CHAPTER ELEVEN

LEO got the phone call from the Schloss at four o’clock in the afternoon. He had just come out of a particularly difficult and aggressive board meeting during which he had only just managed to hold on to his temper when Wilhelm had deliberately obstructed every one of his proposals.

Torn between a helpless desire to laugh at his brother’s sheer cussedness and refusal to accept that their father’s decision to give him control of the corporation was as much an anathema to him as it was to Wilhelm, and an equally dangerous surge of almost savage resentment at Wilhelm’s obstinacy—after all, what real objection could Wilhelm genuinely have to Leo’s proposals to increase their intake of university graduates to include more young people from their fellow EC countries?—the sheer effort of controlling his irritation and ignoring his brother’s constant, relentless needling had left him with the beginnings of a sharply painful migraine.

Migraine was something he thought he had stopped suffering from years ago, and it struck him now as ominous that he had started having them again almost from the moment he had had to take over running the corporation.

His father would have told him that it was a sign of weakness. Leo thought otherwise. If they were caused by any one emotion, that emotion was most probably guilt. Guilt at having, no matter how unknowingly, deprived his brother of the role he had always believed would be his.

So why not simply step down and let Wilhelm take his place? He grimaced to himself. Wilhelm knew as well as he did himself that that simply wasn’t possible, not under the terms of his father’s will, which were extraordinarily specific and detailed. Indeed, they were so detailed that when Leo had been read them the fact that struck him most forcefully had been not so much that his father wanted him to take control, but that he wanted to prevent Wilhelm doing so.

At first when he recognised the familiar voice of his grandmother’s housekeeper on the other end of the line he wasn’t unduly concerned, but when he heard the anxiety in her flustered words his stomach muscles tensed and coiled, his fingers tensing as he gripped the receiver.

His grandmother was ninety-two years old; she had outlived her husband, her sisters, and even her daughter, and now it seemed that she was reaching the end of her own long life.

Her nurse had asked that the baroness’s grandsons be informed that the old lady was approaching death, the housekeeper told him, her voice thick with tears. He would be there just as soon as he could, Leo told her, promising, ‘I shall leave immediately, Helga.’

As soon as he had replaced the receiver he rang through to Wilhelm’s office, only to be told that his brother had left the building without telling anyone where he was going.

Leo’s mouth compressed. That usually meant that Wilhelm was going to see his latest mistress. Like father, like son, and Wilhelm was as brutally contemptuous of keeping his marriage vows as their father had been, but at least Wilhelm didn’t physically abuse his wife, Anna … As far as Leo knew.

Broodingly Leo stared towards his office window. Beyond it lay the familiar Hamburg skyline of the industrial side of the city and the river. Wilhelm had never shared the rapport with their grandparents that had done so much to alleviate the misery of Leo’s childhood. Wilhelm had looked upon the holidays spent at the Schloss as a form of incarceration, although he was keen enough to drop their grandfather’s title into his conversation if he thought it was likely to impress, and Leo knew that, like their father, Wilhelm bitterly resented the fact that it was their mother’s family that held the title, the long centuries of tradition; the blue blood that went back to the times of the great Charlemagne.

Their parents shared a very distant family connection; in effect, Leo’s paternal grandfather had been a cousin many times removed of his maternal grandfather, and his parents had originally met when Heinrich von Hessler had come to the Schloss while tracing his family ancestry.

That had been early on in the war, and Leo had always wondered a little at his father’s apparent freedom to travel at such a time, but, like so much else, he had quickly realised that it was yet another subject which must not be broached.

As he explained to his secretary why he had to leave he put a call through to Wilhelm’s wife. Anna was an elegant, almost too frail woman, whom Leo privately pitied. She had been a model when Wilhelm first met her, but her youthful beauty had long since faded into gaunt despair as the reality of marriage to Wilhelm took its toll on her.

Keeping his voice as neutral as he could, Leo explained the situation, asking if she would tell Wilhelm what had happened when he came home.

‘Don’t you mean if he comes home?’ she asked bitterly.

There was nothing Leo could say. He put down the receiver just as his secretary walked into his office to announce that a company helicopter was being prepared for his flight to the Schloss. It was corporation money that kept the Schloss in the hands of the family, and Leo had always sensed how much his grandparents had felt the burden of their son-in-law’s ‘charity’. His grandfather was dead now. He had died when Leo was fifteen.

Stopping off at home merely to collect a change of clothes, Leo headed for the private airstrip that housed the company’s two helicopters.

The pilot was waiting for him. Leo acknowledged his greeting and followed him out to the waiting machine.

His grandmother was still conscious, but growing very weak, the housekeeper had told him during her telephone call. What were her thoughts as she came to the end of her long life? Leo wondered. Were they of her past, or were they of what might lie ahead? She had lived through so much. Seen so much. He ached inside at the thought of her death, a part of him a small boy still afraid of being left alone, even while the majority of him accepted the inevitability of what had to be.

From the air, the ravine of the River Neckar looked like a toyland, the river itself glinting in the early-evening sun, the steeply wooded escarpments dappled in various shades of green apart from where the sharp sheer sides of its medieval castles rose from the ground like jagged rough-edged teeth.

Their own schloss was small by comparison, its original medieval structure overlayed by its later seventeenth-century façade. Leo could see it up ahead now. The family flag, the standard bearing the ancient arms bestowed on the family by Charlemagne, still flew at full mast, but ominously there was no breeze to stir the canvas, until the descent of the helicopter made it rattle wildly in the down-draught.

Helga was waiting for him. She had been with the family for as long as Leo could remember. Her husband was in charge of the Schloss’s maintenance and had for many years been his grandmother’s chauffeur. He knew how fond they both were of his grandmother. There were those who did not know her well who considered her to be autocratic and withdrawn, but Leo knew the real warmth that lay behind her formal manner.

‘My grandmother,’ he began, his heart catching at the sight of Helga’s tears.

‘She still lives,’ Helga told him. ‘But the nurse feels that it cannot be long.’

Silently Leo patted her hand, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the dimness of the huge silent hall. This, the original great room of the medieval castle, always seemed to him to hold echoes of its origins, despite the panelling with which his eighteenth-century ancestors had cloaked it. Faded rugs, surely very like those that must have once been brought back from the Crusades, were dotted here and there, adding dull patches of colour to the vastness of the stone-flagged floor. A stone staircase rose grimly upwards, its harshness only slightly softened by the carved wooden banister.

On the second floor was a huge window, the family’s arms and honours picked out on it in richly coloured stained glass. The window overlooked the Neckar. During the Second World War the commander of the SS regiment stationed locally had insisted that the window be destroyed to allow his troops to properly survey the river and the skies above it.

The story went that his grandmother had announced that if the SS commander wished to employ his men in carefully removing the stained glass piece by piece in order to replace it with clear glass then he was perfectly at liberty to do so, but that she would not stand by and see her country’s heritage destroyed simply so that his men might obtain a view of the Neckar that might just as easily be obtained by stationing themselves in one of the Schloss’s many attic rooms.

It had been Helga who had told Leo this story, and he had been far too overawed by this evidence of his grandmother’s puissance to even dare to think of questioning her about the event.

Now the evening light shone through the glass, making a golden halo around the cherubic features of the small child who was said to represent the infant son of a medieval baron who had handed the child over to his enemy as a hostage for the safety of his overlord, only to receive the child’s body back in place of his living son.

Yes, the Schloss had known its fair share of violence, both given and received. He could still remember the repugnance he had felt on being shown, by Wilhelm, of course, the site of the oubliette where once their family had imprisoned its hostages.

And yet, for all the violence of its past, now the Schloss breathed tranquillity, as though somehow its great age had conferred on it an absolution for all that had happened within its walls. It was as though the Schloss, having known all the injustice and cruelty of which human nature was capable, had somehow weathered and endured man’s weaknesses and flaws and had emerged from the experience to offer its benign serenity and acceptance to all who came within its walls.

He had always felt the atmosphere of the Schloss very strongly, unlike either his father or Wilhelm, who, while prone to boasting of its existence, were also somehow resentful of that existence, fearing perhaps that it overshadowed them and their achievements.

He went upstairs alone, too familiar with the warren of corridors and blank wall endings to have to think where he was going.

His grandmother’s bedroom in the west tower was the room she had come to as a new bride. Her only daughter had been born there, and her husband had died there in the vast bed, which had cradled the bodies of so many generations of his family in life as well as in death.

He knocked briefly on the door before entering. His grandmother’s nurse, who had been sitting beside the bed, got up as he walked in. A tall, statuesque woman in her later thirties, she moved with that apparently effortless glide developed by professional nurses. Although she wasn’t wearing a uniform, Leo could almost hear the starched crackle of antiseptic clothing as she walked.

He looked towards the bed. His grandmother lay there motionless, her eyes closed. His heart gave a tremendous bound of fear and pain, but the nurse quickly reassured him, telling him in a soft monotone, ‘She still lives, although I do not think it will be long. You will want to be alone with her.’

She had a formal, distancing manner that could sound cold, but Leo knew she was deeply devoted to his grandmother. She had been with her for the last five years, and he made a mental note to make sure that, if his grandmother had not thought to do so, her devotion was properly rewarded.

There was no money in his mother’s family, a fact which his father had never ceased to use as a means of taunting and deriding his in-laws. Once, when Leo had been foolish enough to leap to his grandparents’ defence and to announce hotly that money was not everything, the force of the blow his father had dealt him had knocked him to the floor and left him bruised for over a week afterwards.

He took the chair vacated by the nurse. His grandmother lay still beneath the covers, her fragile body barely discernible. Her hands lay on the coverlet, the skin withered and puckered, the gold of her rings worn thin. Instinctively Leo reached out, covering her hand with both of his.

‘Leo.’

The shock of hearing her speak his name made him jump. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

‘So, my time has finally come, has it?’

She must have seen his distress because she smiled again.

‘No. It is all right. I am ready to go. More than ready. Is Wilhelm with you?’

He could hear the exhaustion in her voice, but he had not expected that she would be so lucid … so much the woman he had always known. He had been afraid of coming here, he admitted. Afraid of what he might see, but she was just as she had always been.

‘No. He … There was a meeting. I have left a message. He will be here soon.’

‘You mean he is with one of his women.’ As Leo watched, her eyes hardened. ‘Who can ever know the tricks fate will play? That you should be so like Wilhelm’s father and that he should be so like yours.’

Leo stared at her. His heart had started to pound with sick, heavy shock, his brain telling him that his ears were playing tricks on him. His body suddenly felt cold and heavy, clammy with fear and awareness.

His grandmother had closed her eyes again. He leaned towards her.

‘Grandmother.’

She opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘Tell me,’ he begged her urgently. ‘What do you mean? Wilhelm and I have the same father.’

‘You mean that you believe that I am a senile old woman who cannot separate truth from fiction. Oh, Leo, if only that were so. Perhaps I should have said nothing to you, but since your mother’s death it has lain so heavily on my conscience. I should never have allowed her to marry your father. It would have been easier to bear the disgrace of her illegitimate child than to suffer the pain of knowing how she suffered through her marriage, but things were different in those days and we were already under suspicion from the SS. Your grandfather had made his views on Hitler too clear. It was only our name that protected us, and for how much longer? Your father …’ She closed her eyes as though silencing herself, and then said slowly, ‘He had already approached your grandfather to ask for Elizabet’s hand, but she … there was someone else … a young man she had met at university. They were very much in love.

‘He was very gentle, a pacifist, I imagine you would call him now, but he was not a coward. He had great spirit, and he loved your mother as she did him.

‘Heinrich hated him, and I have often wondered if it was Heinrich who betrayed him to the SS, but perhaps it is best that there are some things that we never know. He was taken prisoner … executed. Your mother begged Heinrich to try to help him, but it was no good.

‘I didn’t know then that they had been lovers. Your mother was very young, barely eighteen.

‘When less than six weeks after his death she announced that she wished to marry your father I could not believe it. It was then that she told me that she had conceived her dead lover’s child. She must marry Heinrich, she told me, she must have a father for her child. She could not face the disgrace she would suffer if she did not. No one but I knew she was pregnant. She had already, she told me fiercely, given herself to Heinrich, and I saw then that there was no price she would not pay to protect her lover’s child.

‘They were married quickly and quietly, and when Wilhelm was born it was here at the Schloss. Fortunately it was an easy birth so that we were able to pretend that Wilhelm was a seven-month child, a child conceived on the night of his parents’ wedding, so to speak.

‘Your father never questioned that Wilhelm was his. I suspected, although I have no proof, that your mother took care to deceive him into believing that he was her first and only lover. They moved to Switzerland shortly after the birth.’

Her voice had started to fade, and as Leo looked at her she closed her eyes. He hated to press her any further; to question her when she was so obviously close to death, but there was something he had to know, a suspicion as cold as the lack of love he knew his father had always had for him.

He leaned over the bed, his voice low and tense, his hand enfolding that of his grandmother, stroking the aged fragile flesh.

‘Grandmother … my father … did he know, in the end?’

At first he thought she could no longer hear him; that she was already slipping into a pre-death unconsciousness, but then she turned her head and opened her eyes.

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Your mother, before she died … He had been so cruel to her, Leo; so unkind. Many times I wanted to beg her to leave him, but I knew she would not. She was afraid, you see … afraid for you … afraid that your father would persuade the courts to give him custody … and afraid for us as well … afraid of your father’s vengeance, and so she stayed, but in the end she exacted her own payment from him for all the unhappiness he had caused her.

‘She knew she was going to die. She had insisted on the doctors’ telling her the truth. She told me what she intended to do. She could not die with the secret of Wilhelm’s true fathering on her conscience, she told me.’

As Leo watched, his grandmother took a deep breath and then shuddered.

‘She was my daughter, my only child, and I had watched your father abuse and destroy her. I knew that it was not out of guilt that she wanted to tell him the truth but out of anger and hatred. He came to see me afterwards …’

She closed her eyes and then opened them again, and Leo could see that they were bright with tears.

‘He asked me if what she had told him was true. I told him it was. I think he would have disinherited Wilhelm publicly then, had his pride permitted it.’

‘ “Wilhelm is your son,” I told him. “You have moulded him in your own image.”

‘ “He is not my son,” he told me, and I shall never forget the way he spoke, the way he looked. “I have no son. No true son. That bitch your daughter has seen to that.”

‘ “Leo is your child,” I told him.

‘ “Leo … the seed which gave him life was mine, but that is all he has of me. Your daughter took good care to make sure of that. She has cheated me … deceived me. May she rot in hell for eternity for it.” ‘

Leo saw his grandmother shudder as she closed her eyes. ‘If anyone is to have that fate, if indeed such a place as hell actually exists, it will be my father,’ he said painfully. His own eyes ached and burned with the tears he could not shed. Suddenly like a child again, he yearned to be able to unburden himself of the fear and pain of his own thoughts, to tell this woman he had always been so close to of his own discoveries about his father’s past, but as he blinked fiercely the frightened child within him was subdued and the man took control. How could he add to what she had already suffered, the pain she had already known?

‘So that is why he left control of Hessler Chemie to me,’ he said instead.

‘Yes. Because you are his son.’

His son. ‘My son … My son.’ Now he understood what his father had meant with those final bitter, hating words.

There was still one question he had to ask.

‘Wilhelm … does he know the truth?’

His grandmother shook her head.

* * *

The baroness died at two o’clock in the morning. Leo was with her, holding her hand as she slid from one last shallow breath into infinity. He knew immediately that she had gone, even though he continued to hold her hand within his for some time afterwards.

Wilhelm arrived in the morning, heavy-jowled, his jaw nicked where he had shaved, his temper savagely on edge. He still smelled of sex, Leo recognised nauseously as he listened to him cursing the inconvenience of their grandmother’s death.

Even now, knowing the truth, it was difficult to accept that Wilhelm was not Heinrich’s son. His attitude, his manner, his temper were all so much Heinrich’s, but then, he had been taught to model himself on the older man almost from the moment of his birth, and his mother had probably not even realised what was happening in her desire to protect her new-born child—her lover’s child—from her husband’s wrath if he ever discovered the truth. How glad she must have been, how relieved to see the way Heinrich had totally accepted Wilhelm as his own. When had she started to realise what he was doing to the child … her child …?

Leo remembered the way she had always kept him close to her. Because she had seen what Heinrich had done to Wilhelm?

Sickened, he turned away from his brother, full of pity and compassion for him. What might he have been if Heinrich had not distorted and maimed his personality, fostering within him all the arrogance, the greed, the selfishness which made him the man he was?

And how could he tell him the truth? Leo knew that he could not; that to do so would totally destroy him.

‘She’s gone, then, has she?’ Wilhelm demanded aggressively.

‘Yes,’ Leo acknowledged heavily. ‘She’s gone.’

Later, reflecting on what he had discovered, Leo wondered how any man, even one like his father, could reject a child he had brought up as his own the way Heinrich had finally in his will rejected Wilhelm. To love a child was surely to love the child, and not the seed that had given him life?

But then, his father had never actually loved either of them. Leo doubted if he had ever loved anyone, including himself. And Leo knew how all-important it was to love oneself, to accept one’s flaws and weaknesses, because without that capacity for self-compassion, how could one truly love or show compassion for anyone else?

As a young man, disturbed by the pattern of Wilhelm’s marriage, so closely echoing that of his parents’ with its infidelity and disharmony, he had wondered if perhaps his genes were better not passed on to others. He had brooded over the question of marriage, the vulnerability of it, wondering if he too might somehow copy the relationships of his father and brother.

He had been in love several times, but always his love was tinged with fear that he might somehow harm or hurt those he had loved.

While he was at Heidelberg there had been a girl, a fellow student. He had loved her deeply and had ached to tell her so, but his fear had made him hold back. She had accused him of simply using her, of not wanting to give a real commitment.

Just before his death his father had been urging him to marry, telling him that it was his duty.

Because he had discovered that Wilhelm and therefore Wilhelm’s sons were not of his fathering.

* * *

The baroness was buried with due pomp and solemnity four days after her death.

The Schloss felt empty without her. For one family to own such a place was surely an anachronism, Leo reflected. It had been built to house a feudal lord and all his dependants, not a modern nuclear family.

He was not surprised to discover that this unentailed estate had been left to him, and neither, thankfully, was Wilhelm.

‘You’re welcome to it,’ he had told Leo before he returned to Hamburg.

Leo stayed on for another few days. There was nothing really for him to do; his grandmother’s papers were meticulously in order; her preparations for her death made with the care and precision which had hallmarked her whole life. Noblesse oblige.

Leo knew he was delaying his return to Hamburg. In two days’ time he was due to attend a conference in Edinburgh. He had decided to combine the trip with a visit to Cheshire to see Alan Carey’s daughter. He knew that unless he did see her, unless he did everything he could, searched as hard as he could for whatever evidence might exist about his father’s past, he would always wonder if he had not actually deliberately tried to avoid learning the truth.

His enquiries in Germany had revealed nothing that he did not already know. If his father had ever been in any way connected with the SS he had successfully ensured that no one else would ever know. Even the tentative enquiries he made through a tortuously circuitous route in Israel had produced nothing to show that they had any awareness of what his father might have been or might have done.

But those newspaper cuttings could not be ignored; he could not now forget he had seen them.

He had been unwilling to delve too deeply into Alan Carey’s past; in his position there was only so much he could do without exciting other people’s interest and curiosity, which was why he would have to see Davina James personally.

The tentative enquiries he had made had revealed more about Davina than her father. She was popular and well liked, a quiet, calm woman who had apparently stoically borne the infidelities of her husband and the burden of nursing her father.

Now, it seemed, she had taken on another burden: that of an almost bankrupt company.

She appeared to be used to carrying burdens, but did he have the right to inflict yet another on her? And yet if he didn’t see her … didn’t at least try to uncover some evidence …

What more evidence did he need? Didn’t he already know the truth in his heart … hadn’t it already made him soul-sick enough without his adding to that sickness?

There was no going back, no altering what had happened. But Leo knew that he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had seen Davina James.

If Alan Carey had confided in anyone he was far more likely to have done so to his son-in-law rather than his daughter, Leo acknowledged wearily. They had been two of a kind, those two, both of them now dead … like his father … thank God.

* * *

In Hamburg he went straight from the airfield to his own home. He had bought the small town house in the old part of the city over ten years ago, but it had never truly seemed to him to be a real home.

The woman who came in daily to clean for him had kept it aired and polished in his absence. There were fresh flowers on the table in the hallway, and the soft glow from the buttermilk-yellow walls should have felt welcoming to him as he stepped inside.

Was it the house that was at fault or was it him? he wondered. He tried to think when he had last shared the intimacy of waking up in a bed disturbed by a night’s lovemaking … when he had last opened his eyes to look into the sleeping face of his lover, when he had last ached so much for her body that he had cried out in ecstasy just to feel her naked warmth in bed beside him.

His last relationship had finished quietly and discreetly just after his mother’s death. He and Elle had been lovers for just over two years. She was slightly older than he was, a tall, elegant natural blonde whom he had met at a dinner party. Her husband, a government official almost twenty years her senior, apparently turned a blind eye to her affairs provided they were conducted with discretion and tact.

She had been the one to instigate their relationship. She had called round to see him on some pretext or other, subtly making her real purpose clear, but carefully allowing him the opportunity to ignore her sexual invitation if he chose. He had almost done so, but she was intelligent as well as attractive, and his desire for her had overruled caution.

There was no question of her wanting to end her marriage or to leave her husband, she told Leo frankly. Hans suited her as a husband.

‘I know that, no matter how wonderful and exciting the sex between us is now, Leo, there will ultimately come a time when that excitement no longer exists. Marriage is not about sexual desire, or even about love. At least, not for me. Hans understands me. Our marriage works and I intend to ensure that it goes on working, but in the meantime there is no reason why you and I should not enjoy one another … provided we are discreet.’

Which was exactly what they had done. Until just after his mother’s death, when Elle had announced quietly and casually, as though she were discussing nothing more personal than the weather, that she thought it was time for them to part. ‘We are becoming staid … almost middle-aged,’ she had told him, wrinkling her nose. ‘It is time for us both to move on to new partners.’

He had missed her, but not as much as he had expected, and when he had seen her several months later with the man who he suspected had supplanted him he felt no jealousy, only a wry envy of her ability to skim so lightly over the surface of life.

Physically, as a lover, she had been exquisitely skilled, but a part of him had always known that it was not enough and had hungered for more than the mere physical coupling of their two bodies, no matter how sexually pleasurable their lovemaking was.

Wryly he admitted that for him mere sex was not enough and that he would have found it more erotic, more arousing to have been needed and loved rather than merely sexually desired.

A case of role reversal? It had certainly opened his eyes and made him see himself in a new perspective to know that he, the man, needed more emotional input into their relationship than Elle, the woman, who needed him only to satisfy her sexual hunger.

He went upstairs, stripping off his clothes in his bathroom and got into the shower.

It still shook him to know that Wilhelm was not Heinrich’s child; they had been so alike, so much more so than he and Heinrich, and yet he was Heinrich’s son.

Perhaps after all he had been wrong to fear that he might have inherited his father’s genes, his viciousness and cruelty, and that, while these traits were dormant in him, he might somehow pass them on to his own children.

Having seen the effects of his father’s personality, he had come to believe that it was as potentially destructive to pass on to one’s children flawed personality traits as it was to conceive a child one knew would inherit a physical disorder.

Now couples carrying the genes of hereditary physical diseases received counselling and screening. Would there ever come a time when those carrying known character disorders might receive the same benefits, or would that be carrying man’s interference with nature too far?

Once he had not thought so, but now, realising that Wilhelm’s mirroring of Heinrich’s vices might have come simply from living with him, rather than from a flaw carried in the blood, he began to wonder if he had not made too harsh a judgement; a judgement based on fear rather than reality.

He turned off the shower and stepped out on to the floor, reaching for a towel. His body was powerfully muscled, his torso rough with soft thick body hair. He exercised when he could, swimming in the pool at the private health club of which he was a member. In the winter he skied, and occasionally, when he had time, he played squash, although he was beginning to think of himself as too old for the sport.

Elle had once told him teasingly that he had the body of a Greek god and a profile from a Roman coin. She had laughed at his embarrassment, dragging her nails delicately along the inside of his thigh so that the fine hairs were set on edge and his flesh broke out in a rash of goose-flesh as his muscles quivered under the strain of trying to control his reaction to her. She had laughed again then, pouting a little as she glanced downwards at his body. They had already made love, but her deliberately tormenting touch was making it difficult for him to stop himself from having an erection.

When Elle played games she liked to win, and he wasn’t entirely surprised when she bent her head and took him in her mouth, skilfully playing with him until his self-control broke and his penis swelled to hard rigidity.

She had enjoyed being the one who controlled their relationship. Sometimes Leo wondered if she was deliberately trying to push him to the point where he physically dominated her, but that was something he had promised himself he would never do to any woman. Down that road lay the dangerous path of violence and abuse taken by his father and brother, and he was never ever going to follow them. If he ached sometimes to stop Elle’s deliberate torment by rolling her over on to her back and taking her angrily and quickly, he told himself that the brief satisfaction of giving in to that need would very quickly be outweighed by the self-contempt that would follow.

Elle had been an aggressive lover, often leaving his flesh marked with bruises and bites, his back and arms lacerated with raw scratches inflicted by her long nails. To Elle violence seemed to be an integral part of sex—perhaps, in a way, it was—but if so it was a violence he had never felt he dared allow himself to experience.

Instead he had learned to turn Elle’s own need against her, to skilfully arouse her to the point where she would cling demandingly to him, begging him for his penetration of her body, often with words, pleas that used the language of the gutter. The first time she screamed during orgasm he thought he must have hurt her.

He grimaced as he rubbed himself dry now. No doubt she had thought him very naïve.

Well, their affair was over now, and since they had parted he had met no one for whom he had felt any real kind of desire. He was a sensual rather than a sexual man, he had decided. The mere act of penetration on its own was not sufficient to motivate him. When he thought of making love to a woman he thought of touching her slowly, of running his hands over her skin, of caressing her with his mouth, feeling that first sensitive quiver beneath her flesh that meant he was arousing her, feeling her body tense in his arms as she moved closer to him when he kissed her, feeling her tremble against him when she trusted him enough to let him see her need. The scent of her skin, her hair, the warmth of her body, its pliancy and softness, the way she smiled, talked or simply looked—all these were just as erotic and arousing to him as the thought of his body moving within hers as she opened herself to him and shared with him the mystery of her womanhood.

Two days later, when he boarded the Lufthansa flight for Britain, Leo’s spirits were weighed down by the knowledge of what lay ahead of him. He closed his eyes, not wanting to think about what might happen if he proved that his father had not come by the original chemical equations as innocently as he had claimed.

Times, opinions, morals were changing. The generation that had lauded his father’s success and shared his hunger for it had given way to one that was held far less in thrall to materialism, that questioned motives of profit-making far more deeply than the one that had gone before. Drug companies, once hailed as the saviours of the people, were now often viewed with suspicion, accused of putting profits before people, of experimenting on and exploiting humanity.

There was no corporation on earth, even one as powerful as Hessler Chemie, that could not be destroyed by the same people for whom it had been created. If people turned their backs on their drugs … boycotted them, as could very well be done … How short a time ago was it that the fur trade would have laughed in the face of anyone who might have claimed that the views of a few animal activists could destroy them? Now they were becoming as extinct a species as the animals they had once hunted down for their pelts.

Look at the way public opinion had turned against smoking and was now turning against alcohol. It was never wise to assume that one was in an unassailable position, and, whatever his own views might be on some of the methods his father had employed to increase the power of the corporation, it was his duty, his responsibility to ensure that Hessler’s survived, for the sake of all those whose lives it supported.

If at the same time he could introduce a different approach to research and development, an awareness of the benefits of kinder, milder drugs, then he would certainly do so, but his prime duty now was not to ease his own conscience but to ensure that the corporation’s reputation was safe, that it could not be damaged or tarnished by anything his father might once have done.