Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

Jon was in his office when Olivia walked in. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said without preamble.

‘What is it?’ he asked her after he had waved her into a chair. ‘Have you changed your mind, decided to go to America with Caspar after all? If you have, don’t worry—’

‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ Olivia interrupted him quietly. ‘I wanted to, but I discovered that I’d left it too late.’

When she didn’t elaborate Jon shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

‘It’s all right, Uncle Jon,’ Olivia told him gently, ‘I know now why you didn’t want me working here.’

She could see Jon physically stiffening as she spoke and she could see, as well, the way his glance strayed betrayingly to the place on his desk where he had left those incriminating bank statements. He had put them away now as well as the file.

‘I know what Dad’s been doing,’ Olivia pressed on firmly. ‘About the money he’s taken, stolen from Jemima Harding’s trust fund. When did you find out what was going on?’

For a moment she thought that he was going to attempt to deny the whole thing. He took a deep breath, paused and then walked over to the window before saying tiredly, ‘I’ve been suspicious for a while, but stupidly, I suppose, with hindsight … I didn’t want to … I thought that perhaps … You mustn’t judge your father too harshly, Olivia,’ he told her. ‘God knows what kind of pressure he must have been under. I only wish …’ He stopped and shook his head.

‘Oh, Uncle Jon, how could he?’ Olivia demanded, suddenly giving way to her emotions, too wound up to keep still she started to pace the floor. ‘How could he do something like that …?’

‘I don’t think he ever meant things to go so far,’ Jon tried to comfort her. ‘I imagine that he just meant to borrow the money at first, that he fully intended to pay it back, but as things stood—’

‘He couldn’t do it and so instead he just borrowed more,’ Olivia interrupted bitterly. ‘Only he wasn’t borrowing it at all, was he, Uncle Jon? He was stealing it,’ she retorted sharply. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

Jon winced as he listened to her. He felt so guilty—as much to blame as David himself. He should never have allowed David to have so much control over such a vulnerable client, especially not when he knew … But that was all in the past and he had sworn as David’s brother, his twin, sworn on the Bible to his father that the one unfortunate mistake of David’s—that small silly bit of foolishness when David was in London—was something that would never again be mentioned between them. David had escaped a formal charge then because no one, least of all the important client he had been involved with, wanted it to become public knowledge that a junior, as yet unqualified barrister, had almost got away with swindling him out of a considerable sum of money.

Instead the whole affair had been hushed up. David hadn’t actually spent any of the money; that had been repaid. He had been dismissed from chambers and David himself had sworn tearfully to both his father and to Jon himself that he would never be tempted to do such an idiotic thing again. It had simply been the pressure of the way he was living, the crowd he was running with, the fact that Tiggy was pregnant, that had led him into such temptation in the first place. He had never really intended to steal the money, simply to use it, borrow it, until his allowance came through, that was all.

Ben, of course, had to believe him, accept his excuses and his remorse, because to do otherwise would have meant that he had to accept that David was not what he had always so proudly believed him to be. And Jon had accepted the vow of silence imposed on him by Ben because, well, because David was his brother and he had grown used to always shielding and protecting him, helping to maintain the fiction that he was the character their father had established for his favourite son. Who was really to blame if David found maintaining the burden of that character too difficult? David or Ben? And who, after all, was he to sit in judgement on the brother he had been brought up to revere?

Over the years he had done his best to be careful about exposing David to any kind of temptation, but then he had perhaps started to become overconfident, to relax a little too much. He had avoided seeing what was happening because he hadn’t wanted to see it, and because of that laxness …

The burden of the way he had turned his back on his responsibility, the way he had let not just David but Ben, as well, and yes, Olivia and all the others down, too, weighed unbearably heavily on his shoulders.

David had, of course, escaped from his burden of responsibility just as he always escaped or downright avoided it; after all, Jon wasn’t going to take the risk of accusing him now with fraud when to do so could bring on a second and potentially fatal heart attack. But Jon did not like admitting to such thoughts and so he quickly pushed them to the back of his mind. They were not the kind of thoughts he had been brought up to harbour about his brother.

‘Uncle Jon, what are we going to do?’ Olivia asked him huskily. ‘There’s no way that the money can be repaid and even if it could …’ She spread her hands helplessly. ‘He’s guilty of theft … and fraud … and of professional misconduct of the worst possible kind.’

As he listened to his niece and heard the anguish in her voice, Jon forbore to remind her that her father had never qualified either as a barrister or a solicitor and therefore the question of professional misconduct at least did not arise, or at least not in the sense that she meant.

‘It will kill Gramps,’ she whispered, ‘and this …’ She lifted her hand to indicate their surroundings. ‘No one will … It could destroy all of us … the whole family.’

Jon couldn’t deny it. Who would want to hire a firm of solicitors in which one of the partners had been convicted of fraud? The Crighton name, of which his father was so chauvinistically proud, would be ruined. There was nowhere so comfortable and safe as a small town, and nowhere so cruel once you had broken its moral laws, transgressed its ethical boundaries. And the legal world was in many ways very similar to a small town; gossip spread fast and lethally through it. Only the fact that the only other person apart from the client to know about David’s earlier transgression had been felled by a stroke within days of having confronted David had prevented the news of that transgression from spreading. Jon was sure of it.

But this time the truth couldn’t be hidden. Jemima Harding was eighty-nine and in poor health; she couldn’t live for ever and sooner or later—probably sooner—someone was going to start questioning the disappearance of that two million pounds from her accounts.

‘There isn’t anything we can do,’ Jon told her heavily, and for the first time as she looked into his eyes Olivia saw just how great a burden her father had placed on his twin brother.

‘Someone will have to tell Jemima Harding … and the bank … and—’

‘Yes,’ Jon agreed. ‘I’ve already made an appointment to see her accountants,’ he said quietly. ‘I know the senior partner reasonably well.’

They looked at one another in heavy silence. Jon had no other option open to him, Olivia realised. If he withheld the fact that he knew of David’s fraud and did not act upon it, technically he would be as guilty as her father, just as she would be herself.

‘Would you like me to come with you … when you see the accountant?’ she offered.

Jon gave her a ruefully tender smile. ‘No,’ he replied gently. ‘It would be best if no one other than ourselves knew that we’ve had this conversation. In fact, it would be best if we had not had it,’ he added firmly.

‘Oh, Uncle Jon.’ Olivia shook her head as she went over and hugged him swiftly. ‘You always put other people first. You always want to protect them.’

As he returned her embrace, Jon reflected guiltily that she was wrong. He hadn’t thought about protecting Jenny last night when he’d been holding Tiggy in his arms. Why had he done it? He didn’t know what was happening to him. Increasingly over the past few months he had discovered aspects of his character that bewildered and sometimes shocked him. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing an unfamiliar reflection, turning a corner of a well-known street and seeing a totally unknown view, an experience that was both unsettling and alarming.

Lying in bed at night next to Jenny, unable to sleep, he sometimes found himself worrying, questioning where they were going, and even more disturbing, why they should bother going on at all.

Their children would soon no longer really need them. Their marriage. Their lives together had become predictable and routine. But where once he had actually found its steadiness and sameness a comforting security, just recently it had felt more like a prison. He was fifty years old and it was as though he had suddenly woken up to the reality of life itself and seen for the first time how much he had missed out on. Realised how many times he had not done things. The chaotic turmoil of his own thoughts left him feeling confused and agitated; the intensity of his emotions—new emotions many of them—shocked him.

It was almost six months since he had first begun to suspect what David was doing, from a chance remark by their bank manager that David and Tiggy were very fortunate to inherit such a substantial fund of money from her parents. Since he knew that Tiggy’s parents were both still alive and lived in comfortable but very modest circumstances on the South coast, his suspicions had immediately been alerted.

He had tried to discuss the subject with David, but typically his brother had fobbed him off, initially avoiding the issue and then claiming that their bank manager must have misunderstood.

But Jon had not believed him. He closed his eyes briefly. The knowledge that he doubted his brother’s word, his probity, his honesty, had caused him many sleepless nights as he swung from feeling guilty at his own suspicions to fearing that they might be true, his pain, misery, anger and hopelessness accompanying the sense of loss and loneliness.

For the first time in his life, he was forced to confront the truth. David, his brother, his twin, was a liar and a thief. The anger that had filled him, the sense of betrayal and resentment, had been like a flood-tide sweeping through his emotions and his beliefs, destroying whole segments of the person he had always thought himself as being, leaving him stranded in a no man’s land of confusion and doubt, knowing only that now he had a desperate need to sever himself from the role of his brother’s most loyal supporter.

In place of the loyalty and love he had been taught to feel for David, he now felt a huge weight of unexpressed and inexpressible anger, not just against David and his father, he acknowledged tiredly, but against virtually everyone, including himself.

Only Tiggy with her vulnerability, her helplessness, her neediness, seemed able to reach the old tender emotions and ready compassion that had once been the benchmark of his whole personality. A part of him longed, yearned, to be able to tell Jenny how he felt, to be able to share his confusion, his anger, his sense of self-loss and pain with her, but he was afraid to do so, fearing not just her judgement of him but also his being forced to judge himself.

In the final analysis, no matter what his criminal actions, David was still his brother and he was betraying him by revealing what he had done and, more importantly in his own heart, by being unable any longer to go on loving him.

He glanced at his watch and told Olivia quietly, ‘It’s gone six. You go. Your mother doesn’t like being left on her own.’

‘She’s probably gone shopping,’ Olivia said, trying to smile, but then, as she realised where the money had come from for her mother’s compulsive shopping trips, her face crumpled.

Why … why … why hadn’t she gone with Caspar as they had planned? If she had … if she had, nothing would have changed, except that Jon would have been left to carry the burden of her father’s dishonesty by himself, she reminded herself sternly. The least she could do as her father’s daughter, her parents’ daughter, was to be here to share that burden with him.

As he watched Olivia leave, Jon acknowledged sombrely that whilst he had no clear idea yet what exactly it was he wanted to do with the rest of his life, he knew that it could no longer continue as it had. More than anything else, he needed time and space to think. Time away from Jenny’s sad, reproachful eyes and from the knowledge that lay between them. Perhaps with hindsight, it would have been better for them not to have married in the first place. Which was the more cowardly act? To stay in a marriage simply because it was there or to admit the truth and face up to reality, as he had been forced to admit the truth about David.

There was an estate agent’s on the opposite side of the square. He had noticed absently when passing it that one window was devoted to properties to let….

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

‘Hello … I didn’t expect to see you here today.’ Guy smiled warmly at Jenny as she walked into the shop.

‘No, I’m just on my way back from the hospital,’ she told him.

He studied her covertly. She had lost weight over the past few days and it suited her, emphasising the elegant bone structure of her face and narrowing her waist. She had always had neatly defined wrists and ankles; Guy, to whom such things were important, had noticed them the first time they met.

To him there was a natural elegance about Jenny’s body, about the way she held herself and moved, which far surpassed the more common theatrical mannerisms and poses that Tiggy affected.

In his mind’s eye, Guy could transform her into the woman he knew she could be, the woman she should have been—with her dark hair worn slightly longer and styled differently, its natural curl allowed to emphasise the shape of her face and worn in a soft bob, Italian style, the warm tones of her skin accentuated by clothes in mouth-wateringly delicious shades of honey and cream deepened through to cinnamon.