for her future, Letty stared at the loan shark on their doorstep. ‘You’re breaking the law,’ she told him sharply. ‘You are not allowed to harass and intimidate your debtors.’
‘I’m entitled to ask for my money,’ he told her fiercely, a thin little man in a crumpled suit, another man, unshaven and thuggish in shape, poised behind him, his sidekick, Joe, who had attempted to thump her little brother for trying to stand up to him on his last visit. He had backed off when Letty wielded the cricket bat she kept behind the door.
‘You’ll have your payment as soon as I get paid, just like last month and the month before,’ Letty responded, squaring her shoulders, honey-blonde hair caught up in a ponytail bouncing with the movement, her green eyes clear and steady. ‘I can’t give you what I don’t have.’
‘A little bird told me you have rich relations.’
An angry flush illuminated Letty’s creamy skin as she wondered if one of her brothers had let that dangerous cat out of the bag. ‘I asked. He wouldn’t help.’
‘He might help soon enough if you was unlucky enough to have an…accident,’ Joe piped up ungrammatically, baring crooked teeth in a smile that was a grimace of threat.
‘But if I were to have an accident, you wouldn’t be getting any money at all,’ Letty pointed out flatly and closed the door swiftly, seeing no advantage to continuing the dialogue.
‘Rich relations’, she thought wryly, thinking back to her one meeting with her Greek grandfather, when he had visited London on business. A cold, unfriendly man more hung up on the reality that she was illegitimate rather than showing any genuine interest in her actual existence. No, contacting Isidore Livas had been a dead end. She had soon worked out that no rescue bid would be coming from him. He had shaken her off like the poor relation she was.
While her mother, Gillian, hobbled painfully round the tiny kitchen of their council flat on crutches and tried to tidy up, Letty made a cheap but nutritious evening meal for her family. Her two brothers sat at the table in the living room, both of them engaged in homework. Tim was thirteen and Kyle was nine. Letty considered her half-brothers marginally less useless than she considered the rest of the world’s men.
There were no towering heroes in Letty’s depressing experience of men. Her father, Julian, had been a handsome, irresponsible lightweight, incapable of fighting his addictions to toxic substances. He had lived with her mother and her only once and for a brief period, after a more than usually successful stay in a rehab facility, but within months he had fallen off the wagon again and that had been the last Letty had seen of him.
Yet, tragically, meeting Julian Livas had derailed her mother’s entire life. Gillian had been a middle-class schoolgirl at the exclusive co-educational boarding school where she had met Julian. A teenage pregnancy had resulted and when Gillian had refused to have a termination her parents had thrown her out and washed their hands of her. Letty had always respected the hard struggle Gillian had faced, simply to survive as a young mother. As a single parent, Gillian had subsequently trained as a nurse and life had been stable until Gillian fell in love again.
Letty grimaced as she thought of her stepfather, Robbie, a steady worker and a likeable man but, underneath the surface show of decency and reliability, a hopeless womaniser. When Gillian could no longer live with his lies and deceptions, they had had to move on and inevitably their standard of living had gone downhill with the divorce. In his own way, Robbie had been as feckless as her father, although he did maintain a stable relationship with his two sons.
Letty had worked very hard at school, determined that she would never have to rely on a man for support. And what good had it done her? she asked herself ruefully. It had given her a scholarship to a top sixth form college and the chance to study medicine at Oxford but, within a few years, just as Letty was starting to stretch her wings into independence and the promise of a satisfying career, misfortune had rolled back in and her family had needed her back at home to bring in a living wage.
She had been three years into her medical degree when Gillian’s worsening arthritis had forced her to give up work and live on benefits. Undaunted, Gillian had retrained as a drug and alcohol counsellor, who could work from a wheelchair, but all it took was a broken lift in their tower apartment block—and it was frequently out of order—and she was trapped indoors and unable either to work or to earn. That one very bleak Christmas, when Letty was in the fifth year of her course, Gillian had got involved in the murky underworld of unsecured loans and had fallen into debt as the interest charges mushroomed.
Letty rode into work on the elderly motorbike she had restored. Parking her bike and securing it, she walked into the Sunset Home for the Elderly, where she worked as the permanent night shift manager. She was on a good salary and had no complaints about her working conditions or colleagues. She had every intention of completing her medical studies as soon as it was possible but, right at that moment, that desired goal seemed worryingly distant. Her mother was too frail to be left alone with two active boys until she received the double hip replacement she needed. Sadly, the waiting lists for free treatment were too long and private surgery was unaffordable. In the short term, more accessible accommodation would have much improved Gillian’s lot and her ability to work but the large debt that she had accrued with that iniquitous loan had to be cleared before moving could even be considered.
As Letty changed out of bike leathers into work garb, her phone started ringing and she answered it swiftly, always fearful of her mother having suffered a fall, which would exacerbate her condition. But it wasn’t one of her brothers calling to give her bad news, it was, amazingly, her grandfather.
‘If you’re willing to do whatever it takes to help your family, Leo is the man to approach. I will text you the phone number. Furthermore, if you were to reach an agreement with Leo, I will invite you into my home and introduce you to Greek society,’ the older man informed her loftily in the tone of someone who believed he was offering her some great honour.
‘Er…right. Thanks for that,’ Letty responded ruefully, wondering why her grandfather would think that she was interested in being introduced to Greek society and what sort of agreement he believed she could reach with this guy, Leo, that was likely to benefit her or her family. Maybe the older man wasn’t as cold a fish as she had assumed, and he was genuinely trying to help her. She was too much of a cynic for a wannabe doctor, she scolded herself, she really had to start trying harder to see the good in human beings.
The next morning, before she headed home to bed after her shift, she took out the number and phoned it.
‘VR Shipping,’ a woman answered.
‘My name is Letty Harbison. I have to make an appointment with someone called Leo?’
‘If you will excuse me for a moment…’ the woman urged.
Letty groaned at the sound of voices fussing in the background. Was this Leo likely to offer her better paid employment? He was obviously a businessman in an office environment. When she got home, she would look him up online, although she would need more than his first name to accomplish that, she reflected wearily.
‘Mr Romanos will see you at ten this morning at his London office.’ The woman then read out the address of his building.
‘I’m sorry, I’m a night shift worker and it would need to be a little later in the day,’ Letty began apologetically.
‘Mr Romanos will not be available later. He is a very busy man.’
Letty rolled her eyes. ‘Ten will be fine,’ she conceded, reasoning that it was only sensible to check the man out because
