Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

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Max drummed his fingers impatiently of the top of his desk. It was almost seven o’clock, well past the time when he would normally have left chambers, but when five-thirty had come and gone with no sign of Laura getting ready to leave, he had gritted his teeth, cursed his grandfather under his breath and sent Charlotte a warning look when she had started to pout.

‘Still here, Charlotte?’ Laura had commented with a wintry look. ‘That’s not like you.’

‘Charlotte has agreed to work late to finish some typing for me,’ Max had cut in.

‘Really?’ Laura had responded in an even frostier tone. ‘You do surprise me.’

Only by reminding himself of what was at stake had Max been able to prevent himself from retaliating. In the end it had been nearly half past six before she had finally and, he suspected, reluctantly gone.

‘Wait,’ Max had cautioned, shaking his head warningly and taking hold of Charlotte’s arm to restrain her when she would have rushed over to the other woman’s desk virtually the moment she left.

‘Give her another ten minutes,’ he instructed Charlotte, ‘just in case she decides to come back.’

She hadn’t returned, but even so Max had retreated to his own office whilst Charlotte produced her unauthorised set of keys and proceeded to unlock Laura’s desk.

Now it was nearly seven o’clock and she still … Max stiffened as his office door opened.

‘I think I’ve found what you want,’ Charlotte told him. ‘The senior partner has had lunch with a certain Ms Madeleine Browne, that’s Browne with an e, of course. Three times in the past two months and he’s also written her initials in his diary next to the time of the committee meeting.’

Madeleine Browne … Swiftly Max scanned his memory to see if it held any trace of the name and found it didn’t.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ Charlotte informed him with obvious relish, ‘there’s something else you should know. This Madeleine Browne—’ she paused importantly ‘—she only just happens to be the head’s goddaughter. Now,’ she added briskly, ‘about the ball …’

The head of chambers’ goddaughter, he might have known. Max fumed as he made his way back to his flat. Well, at least he now knew who his adversary was. The thing he had to do next was to find a way of eliminating her from the contest, and the easiest way to do that would be to discredit her in the eyes of the committee. As yet he wasn’t sure just how this was going to be accomplished, but there was bound to be a way. There always was—and he would make damn sure that he found it.

It would be essential to find out as much as he could about her. What her strengths were, and her weaknesses, and he did not necessarily have in mind her professional strengths and weaknesses.

Head of chambers’ goddaughter or not, sexual equality laws notwithstanding, he was determined that he would be the one who got the vacant tenancy and not Ms Madeleine Browne, with or without an e.

‘Aunt Ruth.’

Ruth looked down at her great-nephew. She and Joss were walking through the water meadows where, as a girl, she had picked watercress. There were no cress beds here any longer, even though she and Joss had mounted a vigorous and secret campaign to reintroduce the cress to its natural habitat.

‘Why is it, do you suppose, that a person who seems okay … you know, okay, suddenly seems, well … different?’

Ruth frowned as she heard the note of anxious constraint in his voice. ‘Which person in particular are we talking about here, Joss?’ she asked gently. ‘You?’

‘No, not me,’ he replied, shaking his head and causing her to exhale a small sigh of relief. She kept herself reasonably up to date, read papers and magazines, watched news programmes and the like, but she didn’t really think she was up to dealing with any youthful questions about sex or drugs.

‘No, then who?’ she asked.

‘It’s Dad,’ Joss admitted, scuffing the toe of his shoe on the ground.

‘Your father?’ Ruth frowned. ‘Well, I expect he’s very anxious about David.’

‘He spends a lot of time over at Uncle David’s house,’ Joss informed her, studiously casual. ‘With Aunt Tiggy.’

Ruth’s heart sank. ‘Does he? Well, I expect there are a lot of things that Tiggy needs his help with.’

‘Yes, that’s what Mum says,’ Joss agreed.

Ruth hesitated, not sure just what to say. How far to probe. In the end she decided that since he’d brought up the subject, she owed it to him to deal with it responsibly and give him the opportunity to air his obvious concern rather than pretend it did not exist. And so instead of drawing his attention to the fact that several of their plants had at last appeared to have taken root, she prompted, ‘But you don’t agree?’

‘Dad’s different,’ he confessed in a muffled voice. ‘He’s been different for … well, before Uncle David had his heart attack.’

‘Different how, Joss?’ Ruth prodded gently.

‘I don’t know, just different. Not like Dad somehow. Sort of as if … I think he might be having, you know, problems with Mum,’ he stated judiciously. ‘Lots of people at school have parents who are divorced,’ he informed her casually.

Ruth felt her concern turn to alarmed disquiet. ‘Your parents aren’t getting a divorce, Joss,’ she told him. ‘What on earth put that idea into your head?’

He gave a small shrug, his eyes suddenly sombre and very wise. ‘I don’t know … it just came.’

‘Have you talked to them about … about this?’ she asked.

‘No … you see,’ he said earnestly, ‘I don’t think that Mum would want to be divorced and … Aunt Tiggy is very pretty, isn’t she?’

Ruth didn’t try to lie to him. ‘Yes, she is,’ she agreed quietly. ‘But your mother … People don’t always fall in love because of the way the other person looks, Joss,’ she reminded him.

‘No, I know, but Aunt Tiggy needs someone to look after her and now that Uncle David isn’t there … Dad likes it when people need him,’ he added with an almost adult perceptiveness that half shocked Ruth, even though she knew already how intelligent and astute he was.

‘Your Aunt Tiggy is married to David and your father is married to your mother,’ she finally managed to say as she tried to assimilate his words.

Was his fear just the product of some childish imagination, or did it have a deeper and more dangerous cause? Was Jenny and Jon’s marriage in difficulty? Jenny had said nothing to her and to think of Jon considering a divorce as Joss had suggested seemed impossibly far-fetched. If it had been David now …

‘I’m sure there’s nothing for you to worry about, Joss,’ she tried to reassure him gently as they turned round and started to head back.

‘Oh, it’s not me I’m worried for,’ he declared firmly. ‘It’s them, Mum and Dad. He needs Mum. I know he might not think so, but he does. And she needs him. Aunt Ruth, could I stay with you tonight instead of going home? We could go and watch the badgers,’ he coaxed her winsomely.

‘Joss, I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ she began and then as she looked at his face, she changed her mind and added, ‘We’ll see what your mother thinks, shall we?’

‘I know that Mum won’t mind. I’ll go and ring her when I get back, shall I?’

Thoughtfully Ruth watched him. She did so hope that he was wrong and that his suspicions were ill-founded.

She had planned to visit Ben tomorrow. Saul and his mother were leaving in the morning and she knew that Ben, despite his claims to the contrary, would miss their company. She dared not think, however, how he would react to the possibility of a relationship, an affair, between Jon and Tiggy. Jon must know himself how fiercely and furiously Ben would oppose any attempt on his part to replace David in Tiggy’s life, and the mere fact that he could, if indeed he actually was even considering doing so, betrayed how very deeply involved Jon was.

Tiggy’s feelings did not worry her nearly so much. Tiggy she likened to a pretty clinging plant that needed constant support, any support, and that would just as happily attach itself and cling to one plant as another, her emotions like roots, safely shallow and easily transferred.

But Jon … Jon was a different matter entirely and that he who had always put David’s needs first should even begin to consider taking his wife from him seemed grossly out of character.

Always supposing, of course, that Joss had not completely misread the situation. He was, after all, only a boy still. He could be wrong. She hoped he was wrong. Ruth admitted her brother could be a very determined man. She hadn’t forgotten the pressure he had put on her when … But that was all in the past now and in the end he and her father had probably been right. She could never have lived with herself, knowing that she was responsible for the break-up of someone else’s marriage no matter how much she had loved the man concerned, and then there was the fact that he had lied to her, deceived her, letting her believe that he was free to love her when all the time he had a wife and child back home in America.

She bit her lip. Why on earth was she thinking about all that now? It was over fifty years ago.

Olivia heard the phone ringing as she was stripping off the clothes she had worn for work. Somehow they felt tainted by what she had discovered, the cloth soiled and grimy, although she suspected in reality it was merely the dust from the office she could feel.