Power Play

A long meeting with a select and powerful group of Conservative lobbyists the previous evening had kept him out of bed until three a.m. and in consequence, it was well into Saturday morning before he walked into the breakfast room of his Belgravia home in Chester Square. As was his habit, the first thing he did when he sat down was to glance through his mail.

The butler had brought the mail in earlier on a silver tray, and the thick cream envelope with the Minesse Management crest caught his attention straight away.

As a politician it was his business to know those companies and institutions who discreetly funded the Conservative Party machine, and he remembered at once that there had been an extremely respectable donation from Minesse at the end of the last financial year.

Conservative Members of Parliament, in the main a product of the English public school system, are trained almost from birth to adopt the “under” in preference to the “over” statement. It is a British tradition that some say started with Drake playing bowls while he watched the Spanish Armada advancing. The “respectable” donation had in fact been close to a million pounds.

Even so, Simon didn’t open the letter straight away, but eyed it cautiously. Caution was a prime requisite of politicians, and in politics, as in every other power-based structure, favours have to be paid for.

The unanticipated cream envelope disturbed him. It was unexpected, and he wasn’t a man who adjusted well to anything that did not fall within the strict controls he set around his life.

At thirty-two he was privately being tipped, in all the secret and powerful circles that really matter, as a future leader of the Tory party. He deliberately played down his chances, smiling ruefully, adopting the role of impressed but humble student, to the political barons who had taken him up.

He had known since coming down from Oxford that nothing but the ultimate seat of power would satisfy him, but he had learned while he was there to harness and control his ambitions. Overt ambition is still considered both suspicious and ungentlemanly by the British ruling classes. Simon Herries had everything in his favour; he came from a North Country family with aristocratic connections. It was well known in the corridors of Westminster that no one could be an MP without an additional source of income—left wing politicians were financed by their trade union; establishment right-wingers got theirs from private sources. It was from trusts set up by his wife’s family that Simon Herries received the income that enabled him to live in a style which very few of his colleagues could match. As well as the Belgravia house he also owned over a thousand acres of rich farmland and an Elizabethan manor house near Berwick. The Belgrave Square house had been bought on his marriage by his new in-laws. It was conservatively valued at half a million.

He picked up The Times and turned to the first leader, but his eye was drawn back to that cream envelope.

At eleven o’clock exactly, the butler pushed open the baize-covered door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house and brought in his breakfast. Fresh orange juice, squeezed from the Californian oranges that he preferred; two slices of wholemeal bread and a small pot of honey that came from one of his own farms; a pot of coffee made from the beans that were bought fresh every day, apart from Sunday, from Harrods Food Hall and which Simon drank black. He liked his life to be orderly, almost ritualistically so. When people commented on it, Simon said it was the result of his public school upbringing.

He was as careful about watching his weight as he was about everything else. Image was important; one didn’t wish to project the glossy, too well packaged look of one’s American colleagues, of course—the voters would find that insincere, but Simon would have been a fool not to take advantage of the fact that at six foot, with a well muscled athletic build which came from public school sports fields, and rowing for his college, he possessed an enviably commanding presence.

His hair was thick and dark blond. In the summer the sun added distinct highlights, and his skin tanned a healthy brown. He looked arrogantly aristocratic. Women liked him and voted for him and for his policies, men envied and admired his success. He was known in the popular press as the only MP with sex appeal. He pretended to find the description distasteful.

His wife was probably one of the few people who actually knew how much he relished it, and why!

She was away at the moment, visiting her family in Boston. She was a Calvert and could trace her family back to those first arrivals on the Mayflower. She had spent a post-graduate year at Oxford, after graduating from Radcliffe. Her cool Bostonian arrogance had amused Simon; just as it had amused him to take her back to his family’s ancient stronghold in the Border hills, and show her the documents that traced his lineage back to Duke William’s Normans.

Elizabeth in turn had invited him to Boston. Her parents had been impressed with him. Her father was a partner in the family bank, and it hadn’t taken Henry Calvert very long to discover that Simon Herries came from a family that was almost as clever and conservative with money as his own.

The wedding had made headlines in all the Society papers—discreet ones, of course; after all, there was Royalty present. Simon’s godmother was a Royal, and she had graciously consented to attend.

Of course the ceremony had had to take place at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Mrs Calvert had been torn between elation and disappointment. It would have been very pleasant indeed to have hosted a dinner in Boston for her future son-in-law’s godmother, but Simon had been adamant: the ceremony was to take place at St Margaret’s.

There was a piece in The Times lauding the new legislation he was pressing for to tighten up the laws regarding child abuse. He was building up a reputation for being a fierce campaigner for law and order and a return to a more strict moral climate. He was known among his peers, sometimes acidly, as the “Housewives’ Choice.” He smiled as he re-read the piece. There were an awful lot of housewives, and all of them had the right to vote.

His assistant would no doubt cut the piece out for him and clip it to his PR file. She was a twenty-three-year-old Cambridge Honours graduate, and Simon had been sleeping with her for the past three months. She was intelligent, but a little too intense. His mind shifted gear. It was probably just as well that the long vacation was coming up; it would help cool things down a little. He had no intention of getting too heavily involved.

Simon opened the envelope, slitting it carefully with a silver-handled knife, which had been given to his grandfather by the monarch.

The letter was brief and uninformative. It simply invited him to present himself at the offices of Minesse at three on Monday afternoon, to discuss something of mutual benefit.

It wasn’t such an unusual letter; and he checked in his diary to see if he had the afternoon free. He had, and he pencilled in the appointment and a note to ask his secretary to produce everything she could on Minesse and its founder Pepper Minesse. He had never met her, but she had the reputation of being a beautiful and very clever woman.

Miles French, barrister at law, and quite possibly soon to be Judge French, didn’t receive his letter until Monday morning.

He had spent his weekend with his latest lover. He was a man who liked to concentrate on one thing at a time, and when he was with a woman whose company he enjoyed, he didn’t like anything else to distract him. He and Rosemary Bennett had been lovers for almost six months, which was quite a long time as far as he was concerned. He liked beautiful women, but he also liked intelligent conversation, and his mind frequently grew bored before his body.

Rosemary was an editor on Vogue, and occasionally if she felt he was stepping out of line, she liked to punish him by exhibiting him in front of her fashion trade cronies.

A barrister was a rara avis indeed in their enclosed world; the men derided his Savile Row suits and white-collared starched shirts, while the women eyed him sideways, stripped off the suit and shirt, and wondered how much of a chance they would have of stealing him away from Rosemary Bennett.

He was six foot two with a body that was solid with muscle. He had black hair that curled slightly. His eyes were the colour of iced water, and Rosemary claimed that it gave her the most delicious frisson of dread when he looked at her in his “courtroom” manner. They suited one another. Both of them knew the rules; both of them knew exactly what they could and could not have from their relationship. Miles didn’t sleep with other women, but she knew that the moment she began to pall he would drop her and that there would be no court of appeal.

He picked up the letter along with several others as he opened the door of the flat he owned, conveniently close to his chambers. Along with the rest of his mail he dropped it on his desk before going upstairs to shower and change. He had no appointments for the day. He was a man who didn’t like to rush anything he did; a man who was patient and thorough, and to those who didn’t know him, surprisingly passionate. He had a dangerous temper, although it was slow to be aroused.

His phone rang as he stepped into the shower. He cursed and went into his bedroom to answer it, dripping water on to the carpet. His body was strongly made and taut with muscle from his bi-weekly games of squash at his club. His torso was shadowed with dark hair, silky fine and alluringly sensual to the female sex.

The phone call was from his clerk, and Miles answered the query, then rang off.

Once dressed, he went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. He had a daily woman who kept the apartment clean and sometimes shopped for him, but he preferred to be independent. He had never known either of his parents. As a very small baby he had been abandoned on the steps of a Glasgow children’s hospital, and had eventually ended up in a children’s home, where he had learned to value his privacy and independence.

He took his coffee with him into his study. It was a spacious room, the walls lined with bookshelves, and it was one of the reasons he had bought this particular apartment. He sat down at his desk and glanced through his mail, frowning slightly as he came to the Minesse envelope, his bottom lip jutting out slightly, a habitual gesture he wasn’t particularly aware of but which women found sexy. The name of the company was familiar to him, but as far as he knew he had no legal dealings with them, and in any case most of his dealings with clients were via the medium of a solicitor.

Miles opened the envelope and read the letter with a smile. Intriguing, and he would have known that it was a letter from a woman even without his knowledge of who headed Minesse Management. He couldn’t recall if he and Pepper Minesse had ever met, although he had heard about her. He wondered what on earth she could want, tossing several possibilities around in his mind. There was only one way to find out, and he had a free afternoon. Miles picked up the phone.

Pepper spent the weekend with friends who lived just outside Oxford. Philip and Mary Simms were the closest thing she had known to a family since the death of her grandmother when she was fifteen. She arrived just after eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, having timed her journey to avoid the traffic.

The bright early summer sunshine had tempted her to put the hood down on the Aston Martin, and her hair, left loose from its chignon, had been tousled by the wind. She was wearing a linen suit in a soft shade of olive green, the skirt cut short and straight, and the jacket fitting the contours of her breasts and waist. Underneath it she was wearing a cream silk blouse. As she stopped the car engine and swung her legs out on to the gravel drive she saw Oliver Simms disappearing round the side of the shabby Victorian semi.

She called to him, and he turned and waited for her, a grave-eyed boy of ten. He blushed slightly as she approached him, but the good manners instilled by his parents made him wait until she reached him.

“Hi, Oliver.”

Of all his parents’ friends, Pepper was his favourite. She didn’t try to ruffle his hair, or worse still, to kiss him, and she always remembered his birthdays and Christmas with presents that were exactly what he wanted, plus a small sum of money for his post office savings account. At the moment he was saving up for a new bike. His birthday fell in June and he was hoping that as a present his parents would make up the shortfall on his savings.

“Mum and Dad are in the garden,” he told Pepper.

He had arrived in his parents’ lives when his mother was just over forty and his father was eight years older, and in all the ten years of his short existence he had never for one moment doubted how much they had wanted him. He wasn’t spoiled in the sense of being indulged with material possessions—his father taught at the local comprehensive and the family were comfortably rather than well off, but there had never been a second in Oliver’s life when he had not known the security of being deeply loved.

He was a good-natured boy who had learned quite young to analyse and judge logically, and already he knew that although there might be times when he envied those of his school friends who possessed the latest computer, or the latest BMX, in reality many of them came from families where their parents led such busy lives that their fathers and sometimes their mothers were almost strangers to them.

Oliver knew that it was a struggle for his parents to send him to the exclusive prep school he attended, but no matter what sacrifices had to be made there always seemed to be just enough money for things like a new school uniform, and extras, like the skiing holiday he had had just after the New Year.

Once he had seen Pepper safely round into the back garden, he excused himself, telling her gravely, “I’m just off to cricket practice…I might make it on to the first junior team this year.”

Pepper watched him until he had disappeared then headed into the garden.

“Pepper, my dear! You’re early…”

“The traffic was in my favour for once.” Pepper kissed Mary’s cheek and allowed the older woman to hold her close. Mary Simms was the only person she ever allowed to embrace her in that way. Instinctively Pepper always held herself aloof and remote from others, but Mary was different. Without Mary…

“You’re looking very well, Mary—both of you are, in fact.”

There was no emotion in Pepper’s voice as she studied their faces. No one looking at her could guess how close were the bonds between them.

Mary Simms, who had grown up in a rambling old vicarage near Cambridge, populated by not only her parents but a collection of ancient aunts and uncles as well, had almost from birth been used to showing her affection freely and physically. It hurt her more than she could ever put into any words that Pepper had been denied the love she herself had known as a child, and with which she surrounded her husband and son.

Philip Simms greeted Pepper with his usual absent-minded bonhomie. Philip was a born teacher; he had the gift of communicating to his pupils the desire for knowledge. He had taught her so much…given her so much. Here in this shabby house she had….