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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Caper Court
- Sprache: Englisch
Now a QC at the eminent chambers of 5 Caper Court, Leo Davies has a big case on his hands. With Anthony Cross at his side, Leo finds himself representing a group of investors desperate to claim back the fortunes they unwittingly lost. They've staked everything on Leo's performance in court, blissfully unaware of the confusions of his private life which threaten to destroy their case. For at home, the delicate facade of Leo's marriage to Rachel is swiftly crumbling. And meanwhile, Anthony's burgeoning relationship with a colleague leaves Leo jealous at heart. But even these distractions won't stop Leo from making a play for one of his clients, the handsome TV celebrity Charles Beecham. But while Leo eyes Beecham, Beecham's own interests may lie elsewhere . . .
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Seitenzahl: 668
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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An Immoral Code
CARO FRASER
For all long-suffering lawyers – in particular, Jim and Richard
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Charles Beecham could see the postman from where he sat at his desk, next to the stone-framed window. He knew that he himself was screened from the postman’s gaze by the tumble of fading jasmine and honeysuckle leaves which partly obscured the window, and for this he felt both secretly relieved and ashamed. He was reminded of early days in his marriage to Hetty, when his heart had contracted at the sound of letters flipping onto the doormat, and at the awful sight of those cheap brown envelopes containing bills and reminders and letters from his bank manager. Even worse were the ones which Hetty had concealed, or mislaid under a jumble of overdue library books and children’s belongings on the hall table. Hetty was gone. Those days were gone. But, twenty years on, the guilt and dread of financial indebtedness had returned with a vengeance.
The envelopes were no longer cheap little brown things. They were long and white, franked in the City of London, and the paper on which the demands for money were written was thick and expensive, the demands themselves elegantly phrased and gentlemanly. Just as a struggling young polytechnic lecturer in a terraced house in Maida Vale had deserved nothing more than scrappy, terse final demands for mean little sums in double figures, so it befitted a middle-aged man of independent means, living in intellectual tranquillity in his snug eighteenth-century house in the Wiltshire countryside, to receive demands from Lloyd’s of London for sums that ran into tens of thousands.
He heard the flap and clink of the letter box, and watched the postman as he made his way down the long, stone-flagged path, brushing past the clumps of lavender that grew beneath the mulberry tree. It was irrational, of course, to live in the fearful assumption that each delivery of post might contain yet another reminder from his members’ agents that there were overdue calls for which they had yet to receive settlement. But when one owed money, when the yearly demands from Lloyd’s were relentless and overwhelming, one lived in a perpetual state of anxiety and guilt. Gone were the days when he would stroll carelessly into the hall and stoop to pick up the mail, confident perhaps of another royalty cheque, or a letter from his agent confirming the sale of television rights to his latest work. Those might still come – Charles Beecham might still be a familiar name to the elite who cared to watch his documentaries, or buy his books – but the comfortable living which his occupation as a historian and academic had once provided him had long since been eclipsed, obscured by the fiasco of Lloyd’s.
Joining Lloyd’s had seemed the right thing to do at the time, back in the mid eighties, when his finances had taken that wonderful upward swing. He no longer needed to pay money to Hetty, who had remarried some stockbroker, and the children were both past school age. His elder brother, a childless bachelor, had recently died, so that he had inherited the modest country house in which he now lived, together with a tidy little fortune tied up in gilts and treasury bonds. He had been able to give up lecturing, and to use his new-found leisure to write a series of books, which were well received. He had become established as a popular historian, and his boyish good looks, his blonde curling hair, had made him a natural for television. His first BBC Two series, on the history of the Mogul Empire, had been a success, and the familiarity of his face ensured that his subsequent book on the history of Assyria sold widely, and a further television series followed. Successful and reasonably wealthy, he had every reason to believe that membership of Lloyd’s would bring advantages in terms of both money and status. He remembered all the enticements which had been spelt out to him – making one’s capital work twice, setting off losses against taxed income, an unbroken seven-year record of profits – and how he had been told that an investment of £100,000 could net him yearly returns of £15,000 or £20,000. Now, seven years later, his boyish good looks were fading slightly, and the golden hair was greying, but he was still attractive, his books still sold well, and his latest documentary attracted a healthy audience. The nice amount of additional annual income which he had been told Lloyd’s would bring him had, however, never manifested. Disaster after disaster had hit the market, and now he was the embittered recipient of regular demands for money which he could no longer pay. It had never been meant to work that way. Lloyd’s should have brought him in money, instead of draining him of it. And there was no way out. He glanced round at the comfortable room in which he now sat, at the carefully collected pieces of furniture, the shelves of books, and then out at the rambling garden surrounded by warm, worn brick walls, and wondered how soon he would manage to sell the house. It had been on the market for five months now.
The sound of the telephone interrupted his meditations and he reached out to pick it up. When he heard Freddie Hendry’s voice, he sighed inwardly. At least, he thought, whatever bitterness he might feel about the Lloyd’s business, it hadn’t sent him barmy, like poor old Freddie.
‘Beecham?’ barked the voice.
‘Freddie,’ sighed Charles. ‘How are you?’
But Freddie did not bother with preliminary pleasantries. ‘Look, Charles, we’re going to have to rally the troops over this time-bar point. That ass Cochrane has been writing letters to everybody, and I can see we’re going to have to canvass support against the rest of the committee. Now, what I propose …’
But Charles did not listen to the rest. He just sat, the receiver against his ear, waiting for Freddie to finish. He wished, oh, how he wished, that he had never been talked into going on this committee. Charles and Freddie, along with a couple of thousand other unfortunates, were on the Capstall syndicate, number 1766, one of the worst-hit syndicates at Lloyd’s. Alan Capstall, a flamboyant Lloyd’s underwriter whose successes in the seventies were legend, had managed to underwrite a series of run-off policies involving asbestos and pollution risks which exposed his Names to liabilities of horrific, undreamt-of proportions, and had triggered the beginning of Charles Beecham’s financial disaster. Of course, the Capstall syndicate was not the only Lloyd’s syndicate to be adversely affected by the negligent underwriting of spectacularly bad risks. Other syndicates – Outhwaite, Merrett, Gooda Walker – had all suffered calamitous losses. The Capstall syndicate Names had banded together to form an action group with the aim of taking legal proceedings against Alan Capstall and the members’ agents. With all the enthusiasm of grievously wronged litigants, they formed a committee to oversee the matter of the litigation, and Charles Beecham, as a prominent figure, had seemed an obvious choice as a committee member. People liked the idea of having someone on the committee who was something of a celebrity. Besides, at forty-two, Charles was relatively youthful, compared to many of the Names, and it was felt he might inject a certain amount of enthusiasm and energy into the project.
Now, as he listened to Freddie Hendry’s dotty ramblings, Charles felt anything but enthusiastic. When they had launched the case a year ago, his energies had been fuelled by outrage at the disaster which had befallen him, by a bitter sense of complete betrayal by an institution which he had regarded as impregnable. But the warmth of those feelings had gradually been cooled by tedious months of painstakingly slow litigation, and by the increasingly apparent eccentricities and fixations of his fellow committee members. He was still keen to pursue the litigation – anything to avert the financial nightmare which threatened to ruin his life – but he wished now that he did not have to be in any way involved in the coordination of the thing. It seemed that all the energies of the committee were taken up with internal wranglings and petty vendettas against their chairman, a harmless and well-meaning man by the name of Snodgrass. Freddie Hendry was one of the worst of the lot, forever ringing Charles and other members of the committee, and sending endless faxes to Nichols & Co, the solicitors, and even to Godfrey Ellwood and Anthony Cross, the counsel retained by the action group to fight their case.
‘… did you see that article in the Sunday Telegraph? Perfectly obvious that Capstall is a complete crook, and worse besides. I rather think they’re bugging my phone now, Charles. That happened a lot in 1981. And another odd thing. Chap came up to me three times in Wimpole Street the other day and asked me the way to Grosvenor Square. Three times! Same chap! It reminded me of the time when I was in Regent Street, couple of years after the war, actually on my way to Garrard’s—’
‘Freddie,’ interrupted Charles, ‘I’m afraid there’s someone at the door … I’ll have to go … Yes, yes – I understood all of it. Perfectly. Well, maybe we should just leave all that to counsel. They are the experts, after all … No, I don’t imagine that Godfrey Ellwood is related to the Ellwood whom your cousin knew in MI6 … You get those letters out. Super. Bye.’
He heaved a sigh of relief as he put the phone down, then sat motionless in his chair, wondering if he should go out and look at the mail lying on the mat in the hall.
In the living room of his small Bloomsbury flat, Freddie Hendry put the phone down and rubbed his chin. He sometimes wondered if Beecham appreciated the urgency of this whole thing. All very well for him to sit there in the country with his history books, doing his bit towards coordinating and so forth, but what they needed at a time like this was spirit, people prepared to fight their corner.
Freddie rose slowly and went through to the kitchen. It was small and spartan, with just the few basics – pots and pans, some crockery, a kettle, tea in a caddy, powdered milk, cereal, some tins and packets of food. He hadn’t really cooked much for himself since Dorothy died. Just the odd bit of spaghetti on toast, cold tuna … he rather liked those Batchelors Cup a Soups, particularly the pea and ham. Poor Dorothy – what would she think if she could see how he lived now? Of course, it had been the Lloyd’s business which had finished her. She had never got over losing the house in Hampshire, seeing everything sold, leaving all their friends. When they had been forced to move into this poky little flat, that had been the end for her. Freddie muttered to himself, baring his teeth and jerking up his salt-and-pepper moustache as he did so, as he engaged yet again in one of his imaginary diatribes against Capstall. Capstall the smooth-talking charlatan, the crook, the swindler who had abused the trust of his syndicate members, who had cynically underwritten those asbestos risks when the evidence of mounting asbestos claims was there for all to see.
With a hand that trembled faintly, Freddie poured boiling water onto his powdered soup and stirred it carefully. He took it back through to the living room, which was sparsely furnished with a few handsome remnants of furniture from the Hampshire house. Silver-framed pictures of his two grown-up children and their families adorned the mantelpiece, and in the grate stood an old, inefficient gas heater. From the landing outside, beyond the faceless front doors of countless apartments whose inhabitants Freddie did not know, came the distant sound of the lift doors opening and closing, then the whine of the mechanism. It was a bleak sound. On days like this, with the autumn melancholy setting in and long hours to fill, Freddie had to try hard to stave off the loneliness. At least this litigation gave him a sense of purpose. This was probably the last fight he would fight in his life, and by God, he was determined to win it. He sat down beside the telephone and fax machine and set his mug of soup carefully next to it. Freddie had got the fax machine from a second-hand office equipment place, and he regarded it as indispensable to his work as a committee member. It seemed to him vital that he should be able to transmit his thoughts as quickly as possible to those in charge of the case. Ideas often came to him in the middle of the night, and at a time when phones would have rung unanswered, Freddie could sit in his dressing gown, feeding in handwritten pages.
He sipped his soup and wiped his moustache, staring at the pale October sky through the window. What should his next line of campaign be? He must muster more support for his views over this time-bar point. Cochrane and his quislings mustn’t be allowed to get away with what they were doing. Basher Snodgrass was far too weak to be the committee chairman. Freddie had sent three faxes to Godfrey Ellwood on the subject of the time-bar in the past two days, and he had the feeling Ellwood hadn’t paid them much attention. Freddie suspected him of approaching this case too cynically. Well, he would try that junior of Ellwood’s, Anthony Cross. The boy looked far too young to be handling such important litigation, let alone to be a barrister, but everyone assured Freddie he was tremendously good. Maybe he would pay more attention. Freddie took another sip of his soup, picked up his pen and pad of A4 paper, and began to write in his steady, sloping hand, marking the first page for the urgent attention of Anthony Cross, 5 Caper Court, the Temple, London.
In the buildings of 5 Caper Court, all was not as tranquil as it should normally have been on a Friday morning. True, to the eye of the idle clerk passing by on his way from Fleet Street to King’s Bench Walk, or to any barrister glancing in at the windows as they hurried through Serjeants’ Inn to Middle Temple Lane, the picture was ostensibly that of one of the most select sets of barristers’ chambers in the Temple going diligently about its work. Shirtsleeved barristers toiled over briefs and books, computers and word processors hummed and winked reassuringly, figures came and went, and all seemed testimony to a composed little world where the fees were fat and the opinions eminently learned. Among the figures which came and went, however, one moved with greater rapidity and fluster than was normal within those sedate walls.
Felicity Waller thought she would burst into tears if she couldn’t have either a fag or a good swear – right now. Why couldn’t Anthony look after his own effing files? She was a clerk now, not a bleeding secretary, and this stupid Lloyd’s Names case of his was driving her demented. If she had to find yet another frigging Capstall file for him – and there were 208 of the bleeding things, and more to come, apparently – she’d scream.
She tapped up the wooden stairs of chambers at furious speed in her heels, swearing under her breath, and knocked briefly on Anthony Cross’s door before entering in a flurry of lycra and bad temper. Anthony Cross, one of the more junior barristers in 5 Caper Court, but presently made self-important and irritable by the cares and complexities of the case in which he was involved, was in a state of temper fit to match his clerk’s.
‘Well?’ he demanded, straightening up from a swamp of documents. ‘Have you found it?’
‘No,’ replied Felicity shortly. ‘Wherever you think that file is, Mr Cross, it is certainly not downstairs.’ She marched over to a stack of lever arch files that had come to resemble a small stockade.
‘Don’t touch those!’
Felicity ignored him and began unbuilding the stockade. Halfway down, she reached in behind and triumphantly pulled out a dog-eared blue cardboard wallet, thick with papers. She held it out to Anthony without a word, but the ominous tilt of that formidable bust and the set of those pursed lips told him that he had better search his own room thoroughly another time before setting Felicity off to scour the building for his files. Although she had started as a lowly typist at 5 Caper Court a year ago, Felicity possessed all the streetwise talents necessary for a good barrister’s clerk. Henry, the chief clerk, had recognised this and made her his protégée a few months ago. Felicity was determined that the members of chambers should appreciate her new status, and not carry on treating her like a complete dogsbody. Clerks generally received respect, and Felicity wanted some of it.
‘Thanks,’ muttered Anthony, his hauteur somewhat dented by this incident. Then he added, ‘Sorry,’ and shot a look of such charming apology from those great dark eyes of his that Felicity melted, as she usually did after getting into a temper with Anthony. Only inwardly, however, and only slightly. She still had plenty of work to do and not much of the morning left to do it in. Leaving Anthony’s room and turning to go downstairs, she bumped into Leo Davies returning from a conference with counsel in Hare Court, overcoat on and papers tucked beneath his arm. He smiled as he saw Felicity’s face.
‘Our young Mr Cross been giving you grief, then?’ he asked, adopting Felicity’s idiom, which was something he enjoyed doing, in a middle-aged way. He felt a sort of paternal responsibility for her, since he had got her the job here. She had been his wife’s secretary once, but had lost that job, through no fault of her own. He was glad Henry had made her a clerk, was pleased to see her doing well. He enjoyed, too, the way that her micro-skirts and generous expanse of cleavage enlivened the sombre atmosphere of chambers.
She glanced at him, thinking, as she always did, that you could forget Anthony’s dark, pretty good looks, and give her Leo any day. His voice had a light Welsh lilt, which Felicity thought very sexy. And that chiselled face, the silver hair, the blue of his eyes, reminded her of Terence Stamp. She could die for Leo. ‘Don’t, Mr Davies,’ she sighed. ‘You’d think this Capstall case of his was the only one in the world.’
‘You are seeing an up-and-coming junior in the heady throes of his first really big case. It’s like a love affair. You have to make allowances.’ Leo fished in his pocket for the key to his room. ‘By the way, have we got a date for that Driscoll hearing yet?’
‘Yeah, we did. I can’t remember it off-hand, but it’s in the book. I’ll look it up.’
‘Thanks.’ She clattered off downstairs, and Leo, about to go up to his room on the next landing, paused, glancing at Anthony’s door. They hadn’t really had much to do with one another over the past few months. Just the odd snatch of conversation over tea, and whatever exchanges their work might necessitate. But apart from that, Anthony had been careful to avoid Leo unless there were other people around. Leo could understand it. There was no real resolution to that whole sorry mess, which had begun with Anthony falling in love with Rachel, and had ended with Leo marrying her. Surely by this time he must have grown to accept the situation – whatever he imagined the situation to be. Leo wished that he could take him out, explain it to him over a drink. But he didn’t really understand it all himself. And Rachel? What did Rachel, alone in her big, beautiful house with her baby, think was going on?
Leo hesitated, then raised his hand, knocked on Anthony’s door, and went in. Anthony was sitting at his desk, flicking through the file which Felicity had found for him. He had loosened his tie and unfastened his collar, and his dark hair was rumpled from where he had been running his fingers through it in concentration. As always, the sight of Anthony’s vulnerable, frowning face, caught unawares at his work, had a powerful effect on Leo. He wished that he could study Anthony in that pose, gaze at his youthfulness for a long moment. But the moment passed. Anthony cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes?’ His voice was distant, preoccupied, as though the intrusion was slightly unwelcome. Leo could remember times when it would not have been so.
‘I just wondered whether you fancied lunch round the corner. If you’re nearly finished, that is.’ Anthony looked back at his papers, saying nothing, and Leo added, in a slightly gentler tone, ‘We don’t seem to have talked to one another properly in a long time.’
Anthony looked up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve still got rather a lot of work to do,’ he said. It was true. Next Wednesday they were in the House of Lords, and there were still documents which he had not read. ‘Sorry,’ he added, his voice stiff.
Leo paused, his hand on the doorknob, then nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Some other time.’ He closed the door, and Anthony sat listening to the sound of his feet on the stairs as Leo made his way to his room. He did not resume his work. He sat staring at the far corner of his room, at the stacks of documents. He remembered how he had sat in this room five years ago, when he had been Michael Gibbon’s pupil and new to 5 Caper Court, and had listened for Leo’s feet on the stairs, hoping that he would stop and look in. He had always been able to tell Leo’s footsteps; they were more rapid than the others. His heart used to beat painfully if the footsteps passed the room and went on upstairs. He could feel his heartbeat beginning to slow now. The sight of Leo always affected him in this way. Nothing about him ever grew stale or too familiar. His presence was always electrifying. But then, Leo seemed to have that effect upon most people. Look at Rachel.
Anthony swivelled round in his chair and stared out at the grey autumn sky above the roofs of the Caper Court buildings. Of course, it was nothing to do with Rachel. Anthony had been in love more than a few times, and he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t got over it by now. Naturally he had. Well, he assumed he had – he hadn’t seen her since just before she and Leo got married, and that was nearly a year ago. Admittedly, he had been steering clear of women since then, but that was largely to do with the burden of this Lloyd’s case, and the amount of work he had to put in. No, it was not Rachel. It was not even the fact that she had married Leo. Rather, it was that Leo had married her. That he had married anyone. Anthony thought back to the times that he and Leo had spent together, times when his friendship with the older man had seemed the most passionately important thing in the world. That was where he felt betrayed. He rubbed his hands over his tired face and turned back to his work, gazing unseeingly down at the papers before him. So why hadn’t he said yes just now? Why hadn’t he just gone for lunch with Leo, let him work his old magic, maybe make things as they had once been? God knows, he missed his company. Anthony sighed. It was because, he told himself, that now Leo was married all that was over. It should stay that way. What was the point of resuming a friendship which seemed to produce nothing but pain? He put his elbows on the desk and propped his head between his fists, and stared down at the page in front of him:
… a line slip is a device whereby a broker places 100% of a maximum limit for predefined classes of business, and is then able to cede risks to this line slip upon the approval of the rate and terms by the first two subscribing underwriters without having to see the remainder of the underwriters subscribing to the line slip.
He read this sentence over and over until it made sense, and Leo’s visit had faded from his mind. Five minutes later, Felicity came in with a few pages of paper.
‘This fax just came in for you. It says it’s urgent, so I thought I’d bring it up.’
‘Thanks,’ said Anthony. He picked up the first page and recognised the name of the sender. It was the daft old geezer who had been deluging Godfrey Ellwood with missives. Anthony groaned. Now it was obviously his turn. With a sigh, he began patiently to read Freddie’s fax.
In his own room, Leo chucked his papers onto the bare surface of his desk and sat down, still in his overcoat. He sighed and leant back wearily in his chair. There had been a time, on Fridays such as this with the weekend ahead of him, when his life had been his own, the next two days an expanse of time in which he could do as he pleased. He made a wry face as he thought of all the things which it had once pleased him to do. It had been those very things – the lovers, the rent boys, the occasional enjoyable ménage à trois in his country home, the pleasurable, careless dissipation of his private life which had threatened, a mere twelve months ago, to wreck his career, to blight his prospects of taking silk, of moving on in his profession as a barrister. In this most proper of worlds image was all. At the time, salvaging his respectability in the face of growing rumours had seemed like the most important thing in the world. Yet how might it have been if he had not married Rachel? Leo often wondered this. But it was too late for wondering now. He hadn’t intended to marry her. Not at first. She had been just a good-looking young woman, a solicitor from one of the big City firms, and he had hoped that the fact of having her as his girlfriend would be enough to scotch the rumours which might have wrecked his prospects of becoming a QC. The fact that Anthony had been in love with her had not mattered. Of what significance was that, compared to his own career? Then Rachel had got pregnant, and the rest was history. He had married her, and there she was at home now, waiting for him, with their child, a weight in his heart and in his life.
Leo sighed and looked up across the room at the familiar, warm rectangular shapes in the Patrick Heron painting which hung on the wall opposite. He remembered purchasing the picture at the Redfern Gallery eight years ago, as well as the two Tabner drawings which hung next to the bookcase, with some of the money he had earned from a large case. It was his habit, if a case was particularly lucrative, to buy himself a painting, or a piece of sculpture, by way of reward. It harked back to his time as a boy in Wales, when he would reward himself with extra sweets, or a comic, if the money from his gardening jobs exceeded the amount designated for his savings account. Gazing at the picture, then at the drawings, it occurred to Leo that this room in chambers was now the only place in the world which was utterly, absolutely his own.
His mind returned to Rachel. She was going to say something to him soon, he knew. He could see it in her eyes. It was merely extraordinary that she had not said anything before. Where did she think he went on those nights when he did not come home? She never asked. Her silence was astonishing, unsettling. In many ways, he had hoped that there would be some sort of confrontation before now, that the issue might be resolved. The issue of their respective lives, and of where they went from here. He thought of his infant son, Oliver, and a certain guilt touched his heart momentarily. He did not want to be like his own father, did not want to desert his son and leave a painful space in his life for ever.
He sat motionless for a moment, toying with the crimson ribbon tied round the papers on his desk, then picked up the telephone and rang Rachel to tell her to book a babysitter, that they would dine out that night.
CHAPTER TWO
Rachel Davies put down the phone and glanced down at the baby in his carry-seat. She had just been bringing him and the shopping from the car when she had heard the phone ringing. She decided that she might as well leave him where he was; he was quite warm next to the radiator, still asleep, tendrils of blonde hair clinging damply to his forehead, tiny fists loosely curled. She wondered idly, as she pulled off her jacket, how long his hair would stay blonde. Not for long, she supposed, since she and Leo were both dark. Or Leo had been, before his hair had turned prematurely silver some time in his thirties, giving him a distinctive and dashing look. Just the kind of thing a successful QC needed, thought Rachel wryly, taking the shopping through to the kitchen. Of course, she had not known him then, in his dark-haired days. And if she had, if she had known everything about him she knew now, would she have married him? Probably not. Ah, but that wasn’t the correct question, she told herself, spooning instant coffee into a cup and gazing across the large and beautiful garden of their Hampstead house. It wasn’t a question of marrying. Would she have fallen in love with him? And the answer was yes, of course. She would have fallen in love with him at twelve, or twenty, or seventy-seven. He had just happened to be forty-four at the time, and she twenty-seven. In the space of a year she had met and married him, had his baby, and yet she now realised that she scarcely knew Leo at all.
She began to sort out the small amount of shopping, then glanced around the kitchen to see if there was anything to be done, any little domestic chores to while away the time until Oliver’s lunchtime feed. But Mrs Floyd had left everything spotless and smelling lightly of Sainsbury’s Germ Clear. She had even watered the geraniums, Rachel noticed, and now the distant sound of her ever-efficient hoovering could be heard from the upstairs rooms. Rachel often wished that Mrs Floyd wasn’t quite so thorough, and sometimes that she didn’t exist at all. But Leo had insisted, telling her that she couldn’t possibly do all the housework in so large a house, with Oliver to look after as well. But Rachel enjoyed housework. Even when she had been working as a solicitor in a large, high-powered City firm, one of her special pleasures had been to polish and dust and keep her flat trim and pretty and tidy. Had it been a pleasure, or just therapy? Well, whatever, she missed it now. She missed activity, if the truth be told. She missed people, the constant hum of machines, office chatter, telephones, work to be done, people to see, meetings, clients … She sipped her coffee and looked critically at the autumn garden, at the large expanse of lawn which disappeared behind an elegant curve of Leyland cypresses, and wondered if there was any work that she could do out there. But they had a gardener who came once a week, and, anyway, Rachel had little experience of gardens and their contents. This one was dauntingly large, its beautiful mysteries carefully planned by a previous owner. Much as she enjoyed its seasonal beauty, Rachel scarcely felt as though it belonged to her. She might as well have been the second Mrs de Winter, and these the gardens at Manderley. Some other cleverer person had designed it all, had understood it and coped with it. It was much the same with the house, which she and Leo had bought five months ago. Certainly, she had had a hand in choosing colours and furniture and fabrics, but Leo had done most of it – his taste was so unerring, his experience greater than hers. She had felt it difficult to cope with the size of the rooms, had little idea of proportions, of the right furniture for the right space. Apart from anything else, she had found it impossible to spend money as freely as Leo did. She simply wasn’t used to it. And it was his money, after all.
It was his house. It was his life. That was why she found it so hard to question it, to challenge him. She turned her gaze away from the garden and thought she heard Oliver whimper in the hallway. But there was only silence, and the sound of Mrs Floyd bumping about with the squeeze-mop in the bathrooms above. Rachel stared at the table, at its polished surface and the bowl of fruit carefully arranged in its centre, and remembered the first night that he had not come home, when they had still been living in his mews house in Mayfair. She had been pregnant. She recalled the deathly sensation of that realisation, as she woke in the morning, that he had not come back, that she had been alone all through the night. Some odd shadow had fallen upon her, and it had never lifted. She had known he was probably with another man, or some boy. In spite of everything he had said, all his assurances, she had known it instantly. It was something to do with the feeling that his absence gave her – could absence have a quality? His had, that morning.
Rachel slid her thin fingers through her dark, shining hair and put her coffee cup in the dishwasher. Even the interior of that was sparkling clean. Well, she had known about his life before she married him. She had gathered enough about the men and women who had shared his bed, so she had had no right to demand change. Or even to expect it. But she had hoped.
When he had returned home in the evening after that first night’s absence, it had not been mentioned. The envelope from the Lord Chancellor’s office had been waiting for him, telling him that he had been made a Queen’s Counsel, and that had eclipsed everything else. He had been too pleased, and she had had to share his pleasure. She had sensed his relief at the distraction which it provided from his absence. The thing had never been referred to. That had been her first mistake, Rachel told herself. If she had said something then, if there had been some frankness between them, then perhaps things would not be as they were now. It had taken just seven months, during which Leo had regularly failed to come home, for their relationship to have reached a point where the matter of this concealment dominated it. They had mundane, domestic conversations – about his work, about the baby – they made love, they shared one another’s interests, but the thing which was most important was not spoken about. Where Leo went, and what he did, on those nights when he did not come home to her.
From the hallway came the thinnest of wails, resolving itself into a spate of hungry cries, and Rachel, like someone brought back to life, broke free from her thoughts and went to fetch her son, deciding that she would, she must, say something to Leo tonight.
As they sat that evening in the restaurant, Rachel watched and listened while Leo chatted in easy Italian with the owner, and marvelled at his ability to charm whomever he met. Not that Leo exercised his charm without discrimination. She had begun to notice, over the past year, that he only used it on people who were, or might become, important or useful to him. She sipped her wine and remembered the first time she had met him. There had been no deliberate exercise of charm then. That had come later. Why? What had made her suddenly seem useful, or important? Perhaps that was unfair. Maybe he had really fallen in love with her. The past few months had given her a critical detachment, and she wondered now.
She glanced up at the restaurant owner, thinking that perhaps this conversation had gone on a little too long. Would he rather talk to this man than to her? The owner glanced at Rachel, realising her thoughts, and moved away, laughing at Leo’s last remark.
‘You haven’t eaten much,’ Leo remarked, glancing at his wife’s plate. ‘Salad?’
‘I’m not terribly hungry.’ She realised that she felt faintly panicky at the prospect of raising the unspoken subject, too tense to eat. But she had drunk two glasses of wine, and they fortified her resolve not to let the evening pass without discussing it. He was telling her something about a conference he had had that morning, but she realised she had to seize the moment, and interrupted him.
‘Leo—’
He stopped talking and looked up, struck by the urgent tone of her voice. ‘What?’ When he looked directly at her like that, with his intense blue gaze, his handsome features frozen in surprise and anticipation, her resolve almost wavered. She was desperately afraid that this might precipitate something awful, a row, or worse, perhaps. And because she was still in love with him, dependent upon him for all her emotional needs, the thought terrified her. Perhaps it was better just to leave it alone. But the detached, reasoning part of her told her that she must continue.
She sighed, and then said, ‘Oh God, you must know what I’m going to say. What it is I want to talk about. Properly.’
She looked up, and he was still staring at her intently. He put down his fork and drank some of his wine, then poured them both some more. Again he looked at her, and at last he said, ‘Yes, of course I do. We should have talked about it long ago.’
She was thrown by the assertive, brisk tone of his voice. What had she expected? Evasion? That was not Leo’s nature. He was too clever a lawyer not to know that to attack is the best form of defence. Which was what he was doing now, she assumed. Only it wasn’t an attack – more a sort of assumption of control. She found it fascinating. He began to speak again. ‘To be honest, I’m amazed you’ve let it go so long without saying anything.’
‘Where is it you go?’ she asked softly, her insides starting to dissolve in panic, as she realised that this was all going too fast for her, that she had never intended to reach this point without some sort of protective build-up.
He took a reflective sip of his wine, and there was a long silence. Then he said, ‘I go to see a friend. His name is Francis.’ He did not look at her, and she knew suddenly that he detested this, that he wanted to get it over as briskly and in as businesslike a fashion as possible.
Rachel took a deep breath. ‘Is he your lover?’ she asked. She knew the answer, had known all this for months, but when it came, the truth was still unbearable.
‘Yes.’ He looked up at her at last. ‘Yes.’ He tapped the table lightly with his fingers, apparently in irritation, but she knew him, knew that this was a sign of embarrassment. Suddenly he shook his head. ‘It is incredible. I used to come home in the evening the next day, and you’d be there, feeding Oliver, or getting supper ready, whatever, and I would think, “She has to ask me this time.”’ He paused and gave a smile that was not really a smile. ‘You never did.’
‘Why didn’t you say something – ask me?’
‘What – why you never said anything? I didn’t care, frankly.’
The words numbed her. That he should not care was the possibility that terrified her most. ‘About me?’ Her voice was almost a whisper.
He looked across at her. When she was like this – apprehensive, dark eyes wide – her loveliness always moved him. There was something fascinating and fragile about her that almost pushed him to hurt her. ‘Of course I cared – care – about you. I mean, I didn’t care that you didn’t ask. It seemed better, easier.’
‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,’ she said, shaking her head slightly. ‘We have been married for a matter of months, and you’re telling me that you have had a lover all along. A man. And you say that you care about me.’
Leo crumpled up his napkin in exasperation. ‘Rachel, you must have formed your own conclusions about where I was. The fact that you never asked me shows that. You knew when you married me how it might be. I’m too old to change. I make no apologies for that. And,’ he added, ‘I’m too tired for any rows.’
She looked down at the tablecloth. ‘I don’t want to row, Leo. I want to understand.’ She pressed her fingers against her forehead. ‘I want to know why – if you need to do this, if you need to lead this kind of other life – why did you marry me?’ She looked up, the puzzlement on her face quite genuine.
He paused, then drew a small leather case from his pocket and took out a slender cigar. ‘Because you were pregnant.’
‘You tried to persuade me to have an abortion.’
She watched as he lit the cigar carefully, tilting one of the candles on their table towards him. ‘But I changed my mind.’ He looked at her levelly. ‘And I loved you.’ He did not add that he had, at that time, badly needed something to give his life an aura of respectability, something to remove the taint of rumour regarding sexual scandals in his past life which had threatened to prevent him being made a QC. A wife had been just the thing. And there had been Rachel, beautiful, intelligent, and conveniently willing.
‘Loved?’
‘I still love you.’ Her eyes met his, and she wanted to believe him with every fibre of her being. ‘It’s just,’ he added softly, drawing on his cigar, ‘that I need more.’
There was a long silence, while she considered all of this, feeling slightly dazed. She could make nothing of it. ‘What am I meant to do?’ she asked at last, looking up at him.
‘Do?’ He smiled, then shrugged. ‘Whatever you want to do. There are no rules.’
She met his gaze, and the expression in his eyes seemed fathomless. As so often before, she felt there was no way in which she could reach him. It was a situation in which she felt completely helpless. She could not make threats or issue ultimatums – it would get her nowhere. What he had just said was true. For Leo, there were no rules. He might say he loved her, but he loved no one enough to allow them to dictate his life. That she knew. Any other woman would probably leave a husband who was behaving as Leo was. But she was too much in love with him for that. Before she had met him she had not thought herself capable of feeling anything for any man. It was Leo who had taught her not to be afraid. He had rescued her from many things. Maybe it was because he was so amoral that he could understand men and women so completely, and betray their trust utterly. No, she knew she could not go – but what kind of life were they to lead together if she stayed?
‘I think I’d like to go home now,’ she said quietly.
‘Very well,’ said Leo. He glanced at her curiously as he signalled for the bill. He had wondered how she would react when all this was out in the open, and he was still not sure what she was thinking. He knew that the answer would come in the next few hours.
When he came into the bedroom, loosening his tie, Rachel was lying against the pillows, feeding Oliver. Her eyes were closed, and her nightdress was opened to the waist. Oliver lay at her breast, lightly and rhythmically stroking her skin with a tiny fat hand as he sucked. Leo watched them. He always found the sight vaguely erotic, her body open to the child; the blissful mutual absorption of mother and baby made him feel excluded, tantalised him.
He took off his tie and threw it over a chair, unbuttoning his shirt. Then he lay down next to Rachel. Oliver, sated, eyes still closed, moved his head away slightly from her breast, exhaling a little bubble of milk. Rachel opened her eyes and looked at Leo. He gazed at her and traced her lips with his finger, then slid his hand down to caress her. This was the moment. If she was going to say, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t ever come near me again,’ she would say it now. But she said nothing.
‘Put him in his cot,’ murmured Leo. Wordlessly, she picked Oliver up and went through to the nursery. Then she came back and lay back down next to Leo, and let him kiss and draw her body against his, enveloped by a sense of passion that nothing could extinguish, not even the worst of his actions.
Two hours later, while Leo slept beside her, Rachel still lay awake, staring into the half-darkness. With an odd sense of detachment, she wondered why the events of the evening had not made her weep, why the pillow was not wet from her sobbing. Wasn’t that the natural reaction? But crying was easy. It was for small griefs, not for something as shattering as this.
It was clear to her that she must do something. If this was to be her life – with Leo or without him – then she could not allow herself to depend on him any longer. The last few months had been an illusion. She had even thought, in a blind and stupid way, that they might have another baby. At the thought of this she tried to laugh, but it sounded only as a whimper of pain. Life would not be the safe and certain thing she had once hoped for. The first thing to do was to regain something of herself, her old life, and prepare herself for eventualities. She would go back to work. Nichols & Co were holding her job open for her for her period of maternity leave, and that expired in a fortnight’s time, when Oliver would be six months old. In that instant she made her decision. Tomorrow morning she would ring her senior partner and tell him. She would have no compunction about spending as much of Leo’s money as might be necessary to find the best nanny possible. Then, when she had recovered something of her independence, she might feel strong enough to make whatever decisions had to be made about the future.
She turned and glanced at the outline of Leo’s sleeping face. How could he be so at peace with himself, so untroubled by his actions? What was it like to live inside his mind? And why did all that he had told her this evening not make her hate him? If anything, the realisation of how tenuous her position was made her love him all the more helplessly. At that moment Oliver’s thin waking cry broke the silence. Rachel sighed and pushed back the bedclothes. Before she got up to go to the baby, she leant over and kissed Leo lightly on the side of his head, without knowing why, and felt, for the first time, like weeping.
CHAPTER THREE
Anthony arrived in chambers on Monday morning to discover that he had been loaned the services of Camilla, the pupil of one of his colleagues, Jeremy Vane, while Jeremy was on holiday. They were services which he felt he could happily have dispensed with. Camilla was fresh from Bar School, and had struck Anthony from the first as being a typical bluestocking. She was quite pretty, with reddish chestnut hair that was constantly falling in her eyes, but she was astonishingly untidy, wearing baggy black suits and crumpled white blouses, and heavy black shoes. Most women at the Bar managed to make the regulation black and white outfit into something passingly feminine, but not Camilla. She blushed a lot and always seemed to be bumping into people and things, but she made up for all of this by being supernaturally bright. She had been Jeremy’s pupil for three months now, and the other members of chambers were rather impressed by the fact that, as the first female barrister ever to be admitted to the hallowed precincts of 5 Caper Court, she was managing to handle its most arrogant and work-driven member pretty adequately. Jeremy was famous for his vanity, his loquaciousness and his unpopularity with judges, but it had to be admitted that he was very able, and seemed set to become the chambers’ youngest QC next year, when he would be just thirty-seven. He expected Camilla to work as hard as he did, but she was robust and energetic and stood the pace.
‘Only Jeremy thought that I should keep busy while he’s away, you know,’ said Camilla, smiling radiantly at Anthony and following him into his room. It was common knowledge in chambers that Camilla was hopelessly in love with Anthony. Even Anthony was aware of this, and he returned her shining gaze with a rather dismal smile as he unwound his scarf and dumped his papers on his desk. Camilla stood before him, hands clasped behind her back, ready to do his bidding. It was rather like having an eager puppy waiting for one to throw a ball, reflected Anthony. He looked around at the mess of documents, and then glanced at her thoughtfully. Actually, maybe she could be quite useful. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a hearing in the House of Lords on Wednesday. You can help with that.’
She nodded. ‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s this Lloyd’s Names case I’ve been involved in for a few months now. Do you know anything about it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Right,’ said Anthony, sitting down and feeling quite magisterial as he recounted the facts of the case to Camilla. ‘Our clients are all members of the Capstall syndicate, which unfortunately is one of the long-tail syndicates at Lloyd’s. Do you know what one of those is?’
Camilla, with her double first from Oxford, didn’t like to profess ignorance in any area, but here she was forced to. ‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Well, a syndicate is a group of Lloyd’s investors, and a long-tail syndicate is one specialising in insuring long-term risks, like latent disease and pollution, which might result in claims years after the insurance was written. Now, Lloyd’s syndicates operate a three-year accounting period, and when a syndicate’s accounts are closed at the end of that three-year period, one of the decisions which the underwriter has to make is the amount of internal reinsurance to close. It’s called an RITC. It’s the amount required to reinsure any outstanding risks, and it’s the amount the Names on one year pay to the Names on the next year to take over liabilities. Sort of selling the risks on, if you like.’
‘But if you have a syndicate specialising in latent disease claims, like Capstall’s, how can you assess the amount of reinsurance to close? I mean, how can you possibly know the extent of future claims?’
Very quick on the uptake, thought Anthony, with a flicker of admiration. ‘Precisely. On long-tail syndicates, like Capstall’s, the amount of RITC has to be judged very finely by the underwriter, because the Names on the new year may be different from those on the old years. So if the RITC is too low, the Names inheriting the risks lose out, because the premium’s too low to pay the claims, but if it’s too high, the old Names lose out by having paid too much. Now, run-off contracts, which are what Capstall was writing, are similar to RITCs, but whereas RITC is an internal syndicate transaction, a run-off is an arm’s-length policy written by another reinsurer. Our fellow Capstall wrote a load of run-off policies in the eighties, as a result of which the Names were exposed to massive claims arising out of asbestos and pollution actions, mainly in the States. And the Names’ argument is that Capstall was negligent when he wrote all those run-off contracts, because he completely failed to make adequate provision for the latent disease claims which were looming, particularly asbestosis. Which is why they’re trying to recover some of their losses by suing him.’
‘But I don’t understand how he could write those run-offs. It must have been obvious to anyone the kind of risks he was running. Why did he do it?’
‘A variety of reasons. Premiums were high and potential profits must have appeared good. Plus, he probably took the view that such claims as might be made would only arise over a very long period, and in the meantime profit would pile up on the investment income. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.’
‘But as an underwriter surely he had a duty to investigate the risks he was assuming on behalf of the Names?’
‘You would have thought so, given the amount of concern there was in the market at that time about asbestosis, but he seems to have been too lazy, or too arrogant. Or both. When you get a reputation as a high-flier, a risk-taker, you tend to live by that code. He’s a character – flamboyant, daring, all that stuff. Not exactly a man of prudence and caution. Anyway, you know the motto of Lloyd’s – Uberrima Fides. The utmost good faith. That seems to have been conspicuously lacking here. Now,’ sighed Anthony, ‘the asbestos and pollution claims are literally piling up in the American courts, and the courts are using any device they can to get at the insurers. Our Names are the poor suckers who have underwritten those risks. They’ve already paid out a small fortune in claims, and God knows how many more demands will be made on them. Most of them hadn’t a clue what kind of risks Capstall was underwriting.’
‘If you’re a Lloyd’s Name, your liability is unlimited, isn’t it?’ said Camilla.
‘Quite. Most people didn’t appreciate the dire implications of that, even though they were told it when they became members. The fact is,’ sighed Anthony, ‘a lot of our Names were suckered into joining Lloyd’s. I feel a bit sorry for most of them. They had no business becoming Names. But they’d heard that there was nice easy money to be made, and decided they’d like some of it.’
Camilla was thrilled to be having her most sustained conversation with Anthony so far. She was happy just to sit and listen to him, to watch him. She found something romantic in the fact that Anthony didn’t come from the same background as the other people in chambers – people like Roderick Hayter, Cameron Renshaw, and Jeremy, who had all been to public school and Oxbridge – but had struggled to become the excellent barrister he now was, with a brilliant career ahead of him. She had heard that his mother was a primary school teacher, and that he’d only just managed to get by on scholarships and handouts when he’d first started. As Anthony swivelled around in his chair, talking about run-offs and under-reserved risks, Camilla gazed at his lean, tall figure, at his expensively cut suit and silk tie, and marvelled.
‘What’s the hearing on Wednesday about?’ she asked, forcing herself to concentrate on the case in hand and trying not to gaze too fixedly into Anthony’s wonderful brown eyes.
‘It’s a preliminary point, but pretty much a vital one. Capstall’s lawyers are saying that there’s no duty of care owed by Capstall to the Names. We say there is, and that there’s also a parallel duty in tort. We won at first instance in front of the blessed Sir Basil, but lost in the Court of Appeal.’
‘Do you think you’ll win in the House of Lords?’
Anthony grimaced. ‘God, I hope so. Because if we don’t, our claim is finished before it even gets off the ground. At any rate, Godfrey Ellwood – he’s our leader in the case – seems fairly sanguine. But you can never be sure about these things.’
‘So what can I do?’ asked Camilla, preparing to throw herself into the task of learning everything there was to learn about reinsurance and the complexities of Lloyd’s underwriting. She wanted very much to demonstrate to Anthony how able she was.
Anthony smiled. She really was rather sweet. ‘Well, you can start by putting all those files in date order, and then you can photocopy these three bundles. Not very exciting I know, but very useful.’
She nodded, gazing apprehensively at the heaps of documents which lay stacked around Anthony’s desk. Oh, well, at least she was doing it for Anthony, which made it worthwhile. And maybe he would let her come to the hearing. She could sit in the House of Lords in her wig and gown – she didn’t think the thrilling novelty of appearing robed in court was ever going to wear off.
‘How’d it go?’ asked Felicity two days later, as Camilla puffed into chambers behind Anthony, bearing bundles of documents, her cheeks red from the cold air and the excitement of having been in the House of Lords. She had sat next to Anthony, feeling pretty important, even though she’d had nothing to do except carry things in and take notes. Anthony hadn’t had much to do either, since the leader, Godfrey Ellwood QC, had done all the talking, but she could see from the way that Ellwood spoke to him, asked his advice in an undertone while the other side’s counsel was on his feet, that Ellwood respected his views and regarded Anthony as important to the case. For Camilla, it had been bliss just to be so near to him, to smell the wondrous faint scent of his aftershave, to watch the way he held his pen, crossed his legs, yawned … all for two whole hours.
