For His Eyes Only(83)

                ‘Unfortunately, the Hadleys weren’t great art collectors. No one had the foresight to commission Gainsborough to paint the family portraits, buy Impressionists when they were cheap, snap up a Picasso or two.’

                ‘Ancestors can be so short-sighted. What about land? Or the cottages?’

                ‘The land is green belt and can’t be built on. The cottages are occupied by former members of staff. I’ll use what’s left from the sale to rehouse them.’

                ‘And the London flat?’

                ‘When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Ramsey insisted my grandfather sign a power of enduring attorney in my name. I sold the flat to finance his nursing care. There’s some money left, but not enough to pay the inheritance tax.’

                ‘Your grandfather might have raised you, Darius Hadley, but you are nothing like him.’

                ‘At seventeen I was halfway there. Arrogant, spoilt, thought I owned the world. If I’d stayed here, I would have been exactly like him.’

                She wanted to tell him he was wrong. She just tightened her hold around his waist and for a moment he buried his face in her hair. After a while, he said, ‘My grandmother came to my first exhibition. She was dying by then, but she defied him that once. I went to her funeral but when my grandfather saw me he thought I was my father and began ranting at me...’

                ‘Did Ramsey discover any more about what happened to your parents?’ she said, desperate to distract him from the horror of that image.

                ‘Only rumours. That the family had been caught trying to leave the country and they were all either rotting in jail or dead. That my father had made the whole story up just to get his hands on the money and he and Soraya were living somewhere in the sun. That my father was the victim of a honeypot trap and once he’d handed over the money he was disposed of. Take your pick.’

                ‘No. Not the last one.’

                And for the first time the smallest hint of a smile softened his face. ‘You know that for a fact, do you?’

                ‘One hundred per cent,’ she said. ‘Maybe, for a passion so intense that nothing else mattered they might have surrendered their son. Considered it their penance. But if it had been a con, Soraya would have got rid of you the second she realised she was pregnant.’

                Totally focused on him, on his pain, she saw the gone-in-a-moment swirl of emotion deep in his eyes; scudding clouds of joy, sorrow, dark and light, every shade of grey.

                ‘You didn’t know any of this? Growing up?’ He shook his head. ‘Gary. Gary told you.’ Who else? ‘Was it one too many beers on one of your owl-or badger-watching adventures?’

                ‘It wasn’t beer that loosened his tongue. It was a motorbike. He had an old bike that he’d rebuilt from scrap and he taught me to ride when I was barely tall enough to reach the pedals. When I got a brand-new bike for my seventeenth birthday he was the first person I wanted to share it with.’

                ‘Oh...’ She could see what was coming.

                ‘Young, brash, spoilt, it never occurred to me how he would feel. Obviously, I’d always had more than him, but this was grown-up stuff, stuff he wanted and could never afford on the pittance my grandfather paid him. Stuff I didn’t have to work for, but would come to me just because my name was Hadley. It was like a chasm had opened up between us and he lashed out with the only weapon he had to put himself back on top. It just came out. How my father had sold me so that he could be with his whore.’