SIX
Aubrey spent the weekend with a headache, the spectres of two very different women haunting him day and night. He’d expected to be persecuted by thoughts of Liv, but the fact Evie kept forcing herself into his mind seemed completely unfair.
“Ought to be locked up,” he muttered, sitting on his sofa, a very cold beer in his hand.
“Suicidal, stupid little wench ,” he said with gritted teeth, packing his suit for the dry cleaners, scowling at the ketchup on the sleeve.
“Of all the idiotic, immature, conniving little…” he said on Monday morning as he brushed his teeth, reckoning he looked at least five years older. He stepped into the shower, water scalding hot. “Imagine bending me over this bar and…”
“No,” he told the empty, steamed-up bathroom. “Absolutely not.”
The day felt interminably long, and Aubrey was looking forward to his sofa and another ice cold beer when George Blackton stepped into his office.
Aubrey greeted him with a sinking feeling. The man normally stepped in once or twice a week for these chats. Probing for a weak spot. But today’s visit could only be for a report on last Friday’s event.
“How’d it go, then?” George asked, getting straight to it as usual.
“Fine. I think.”
“Fine? We need better than fine. I want the man secured.”
“He’s friendly. He likes us. But it’s natural for a man like that to be cautious.”
“Hm.” George stepped past Aubrey’s desk and looked out of the window, hands clasped behind his back. Aubrey swivelled his chair to face him, waiting for the man to speak, fairly sure what was coming next. He was right.
“Domnall’s interested in us for our class. He’s new money, but he wants the appearance of old. It’s my peerage, my family’s name, that first drew him to us.” He turned and looked at Aubrey. “That’s one of many reasons I wanted Roscoe in this role. He was the perfect lure for a man like Domnall.”
Aubrey made no response, expression unchanging.
“If it’s English aristocracy he wants, that’s what we’ll have to give him,” George continued. “It’s shooting season in a few weeks. Duck. Partridge. I will personally invite him up to Conyers for a hunting weekend. You will come, too. You don’t have any of those daft qualms about hunting, do you?”
“No,” said Aubrey, unsure if he was lying. He’d never given it any thought.
“Good. I didn’t think so. That’s at least one advantage you have over my children.”
He moved towards the door, then paused, giving Aubrey a speculative look.
“Rumour has it you took a date to the Awards on Friday?”
Aubrey said nothing. No one at all would have been able to tell his heart had nearly stopped.
“I know you’re a private man,” continued George, “but is it serious?”
“Like a hole to the head.”
“Excellent. Bring her with you.”
Aubrey stared. “Bring…?”
“She’s a looker, I take it? Bound to be, with your eye for things. Bring her to Conyers. Domnall’s weak for pretty women. It’ll put him in a good mood. Make him want to show off a bit, talk big numbers.”
“It’s not… It was a one-time thing. Entirely over.”
He didn’t bother to ask if George’s wife would be coming. Rumour had it she was currently shacked up with her latest lover in Dubai.
George frowned. “Pity. Oh well, Aubrey. You’ll just have to charm him yourself.”
A few weeks later, Aubrey drove to Lancashire to spend a weekend with his boss, his intractable client, and the woman who had broken his heart. Twice.
He drove fast, illegally so, hoping he might die. But God was cruel and spared him.
It was a bright blue September afternoon when he arrived, turning off a country lane onto a winding, gated driveway, parkland to left and right, lush grass studded with enormous oak and beech trees.
“Blimey,” he muttered as the house itself finally came into view, revealing itself in calculated glimpses as the driveway curved, now lined by an avenue of limes.
Conyers House. An enormous rectangle of red brick, too big to be truly beautiful, too arrogant, the way it stood fast, a hundred glimmering glass windows surveying the sweeping gardens.
Aubrey, having worked in wealth management for years, and being the son of an extremely successful lawyer, was no stranger to money. But still. It was a house designed to awe, and it did the job.
No wonder, he thought bitterly to himself as he guided his car round the driveway to the left of the house as instructed, that the daughter of such a place is so damned uppity.
At least she wouldn’t be here. He’d reassured himself of that with an extremely subtle set of questions put to Roscoe. “She hates the place,” her brother had told him. “Especially if our dad’s there. Last I heard, she’s planning to stay in London for the foreseeable.”
One less thing to worry about. He just had to survive everything else.
He’d hoped to arrive before Domnall and Liv and give himself some time to acclimatise, steel himself, but as he parked outside a set of old sandstone stable buildings at the side of a vast courtyard, he heard the unmistakable sound of helicopter rotors and looked up just in time to see Domnall’s private conveyance come in to land on the other side of the stable block. Hardly fair, was it? Road vs air.
Stiff, grim, dreading everything, he got out of the car and picked up his suits in their covers from their hook in the back, slung his leather travel bag over his shoulder, and headed for the first of the many doors set into the house’s back, ducking gratefully through it just as he saw George Blackton and another man come out through one further down.
He was lost almost immediately, following a dark, wood-panelled hallway deeper into the house, an innumerable number of gold-framed paintings of what appeared to be every horse ever in existence decorating the walls. He crossed a gallery, ancient Blackton ancestors staring down at him, and found himself in another hallway that seemed exactly the same as the first, except the paintings this time were of dogs.
What a bloody maze. Surely there was a housekeeper or a—
He found himself in a huge, domed entrance foyer, the triple-height ceiling painted with heavenly Renaissance scenes, the plaster scrollwork gilded. He stared up at it, getting that strange, trespassing sense he always felt in churches. Then he heard a step, turned to the broad staircase, and came face-to-face with Evelyn Blackton.
She trod lightly down from the last step, smiled widely, and said, “Hello, Aubrey. Fancy meeting you here.”
“You.” Heat flushed his neck—all anger, not embarrassment. “You can’t be here.”
She tipped her head to the side, puzzled. “But I live here.”
He should have driven faster. Or maybe he had crashed after all and this was Hell. Evie’s presence strongly supported the theory. Except, no matter her opinion, he didn’t quite believe he deserved the fire and brimstone.
“Are you insane?” he said, taking an angry step towards her, and wishing he didn’t have suits bundled over his arm. They took the edge off his furious gesturing. “Domnall’s here! What the hell are you planning, Evie? Do you think for a moment I won’t tell your father?”
Evie gave a small laugh. “What’s he going to do? Throw me out? He’s already done it a dozen times. Cut off my allowance? I asked him to when I was fifteen.”
“Maybe call the police.”
“For ketchup? Please. The only thing my dear daddy cares about more than money is the family name. He’d be the first to cover it up.”
How was it possible that she’d got worse since last time? If he’d ever wasted a second imagining how his next meeting with Evelyn Blackton would go, it would be with her embarrassed, apologetic. Maybe he would magnanimously accept her apology, for Roscoe’s sake. Then take her slim, pale wrist and reassure himself he hadn’t left any bruises… But she stood there cool as day, smiling faintly to herself as though his anger amused her.
“I could kill you,” he breathed with an alarming degree of longing.
“But that would be a slightly worse crime than ketchup,” she pointed out, coming up to him. She gave him a placating pat on his tensely quivering shoulder and took the suit bags from his arm. “I’ll show you to your room. I suspect you’re lost.”
Lost? Doomed.
“Come on, Aubrey,” she said, smiling, when he made no move to follow her. “I promise I’m not going to do anything to Domnall. That phase of the plan is over. I’m here merely as an observer. I’m allowed to watch what the man does, aren’t I? After all, I’m sure he has nothing to hide. That’s all FTP wants me to do.”
“FTP?”
“For The Planet. The campaign group I’m part of.”
“Oh God. There’s more of you.”
She grinned. “A whole army.”
He had no chance to recover from that. They both turned at the sound of voices. George Blackton, Domnall, and Liv walked into the hall.
“I must take you this way,” Evie’s father was saying. “The painted ceiling is one of Conyers’ finest—”
He stopped at the sight of them. His daughter’s presence seemed to cause him much the same sort of choking anger as it did Aubrey, because, for a moment, he was speechless.
It was Liv who broke the silence. “Oh! How lovely, Aubrey. You brought your delightful girlfriend. What a marvellous time we’re all going to have!”