Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

As she followed Jon up the narrow, creaky stairs, Olivia remembered nostalgically how exciting she had found it as a child to come here and how fascinated she had been by the rows of old-fashioned, heavily bound law books that filled the shelves of the small gallery at the top of the stairs.

Of the two rooms, her father’s office had always been the larger and Olivia paused a little uncomfortably outside its door, then turned to Jon. ‘If you would prefer Dad’s office …?’ she suggested.

Jon shook his head. ‘No, it’s all right. As a matter of fact I prefer my own,’ he told her as she continued to hesitate. ‘It’s quiet and it gets more light.’

A little uncertainly Olivia opened the door to her father’s office. She frowned as she surveyed the interior; it looked much larger than she remembered. Then she realised that the heavy bank of metal filing cabinets that ran along one wall had gone.

‘Where …?’ she began, staring at the empty space.

‘We moved them into my room,’ Jon explained calmly to her but Olivia could sense that for some reason her question had discomforted him. ‘We’re in the process of putting everything onto computer and since I was the one who attended the induction course, David thought I might as well deal with that side of things.’

A simple enough explanation but Olivia felt oddly uneasy. Something, she didn’t quite know what, didn’t ring fully true about it.

‘It will take me a few days to get into the routine,’ she told Jon. ‘I’ll have to familiarise myself with Dad’s cases and clients, of course, read up the files. I know you deal with most of the conveyancing side of things while Dad handled all the family trusts and wills.’

‘Broadly speaking, yes,’ Jon agreed, but he wasn’t looking at her, Olivia noticed, and once again she was aware of an odd tension in his voice that she suspected wasn’t purely because he hadn’t wanted to accept her offer of help.

She must not be too sensitive, Olivia warned herself. She was here to help not cause more problems.

‘Well, I’m here to do whatever I can,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’ll need a list of Dad’s clients and—’

‘Er, I’m afraid we didn’t do things quite so formally,’ Jon interrupted her. ‘It wasn’t really necessary and then we often found we were overlapping interests.’

Olivia frowned. That wasn’t how she had understood the practice was run. She had always been under the impression that the two brothers clearly divided their workload and their fields of operation.

‘Well, if you would give me some keys to Dad’s desk, I’ll go through his diary,’ Olivia suggested.

It was several seconds before Jon produced her father’s keys and Olivia had the distinct feeling that he didn’t really want to give them to her. Heavy-hearted she went into the office and firmly closed the door behind her.

Tiny motes of dust danced in the sunshine streaming in through the room’s windows. Olivia went to open one of them to let in some fresh air. The room smelled of lavender polish and old wood.

Her uncle had mentioned switching from their traditional filing system to computers, but to judge from the way the screen and keyboard had been pushed to one corner of her father’s desk virtually out of reach, she doubted that he had ever made much use of it.

Beneath the window the town was stirring sleepily into life, shops starting to open, one or two people walking through the square.

Determinedly Olivia turned her back on the window and walked over to her father’s desk. It was over a hundred years old, a heavy mahogany partner’s desk with a faded leather top. Her grandfather had used it, and before that, his father; very gently she touched the antique leather. The whole room breathed tradition; it hung heavily in the air so that her shoulders bowed automatically beneath the weight of it. Perhaps if Caspar had come here, seen this, he might have understood.

Caspar … She looked at the telephone. He wasn’t leaving until around noon. There was still time for her to telephone him … go home.

Resolutely she turned her back on the temptation of the telephone as she unlocked her father’s desk. She found his diary easily enough, the drawers surprisingly almost too neat and tidy, as though someone had already been through them … as though …

She sat down and opened the diary. No appointments for today, thank goodness. That would give her time to start doing some reading up. None for tomorrow, either, or the day after. Olivia started to frown as she flicked through the diary and found it empty of any appointments other than the odd half days pencilled in for golf.

Uneasily she started to look back through the diary, her muscles tensing as she studied the empty pages. Perhaps her father had another diary and this was simply one he used to record his golf matches. Yes, that must be it, she decided eagerly as she put it down and started to search through the drawers a second time.

And found nothing. Nothing!

Blankly she reopened the diary and restudied it once again. Earlier in the year there had been a clutch of appointments, but these had gradually tapered off until there were barely more than two or three a week and then even less, which meant …

‘Olivia.’ She stiffened as the door opened and Jon came in. ‘The post has arrived,’ he told her. ‘If you’d like to come into my office we can go through it together … oh, you’ve found your father’s diary,’ he commented unnecessarily.

‘Yes,’ Olivia agreed. She took a deep breath and then forced a smile, remarking, ‘Luckily he doesn’t appear to have any appointments this week, other than a game of golf.’

‘Oh yes, that is lucky,’ Jon agreed, smiling back, but his smile seemed forced, even if he did seem to relax a little bit as she got up to accompany him to his office. Because he was becoming more accustomed to the idea of having her working in the practice, or because she hadn’t made an issue of her father’s virtually empty diary?

In contrast to her father’s office, Jon’s seemed smaller than she remembered, and of course there were the familiar filing cabinets, plus some modern additions to house the computer system. But unlike her father’s desk, his was almost covered in files and papers, and his diary, which lay open next to his keyboard, looked pretty full, as well.

‘So the practice hasn’t become a complete Marie Celeste of the legal world,’ Olivia couldn’t resist saying.

‘Er, excuse me …?’

‘We do still have some clients, Uncle Jon,’ Olivia explained dryly. ‘I had begun to think from the state of my father’s office and his diary that the practice might be completely devoid of them.’

‘Oh … yes. Oh yes … I see. Well, you know how it is. Sometimes one side of things can be busy and sometimes it’s the other….’

‘Mmm. I suppose so. You mean that people don’t die in Haslewich in the summer?’

She was being unfair, Olivia recognised remorsefully as she saw the almost hunted look in her uncle’s eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘It was just that I had the impression from Tiggy that Dad was very busy.’

‘Oh yes, he was … it’s just … Well, to tell the truth, Olivia, I came down the other day and—’

‘Cleared out Dad’s desk,’ Olivia supplied gently and yet she knew she had made it sound more like an accusation than an acceptance of kind intent.

‘I just wanted to check that there was nothing that was urgent, that was all,’ Jon told her stiffly.

Had he, after all the years of playing second fiddle to her father, both in the family and in the practice, suddenly rebelled and seen … seized the opportunity to assert himself and take over his brother’s role? Guiltily Olivia tried to dismiss such a disquieting thought. Jon, so far as she knew, had never been anything other than fully supportive of her father. But there must surely have been times when he had felt some resentment, some jealousy, some sense of anger at being pushed into second place?

She stole a look at her uncle as he started to go through the post with her, handing her each letter to read and meticulously explaining its origins.

An hour later she decided that there was nothing she need feel too apprehensive about. Most of the letters had seemed pretty straightforward; the practice did not deal with complex litigation cases or even the more complex European and international intercompany legal wranglings that were her particular field.

‘I’m going to have to leave soon. I’ve got an appointment with Lord Burrows at eleven,’ Jon told her. ‘He wants to go through some of the tenancy agreements for his farms.’ Yes, it was a world away from the kind of work she was familiar with, Olivia acknowledged as Jon added, ‘and then I promised I’d go with your mother when she visits your father.’

So far as she could see, her day’s work was going to consist of drafting a new will, chasing authority for some details they needed on a conveyance, clarifying a property boundary and reading through the half-dozen or so files that Jon had entrusted to her. Nowhere near enough to keep her thoughts too busy to stray to Caspar—unfortunately.

11

Max’s first set-back of the day came when he walked into the poky little room that housed the chambers’ two secretaries and their equipment to discover that Charlotte wasn’t there.

‘She’s at the dentist,’ Wendy told him in her nervous little-girl whisper that always aroused in him the desire to torment her by pretending he couldn’t hear her. He knew that she felt intimidated by him and that she disliked and resented him, just as he knew that she was too nervous and fearful to dare to complain when he arrived in the office at ten to five in the afternoon with more than half an hour’s ‘urgent’ typing for her to do.

Charlotte would never have stood for such bullying tactics and it amused Max to witness the skilful way she always managed to pass on the main burden of the work to Wendy and yet at the same time give the impression that she was the one who was the more efficient and hard-working of the pair.

Charlotte and he were in many ways, he suspected, two of a kind, which was why they tended to treat one another with a certain amount of healthy respect. Like him, he imagined that Charlotte had chosen to work at Gray’s Inn because, of the four Inns of Court, Gray’s was the one with the reputation of providing the best social life, and he already knew that there was no way that Charlotte would provide him with the information he wanted without requiring some form of payment in kind.

‘Well, when she comes back, tell her I want to see her, will you?’ he asked Wendy.

She had flushed a painful shade of unflattering pink when he walked into the room and now her whole face and throat were dyed an unpleasant shade of puce. She was more than likely still a virgin, he reflected—and very likely to stay that way.

In his own office, his desk was piled high with work, none of which was likely to earn him anything more than a meagre few hundred pounds. Once he had his tenancy all that, of course, would soon change. Once he had it. He glanced at his watch. How long did it take to visit the dentist, for God’s sake, if indeed that was where Charlotte was?

He sat down and reached for the first file, studying the note pinned to it impatiently. Another no-hoper. My God, why the hell did these people bother? He glanced contemptuously at the letter of instruction from the acting solicitor, formally requesting counsel’s opinion as to the feasibility of their client’s claim. A five-year-old could see that there was no claim. No claim, which meant no case, which meant no fees.

He reached for the next file.

In the end it was almost lunch-time before Charlotte came sauntering into his office, her hair and make-up glamorously immaculate as always, the skirt of her suit just that little bit too short, the jacket just that little bit too fitted for a woman who took her career seriously.

‘You wanted to see me?’

The glossy red lips pouted provocatively as she stood in front of him, making sure he got the full benefit of the long length of her legs and the full curve of her breasts, Max observed, leaning back in his chair, hands crossed behind his head as he looked her lazily up and down.

‘I always enjoy seeing you, Charlotte,’ he assured her mockingly.

The look she gave him suggested that he stop wasting her time.

‘You know it’s the annual dinner dance the month after next,’ he commented, watching as Charlotte eyed him warily.

The annual dinner dance was an external prestigious event with tickets strictly limited, supposedly on a first-come first-served basis, but in reality available only to preselected applicants.

For the first time this year, Max had managed to obtain two tickets, illegitimately, of course, through the good offices of the wife of a certain junior judge who just happened to be on the selection committee and with whom Max had had a judiciously planned flirtation, which had resulted in the then bedazzled lady in question getting his name onto the requisite list.

Charlotte, unless she was invited to the affair by a ticket holder, would have no chance of attending, a fact that they both knew, just as they both knew how beneficial it would be to her in her quest for the right husband if she could be present. There was no limit to the kind of contacts and opportunities an enterprising girl like Charlotte could find at such an event.

‘Is it?’ Charlotte now countered with deliberate vagueness.

Max allowed himself an indulgent smile. ‘I’ve got two tickets for it and as yet no partner.’ He paused. If anything, Charlotte looked even more wary.

‘I need some help … some information …’ Max told her quietly. This was the risky bit. The unprotected leap from one position of strength and safety to another. There was no guarantee—as yet—that Charlotte would take the bait he was offering. She could choose to expose him instead, and if she did …

‘What information?’ she asked him carefully.

Max allowed himself to start to relax.

‘Nothing too unreasonable,’ he assured her easily. ‘Just a name …’

‘A name … what name?’ Charlotte demanded, her eyebrows lifting.

‘Not what, whose,’ Max corrected her loftily.

This was the second hazard; even if she had access to the information he wanted, she might decide not to give it to him, and again he was risking potential exposure.

He paused for a second and then, reminding himself of how much was at risk, told her bluntly, ‘There’s another applicant for the upcoming vacant tenancy—a woman. I need to know her name.’

‘Only the tenants on the tenants’ committee have access to that kind of information,’ she reminded Max.

‘The tenants and the chambers clerk,’ Max agreed smoothly, ‘but at some stage an appointment has to be made … letters have to be written.’

‘Laura deals with all that kind of correspondence,’ Charlotte informed him.

Max raised his eyebrows.

‘All right, I’ll do what I can,’ Charlotte agreed, ‘but I’m not promising anything.’

‘Neither am I,’ Max warned her smoothly.

They exchanged looks.

‘I’ll have to wait until Laura leaves this evening.’

‘Excellent. You’ll be able to do some extra typing for me then, won’t you?’ Max remarked.

Charlotte gave him a warning look and asked mock-sweetly, ‘These tickets, do they include the dinner or are they just for the dance afterwards?’

‘They include everything,’ Max assured her, ‘the dance, the dinner and the pre-dinner cocktail party. I hope you’ve got a suitable dress.’

Charlotte smiled at him.

It was a pity in a way, Max mused after Charlotte had gone. He had worked hard for those tickets, damned hard, far too hard to have wasted a ticket on someone like Charlotte under normal circumstances, but then these were not normal circumstances, and in view of what he ultimately stood to gain, some sacrifices had to be made.

The practice’s cases might not involve the huge sums of money she was used to dealing with but they were certainly far more interesting, Olivia decided after she had finished reading through the tangled history of one of them. A land dispute had sprung up between two brothers, both of whom claimed to have rights over a piece of land left by their uncle. Both men were already relatively wealthy local farmers but this piece of fiercely disputed land also contained a stream, and it was access to the stream that was the real cause of the dispute. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that at some stage the course of the stream had been altered, diverted, as one brother claimed, so that it now ran through the other brother’s land instead of running in its original course on his land.

Olivia had spent most of the morning poring over old maps and deeds, which in itself was an unfamiliar enough task to her to be intensely absorbing, but trying to read the fine old-fashioned writing was beginning to make her eyes ache. Then she remembered seeing a small magnifying glass on her uncle’s desk.

He had already left for his first appointment, but his office door was open and she could see the magnifying glass beside some papers. She went inside and walked over to get it. As she reached out to pick the glass up, her attention was caught by the open wallet of bank statements on the desk. They were her father’s, she realised, and her uncle had presumably been going through them because they were folded back to show the month of February. One item on the statement was ringed in red, and without intending to do so, Olivia found she was studying it, her heartbeat registering her shock when she discovered that the circled item related to a credit to her father’s account of almost a quarter of a million pounds.

Her father was not the kind of man who had ever managed to accumulate large sums of money. As a family they lived well, very well in fact, but both her parents in different ways tended to be financially extravagant; they were not savers or investors, which meant that her father either must have been given the money or …

Her heart thumping heavily, Olivia sat down in her uncle’s chair and pulled the statements towards her. The money had been deposited by credit transfer. From her grandfather perhaps? Olivia knew that there had been occasions in the past when her father had had to apply to Ben for a ‘loan’ but she, perhaps naïvely, had always assumed that the sums her father had borrowed had been for much smaller amounts.

She flicked forward through the statements and then stopped abruptly as she came to another credit entry—easy enough to find since the bulk of the statement entries were for withdrawals, withdrawals that ran to sums far in excess of her father’s drawings from the practice.

This time the credit was smaller, one hundred thousand pounds, and it was dated very recently, only days before her father’s heart attack, in fact. More slowly this time, Olivia turned back to the first statement and started to go carefully through them all.

By the time she had finished, she felt ice-cold and her hands were shaking so much she could hardly turn the statements. By her rough calculations, in the past five years her father’s account had been credited with close on two million pounds. Where had he got such a vast sum of money? What had he spent it on? So far as she could see, it had been absorbed by her parents’ day-to-day living expenses, by extravagance and overspending to a catastrophic degree. Yes, she could see where the money had gone, but where had it come from?

She had a nauseous feeling that she already knew, if not the exact source of the money, then at least the type of source it was most likely to have come from. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to steady herself.

‘Oh, Dad, how could you …?’ she whispered shakily.

Her glance fell on a file that had been tucked underneath the statements. It looked very like the one Olivia had seen her uncle holding in her father’s study the previous evening. Reluctantly she picked it up and glanced at the name. JEMIMA HARDING—TRUST FUND.

Her fingers were trembling so much she could hardly open it. She knew the Harding family, who lived in Haslewich. They had originally been local landowners; some of their land had been sequestered for use as an American army base during the war, and more recently the same land had been sold off along with the land the Hardings still owned close to a huge multinational chemical and drug conglomerate, which had its British headquarters several miles outside town.

That sale had made Jemima Harding a millionairess. It had also enabled her only son to buy the fast sports car in which he had met his death and, so local rumour said, brought about the split between her and her husband that had ultimately led to their very acrimonious divorce and her reverting to her maiden name of Harding.

She was an old woman now, in her late eighties, Olivia reckoned, living in a residential home.

She was also one of her father’s clients; he was her sole executor and held power of attorney over her financial affairs. Was that where the money had come from? Olivia wondered bleakly. Had her father used those powers to transfer money from Jemima’s account into his own? It would have been easy enough for him to do and easy enough to keep hidden—just so long as Jemima remained alive and no one questioned what was happening to her estate.

The cold, icy calm of deep shock had fallen over her. She was distantly aware of neatly placing the file where she had found it along with the statements, of getting up and even remembering to collect the magnifying glass she had originally come for before walking back to her father’s office. But once there she felt her legs starting to buckle beneath her and her whole body starting to shake so much that she was forced to cling to the back of a chair, unable to move, unable to do anything other than stand there shivering violently and trying to force her emotions to accept what her brain insisted they had to know.

Her father had stolen money from someone else. Her father had defrauded someone who trusted him. Her father was no different from the thief who broke in during the night, the con man who deceived vulnerable old folk out of their savings and pensions. Her father …

She swallowed uneasily. Uncle Jon … had he known …? Had he guessed? Was that why …? Her head started to pound. The temptation to run back to Jon’s office and go through the statements again, to convince herself that she was wrong, that she had misread the evidence, misunderstood what she had seen, was so strong she had to forcibly prevent herself from moving.

Her father …

‘Has he been under any unusual stress?’ the specialist had asked them and she had wondered guiltily then if she ought to mention her mother’s ‘problem’ but had decided not to do so since she was not sure whether her father was aware of it. The stress caused by that knowledge would have been bad enough, but this …

How on earth had he managed to live with himself, knowing what he had done not once, but regularly, consistently, over a period of five years? How could he have done it?

Abruptly, achingly, Olivia longed for Caspar. And not just for him, but the means of escape he could have provided from the appalling dilemma she now faced. If only she had never seen those statements, opened that file. If only she was now safely on her way to London with Caspar.

It shocked her that she, who had always privately thought of herself as strong and independent, should, the moment she was tested, become so mortally afraid and vulnerable, and even worse than that, a moral coward who, instead of facing up to what she had discovered, simply wanted to run and hide herself away from it, preferably in the safe sanctuary of Caspar’s arms.

Caspar. She looked at her watch. It still wasn’t too late for her to catch him before he left, she decided feverishly. If she drove straight to the airport, there was still time before his flight took off for London.