Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (52 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight
February1974
Shades of Bruising

Robert had approached her early in February
with a pile of papers, and a worried look on his wise owl face. He had pointed out a few small discrepancies, mostly in Jamie’s foreign holdings, and a small bleed of shares that had been purchased under names that led to small companies appearing to be mere fronts for something larger and anonymous.

“The entire thing reminds me of a Potemkin village,” Robert said. “Complex fronts to fool the onlooker but nothing of substance behind the façade. Yet whoever it is, is doing damage.”

They put their heads together and followed the trails that seemed to leave only the occasional breadcrumb to guide them. The result was that Robert went off to Belgium to check on a potential lead and she stayed behind to man the fort and see if she could make any more headway in discovering what was going on.

It was like trying to follow the strands of a spider web in a snowstorm. Just when she thought she had found the end of the trail, it branched off into another direction. Something this well plotted would have taken immense time and patience, the sort of cunning that—well—that a spider would have.

She kept most of the files under lock and key at home now for she put nothing past Philip. The man had made good on his promise and was obviously not going to go away without his pound of flesh or fortune. Solicitors for both sides had come to a stalemate and she and Robert had quickly realized that her position, despite Jamie’s wishes, was very precarious.

This evening she had put Conor down for the night shortly after dinner. He was exhausted after two fretful days of teething. The tooth had broken through this afternoon, and he had eaten his dinner, had a bath and after a cuddle in the rocking chair, gone deeply to sleep. Casey was working late to finish up a job, so the house was quiet around her as she sat elbow-deep in neatly stacked ledgers, papers, account books and correspondence. It wasn’t long before the papers were sliding toward the edges of the table, the ledger books were crisscrossed, and the correspondence had been consigned to her knitting basket to be dealt with later.

The learning curve had been exceptionally steep, and she had been barely keeping abreast of things when she and Robert were thrown the curveball that was Uncle Philip. And now there was the elusive evidence that things were in no way straightforward on the edges of Jamie’s kingdom.

Casey came in some time later on a gust of frosty air, riffling the papers around her and startling her out of a doze.

“That excitin’, is it?” He bent over and kissed her, and the smell of wood and water filled her senses. She breathed in deeply, his scent always a restorative.

“Your supper’s in the warmer,” she said, and got up to stretch. “I’ll get it for you.”

“No, sit back down an’ tell me what’s got ye so frustrated,” he said, putting his coat on its peg, then filling the kettle and placing it on the Aga.

“How can you tell I’m frustrated?”

“Because yer hair is standin’ out around yer head like a porcupine caught the wrong way in a windstorm. Ye always twist yer hair about when yer troublin’ over something.”

She gave him a very green look and indicated the papers strewn all over the table.

“These damn numbers, I can’t make head nor tail of them. I don’t know what the hell Jamie was thinking, putting me in charge of all this. Robert noticed there have been discrepancies and brought it to my attention. But now he’s in Belgium for the next two weeks and can’t help me figure them out. Ultimately, it’s for me to get to the bottom of it and I can’t seem to. It’s like a maze of numbers and it’s only a hint here and a glimpse there, nothing to make a whole picture from to see what’s actually taking place.”

“Would ye like me to take a look?”

“Would you? If you can figure out what’s going on, I’ll be your slave for eternity.”

Casey grinned. “Don’t be after makin’ such rash statements, Jewel, because be certain I’ll hold ye to it.”

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 he 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.”