The Proprietor's Daughter

by Lewis Orde

  When Katherine entered, Sally was wiping the leaves of a rubber tree plant that stood in a brass bucket by the window.

  “Ah, the birthday girl,” Sally greeted her. “Having a good one?”

  “Not bad.” Of all people, Katherine thought, Sally Roberts was the one guaranteed to remember her birthday.

  Sally sat behind a large mahogany desk. Her dress was a dark green which almost matched the color of her eyes. Katherine had noticed Sally favored that particular shade, because it also complemented the auburn of her wavy hair.

  As Katherine settled on the sofa facing Sally’s desk, Gerald Waller entered the office. Like Sally, the editor of the Daily Eagle was in his early fifties, but he could have passed for forty. No gray streaked his dark brown hair, his face was barely lined, and he lacked even the suggestion of a paunch. The youthful appearance, though, was more than offset by his conservative sartorial tastes, which had caused Erica Bentley to once scathingly remark that Waller owned the world’s most comprehensive collection of dark blue suits and white shirts. Katherine liked and respected Waller. He was a hands-on editor, who got himself involved with almost every story.

  “Sally . . . Katherine . . .” Waller greeted both women before sitting down and lighting a cigarette.

  “Erica mentioned your lunchtime conversation,” Sally said to Katherine. “Archie’s troubles. What do you have in mind?”

  Katherine knew she was being asked to sell her idea. “Learn for myself if there’s a story. See this harassment firsthand.”

  “Live with Archie?” Waller asked incredulously.

  Katherine nodded. “Just for some of the time. Pretend to be his niece, come up from the country to find work in London.” She recognized doubt on Waller’s face, and knew exactly what was passing through his mind. Waller was editor — God, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, and Allah all rolled up into one. But in this particular instance, Katherine’s father paid God’s salary, provided Him with a new Rover sedan each year, contributed to a generous pension plan, and never queried His expenses. The possibility of placing Katherine in even the slightest danger gave Waller cause for concern.

  Katherine pressed on. “Only I could pull this off. No one else on the editorial staff has the special rapport I have with Archie. He’s like a grandfather figure to me.”

  Waller wavered. “I don’t know, Katherine. Erica says she can spare you, but I just don’t know.”

  “With the victim working for Eagle Newspapers, you’ll be able to run the Daily Eagle name on every line of the story.”

  Waller gave a sudden grin, which accentuated the boyishness of his face. “You just persuaded me, Katherine. Make your arrangements to adopt Archie as an uncle, and I’ll make certain that you have a photographer nearby at all times. The biggest and strongest we have on staff. But just be careful, all right?”

  “I promise.”

  Waller glanced at his watch and excused himself. As he left the office, Sally’s secretary entered and placed a green folder on her desk. Sally pushed it across to Katherine, saying, “This will give you a start, some research on Cadmus Property Company.”

  “You knew Gerry Waller would approve my idea?”

  “I never doubted that you’d know how to get around him.”

  Katherine opened the folder, read aloud the pertinent details. “Cadmus Property Company’s run by a man named Nigel Hawtrey. . . . Archie Waters’s block of flats was the first property they bought, back in 1970, and the company’s name derives from that initial purchase. . . . Since then, they’ve acquired five more properties in London. . . . All like Cadmus Court, nice blocks at one time but dilapidated when purchased, so picked up quite cheaply. . . . And all are buildings in areas tipped to be on the upswing.” Katherine closed the folder and dropped it onto the desk. “So they can do more of what they’re doing to Archie.”

  “Unless something’s done about it,” Sally said.

  “Did you ever do this kind of investigative reporting in your day, Sally?”

  “In my day?” Sally burst out laughing. “I’m still enjoying my day, young lady. I’m only fifty-four, so please don’t have me drawing my pension just yet.”

  “You know what I mean — when you were writing, instead of sitting comfortably on the top floor.”

  “I did my share. Only in those days, during the war and the bad times afterwards, it was known as muckraking.”

  Katherine glanced at Sally’s left hand. The fingers were devoid of jewelry. Sally had been married twice. A divorce had finished the second; the war had put an untimely end to the first. “Well . . .” Katherine stood up. “I suppose I should start getting into the role of Archie’s niece. Do you think I could be his niece from Swansea or Cardiff, somewhere in Wales?”

  Sally appeared mystified. “Why Wales?”

  “Thanks to my housekeeper, I now do a wonderfully authentic Welsh accent. Want to hear?”

  Sally waved a hand of dismissal. “Spare me that, please. Get out of here and rake some muck.”

  Chapter Two

  AT FIVE-THIRTY that evening, Katherine left the newspaper building to join the homeward surge of people on the underground. She took the train to Chalk Farm, where she had left her sports car, and from there battled rush-hour traffic for the remaining few miles home.

  She drove without thinking, moving forward or stopping as conditions dictated. Her mind was still at work, locked into that meeting about Cadmus Court. Two words kept surfacing. Special rapport. She had claimed to share such a bond with Archie Waters — that was why she alone would be able to do justice to the story. To a degree, she did. Yet she knew that if a special rapport did exist between herself and anyone else at Eagle Newspapers, that person was Sally Roberts.

  At one period or another during Katherine’s life, Sally had acted as older sister, favorite aunt, best friend, and fairy godmother. In all probability, although Katherine could not recall it, Sally had changed her and powdered her bottom as well. It seemed she had always been there, with sound advice, a restraining touch, and just occasionally a firm hand to shove Katherine toward a certain objective. Sally had performed many of the same roles for Katherine’s father. Plus one other. Twenty-nine years earlier, Sally had been Roland Eagles’s lover.

  Ahead of Katherine, a traffic light changed to amber. She debated going through until she spotted a police car tucked down a side street. She stopped, applied the handbrake, and continued her train of thought. Sally and Roland Eagles had met in November 1947, on a train from Aldershot to London. In those days, Sally had been a reporter on the now-defunct London Evening Mercury, and Roland . . . well, Katherine supposed it was true to say that her father had been between careers. Only hours before meeting Sally, he had exchanged his British army uniform and captain’s pips for civilian clothes.

  Roland had entered the army in 1940, on his sixteenth birthday. He had lied about his age because he was desperate to join the fight. Only two days earlier, his parents and younger brother and sister had been killed during a German air raid on the Kent coastal town of Margate. When a crippled Heinkel had jettisoned its bomb load along the street where the Eagles family lived, Roland’s childhood had come to a savage end.

  It had been a happy childhood, marred for Roland by only one thing: the black void that existed between Roland’s father and his family. Roland’s mother was Catholic, and his Jewish father had incurred the wrath of his own well-to-do family by falling in love with her. The final split had come when Roland’s father had married the girl, changed his name to Eagles, and moved from London to the coast. After that, neither side had attempted to make contact. Katherine recalled her father describing the speedy burial service for his family. How he had carried two separate hatreds that day, each screaming for vengeance: one against the men who had caused his family to perish; the other against his father’s family, who did not even know his father was dead. Didn’t even know that Roland existed!

  The traffic light turned green, and Katherine pressed the accelerat
or to the floor, enjoying the brief stretch of clear road. Her father had avenged himself, all right, for the loss of his family. Awarded the Military Medal and the Military Cross — bravery both as a corporal at El Alamein and a lieutenant at Normandy. When he left the army in November 1947, though, he still had one piece of unfinished business. He no longer hated his father’s family because he had come to realize that some of the blame must rest with his own father’s unforgiving attitude. Roland just wanted to meet them. Not knock on their door and introduce himself like some outcast begging for admittance. First, he wanted to make a name for himself in a country that was recovering from a long and costly war. And then he wanted to meet his father’s wealthy family as an equal.

  Starting with nothing more than a bankrupt electrical company saved from receivership, Roland had created a retail empire called the Eagles Group. Department stores in Britain, Europe, and the United States. And finally the newspaper group; the dream of every self-made man, to be a press baron. And Sally Roberts had been with him every step of the way, from a lover to friend, and finally employee. No, that wasn’t strictly true, Katherine told herself. Sally had never been an employee of Roland Eagles; she had always been his peer.

  Katherine considered how strongly the Eagles Group had affected her own life. It was through the group she had met Franz. In the beginning of 1967, Katherine had been vacationing with her father in Monte Carlo. Also at Monte Carlo was a German industrialist named Heinrich Kassler, who was accompanied by his son. Roland and Heinrich Kassler were long-time business associates, who shared a fascination for games of chance. While the two men had amused themselves at the gambling tables, a sixteen-year-old English girl had fallen in love with a German boy of twenty.

  For three and a half years, the romance had been kept alive through letters, telephone calls, occasional visits. Then, in 1970, everything changed. The older Kassler asked Roland if he could find Franz a job in London with the Eagles Group; the experience of working in another country, he claimed, would do the young man good. From Katherine, Roland learned the real reason behind the request. Franz had been in trouble, arrested during a Vietnam demonstration outside an American air base. The resultant publicity had severely embarrassed his father. While Roland wavered, Katherine pressured. At last, Roland gave Franz a position in operations, the day-to-day running of the stores.

  Within three months of Franz’s coming to England, shortly after Katherine’s twentieth birthday, they were married. As if to cement the union, Roland sold Heinrich Kassler some of his holdings in the Eagles Group. It was more than a sentimental gesture, however, because it gave Roland the capital to buy back and own privately Eagle Newspapers Limited and a group of department stores based in London’s Regent Street, with branches in Manchester and Edinburgh. The department stores had been taken over by the Eagles Group ten years earlier, after Roland had organized a raid on the shares. His aim, he had said at the time, was to use the three prestigious stores to head up what was then a diverse group of shops with little apparent cohesion or direction. In truth, he acquired the stores because of their name, Adler’s. The same name Roland’s father had rejected so many years earlier, during the split with his family. Roland had introduced himself to his father’s family as an equal — by mounting a share raid on what should have been his birthright.

  Heinrich Kassler’s death in an automobile accident three years after the wedding brought home to Roland that it was time to take things easier. He relinquished his chairmanship of the Eagles Group, sold his shares, and concentrated on running the newspaper group and the Adler’s department stores. Both were businesses, Katherine knew, which ran themselves adequately without any help from her father. She often wondered how much he really missed the furious pace of the business life he’d known. . . .

  When she arrived home at six-thirty, she found Edna Griffiths preparing Henry and Joanne for bed. “Mr. Kassler telephoned half an hour ago,” Edna told Katherine. “Said he’d be stuck in a meeting until late, and would you go on alone to your father? He’ll meet you there.”

  After a quick shower, Katherine put on jeans and a robin’s egg blue cashmere roll-neck sweater. Traffic was lighter when she left the house. She could drive the Stag as its designers had intended it to be driven: top down, wind buffeting her face and lifting her hair. She drove the same way she handled a horse, with an easy confidence that, in a less competent person, would have bordered on the reckless. She passed through Stanmore, on London’s northwest fringe, and accelerated hard up the long hill leading from the village. Her father’s home was at the very top, opposite the common where the local cricket team played on summer weekends.

  Drawing level with the common, Katherine swung left to pass between the red-brick pillars marking the entrance to Roland Eagles’s home. She doubted that her father had ever once, during his twelve years in the house, wandered across the road to watch a cricket match. He had no interest at all in sport, except for horse racing. Even then, it was not the beauty of the animals that excited him, as it did his daughter, but the opportunity to gamble. To test his skill. How many times had Katherine argued with her father over that . . .! She recalled once screaming at him in childish fury that God had not created horses for men to bet money on! To which Roland, straight-faced, had teasingly replied: “You’re perfectly right. God put them on earth so mankind could have glue.”

  She stopped in front of the house and switched off the engine. The front door opened and Roland stood framed in the doorway, a tall man with thinning silver hair and a round face dominated by eyes that were every bit as blue as his daughter’s. He wore a dark gray single-breasted suit which, although simple in style, was exquisitely tailored. The suit, like almost every piece of clothing Roland wore, came from H. Huntsman and Sons, in Savile Row.

  Katherine climbed out of the car, ran toward her father and kissed him on the cheek. Roland held her close for several seconds before gently pushing her back to arm’s length so he could study her face. “Look at you — little Kathy, all grown up.”

  “How does it feel to have a daughter of twenty-six?”

  “Old. Ancient. Venerable. Antique.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Give me a minute to check the thesaurus, come up with a few more similes.”

  “Synonyms,” Katherine corrected him. “A simile is a figure of speech which likens one object to another, while a synonym —”

  Roland placed a finger on his daughter’s mouth. “I don’t need to know the difference between similes and synonyms. I hire people like you to know for me.”

  Katherine stepped back, hands on hips. “You’re like all employers — you think your money can buy everything.”

  “As opposed to journalists, who think they’re the only ones in the entire world fit to make moral judgments?”

  Katherine laughed and kissed her father again. She entered the house, walking through the large reception hall into the drawing room with its comfortable floral-print chairs and sofas. In front of the bay window was a Victorian-style rocking horse. Pinned to its head was a card with Katherine’s name.

  “Is that really for me?” She moved closer to inspect the horse. It was fifty-two inches at the head, dappled gray with white mane and tail, and tan leather upholstery. “Or is it for Henry and Joanne? Your subtle way of spoiling them even more under the guise of giving me a present.”

  “Does it really matter?”

  “No.” She mounted the horse sidesaddle. It could go up to the game room, where the children would be able to ride it to their heart’s content. Just as long as Franz was not going through his morning exercise routine — and she was not with him!

  She slid off the horse as the drawing room’s double doors opened. A thin man in his late middle years, wearing a black jacket and gray striped trousers, entered the room. “Miss Katherine, how nice to see you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Parsons. Are you and Mrs. Parsons well?” Arthur Parsons and his wife, Peg, had been with Roland for twe
lve years. At fourteen, Katherine had felt uncomfortable calling them by their given names. Now, grown up, habit precluded familiarity.

  “Very well, thank you.” Parsons turned to Roland. “Dinner will be ready whenever you desire, sir.”

  “Half an hour or so. We’re waiting for my son-in-law.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  Parsons withdrew, closing the doors behind him. Katherine walked across the room to the fireplace. The mantelpiece was bare except for a clock and a framed black-and-white photograph. She took the picture to the bay window, which looked out over a colorful rose garden.

  “You know, other than your hair going gray and . . . well, sort of thin, you’ve hardly changed in the last twenty-seven years.”

  “I believe I’ve just been damned with faint praise,” Roland said as he joined Katherine at the window. The photograph showed him sitting at a table in a London nightclub. Next to him was a young woman with jet-black hair and dark, lively eyes. The light of the photographer’s flashbulb was bright in their faces, and they shared a slightly startled look, as if they somehow understood that they would soon be the standard-bearers of youth and romance in an age of austerity and ration books.

  The young woman was Catarina Luisa María Menéndez, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Nicanor Menéndez, the Argentine Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Catarina and Roland were in love and wanted to marry, but the ambassador refused to give his consent to such a match. Nicanor Menéndez had brought his only daughter to England for her to meet a suitor of quality, a man from a long-established, well-connected family: he had not intended her to be swept off her feet by a sharp-witted, half-Jewish adventurer.

  After failing to change the ambassador’s mind, the lovers eloped on New Year’s Day 1950, fleeing to Scotland, where the age of consent was lower and Catarina could marry without her father’s blessing.