How on earth could she have been so complacent? Allowed herself to think that difficult teenagers were products of other people? That her own daughter was as safe as houses?
Her last thought as she drifted into sleep was that she would have to do something about the situation. She wasn’t going to sit back and let life dictate to her. She would damn well do the dictating herself.
It was only on the Sunday evening, after she had made sure that Lucy sat down with her books, after she had checked her work, knowing that her efforts at supervision were tolerated, but only just, after she had delivered several more mini-lectures on the subject of education—after, in fact, Lucy had retired to bed in a fairly good mood despite everything—that the idea occurred to her.
No point fighting this battle single-handedly.
She could sermonise until she went blue in the face, but the only way she could get Lucy back onto the straight and narrow would be to collect her from school and then physically make sure that she stayed rooted inside the house.
It was an option that she shied away from. Once down that particular road, she might find the seeds she had sown far more dangerous than the ones she was hoping to uproot.
No, there was a better way. She knew relatively little about Mark Newman, but she knew enough to realise that he was an influence over Lucy.
And Mark Newman had a father.
She doubted that she could appeal to the boy’s better instincts. A seventeen-year-old who saw nothing wrong in keeping a child of sixteen out until two in the morning probably had no better instincts.
She would go straight to the father.
Naturally, Lucy couldn’t be told. Jessica felt somewhat sneaky about this, but in the broader scheme of things, she told herself, it was merely a case of the end justifying the means.
Nevertheless, at nine-thirty, when she picked up the telephone to make the call, the door to the sitting room was shut and she knew that she had the studied casualness of someone doing something underhand.
It hadn’t helped that the man was ex-directory and she had had to rifle through Lucy’s address book to find the telephone number.
She listened to the steady ringing and managed, successfully, to persuade herself that what she was doing she was doing for her daughter’s sake. Most mothers would have done the same.
The voice that eventually answered snapped her to attention, and she straightened in her chair.
‘May I speak to Mr Newman, please?’
‘I’m afraid he’s not here. Who’s calling?’
‘Can you tell me when he’ll be back?’
‘May I ask who’s calling?’
‘An old friend,’ Jessica said, thinking on her feet. No point launching into an elaborate explanation of her call. She had no idea whose voice was at the other end of the phone, but it sounded distinctly uninviting. ‘I haven’t seen Mr Newman for years, and I just happened to be in the country so I thought I’d give him a ring.’
‘May I take your name?’
‘I’d prefer to surprise him, actually. He and I…well, we once knew each other very well.’
It suddenly occurred to her that there might be a Mrs Newman on the scene, but then she remembered what Lucy had said—‘there’s only his dad’—and she must be right, because the voice down the line lost some of its rigidity.
‘I see. Mr Newman should be back early tomorrow morning. He’s flying in from the States and going straight to work.’
Jessica chuckled in a comfortable, knowing way. ‘Of course. Well, he hasn’t changed!’ It was a good gamble, and based entirely on the assumption that men who travelled long haul only to head straight to the office belonged to a certain ilk.
‘Perhaps you could tell me where he works? It’s been such a while. I’m older now, and the memory’s not what it used to be. Is he still…where was it…? No, just on the tip of my tongue…” She laughed in what she hoped was a genuine and embarrassed manner, feeling horribly phoney.
‘City.’ The voice sounded quite chummy now. He rattled off the full address which Jessica dutifully copied down and secreted in her handbag.
And tomorrow, Mr Newman, you’re in for a surprise visit.
At ten past ten on Sunday evening, sleep came considerably easier.
She made her way to the City offices as early as she could the following morning, after a quick call to Stanford, James and Shepherd, telling them that she needed to have the day off because something unexpected had turned up, and then the usual battle with the underground, packed to the seams because it was rush hour and coincidentally heading into the height of the tourist season.
She had dressed for the weather. A sleeveless pale blue dress, flat sandals. Yet she could still feel the stifling heat seeping into her pores. Temperatures, the weather men had promised, were going to hit the eighties again. Another gorgeous cloud-free day.
She wished that she could close her eyes and forget all these problems. Go back to a time when she’d been able just to whip Lucy along to the park for a picnic, when the nearest thing to defiance had been a refusal to eat a ham sandwich.
She allowed herself to travel down memory lane, and only snapped back to the present, with all its worrying problems, when her destination confronted her—a large office block, all glass and chrome, like a giant greenhouse in the middle of London.
Inside it bore some resemblance to a very expensive hotel foyer. All plants and comfortable sitting areas and a circular reception desk in the middle.
Jessica bypassed that and walked straight to the lifts. She knew what floor the Newman man was located on. She had managed to prise that snippet of information from the unwelcome recipient of her phone call the evening before, still working on the lines of the wonderful surprise she would give him by turning up, and shamelessly using a mixture of charm and flirtatiousness to wheedle the information from him.
The man, she had thought since, would never have made a security guard. Did he dispense floor numbers and work addresses to every caller who happened to telephone out of the blue and claim acquaintanceship with his employer?
But she had been grateful for the information, and she was grateful now as the lift whizzed her up to the eighth floor.
Receptionists, she knew from first-hand experience, could be as suspicious as policemen at the scene of a crime, and as ruthless in dispatching the uninvited as bouncers outside nightclubs. Paragons or dragons, depending on which side of the desk you were standing.
Stepping out on the eighth floor was like stepping into another world.
There was, for starters, almost no noise. Unlike the offices where she worked, which seemed to operate in a permanent state of seemingly chaotic activity—people hurrying from here to there, telephones ringing, a sense of things that should have been done sooner than yesterday.
The carpet was dull green and luxuriously thick. There was a small, open-plan area just ahead of her, with a few desks, a few disconcertingly green plants, and secretaries all working with their heads down. No idle chatter here, thought Jessica, trying to think what this said about their bosses. Were they ogres? Did they wield such a thick whip that their secretaries were too scared to talk?
She slipped past them, down the corridor, passing offices on her left and pausing fractionally to read the name plates on the doors.
Anthony Newman’s office was the very last one along the corridor.
Strangely, she felt not in the least nervous. She had too many vivid pictures in her head of her daughter being led astray by the neglected son of a workaholic for nerves to intrude.