Kitabı oku: «The Perfect Sinner», sayfa 2

‘I hate to think what it would have done to Gramps if Max hadn’t got a place in chambers. I know that it was touch-and-go for a while, and of course, the fact that your father is so influential obviously helped in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Madeleine had agreed. She knew Olivia far too well to suspect her of any kind of malice or unkindness. She was simply stating what she saw as the facts, and her opinions were quite naturally tainted by her dislike of Max. She had always been completely open with Madeleine about her feelings for her cousin, explaining that they went back a long way, and that much as she liked Madeleine herself, she doubted that she could ever pretend to feel anything other than wary acceptance of Max.

Did Olivia know that the only reason that Max had married her had been to further his career? Madeleine hoped not. Olivia was basically very kind-hearted, and Madeleine knew she would never have deliberately hurt her by raising the subject if she had known the whole truth.

‘Gramps is going to be putting an awful lot of pressure on Leo to follow in Max’s footsteps,’ she started to warn Madeleine, but Madeleine stopped her, shaking her head calmly.

‘Leo isn’t like Max,’ she told Olivia quietly. ‘I think if he takes after anyone, it’s Jon, and I suspect that if he does go into the law he will be quite happy to follow Jon into the Haslewich practice.

‘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

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.

That had been several years ago, and now Max’s reputation had grown and his name on a case was likely to strike dread in a wealthy husband about to enter the divorce arena.

The extremely high fees Max charged for his services weren’t the only benefit he earned from his work. Max had quickly and cynically discovered that newly divorced and about-to-be-divorced women very often had an appetite for sex and the male attention that went with it, which ensured him a constant turnover of willing bed mates.

One of the main advantages of these relationships, from Max’s point of view, was that they were always relatively brief. While his female clients were going through their divorces, he provided a comforting male shoulder to lean on, someone with whom they could share their problems as well as their beds. But once everything had been finalized, he was always able to very quickly and firmly detach himself.

If any of his lovers showed a tendency to cling and become possessive, he suddenly became far too busy with ‘work’ to be able to take their calls—they soon got the message. A new client, a new lover—it was time for Max to move on.

The affair with Justine, because of the extremely complex nature of her husband’s financial affairs and the huge amount of money potentially involved, had lasted considerably longer than usual, and as yet Justine’s husband had not been served with any divorce papers.

‘I’ve got at least two friends who got damn all out of their ex’s,’ Justine had told Max, showing him her expensive dental work in a very sharp, foxy smile.

‘I have no intention of allowing that to happen to me. Here is a list of the assets I intend to make a claim on,’ she had told Max, handing him an impressively long typed schedule.

They had been lovers for more than two months, and Max had to admit that he was impressed. He doubted that Justine had a single ounce of emotional vulnerability in her entire make-up. She was one of the most sexually demanding women he had ever had, abandoning herself completely and totally to the sexual act and not allowing him to stop until she was completely and utterly satisfied. But once she was, she was immediately and instantly back in control; her mind, her brain, were as sharp and dangerous as an alligator’s teeth.

Her husband would be lucky to escape with even half of his fortune intact, Max had decided as he listened to her plans for using her knowledge of his tax affairs to blackmail him into settling and giving her what she wanted.

‘I don’t intend to file for divorce until after this new deal he’s working on has gone through,’ she had told Max candidly. ‘It’s worth almost five hundred million, and I want to make sure I get my share of it.’

‘Look. I … I can’t talk now,’ he heard her saying quickly to him now. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’ll come round to your place….’

She had rung off before Max could object, leaving him angrily aware of his sexual frustration and even more importantly, with a sharp sense of unease.

It was going on for two o’clock in the morning, but he felt too restless for sleep. Max’s instinct for survival was very acute and very finely tuned. It had had to be. As his grandfather’s favourite he had spent his growing years fighting off any potential claims on his position from his siblings and cousins, and as a young adult he had had to strive to maintain that position.

Now that he was married to Madeleine, his grandfather’s favour didn’t matter in quite the same way. Madeleine’s trust funds were worth considerably in excess of his grandfather’s assets, but it wasn’t just the desire for wealth that drove Max. He had another need that in its way was just as intense, and that need was to stand apart from his peers, to set himself above them, to be envied by them. Friendship, affection, love, none of these interested Max nor mattered to him.

Supremacy, that was what Max craved. Supremacy and the security that came with it. The supremacy of being the best divorce barrister, the best QC, the best head of chambers in the best set of chambers. In Max’s opinion, there were two ways to gain those goals. The first was through merit and skill, the second—sometimes the more subtle—was an underhanded method of gaining power, which made its acquisition all the sweeter. To emerge as top dog was important when others had openly derided one’s fitness for such a role.

It had amused him recently to bump into Roderick Hamilton, the barrister who had beaten him on a vacancy they had both applied for in his last set of chambers and who had none too subtly crowed his victory over him.

Max had invited Roderick to join him for a drink and over it had encouraged him to talk about himself. He had learned that Roderick had married somebody from the county set, the lower echelons of the upper classes of whose acquaintanceship he had once boasted to Max.

His wife, to judge from the photograph he had shown Max, was the plain horsy type, and no, they had no children as yet … but they were trying…. His dream, it turned out, was to buy himself a small country house.

‘But they’re so damned expensive, old chap, and Lucinda’s wretched horses cost the earth to keep.’

Max had smiled and casually mentioned his own two children. Maddy’s grandparents’ family seat was also dropped into the conversation along with references to its history and its decor; not too much, just enough to ensure that Roderick realized that he, Max, was living the life-style that the other man so desperately wanted, that he had fathered the children that Roderick so far had not.

And sweetest of all had been when he had given him a lift home in his new Bentley, to coolly refuse the invitation extended for him and Maddy to join Roderick and his wife ‘for supper one evening.’

‘’Fraid no can do, old chap,’ Max had told him, giving him his crocodile smile. ‘We’re pretty fully booked right now.’

Revenge indeed.

Max couldn’t really remember when he had first discovered this power he had within himself to hurt others. What he could remember, though, was the sickening sense of anger and fear he had felt when he had once overheard his father and his uncle David talking about him.

He had been about ten at the time and already feeling the effects of Louise and Katie’s arrival on his relationship with his parents. Max had never been the kind of child who liked being held or touched. Even before he could walk he had wriggled out of the reach of adults who would have picked him up and fussed over him, resenting, too, his cousin Olivia’s challenging presence in the arena of his life. Olivia, who was always cuddling up to his mother. Olivia, whom his mother seemed to like more than she liked him.

‘You’ve got a fine boy there,’ he could remember hearing his uncle David say enviously to his father. ‘The old man thinks I’m letting the side down by not giving him a grandson. Mind you, I’ve got to say, Jon, that you and Jenny don’t seem to realize just how lucky you are.

‘If Max was mine … Perhaps he should have been mine,’ David had said very softly. ‘Dad certainly seems to think so. He says that Max is far more like me than you. You know, Jon, sometimes it seems to me that you and Jenny don’t like your son very much.’

The two men had moved out of earshot before Max could hear any more. What had his uncle David meant? Why didn’t his parents like him?

Deliberately Max had begun to test them, anxious to discover if what his uncle David had said was the truth.

He asked for a new bicycle and he was told he couldn’t have one, but the twins were given new tricycles for their birthday.

Max had ‘borrowed’ one of them, and when it had ‘accidentally’ been pushed under the wheels of a delivery van and smashed, he had told his stern, grave-eyed father that he hadn’t meant to push the bike, he had just let go of it at the wrong time.

The other tricycle had mysteriously disappeared, and when questioned about it Max had stubbornly refused to say a word.

His sharp eyes began to notice how much more time his mother spent with the twins than she did with him, how much more fuss she made of Olivia.

He told her that he didn’t want her to take him to school any more and that he was going to ask his grandfather to tell uncle David to take him. This was despite the fact that more often than not it was Jenny who took Olivia to school, David being far too self-engrossed to consider doing anything so mundane as the school run.

Max began to listen keenly to the way his grandfather compared his two sons, praising David and speaking contemptuously of Max’s own father, Jon. His father, Max had discovered, was a man to be despised and ignored. His grandfather and his uncle David became the pivotal male role models in his life. To cloak his childish fear of his parents’ rejection of him, he began to cultivate a protective wall of indifference to any kind of adult emotion, and at the same time he started to learn how to manipulate it to gain his own ends.

In much the same way as he had learned to distrust his parents—his father might speak of chastising him out of love for him, but Max knew better: his father did not love him, his father did not like him. Max had heard his uncle David saying so—so Max also learned to distrust and alienate his peers. Better to protect himself by cultivating and inciting their antagonism than to risk the pain of being rejected by them.

Now, twenty odd years down the line, if anyone had suggested to Max that it was out of the seeds of his extreme emotional sensitivity and vulnerability as a child that his adult persona had grown, he would have laughed at them in cynical mockery.

He was as he was; he liked being as he was, and for those who didn’t like it or him—then too bad!

It irritated him that Justine had put him off instead of inviting him to go straight round, as he had expected her to do.

He had been looking forward to the release he knew that having sex with her would have brought him; not just for his sexual desire but also from the anger and sense of ill-usage that being with his family always caused him.

Madeleine, with her pathetic humility and eternal self-sacrificing; his parents with their well-mannered ‘niceness’; his cousin Olivia with her smug self-satisfaction; Luke with his arrogant superiority; and Saul, the perfect father and husband. God, but they all irritated the hell out of him. He knew how much they disapproved of him … disliked him…. How sorry they felt for ‘poor Maddy,’ how they talked about him behind his back, but he was the one whose name was beginning to appear with flattering regularity in the society columns; he was the one whose income was running very satisfactorily into six figures; he was the one who never lacked a willing sexual partner—a variety of willing sexual partners. Well, at least not normally!

Tomorrow he would have to punish Justine a little for tonight, to point out to her that he had virtually walked out on a family gathering just to be able to spend the night with her—it didn’t matter that he would have left, anyway; she wasn’t going to know that. Yes, just a small cooling off on his part; a discreet hint of withdrawal should be more than enough to make her come running, eager to appease him.

He had a meeting in chambers to attend in the afternoon, which would give him an excuse to cut short the time he spent with her, further reinforcing and underlining the stance he intended to take with her. It was their final chambers meeting before they closed down the office for the Christmas and New Year period.

Apart from Justine’s proposed divorce, Max had no other major work currently in progress, but that did not concern him too much. Early spring was always a good time for new briefs; the forced conviviality and intimacy of the winter months en famille often proved to be the breaking point for a marriage under strain. Also, Justine had already dropped several hints about inviting him to join her when she went skiing. Max had no particular love of either the sport or the cold, but he had to admit that the thought of Aspen and its social life, its socialites, was extremely tempting.

He would tell Maddy that it was business, of course. Getting off the bed, he started to strip off his clothes before heading for the shower.

Like virtually all other male members of his family, Max was a stunningly sexy man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a naturally well-muscled torso, he shared his male cousins’ dark-haired and very masculine good looks. However, in Max they possessed a certain almost magnetic intensity that one of his smitten victims had once described as making her completely spellbound, like standing in the path of a ten-ton lorry, knowing it had the potential to destroy you and yet being so hyped up on the mixture of adrenaline-induced excitement and fear that knowledge produced that you simply couldn’t move out of its way.

‘It’s that look of cold ruthlessness in his eyes,’ she had continued, shivering sensually. ‘You just know, the moment you look at him, that he doesn’t give a damn about you or your emotions, but somehow you just can’t help yourself.’

There was a sharp ache in Max’s body, which he knew from experience could only be alleviated by sex. He smiled grimly to himself as he turned on the shower. He should, after all, have taken Maddy to bed before he left Haslewich. Although he would never have told her so, despite her lack of self-esteem and her plainness, there was about Maddy a very rich vein of sexual warmth and generosity, a femininity, a womanliness that Max knew perfectly well most men would have found extremely alluring, all the more so because her own unawareness of it meant that it would be a secret that only a lover would have access to, just as only one lover would have access to her body.

Maddy had been a virgin when he had first taken her to bed, inexperienced and unknowing, untutored, but her body had surrounded him with a softness, a warmth as instinctive and natural as her protective mother love for her children.

She didn’t receive him with that same innocent generosity and warmth any more, of course. On the rare occasions when they did have sex, he could feel how much she resented his ability to arouse her and how hard she strived to resist her physical desire for him. It amused Max to let her. He knew he could make love to her more often and easily turn her resistance into molten liquid acceptance and desire, but what was the point? The last thing he wanted was for Maddy to be sexually demanding or sexually possessive.

He showered himself briskly, then stepped out of the cubicle, smoothing his dark, wet hair back sleekly off his face as he reached for a towel.

If he was going to go to Aspen he would need to buy himself some suitable clothes. He had read that a lot of the Hollywood set went there for the season. He started to smile as he rubbed his body dry and then padded naked across to his bed.

Max was going through some paperwork when he heard the front doorbell ring. On his way to answer it he quickly checked his appearance in the hallway mirror. He was wearing the expensive after-shave that Justine had given him and the Turnbull and Asser shirt, which had been another present from her. The gold cuff links had been a gift from another grateful client. He glanced at his watch, a Rolex that Maddy had given him as a wedding present. Justine was earlier than he’d expected her. Well, she was still going to have to make due reparation for last night and wait a little for her sex. Yes, and plead with him for it, too!

Max opened the door.

‘Crighton, may I come in?’

Without waiting for Max’s assent, Justine’s husband stepped determinedly into the hallway.

Max had met him on only one previous occasion at a dinner party given by a friend of Justine’s to which he had been invited.

Although not as tall as Max and certainly a good twenty years older, Robert Burton nevertheless possessed that aura of power and forcefulness common to most entrepreneurially successful men. He might not walk with a deliberate swagger nor verbally boast of his achievements or his wealth, but he most definitely had about him that air that warned other males that he considered himself to be their superior, and as he eyeballed Max with cool aggression as he marched past him, Max was immediately and acutely aware of a relentless dislike he could feel emanating from him.

To give Max his due, though, apart from a small betraying distortion of his pupils and a reactive tensing of his muscles, he gave no other sign that his visitor was not the person he had expected to see, even managing a passably plausible, polished wave of his hand in the direction of his sitting room as he invited, ‘Robert. Good to see you, old man. What can I do for you …?’

On the verge of walking into the sitting room, Robert Burton turned round and thoroughly scrutinized Max.

‘I’ll say this for you, Crighton, you’ve got nerve,’ he commented tersely. ‘I’m a very busy man and I don’t have time to play verbal games. Justine has told me what’s been going on and …’

‘Ah. Good.’ Max cut in on him smoothly. ‘I did counsel her to tell you that she wanted a divorce. These things are always better when the two parties concerned discuss them as adults, and—’

‘Better for the bank balances of their lawyers, yes,’ Robert Burton cut him off acidly, ‘but let’s not get side-tracked. It isn’t your professional relationship with my wife I’m here to discuss.’ He paused meaningfully. ‘I do know, like I said, what’s been going on. A friend tipped me off. Apparently you’ve got quite a reputation for bedding your female clients….’