CHAPTER NINETEEN

LEO’S original plan following the end of the conference had been to drive straight from Edinburgh to Cheshire and once there to discreetly make contact with Davina Carey, or Davina James as she now was, but meeting Christie had thrown him so far off balance that instead of taking the direct motorway route south he opted to travel at a more leisurely pace through the countryside.

He needed time, he recognised, not only to prepare himself for what might lie ahead when he met Davina James, but also, just as importantly, if very much more personally, to adjust to the unexpected, almost unwanted in some ways, shock of Christie’s impact on him.

Had he once as a young man daydreamed with idealistic fervour and ignorance of falling instantly and devastatingly in love with someone, of turning his head and seeing her and knowing immediately and incontrovertibly that she was The One? If so, it had obviously not occurred to him that she might not share his ideals, his emotions, and it had certainly not occurred to him that she might be the independent, firm-minded kind of woman who had relegated that kind of emotional immaturity very much to a past part of her life and who now placed his sex in predetermined and sharply divided sections of her life and kept them there: this man a friend, this one a colleague … this one a lover and this one an enemy.

Christie had touched some nerve within him he had thought long and mercifully anaesthetised, or even dead. Meeting her had proved to him that it was very much alive. He had found her physically attractive, almost instantly, overpoweringly so in a way that was disconcertingly unfamiliar to him, but he had witnessed the effects of ‘conference fever’ on his colleagues far too often for him initially to be anything other than startled and rather wryly amused that he himself had finally and unexpectedly succumbed to it.

But then he had found himself thinking almost compulsively about her, wanting to see her; to be with her. And then he had taken her out to dinner.

Long, long before the meal was over he had known the truth: that here was the woman he had ached for, dreamed of and wanted so desperately in the empty painful years of his young manhood, his lover, partner, companion, the other half that alone could make him totally whole.

He had mocked himself even while the thoughts, the knowledge filled him, and he had known as he’d listened to her just how hard it was going to be to persuade her to allow him into her life in the way he wanted to be there; and not just because of who he was.

No matter what his role in life, she would have tried to corral him into one role. She might have allowed him to be her friend, but then would never have permitted him to be her lover; he could have been her lover, but then not her friend …

She was afraid, he saw, afraid in the way that those who had been hurt when they were too young and too giving, too loving to withstand that hurt, always were. He had recognised that fear, that hurt within her because in so many ways it had mirrored his own.

He had managed to obtain a tape of her speech, and all the way down from Edinburgh he had played it compulsively on the car’s cassette machine so that now he knew every nuance, every small inflexion of her voice. And when she spoke it was almost as though his senses could conjure up her whole image there in the car with him.

So this was love—this raw agony of pain and helplessness; this knowledge of being totally powerless, totally out of control, while yet seeming to be the very opposite; this awareness that the whole of his life’s course had been changed, this suppressed anger against himself and foolishly, childishly against her, because things could not have been different.

Things, or her? Would he have been drawn so powerfully to her had she been different—less passionate, less fiercely protective of what mattered to her? Would he really want her tamed and subjected to the same constraints that tied him to Hessler Chemie; to all the demands it made upon him, all the ways it frustrated him and denied him the right to live his own life?

Even now, here in this car, he could not escape from it. Already there had been phone calls from Hamburg, urgent messages that he return as quickly as possible because his brother was stirring up so much trouble, provoking so many quarrels and so much unease.

There had even apparently been rumours in the Press about the internal rivalry within the corporation, hinting that a power struggle might be about to develop between the two brothers; hinting that Leo might have used some secret means to pressurise their father into giving him control of the corporation instead of his brother, and Leo suspected that these ‘rumours’ had originally been leaked to the Press by Wilhelm.

As he battled against his irritation with his brother he reminded himself of how important the corporation had always been to Wilhelm; he had based his whole life around it and nothing mattered more to him, as Anna, his wife, was constantly complaining.

Leo knew she had a valid complaint and that the power and prestige of being the heir apparent to their father had always dominated Wilhelm’s life.

Now that prize had been snatched away from him, and by his despised and disliked younger sibling. Oh, yes, Leo could well understand what motivated Wilhelm in this constant guerrilla warfare he was waging against him.

His circuitous route south took him through the Yorkshire Dales. He stopped there for lunch and to get some fresh air. The landscape had an aura of timelessness and steadfastness about it that must have touched many men’s souls, Leo reflected as he studied the expanse of sky above the bare, rolling hills.

Here time even more than nature somehow dwarfed mankind. How many countless centuries had gone into the making of these smooth hills, this powerful landscape? It ought to have put his own problems into perspective, but all it did do was sharpen the tensions within him.

It seemed an extra taunting dagger-thrust of fate that Davina James should live so close to Christie, but Leo knew that he would not make any attempt to see her again.

The business that was taking him to Cheshire must not be clouded by any other issues, especially not selfishly personal emotional ones. Besides, he could just imagine how Christie would react to the knowledge that he suspected his father might have founded Hessler Chemie on chemical research bought at the cost of the kind of cruel and sadistic practices used in Hitler’s medical experiments. And that only took into account the possibility that his father had somehow merely obtained the information at the end of the war.

The other possibility, that his father might actually have been actively involved at a more personal level, caused Leo the same kind of gut reaction he had experienced as a child when he knew that his father was about to hit him: a churning mixture of panic, fear, pain and self-disgust. And it wasn’t any easier to bear now than it had been then.

He got back into the car and started the engine. He had made his own booking for the hotel in Cheshire, telling his assistant simply that he was going to spend a few days with an old friend.

His slow, cautious research into the past—cautious because it had to be if he wasn’t to arouse other people’s curiosity, and slow because there was no one he could trust to do it other than himself—had done nothing to alleviate his suspicions. Alan Carey was dead and could not answer his questions. He had left behind a daughter. Would he have confided to her the truth about the past, told her how he had come by the knowledge on which his business had been founded? Not if he had been anything like his own father, Leo admitted.

Davina James had recently been widowed. Leo frowned, remembering what his careful enquiries had revealed about her husband and his infidelities, and then his frown deepened.

Before Alan Carey’s death there had been a fire at the company’s premises which had virtually gutted his office. No one seemed to know how the fire had originally started; the company had not even made a full claim against their insurers for recompense. It had been shortly after this event that Alan Carey had allowed his son-in-law to take virtual control of the financial running of the business. Because he recognised that he himself was beginning to grow older, or because his son-in-law had put pressure on him to do so?

That fire. Had it been an accident, an older man’s momentary carelessness, or had it been something more? The blackmailer, blackmailed?

Why was it that evil seemed to have this way of reproducing and perpetuating itself?

Leo frowned, suddenly aware that he had reduced speed slightly as though subconsciously he was reluctant to reach his destination.

He had a momentary aching mental image of Christie. No need to ask himself how she would react to what he suspected his father had done.

Christie Jardine. Why the hell did he have to have met her?

* * *

Less than a hundred miles away Christie was thinking very much the same thing about him. The physical ache tormenting her was something she could control, subdue; the emotional pain she was suffering—that was something different, and, because it was and always had been her greatest fear and dread, her anger and resentment against Leo was all the more intense. After her childhood and then Cathy’s birth she had promised herself that she would never be vulnerable through her emotions again; that she would make sure she avoided the kinds of relationships that would lead to her being hurt, and she had stuck to that decision. Until now …

As she fought frantically against her emotions she told herself that what she was experiencing, or what she thought she was experiencing, simply couldn’t exist; that it was impossible to meet a man and, over the course of one meal with him, a handful of hours spent in his company, somehow allow him to become the entire focus of your life. But it had happened, and her fear and panic fuelled the anger that drove her.

Every time her thoughts veered treacherously in his direction she reminded herself of the way he had deceived her, and of the kind of man … of human being this made him.

She also reminded herself of how different their lives were, of how far apart their goals and aims. He could not be the head of a corporation like Hessler’s without having absorbed and approved the kind of fallacious moral decisions that gave such organisations their life-blood; his outlook on life completely opposed hers. He represented everything she most detested. They were on opposite sides of a line which for her had been drawn very clearly and sharply for almost all of her adult life. She simply could not allow herself to cross that line, not out of desire, need and wanting; not even out of love! If she did she knew that ultimately she would choke on the poison-laden atmosphere she was polluting with her own betrayal of everything she believed in.

Not that Leo had asked her to cross that line; nor, in fact, shown any indication of wanting to ask her. But if all he had wanted from her had been impersonal sex, then why had he rejected her, walked away from her?

Only she knew how much that had surprised and hurt her, how she had raged against him and the tormenting ache of her own need alone in her bedroom.

Tomorrow was her birthday, her thirty-fifth. Saul was taking her and Cathy out to dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester.

Cathy was almost giddy with excitement at the thought of being treated almost as a grown-up. All she wanted to do was to hide herself away somewhere and to block out everything and everyone, but most especially of all Leo von Hessler. The last thing she wanted to do was to go out for a meal that might all too painfully remind her of another night out, another meal … and a man who had left her at her bedroom door with her body aching for him and a pain in her heart which had begun as innocently as a tiny thorn prick but which was now poisoning the whole of her life.

She didn’t want to feel like this about him; and at the back of her mind lay the knowledge that it wasn’t just because her emotional and physical response to him contravened the rules she had laid down for herself for the way she wanted to run her life that made her so afraid.

No, her fear went deeper than that, was more deep-rooted, and sprang from that small seed of misery and self-loathing which had been sown by her father’s rejection of her in favour of Saul.

A long time ago, deep within her psyche, the connection had been made between loving a man and not having that love returned, being rejected by him, and it was that fear that fuelled her anger against Leo now; that and the knowledge that he had deceived her, deliberately and calculatedly.

And yet that knowledge, which should have made it so much easier for her to cut herself free of all that he had made her feel, somehow only added to the intensity of her emotions.

If he hadn’t wanted to have sex with her then why bother deceiving her? It wasn’t logical; it wasn’t how she knew the male mind worked and it wasn’t in line with the character her anger and pain had built for him to superimpose over the ache of her memories of the evening they had spent together. Face it, she derided herself as she listened to Cathy’s chatter about her day, it was about as effective as trying to stop a heart attack with a placebo.

* * *

Davina was in the kitchen when the phone rang. Despite the fact that it was gone six o’clock, a fierce thrill of sensation ran through her as she had an instant mental image of Saul Jardine.

She had had to endure both the bank manager and Giles lecturing her about the folly of what she had done. Dealing with Giles had been harder than dealing with Philip Taylor, even though Philip had been the more irate and more acerbic of the two.

In Giles’s eyes she had seen the beginnings of an awareness that she was not perhaps, after all, worthy of the pedestal on which he had placed her. She had hurt him, she acknowledged as she listened to him, if only by default.

Yesterday after Saul Jardine had gone Giles had rung her, his voice stiff and distant as he explained to her that he was staying at home for a few days.

This week had seen the anniversary of their baby’s death, he had informed her, and he had felt that he owed it both to Lucy and the baby they had created together to be with her.

‘She’s been very upset,’ he had told her, and Davina had caught the note of guilt in his voice, of self-justification almost. Giles needed to be leant on, she recognised. It made him feel strong and able, and she had leaned on him since Gregory’s death.

She had smiled a little wryly to herself, wondering if Saul Jardine had ever felt the need to have someone dependent on him, already knowing the answer. He was simply not that kind of man.

She didn’t ask herself how she knew so much about him on so short an acquaintanceship, much less why she should be thinking about him in the first place. And now, as the sharp command of the telephone sliced through the silence and her stomach lurched with tension, she was equally wary of asking herself questions she knew she wouldn’t want to answer.

She picked up the receiver, forcing herself to smile, hoping that by doing so she might displace some of her tension.

‘May I speak with Davina James, please?’

The voice at the other end of the line, while male, was unfamiliar, the English so perfect and accentless that she knew immediately it was not the speaker’s first language.

‘Speaking,’ she announced, waiting uncertainly, trying to ignore the abrupt cessation of the adrenalin surge that had brought her to the phone.

Leo had rehearsed what he would say to Davina many times, and the words, the brief explanation that he believed their fathers had been friends during the war rolled easily enough from his lips, but much less easily from his heart.

Even without seeing her, he could sense Davina’s surprise and uncertainty; and knew that it was good manners rather than conviction that led to her offering him the invitation he had blatantly fished for.

If she was startled by the way he responded so immediately and decisively to her hesitant agreement to his request that she agree to see him she managed to hide it.

He was relieved when she confirmed that she was free that evening. The less time he had to spend in Cheshire, the better; not so much because he was afraid that he might run into Christie—that, after all, was hardly likely. No, what he feared was that he might ignore all the arguments he had had with himself, all the logic which warned him that things were better, safer left as they were, even the knowledge that if his own control slipped to the point where he was in danger of using her physical desire for him to get closer to her he could easily endanger her and not just himself, and be drawn, lemming-like, into a storm of emotion that could engulf Christie as well as himself.

The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, and yet incontravertibly he knew that, for her, to love him would be ultimately to be hurt because she could never adapt her life, her beliefs to accommodate the way he had to live his life.

It was bad enough for him, suffering the suppression of his own deeply held convictions, in the knowledge that he had to do so if he was to remain at the head of Hessler Chemie, and that to abdicate that responsibility in favour of his brother was to accept that the corporation with its great power could quite easily become corrupt, even to the point where people, their health, their lives were far less important than the profits the corporation generated; and even more important to Wilhelm than money was power. It was not his fault. He was addicted to it, had been force-fed that addiction all his growing life by their father. By his father, Leo corrected himself mentally.

No, to become a part of his world would ultimately destroy Christie. And yet wouldn’t living without her destroy him?

He smiled grimly to himself as he thanked Davina for agreeing to see him and replaced the receiver.

Frowning slightly, Davina wandered slowly back into the kitchen. Leo von Hessler. She had recognised the name, of course, but it was news to her that her father had ever even known, never mind been friendly with his.

Davina had known her father well, or, rather, she had thought she had. He had not been the kind of man who would have kept quiet about such a prestigious friendship. Never, as far as she could remember, had anyone with that name written to or contacted her father, and her father had never contacted him. Neither had he ever visited Germany since the end of the war.

Davina’s frown deepened as she recognised that she ought perhaps to have questioned Leo von Hessler’s assumption that they had known one another a little more closely. But there had been something about his calm certainty, about the quiet way he had stated their friendship as an established fact, that had lulled her into accepting that it must be so.

No, with hindsight she sensed something odd, something unknown and somehow slightly disturbing about the phone call.

And yet why should she feel like that? Leo von Hessler himself had sounded calm, pleasant and somehow reassuring, so why did she have this odd shiver of tension, of unease?

She glanced at her watch. He would be here within an hour. She wondered if she ought to offer him something to eat—and, if so, what?—wryly acknowledging that this concern could quite easily be a way of displacing the tension she felt and of pushing it to one side so that she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

It irritated her a little that the habit of self-evasion, which she had developed as a means of protecting herself, was still something she hadn’t entirely escaped from even now when it was no longer necessary.

‘Lie to the world if you have to,’ Matt had once counselled her, ‘but never lie to yourself—about anything.’

And now she was lying to herself, and not just about her unease over Leo von Hessler’s imminent visit either.

He arrived on time, as Davina had expected. She watched him drive up from an upstairs window, noting the controlled way he parked the car.

Physically he wasn’t what she had expected; more relaxed, less … less Teutonic than she had imagined from his voice, and startlingly good-looking, much more so, for instance, than Saul Jardine, whose hard bone-structure, while rendering him powerfully and very intensely male, did not possess the almost film-star good looks of this man.

Davina blinked a little as she watched him walk towards the front door. He moved easily and elegantly, but there was a slight air of tension about him, a hesitation almost before he rang the bell.

Quickly she hurried downstairs, her own tension increasing.

He was sensitive as well as good-looking, she decided ten minutes later, having welcomed him in and observed the way he kept a non-threatening distance from her, touching her only briefly and accidentally when he handed her the flowers he had bought for her. Freshly cut locally grown cottage-type blooms, Davina noticed approvingly, and not the too perfect, almost unreal hot-house ones she detested so much. Perhaps because they reminded her of Gregory and the early days of their marriage.

‘Please come in,’ Davina invited, leading the way to the sitting-room after she had placed the flowers in water in the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t sure whether or not you would have eaten.’

‘Yes, earlier. Your afternoon tea … I had not realised it would be so filling.’

‘The Grosvenor prides itself on its food,’ Davina told him. She was conscious of the fact that they were both making small talk, both hesitant and wary, both on guard almost.

‘You mentioned a friendship between your father and mine,’ she encouraged him, taking the plunge and then discovering that she was holding her breath, her heartbeat just a little too fast and shallow.

‘Yes.’ Leo looked gravely at her. ‘You knew nothing of such a friendship, I take it.’

‘No,’ Davina admitted. ‘I knew, of course, that my father was in Germany at the end of the war …’

‘Yes. He was with the first of the British forces there, I believe.’ He mentioned the name of her father’s regiment and where they had been stationed, and Davina looked at him uncertainly.

‘You seem to know more about his war service than I do,’ she admitted. ‘My father wasn’t … that is, he and I … He was a rather reserved man,’ she told him hesitantly, groping for the right words to tell him just how little she knew about her father’s past without betraying her real feelings towards him and their relationship.

‘Something else our fathers seemed to have in common. Mine also was … reserved,’ Leo told her quietly.

Something else they had in common? Davina watched him carefully. She could almost feel the tension increasing, and she wasn’t sure which of them was generating it, or were both of them doing so, and if so why?

‘Something else?’ she questioned.

‘They both founded drug companies,’ Leo told her sombrely.

Davina frowned. ‘My father didn’t actually found Carey’s. It was my grandfather, his father, who did that. He was the one who accidentally discovered the formula for the heart drug.’

‘When … when did he “accidentally” discover this formula?’

The sharpness of Leo’s question took Davina slightly off guard. ‘I’m not sure exactly,’ she admitted. ‘Some time before the war, I suppose, because my father was at university at the time. He opted out and volunteered … joined the army,’ she explained, ‘and then when he returned …’

‘He did what?’ Leo pressed her. ‘Did he go back to university, take his degree?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Davina frowned and told him defensively. ‘But neither did many others in the same position. I think there was a general feeling among them that they had experienced too much to go back.’

‘But you don’t know why your father did not complete his degree?’ Leo persisted.

Davina shook her head. ‘No, it was something we never discussed.’ She moved restlessly in her chair. ‘My father was … he was a very private man. He never talked much about himself … about his past.’

‘But he did tell you that the drug formula was originally discovered by his father.’

‘No. Not exactly,’ Davina admitted. ‘It was my mother who told me.’ She frowned and then as she caught sight of Leo’s expression her stomach lurched. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she demanded anxiously.

Helplessly Leo watched her. She obviously knew as little as he had done himself. Less, and suddenly he desperately wanted to protect her from the truth, but as he watched her he knew that he couldn’t. That he had already said too much.

Inwardly he cursed himself for being so obsessed with his own need to find the truth. It was too late now to retract. Davina was waiting anxiously for him to give her an answer, and if he refused to give her one … No, he could not do that.

‘I don’t suppose you have a copy of the … of your grandfather’s original notes anywhere, do you?’ he asked her tonelessly.

‘No. No, I don’t … There was a fire in my father’s office some years ago. Everything in it was destroyed.’ It had been shortly after that that Gregory had announced that he was taking financial control of the company, she remembered.

She had never been sure just how Gregory had managed to wrest that agreement from her father. Certainly it had led to a great deal of enmity between them; a challenging hostility which Gregory seemed to enjoy and which her father had endured with a bitter resentment.

She had always assumed that it had had something to do with the fact that Carey’s had not produced any new drugs, but then under Gregory’s control, as she now knew, even less money had been invested in research than during her father’s rule.

She got up abruptly and walked over to the window.

‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ she challenged Leo as she turned round to face him. ‘Our fathers were never friends.’

‘Not friends, no … but I very much fear that they might have been accomplices,’ Leo told her heavily.

As he watched her he found himself wishing that things might have been different. It would become a personal burden for her, this small, slight woman who watched him with such anxious, wary eyes. If his assumptions, his suspicions were right she would feel as he did; as, it seemed, neither of their fathers had been able to feel.

‘It’s a long and complicated story, full of gaps and uncertainties,’ he told her quietly.

Davina had always been a good listener and she listened now, uneasy at first, and then dazed with disbelief as Leo gently told her what he had discovered, or, rather, as he corrected himself, what he believed he had discovered.

‘So what are you telling me,’ Davina interrupted him at one point, ‘that my father … our fathers used medical research which had been developed by … by … by experimentation on human beings in places like Auschwitz?’

‘Your father was probably only guilty of using it. I wish mine …’

When Davina saw his face, her own shock and sickening sense of horror was pushed to one side by her instinctive compassion.

‘It’s not your fault. Not your guilt,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You are not responsible.’

‘For my father, no, but for Hessler Chemie, yes … I am. There have always been rumours about my father … rumours which surfaced briefly over the years and were quickly suppressed. He had always claimed that he was out of Germany for most of the war. And that much is true, he was, but there are those who say that he did not leave Germany because, as he claims, he could not fight for Hitler and yet neither could he fight against his countrymen—but because he was a highly paid spy; someone high up enough in the confidence of others to know exactly what was going on in those death camps; someone even who knew this medical research existed … someone who was perhaps discovered by your father removing this particular research from some secret place.’

Davina went white. ‘Are you saying … do you mean …?’ Her throat was raw with horror, her voice a thin whisper of protest.

‘I have no proof to say whether or not your father blackmailed mine into giving him one of those chemical equations. I do not have enough knowledge of your father to make that kind of accusation. All I can say is that I believe that the formula on which Carey Chemicals’ major—only, in fact—drug is based bears far too close a resemblance to the one I found in my father’s possessions for it merely to be coincidence.’

He had seen the way Davina’s body had jerked in response to his use of the word ‘blackmail’ and now he looked at her and apologised sincerely. ‘I’m sorry. Believe me … I didn’t come here to distress you. I know what you must feel and, besides, I could be wrong.’

Davina shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him painfully. ‘I don’t think you are.’ She didn’t know how she knew that his suspicions were correct, but it was as though listening to him had turned the key in a locked door within her own subconscious so that she was illuminatingly aware of just how capable her father could have been of that kind of act. ‘I think you are probably right.’ She shivered a little, trying not to think about the source of the money that now lay in Gregory’s bank accounts, her bank accounts, the same money which had provided for the clothes on her back and the food in her mouth.

‘Try not to think about it,’ Leo advised her, correctly reading her thoughts.

‘I can’t help it. Those people … the ones in … in those camps. They … their families … they are the ones who should have benefited from the success of these drugs.’ Her gorge rose at the images forming in her brain. ‘I can’t bear to think about it,’ she told Leo rawly. ‘How …?’

‘I don’t know,’ Leo told her. ‘I’m still trying to come to terms with it myself. Your father was merely guilty of blackmail, of perhaps simply taking the option of not reporting my father in return for the research, while mine … Did he simply come across the medical reports, discover them by accident, or was he looking for them, aware of their existence? Had he …?’

‘The heart drug was the only one that Carey’s ever produced successfully,’ Davina murmured. ‘But Hessler’s …’

‘Who knows how my father came by the original workings for all the other drugs he claimed came from our laboratories, apart from the original tranquilliser?’ Leo interrupted her painfully. ‘Maybe they were genuinely produced there. I hope to God they were.’

‘I can’t bear to think of what they did,’ Davina whispered.

‘No,’ Leo agreed. ‘When I first knew, I wanted to destroy Hessler Chemie, to take it and physically scatter every particle of it into the dust, to scream my father’s guilt from the roof-tops, so great was the burden of my own pain; but how can I do that? How can I put at risk the livelihoods of so many thousands of innocent people, people who have no knowledge of what the corporation they are working for was founded on?

‘If I were to reveal the truth to the world to appease my own guilt it wouldn’t be my father who would suffer, or so I tell myself.’ He looked broodingly at Davina. ‘Am I a moral coward as well as the son of a sadist and murderer?’

Davina winced at the tone of his voice but shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him huskily. ‘But I know how you feel. Carey’s … the thought of ever having to go there again makes me feel physically sick … like this house … like everything bought with my father’s money, and yet if I desert Carey’s now …’ She paused and looked at him. ‘I expect you know that we’re on the verge of bankruptcy. You seem to know so much else.’

Leo nodded, and suddenly Davina wanted to ask his advice. He was a stranger, and yet in many ways he had come, through what he had told her, closer to her than if they had been born twin souls.

‘I have been approached by someone who wants to buy the company. The bank wants me to sell, but I can’t do that until I have categoric assurances that everyone’s jobs will be safe and that their working conditions will be improved. Saul Jardine—’

‘Jardine?’ Leo questioned abruptly.

‘Yes.’ Davina hesitated uncertainly. ‘Do you … do you know him?’

‘No,’ Leo told her.

‘He … he works for Sir Alex Davidson,’ Davina continued.

Leo frowned. He knew of Alex Davidson, an entrepreneur who was more pirate than anything else, a man with a good nose for a weak or unprotected business, but what could he possibly want with Carey’s?

Leo was not surprised by Davina’s admission that Carey’s was on the verge of bankruptcy. What had surprised him was that someone, anyone should want to buy her out.

‘We’ll never really know, will we,’ Davina asked him tiredly, ‘about our fathers, I mean?’

‘No,’ Leo agreed sombrely.

‘We were never close … we never really got on. I always knew he didn’t love me, and I didn’t particularly like him,’ Davina admitted. ‘But I never actually hated him before. How could he …?’

Leo didn’t try to comfort her; he knew there was nothing he could say that would offer comfort.

‘Thank God he’s dead,’ Davina said passionately at last. ‘If he weren’t …’

‘I know,’ Leo agreed.

‘What will you do now?’ Davina asked him.

He shook his head. ‘There is nothing I can do; for the sake of the corporation, I cannot expose my father’s past. I’m sorry you have been involved. I should not perhaps have burdened you with such knowledge.’

‘No,’ Davina told him fiercely, and as she said it she knew it was true. ‘I’m glad in a way that I do know. It makes it easier somehow, knowing that perhaps, after all, I was not at fault for not loving him.’

‘I understand,’ Leo said grimly, and, looking at him, Davina had the feeling that he did.

‘It can never be wholly confirmed, you know,’ he told her gently. ‘At best it is only surmise. I have been discreet,’ he added. ‘My enquiries will not put you at any kind of risk, although I am not sure now if my motives in seeking you out were quite as I had believed. I had told myself it was simply that I had to have confirmation of my suspicions of my father’s guilt, but now I wonder if I wasn’t also looking for someone to share with me the horror that goes with them.’

Davina touched his arm lightly. There was a bond between them now that could never be severed; it would be deeper and more binding than any bond of love or blood … as deep perhaps as the bond of guilt and deceit that had linked their fathers?

‘I could still be wrong,’ Leo persisted. ‘There is no real proof.’

Davina shook her head. ‘My father was the proof,’ she told him quietly. ‘And you are not wrong. What will you do now?’ she asked him.

‘Go back to Hamburg and pray that our fathers’ crimes remain buried with them,’ he told her grimly. ‘And you?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. First I must find a buyer … the right buyer for Carey’s.’ Only when she had done that would she be free to walk away from the burden of her father’s guilt … his blood money.

She shuddered a little, knowing that she would never be entirely free of its taint, but she could not go back and alter the past.

The future was a different matter.

After his death Matt’s solicitors had approached her, discreetly and very carefully, to advise her that he had left her a small legacy. In the letter they had given her he had written,

She had never touched the money, investing it instead. It wasn’t a large sum, but it was enough—more than enough for her to live on while she trained for some kind of occupation … enough to enable her to rent a small house or flat for long enough for her to start to make her own way financially.

It seemed almost prophetic that Matt, who had already given her so much, should also have given her this.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Leo began, but Davina shook her head.

‘No … I’m glad you told me and … and … I’ll go through my father’s papers just to check. You’re staying at the Grosvenor … How long for?’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow, but I’ll give you my number in Hamburg, and not just in case you do find something. I want us to keep in touch, Davina.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed shakily. ‘So do I.’

He stood up and held out his hand to her to shake hers and then abruptly changed his mind, taking hold of her and hugging her. It was not a sexual embrace in any way, but it was one that was full of warmth and compassion.

‘Don’t feel you must share their guilt,’ he told her.

‘Don’t you?’ she asked him quietly.

As he released her Davina gave him a wan smile. ‘If I discover anything I’ll let you know,’ she promised him as they said their goodbyes.

Half of her already suspected that she wouldn’t. Surely her father would not have made that kind of mistake? But then, in keeping the equations in their original form, Leo’s father had. Greed was a strange and powerful force and a very destructive one.