Now, all these years later, Matias was Art’s boss and in return Art was his most loyal employee. There was no one Matias trusted more. He motioned for Art to sit and leaned forward to take the mobile phone handed to him.
He scrolled down the three pictures capturing a small, homely, plump little creature leaving Carney’s mansion in an old car that looked as though its only wish was to breathe its last breath and depart for the great automobile parking lot in the sky.
Matias vaguely wondered why she wasn’t in a car befitting a man who had always made social climbing his priority.
But more than that he wondered who the hell the woman was and why he hadn’t heard of her before.
‘How is it that I am only now finding out that the man has a child?’ Matias murmured, returning the mobile phone to his friend and relaxing back in the chair. ‘In fact, how do you know for sure that the woman is his daughter?’
At a little after seven, his office was empty. It was still summertime hot, it was Friday and everyone else had better things to do than work. There was nothing pressing to hold his attention. His last lover had been dispatched a few weeks ago. Right now, Matias had all the time in the world to think about this development in his campaign.
‘She said so,’ Art told him, pushing his wire-rimmed spectacles up his nose and looking at his friend with some concern. ‘But I don’t suppose,’ he added uneasily, ‘it makes any difference, Matias. Does it?’
Matias pushed his chair back and stood up. Seated, he was formidable. Standing, he towered. He was six feet three of solid, packed muscle. Black-haired and black-eyed, the product of an Argentinian father and a dainty Irish mother, Matias had resoundingly come up trumps in the genetic lottery. He was sinfully beautiful, the hard lines of his lean face wonderfully chiselled into absolute perfection. Right at this moment, he was frowning thoughtfully as he strolled towards the floor-to-ceiling bank of glass that overlooked the busy London streets in the heart of the city.
From this high up, the figures down below were matchstick small and the cars and taxis resembled kids’ toys.
He ignored the latter part of his friend’s remark and instead asked, ‘What do you mean “she said so”? Surely I would have known if the man had offspring. He was married and it was a childless union.’ But in truth, Matias had been uninterested in the personal details of James Carney’s life.
Why would he care one way or another if the man had kids or not?
For years, indeed for as long as he could remember, he had been focused on bringing the man to his knees through his company. The company that should never have been Carney’s in the first place. The company that had been founded on lies, deceit and Carney’s outright theft of Matias’s father’s invention.
Making money and having the power associated with it within his grasp was so entwined with his driving need to place himself in a position to reach out and wrench Carney’s company from under his feet, that it would have been impossible to separate the two. Matias’s march towards wealth had also been his march towards satisfying his thirst for revenge. He had gained his first-class degree, had bided his time in an investment bank for two years, making the money he needed to propel himself forward, and then he had quit with money under his belt and a black book stuffed with valuable connections. And he had begun his remorseless rise to the top via mergers and acquisitions of ailing companies, getting richer and richer and more and more powerful in the process.
Throughout it all, he had watched patiently for Carney’s company to ail and so it had.
For the past few years, Matias had been circling the company, a predator waiting for exactly the right time. Should he begin the process of buying shares, then flooding the market with them so that he could plunge the company into a premature meltdown? Should he wait until the company’s health deteriorated beyond repair so that he could instigate his hostile takeover? Choices, choices.
He had thought about revenge for so long that there was almost no hurry but the time had finally come. The letters he had recovered from his mother’s possessions, before she had been admitted to hospital three weeks previously, had propelled him towards the inevitable.
‘Well?’ he prompted, returning to his chair although he was suddenly restless, itching now to start the process of retribution. ‘You had a convivial conversation with the woman? Tell me how you came to your conclusion. I’m curious.’
Matias looked at Art, waiting for clarification.
‘Pure coincidence,’ Art admitted. ‘I was about to turn into Carney’s drive when she came speeding out, swerved round the corner, and banged into the car.’
‘The woman crashed into my car? Which one?’
‘The Maserati,’ Art admitted. ‘Nasty dent but her car, sadly, was more or less a write-off. No worries. It’ll be sorted.’
‘So she banged into my Maserati,’ Matias hurried the story along, planning on returning to this little episode later down the line, ‘told you who she was and then...what?’
‘You sound suspicious, Matias, but that’s exactly what happened. I asked her if that was the Carney residence and she said yes, that her dad lived there and she had just seen him. She was in a bit of a state because of the accident. She mentioned that he was in a foul mood and that it might be a good idea to rearrange whatever plans I had with him.’
‘So there’s a daughter,’ Matias said thoughtfully. ‘Interesting.’
‘A nice girl, Matias, or so it would seem.’
‘Impossible.’ That single word was a flat denial. ‘Carney is a nasty piece of work. It would be downright impossible for him to have sired anything remotely nice.’ The harsh lines of his face softened. For all his friend’s days of being bullied, Art had an instinctive trust in the goodness of human nature that he, Matias, lacked.
Matias had no idea why that was because they were both mixed race, in Art’s case of Spanish descent on his mother’s side. They had both started at the bottom of the pecking order and had had to toughen up to defend themselves against casual racism and snobbery.
But then, Matias mused not for the first time, he and he alone had witnessed first-hand the way criminal behaviour could affect the direction of someone’s life. His father had met James Carney at university. Tomas Rivero had been an extraordinarily clever man with a gift for all things mathematical. He had also been so lacking in business acumen that when, at the age of twenty-four, he invented a computer program that facilitated the analysis of experimental drugs, he was a sitting duck for a man who had very quickly seen where the program could be taken and the money that could be made out of it.
James Carney had been a rich, young thing with a tribe of followers and an eye to the main chance. He had befriended Tomas, persuaded him into a position of absolute trust and, when the time was right, had accumulated all the right signatures in all the right places that ensured that the royalties and dividends from the software went to him.
In return, Tomas had been sidelined with a third-rate job in a managerial position in the already ailing family business Carney had inherited from his father. He had never recovered mentally.
This was a story that had unfolded over the years, although, in fairness to both his parents, nothing had ever been said with spite and certainly there had never been any talk of revenge on the part of either of them.
Matias’s father had died over a decade previously and Rose Rivero, from the very start, had not countenanced thoughts of those wheels turning full circle.
What was done, was done, as far as she was concerned. The past was something to be relinquished.
Not so for Matias, who had seen his father in those quieter moments, seen the sadness that had become a humiliating burden. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that being shoved in some dingy back office while you saw money and glory heaped on undeserving