Walking in Darkness (23 page)

Freddy wrote on the pad, ‘Bennett, accountant.’ He picked up the thick print-out of shareholders’ names which lay on the table, skimmed through it and stopped, pointing at the name he had been looking for. Bennett was a minor shareholder; he had held shares for only a few months.

Paul nodded, tore off the top sheet of his pad and pushed it into his pocket. So, Salmond had someone planted among the shareholders of this particular company? Was that repeated over all his companies?

He murmured to Freddy, turning his head away so that nobody in the hall could lipread what he said, ‘When you get back to the office, check all our companies to see how many of them have shareholders who might be planted by Salmond.’

Freddy nodded, frowning. Paul saw the alarm in his eyes. Freddy was constantly afraid that Nemesis would catch up with them.

‘Stop worrying,’ Paul told him affectionately.

Freddy sighed. ‘Wish I could.’

Paul rushed off from the shareholders’ meeting to a private meeting with the chairman of a company he was considering acquiring. Their negotiations had been going as merrily as a wedding bell until the news of Salmond’s take-over bid got out, and now the other board was in a state of panic. Before the lunch, which took place in Paul’s boardroom, with his private staff serving an elegant, sophisticated meal, Freddy produced a list of suspected Salmond plants among the shareholders of all the Brougham companies, which he gave privately to Paul.

‘You see? Salmond is dangerous. We’re in trouble.’

Giving him a reckless, dancing grin, Paul said, ‘We’ll chop him off at the knees, don’t worry. He isn’t going to win. We are.’

Telling yourself you’re going to win makes it far more likely that you will; he had known that from the start of his career, but Freddy had never had that clear-sighted confidence, and he didn’t have it now.

He turned that arrogant, assured smile on the chairman he was hoping to convince, and Freddy watched him with his usual mix of admiration and uneasiness. Paul always had won his battles – but Freddy was more worried than he had ever been before.

Later that afternoon, sitting at the boardroom table in wintry sunlight, Freddy still watched him with that same uncertainty. What was he thinking as he smiled at the Frenchwoman he had had an affair with last year? Freddy could never read Paul’s expressions.

He had never liked Chantal Rousseau himself; she never bothered to be charming to him – she had concentrated all her allure on Paul. Had she been in love with him? Or had she just hoped to marry him? She was certainly lovely – hair like midnight, eyes as dark as coals, and a figure that promised hot nights. But there was a secrecy in her, a touch of malice, a glitter of feline spite that Freddy found unpleasant.

‘We’ve done well for you and your investors over the past few years, Chantal, so I hope you’ll be sticking with us,’ Paul said softly, smiling into her eyes.

She smiled back. ‘I can’t give a cast-iron guarantee, Paul, you realize that? Not yet, anyway. I have to consult our board fully and see how high Salmond is prepared to go.’

The sunlight gleamed on her pale throat, and Paul was suddenly reminded of last night, of Cathy arching over him, her hair brushing his eyes, her breasts touching him. His body seemed to be boneless suddenly, he was melting with desire and tenderness.

Chantal Rousseau watched him intently, saw his throat move as he swallowed, his tongue touch his lower lip as if it was ash-dry.

At that second his secretary took a phone call and turned to whisper to him, ‘Senator Gowrie, sir. He insists on talking to you.’

Paul looked round the table. ‘Sorry, this won’t take long.’ He took the phone. ‘Hello, Senator, anything wrong?’

‘Hi, Paul, hope I’m not interrupting anything important, but . . . I’ve been thinking. The security at your place is really tight, isn’t it? I know your men have checked the estate over, but I think it might be wisest if I sent some men down now, before I arrive.’

Irritated, Paul said, ‘That might alarm Cathy. Don’t worry, nobody is going to get in or out of Arbory without the alarms going off. Keep to our arrangement, Don. Don’t worry so much, this is England, not the States. I don’t want Cathy getting into a panic. Sorry, sir, but I’m in the middle of a board meeting, I must get on . . . see you soon.’

He hung up and looked around the table. ‘Now, where were we?’

‘Yes, where were we?’ Chantal Rousseau asked.

One of the board said gloomily, ‘I get the impression Salmond has been planning this for months. He isn’t in any hurry to make a kill because he’s so damned sure he’s going to get us. When he has enough of a share base, he’ll offer some sort of share-for-share deal, rather than offering cash. He may have a good cash-flow, but I imagine he’d rather make a paper deal. It would make sense.’

‘We have to convince our shareholders it isn’t in their long-term interest to accept whatever he offers,’ Paul said. Why hadn’t he seen this coming long ago? But he knew why – because he had been too obsessed with Cathy to think of anything else. For years he had been steering his ship between dangerous rocks and getting away with it – but the voice of a siren had drawn him on to a fatal shore and he had a terrible feeling that he might never get off it again.

Sophie was so tired out by the long flight that she went to bed early that night and slept heavily. Next morning Steve and she had breakfast together downstairs in the hotel café; Sophie just had orange juice, coffee, rolls and a thin spreading of black cherry jam, which to her delight turned out to be from her own country, a Czech brand which she knew well, with thick real fruit embedded in every spoonful.

‘Try it! It’s delicious,’ she urged Steve, who looked amused, but took some with his toast.

‘Not bad,’ he agreed, picked up the small pot and read the name of the company, the address in the Czech Republic. ‘I could taste the fruit and it was thick stuff, not the thin tasteless stuff you sometimes get in these hotels.’

‘My mother makes her own jam, from fruit she grows herself – apples and blackberries . . . it’s even better than this!’

‘My mother makes her own preserves, too – we have rows of fruit bushes and fruit trees at the far end of the yard and every autumn my mother is busy in the kitchen filling jars and stacking the shelves in the pantry with them. She’s a terrific cook. When I was a kid I loved sandwiches made with a mix of jelly and peanut butter.’

She made an incredulous face. ‘Sounds weird. Peanut butter AND jam? Ugh.’

‘Well, I have to say I haven’t eaten it in years. I’d probably hate it now – our tastebuds change over the years, don’t they? Along with everything else.’

He picked up the notes she had made for him on the various English politicians who would be seeing Don Gowrie today. ‘What are you going to do today? Are you coming along with us? You’re invited to the dinner tonight, you’ll see Gowrie then, but if you want to hang about waiting for him to come out of meetings, you’re welcome to come with us.’

She shook her head. ‘I thought I might go around London. I enjoyed my time here and there are lots of places I want to see again. Unless you need me?’

‘No, I guess I don’t need you.’ He frowned at her, though. ‘Sophie, don’t get any crazy ideas, will you? Don’t do anything stupid. Remember, somebody tried to kill you in New York – keep an eye out for anyone following you, stay out of the subways, take taxis – I’ll give you some British money to pay for them, they can go on our expense sheet, don’t worry. I don’t want to hear you’ve been pushed under a London bus! Do your sight-seeing and shopping, whatever, but for God’s sake keep out of trouble.’

The camera crew appeared in the doorway, gesturing urgently, and Steve sighed. ‘Got to run. Now, be good, won’t you? Be sensible!’

‘OK, Steve,’ she meekly said, but she did not intend to be sensible. She couldn’t stay here in London, even though it might be safer not to go alone. Whatever her head might say, her heart spoke a different language. She had to get to Arbory House as soon as physically possible. She kept hearing Anya’s voice echoing in her head.

Her whole body was shivering with the realization that for the first time she had finally heard her sister speak. It was like hearing the tomb gape open and the angels singing.

She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it didn’t matter, anyway. She had loved that voice – so warm and confident, full of life and certainty – she had listened to it, and been so choked that she couldn’t say any of the things she wanted so desperately to say. All she could do was whisper, ‘Is that you, Anya?’ At that instant she had believed, somehow, that her sister would instinctively recognize her own real name and answer, would sense, too, that it was her own flesh and blood on the other end of the line.

But Anya had just sounded startled and puzzled. Sophie had been so upset that she had hung up. That had been stupid. What on earth must Anya have thought? Shouldering into her coat, she buttoned it up with ice-cold, trembling fingers. She was not sitting around in a hotel bedroom or waiting for Steve to come with her. She had come here to see her sister, and she didn’t care about the dangers she might be risking – come hell or high water she was going to see Anya and ask her to come and see their mother before she died.

There was a taxi rank right outside the main entrance of the hotel. Sophie headed for it, told the driver to take her to the main-line station from where she could get a train to Buckinghamshire.

He stared at her, scratching his chin. ‘Now is that St Pancras or Euston?’

‘I don’t know, I thought you would.’

‘Well, hop in and we’ll find you the right station.’

As they drove off he started talking on his mobile phone, checking with his base office which station she would want. Sophie listened, not noticing the taxi that took off immediately after her own, or the black car parked on the other side of the road which pulled out and slotted into the traffic behind that. She got out of the taxi ten minutes later and paid the driver before walking into the busy, echoing main-line terminal, quite unaware that she was being followed.

Paul Brougham liked to hear the wind howling like a banshee outside the double-glazed windows of his sixtieth-floor office above the gun-metal waters of the Thames. It made it impossible for him to forget the power of nature which the grey London streets spreading in all directions shut out. Without the wind, up here it was easy to feel godlike, floating among the clouds high up above the earthbound common humanity. His offices were deeply carpeted, elegantly designed, air-conditioned, his private lift shot him up to this level in seconds. From the floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall he looked down on cars like toys and people like ants. Only the threat of the wind tugging at the walls and windows, trying to wrench them up and toss them away, reminded him that he, too, was human, and could be blown away. Paul had a superstitious streak; he was afraid of hubris, of losing touch with reality and being destroyed by it.

That morning, though, he was too absorbed in work; absorbed – and humming with the energy of someone under threat. Adrenalin was running high inside him. Salmond was on his tail and he had to shake him off somehow. He still didn’t quite know how.

Running his eye down a balance sheet, he listened intently to his chief accountant. He could have sung Freddy’s song for him; there was nothing Paul did not know about the financial status of his companies, but sometimes when he listened to Freddy’s slow, careful expositions it helped to clear his mind and show him a way through a tangled problem.

‘I’m sorry, but it can’t be done,’ Freddy Levinson ended. He was a thin, grey-haired, stooping man with the expression of a solemn heron fishing in muddy waters, which they frequently had during the twenty-odd years they had worked together.

They had met in 1972 when they both worked for a printing firm in Buckinghamshire which owned a small handful of magazines and local newspapers. The chairman and managing director, William Wood, had inherited the company from his father. A methodical, unadventurous man, trained by his father to follow in his footsteps, Wood had run his company exactly as his father had ordained.

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.