The Perfect Match (2 page)

'Tell me about it,' Guy invited. 'When I went up there to do a valuation on the antiques for his insurance company, he practically hit the roof when I told him that he was going to need to have an alarm system installed. I take it he never did?'

'Well, you know Ben,' Jenny sighed. 'Luckily they didn't take very much and the police think they must have been disturbed either by the phone ringing or by someone arriving at the house.'

'It's so hard to contemplate that someone would actually break in in broad daylight and calmly proceed to remove not just small items but actual pieces of furniture, as well.'

'The police did warn us that there's very little chance of our getting anything back. Apparently there's been a spate of these kinds of robberies recently and they think it's gangs coming out from the city wanting to make money to buy drugs. The new motorways, of course, facilitate a quick getaway and make them and the stolen property so much harder to trace.'

'But you've managed to persuade the old boy to have someone living in?' Guy questioned her as he started to check through the contents of a large pack-ing case that contained goods from a house clearance.

Junk in the main, he suspected, but you never knew....

'Well, unfortunately, no,' Jenny replied. 'But Maddy is due to arrive at the end of the week. You know she always comes up from London to spend a few weeks here in the summer.'

'Will Max be coming with her?' Guy asked, referring to Jon and Jenny's elder son and Maddy's husband.

Jenny bit her lip. 'No...no, he won't. It seems he's heavily involved on a case at the moment and he's going to have to fly out to Spain to see his client.

She's got a yacht that's apparently in a marina out there.'

Max was a barrister working from a prestigious set of chambers in London. He specialised in divorce work and it hadn't escaped Guy's notice that most of his clients were women. Max liked women, or rather he liked the boost to his ego that deceiving them gave him.

Guy did not have a very high opinion of Max but he cared far too much for Jenny to let her know it.

Life hadn't always been easy for Jenny and although she and her husband, Jon, were happy together now...

Unlike Max, Guy genuinely did like women, all women, but some women especially so. Women like Jenny—warm, gentle, womanly women with quiet, understated beauty. Their more flashy, visually eye-catching counterparts held very little allure for Guy.

He was a physically good-looking man himself and well knew how worthless mere good looks could be.

A warm, loving, caring nature, though, now
that
was something that time could never erode, something enduring and worthy of loving, cherishing...

But he had long ago come to accept that Jenny was not for him; that she loved her husband and would never see him as anything more than a friend. 'A much younger friend' as she had once stressed to him, reminding him of the age gap between them. At thirty-nine Guy no longer considered himself to be particularly 'young'.

'Apart from the shock of the burglary itself, the thing that's upset Ben the most,' Jenny was saying,

'is losing the little yew desk. His father apparently had it copied from the French original that belonged to
his
grandmother. It was a very pretty little piece, but being a copy, not really of any great financial value.'

'But a good deal of sentimental value,' Guy suggested.

'Very much so,' Jenny concurred. 'When I was talking to Luke about it the other day, he told me that the Chester side of the family owned a matching pair of the original from which Ben's desk was copied and that they had been gifts brought back from France for the twin daughters of the Crighton who bought them.

His father now has one of them and his uncle the other.'

'Mmm...well, perhaps the thief or thieves didn't realise Ben's was a copy.'

'Maybe not, although the police seem to think they probably took it because it was in the hallway and easy to move like the silver and jewellery they took.

'Ruth and I had to spend virtually a whole day checking over the house and listing what was missing.

Ben certainly wasn't in any fit state to help and although, of course, I had some knowledge of what should have been there, Ruth, as Ben's sister, was naturally much more accurate.'

'She's back from the States, then?'

'Yes, she and Grant flew in on Saturday.' Jenny laughed. 'I think it's wonderful how the two of them have stuck to their agreement to spend alternate three months in one another's countries.'

'It's lovely to see them together. They're so much in love, even now.'

'Well, I imagine all that they've been through must make the time they're having together now all the more precious.'

'I agree. Real confirmation that fact can be stranger than fiction.'

'And real love so strong that nothing can diminish or destroy it,' Jenny added softly. 'In all the years they were apart, neither of them was ever tempted to marry someone else.'

'But at least they're together now and so deeply in love that Bobbie complains that despite the fact that they were all married at the same time, Ruth and Grant are a far more romantic couple than her and Luke.'

'Well, Bobbie and Luke do have a young child and two busy careers,' Guy commented, 'while her grandparents are both retired and free to concentrate exclu-sively on one another.'

'They may both be retired but Ruth is still on half a dozen local committees as well as running her single-parent units,' Jenny reminded him. 'And Grant has an extraordinary spread of business interests to keep him busy. I sometimes feel exhausted just listening to what they've been doing. I can't help comparing their energy and the enjoyment they get out of life with Ben's growing lack of interest in everything.'

Jenny's forehead pleated in a worried frown as she reflected on her father-in-law.

'Is he still going ahead with his hip-joint replace-ment operation?' Guy asked her.

'I hope so,' Jenny told him feelingly. 'It's sched-uled for the end of the summer and the plan was that Maddy would be there when he comes out of hospital to look after him. He responds far better to her than he does to any of us, partially because she's Max's wife, of course, and so far as Ben is concerned, Max can do no wrong.'

'But not so far as you, Max's mother, are concerned,' Guy offered shrewdly.

Jenny shook her head. 'Ben has always spoiled Max and Max has never needed any encouragement to believe he deserves to receive preferential treatment. I did hope that when he and Maddy married...'

She stopped and shook her head, changing the subject to ask, 'Anything interesting in that lot?'

'Not really,' Guy replied, taking his cue from her and letting the subject drop, switching from discussing personal matters to their shared business interests.

'I've had a call to do another house clearance this morning although I doubt that there'll be anything there of any interest. Charlie Platt,' he added grimly.

'Charlie Platt?' Jenny queried, frowning again, then her expression clearing. 'Oh yes, I know who you mean.'

'Yes,' Guy went on. 'By all accounts he virtually drank himself to death.'

'Oh, poor man,' Jenny sympathised compassionately.

'Poor man nothing,' Guy told her grimly. 'He was the biggest con man in town. His parents publicly dis-owned him. He died leaving debts all over the place.'

From the tone of his voice, Jenny wondered if Guy was one of the people he had owed money to. If so, she doubted that Guy would admit, even to her, that he had been taken advantage of.

Normally an easygoing, compassionate man, generally inclined to judge others gently rather than harshly, he also possessed a surprisingly fierce streak of pride, accentuated, Jenny suspected, by the fact that his family, the Cooke clan, various members of whom were spread throughout the town, had originated, so local history had it, from the unsanctified union of one of a band of travelling Romany Gypsies and the naively innocent daughter of a town schoolmaster. They were generally held in a mixture of awe and contempt by their less enterprising and energetic peers.

The girl had been married off in haste and disgrace to a local widowed tavern keeper desperately in need of someone to take charge of his sprawling brood of existing children.

Dependent upon where you stood in the local hi-erarchy, there was a tendency to regard the activities of the Cooke clan, both professionally and privately, as extremely suspect or extremely enviable.

Over the generations, the name Cooke had become synonymous, not just with the local taverns and public houses that they ran, but also with such disparate activities as poaching, gaming and other enterprising methods of increasing their income, a habit the more God-fearing local folk were inclined to put down to the genes they had inherited from their roving-eyed Gypsy forebears.

Not that any members of the family went in for poaching or its equivalent these days.
That
practice had died out with his grandfather's generation, Guy had once wryly told Jenny, along with the bulk of his then-adult male relatives, most of whom had been with the Cheshire Regiment during the First World War.

'But that kind of reputation is hard to lose,' Guy had told Jenny. 'Once a Cooke, always a Cooke!'

'And having those brigandish dark good looks of yours doesn't help,' Jenny had teased him gently.

'No,' Guy had agreed shortly. He had lost count of the number of fathers who had sternly admonished their daughters against dating him when he had been younger. He thought now that he must have been the only teenage boy in the locality to have gained the reputation of being wild and dangerous whilst still possessing his virginity.

It was half-day closing, and after Jenny had left and Guy had locked up the shop, he went home to work on his other business interests, which ranged from a half share in the very popular local restaurant owned by one of his sisters and her husband to a smaller share in a firm of local builders owned by yet another relative.

He had recently been considering the validity of investing in small local properties that could be ren-ovated and then let out on short-term leases to employees of one of the large multinationals that had recently started to move into the area.

Antiques, especially furniture, were his first love but the business he shared with Jenny was hardly sufficient to keep him fully occupied.

He frowned as he studied the post. He and Jenny were the prime motivators behind the Antiques Fair that was due to be held at Fitzburgh Place the following month, a combined event to promote the area and hopefully raise money for Jenny and Ruth's pet charity, the single mothers homes scheme, which Ruth had started as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried mother.

As Guy started to check off the list of exhibitors to the fair against the list of invitation letters he had sent out, he remembered what Jenny had said about Charlie Platt.

He and Charlie had been at school together.. .just.

Guy had entered the school just as Charlie was on the verge of leaving it to move up to the seniors.

A thin, pale boy, who had suffered badly from childhood asthma, which thankfully he had later out-grown, Guy had shown no signs then of the fact that as an adult male he would grow up to be strong and muscular. He had been small and vulnerable-looking, the youngest of his mother's brood, a quiet, studious boy whom his female siblings had mothered and whom Charlie Platt had immediately and instinctively focused on as an ideal victim for his practice of blackmailing the vulnerable into parting with their dinner money.

Guy had tried to resist, refusing trenchantly to hand over the money—he was, after all, well used to being cuffed and teased by his much larger and far more boisterous male cousins—but he had had one fear he kept hidden from his family and that was of water.

Because of his asthma, he had never been allowed to learn to swim or to play in the river that bounded the town in case the cold water brought on an attack.

Charlie Platt had very quickly discovered Guy's fear, both of the river and, even more importantly, of other people's discovering how he felt. Predictably he had made use of it.

Guy knew he would never forget the day Charlie Platt had held him under the water for so long that Guy had really believed he was going to die, probably would have died if one of his bigger and older cousins hadn't happened to come along, seen what was happening and treated Charlie Platt to the kind of rough justice that boys of that age could mete out to one another, blacking his eye, bruising his pride and put-ting an end to Guy's torment.

That summer, Guy had taught himself to swim, and after Charlie had left the school Guy hadn't come across him again until they were both adults, by which time Charlie was already drinking heavily and gaining something of an unsavoury reputation for himself.

And now Charlie was dead. Guy couldn't feel surprised, nor sorry, and he certainly had no desire to accommodate the terse telephone instructions he had received via his answerphone from the young woman who had announced herself as Chrissie Oldham.

Who exactly was she? She had sounded too crisp and businesslike to be one of the steady stream of women who, at one time or another, had shared Charlie's roof. She must have been employed to sort out the estate.

Guy's frown deepened. One thing Charlie's death had done was to focus his own mind on the fact that he was close to forty with little to show for his life other than a healthy bank balance and a small group of friends.

Avril, his next to eldest sister, had complained to him at Christmas that it was high time he got married and produced a family of his own, as she watched him playing with her own grandchildren. Grandchildren!! But then Avril
was
fifteen years his senior.

He had no plans to follow her advice, though. There was no way he could share his life, commit his life...his self to another person without loving her to the point where life without her would quite simply be an untenable option.

And he had only once come even close to feeling like that and she... He got up and walked across to the window, then stood staring out at the view in front of him.