close her eyes and forget all these problems. Go back to a time when she’d been able just to whip Lucy along to the park for a picnic, when the nearest thing to defiance had been a refusal to eat a ham sandwich.
She allowed herself to travel down memory lane, and only snapped back to the present, with all its worrying problems, when her destination confronted her—a large office block, all glass and chrome, like a giant greenhouse in the middle of London.
Inside it bore some resemblance to a very expensive hotel foyer. All plants and comfortable sitting areas and a circular reception desk in the middle.
Jessica bypassed that and walked straight to the lifts. She knew what floor the Newman man was located on. She had managed to prise that snippet of information from the unwelcome recipient of her phone call the evening before, still working on the lines of the wonderful surprise she would give him by turning up, and shamelessly using a mixture of charm and flirtatiousness to wheedle the information from him.
The man, she had thought since, would never have made a security guard. Did he dispense floor numbers and work addresses to every caller who happened to telephone out of the blue and claim acquaintanceship with his employer?
But she had been grateful for the information, and she was grateful now as the lift whizzed her up to the eighth floor.
Receptionists, she knew from first-hand experience, could be as suspicious as policemen at the scene of a crime, and as ruthless in dispatching the uninvited as bouncers outside nightclubs. Paragons or dragons, depending on which side of the desk you were standing.
Stepping out on the eighth floor was like stepping into another world.
There was, for starters, almost no noise. Unlike the offices where she worked, which seemed to operate in a permanent state of seemingly chaotic activity—people hurrying from here to there, telephones ringing, a sense of things that should have been done sooner than yesterday.
The carpet was dull green and luxuriously thick. There was a small, open-plan area just ahead of her, with a few desks, a few disconcertingly green plants, and secretaries all working with their heads down. No idle chatter here, thought Jessica, trying to think what this said about their bosses. Were they ogres? Did they wield such a thick whip that their secretaries were too scared to talk?
She slipped past them, down the corridor, passing offices on her left and pausing fractionally to read the name plates on the doors.
Anthony Newman’s office was the very last one along the corridor.
Strangely, she felt not in the least nervous. She had too many vivid pictures in her head of her daughter being led astray by the neglected son of a workaholic for nerves to intrude. If people couldn’t rustle up time for their children, then as far as she was concerned they shouldn’t have them.
She knocked on the door, not in the least anticipating that the workaholic Newman person might be involved in a meeting somewhere else, and her knock was answered immediately.
Jessica pushed open the door, hardly knowing what to expect, still fuelled by a sense of fully justified parental concern, and was immediately confronted by a large expanse of carpet, an imposing oak desk, and behind that a man whose initial appearance momentarily made her stop in her tracks.
The man was on the phone. His deep voice was barking orders down the line. Not loudly, but with a certain emphatic quietness that made some of her sense of purpose flounder.
She looked at him as he gestured to her to take a seat, and was unwillingly fascinated by the curious, disorientating feeling of power and authority he seemed to give off.
Had she been expecting this? She realised that at the back of her mind she had anticipated someone altogether less forbidding.
It was only when she was seated that she became aware that he was watching her with an equal amount of curiosity. He continued talking, but his cool grey eyes were focused on her, and she abruptly looked away and began inspecting what she could see of his office from where she was sitting.
Not much. Not much, at any rate, that didn’t include him in the general picture.
‘Who,’ he said, replacing the telephone and catching her while her attention was focused on a painting on the wall—an abstract affair whose title she was trying to guess—‘the hell are you? What do you want and how were you allowed into my office?’
His voice was icy cold, as was everything about him.
Jessica looked at him and felt a shiver of apprehension which she immediately slapped down.
His was a face, she thought, designed to stop people in their tracks. Everything about it was arresting. It wasn’t simply a matter of strikingly well-formed features. More what they revealed. An impression of vast self-assurance and intelligence. He was the sort of man, she thought, who was accustomed to wielding power, to having orders obeyed, to snapping his fingers and having people jump to attention. He was also younger than she had anticipated. Late thirties at the most.
What a shame he obviously couldn’t keep a handle on his own son.
Jessica smiled politely, keeping her thoughts to herself.
‘I take it you’re Anthony Newman?’
‘You haven’t answered my questions.’
‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but I thought that the sooner we had a little chat, the better.’
‘If you don’t answer me right now,’ he said softly, leaning forward, ‘then I’m afraid I’m going to have to call a security guard and have you removed from the premises. How did you get in here?’
‘I took the lift up and walked down the corridor.’
‘I don’t have time for games.’
Neither, thought Jessica icily, do you have time for your son. Which is why I’m here in the first place.
‘I tried phoning you last night, but I was told that you were away on business and wouldn’t be back until this morning.’
‘Did Harry tell you where I worked?’
‘The man who answered the telephone did, yes.’
He didn’t say anything, but there was a look in his eyes that didn’t augur well for Harry’s fate.
What would he do? Jessica wondered anxiously. Sack the hapless Harry on the spot? Roast him over an open spit? Anything was possible. The Newman man looked like someone who ate raw meat for breakfast.
‘You’re not going to…do anything…are you?’ she asked, worriedly. ‘I mean…it wasn’t his fault… I implied that you and I were acquaintances…well, quite good friends, actually. I told him that you would be pleasantly surprised to see me…after all this time…delighted, in fact…’ Her voice trailed off, along with a fair amount of her momentum.
‘Now, why would you imply anything of the sort?’ He looked at her coldly and assessingly, and whereas anyone else might well have been trying to cast their mind back, wondering perhaps whether they knew who she was, she could tell that that wasn’t on his mind at all. This man knew quite well that he had never seen her in his life before.
Impressions
