Chapter 16

Life, say the Americans, has a habit of throwing you a curveball. I believe it’s a baseball metaphor. I suppose the British equivalent would be Life sometimes bowls you a googly.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is that the Universe has a way of foisting the unexpected on you. I guess I’d had my fair share of that since last October. But the Universe didn’t seem to think so.

After spending about an hour reviewing the website analytics and bringing the company accounts up to date (Mel and Emma were proving quite good at keeping receipts but less good at recording them), I had four meetings scheduled. The first two had been clients of mine for years. The third was relatively new—a young man who’d come into some money through the loss of some loved ones. I’d looked after his investments on behalf of his trustees until he came of age and after an initial meeting, I’d agreed to continue to look after his finances.

All three meetings went well and were quite productive. All three were WestInvest members and knew all about my latest venture. The eldest of the three had even joked about filming a scene or two himself.

At least, I think he was joking.

My final meeting was with the new client my old firm had referred. Just after twelve, I got the call that she was waiting for me in the building’s shared reception area. I grabbed a notepad in a leather folio, a pen and a business card and headed down to meet her. My office was on the third floor, so rather than asking clients to traipse up there, I’d booked a small meeting room just off the reception to see them in.

When I entered the reception, only one person was sitting in the waiting area and she had her back to me. I approached from the side and said, “Mrs Astill, I’m—” The client turned to face me and I recognised her instantly. “Bea? What the fuck—?”

“Robert. Language.” Her tone was stern but her expression light.

I lowered my voice. “What are you doing here, Bea?”

My ex-wife stood and then smiled as she walked towards me. It was a predatory smile, just like it always had been. “I’m Mrs Astill. I’m your new client.”

I shook my head and narrowed my eyes. “You gave a false name?”

She shrugged. “Would you have agreed to meet me if you’d known who it was?”

“No,” I said, firmly.

“Exactly. Now, where are meeting? Or do you intend to discuss my affairs out here in the open?”

“I’ve half a mind to turn around, go back upstairs and leave you here.”

“But you won’t. You’re too curious to know why I’m here.” She stated it like it was fact and she had every right to be confident about it. She knew me very, very well.

I grunted and walked toward our meeting room. “Come on,” I said as I held the door open. “Let’s get this over with.”

Beatrice Smyth-Ryland, the third wife of The Right Honourable Lord Barrington Smyth-Ryland of Cheddington, walked past me into the office and took a seat. She was dressed in an elegant ladies’ business suit—a pale blue jacket and skirt over a white blouse and tan hose with colour matched court shoes—and her long blonde hair was in a smart, functional updo. Her ample bosom filled the blouse and her legs looked magnificent. Endless. The kind of legs a man loved to have wrapped—

I stopped myself. That train of thought led nowhere good.

Beatrice was a seductress. She always had been. She seduced me into marrying her and during our marriage, she’d seduced many men into doing what she wanted from them, normally without even having to follow through on her unspoken promises. But not always.

Let’s just say that while our marriage wasn’t exactly open, neither one of us completely bought into the notion of fidelity if it got in the way of what we wanted. We were a power-hungry, hedonistic, materialistic couple. And we didn’t pretend to be otherwise.

I sat on the opposite side of the small round desk to her. “So?”

“What, no chit chat? No catch-up? It’s been such a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Stop playing games, Bea. Why are you here? Why now? It’s been, what? Five years?”

“Near enough. Doesn’t seem very long, really does it? Just about half as long as our marriage.”

“What do you want, Bea?”

“What do I want? My fair share, that’s what I want.”

“Fair share? Of what?”

“Of Barrington’s estate, of course.”

“So, you’re divorcing him? You need a lawyer, not someone like me.”

“No, you fool, I’m not divorcing him. He died. Last month. Surely you heard about that?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up with Society news and gossip.” I paused. “My condolences on your loss.”

Beatrice waved her hand dismissively. “Heart attack during the night. It must have been a few hours or so after I’d drained his balls. I guess you could say I fucked him to death.”

Not a bad way to go, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.

“The point is,” Bea continued, “that the bastard pretty much cut me out of his Will.” She opened the leather document wallet she held in her lap and took out a set of papers stapled together in one corner. She held them out to me. “Here. Look.”

I took the papers from her. It was a copy of her late husband’s Will. There was silence as I scanned through it and not for the first time in my life I considered how much I hated the language of the law.

The Will made provision for Lord Smyth-Ryland’s interest in the family farming business to pass to his two sons by his first wife, James and Julian. The farm had been in the family for generations and was the basis of its wealth. The Lord himself hadn’t had anything to do with the farming side of things for many, many years, but was instead a businessman—turning the family farm into a large-scale business with land all over the country through aggressive acquisitions and mergers.

Then there were some other specific gifts before the Will dealt with the distribution of what I imagined was the not inconsiderable wealth that remained.

“So, you’re getting the apartment in London—”

“Lifetime interest, whatever that means!”

“It means you get to keep the apartment for as long as you live. Seems like a good deal to me. It’s what? A two-million-pound property?”

“Like that matters. It’s not like I can sell it, is it? That’s what Lifetime interest means, right?”

“Yes. But that’s not all. You’ve been gifted a half-a-million-pound legacy and five percent of the residual estate. It doesn’t look like you’ve been cut out of the Will to me.”

“Five percent! Five measly percent, Robert. One percent each of the five years I sucked that disgusting, wrinkled old dick. One percent for every year I lay back while he huffed and puffed and pumped away at me. Does that seem fair to you? I mean, look at what that little bitch is getting. Fifty-five percent! What has she done to deserve that? Huh?”

“Little bitch? I assume you mean his daughter?”

Lord Smyth-Ryland’s youngest child and only daughter, Felicity, by his second wife, was only five years younger than Beatrice, his third wife, and she’d made it very clear that she had never approved of the union. She was indeed getting fifty-five percent of her father’s residual estate while her brothers only got twenty percent each, with the final five percent going to his widow. That seemed fair to me given that Felicity wasn’t being handed a share of the farming business.

Bea huffed.

“Look, Bea, I don’t know what you expect me to do. It looks to me like you’ve got a lot of money coming your way. What is the estate worth, anyway?”

“I’m not sure exactly. After you take out the farm going to the Boys, which I suppose is only right since they already run the place —” I smiled at that. She referred to James and Julian as The Boys even though both were older than her. Unlike their sister, they’d never disapproved of Beatrice. In fact, I suspect both were rather close to their step-mother in ways that may have been seen by many as inappropriate. Not that I was one to criticise a socially inappropriate relationship with a step-child.

“Then there are the apartments for me and Bitchy McBitchy-Face and all those legacies for grand-children and other family and friends. I think there’s only about one hundred and twenty million left after that or something.”