulders and breasts.
She turned her head away from him towards the small window in the narrow, shabby room. She’ll be thinking of Valerian, he thought. Perhaps now the hysterics will begin?
She was indeed thinking of Paul Valerian, remembering the scent of brandy and Gauloise cigarettes that had so nauseated her and which now she would never again have to endure. But she was also remembering times past, happy times in many cities, Istanbul, Berlin, Paris, when he had looked after her, helped her and, in his own way, worshipped her. He had been a good friend.
‘His passing’, she heard Willoughby say, ‘means that Michael and I will now work all the harder for you and I promise that we shall. We shall miss him, but he would have wanted you to go on even if he will not be beside you when you get what is yours, as I am certain that you will.’
It was true, she thought, Paul would have wanted her to go on. He had urged her on when she’d hesitated. He had told her what she must do. He had provided the money. Having got so far he would not want her to abandon it.
She turned her head back to Willoughby, who now spoke even more sadly and gently as he approached the real reason he had been so anxious to be the first to bring her the news.
‘What makes it so tragic is that only yesterday we were discussing an agreement between us. Paul understood that the costs of the claim would be great and would increase as litigation approached, and we were talking about how best we could share those costs; and when we had won, how we would share the winnings. He had insisted, although we were of course friends, that we must put our relationship on to a proper business footing so as to avoid any risk of any misunderstanding in the future. He was so sensible, so wise, and this is what we were engaged in doing just before he died.’
‘Where will he be buried?’ she asked abruptly, the first words she had spoken.
Willoughby thought for a moment. ‘There will have to be an inquest. There always has to be when a death has been –’ He was going to say ‘violent’, but he checked himself. ‘When death is due to an accident. Michael Stevens will look after it. He will deal with the Coroner’s office. As to burial, where do you think he would have liked to rest? Here or in Paris?’
She shook her head. ‘Whichever is quickest, that’s all I want.’
‘Stevens will arrange it. There is also the question of his belongings –’
‘He has none.’
‘He must have some, clothes, personal effects. Do you know of any relatives in France? He owned the club in Paris. There will be a will. Perhaps you –’
‘I want nothing,’ she burst out, pulling her hands away. ‘I want nothing of his.’
‘Of course. But where did he live in Paris?’
‘At the club, above the club.’
‘We’ll see to it that everything is done properly. There will be no need for you to worry.’ Then he went on more briskly. ‘But to return to what I was saying, when you feel you are ready for business, you and I and Michael Stevens must meet. Just the three of us, alas, no longer four, to settle the agreement Paul had in mind.’
She remembered Paul’s warnings. That Blake wanted to take her over and would cheat her. But what could she do? Who could help her? Greg? From the moment she’d cast eyes on Greg she’d been attracted to him, and their sudden love-making had given her a sense of fulfilment, a release from the tensions and anxieties of the past months. But could he take the place of Paul, the place which Willoughby Blake was now offering to fill?
‘Whatever happens,’ she heard him say, ‘we must do what Paul would have wished, and that is to press on.’ He stood up. ‘My dear,’ he said, looking at her very kindly, and she saw how handsome he looked with his bronzed face and silver hair, how prosperous in his silk, cream shirt and blue tie and well-cut suit. ‘Will you let me take you from here? I think it would be best for you to leave this place where you were with him. Come with me to the hotel in Kensington where I have taken rooms. You can be there with your grandmother who is flying from the Argentine. She is old. I have engaged a companion for her, a Mrs Campion. She is at the hotel already and I know she’d be happy to look after you as well.’ He looked around the room. ‘It will be much nicer at Kensington than here, more comfortable. And you will not be alone but with friends. I can send later for your things.’
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap. She couldn’t involve Greg. There would be too much explaining. And would he have the money? For a moment she thought of abandoning it, of running away. But where to go? There was only the old life in the clubs. Could she face a return to that after she had broken from it? No, she knew she had to go on, and if she was to go on, there was no alternative to Blake and Stevens.
‘I’ll come,’ she said. ‘I’d like to leave here.’
When she had dressed, she joined Willoughby in the foyer, not even bringing her small suitcase. He said he’d send for everything. The pinched receptionist was not at her desk. Willoughby had seen to that. He had laid out more money and told the woman about the accident and that Mr Valerian was dead. His lawyer would come later to look after everything, settle the bill, collect the belongings.
Willoughby led Fleur to his car. At the large, opulent Kensington Park Hotel, Mrs Campion settled her in bed in a bright, airy room, so very different from the drab little room she had just left. She brought her some pills. ‘You’ll be glad of these. They will help you get over the shock.’
She drew the curtains and left.
Fleur curled up in the bed. Poor Paul, poor drunken old Paul. I hope he didn’t suffer.
All that day and all the following night she dozed in the comfort of the great bed and the attentions of Mrs Campion. At some time, in the middle of the night, she thought her door opened and light flooded into the room. She thought she heard a voice say, ‘Is the black bitch in here?’ But it was probably a dream.
She slept long into the next morning. It was early afternoon when Willoughby came into her room and sat beside her bed.
‘How did you sleep?’
‘Very well. But I thought someone came into my room in the middle of the night.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sure not, unless it was Mrs Campion to see if you were all right. I expect you were dreaming. The pills Mrs Campion gave you were very strong. Now you must rest some more. Do not hesitate to ask if you need anything.’
He spoke gently and he made her feel safe. Before, she’d been wary of him. Now she knew she would have to rely on him – until it was over. When it was over, she’d go to Greg.
In the evening, Willoughby returned. ‘If you’re well enough, I’m afraid I must trouble you with a little business. First, your grandmother has arrived. She’s anxious to see you but she is exhausted after her long journey from South America and has gone to bed. Tomorrow you will meet. Next, Stevens has agreed to look after the inquest. When that is over, he thinks it better that the body should be taken to Paris.
He’s in touch with the assistant manager at the club. But he keeps insisting that as soon as you are well enough, we must put our relationship on a business basis. He keeps talking about cost. Expenses, he says, are mounting, especially the legal fees and the maintenance of you and your grandmother here in the hotel. He is right, but tiresome, like all lawyers. I told him you won’t be fit for business for a day or so and we can discuss it when you’re stronger.’
He rose and walked to the window. ‘There is, I’m afraid, something I should tell you about your grandmother.’ He turned and looked back to the bed. ‘She will be a very important witness, because she’s the one member of the family who is supporting you. Michael Stevens says her evidence will be vital. But she has a little problem. Probably because she’s lived so much alone, she does – well, she does like to drink, sometimes too much. So we must look after her.’
He walked from the window to the bed. Fleur, in her nightdress, was sitting up, the bedclothes thrown back, her arms around her knees. Willoughby could see her breasts. She knew he could, but she didn’t cover them. ‘I’m sure you’ll do what you can to help her.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s enough business for one day and I’m sorry, my dear, I have had to trouble you with it. Now you must rest. If there’s anything you want, anything at all, just tell Mrs Campion.’
He leaned over the bed and she looked up at him. He would like to kiss me, she thought.
‘I have one of my headaches,’ she said.
He took her hand. ‘Then be sure you rest and stay quiet.’
In the sitting-room of the suite, Willoughby said to Margaret Campion, ‘See how she is tomorrow. She must meet the Senora as soon as the old woman is in a fit state, and then in a few days, we must get her to Stevens.’
Next day Mrs Campion helped Fleur to get up. When she was dressed she went into the sitting-room where she was grabbed by a short, fat, painted old woman and buried in a great embrace. It was still morning, but over the scent Fleur got the whiff of alcohol. Mrs Campion stood discreetly at the far end of the room.
‘My darlink,’ the old woman began, ‘my little darlink, my Julio’s little baby whom I have never seen. Come, my darlink, come and sit with your old grandmamma and tell her all about yourself.’ She pulled Fleur down beside her on the sofa, still holding Fleur’s hands, and thrust her face into Fleur’s. ‘You are beautiful, my darlink, you are quite beautiful, such pretty eyes and hair – and not nearly as black as I expected.’ She kissed Fleur’s cheek. ‘I know we’re going to be friends, very, very good friends. And you are going to look after your poor old grandmamma for the rest of her poor old life.’
* * *
Only routine interest was shown in the inquest on the accidental death of Paul Valerian, a visitor from Paris. The autopsy had shown that he was full of alcohol. After the inquest the body was shipped home, where Jean, the assistant manager at Valerian’s club, made the arrangements for the burial. The club was mortgaged and heavily in debt and after the funeral expenses, there would be little left. But there was a will – and a wife, long separated from him, an elderly Polish woman who’d been a cleaner in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Jean’s lawyer had got in touch with her and she came to the funeral but stood apart from Jean and three others who had come from the club. They did not know the widow and ignored her.
There was, however, one other person at the burial, a stranger to all of them, a stout, neat little man, wearing a dark raincoat and black hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. He kept to the path some way from the grave, watching. When the coffin had been lowered and the earth poured on it and the mourners from the club had drifted away, he crossed the grass and approached the widow, raising his hat, telling her he was from London. When he expressed his condolences, she shrugged. He said he had known Mr Valerian in England, and after they had talked a little by the grave, he told her he had a taxi waiting and offered her a lift home. She accepted gratefully. On the way he suggested they have some coffee or tea, so the taxi dropped them at a café. Later, after a meal and some wine, he took her home.
* * *
A few days after the burial, Fleur, now settled into the suite of rooms in the Kensington hotel, was taken by Willoughby to Stevens’ office. There the formal, confidential agreement between the three was executed. In consideration of unlimited legal and representational support by Stevens and Co., including the cost of briefing counsel to appear at all stages in the hearing of her claim up to and including the trial and any appeal and any application to the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords; and for the advice and special arrangements made on her behalf to promote her claim and for her maintenance and an allowance for her personal needs provided by Willoughby Blake Associates, Fleur Caverel, the claimant to the Caverel estates and barony, agreed that all or any of the assets which she might receive arising from the prosecution of her claim were to be divided equally between herself, her lawyer Michael Stevens, and Mr Willoughby Blake. Willoughby, however, made a point of insisting that the house itself, Ravenscourt, apart from its contents, must be excluded. The house, he said, should be for the claimant alone. It was the home of her ancestors. He did not explain how it could be maintained on only a third of the revenue of the estate.
Back in the sitting-room at the hotel, he ordered champagne. The Senora declined the champagne and drank from a tumbler of what she said was water but which Mrs Campion knew was vodka. Fleur sat curled up on the sofa, sipping the wine, conscious that Willoughby was looking at her legs.
Willoughby raised his glass. ‘A toast,’ he said, ‘let us drink a toast to the claimant, the future Baroness Caverel of Ravenscourt.’ They all drank. ‘Very soon,’ he went on, ‘I shall have the honour of introducing the Caverel Claimant to the public.’ He bent and kissed Fleur’s hand. ‘Then, my dear, you will be famous. Later you will be rich.’
16
There were empty seats and Richard Jameson could have sat but he preferred to stand at the back where he could keep an eye on everybody and everything. He leaned against the wall, his arms folded, as still and motionless as ever, his eyes on the audience and, beyond them, on the figures on the stage.
His special charge was the Senora. It was he who had located her and it was he who had suggested his cousin as her companion, a Mrs Campion, whom the Senora had at first resented. But as Mrs Campion had discreetly helped over the supply of vodka, the Senora had accepted her. Now she stood in the wings unseen by the audience while the Senora sat behind a table on the dais under the lights, a tangle of dyed orange hair above beads and bangles and an electric blue dress cut low showing the wrinkled skin of her chest and arms. She kept swinging the beads round her neck, smiling and bowing, now and then patting the hand of Fleur who was seated beside her. The professional make-up artist Willoughby had brought to the hotel to prepare Fleur and the Senora had done as well as she could with the old woman but her work to the mouth had not remained unsmudged for long, for when she had been finished, the Senora had waddled off to her bedroom. At the studio, she had gone to the Ladies and returned bearing a glass of colourless liquid which she carried on to the stage with her. She had then called for a carafe, which certainly contained only water for it was brought to her by one of the attendants.
Although many of the chairs set out for the audience were unoccupied, Willoughby was content. ‘It’s quality that counts,’ he said. Representatives from each of the two best-selling daily tabloids and Sundays, stringers for Der Spiegel and Paris Match, and a pair from the Black Banner, a local weekly circulating in Hackney – Jameson had been sent to recruit the last. ‘You should come,’ he’d told them. ‘It’s a race thing.’ Willoughby himself had got the two-man crew from Channel 4 with a camera and a boom mike, which accounted for the lights under which the three on the platform were sitting. As they faced the audience, Willoughby, his silver hair neatly coifed, bronzed under his makeup, wearing his light grey suit and bright blue tie with a red carnation in his butt
onhole, was on the right. In the centre was Fleur, in a pale blouse which set off her chocolate skin, and a short black skirt. She wore no lipstick and no jewellery, not even ear-rings.
‘Vulnerable, a little bewildered,’ Willoughby had said, ‘that’s what we want.’
With her hands clasped on the table in front of her, Fleur made a striking contrast to the flamboyant and outrageous old woman on her left.
Two days earlier Willoughby had taken her to a photographer and ordered head and shoulder pictures, sepia, rather misty, old-fashioned pictures, and these he had distributed with the handout before the platform party had appeared.
Willoughby now began, not standing, talking easily, professionally, into the microphone, welcoming everyone, telling them they’d been asked here to meet Fleur Caverel and hear the extraordinary story of how a simple young woman had come to learn that she was the rightful heiress to one of the oldest titles in the British peerage.
‘Until a few weeks ago,’ Willoughby said, ‘this young woman…’ Here he took Fleur’s hand and looked at her but she kept her eyes lowered. ‘… this beautiful young lady believed she was the child of humble, elderly parents who had raised her in the countryside in South Carolina in the United States. But three months ago, in the office of an attorney in Charleston, she was handed a letter written by her real mother on her death-bed over twenty-five years before. The attorney told her that the old woman who she believed was her real mother was in fact her foster mother. From the letter she learnt that her name was not Sarah Wilson, but Fleur Caverel, the daughter of Julian Caverel, the elder son of the 15th Baron Caverel of Ravenscourt in the county of Wiltshire, in England.’
The Caverel Claim Page 8