important things he had learned from his father; this time he wasn’t going to make the mistake of allowing his emotions to get in the way of his ambitions.
The phone rang. Saul frowned as he picked up the receiver.
‘Ah, Saul. Glad I was able to catch you in.’
His frown intensified as he recognised Sir Alex’s voice. It was like the man that he should feel no need to introduce himself; that he should assume autocratically that he needed no introduction.
‘I was half expecting you’d be on your way to Cheshire by now.’
Subtlety, at least when it came to people rather than business, had never been Sir Alex’s strong point, Saul reflected. His tools of persuasion veered more towards the verbal bludgeoning and threatening school than the delicate hint.
‘You haven’t forgotten our discussion, have you?’ Sir Alex queried sharply when Saul made no response. ‘Or are you suffering another crisis of conscience?’
‘I shall be leaving for Cheshire once I’ve tied up some loose ends here,’ Saul told him coolly.
There weren’t really any loose ends for him to tie up. He knew already as much as he was going to know about Carey’s without being on the spot to do some far more in-depth research, but he could feel himself bristling inwardly at Alex’s bullying tone. The older man’s manner was beginning to jar on him. There were many things about him that Saul genuinely liked and admired, but he had never been more conscious of how little he wanted to be like him.
And yet for years he had worked patiently towards that one goal: to take over from Sir Alex when he retired. To take over from him, but not to be him.
On Sir Alex’s desk was a photograph of his daughter, taken when she graduated from Cambridge. Sir Alex had not been there for her graduation. He had been away on business. He and his wife had divorced over twenty years ago, and as far as Saul knew Sir Alex’s contact with his daughter was now limited to the exchange of cards at Christmas. Was that what he wanted? Was that the kind of relationship he wanted with his children?
For the first time behind the slightly hectoring tone of his employer’s voice Saul was suddenly aware of, if not exactly a loneliness, then certainly an aloneness. Two men, both of them, in the eyes of the world, successful and to be envied, but take away their work and what was there really in their lives?
For quite a long time after his conversation with Sir Alex was over he sat motionlessly where he was.
Beside him on his desk was the small file containing the basic facts about Carey Chemicals. He picked it up, flipping it open as he started to read.
He read quickly, pausing only a handful of times, once when he read how the company had originally come into being, a second time when he read of Gregory James’s heavy losses on the money markets, and a third time when he read that the company was now in the hands of his widow, the founder’s granddaughter, Davina James.
She would want to sell. She would have to. There was no other option open to her. The business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Saul suspected he knew the kind of woman she would be. The investigating agents Sir Alex had employed had been thorough. There were no details of Gregory James’s many affairs, just a couple of paragraphs stating that his unfaithfulness was a constant and ongoing situation and that it would seem that his wife must have been aware of it.
Saul thought he knew the type. He had met enough of them over the years; elegant, brittle, too thin, too tense and too expensively dressed, they reminded him of fragile china ornaments. You always had the feeling that if they were asked to participate in anything real they would crack and fall apart.
Some of them turned to sex as a means of solace for the uninterest of their husbands, some of them turned to drink, some to good works, but none of them, it seemed to Saul, seemed prepared to take the simple step of freeing themselves from the humiliation and destruction of their marriages by divorcing their husbands. Wealth, position, appearances, it seemed, were always more important than pride, self-respect or self-worth.
He had once made the mistake of saying as much to Christie and she had turned on him immediately, challenging him to put himself in their shoes, to be what life and circumstances had forced them to be.
He winced a little as he remembered her anger, her vehemence about the fact that so many members of her sex were taught almost from birth to accept second best, to put others first, to give instead of to take. Many of them were held in those marriages by their children, she had told him fiercely.
But Davina James did not have any children. He frowned as he lifted the last sheet of paper from the file and saw the photographs pinned neatly behind it.
There were several of Carey Chemicals, showing the run-down state of the buildings and how totally ill equipped it was to compete with even the poorest of its competitors. Without that all-important heart-drug patent which had been revised over the years to create a second patent it would have disappeared decades ago.
There was another photograph. He stiffened as he saw the name written on the back: ‘Davina James’.
He turned it over.
She was nothing like what he had imagined. The file quoted her date of birth, so he knew that she was thirty-seven years old, but in this photograph she looked younger and vulnerable in a way that made his body tense with rejection.
There was none of the glossy sophistication that he had expected about her. She was dressed in jeans and what looked like a man’s shirt, one hand lifted to push a strand of soft fair hair out of her eyes. She was wearing gardening gloves and there was a smear of dirt along one cheekbone, a fork in the ground at her feet. Her skin, free of make-up, looked clear and soft, and without even realising what he was doing Saul suddenly discovered that his thumb was touching her face.
But it wasn’t the living warmth of a woman’s flesh he could feel, just the hard glossy texture of the print.
He withdrew his hand as though the print had scorched him.
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