The Perfect Sinner

‘To be truthful, I think if any of the babes are destined to be real high flyers, it’s going to be your Amelia….’

Olivia had smiled lovingly at her elder daughter.

‘She is very quick and very determined,’ she had agreed, ‘but life doesn’t always turn out as we expect it to. Look at Louise. We all thought that she was going to be a real career girl, and look at her now. She and Gareth are so very, very much in love, and Louise is already talking about having a family and putting her career on hold. Now it’s Katie, whom all of us have always thought of as the quiet twin, the one who would probably settle down the first, who looks as though she’s going carve out a career for herself.’

Olivia didn’t say anything to her about the fact that she, Madeleine seemed to have no interest in anything outside her domestic life and her children, she noticed rawly.

‘Mmm … these cookies are delicious,’ Olivia had suddenly confounded her by saying. She added, ‘You could cook professionally, Maddy. I’m not surprised that you manage to coax Gramps into eating so well.’

Madeleine had said nothing, just as she had said nothing about the kitchen cupboards that were brimming with the fruits of her labours over the long summer and autumn—literally. She enjoyed gardening as well as cooking, and with Ruth’s expert tuition and assistance when she was in Haslewich, Madeleine had resurrected Queensmead’s neglected kitchen garden, with its espaliered fruit trees and its newly repaired glass house along its south-facing wall. She was presently cosseting the peach tree that had been Ruth and Jenny’s birthday present to her and that she hoped might bear fruit next summer.

Since moving into Queensmead, she had quietly and gently set about bringing the old house back to life—dusty rooms had been cleaned and repainted, furniture mended and waxed. She had even made the long trip north to Scotland to persuade her maternal grandparents to part with some of the sturdy country furniture not deemed grand enough for the lofty, elegant rooms of their Scottish castle and currently housed in its attics, but which she had known immediately would be perfectly at home at Queensmead.

Guy Cooke, the local antique dealer with whom Jenny had once been in partnership, had whistled in soundless admiration when he had visited Queensmead and been shown the newly revamped and furnished rooms.

‘Very nice,’ he had told Madeleine appreciatively. ‘Too many people make the mistake of furnishing houses like Queensmead with antiques that are far too grand and out of place, or even worse, buying replicas, but these … you’ve definitely got an eye, Maddy.’

‘It helps having grandparents with attics full of furniture,’ Madeleine had laughed as Guy turned to examine the heavy linen curtains she had hung in one of the rooms.

‘Wonderful,’ he had told her, shaking his head. ‘You can’t buy this stuff now for love nor money. Where …?’

‘My great-great-grandmother had Irish connections,’ Madeleine had told him mock-solemnly. ‘I found it …’

‘I know, in the attics,’ Guy had supplied for her.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Madeleine had laughed again. One of her third cousins had apparently been aggrieved to discover that Madeleine had made off with the linen from one of the many spare bedrooms, having earmarked it for some expensive decorating project herself.

‘I’m so looking forward to Christmas this year,’ Jenny suddenly said to her. ‘You’ve done wonders with Queensmead, Maddy, and it’s going to make the most wonderful venue for the family get-together. That’s one thing that the Chester family doesn’t have that I suspect they rather envy….’

‘Mmm … Queensmead is a lovely home,’ Madeleine agreed.

‘Jon’s had a word with Bran,’ Jenny told her, ‘and he’s arranged for the tree to be delivered the day after tomorrow. I’ll come round if you like and give you a hand decorating it.’

‘Yes, please,’ Madeleine accepted with alacrity. The Christmas tree that was to go in Queensmead’s comfortably sized entrance hall was coming from the estate of Bran T. Thomas, the Lord Lieutenant and a close friend of the family. Elderly and living on his own, he had been invited to join the family for Christmas dinner. Madeleine liked him. He had a wonderful fund of stories about the area and talked so movingly about his late wife that Madeleine often found her eyes filling with tears as she listened to him.

‘I think Louise is getting ready to leave,’ Jenny warned her daughter-in-law now, disturbing Madeleine from her reverie.

As she glanced towards the newly married couple, Maddy’s heart suddenly missed a beat. They seemed so happy, so much in love, Gareth looking tenderly down into Louise’s upturned face and then bending to kiss her. As they reluctantly broke apart, Maddy could quite plainly see the look of shimmering joy illuminating Louise’s face. It wasn’t that she begrudged Louise her happiness—how could she? It was just … it was just … Swallowing hard, Maddy looked the other way.

Obligingly Madeleine got up and went to separate her own two children from the happy mass playing in the adjacent anteroom.

Leo, who had been a page boy, had conducted himself with aplomb, and Emma had swiftly recovered from the morning’s bout of nausea, but they were tiring now as Madeleine’s experienced maternal eye could tell.

As Bobbie, Ruth’s granddaughter, came to find her own daughter, she grimaced at Madeleine and confided, ‘I’m not looking forward to a transatlantic flight on top of this….’

‘But it will be worth it once you’re with your family,’ Madeleine reminded her.

‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Bobbie agreed fervently.

As Luke came to join her and picked up their small daughter, cradling her tired body in his arms, Bobbie couldn’t help reflecting on the differences between Luke and Max.

Her Luke was a tender, loving father and an equally loving husband, while Max … Max might pretend in front of others—especially his grandfather—to be a caring human being, but Bobbie could see through that pretence.

Poor Maddy.

2 (#ucbe171ad-c840-5b0c-980b-28fb5d63b88d)

Poor Maddy. She had heard herself so described so often that sometimes she thought she ought to have been christened thus, Maddy reflected several hours later, unwillingly recalling hearing Bobbie whisper the two words under her breath as she had turned to smile at Luke.

Leo and Emma were safely tucked up in bed, their stories read and sleep not very far away.

Ben had gone to bed protesting that Maddy was fussing unnecessarily and that there was nothing wrong with him, even though it was perfectly obvious that he was in pain. Tiredly Maddy headed for her own bedroom. Supposedly it was the room she shared with Max on his rare visits home, but in reality … Max might deign to sleep in the large king-size bed alongside her, but for all the intimacy, the love, the natural closeness one might expect to be shared between a married couple, they might just as well have been sleeping in separate beds and at opposite ends of the large house.

On this occasion, though, Max was not intending to stay the night and had already left for London. Maddy had long since ceased to struggle with the pretence that their marriage was either happy or ‘normal,’ just as she had ceased to question the fact that Max was returning to London ostensibly to ‘work.’

And the worst thing about the whole horrid situation was not that Max cared so little for her, but that she cared so much. Too much. What had happened to the dreams she had once had, the bright shining hopes, the belief that Max loved her?

Her maternal ears, forever tuned, picked up the sound of a soft cry from Emma’s room. Tiredly she slid out of bed. Emma was going through a phase of having bad dreams.

Having parked his Bentley at the rear of the smart mews house he had bought with the wedding cheque given to them by Maddy’s grandparents, Max unlocked the front door and headed for the bedroom, dropping his overnight bag on the floor and stretching out full length on the bed as he reached for the telephone and confidently punched in a set of numbers.

The woman’s voice on the other end of the line sounded sleepy and soft.

‘Guess who?’ Max asked her, tongue in cheek.

There was a brief silence before she responded.

‘Oh, Max … But I thought! You said you were going to a family wedding and that you’d be staying for the weekend….’

‘So, I changed my mind,’ Max told her, laughing. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

‘Breakfast … Oh, Max … I don’t … I can’t …’

She sounded more alert now, and Max could picture her sitting up in bed in her Belgravia house, her tawny hair down round her shoulders, her skin honey gold from her recent holiday in Mauritius. He had flown out to join her there for five days.

‘Some client conference,’ the solicitor who had originally instructed him had commented enviously when he had handed Max Justine’s fax.

‘When you’re playing for millions, the cost of flying your barrister out for an urgent conference is pretty small beer,’ Max told him carelessly.

Justine was the wife of a millionaire, soon-to-be billionaire corporate raider. The first thing she had done when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her ‘friends’ was to instruct her solicitor that she wanted him to hire Max as her barrister, the second was to arm herself with as much evidence as she could of her husband’s business affairs, including his complex and often adventurously artistic interpretation of the tax laws.

Max had decided appreciatively that she had enough on him to make it a piece of cake for them to get her the kind of divorce settlement that would make her virtually as comfortably wealthy as his ex as she had been as his wife, and to get him the kind of publicity that would ensure that he maintained his position as the country’s foremost divorce barrister.

‘Divorce isn’t really the kind of thing we like to specialize in here in chambers,’ the most senior member, a QC and one of the country’s foremost tax law specialists, had advised Max stiffly when he had originally joined them. ‘It’s not really quite us, if you know what I mean.’

Max had known exactly what he meant, but he had also been acutely aware of the fact that it was only his father-in-law’s name that had got him a place in the chambers at all. He also knew that the only reputation he had then to gain him the clients who would bring him the kind of high profile and even higher income he craved so desperately was one of being unwanted and rejected by his previous ‘set,’ where he had been allowed to work only as a tenant and on the cases that no one else wanted to deal with.

His new chambers attracted a clientele who wanted and expected only the best barristers whose names and reputations they already knew, and so Max had seen a niche for himself in the one field where the chambers didn’t already have a specialist—matrimonial law.