‘OK, Steve,’ she meekly said, but she did not intend to be sensible. She couldn’t stay here in London, even though it might be safer not to go alone. Whatever her head might say, her heart spoke a different language. She had to get to Arbory House as soon as physically possible. She kept hearing Anya’s voice echoing in her head.
Her whole body was shivering with the realization that for the first time she had finally heard her sister speak. It was like hearing the tomb gape open and the angels singing.
She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it didn’t matter, anyway. She had loved that voice – so warm and confident, full of life and certainty – she had listened to it, and been so choked that she couldn’t say any of the things she wanted so desperately to say. All she could do was whisper, ‘Is that you, Anya?’ At that instant she had believed, somehow, that her sister would instinctively recognize her own real name and answer, would sense, too, that it was her own flesh and blood on the other end of the line.
But Anya had just sounded startled and puzzled. Sophie had been so upset that she had hung up. That had been stupid. What on earth must Anya have thought? Shouldering into her coat, she buttoned it up with ice-cold, trembling fingers. She was not sitting around in a hotel bedroom or waiting for Steve to come with her. She had come here to see her sister, and she didn’t care about the dangers she might be risking – come hell or high water she was going to see Anya and ask her to come and see their mother before she died.
There was a taxi rank right outside the main entrance of the hotel. Sophie headed for it, told the driver to take her to the main-line station from where she could get a train to Buckinghamshire.
He stared at her, scratching his chin. ‘Now is that St Pancras or Euston?’
‘I don’t know, I thought you would.’
‘Well, hop in and we’ll find you the right station.’
As they drove off he started talking on his mobile phone, checking with his base office which station she would want. Sophie listened, not noticing the taxi that took off immediately after her own, or the black car parked on the other side of the road which pulled out and slotted into the traffic behind that. She got out of the taxi ten minutes later and paid the driver before walking into the busy, echoing main-line terminal, quite unaware that she was being followed.
7
Paul Brougham liked to hear the wind howling like a banshee outside the double-glazed windows of his sixtieth-floor office above the gun-metal waters of the Thames. It made it impossible for him to forget the power of nature which the grey London streets spreadin
g in all directions shut out. Without the wind, up here it was easy to feel godlike, floating among the clouds high up above the earthbound common humanity. His offices were deeply carpeted, elegantly designed, air-conditioned, his private lift shot him up to this level in seconds. From the floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall he looked down on cars like toys and people like ants. Only the threat of the wind tugging at the walls and windows, trying to wrench them up and toss them away, reminded him that he, too, was human, and could be blown away. Paul had a superstitious streak; he was afraid of hubris, of losing touch with reality and being destroyed by it.
That morning, though, he was too absorbed in work; absorbed – and humming with the energy of someone under threat. Adrenalin was running high inside him. Salmond was on his tail and he had to shake him off somehow. He still didn’t quite know how.
Running his eye down a balance sheet, he listened intently to his chief accountant. He could have sung Freddy’s song for him; there was nothing Paul did not know about the financial status of his companies, but sometimes when he listened to Freddy’s slow, careful expositions it helped to clear his mind and show him a way through a tangled problem.
‘I’m sorry, but it can’t be done,’ Freddy Levinson ended. He was a thin, grey-haired, stooping man with the expression of a solemn heron fishing in muddy waters, which they frequently had during the twenty-odd years they had worked together.
They had met in 1972 when they both worked for a printing firm in Buckinghamshire which owned a small handful of magazines and local newspapers. The chairman and managing director, William Wood, had inherited the company from his father. A methodical, unadventurous man, trained by his father to follow in his footsteps, Wood had run his company exactly as his father had ordained.
Freddy was his accountant, Paul ran the office in the printing works, but neither of them had been allowed to initiate anything. Wood did not want any innovations, thank you, he said, the first time Paul went to him with an idea for an improvement in production. He wanted a job well done; safe, not sorry, was his business motto.
In 1973 Wood had a heart attack and died. His childless, middle-aged widow had been distraught. She had never taken any interest in the business, she had simply obeyed her husband and done as he wished; now she had no idea what to do. Paul went to see her after the funeral and had no trouble at all persuading her to let him take over her husband’s job. Mrs Wood, who was a well-preserved woman in her late fifties with a conservative dress sense, silvered blonde hair and a good figure, was very grateful to have someone to trust and rely on as she always had her husband. She handed over full control to Paul, and happily sank back into domestic oblivion, resuming her busy life of coffee-mornings, flower-arranging, lunches with her friends, charity work and shopping.
Paul waited a year, then went to see Mrs Wood with an excellent set of accounts, audited by the man who had always audited her husband’s books, a rather dull but famously honest local accountant.
‘We are doing very well, Mr Brougham,’ she delightedly said, looking only at the final profit because she did not understand accounts. ‘Well done. You must give yourself a rise!’
‘I think we could do better, Mrs Wood,’ he said, and began to explain his plans for expansion of the company, but she stopped him, shaking her head.
‘Please don’t explain figures to me, Mr Brougham, I never understand them.’
He eyed her indulgently. ‘Well, briefly, then, I can make you far more money, if you’ll trust me.’
She trusted him; she was not a clever woman in many ways, but in one sense she was very shrewd. She understood human nature and she instinctively trusted Paul, and was right to do so.
He began his new regime at once; using the company as collateral he borrowed money and began to expand.
It made Freddy’s head spin to look back down the years to the beginning. Their growth had been phenomenal; at almost every stage Freddy had said, ‘It can’t be done, Paul!’ and been proved wrong. They often had no cash in hand, and yet the business kept growing. Paul was a magician, a juggler. Even Freddy was never quite sure how he did what he did. The quickness of the hand deceived the eye. The small company had grown into a bigger one almost at once, then even bigger. Mrs Wood had died five years after her husband. She had no relatives at all, and left her shares to Paul, who had gone on to acquire most of the other shares. Now he headed a cleverly interwoven web of related companies which, together, made Paul one of the most powerful men in the media business, but with an American media company muscling in on their territory Freddy was afraid it was all going to come apart for them.
‘If we shed some of the local newspaper chains, we could raise money to improve our cash flow immediately,’ Paul suggested.
Until now, he had always refused to sell, had only wanted to acquire, even though that policy had meant that they often had to juggle accounts, moving them from one company to another on paper and giving Freddy nightmares.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Do I look as if I’m joking?’