The Billionaire Banker(60)

Afterwards he carries her to the bed and dries her body carefully.

She looks up to him. ‘What are you thinking of?’

‘Your body.’

She says nothing.

‘Why did you walk so far in the rain?’

She stares into his eyes. They are unreadable. ‘I like the rain. I’ve always walked in the rain.’

‘But the rain in England is cold.’

‘I don’t know any other type of rain.’

He brings the hairdryer and a brush and sits on the bed with them beside him. Then he calls her to sit on the floor against the bed between his knees and begins to towel dry her hair. He is careful not to rub hard. Afterwards he runs his fingers through her hair and gently untangles any knots he finds. Only then does he switch on the hairdryer and begin to dry her hair. When he switches off the hairdryer she says, ‘You can’t cook but you can blow dry hair.’

‘I used to dry my sister’s hair for her.’

She swivels her neck around. ‘You don’t have a sister.’

Firmly he turns her head to face away from him. ‘I’ve told you before, don’t trust everything Wikipedia says.’

The brush glides through her hair in long, slow strokes.

‘Why is she not known to the public?’

‘She was born with a genetic anomaly. She’s not like you and me. She lives in her own world. All great families have such relatives—they just don’t acknowledge or advertise them. It’s an unfortunate effect of interbreeding.’

‘So she is locked away?’

There is a pause. ‘Something like that.’

‘Do you still see her?’

‘No, she is in our Buckinghamshire property. She has a whole wing and sectioned off grounds. Nurses and servants to care for her twenty-four hours a day.’
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‘What’s she like?’

‘A four-year-old child. She communicates by pointing and smiling.’ His voice is sad.

‘Why did you stop going to see her?’

The brush stops for a second, then starts again. ‘The last time I saw her was when I was twelve. I was brushing her hair and my mother walked into the room. She was horrified. “Are you going to become a great man like your father or a sissy like your great uncle George?” He is another family member that we all pretend doesn’t exist. I never went back after that.’

She turns around and catches his wrist. The brush stills mid-air. ‘I don’t care what anybody else says, you are a good man,’ she says.

‘Don’t fool yourself, Lana. We’re all no good. Don’t trust any of us. Not even me.’

‘Is there no one you trust?’

‘No one.’

‘Not even your dad?’

‘Dad?’ he repeats sarcastically. ‘Dad’s a sociopath.’

Lana’s eyes widen. ‘Isn’t he a great philanthropist?’

‘Naïve little Lana. My father’s a trillionaire. And there is no such thing as a philanthropist trillionaire. Do you know what one has to do to become a trillionaire? Spend your whole life crushing people for profit and then donate a library? I don’t trust him and neither should you. It would cause him the same grief to crush you if you stood in his way as it would if he trod on an ant in his path.’

‘Do trillionaires exist?’

‘Think, Lana. What is the debt of the United States alone? Who are all those lovely trillions owed to?’

‘The Federal Reserve?’

He laughs. ‘And who do you think owns that? The Federal Reserve is a private company just like the Bank of England, and every central bank throughout the world.

Through a network of holding companies, the old families own vast controlling portions of not only their stocks, but all the too-big-to-fail banks that you hate so much.’

Lana frowns. She needs time to think about the true meaning of what he has revealed to her. ‘What about your mother?’

‘My mother threw us to the wolves a long time ago. My brothers and I grew up in stifling conditions.’

Lana shakes her head. ‘And there I was, wishing I was rich, while I was growing up in stifling conditions.’

‘You don’t understand, Lana, and perhaps you never will. We are different. We are not merely rich. We don’t own tracts of land, we own countries and politicians. We have different responsibilities. We have an agenda.’ Then his face closes over.





Twenty nine

Your hands are inside my heart.

lake stands on the embankment and watches the Bwater rushing by. He thinks of Lana and feels confused. There is a room inside her that he can’t enter. It is like the room inside him that she cannot enter. It is where she keeps all the hurts he has caused. There are other things in that room, too. She has secrets now. He tries to imagine what else could be hidden there.