by Janet Tanner
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Janet Tanner
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Janet Tanner
Daughter of Riches
Janet Tanner is a prolific and well-loved author and has twice been shortlisted for RNA awards. Many of her novels are multi-generational sagas, and some – in particular the Hillsbridge Quartet – are based on her own working class background in a Somerset mining community. More recently, she has been writing historical and well-received Gothic novels for Severn House – a reviewer for Booklist, a trade publication in the United States, calls her “ a master of the Gothic genre”.
Besides publication in the UK and US, Janet’s books have also been translated into dozens of languages and published all over the world. Before turning to novels she was a prolific writer of short stories and serials, with hundreds of stories appearing in various magazines and publications worldwide.
Janet Tanner lives in Radstock, Somerset.
Chapter one
St Helier, Jersey, 1990
The file was at the very bottom of the cupboard, coated with a thin layer of dust and securely tied with pink legal tape, a fat file with a few bits of paper sticking out of it, creased over on the edges and clearly marked in thick black ink as well as with a typed stick-on label.
ATTORNEY GENERAL v. SOPHIA LANGLOIS – November 1972
Dan Deffains pulled it out and sat back on his heels looking at it with interest. He had been hating every moment of the job he had to do. Bad enough that his father, successful advocate and thoroughly decent human being, should have been struck down so unexpectedly in what had still been his prime, worse that it had fallen to Dan to turn out the office around which his father’s whole life had revolved. For one thing it was a painful duty – he had thought the world of the old man although they had not always seen eye to eye – and there was so much of the essence of the man stilt there, so much that had refused to die with him. But besides this the task was also time consuming and tedious. Daniel Deffains Senior had worked from the same office for more than thirty years and it seemed he had never thrown anything away. The strong room was full to bursting, every cupboard and drawer, even the odd corner of floor space, overflowed with masses of old letters and documents that had long since ceased to have any importance. Mostly they were the legacy of long forgotten and, truth to tell, not very interesting cases and everyday law business, and Dan had had little hesitation about consigning them to the shredder.
But not this one. This one was different.
Dan straightened up, dusting down the file with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and sneezing explosively as the resulting cloud tickled his nostrils.
ATTORNEY GENERAL v. SOPHIA LANGLOIS. It had been one of his father’s hobby horses, he knew, a case that had never ceased to haunt him even though it had happened almost twenty years ago.
He himself had only been a boy at the time, of course, only eleven years old and far more interested in football, conkers and his beloved bicycle than any murder case, however mysterious, and however glamorous, the leading characters. Later, when he had joined the island police force, against the wishes of his father, who had desperately hoped Dan would follow him into the family law firm, he had wondered about it briefly, remembering his father’s preoccupation with Sophia Langlois almost as one remembers a half-forgotten dream – mostly flavour, little substance – and it had not been long before day-to-day policing and current enquiries had driven out all thought of the Langlois case which, even at the time, had been an open-and-shut one. Now, however, it was different. Dan was no longer a policeman. Fate – and a drunken driver – had brought his career to an untimely end two Christmases ago and nowadays Dan earned his living as an investigative reporter. As the label on the file jogged his memory so his interest quickened.
What was it his father had always said? ‘ She didn’t do it. I’m damned sure she didn’t. But how could I defend her when she was dead set on proving that she was guilty?’
A corner of Dan’s mouth lifted as he saw the glimmerings of an excuse to give himself a break from the tedium of sorting the old files. He got up, a tall athletically built man in denim jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and depressed the button on the intercom that connected with the downstairs office.
‘Any chance of a cup of coffee, Carol?’
‘Oh I should think so. I’ll be right up.’
‘Well done.’
He crossed to the window, stretching his legs while he waited for her to arrive. The street below was busy with a constant stream of traffic and he thought that if it was like this now, in April, heaven only knew what it would be like when the season really got under way. That was the trouble with Jersey. The narrow winding lanes had never been meant for thousands of hire cars, all driven by people without the first idea of where they were going.
And they hadn’t been meant for drunken drivers either. Not that anywhere on God’s earth was meant for them. Swine.
Once upon a time – two years ago – Dan would cheerfully have played executioner to the criminally irresponsible idiot who had spent his Christmas Eve getting steadily legless, then got into his car, ignored, or perhaps not even noticed, a STOP sign at a junction, and driven straight out into the path of Dan’s motor cycle. That piece of criminal carelessness had meant the end of Dan’s career, for one of his legs had been so badly broken that he was considered no longer fit for active duty.
But Dan’s disabling injury had been only part of what the drunken swine had done. There had been worse. Dan’s wife of five months, Marianne, had been on the pillion when the accident had happened. Severe as the consequences for Dan had been he knew he had escaped lightly. Marianne had not. She had sustained terrible head injuries and after lying in a coma for almost a month she had died without ever regaining consciousness.
Sweat still rose in a clammy sheen on Dan’s skin when he thought about what had happened but he did not want to kill the drunken driver any more; his hatred had burned itself out. Nowadays his bitterness and resentment was reserved for
the police force that had thrown him onto the scrapheap just when he had most needed his career to fill the empty days, some semblance of normality to cling to in the midst of his grief and self-recriminations for, in spite of knowing the accident had not been his fault, he had not been able to help blaming himself for what had happened.
In those black days his father had tried once again to talk him into becoming an advocate and joining the law firm of which he was so proud. It wasn’t too late, he had insisted. Dan could still train at Caen, as he himself had done, in the old traditional manner. But Dan had refused – rather gracelessly, he now admitted as he mourned his father – though he was still certain he had done the right thing. Sorting these mounds of files had convinced him of that if nothing else. Studied arguments and the finer points of law were not for him. To his less academic mind and impatient nature they held no fascination and certainly no satisfaction. He needed action, excitement or the thrill of the chase to set him alight. He had told his father that at the age of eighteen and nothing really had changed.
‘Coffee up.’
Dan turned back from the window as the door swung open and his father’s secretary entered bearing an enormous breakfast-sized pottery cup and saucer and a jug of coffee. As the aroma reached him he sniffed appreciatively.
‘That smells wonderful,’ he said, failing to notice the pleased flush that rose in her cheeks. Members of the opposite sex invariably found Dan attractive and the fact that Carol was an old married woman of thirty-three did not render her immune. Dan was, as she said to her best friend, Sheila, ‘all man – not good looking exactly but with the sexiest eyes you ever saw and a smile to turn your spine to water. But,’ she usually added, ‘ to my knowledge he’s never so much as looked at another woman since his wife was killed. What a waste!’
Dan turned that famous smile on her now.
‘I think I’m making some headway up here at last. How are you doing?’
‘All right I suppose. Not that I’m in any hurry. You realise once we get this all cleared up I shall be out of a job?’
His smile died. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Carol, I wish there was something I could do for you but I can’t – except of course put in a word for you if I hear of anyone wanting a reliable secretary. Would you be interested if anything of the sort came up?’
Carol grimaced. ‘I don’t really know. I think it’s probably high time I started thinking about staying home and having a family. Bob’s been hinting as much for a long while but I couldn’t face telling your father I was leaving. I’ve been here since I was seventeen, you know, and I like to think he depended on me.’
‘He did,’ Dan said truthfully.
‘It’s funny, you know, I still can’t believe he’s dead … that I’m not going to see him any more. I keep thinking he’s going to come bursting in, looking the way he always did when he’d had a good day in court, and asking me what’s new.’ She turned away, close to tears suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to be I sentimental. It’s just that I was very fond of him.’
‘I know,’ Dan said roughly. ‘I miss him too.’
‘I’d better get on.’ Carol moved to the door with determined briskness. ‘ Enjoy your coffee.’
Dan lowered himself into his father’s big leather chair, his face serious. Funny how it could hit you so suddenly. You’d go on, almost as normal, doing what had to be done, and then all of a sudden you’d realise that the reason you were doing it was because he wouldn’t be coming back. Christ, it was hard to believe – a man of his powerful charisma snuffed out just like that in the space of less than an hour. It wasn’t even as if he’d been old. Just sixty-five – and with not the slightest intention of retiring.
Dan poured himself a coffee and stirred in two spoonfuls of brown sugar and a portion of cream. Better give this up if he didn’t want to go the same way. But not just now. Dan sipped the coffee with relish, pulled the Langlois file towards him and slid off the pink legal tape that bound it.
Let’s have a look then, Dad. Let’s see what it was that you used to go on about.
Half an hour later the coffee jug was empty and Dan was still reading. Fascinating – especially when one considered that the people involved were so well known in the island. What a stir it must have caused! With a sigh of resignation he closed the dusty manilla covers, then sat thinking about the story that had emerged from the statements, depositions and notes, yellowing now from age.
Sophia Langlois, then aged forty-six years, had been the widow of Bernard Langlois, founder of a leisure agency and a chain of luxury hotels whose very names were synonymous with discreet service and unashamed self-indulgence for the wealthy guests who stayed in them – La Maison Blanche, the Westerley, Les Belles Fleurs, the Belville. Dan knew her by sight though he had never had cause to meet her – a slimly built woman with hair that had turned prematurely to a silvery grey, whose chauffeur-driven Bentley could sometimes be seen slipping through the business and holiday traffic here in St Helier. There was a sereneness about her which made it almost impossible to associate her with scandal of any kind, much less violent death. Yet this was exactly the occurrence which had rocked the island eighteen years ago and the victim had been her son, Louis.
There had been three Langlois sons, Dan had gathered from the file, Louis and Robin, both in their middle to late twenties at the time of Louis’s death, and a younger boy, still in his teens. That would be David Langlois, who headed the hotel empire now, Dan realised.
Back in 1972 Bernard, the boys’ father, had only recently died – (he must have been even younger than my father, Dan thought; I wonder what caused him to cash in his chips?) and control of the hotel empire had passed to the two older boys. From reading between the lines Dan could see there had been any amount of family friction of one sort or another but presumably no one had foreseen the outcome.
One night in November 1972 Sophia had been to a glittering trade gala in St Helier. She had left early pleading tiredness and her chauffeur had driven her back to the family mansion on the North Coast of the island. Then at about midnight Sophia had made a telephone call to the emergency services. Her very words had been recorded and noted down: ‘This is Sophia Langlois at La Grange. I think I need both an ambulance and the police. I have just shot my son.’
Dan leaned back against the soft leather, imagining the furore that telephone call would have unleashed – sirens and flashing blue lights as police cars rushed through the night, their occupants still half-convinced perhaps that this was some kind of sick hoax, telephone calls for a scenes-of-crime officer, a photographer, the centenier of the parish … and Sophia’s lawyer, his own father. What a night it must have been!
But why, he wondered, frowning, had his father been so insistent Sophia had not done it? Zeal in defence of one’s client is all very well, but on paper this was an open and shut case.
Louis Langlois was dead, shot with his own gun. Sophia maintained her guilt from first to last. Clearly the police had believed the story and been only too glad to add it to their ‘ clear-up rate’. So why had his father gone to his grave convinced of Sophia’s innocence?
Dan shook his head, tying the pink tapes around the file and preparing to toss it into the pile for the shredder. Then at the last moment he changed his mind and put it instead on the corner of the desk underneath his car keys and sunglasses.
Perhaps when he had finished here he would have another look at the file, see if there was something he’d missed. He couldn’t imagine there would be. If there had been anything, the merest hint of suspicion that someone other than Sophia was responsible, she would never have been prosecuted – not an influential person like her. And at least his father had made sure the charge was not murder but manslaughter. Sophia Langlois had served only just over a year in a mainland gaol and returned to Jersey almost as if nothing had happened. Yet for some reason a question mark had remained in his mind over the whole business.
Now, remembering his father’s doubts, exp
ressed on more than one occasion, that Sophia Langlois had been guilty of anything but lack of adherence to the truth, Dan found himself wondering whether it was possible there was indeed more to the story than had ever come out. Had she lied that night when she had rung the police to confess to the killing of her son – and then stuck to the story so stubbornly that she had been prepared to serve a prison sentence rather than retract it? And if so – why?
All the investigative juices that had made Dan a good detective and now helped him make his living uncovering unsuspected frauds and hidden scandals were beginning to run, a heady dose of anticipation and sharp tingling intuition prickling his nerves and senses. What a story it would make if he could uncover some hitherto unsuspected angle to the case that had rocked the island’s society almost twenty years ago! What a scoop!
Dan made up his mind that he would certainly study the case and do a few investigations of his own. But exciting though the prospect was, for the moment it was going to have to go on the back burner and wait its turn. He had more pressing, if far less interesting, matters to claim his attention.
Dan sighed, tore his gaze away from the Langlois file and went on with the interminable task of sorting his father’s papers.
Chapter two
Sydney, Australia, 1991
Juliet Langlois looked at her mother and father across the kitchen and wondered if she would ever really understand either of them.
Her father, she supposed, was not really such an enigma. His vagueness and his preference for peace-at-all-costs could be said to explain a lot of things. Robin hated arguments, hated conflict of any kind, and was happiest when the world was passing him by. An accountant by profession he loved classical music, good wine and her mother, though not necessarily in that order, and as long as he had them he was quite content with life.
But Molly puzzled Juliet profoundly. How was it possible for anyone to have reached their middle forties and be so ingenuous? How was it possible for anyone to be so ingenuous and yet so secretive? To all intents and purposes Molly conveyed the impression of almost childlike innocence. Her tastes had never matured, she liked frills and ice-cream and easy beat music and hated being left alone. But she was also secretive to the point of paranoia. Certain things always made her clam up and if Juliet tried to pry further she would adopt an attitude of hurt self-righteousness as if to be questioned was a personal insult.
