The Perfect Sinner

Maddy had simply shaken her head, unable to explain to Louise why she remained married to her brother. How could she when she couldn’t really explain it to herself? All she could have said was that here at Haslewich she felt safe and secure … wanted and needed…. Here, while she had a task to complete, she felt able to side-line the issue of her marriage, to pretend to herself, while Max was away in London and she was here, that it was not, after all, as bad as it might seem to others.

The truth was, Maddy suspected that she didn’t divorce Max because she was afraid of what her life might be, not so much without him as without his family. It was pathetic of her, she knew, but it wasn’t just for herself that she was being what others would see as weak. There were the children to be considered as well.

In Haslewich they were part of a large and lovingly interlinked family network where they had a luxury not afforded to many modern children, the luxury of growing up surrounded by their extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins. The Crighton family was part of this area of Cheshire, and Maddy desperately wanted to give her children a gift that she considered more priceless than anything else; the gift of security, of knowing they had a special place in their own special world.

‘But surely if you lived in London, the children would be able to see much more of their father,’ one recent acquaintance had commented to her not long ago.

Madeleine had bent her neat head over the buttons she was fastening on Leo’s coat so that her hair fell forward, concealing her expression as she had responded in a muffled voice, ‘Max’s work keeps him very busy. He works late most evenings….’

Luckily the other woman hadn’t pressed the subject, but as she ushered Leo towards the path that cut across behind the building where he attended play school classes three mornings a week—Madeleine refused to use the car unless she absolutely had to, one of the pleasures of living in a small country town was surely that one could walk almost everywhere—Madeleine had felt acutely self-conscious. Within the family it was accepted that Max remained in London supposedly mostly during the working week, but in reality for much longer stretches of time than that, so that she and the children could often go weeks if not months on end without really seeing him.

Although her marriage was a subject that she never discussed—with anyone—Madeleine knew that Max’s family had to be aware that it wasn’t merely necessity that kept Max away.

Sometimes she was sorely tempted to confide in Jenny, Max’s mother, but the natural reticence and quiet pride that were so much a part of her gentle nature always stopped her, and what, after all, could Jenny do? Command Max to love her and the children; command him to …

Stop it, Madeleine hastily warned herself, willing her eyes not to fill with tears.

Max was already in a foul-enough mood without her making things any worse. He might not be the kind of man who would ever physically abuse either his wife or his children, but his silent contempt and his hostility towards them were sometimes so tangible that Madeleine felt she could almost smell the dark, bitter miasma of them in the air of a room even after he had left it.

The first thing she always did after one of his brief visits to Queensmead was to go round and open all the windows and to breathe lungsful of clean, healing fresh air.

‘Where’s that husband of yours?’ she remembered Ben asking her fretfully recently as he shifted his weight from his bad hip to his good one. The doctor had warned him the last time he had gone for a check-up that there was a strong possibility that he might have to have a second hip operation to offset the wear-and-tear caused to his good hip by him favouring it to ease the pain in his ‘bad’ one.

Predictably he had erupted in a tirade of angry refusal to accept what the doctor was telling him, and it had taken Madeleine several days to get him properly calmed down again.

But despite his irascibility and his impatience, she genuinely liked him. There was a very kind, caring side to him, an old-fashioned protective maleness that she knew some of the younger female members of his family considered to be irritating, but which she personally found rather endearing.

‘I do not know how you put up with him,’ Olivia had told her vehemently only the previous week. She had called to see Madeleine, bringing with her Christmas presents for Leo and Emma, and she had brought her two small daughters, Amelia and Alex, with her.

‘Daughters! Sons, that’s what this family needs,’ her grandfather had sniffed disparagingly when she had taken the girls in to see him. ‘It’s just as well we’ve got young Leo here,’ he had added proudly as he gazed fondly at his great-grandson.

‘I will not have him making my girls feel that they are in any way inferior to boys,’ Olivia had fumed later in the kitchen to Madeleine as they drank their coffee.

‘He doesn’t mean anything by it,’ Madeleine had tried to comfort her, pushing the plate of Christmas biscuits she had baked that morning towards Olivia as she spoke.

‘Oh, yes he does,’ Olivia had told her darkly as she munched one of them, ‘and I should know. After all, I heard enough of it when I was growing up. He never stopped making me feel … reminding me … that as a girl I could never match up to Max, and my father was just as bad. Sometimes I used to wish that Max had been my father’s child and that Uncle Jon had been my father….’

‘Jenny’s told me how dreadfully Gramps spoiled Max when he was growing up,’ Madeleine remarked quietly.

‘Spoiled him is exactly right,’ Olivia had agreed forthrightly, momentarily obviously forgetting that Madeleine was Max’s wife. ‘Anything Max wanted he got, and Gramps was forever boasting about him to everyone else. Whenever we had a get-together with the Chester lot, there was Gramps singing Max’s praises, and woe betide anyone who tried to argue with him.

‘I hate to think what it would have done to Gramps if Max hadn’t got a place in chambers. I know that it was touch-and-go for a while, and of course, the fact that your father is so influential obviously helped in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Madeleine had agreed. She knew Olivia far too well to suspect her of any kind of malice or unkindness. She was simply stating what she saw as the facts, and her opinions were quite naturally tainted by her dislike of Max. She had always been completely open with Madeleine about her feelings for her cousin, explaining that they went back a long way, and that much as she liked Madeleine herself, she doubted that she could ever pretend to feel anything other than wary acceptance of Max.

Did Olivia know that the only reason that Max had married her had been to further his career? Madeleine hoped not. Olivia was basically very kind-hearted, and Madeleine knew she would never have deliberately hurt her by raising the subject if she had known the whole truth.

‘Gramps is going to be putting an awful lot of pressure on Leo to follow in Max’s footsteps,’ she started to warn Madeleine, but Madeleine stopped her, shaking her head calmly.

‘Leo isn’t like Max,’ she told Olivia quietly. ‘I think if he takes after anyone, it’s Jon, and I suspect that if he does go into the law he will be quite happy to follow Jon into the Haslewich practice.

‘To be truthful, I think if any of the babes are destined to be real high flyers, it’s going to be your Amelia….’

Olivia had smiled lovingly at her elder daughter.

‘She is very quick and very determined,’ she had agreed, ‘but life doesn’t always turn out as we expect it to. Look at Louise. We all thought that she was going to be a real career girl, and look at her now. She and Gareth are so very, very much in love, and Louise is already talking about having a family and putting her career on hold. Now it’s Katie, whom all of us have always thought of as the quiet twin, the one who would probably settle down the first, who looks as though she’s going carve out a career for herself.’

Olivia didn’t say anything to her about the fact that she, Madeleine seemed to have no interest in anything outside her domestic life and her children, she noticed rawly.

‘Mmm … these cookies are delicious,’ Olivia had suddenly confounded her by saying. She added, ‘You could cook professionally, Maddy. I’m not surprised that you manage to coax Gramps into eating so well.’

Madeleine had said nothing, just as she had said nothing about the kitchen cupboards that were brimming with the fruits of her labours over the long summer and autumn—literally. She enjoyed gardening as well as cooking, and with Ruth’s expert tuition and assistance when she was in Haslewich, Madeleine had resurrected Queensmead’s neglected kitchen garden, with its espaliered fruit trees and its newly repaired glass house along its south-facing wall. She was presently cosseting the peach tree that had been Ruth and Jenny’s birthday present to her and that she hoped might bear fruit next summer.

Since moving into Queensmead, she had quietly and gently set about bringing the old house back to life—dusty rooms had been cleaned and repainted, furniture mended and waxed. She had even made the long trip north to Scotland to persuade her maternal grandparents to part with some of the sturdy country furniture not deemed grand enough for the lofty, elegant rooms of their Scottish castle and currently housed in its attics, but which she had known immediately would be perfectly at home at Queensmead.

Guy Cooke, the local antique dealer with whom Jenny had once been in partnership, had whistled in soundless admiration when he had visited Queensmead and been shown the newly revamped and furnished rooms.

‘Very nice,’ he had told Madeleine appreciatively. ‘Too many people make the mistake of furnishing houses like Queensmead with antiques that are far too grand and out of place, or even worse, buying replicas, but these … you’ve definitely got an eye, Maddy.’

‘It helps having grandparents with attics full of furniture,’ Madeleine had laughed as Guy turned to examine the heavy linen curtains she had hung in one of the rooms.

‘Wonderful,’ he had told her, shaking his head. ‘You can’t buy this stuff now for love nor money. Where …?’

‘My great-great-grandmother had Irish connections,’ Madeleine had told him mock-solemnly. ‘I found it …’

‘I know, in the attics,’ Guy had supplied for her.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Madeleine had laughed again. One of her third cousins had apparently been aggrieved to discover that Madeleine had made off with the linen from one of the many spare bedrooms, having earmarked it for some expensive decorating project herself.

‘I’m so looking forward to Christmas this year,’ Jenny suddenly said to her. ‘You’ve done wonders with Queensmead, Maddy, and it’s going to make the most wonderful venue for the family get-together. That’s one thing that the Chester family doesn’t have that I suspect they rather envy….’

‘Mmm … Queensmead is a lovely home,’ Madeleine agreed.

‘Jon’s had a word with Bran,’ Jenny told her, ‘and he’s arranged for the tree to be delivered the day after tomorrow. I’ll come round if you like and give you a hand decorating it.’

‘Yes, please,’ Madeleine accepted with alacrity. The Christmas tree that was to go in Queensmead’s comfortably sized entrance hall was coming from the estate of Bran T. Thomas, the Lord Lieutenant and a close friend of the family. Elderly and living on his own, he had been invited to join the family for Christmas dinner. Madeleine liked him. He had a wonderful fund of stories about the area and talked so movingly about his late wife that Madeleine often found her eyes filling with tears as she listened to him.

‘I think Louise is getting ready to leave,’ Jenny warned her daughter-in-law now, disturbing Madeleine from her reverie.

As she glanced towards the newly married couple, Maddy’s heart suddenly missed a beat. They seemed so happy, so much in love, Gareth looking tenderly down into Louise’s upturned face and then bending to kiss her. As they reluctantly broke apart, Maddy could quite plainly see the look of shimmering joy illuminating Louise’s face. It wasn’t that she begrudged Louise her happiness—how could she? It was just … it was just … Swallowing hard, Maddy looked the other way.

Obligingly Madeleine got up and went to separate her own two children from the happy mass playing in the adjacent anteroom.

Leo, who had been a page boy, had conducted himself with aplomb, and Emma had swiftly recovered from the morning’s bout of nausea, but they were tiring now as Madeleine’s experienced maternal eye could tell.

As Bobbie, Ruth’s granddaughter, came to find her own daughter, she grimaced at Madeleine and confided, ‘I’m not looking forward to a transatlantic flight on top of this….’

‘But it will be worth it once you’re with your family,’ Madeleine reminded her.

‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Bobbie agreed fervently.

As Luke came to join her and picked up their small daughter, cradling her tired body in his arms, Bobbie couldn’t help reflecting on the differences between Luke and Max.

Her Luke was a tender, loving father and an equally loving husband, while Max … Max might pretend in front of others—especially his grandfather—to be a caring human being, but Bobbie could see through that pretence.

Poor Maddy.

2

Poor Maddy. She had heard herself so described so often that sometimes she thought she ought to have been christened thus, Maddy reflected several hours later, unwillingly recalling hearing Bobbie whisper the two words under her breath as she had turned to smile at Luke.

Leo and Emma were safely tucked up in bed, their stories read and sleep not very far away.

Ben had gone to bed protesting that Maddy was fussing unnecessarily and that there was nothing wrong with him, even though it was perfectly obvious that he was in pain. Tiredly Maddy headed for her own bedroom. Supposedly it was the room she shared with Max on his rare visits home, but in reality … Max might deign to sleep in the large king-size bed alongside her, but for all the intimacy, the love, the natural closeness one might expect to be shared between a married couple, they might just as well have been sleeping in separate beds and at opposite ends of the large house.

On this occasion, though, Max was not intending to stay the night and had already left for London. Maddy had long since ceased to struggle with the pretence that their marriage was either happy or ‘normal,’ just as she had ceased to question the fact that Max was returning to London ostensibly to ‘work.’

And the worst thing about the whole horrid situation was not that Max cared so little for her, but that she cared so much. Too much. What had happened to the dreams she had once had, the bright shining hopes, the belief that Max loved her?

Her maternal ears, forever tuned, picked up the sound of a soft cry from Emma’s room. Tiredly she slid out of bed. Emma was going through a phase of having bad dreams.

Having parked his Bentley at the rear of the smart mews house he had bought with the wedding cheque given to them by Maddy’s grandparents, Max unlocked the front door and headed for the bedroom, dropping his overnight bag on the floor and stretching out full length on the bed as he reached for the telephone and confidently punched in a set of numbers.

The woman’s voice on the other end of the line sounded sleepy and soft.

‘Guess who?’ Max asked her, tongue in cheek.

There was a brief silence before she responded.

‘Oh, Max … But I thought! You said you were going to a family wedding and that you’d be staying for the weekend….’

‘So, I changed my mind,’ Max told her, laughing. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

‘Breakfast … Oh, Max … I don’t … I can’t …’

She sounded more alert now, and Max could picture her sitting up in bed in her Belgravia house, her tawny hair down round her shoulders, her skin honey gold from her recent holiday in Mauritius. He had flown out to join her there for five days.

‘Some client conference,’ the solicitor who had originally instructed him had commented enviously when he had handed Max Justine’s fax.

‘When you’re playing for millions, the cost of flying your barrister out for an urgent conference is pretty small beer,’ Max told him carelessly.

Justine was the wife of a millionaire, soon-to-be billionaire corporate raider. The first thing she had done when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her ‘friends’ was to instruct her solicitor that she wanted him to hire Max as her barrister, the second was to arm herself with as much evidence as she could of her husband’s business affairs, including his complex and often adventurously artistic interpretation of the tax laws.

Max had decided appreciatively that she had enough on him to make it a piece of cake for them to get her the kind of divorce settlement that would make her virtually as comfortably wealthy as his ex as she had been as his wife, and to get him the kind of publicity that would ensure that he maintained his position as the country’s foremost divorce barrister.

‘Divorce isn’t really the kind of thing we like to specialize in here in chambers,’ the most senior member, a QC and one of the country’s foremost tax law specialists, had advised Max stiffly when he had originally joined them. ‘It’s not really quite us, if you know what I mean.’

Max had known exactly what he meant, but he had also been acutely aware of the fact that it was only his father-in-law’s name that had got him a place in the chambers at all. He also knew that the only reputation he had then to gain him the clients who would bring him the kind of high profile and even higher income he craved so desperately was one of being unwanted and rejected by his previous ‘set,’ where he had been allowed to work only as a tenant and on the cases that no one else wanted to deal with.

His new chambers attracted a clientele who wanted and expected only the best barristers whose names and reputations they already knew, and so Max had seen a niche for himself in the one field where the chambers didn’t already have a specialist—matrimonial law.

That had been several years ago, and now Max’s reputation had grown and his name on a case was likely to strike dread in a wealthy husband about to enter the divorce arena.

The extremely high fees Max charged for his services weren’t the only benefit he earned from his work. Max had quickly and cynically discovered that newly divorced and about-to-be-divorced women very often had an appetite for sex and the male attention that went with it, which ensured him a constant turnover of willing bed mates.

One of the main advantages of these relationships, from Max’s point of view, was that they were always relatively brief. While his female clients were going through their divorces, he provided a comforting male shoulder to lean on, someone with whom they could share their problems as well as their beds. But once everything had been finalized, he was always able to very quickly and firmly detach himself.

If any of his lovers showed a tendency to cling and become possessive, he suddenly became far too busy with ‘work’ to be able to take their calls—they soon got the message. A new client, a new lover—it was time for Max to move on.

The affair with Justine, because of the extremely complex nature of her husband’s financial affairs and the huge amount of money potentially involved, had lasted considerably longer than usual, and as yet Justine’s husband had not been served with any divorce papers.

‘I’ve got at least two friends who got damn all out of their ex’s,’ Justine had told Max, showing him her expensive dental work in a very sharp, foxy smile.

‘I have no intention of allowing that to happen to me. Here is a list of the assets I intend to make a claim on,’ she had told Max, handing him an impressively long typed schedule.

They had been lovers for more than two months, and Max had to admit that he was impressed. He doubted that Justine had a single ounce of emotional vulnerability in her entire make-up. She was one of the most sexually demanding women he had ever had, abandoning herself completely and totally to the sexual act and not allowing him to stop until she was completely and utterly satisfied. But once she was, she was immediately and instantly back in control; her mind, her brain, were as sharp and dangerous as an alligator’s teeth.

Her husband would be lucky to escape with even half of his fortune intact, Max had decided as he listened to her plans for using her knowledge of his tax affairs to blackmail him into settling and giving her what she wanted.

‘I don’t intend to file for divorce until after this new deal he’s working on has gone through,’ she had told Max candidly. ‘It’s worth almost five hundred million, and I want to make sure I get my share of it.’

‘Look. I … I can’t talk now,’ he heard her saying quickly to him now. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’ll come round to your place….’

She had rung off before Max could object, leaving him angrily aware of his sexual frustration and even more importantly, with a sharp sense of unease.

It was going on for two o’clock in the morning, but he felt too restless for sleep. Max’s instinct for survival was very acute and very finely tuned. It had had to be. As his grandfather’s favourite he had spent his growing years fighting off any potential claims on his position from his siblings and cousins, and as a young adult he had had to strive to maintain that position.

Now that he was married to Madeleine, his grandfather’s favour didn’t matter in quite the same way. Madeleine’s trust funds were worth considerably in excess of his grandfather’s assets, but it wasn’t just the desire for wealth that drove Max. He had another need that in its way was just as intense, and that need was to stand apart from his peers, to set himself above them, to be envied by them. Friendship, affection, love, none of these interested Max nor mattered to him.

Supremacy, that was what Max craved. Supremacy and the security that came with it. The supremacy of being the best divorce barrister, the best QC, the best head of chambers in the best set of chambers. In Max’s opinion, there were two ways to gain those goals. The first was through merit and skill, the second—sometimes the more subtle—was an underhanded method of gaining power, which made its acquisition all the sweeter. To emerge as top dog was important when others had openly derided one’s fitness for such a role.

It had amused him recently to bump into Roderick Hamilton, the barrister who had beaten him on a vacancy they had both applied for in his last set of chambers and who had none too subtly crowed his victory over him.

Max had invited Roderick to join him for a drink and over it had encouraged him to talk about himself. He had learned that Roderick had married somebody from the county set, the lower echelons of the upper classes of whose acquaintanceship he had once boasted to Max.

His wife, to judge from the photograph he had shown Max, was the plain horsy type, and no, they had no children as yet … but they were trying…. His dream, it turned out, was to buy himself a small country house.

‘But they’re so damned expensive, old chap, and Lucinda’s wretched horses cost the earth to keep.’

Max had smiled and casually mentioned his own two children. Maddy’s grandparents’ family seat was also dropped into the conversation along with references to its history and its decor; not too much, just enough to ensure that Roderick realized that he, Max, was living the life-style that the other man so desperately wanted, that he had fathered the children that Roderick so far had not.

And sweetest of all had been when he had given him a lift home in his new Bentley, to coolly refuse the invitation extended for him and Maddy to join Roderick and his wife ‘for supper one evening.’