Lingering Shadows

‘Ah, Saul. Glad I was able to catch you in.’

His frown intensified as he recognised Sir Alex’s voice. It was like the man that he should feel no need to introduce himself; that he should assume autocratically that he needed no introduction.

‘I was half expecting you’d be on your way to Cheshire by now.’

Subtlety, at least when it came to people rather than business, had never been Sir Alex’s strong point, Saul reflected. His tools of persuasion veered more towards the verbal bludgeoning and threatening school than the delicate hint.

‘You haven’t forgotten our discussion, have you?’ Sir Alex queried sharply when Saul made no response. ‘Or are you suffering another crisis of conscience?’

‘I shall be leaving for Cheshire once I’ve tied up some loose ends here,’ Saul told him coolly.

There weren’t really any loose ends for him to tie up. He knew already as much as he was going to know about Carey’s without being on the spot to do some far more in-depth research, but he could feel himself bristling inwardly at Alex’s bullying tone. The older man’s manner was beginning to jar on him. There were many things about him that Saul genuinely liked and admired, but he had never been more conscious of how little he wanted to be like him.

And yet for years he had worked patiently towards that one goal: to take over from Sir Alex when he retired. To take over from him, but not to be him.

On Sir Alex’s desk was a photograph of his daughter, taken when she graduated from Cambridge. Sir Alex had not been there for her graduation. He had been away on business. He and his wife had divorced over twenty years ago, and as far as Saul knew Sir Alex’s contact with his daughter was now limited to the exchange of cards at Christmas. Was that what he wanted? Was that the kind of relationship he wanted with his children?

For the first time behind the slightly hectoring tone of his employer’s voice Saul was suddenly aware of, if not exactly a loneliness, then certainly an aloneness. Two men, both of them, in the eyes of the world, successful and to be envied, but take away their work and what was there really in their lives?

For quite a long time after his conversation with Sir Alex was over he sat motionlessly where he was.

Beside him on his desk was the small file containing the basic facts about Carey Chemicals. He picked it up, flipping it open as he started to read.

He read quickly, pausing only a handful of times, once when he read how the company had originally come into being, a second time when he read of Gregory James’s heavy losses on the money markets, and a third time when he read that the company was now in the hands of his widow, the founder’s granddaughter, Davina James.

She would want to sell. She would have to. There was no other option open to her. The business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Saul suspected he knew the kind of woman she would be. The investigating agents Sir Alex had employed had been thorough. There were no details of Gregory James’s many affairs, just a couple of paragraphs stating that his unfaithfulness was a constant and ongoing situation and that it would seem that his wife must have been aware of it.

Saul thought he knew the type. He had met enough of them over the years; elegant, brittle, too thin, too tense and too expensively dressed, they reminded him of fragile china ornaments. You always had the feeling that if they were asked to participate in anything real they would crack and fall apart.

Some of them turned to sex as a means of solace for the uninterest of their husbands, some of them turned to drink, some to good works, but none of them, it seemed to Saul, seemed prepared to take the simple step of freeing themselves from the humiliation and destruction of their marriages by divorcing their husbands. Wealth, position, appearances, it seemed, were always more important than pride, self-respect or self-worth.

He had once made the mistake of saying as much to Christie and she had turned on him immediately, challenging him to put himself in their shoes, to be what life and circumstances had forced them to be.

He winced a little as he remembered her anger, her vehemence about the fact that so many members of her sex were taught almost from birth to accept second best, to put others first, to give instead of to take. Many of them were held in those marriages by their children, she had told him fiercely.

But Davina James did not have any children. He frowned as he lifted the last sheet of paper from the file and saw the photographs pinned neatly behind it.

There were several of Carey Chemicals, showing the run-down state of the buildings and how totally ill equipped it was to compete with even the poorest of its competitors. Without that all-important heart-drug patent which had been revised over the years to create a second patent it would have disappeared decades ago.

There was another photograph. He stiffened as he saw the name written on the back: ‘Davina James’.

He turned it over.

She was nothing like what he had imagined. The file quoted her date of birth, so he knew that she was thirty-seven years old, but in this photograph she looked younger and vulnerable in a way that made his body tense with rejection.

There was none of the glossy sophistication that he had expected about her. She was dressed in jeans and what looked like a man’s shirt, one hand lifted to push a strand of soft fair hair out of her eyes. She was wearing gardening gloves and there was a smear of dirt along one cheekbone, a fork in the ground at her feet. Her skin, free of make-up, looked clear and soft, and without even realising what he was doing Saul suddenly discovered that his thumb was touching her face.

But it wasn’t the living warmth of a woman’s flesh he could feel, just the hard glossy texture of the print.

He withdrew his hand as though the print had scorched him.

CHAPTER SIX (#u6f0fd936-9bca-5424-abf4-f69d60383cb6)

GUILTILY aware of how long it had been since she had last seen Lucy, and of the discomfited look on Giles’s face whenever she mentioned his wife to him, on Saturday afternoon, knowing that Giles would be playing golf and that Lucy would be on her own, Davina decided to call round and see her.

She had done nothing wrong, she assured herself as she drove through the village. It was her duty to do all she could to protect the livelihoods of those who worked for Carey’s, and without Giles’s help she could not do that.

But Giles was Lucy’s husband, and one of the reasons she had been able to persuade Giles to stay on had been his feelings for her. Feelings which neither of them had discussed … admitted, but which both of them knew were there. Did Lucy know as well?

Davina’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt anyone, and she genuinely liked Lucy. Oh, she knew that there were those in their small, tight-knit local circle who disapproved of her; Lucy wasn’t like them. She was flamboyant, outspoken, turbulent and passionate. She was also extremely attractive, Davina reflected as she drove through the soft Cheshire countryside.

And extremely unhappy?

Davina pushed the thought away. Lucy’s obvious disenchantment with her life and with her husband had nothing to do with her. Lucy was not a woman’s woman. She had no interest in cosy, gossipy chats over cups of coffee, comfortable womanly discussions on the failings of men in general and husbands in particular, rueful, sometimes too dangerously honest admissions that there came a point in a relationship when sex was no longer its prime motivating force, when, as one long-married wife had once put it in Davina’s hearing, she ‘got more excitement out of watching Neighbours than making love with her husband’.

Lucy was openly, too openly sometimes, scornful of that kind of female intimacy. Lucy was different, and, because she was different, other women found her dangerous.

Davina didn’t find her dangerous. Davina liked her, and when Giles had first come to work for Carey’s Davina had envied her. Things had been different then. She had not yet met Matt, and Lucy and Giles had been so obviously, so passionately, so blindingly in love with one another that it had made Davina’s empty heart ache just to see them.

She remembered calling round early one afternoon just after they had moved in. Giles had come to answer the door, his face flushed, his hair untidy, apologising for keeping her waiting, and then behind him on the landing Davina had seen Lucy, and she had known immediately that she had interrupted them making love.

She had felt so envious then, so alone.

And now she felt guilty, even though she told herself she had nothing to feel guilty about.

Davina parked her car on the Cheshire brick herringbone-patterned drive and walked up to the front door.

She remembered the first time she had visited the house and how stunned she had been by the way Lucy had decorated and furnished it. The whole house had seemed to sing with harmonious colour and warmth, soft peaches and terracottas which complemented Lucy’s dark red hair, cool blues and greens and creams, the colour of her eyes and skin; the house was Lucy, Davina had thought, right down to the femininity of the soft cushions and the voluptuous way in which she had used her fabrics. It was a house in which even on the greyest of days the sun always seemed to be shining.

Today the sun was shining, but when Lucy opened the door Davina was shocked to see how pale she looked, how withdrawn her manner was in stark contrast to her normal ebullience.

‘Lucy, it’s been ages since I saw you,’ Davina told her nervously. ‘It’s the company. It seems to eat into my time.’ As she followed Lucy into the kitchen Davina was aware that she was speaking too fast, gabbling almost.

‘Funny, that’s always Giles’s excuse,’ Lucy told her harshly. ‘The company. Odd that you never seemed very interested in it while Gregory was alive, isn’t it?’

There was outright hostility in her voice now and Davina’s heart sank. This was what she had been dreading; that Lucy would resent her for persuading Giles to stay on.

‘Lucy, I know how you must feel,’ she began awkwardly. ‘But——’

‘Do you? I don’t think so,’ Lucy interrupted her bitterly. ‘You aren’t the one who has to sit here alone all day waiting for your husband to come home, are you? Why are you so anxious to hold on to Carey’s, Davina? You never cared about it while Gregory was alive.’

‘I didn’t realise then the problems they were having,’ Davina told her. On that subject at least she could be totally honest with Lucy. She owed it to her to be totally honest with her. ‘I have to try to keep Carey’s going, Lucy. I can’t let the company close down.’

‘Why not? You’re financially secure, aren’t you?’

Davina winced at the accusation in her voice. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It isn’t the money, Lucy. It isn’t for me …’

‘Then who is it for?’ Lucy asked sarcastically. ‘Giles?’