Next of Kin (11 page)

‘It's Raymond Davis,' he said, extending his hand, quick to give her his name in order to avoid the embarrassment of her having to ask for it. ‘We met at Ascot, don't you remember?'

‘Of course I remember,' she lied. ‘It was a lovely day and you were perfectly charming.'

‘We said we should have lunch some day. If I was ever down here. And here I am. Down here,' he added nervously.

‘Well then, we should have lunch,' she said, for he seemed a personable enough chap and a girl had to eat after all. ‘Let me just get my coat.'

They had taken a stroll down to the local village and dined in the restaurant there where Raymond had told her all about his own background. His father was retired from the navy, where he had been an admiral, and his two older brothers held various ranks there now. One of them was currently stationed somewhere in the Caribbean, near an island whose name he could never remember.

‘You didn't want to join up?' asked Stella.

‘I don't like the water,' said Raymond apologetically, which made her laugh. ‘I can't even swim. So it seemed a little pointless.'

‘I bet that went down well with the family,' she said with a smile. Raymond had found in the past that most girls lost interest in him when he admitted to failings like this but Stella, always contrary to most girls, seemed to think it a point in his favour.

‘Not very well,' he admitted. ‘I am something of the black sheep.'

Her smile faded a little and she looked out the window to where some noisy children were being allowed to run wild. ‘Every family has one of them,' she said. ‘Or creates one for themselves anyway.'

‘I don't mind too much,' he said, sounding like a man who minded rather a lot.

‘So what do you do then?' she asked.

‘I studied for a degree in botany,' he told her. ‘And I'm currently working at the Royal Horticultural Society in London, researching and propagating some new species of roses. Hybrid Teas, mostly. Some floribundas and climbers. It's tremendously interesting.'

‘Flowers,' she said, simplifying things rather.

‘Well … yes,' he admitted with a nod. ‘I mean there's rather more to it than that, of course, but I suppose at its most basic level … it's flowers, yes.'

Stella leaned forward and took his hand for a moment, squeezing it tightly, and he opened his eyes wide, surprised and thrilled by the intimacy. ‘I think that must have been a very brave choice,' she said, as if he had just admitted to a perversion he was hoping to conquer, before releasing him and leaning back in her chair.

‘Do you … do you do anything?' he asked after a few moments, once he had managed to compose himself again. ‘For a living, I mean.'

‘Good Lord, no,' she said, laughing a little at the thought of it. ‘Nothing at all. There was talk a year or two ago of me getting a career but in the end it came to nothing. Nothing appealed to me, you see. I try to keep busy by doing some charity work of course. I ran a tombola last summer at Leyville to help provide medicine to the children of miners in the North-East and it was a tremendous success. And earlier this year I raised almost three thousand pounds for the local hospital by organizing a village fête. My father's very wealthy, of course.'

‘Yes, I know,' said Raymond, instantly regretting the way that sentence had come out; it made him sound like a gold-digger. ‘Mine is pretty well off too,' he added then in order to atone for it, and then worried that he was coming across as competitive. ‘And you have brothers, I suppose?'

Stella shook her head. ‘I had one brother,' she told him. ‘Andrew. But he died when he was eighteen. A shooting accident.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Raymond.

She shrugged her shoulders and looked away for a moment. She had become immune to people saying that whenever the subject came up.

‘So there's just you?' he asked.

‘Well, no,' she told him. ‘I have a cousin, Owen, who lives with us. He's a few months younger than me. I suppose he's more of a brother in a way. He came to us when he was five, just after his parents died and he's been with us ever since. We were all very close as children, actually.'

‘And what does he do?' asked Raymond.

‘He studied history of art at Cambridge,' said Stella. ‘He took a first and then got his master's in record time. And now he's working at an art gallery in London. I've been there. It's very contemporary, and Father says it's all rot of course. They don't allow anything in that was produced before nineteen hundred.'

‘Really?' asked Raymond in surprise. ‘And has there been any decent art produced over the last thirty years?'

‘None whatsoever,' said Stella, breaking into a laugh. ‘But it's awfully good fun looking at the rubbish that gets put on show there all the same. Everyone's afraid to criticize it because no one wants to appear old-fashioned. So they sell these dreadful canvasses for huge amounts of money and Cousin Owen pockets a fairly decent commission, I imagine. Not that he's in it for the money of course. Nothing as vulgar as that. I think he quite enjoys his job. He seems committed to it anyway.'

‘Well, we all need money,' said Raymond with a smile.

‘Not Owen. He stands to inherit the entire Montignac fortune. The Montignacs always inherit on the male line,' she explained. ‘Right through our ancestry. They've never let a girl take over the estate, the sexist swine. It should have gone to Andrew, of course, but since he died … well Owen's stood as heir ever since. His father was my father's elder brother. He was cut off in a scandal years before I was born but then he died during the war and there was nothing else my father could do but take the boy in. And he's very fond of him.'

Raymond nodded; he wasn't particularly interested in the financial operations of the Montignac family but he enjoyed watching her talk about them because it gave him an excuse to stare directly at her. As usual she was wearing very little make-up and her porcelain-like skin made him want to reach across and touch her, like one might have the urge to stroke a sheet of satin in a fabric shop. Stella turned away from the window and looked across at him, narrowing her eyes for a moment as if she was deciding something for herself.

‘I suppose we might start seeing more of each other from now on then,' she said decisively and he nodded quickly and that was that.

In the eighteen months since then they had officially established themselves as a couple. They spent much of their time in London where Stella lived the charmed life of a lady of leisure during the day and by night they went to plays and restaurants with their friends. From time to time—and Raymond could never predict when—Stella would invite him to stay in her suite with her and they would make love so passionately that he couldn't understand why he was so quickly dismissed again the following morning. She wasn't the only girl he had ever been with but he couldn't imagine another any more, despite the fact that there remained something of an emotional distance between them, a wall that she wouldn't allow him to climb over.

‘I don't like talking about love affairs,' she told him once. ‘I did it once, a long time ago, and it was very nearly the death of me. Quite literally.'

He tried to press her on this former romance but she was close-mouthed about it and he had since stopped trying.

He dreaded the rare occasions when he was invited to Leyville for the weekend; Peter Montignac was polite enough, for form's sake, but seemed completely disinterested in his entire existence. Raymond tried to engage him on any number of topics but it was pointless; the man simply didn't want to know. And while Owen Montignac had warmed a little from the iceberg frostiness of their initial relationship, it was obvious to Raymond that he didn't think him good enough for his cousin. He sought every possible opportunity to mock Raymond's profession, while ignoring the fact that he was hardly an army serviceman himself, and Raymond felt intimidated whenever they were together. But Stella had insisted that he join them for dinner that evening and he had dutifully gone.

‘You may as well stay tonight,' she said, kicking her shoes off now and finishing her drink. Raymond beamed and found that he could relax at last.

‘All right,' he said. ‘If you like.'

‘I do like,' she said quickly. ‘Now tell me,' she added, leaning forwards. ‘The truth now. Be completely honest. Do you think that Owen believes I had anything to do with Father changing his will?'

5

‘I'VE BEEN MEANING TO
come to see you,' said Owen Montignac, standing with his back to the door but not edging any further forwards for the moment; he tried to speak in as casual a fashion as possible, as if the whole thing was terribly trivial and unworthy of his attention. ‘Everything's just been so busy at the gallery recently that it slipped my mind.'

‘Perfectly understandable,' said Nicholas Delfy, extending his hands wide in a show of magnanimity. ‘We're both busy men after all.'

‘Indeed.'

‘Have a seat, Owen.'

There was no hint of a request here; it was a simple order and Montignac obeyed it. There were very few men in the world who had ever scared him but Delfy was one. It wasn't that he himself was physically intimidating; in fact, with his short stature and angelic face he could hardly have been less threatening. And it wasn't concern about the henchmen and bodyguards that surrounded him and could injure a man without a second thought that made Montignac wish he was anywhere but in his office right at that moment. It was Delfy's reputation that made him nervous, for he was not known as a man who went so far as to kill his enemies. He was crueller than that. He found ways to hurt them through the people they cared about or, if there was no one of sufficient importance in the victim's life to harm, he inflicted only enough damage to cause endless misery to his target. He had been known to paralyse people, leaving them in wheelchairs or hospitals for the rest of their lives, or blind them by ripping the eyes from the sockets. From time to time, he liked to remove a vital organ. He didn't believe in giving anyone the easy escape of death.

‘I was sorry to hear about your uncle,' said Delfy. ‘Were you close to him?'

‘I lived with him from the time I was five years old.'

Delfy smiled. ‘That's not what I asked,' he said.

‘I was close to him,' he said hesitantly. ‘Up to a point.'

‘I had an uncle myself once,' said Delfy. ‘I don't remember him well, except that he was very kind to me as a child. Always brought me presents when he came to visit and played chess with me too, as I recall. Although he wasn't very good and I could beat him by the time I was seven. I seem to remember that he never minded when I won. If anything he was proud of me for it. But then he was killed in the Great War.'

‘My father died in the war too,' said Montignac, biting his lip as he said this because he didn't like to talk about his parents much and certainly wouldn't have chosen to discuss them with someone like Nicholas Delfy. He had only a vague recollection of his mother and father and knew that people had been discouraged from mentioning their names at Leyville while he was growing up.

‘Really?' asked Delfy, interested now. ‘How did he die?'

‘He was at the battle of the Somme,' he replied. ‘His platoon was hit by a shell from a German artillery tank. He was only thirty-four at the time.'

‘Is that so,' said Delfy quietly, nodding his head out of respect. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘Why would you?' asked Montignac.

‘True, true. And was your father a gambler, Owen?'

Montignac sighed; he didn't want to discuss his father as a metaphor for his own behaviour. ‘I'd hardly label myself as a gambler,' he said.

‘Wouldn't you?' asked Delfy as if he was truly surprised by the answer. ‘How extraordinary.' He reached across the desk to his ledger and started to flick through it until he came to a page about a third of the way from the end. He examined it silently for a moment before looking across at Montignac. ‘It says here,' he began, ‘that you are in debt to me for a very large amount of money.'

‘Reasonably large, yes.'

‘Fifty thousand pounds,' said Delfy with a whistle. ‘And change.'

‘I don't think it can be quite that much.'

‘Would you like to see the figures?' asked Delfy, the smile fading from his face. ‘I think you'll find it's perfectly accurate.'

‘No,' said Montignac, shaking his head. (In fact he thought the figure had been slightly over sixty thousand so, up to a point, he was pleased.)

‘And then, of course, you wrote me a letter,' said Delfy, lifting an envelope from the page and carefully removing the piece of paper within, as if it was an important piece of evidence that had to be handled with caution. ‘Quite an extraordinary piece of prose, if I may say so.'

‘The thing about that letter—'

‘
Dear Nicholas
,' said Delfy, scanning it and reading selected passages. ‘Nothing too important to begin with …
sorry I haven't been in touch
 … Well we were all sorry about that, Owen,' he said, looking up and smiling again as if the whole thing was an enormous joke. ‘I could hardly sleep out of concern for you. I thought perhaps you'd done a runner.'

‘I wouldn't do that, Nicholas—'

‘
However I believe I will be in a position to start repaying you the money I owe you very shortly. My uncle has just passed away and once the estate has been settled I will be able to send you a cheque for
 … very sad when a beloved family member passes away, Owen. You must have been distraught.'

‘If you would just allow me to explain,' said Montignac, fighting to control his temper now.

‘Fine,' said Delfy, leaning back in his chair and willing to let him dig his own grave. ‘Explain. Thrill me with stories of anticipation and disappointment.'