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No. But for circumstances, she could have been one of them. A barrister. Well-read, treading a career path, moving upwards and onwards. Qualified.
Lucy might not appreciate the importance of completing her education, but Jessica was damned if she would let opportunity slip through her daughter’s fingers the way that it had slipped through hers.
Mark Newman. The name that had cropped up on several occasions. She racked her brains to try and locate when that name had first been mentioned. Had Lucy mentioned anyone else’s?
Jessica couldn’t remember, but she didn’t think so. No, Lucy had been happily drifting through with her schoolfriends, and her only show of rebellion had been her rapid change of dress code, from jeans and jumpers to long black skirts and flamboyant costume jewellery.
She could remember laughing with Kath’s mum at the abrupt transformation, astonished at how quickly it had marked the change from girl to teenager, quietly pleased that really there was nothing for her to worry about.
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. If people couldn’t rustle up time for their children, then as far as she was concerned they shouldn’t have them.
She knocked on the door, not in the least anticipating that the workaholic Newman person might be involved in a meeting somewhere else, and her knock was answered immediately.
Jessica pushed open the door, hardly knowing what to expect, still fuelled by a sense of fully justified parental concern, and was immediately confronted by a large expanse of carpet, an imposing oak desk, and behind that a man whose initial appearance momentarily made her stop in her tracks.
The man was on the phone. His deep voice was barking orders down the line. Not loudly, but with a certain emphatic quietness that made some of her sense of purpose flounder.
She looked at him as he gestured to her to take a seat, and was unwillingly fascinated by the curious, disorientating feeling of power and authority he seemed to give off.
Had she been expecting this? She realised that at the back of her mind she had anticipated someone altogether less forbidding.
It was only when she was seated that she became aware that he was watching her with an equal amount of curiosity. He continued talking, but his cool grey eyes were focused on her, and she abruptly looked away and began inspecting what she could see of his office from where she was sitting.
Not much. Not much, at any rate, that didn’t include him in the general picture.
‘Who,’ he said, replacing the telephone and catching her while her attention was focused on a painting on the wall—an abstract affair whose title she was trying to guess—‘the hell are you? What do you want and how were you allowed into my office?’
His voice was icy cold, as was everything about him.
Jessica looked at him and felt a shiver of apprehension which she immediately slapped down.
His was a face, she thought, designed to stop people in their tracks. Everything about it was arresting. It wasn’t simply a matter of strikingly well-formed features. More what they revealed. An impression of vast self-assurance and intelligence. He was the sort of man, she thought, who was accustomed to wielding power, to having orders obeyed, to snapping his fingers and having people jump to attention. He was also younger than she had anticipated. Late thirties at the most.
What a shame he obviously couldn’t keep a handle on his own son.
Jessica smiled politely, keeping her thoughts to herself.
‘I take it you’re Anthony Newman?’
‘You haven’t answered my questions.’
‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but I thought that the sooner we had a little chat, the better.’
‘If you don’t answer me right now,’ he said softly, leaning forward, ‘then I’m afraid I’m going to have to call a security guard and have you removed from the premises. How did you get in here?’
‘I took the lift up and walked down the corridor.’
‘I don’t have time for games.’
Neither, thought Jessica icily, do you have time for your son. Which is why I’m here in the first place.
‘I tried phoning you last night, but I was told that you were away on business and wouldn’t be back until this morning.’
‘Did Harry tell you where I worked?’
‘The man who answered the telephone did, yes.’
He didn’t say anything, but there was a look in his eyes that didn’t augur well for Harry’s fate.
What would he do? Jessica wondered anxiously. Sack the hapless Harry on the spot? Roast him over an open spit? Anything was possible. The Newman man looked like someone who ate raw meat for breakfast.
‘You’re not going to…do anything…are you?’ she asked, worriedly. ‘I mean…it wasn’t his fault… I implied that you and I were acquaintances…well, quite good friends, actually. I told him that you would be pleasantly surprised to see me…after all this time…delighted, in fact…’ Her voice trailed off, along with a fair amount of her momentum.
‘Now, why would you imply anything of the sort?’ He looked at her coldly and assessingly, and whereas anyone else might well have been trying to cast their mind back, wondering perhaps whether they knew who she was, she could tell that that wasn’t on his mind at all. This man knew quite well that he had never seen her in his life before.
Impressions of him, she realised, were mounting by the second, and none of them were going any distance towards putting her at her ease.
‘It seemed the quickest route to getting to see you,’ she said flatly, and his eyes narrowed.
‘Well, well, well. You don’t beat about the bush, do you?’
‘I have no reason to.’ She didn’t care for the look in his eyes, but was damned if she was going to be intimidated. She wasn’t easily frightened. Her past had strengthened her, and if he wanted to play mind games with her then he was in for a surprise.
‘If you’re after money, then I’m afraid you’ve taken the wrong route.’ He glanced down at some documents lying on his desk. Having made his deductions as to her reason for being in his office, his curiosity was giving way to indifference. In a minute, she suspected, he would look at his watch, yawn, then stand up and politely usher her to the door.
‘My company already contributes a sizeable amount towards charities.’ He linked his fingers together, dragged his eyes away from the document, and looked her over. ‘And a little word of advice here—if you want someone to give you a donation, the very last thing you should do is connive your way into their offices and try to catch them off guard. People generally don’t care for the element of deviousness involved.’
Jessica found that she was leaning forward in her chair.
‘I am not here in connection with a request for money, Mr Newman.’
His eyebrows flew up at that. ‘Then why are you here?’ Mild curiosity there, she saw. He probably thought that she would get back to the subject of money in a while, after a few byroads to try and divert his attention. A naturally suspicious mind.
‘I’m here about your son.’
That worked. It wiped all expression off his face. It was as though shutters had suddenly been pulled down over his eyes.
‘And you are…?’
‘Jessica Hirst.’
He frowned. ‘Well, Mrs Hirst…’
‘Miss.’
‘Well, Miss Hirst, whatever you want to discuss can be discussed on the school premises. If you’d care to see one of my secretaries, she’ll fix you an appointment. Frankly, I do think that it’s a bit unorthodox to barge your way into my offices.’ His frown deepened. ‘Why did you involve yourself in a ruse to get this address? Surely it’s on the school file?’
‘Most probably,’ Jessica said calmly. ‘But, since I’m not a teacher at your son’s school, that wouldn’t have done me much good, would it?’
‘Then who the heck are you?’
Your son is a corrupting influence on my daughter.
Your son is leading my daughter astray.
I’m here to ask you to keep your wretched son away from my daughter.
‘My daughter is Lucy Hirst. Perhaps your son Mark has mentioned her to you?’
‘What the hell has he gone and done?’ His voice was as hard as steel. ‘No, Miss Hirst,’ he said heavily, ‘Mark hasn’t said anything to me about your daughter. At least, not that I can recall.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and looked at her without flinching.
‘Nothing at all?’ This time it was her turn to frown, and to wonder whether she hadn’t read the signs all the wrong way. Perhaps his name hadn’t been dropped into conversations as regularly as she had thought. Maybe she had been mistaken, and the boy was only some kind of acquaintance. Perhaps Lucy’s change of attitude had nothing to do with any malign influence at all, and was simply a matter of hormones and puberty kicking in later than she had expected. She had no experience of these things. She could hardly recall her own growing pains, although there had been no room in her disintegrating family life for growing pains to have much space.
