Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘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 (#ufcc4f2fd-df2c-5918-87db-8cfc05f14296)

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.