She gave him an affectionate cuff on the shoulder and went to finish making the tea. Casey had a natural affinity with numbers and she trusted that if anyone other than Robert could untangle the snarl of financial threads, it would be him.
It took two hours, three cups of tea and one of whiskey, and his own hair bearing a decided resemblance to a small prickly mammal, but figure it out he did.
“Here, come sit with me an’ I’ll show ye what it is, Jewel. It’s not easily seen, so don’t think that ye made a mistake in not seein’ it sooner. Someone has been very sneaky.”
She gave him a questioning look. The headache was creeping back in.
He showed her where the pattern to the fraudulent share purchases was, and why it wasn’t apparent on the surface.
“It’s all on the manufacturin’ end of the process if ye notice—the bare bones, the part of the businesses that build things, and the inner structure of the companies themselves—it’s the support beams of the companies, if ye’ll forgive a buildin’ metaphor. If ye control the supports of all these companies, ye can also destroy things right at the foundation. They’ve thrown in a few purchases designed to distract from the overall pattern, but it’s there. It would take some time an’ doin’, but I imagine it would amount to a fair bit of the company after awhile. Someone is very patient is all I can say.”
“Someone who obviously knows Jamie is away.”
“Aye, I’d say so.”
He sketched it out for her. “I’m no expert on this sort of thing, darlin’, but someone inside the company has to be helpin’ your mystery party. It looks as though the books are bein’ cooked, only so subtly that it’s not goin’ to bring attention to itself until it’s far too late.”
He showed her what he meant and it was even more damaging than she and Robert had suspected. Concerned as they both were with a thousand details each day, it would have been easy for someone with an ally inside the house, so to speak, to wreak havoc upon the edges, slowly opening a way directly into the center.
She stuck her hands in her hair tugging at the roots, as though she could loosen the ache inside her skull and possibly stimulate some idea about how to deal with this latest problem.
“When ye want to defeat an enemy, ye use his own tactics against him,” Casey said, as though he had read her mind.
“Are you saying we start buying our own stock and hiding it in shell companies?” she asked, not certain how that could work.
“Aye, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It might be high finance, Jewel, but it’s all just a shell game when ye get right down to it, no?”
“I suppose so,” she said, knowing what he meant, but thinking it was a far more complicated shell game than she wanted to play.
“It is that simple, only ye would have to have nerves of steel to pull it off. Here’s how I think ye might start, though.”
Casey might have thought it was simple, but to Pamela it sounded less like a street-side game than a walk across a high wire in glass slippers. She could see the simple genius of using their own methods against the thieves, still he was talking about millions of pounds, about people’s livelihoods and well-being, about a legacy that had been handed from generation to generation.
“I’m scared that I’ll make a mess of this whole thing, Casey. That I’m going to lose Jamie’s companies. What if someone is staging a coup? How the hell do I stop them?”
“By playin’ their game better than they can, Jewel.” He frowned and looked back down at the ledgers, now stacked neatly at his right hand. “Ye know what’s oddest about all this?”
“Yes,” she said, for it had occurred to her before anything else. “It’s the dates you mean, isn’t it? It started before Jamie left—he would have surely noticed.”
“Aye,” Casey said. “It’s as though he were allowin’ it to happen.”
“I can only think of one reason he would do that, Casey.”
His eyes met hers over the piles of papers and long columns of figures.
“He was tryin’ to draw them out, whoever they are.”
“That and…” she let the thought trail off but Casey, understanding, finished it for her.
“He never meant to be gone this long, but I think we knew that already, darlin’, didn’t we?”
“I suppose we did,” she said, glaring at the piles of papers as if that would make them snap to order and pull in their tails of long, trailing, misbehaving numbers. “I bloody wish he would have left all this,” she gestured at the mess of paper, “to someone more competent than myself, someone who knows how to fix this.”
Casey eyed her soberly. “Well, in the first place, Pamela, if the man didn’t think ye entirely capable, he wouldn’t have left everything in yer hands. An’ furthermore, I think ye need to quit lookin’ at them as Jamie’s companies an’ take the reins like they’re yours, because for all intents an’ purposes, an’ if—God forbid—something has actually happened to the man, they are yours.”
“Sometimes I am so mad at him for leaving me all this.”
“Aye, I imagine the man knew that ye would be, an’ yet he left it to ye nonetheless. Ye might ask yerself why, rather than fightin’ against it. An’ then ye need to dig yer heels in and start fightin’ for it. I know ye can, Pamela, an’ I think sooner will be better than later. Ye owe him that.”
She ruffled her hair hard, trying to clear the cobwebs from her mind. “I don’t need reminding,” she said testily. “But sometimes I just want to stay home, be Conor’s mam, make dinners, knit sweaters and plant a garden.”
“Would ye really?” Casey said, in a rather too dubious tone. “I don’t see it myself, woman. In fact, I’m grateful the man did leave it all on ye, as it’s kept ye too busy to go harin’ about the countryside, chasin’ down machine-gun totin’ bandits an’ hitmen. An’,” he added picking up the mugs and the whiskey bottle, “the pay is a bit better too. Now,” he said, regarding her with a very serious look, marred only a wee bit by his dimple, “about that promise ye made… Get upstairs, woman, because I’m about to call ye on it.”
When she looked up from Jamie’s desk, it was far later than she had realized. She had sat down to catch up on the endless pile of correspondence that landed in the mailbox each day, intending to give it an hour before heading home. But the rosy twilight had now faded into an inky dark outside the windows. It was chilly in the study, the fire had burned down to ash while she was absorbed in letters from everyone from a Dutch farmer from whom they bought flax to an Italian Countess whose memories of Jamie were exceedingly fond.
She stood and stretched, yawning and pushing her fists into the small of her back to ease the tight muscles. She needed to get home and start dinner. But she would have to take the time to pack up today’s work and take it with her, for she didn’t dare leave anything here at the mercy of Philip’s prying eyes.
As though her thought of the man had drawn him like a demon out of smoke, he entered the study without knocking. She frowned, certain that she had locked the door behind her when she returned after lunch. He had taken to showing up unannounced this way, every other week or so.
“I was just leaving,” she said, striving to keep her tone civil but not quite managing it.
“I should like to speak with you. What I have to say will only take a few minutes.”
She was sorely tempted to say no and order him out of the study but knew she could not afford to antagonize him any further.
She sat in the wingback by the hearth, wishing she hadn’t let the fire go out. She was chilled through now, as she always seemed to be in this man’s presence.
“I have a friend—” he began.
“Do you?” She allowed a good dose of skepticism to salt her tone.
He ignored her and sat himself down in the chair opposite, somehow managing to convey that h
e was lord of the manor and she the rather unwelcome guest. She sighed, thoroughly tired of these meetings.
“This friend told me something about you that I found interesting.”
“Yes, and what was that?” she said feigning unconcern but feeling an inky pool of anxiety begin to spread in her stomach.
Philip looked at her directly, settling his hands over his belly and sliding his tongue over his full bottom lip. “He told me about a night on a train, and about you and four men.”
She made a concentrated effort not to move her hands, not to betray anything by movement or change in the color of her skin, even if the blood was dropping to her feet at present.
“If you have something to say, just say it.”
“He told me these men—all four of them—made good use of you, in every way men can make use of a woman—physically that is.”
She was grateful that she had little more than tea and fruit in her stomach.
“He also told me that all these men died as a result of that night.”
“Did they? I can’t say I’ll mourn them, but I have no idea how they wound up dead.” Her voice was the consistency of needles.
“Don’t you?” Philip said and stood, walking over to where she sat frozen in place, unable to think or move or to deny, even had it not been futile, and she saw clearly that it was.
“Men do seem to wind up dead around you. Oh say—Love Hagerty for instance. This friend tells me the relationship there was far more than employer/employee and that when you tired of him, you set the mafia on him.”
“Who is this friend?” Pamela asked, her tone no longer calm.
“Oh, that’s for me to know. Let us just call him an interested party. I did find it fascinating that he seemed to believe that my nephew and your husband may have had a great deal to do with the demise of those four men.”
“That is ludicrous,” she said, tone sharp in spite of herself, for she could not allow this man to touch Casey or Jamie because of this.
“Oh, I don’t think so. You might be partially blinded by my nephew’s charms, but I think you well know how ruthless he is. How could you not know when you are exactly so yourself?”
“Is there something in particular that you want from this conversation? Because if not, I should like you to leave.”
“Oh, as tempted as I am by that idea, I have no desire to find myself another pint upon your bloody hands. As much as I should like,” his finger caressed the line of her neck, “to part those lovely white thighs and partake of what’s between them, I think—in the interests of breathing—I will pass on your charms.”
“I would rather die than allow you to touch me,” she said quite calmly, all things considered.
“I would be careful about making such sweeping statements. One never knows when one might need to go back on them.” His voice was as insidious as a scaled, oily creature creeping upon her skin.
“It’s a puzzle to me, you know.”
She gritted her teeth as she felt his breath upon her neck. She would not move until she understood just what he wanted.
“It’s a puzzle how a whore like you can look so untouched, so beyond the reach of most men and yet apparently—as my friend tells me—not beyond so many at all.”
She stood, unable to bear his looming presence any longer. She faced him, eyes blazing with anger, her entire body deadly cold.
“I think you had best get to the point.”
“The point, my lovely, is the same as it has always been. I want what is rightfully mine: this house, the companies, all the assets that my nephew left to you.”
“I don’t know how many times you require to hear the word ‘no’, but I am saying it again. Jamie trusted this to me, and when he returns I plan to turn it back to him as he left it, if not better.”
“Jamie is dead, dear girl. He isn’t coming back to rescue you. I will get what is mine one way or the other. I can take it without an ugly and protracted fight or it can be as bloody as you like. It’s up to you.”
“You aren’t getting any compromise from me, so sharpen your sword,” she said.
“Have it your way, Pamela, but don’t say you weren’t warned. Coups can be extremely ugly.”
She sat for several long moments after he left. The scent of his aftershave was stuck in her throat and she still felt as though she was going to be sick.
His words had conjured up the image of that night on the train when four men had indeed used her in every way they had time and imagination enough to do. She had long ago left the shame of it behind. Or so she thought, for somehow Philip had managed to pull it up in front of her again, to make her skin crawl and shudder with the memory. The shame was still there, sunk under the skin like delicate pools of paint in shades of bruising. Dip in the brush of another’s words, red and harsh, and they spread once again through her body in ripples of blood and bone memory.
In the aftermath, each of those men had died, but she had never asked Casey nor Jamie about it. She had not wanted to know. She was certain, though, that between the two of them they knew how each man died. There were only two other people who knew the truth of that night. One was her brother-in-law, who still suffered his own scars, and the other was a man she had hoped never to encounter again.
It appeared that the Reverend Lucien Broughton had returned from the pits of hell to which she had wished him.
Now she wasn’t just angry, she was deathly afraid.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Spinning Orb
Each web began with a single strand, a bridge by which all others would be built and sustained. His original strand had grown over time, fed carefully on his own sense of injustice, and out from there had come the structural threads, the foundation on which revenge could be built, one sticky strand at a time.
Each stage took patience, but he understood that waiting and planning and taking the time to utilize each step of that plan was the only guarantee to capturing the prey you truly wanted. Years had gone into the framing of his web, the finding and training of the right people through which he could begin undermining the House of Kirkpatrick. The radius threads then were laid, the small holdings at the outer reaches of His Lordship’s empire into which he had placed people, the little flies that were his own, and through them he would feel every vibration, come to see every weakness, every crack through which an able spider might creep. And then there was the careful, slow spiral of the auxiliary thread, the hidden pathway that allowed him to build the silken trap in parallel while keeping himself safe but close enough to observe who came along the more dangerous path.
There were obvious prey, and then there had been some surprises. Jamie’s own will had given him the most desirable prey, had placed her near the center of the web like a beautiful, fragile butterfly whose sheltering calyx had been shorn away, leaving her open to the winds of fate. He knew not to underestimate her though. Other men had and lived—or rather not lived—to regret such folly. He enjoyed this contest, for under the tutelage of his own arch-enemy she had become a far more interesting opponent than he had previously found her. Still, she was only the foretaste of that for which he truly hungered.
Philip had not been a surprise, though his venomous spite was certainly a bonus. He had groomed Philip for a long time, making the insinuating threads both inviting and tight, so that the man was entirely his with which to toy, to maneuver, and yet the fool had no notion of himself as anything other than the predator. There was time enough to disabuse him of that notion, and for now his ego blinded him most effectively to the true design which he wished no one to see except Lord James Kirkpatrick himself—and him only when the entire arrangement had played out and he would be able to understand what had been done to him and those he loved.
The real surprise on that sticky pathway, the treasure, had come along unexpectedly, a
nd he had barely felt the vibrations of it at first. But when he had… oh, when he had… it had been like finding an exquisitely jeweled dragonfly trapped by its own iridescent beauty within those winding silks. A dragonfly that didn’t understand its own power and therefore was malleable by one who did.
Some time back, James Kirkpatrick had destroyed all his careful planning, had in one stroke wiped out his work, forced him to destroy his own creation, to crawl backward eating his own web as spiders were forced to do occasionally in order to rebuild. But a smart spider knows that during daylight one hides at the edge of the web or retreats into a secret nest, one foot delicately poised on a signal line invisible to all other eyes, so that no movement, however slight, goes unnoticed. He had kept his original bridge, and that was all a good spider needed to rebuild the entire structure.
And so he did just that—rebuilt his web slowly, walking it by the secret pathways, checking and re-checking his lines, keeping in his peripheral vision any bright flashes that would warn of the enemy. There had been none such in a very long time, for the enemy was lost, prey to stranger forces than he himself had foreseen. Meanwhile, there were all sorts of interesting vibrations to keep a spinner entertained through the long days and weeks and months of waiting. Time to let the lines out so that they might wind back into places both old and new, fasten themselves and begin to do their damage. He was aware too, through those filaments, of which were the dangerous ones that landed in his web, for their vibrations were different—like those of a wasp, something a spider had to be far more wary of tangling with. The British agent who had seemingly fooled everyone but himself, the woman’s husband, the more volatile factions within the Redhand Defenders and the fat Jesuit. Wasps of varying degrees of threat.
For now, he held the most interesting pawn hostage to himself—that beautiful bejeweled dragonfly that he had brought into the web through careful coaxing and golden promises. A dragonfly guided along the threads with such careful, delicate handling that the dragonfly never even guessed at his true purpose. For such a creature could end the game, bring it all down prematurely, the way an early hard frost could kill a spider. But that, of course, was not how this game was played. One waited for one’s true opponent to return to the web. One allowed him time to struggle against the ties that would bind him inextricably in a weft from which he would never be able to free himself. That was going to be his greatest pleasure. For his patience was greater than that of the spider, that could after all succumb to seasons and time or simply fall to a predator greater than itself. Only he understood all the intricacies of this web. Only he knew every drag line, every net, and every sticky silken prison to which his prey could be consigned.
Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Page 42
