She must have misheard. Or it was a coincidence. There was another North. It couldn’t be…
‘Did you say North?’ she asked.
‘Ask your editor, Miss Thackeray. He has all the details that are being released to the press.’
‘Yes… Thank you,’ she added belatedly as the dialling tone kicked in.
No…
No, no, no, no, no…
She repeated the word with every step as she ran upstairs to the office and turned on her cranky laptop. Kept saying it as it took an age to boot up. Even as she searched on the internet for Hal…no, Henry North.
It. Could. Not. Be. Him.
There was no shortage of hits—there were, apparently, a lot of Henry Norths in the world—and rather than plough through them, she switched to ‘images’ to see if she recognised any of them.
There were dozens of photographs, but one leapt out at her and it was the shock of seeing Hal face to face in the ditch all over again. That stop-the-world total loss of breath where the only thing moving was her mind, and that was spinning like a top. Seeing it in front of her she refused to believe it even when she clicked on the image to bring up the document it was attached to; a company report.
She knew it couldn’t be true. But there he was. Hal North. In full colour.
The Hal North she’d knocked off his feet a couple of hours ago was, apparently, the Henry North who owned a freight company. Make that an international freight company.
The one with the sleek black-and-silver HALGO livery familiar to anyone who’d ever stood at a bus stop by a busy road watching the traffic thunder by.
Vans, trucks, eighteen-wheelers, not to mention air cargo and shipping.
Hal North, her Hal North, was the chairman of a household-name company with a turnover in billions.
* * *
‘Hal! At last. Where on earth have you been?’ Bea Webb rarely got agitated, but she was agitated now. ‘I’ve organised the staff meetings for Monday, but I have to get back to London and so do you.’
‘Sorry. I was looking around the Park and got sidetracked.’
‘Collecting junk left by fly-tippers more like,’ she said, as he lifted Claire’s bike off the back of a Land Rover.
‘I couldn’t just leave it there,’ he said. Easier than telling her what had really happened.
‘Well, don’t. The consultants have arranged for a contractor to come in and do a thorough clean-up of the estate, clear the outbuildings. Do you want me to organise someone to take a look through all this junk before they start?’ she asked, with a dismissive wave in the direction of the ornate, eighteenth-century stable block. ‘Just in case there’s a priceless Chinese vase tucked away in a box of discarded china?’
‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘Cranbrook had experts go through it all with a fine-tooth comb in the hopes of finding buried treasure.’ Anything to save him bankruptcy. Anything to save him from being forced by his creditors to sell to him.
It was knowing that Sir Robert Cranbrook wouldn’t see a penny of his money that had made paying the price almost a pleasure. Once the tax man had taken his cut, the remainder would go to the estate’s creditors; the small people Cranbrook had never given a damn about so long as he continued to live in luxury.
That and the fact that Robert Cranbrook knew that every moment of comfort left to him was being paid for by the son he’d never wanted. Whom he’d always refused to acknowledge. Knowing how much he’d hate that, but not having the moral fibre to tell him to go to hell, was the sweetest revenge.
‘What I do need is a front loader. The public footpath running beside the stream has been seriously undermined and is in danger of collapse. We can use some of this stuff to make a temporary barrier. The last thing I need is for someone to get hurt.’
‘Terrific,’ she said. ‘Tell me again why you bought this place?’
‘The Cran is a great trout stream. I thought I’d take up fishing,’ he said, removing Gary Harker’s rod from the back of the Land Rover.
Her eyebrows suggested she was not convinced, but she confined herself to, ‘Not today. You’ve got a board meeting at two-thirty and if we don’t get moving you’ll be late.’
‘I gave Angus a call and asked him to stand in for me.’ Her eyebrows rose a notch. ‘He can handle it and right now I’m needed here.’
‘In other words you want to play with your expensive new toy.’
‘Every man needs a hobby.’
‘Renting a stretch of someone else’s trout stream would have been a lot cheaper,’ she pointed out. ‘Besides, I thought you were going to leave all this to the experts. Keep a low profile.’
‘This is the country. No chance of that.’ Not when you’d just had a close encounter with the local press. ‘Front loaders?’ he prompted, picking up Claire’s bike then, as Bea called up an app on her phone to search for a local hire company. ‘Any messages?’
She shook her head, then looked up. ‘Were you expecting a call?’
‘No.’ As far as Claire knew there was no one to take a complaint about uppity staff who took shocking advantage of maidens in distress. On the other hand… ‘I thought you might have heard from the local paper.’
‘No “might” about it. The editor rang, hoping for a quote to go with the announcement of the sale they’re running in Monday’s edition. Then there was some girl wanting “the personal angle” on the new owner of Cranbrook Park…’ Her phone began to ring. ‘Don’t worry, Hal. I made it clear that you don’t give interviews.’
Some girl.
No prizes for guessing who that was. Claire Thackeray hadn’t been so shocked by her tumble, by her confrontation with him, that she’d neglected to follow up the news that the estate had been sold.
‘Hold on, Katie…’ She held the phone to her chest. ‘Is there anything else, only I really do need to get home. There’s an open evening at Katie’s school this evening.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered.’ He picked up the bike. ‘Tell Katie that she can come down for the half term if she likes. She’ll enjoy the deer.
‘You’re staying down here?’ she asked.
‘For a week. Maybe two. The roof needs immediate attention. It’s getting me out of the office,’ he pointed out, when she would have protested. ‘Something you’re always encouraging.’
‘Creating barriers for footpaths and dealing with a leaky roof wasn’t quite what I had in mind. And thanks for the invitation but we’re headed to Italy and guaranteed sunshine. Lying by the pool beats picking up rubbish hands down. There’s plenty of space if you fancy a change of scene,’ she said.
‘I’ll
