by Penny Jordan
No, this was a problem he must deal with himself. Quietly … discreetly … secretly. He grimaced over that last word. It reminded him too much of his father.
Secretly.
It left an acrid, sour taste in his mouth and shadowed his soul with bleakness.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I MUST say I’m a little surprised by your attitude, Saul.’
The voice, the smile were benign, almost avuncular. They were also, as Saul knew quite well, a complete deceit.
He said nothing, simply waiting.
‘Of course I realise that Dan Harper is a friend of yours,’ Sir Alex Davidson commented kindly, and then when Saul remained silent he added less kindly and very smoothly, ‘After all, weren’t you sleeping with his wife at one time?’
Saul hadn’t been, but he let the comment pass. He knew enough of his boss’s tactics by now to know how much Sir Alex enjoyed the feeling that he had touched a raw nerve; that he had succeeded in slipping his knife into an unprotected and vulnerable organ.
‘However, business is business, and it was your responsibility to me to see that the take-over of Harper and Sons went through smoothly and discreetly, and not instead to warn Harper that we intended to buy him out and then to strip his company of its assets, and to close it down after dismissing its entire staff. Which, unless I am mistaken, is exactly what you did do.’
Now Saul did speak, simply saying calmly, ‘A rather dramatic interpretation of events.’
His eyes were cold. He was a very formidable-looking man despite the fact that he was twenty-five years his boss’s junior, despite the fact that he was merely an employee in the company Sir Alex headed and owned. An employee whom Sir Alex had been grooming to take his place.
‘But you did warn Harper what was in the wind.’
‘I didn’t warn him about anything,’ Saul responded in a clipped voice. ‘I simply pointed out to him what might possibly happen if he sold out.’
‘Semantics,’ Sir Alex accused. He wasn’t smiling now and his voice most certainly wasn’t kind. ‘Absolute loyalty, that’s what I demand from my employees, Saul, and most especially from you. You are my most trusted employee … I pay you extremely well.’
Under his breath Saul murmured cynically to himself, ‘Caveat emptor,’ but there was self-contempt in the words as well as cynicism.
Sir Alex was still talking and hadn’t heard him.
‘As I said, I was very disappointed. However, something more important has cropped up now. I want you to go to Cheshire. There’s a company there called Carey Chemicals. I want it.’
‘Carey Chemicals?’
‘Mm.’ Sir Alex picked some papers off his desk. ‘A small one-man-band company … or at least it was. The man in charge died fairly recently. The company is in trouble, sinking fast, and all too likely to go under. We are going to perform a rescue operation.’
‘Really? Why?’ Saul asked him sardonically.
Sir Alex looked at him and then asked acidly, ‘Before I tell you, can I take it that you don’t have a close friend or a mistress working for them?’
Saul gave him a cold close-mouthed stare, which for some reason made Sir Alex’s own gaze waver slightly.
‘All right,’ he said testily, even though Saul hadn’t said anything. ‘Carey’s is a drug-producing company; not that they have produced anything remotely profitable for the last few decades. The widow who has inherited the business is bound to want to sell out.’
‘And you want to buy.’
‘At the right price.’
‘Why?’ Saul asked him.
‘Because a little bird has told me that the government is making plans to offer very generous, and I mean very generous incentives to British-owned drug companies that are prepared to invest in drug research. In turn, if those companies succeed in producing a marketable drug they will repay the government’s generosity by providing the National Health Service with their drugs at a lower than market price.’
‘Thus wiping out the benefit to the company of the government’s financial incentives,’ Saul said drily.
‘Well, there would always be the profit from overseas sales,’ Sir Alex pointed out, ‘but, in essence, yes.’
‘So why are you interested?’ Saul asked him.
‘Because if the research does not produce a marketable drug, the government cannot claw back any of its investment.’
‘Ah, yes, I think I begin to understand,’ Saul said. ‘You buy the company, fund what on the surface looks like a genuine research department, with very generous assistance from the government, of course, but, as we know, with the complexities of modern company finance, a good accountant can quite easily lose large, if not vast sums of money by moving it from one company to the other, and, if ultimately the research fails to produce any marketable results, well …’
Sir Alex smiled at him.
‘I’m relieved to see that your recent attack of conscience and friendship hasn’t totally atrophied your brain, Saul. There are several other companies worth investigating, but none quite as perfect as Carey’s. It is a very shorn little lamb, so to speak, and I’m very much afraid that without our protection it could all too easily fall prey to the ravages of some hungry wolf.’
‘And you want me to find out as much as I can about how vulnerable this lamb is and how cheaply we can acquire it.’
‘Yes. You can be our wolf in sheep’s clothing. A role for which you’re admirably equipped.’
A wolf; was that how the other man saw him, a predator who enjoyed the terror, the mindless blind panic his appearance created in others? Saul wondered acidly.
As he took the executive lift down to the ground floor, a line from one of Byron’s poems came into his mind.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.
The words, like the visual images it conjured up, disturbed him. He had been suffering far too many of these disturbances recently, of these unfamiliar attacks of conscience.
Of conscience or of rebellion—which? The thought flitted across his mind and was quickly dismissed. He had work to do.
The receptionist watched him as he walked past her desk. She sighed faintly to herself. He was one of the sexiest men she had ever seen. All the girls who worked for the Davidson Corporation thought so, and yet he never exhibited any interest in any of them. There was an austerity about him, a remoteness, that challenged her.
He would be a good lover, too, you could see that from the way he moved. She wondered if his body hair was as thick and black as that on his head.
His eyes were the most extraordinary shade of pale blue, his face hard-boned, like his body. There was a hunger about him, an energy, an anger almost, that stirred a frisson of sexual anticipation in her body.
Saul walked out of the building into the early summer sunshine. Cheshire. His sister, Christie, lived there.
Perhaps it was time that he visited her.
He would ring her this evening. He would have to ring Karen as well. It was over five weeks since he had last seen his children. He had had to cancel his last access visit. He frowned, his body tensing. He doubted that either his daughter or his son minded not seeing him. But he minded like hell. They were his children, for God’s sake. He remembered his own father, how close they had been.
Too close, Christie had once told him. He had accused her of being jealous and she had laughed at him. Theirs had been a turbulent relationship. They were alike in so many ways and yet so very different in their outlooks on life, so very, very different.
Again he felt the shadow of the malaise which seemed to be clouding his life, confusing and disturbing him. He, who had always seen his life’s objectives so clearly. And he had achieved them, hadn’t he? He had succeeded, fulfilled his promises to his father. So why did he feel this emptiness, this fear that somehow he had omitted something, neglected something, this hesitancy about reaching out for the trophy that was now so nearly within his grasp?
In another few years
Sir Alex would retire and Saul would take his place. It was what he had worked for … what he had planned for … what he had promised his father.
But was it what he wanted? He cursed under his breath. Why the hell did he have to have this attack of mid-life crisis now?
Saul strode out into the street, joining the crowds, joining them but not becoming a part of them, nor being absorbed by them. He wasn’t that kind of man. His contemporaries, his peers, envied him, he knew that, and why shouldn’t they? The financial Press praised him, acclaiming his astuteness, his shrewdness. In the years he had been with it he had taken the company Sir Alex had founded to the very top of its league.
If Sir Alex was the old-fashioned type of entrepreneur, a buccaneer almost, then Saul was the financial diplomat, the man who had turned the raw materials of Sir Alex’s company into the sleekly powerful thing it was today.
Through Saul its growth had been planned, controlled. When the recession came, Saul had been prepared, Saul had looked ahead, and where Saul went, others followed.
He was a pioneer, admired and envied, and now he was virtually throwing it all away, breaking his own rules, the rules laid down for him by his father.
Even he wasn’t sure why he had warned Dan Harper that Sir Alex wanted to take over his company. They were friends, it was true, but not close friends. Saul did not allow anyone to get close to him. Not any more.
Not men, nor women. Since the break-up of his marriage there had been women, relationships. Discreet, orderly, controlled relationships that threatened no one, and he had certainly not had an affair with Dan’s wife, despite Sir Alex’s comment.
There was no one at the moment, but he had a single-minded ability to dismiss sex from his life when he felt it necessary. He had never been driven by his appetites, nor controlled by them.
Sometimes, when watching a competitor greedily consuming the meal he was paying for, greedily consuming the bait he was putting down … greedily anticipating what advantages might accrue to him through his involvement with him, Saul was filled with a sharp sense of disgust for that greed, for that wanton waste when so many were without.
It was his Scots blood, he told himself sardonically. All those generations of strict Presbyterians and their moral outlook on life.
Sir Alex was testing him, he knew that. His boss was sometimes laughably easy to see through, even though Sir Alex believed himself to be a master of subtlety.
Normally he would never have given Saul such a routine task. Normally they employed agents, at a distance of course, on this kind of business, keeping their own identity secret until they were ready to move in for the kill.
His stomach twisted. He was forty years old, fitter than many men fifteen years his junior, no grey as yet touched his dark hair, and yet sometimes he felt immeasurably old; divorced, distanced somehow from reality, completely alone and alienated from the rest of the human race.
At other times he felt a deep sense of resentment, of anger, of somehow having been cheated of something, and yet he could not quantify what.
Why had he warned Dan about the take-over? Why had he felt so much distaste about the thought of destroying the small old-fashioned company that had passed from father to son for five generations? After all, he had done it before without any qualms. Why now … now, when Sir Alex had virtually promised him that he would soon be stepping down and that he, Saul, would be taking over the chairmanship?
He could still recoup the ground he had lost. Sir Alex’s speech today had confirmed that.
So why had he experienced that overwhelming impulse simply to walk away, to turn his back on Sir Alex and his own future?
There was a very deep and very intense anger inside him, he recognised, coupled with a fear of its overwhelming his self-control. Saul prized his self-control. It was his strongest weapon and now it seemed to be deserting him.
Cheshire. What the hell kind of game was Sir Alex playing, sending him out there? He loved manipulating people, pulling their strings and making them dance. Well, Saul had never responded to that kind of treatment. He might work for Sir Alex, but he had always made it clear that he would not be subservient to him. Sir Alex was the kind of man who could only respect someone he could not bully.
What exactly was he planning? Was it just because he wanted to buy out this drugs company at the lowest possible price that he was sending Saul to Cheshire, or was there an additional motive?
Saul wondered sardonically if, like one of his predecessors, he would return to London to find someone else sitting at his desk. And if he did, would he really care? Did he really care about anything any more? He cared about his children, he told himself. He cared that they rejected him, that they seemed to be more concerned with material possessions. Had he been like that? Josey was fifteen, Thomas nearly thirteen. They were very different in character, as different as he and Christie had been.
He and Karen had been divorced for nearly ten years and his children were strangers to him. Ten very busy years for him. Too busy for him to make time for his children?
The thought itched and stung like a burr under the skin. Just recently he had been asking himself questions, too many questions he could not answer, and why? Because he had woken up one morning and suddenly been sickened by himself, by his life. Why should he feel like that? He had always made his own decisions, his own choices.
From the past he heard Christie’s voice, harsh with passion, her young face angry with contempt as she slung at him, ‘You don’t do anything for yourself, do you, Saul? You just do things to please Dad. That’s why you’re his favourite.’
He had laughed at her, dismissing her outburst. He was a boy. It was only natural that he should be closer to his father … his favourite … or so he had thought then.
Christie … passionate, turbulent, aching for freedom, for full control over her own life even then.
And she hadn’t really changed.
Not that they saw much of one another these days. He had visited her a couple of times since she had moved to Cheshire … a disastrous pair of visits when he had reluctantly … very reluctantly been accompanied by his children.
Christie, as a busy GP, hadn’t been able to spare much time to spend with them, and Josey had been openly scornful of her aunt’s disorganised home life, of the fact that meals were invariably eaten in the kitchen, of the fact that Christie hardly ever wore make-up and certainly never bought designer clothes, unlike her own mother.
The only thing Josey had approved of about her aunt was the fact that she was a single parent. Women no longer needed men, Josey had told Saul challengingly, and he had wondered if what she meant was that children no longer needed fathers, especially fathers like him.
Of the two of them, Josey had always been the more antagonistic towards him. He was surprised how much that hurt him. He had far more important things to think about than his relationship with his daughter, an inner voice warned him, but another challenged quietly, what … what could be more important than his own children? And he stood still in the street as the impact of his own thoughts hit him, unaware of the curious looks of passers-by.
Perhaps a week or so away from London, from Sir Alex, was what he needed, he reflected as he started walking again. A breathing-space … a time to reflect.
But what was there to reflect on? he wondered impatiently, frowning at the unease he could feel. He didn’t like this dichotomy between what he knew he should feel and what he did actually feel. It was so out of character.
‘You have to be single-minded to succeed, Saul.’ That was what his father had always told him, his face shadowed by the disappointments of his own life, by the effects of his own inability to achieve the goals he had set himself.
Fate had been unkind to his father.
But it had been kind to him, he himself had seen to that, or so he had thought until recently.
CHAPTER THREE
‘DAVINA, I know you’re busy, but I wonder if you could spare me half an hour
before you go home.’
Davina forced herself to smile.
‘Of course I can, Giles. Would five o’clock be all right?’
As soon as he had closed the office door behind him her smile disappeared. There had been many challenges for her to face in the three months since the death of her husband Gregory, and now it seemed that she was going to have to face another one.
She suspected that Giles Redwood was going to tell her that he wanted to leave. She couldn’t blame him. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and she knew quite well that the only reason Giles was still here was because he was too gentle, too kind-hearted to leave her completely in the lurch.
And because he loved her?
She winced, her mind shying away from the thought, not wanting to admit its existence.
She had always liked Giles, but it was only since Gregory’s death that she had become aware that he might have much stronger feelings for her. It disturbed her to have to acknowledge that she might have inadvertently played on those feelings in asking him to stay and to support her through the initial crisis of Gregory’s death.
She hadn’t meant to do so. Had, in fact, been motivated purely by panic, the panic of discovering that her father’s company wasn’t the thriving concern she had so foolishly believed, but was actually close to insolvency. That had shocked her more than Gregory’s death in many ways.
It had been Giles who had comforted her, who had told her that she must not blame herself for the lack of awareness of the company’s situation. And it was true that Gregory, and her father before him, had always refused to allow her to have anything to do with the company, to play any part in it.
But now she had no choice. Carey Chemicals was the largest local employer. If Carey’s closed, people would be put out of work; families, whole households would suffer. She could not allow that to happen.