It had been Dee’s first choice of university, since it had offered the courses she’d wanted to take, and, more importantly, had meant that she wouldn’t have to move too far away from her father. In those days the new motorway which now linked the university town to Rye had not been built, and the drive had taken closer on four hours than two, which had meant that she had had to live in student digs rather than commute from home.
Those days…How long ago those words made it seem, and yet, in actual fact, it had only been a mere ten years. Ten years…a different life, a lifetime away in terms of the girl she had been and the woman she was now. Ten years. It was also ten years since her father’s unexpected death.
Her father’s death. Dee knew how surprised those who considered themselves to be her closest friends would be if they knew just how profoundly and deeply she still felt the pain of losing her father. The pain—and the guilt?
Abruptly she switched off her computer and got up.
Seeing Anna had done more than reawaken her own secret longing for a child. It had brought into focus things she would far rather not dwell on. What was the point? What was the point in dwelling on past heartaches, past heartbreaks? There wasn’t one. No, she would be far better employed doing something productive. Absently—betrayingly—she touched the bare flesh of her ring finger, slightly thinner at its base than the others. Other things—such as what?
Such as driving over to Lexminster and visiting Peter, she told herself firmly. It was a couple of weeks since she had last seen him, and she tried to get over at least once a fortnight, making her visits seem spur-of-the-moment and accidental, or prompted by the need for his advice on some aspect of her charity work so as to ensure that his sense of pride wasn’t hurt and that he didn’t guess how anxious she had become about his failing health.
Her sleek car, all discreet elegance, just as discreetly elegant as she was herself, ate up the motorway miles to Lexminster, the journey so familiar to her that Dee was free to allow her thoughts to drift a little.
How excited she had been the first time she had driven into the town as a new student, excited, nervous, and unhappy too, at leaving her father.
She could still vividly remember that day, the warm, mellow late-September sunshine turning the town’s ancient stone buildings a honey-gold. She had parked her little second-hand car—an eighteenth-birthday present from her father—with such care and pride. Her father might have been an extremely wealthy man, but he had taught her that love and loyalty were more important than money, that the truly worthwhile things in life could never be bought.
She had spent her first few weeks at university living in hall and then moved into a small terraced property, which she had co-bought with her father and shared with two other female students. She could still remember how firm her father had been as he’d gone over the figures she had prepared to show him the benefits of him helping her to buy the cottage. He had known all the time, of course, the benefits of doing so, but he had made her sell the idea to him, and she had had to work too, to provide her share of the small mortgage payments. Those had been good years: the best years of her life—and the worst. To have gone from the heights she had known to the depths she had plummeted to so shockingly had had the kind of effect on her that no doubt today would have been classed as highly traumatic. And she had suffered not one but two equally devastating blows, each of which…
The town was busy; it was filled with tourists as well as students. All that now remained of the fortified castle around which the town had been built were certain sections of carefully preserved walls and one solitary tower, an intensely cold and damp place that had made Dee shiver not just with cold but with the weight of its history on the only occasion on which she had visited it.
Economics had been her subject at university, and one which she had originally chosen to equip her to work with her father. But there had always co-existed within her, alongside her acutely financially perceptive brain, a strong streak of idealism—also inherited from her parents—and even before she had finished her first university term she had known that once she had obtained her degree her first choice of career would be one which involved her in using her talents to help those in need. A year’s work in the field, physically assisting on an aid programme in one of the Third World countries, and then progressing to an administrative post where her skills could be best employed, had been Dee’s career plan. Now, the closest she got to helping with Third World aid programmes was via the donations she made to their charities.
Her father’s untimely death had made it impossible for her to carry on with her own plans—for more than one reason. Early on, in the days when she had dutifully taken over the control of his business affairs, there had been a spate of television programmes focusing on the work of some of the large Third World aid organisations. She had watched them with a mixture of anguish and envy, searching the lean, tanned faces hungrily, starving for the sight of a certain familiar face. She had never seen him, which was perhaps just as well. If she had…
Dee bit her bottom lip. What on earth was she doing? Her thoughts already knew that that was a strictly cordoned-off and prohibited area of her past, an area they were simply not allowed to stray into. What was the point? Faced with a choice, a decision, she had made the only one she could make. She could still remember the nightmare journey she had made back to Rye-on-Averton after the policeman had broken the news to her of her father’s death—‘a tragic accident,’ he had called it, awkwardly. He had only been young himself, perhaps a couple of years older than her, his eyes avoiding hers as she’d opened the door to his knock and he’d asked if she was Andrea Lawson.
‘Yes,’ she had answered, puzzled at first, assuming that he was calling about some minor misdemeanour such as a parking fine.
It had only been when he’d mentioned her father’s name that she had started to feel that cold flooding of icy dread rising numbingly through her body.
He had driven her back to Rye. The family doctor had already identified her father’s body, so she had been spared that horrendous task, but of course there had been questions, talk, gossip, and despite the mainly solicitous concern of everyone who’d spoken with her Dee had been angrily conscious of her own shocking secret fear.
Abruptly Dee’s thoughts skidded to a halt. She could feel the anger and tension building up inside her body. Carefully she took a deep breath and started to release it, and then just as carefully slid her car into a convenient parking spot.
Now that the initial agonising sharpness of losing her father had eased Dee wanted to do something beyond renovating Lawson House to commemorate his name and what he had done for his town. As yet she was not quite sure what format this commemoration would take, but what she did know was that it would be something that would highlight her father’s generosity and add an even deeper lustre to his already golden reputation. He had been such a proud man, proud in the very best sense of the word, and it had hurt him unbearably, immeasurably, when…
She was, Dee discovered, starting to grind her teeth. Automatically she took another deep breath and then got out of her car.
In the wake of the arrival of the town’s new motorway bypass there had also arrived new modern industry. Locally, the town was getting a reputation as the county’s equivalent to America’s silicone valley. The terrace of sturdy early Victorian four-storey houses where Peter lived had become a highly covetable and expensive residential area for the young, thrusting executive types who had moved into the area via working in the new electronics industries, and in a row of shiny and immaculately painted front doors Peter’s immediately stuck out as the only shabby and slightly peeling one.
Dee raised the knocker and rapped loudly twice. Peter was slightly deaf, and she knew that it would take him several minutes to reach the door, but to her surprise she had barely released the knocker when the door was pulled open. Automatically she stepped inside and began, ‘Goodness, Peter, that was quick. I didn’t expect—’
‘Peter’s upstairs—in bed—he collapsed earlier.’
Even without its harshly disapproving tone the familiarity of the male voice, so very, very little