by Penny Jordan
He hadn’t answered her, and it had been a shock to go into the kitchen and find him sitting there, immobile and silent.
Equally shocking had been the sight of a bottle of whisky on the table beside him and an empty glass. Her father rarely drank, and when he did it was normally a glass or maybe two of good wine.
‘Dad...Daddy,’ she pleaded anxiously, her heart plummeting as he turned his head to look at her and she saw the despair in his eyes.
‘Daddy, what is it? What’s wrong?’ she asked him, running over to him and dropping to her knee in front of him. They had never been physically demonstrative with one another, but almost instinctively Dee took hold of his hands in both of hers. They were frighteningly icy cold.
‘What is it...are you ill...? Dad, please...’ she begged him.
‘Ill...?’ His voice cracked harshly over the word, sharp with bitterness and contempt. ‘I wish... Blind, that’s what I’ve been Dee, corrupted by my own pride and my vanity, my belief that I knew...’ He stopped, and Dee realised that the tremors shaking her own body were coming from his. It shocked her immeasurably to see him like this, her father, who had always been so strong, so proud...
‘Dad, please—please tell me what’s wrong.’
‘You shouldn’t have come here. What about your finals...? Where’s Hugo...?’
‘He...he had to go out.’
‘So he isn’t here with you?’
She could see the relief in his eyes.
‘At least I’m spared that, although it can only be a matter of time and then everyone will know.’
‘Know what?’ Dee demanded.
‘That I’ve been taken in by a liar and a cheat, that I’ve given my trust to a thief and that he’s... Gordon Simpson rang me last week,’ he told her abruptly.
Gordon Simpson was the manager of the local branch of their bank, and a fellow committee member with her father on the local branches of two national charities.
‘He’s been going through the charity accounts with the accountant, and certain anomalies have come to light.’
‘Anomalies...what, accounts mistakes, you mean?’ Dee asked him, perplexed. She knew how meticulous her father was about such matters, and how annoyed with himself he would be at having made a mistake, but surely not to this extent.
‘Accounting mistakes? Well, that’s one way of putting it.’ He laughed bitingly. ‘Creative accounting is how the gutter press prefer to refer to it—or so I’m told.’
‘Creative accounting.’ Dee’s blood ran cold. ‘You mean fraud?’ she asked him in disbelief. ‘But that’s impossible. You would never—’
‘No,’ he agreed immediately. ‘I would never...but Julian Cox... He deceived me, Dee, took me in completely. He’s cheated the charity out of a good few thousand pounds already, and all under my protective aegis. Oh, Gordon told me that no one would hold me to blame...he said he’d been as convinced of the man’s honesty as I was...but that doesn’t matter. I am still the one who was responsible for allowing him to become involved. I am still the one who vouched for him.
‘Of course, I’ve repaid the missing money immediately, and Gordon and Jeremy, the accountant, have given me their assurance that the matter won’t go any further.
‘I tackled Cox immediately, and do you know what he had the gall to say to me? He told me that...he tried to blackmail me, Dee. Me! He threatened to go to the press and tell them that I’d supported him, encouraged him, unless I agreed to let him get away with it.
‘Gordon and Jeremy said there was no point in pursuing him legally, and that to do so would bring the matter into the public arena and damage people’s faith in the charity. They said that since I’d offered to refund the money the best thing to do was to simply keep the whole thing quiet.’
‘Oh, Dad,’ Dee whispered helplessly. She knew how strongly her father felt about matters of law and morality, and how much it must be hurting him to have to tell her. It wasn’t just his pride that had been damaged, she knew, it was his whole sense of self, his whole belief about the importance of honesty.
Dee tried her best to comfort and reassure him, but she felt helplessly out of her depth. He was, after all, her father, and a man, and he was also of a generation that believed that it was a father’s and a man’s duty to shield and protect his womenfolk from anything that might cause them pain.
He had, Dee recognised, always sheltered her from the unpleasant things in life, and it frightened her to see him so vulnerable, so alarmingly unlike himself.
She spent the night at home with him. When she rang Hugo to tell him what she was doing there was no reply to her call, and, illogically, some of the anger and resentment she felt against Julian Cox she transferred to Hugo, for failing to know of her need and thus failing to meet it.
In the morning her father’s air of restless anxiety made her feel equally on edge. He had someone he needed to see, he told her evasively when he came back downstairs for the breakfast she had prepared, but which neither of them ate, but when she asked him who he refused to answer her.
Since she had last seen him he had lost weight, and his face looked gaunt. Dee’s heart ached for him. How could Julian Cox do this to her father?
‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ she told him fiercely. ‘It’s Julian Cox and not you.’
‘Nothing wrong legally, maybe, but I still let him make a fool of me. I trusted him and, what is worse, I trusted him with other people’s money. Who’s going to believe that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t a party to what he was planning to do?’
‘But Dad, you don’t need the money.’
‘I know that, Dee, and so do you, but how many other people are going to question my honesty? How many are going to believe there’s no smoke without a fire?
‘You’d better get back to Lexminster,’ he told her wearily. ‘You’ve got your finals in four weeks.’
‘I’ve got plenty of time to study.’ Dee fibbed. ‘I want to stay here with you, Dad. I’ll come with you to this meeting...I—’
‘No.’
The sharpness of his denial shocked her. She had rarely seen him angry before, never mind so frighteningly close to losing control.
‘Dad...’
‘Go back to Lexminster, Dee,’ he reiterated.
And so, stupidly, she did. And that was a mistake; an error of judgement; a failure to understand that she would never, ever forgive herself for.
If Julian Cox was responsible for her father’s death, then she was certainly a party to that responsibility. If she had refused to go back to Lexminster, if she had stayed with him...
But she didn’t... She drove back to Lexminster, desperate to see Hugo and tell him what had happened, running in fear to him, like a child denied the comfort of one strong man’s protection and so running to another.
But when she reached the house Hugo wasn’t there.
He had left her a note, saying that he had been called to London unexpectedly to attend another interview and that he didn’t know when he would be back.
Dee wept in a mixture of anger and misery. She wanted him there with her, not pursuing some selfish, idealistic dream. She needed him there with her, and surely for once her needs came first. Was this how it was going to be for the rest of their lives? Was Hugo always going to be missing when she needed him? Were other people always going to be more important to him than her? She was too wrought up to think or reason logically; it didn’t make any difference that Hugo had no idea what was happening—it was enough that he just wasn’t there.
Anxiously Dee rang her father at home. There was no reply. She tried his office, and gritted her teeth as she listened to the vague voice of the middle-aged spinster he employed as his secretary more out of pity for her than because he actually needed her help. She lived with her widowed mother and three cats, and
was bullied unmercifully—both by her mother and the moggies.
‘Your father—oh, dear, Andrea, I’m sorry; I have no idea... He isn’t here—’
‘He said he had an appointment with someone,’ Dee told her, cutting across her. ‘Is there anything in his diary?’
‘Oh, let me look... There’s a dental appointment—but, no, that’s the fifteenth of next month. Just let me find the right page. Oh, yes...here we are. And it isn’t the fifteenth today at all, is it? It’s the sixteenth... No...he was to have seen that nice Mr Cox for lunch today...’
She paused as Dee made a fierce sound of disgust deep in her throat. What was loyal Miss Prudehow going to say when she learned just how un-nice ‘nice Mr Cox’ actually was? When she learned just what he had done to Dee’s father—her employer?
Five minutes later, having extracted from her the information that she had no idea where Dee’s father was, Dee replaced the receiver and redialled the number of her father’s home. Still no reply. Where was he...?
* * *
It was later in the day when she knew. Early in the evening, to be exact.
The young policeman who came to give her the news looked white-faced and nervous when Dee opened the door to him. After he had asked to come in, and followed her inside the house, Dee noticed how he was unable to meet her eyes, and somehow, even before he said her father’s name, she knew.
‘My father?’ she demanded tautly. ‘Something’s happened to my father...’
There had been an accident, the young policeman told her. Her father had been fishing. Quite what had happened, no one was sure. But somehow or other he had ended up in the river and got into difficulties. Somehow or other he had drowned.
Dee wanted badly to be sick. She also wanted badly to scream and cry, to deny what she was being told, but she was her father’s daughter, and she could see that to give in to her own emotions would upset the poor young policeman, who looked very badly as though he wanted to be sick as well.
Dee had to go back with him to Rye. There were formalities to be attended to but not, thankfully, by her. She wanted to see her father, but Ralph Livesey, his friend and doctor, refused to allow her to do so.
‘It isn’t necessary, Dee,’ he told her firmly. ‘And it isn’t what he would have wanted.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she whispered, over and over again and throughout it all. ‘How could he have drowned? He was such a good swimmer and...’
As she looked at Ralph she saw the look in his eyes, and instantly a sickening possibility hit her like a blow in the solar plexus.
‘It wasn’t an accident, was it?’ she whispered sickly to him. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’
Her voice started to rise as shock and hysteria gripped her. ‘It wasn’t an accident. It was Julian Cox...he did it. He killed him...’
‘Dee,’ she heard Ralph Livesey saying sharply, before turning to the policeman who was still there and telling him, ‘I’m afraid she’s in shock. I’ll take her home with me and give her something to help her calm down.’
Once he had bundled her into his car Ralph Livesey was grimly relentless with her.
‘Whatever you might think, Dee, so far as the rest of the world is concerned your father died in a tragic accident. I don’t want to cause you any more pain. I can understand how upset you are, but for your father’s sake you have to be strong. To make wild accusations won’t bring him back, and could actually do him a lot of harm.’
‘Harm? What do you mean?’ Dee demanded.
‘There’s already some disquiet in town about...certain aspects of your father’s professional relationship with Julian Cox.’
‘Julian tried to deceive Daddy. He lied to him,’ Dee defended her father immediately.
‘I’m quite sure you’re right, but unfortunately your father isn’t here to defend himself, and Julian Cox is. To suggest that your father might have taken his own life will only exacerbate and fuel exactly the kind of gossip he would most want to avoid.’
‘You mean that Julian is going to get away with murdering him?’ Dee protested sickly. ‘But...’
‘I understand how you feel, Dee, but Cox did not murder your father. No one did. My guess is that he slipped off the bank whilst he was fishing. We’ve had a lot of rain recently, and the ground is treacherous. He lost his balance, fell into the river, probably knocking himself unconscious as he did so, and whilst he was unconscious, very tragically, he drowned.’
Dee looked at him with huge pain-filled eyes.
‘I can’t believe it was an accident,’ she whimpered to him. ‘Dad was a strong swimmer and—’
‘It was an accident,’ Ralph Livesey told her firmly.
‘That is my judgement as a doctor, and I believe it is the one your father would have wished for.’
It was almost a week before Dee was able to leave Rye and return to Lexminster. There were formalities to attend to—formalities relating to her father’s business affairs which, as Dee might have expected, had been left in meticulous order. Meticulous order, maybe, but someone would have to take over the business, someone would have to stand in her father’s shoes. Dry-eyed, Dee had calmly made a brief list of those who might be able to do so, and then equally calmly she had put a cross through them all. There was only one person who could be trusted to carry on the work her father had been so dedicated to—only one person who could ensure that his memory was forever enshrined in the hearts and minds of the townspeople with all the respect and love to which he was entitled—and that one person was her.
Once she had made her decision she made it known to her father’s solicitors, now hers, and all those people he had worked most closely with.
‘But, Dee, whilst I applaud your desire to do this, it really isn’t practical,’ her father’s solicitor told her. ‘For one thing you’ve still got your finals ahead of you, and for another...’
Dee closed her eyes, and on opening them looked at him and through him.
‘I’m not going back to university,’ she told him distantly. How could she? How could she leave Rye? How could she leave her father’s name and reputation unprotected and vulnerable to the likes of Julian Cox? She had made the mistake of leaving her father unprotected once, and look what had happened. She wasn’t going to do it again. It never occurred to her that she might be in shock, or that her emotions might be warped and twisted by the sheer intensity of what had happened.
She had made her decision.
Hugo would have to be told, of course, but she doubted that he would care very much. If he cared he would be here with her, wouldn’t he? If he cared he would have saved her father, wouldn’t he? But he hadn’t done. Had he?
Two days after her father’s death, and the day before his funeral, she had a telephone call from Hugo.
‘Dee, what on earth...? I’ve been ringing the house for the last two days. What are you doing in Rye?’
‘I had to come home,’ she told him bleakly.
‘Look, I’m not going to be back for another few days. Whilst I was having my interview they told me that someone had dropped out of one of their training programmes, and they asked me if I’d like to take his place. It will speed things up by about six weeks, since they only run these induction programmes every two months, but of course it’s meant that I’ve had to put everything else on hold.
‘They do it here in London, in-house, and they’re putting me up with one of the guys who works for them. Dee, it’s fascinating, but it makes me feel so inadequate. There’s just so much to learn and know. Some of these people are still farming using methods that date back to biblical times, and...’
Still numb from the trauma of her father’s death, Dee was only distantly aware of Hugo’s selfish absorption in himself, and his total lack of awareness of her own need, her own pain and anger—emotions which fused
together to make her feel that she had to protect her father, not just from Hugo’s lack of love for him but also from his patent lack of awareness that anything was wrong with her. And so, deliberately, she said nothing—after all, why should she? Hugo quite obviously didn’t care. Somewhere deep inside she knew that somehow this discovery was going to hurt her, and very badly, but right now all that mattered was her father—not her, and most certainly not Hugo and his precious interview!
‘Hugo, I’ve got to go,’ she interrupted him unemotionally.
‘Dee...? Dee...?’ she heard him demanding in astonishment as she replaced the receiver.
The phone rang again almost immediately, but she didn’t answer it. She couldn’t.
Tomorrow her father was to be buried, but Hugo was more interested in the farming methods of people he didn’t even know than in her father’s death and her own pain. Her father had been right to question Hugo’s love for her. And even if he did love her as much as he had always claimed to...as much as she loved him...there was no future for them together now, Dee recognised. How could there be? Her place was here, in Rye. It had to be. She owed it to her father.
Dee closed her eyes. Right now she couldn’t think about where Hugo’s life and future lay. Right now all she could think about was that Julian Cox had destroyed her father...taken his life...and that it was down to her to ensure that nothing else was taken from him, that his reputation remained intact—and not just intact but revered and honoured.
* * *
Hugo tried to talk her out of her decision, of course, but she had remained obdurate. Her refusal to answer the phone had caused him to come straight back to Lexminster, but by then Dee’s resolve had hardened. All that she allowed herself to remember of their relationship was that Hugo had never loved her father and how important his ambition was to him—far more important than her.
‘But, Dee, we love each other,’ he pleaded with her, white-faced and patently unable to take in what she was telling him.
‘No,’ she announced, averting her face from his. ‘I don’t love you any more, Hugo,’ she lied. ‘My father was right; it would never have worked between us.’
