Deception and Desire

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• Janet Tanner
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Dinah
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Steve
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Epilogue
  

Janet Tanner is a prolific and well-loved author and has twice been shortlisted for RNA awards. Many of her novels are multi-generational sagas, and some – in particular the Hillsbridge Quartet – are based on her own working class background in a Somerset mining community. More recently, she has been writing historical and well-received Gothic novels for Severn House – a reviewer for
Booklist
, a trade publication in the United States, calls her “ a master of the Gothic genre”.

Besides publication in the UK and US, Janet's books have also been translated into dozens of languages and published all over the world. Before turning to novels she was a prolific writer of short stories and serials, with hundreds of stories appearing in various magazines and publications worldwide.

Janet Tanner lives in Radstock, Somerset.

My grateful thanks are due to Bill Head, who, as a former deep sea diver, was able to answer all my queries on North Sea oil rigs and diving in general as well as helping me with suitable locations and underwater mishaps. Also to Warwick Newton, for sharing with me his extensive knowledge of the boot and shoe industry both past and present. And to everyone else on whom I pressed questions about various topics – Thank you!

The story was front-page news in every one of the tabloids.

VANDINA BOSS DIES IN FLYING ACCIDENT, the headlines screamed in inch-high capitals. DINAH MARSHALL WIDOWED BY AIR CRASH.

The young man saw them when he went to pick up his mail.

The newspapers were brought to the oil rig off the Aberdeen coast by the helicopter which made the thirty-minute journey twice daily, and they were always seized upon eagerly by the men who lived and worked there. There was a loneliness about the life, a feeling of being isolated from the rest of humanity, that the comradeship and closeness that existed between them could never quite eradicate, a sense of being cut off by the elements and buried alive in the danger and the boredom and the exhaustion that came from the sheer hard work that made them long for news of the outside world with a hunger that no amount of television-watching could satisfy.

But the young man had not even seen the television news the night before – he had been in recompression following a dive – and now the headlines that leapt up at him started an interest that was more than mere curiosity. A jolt like an electric shock ran through him and he felt his pulses change gear the way they did just before a dive. He put down his money on the counter and picked up the paper, forcing himself to jam it in the pocket of his windcheater. Eager as he was, he did not want to read it here, with others watching him. That had to wait until he was alone.

Back in his cabin he yanked the newspaper out of his pocket and spread it out on the table, bending over it avidly without even stopping to take off his jacket. Not that he wanted to take off his jacket – it was always so damned cold out here in the North Sea, a bone-chilling cold that seemed to invade every pore and devour his flesh so that it was hard to remember what it felt like to be completely, comfortably warm.

The headline leapt at him again.

He absorbed it automatically and moved swiftly on to read the report.

Van Kendrick, head of the Vandina leather goods fashion empire, died yesterday when the light aircraft he was piloting crashed into a hillside in Gloucestershire. Van Kendrick, 54, was alone in the Cessna at the time of the accident, the cause of which is a complete mystery. Witnesses said the aircraft, which had only recently undergone a complete overhaul, seemed to go into a steep dive before ploughing into the hillside and bursting into flames.

‘I saw it come down from the field where I was working,' farmworker Melvin Tucker, 25, said. ‘I ran to the scene but there was nothing I could do. The heat was so intense I couldn't get anywhere near it.'

Experts sifting the wreckage agreed that the devastation was such that in all likelihood Van Kendrick died instantly, but even if this were not the case he would have stood no chance of escaping the inferno that followed. Weather conditions at the time of the accident were fine and clear and wind speeds were normal. But friends said that Van Kendrick had been complaining of chest pains recently and speculation is rife that he might have suffered a heart attack.

The Vandina fashion empire, the brainchild of Van Kendrick and his wife, Dinah Marshall, was born twenty-five years ago in a tiny workshop in Somerset. Dinah Marshall's talent for anticipating trends and designing quality products to capture the imagination of the fashion- and quality-conscious rich the world over, coupled with Van Kendrick's legendary business acumen produced a phenomenon that outstripped its humble beginnings and swept like a bushfire through the once staid accessories scene to challenge the great houses such as Hermes. It was Van Kendrick who was responsible for the slogan that epitomised Vandina's appeal – ‘A Touch of the Country' – which was to become synonymous with quality, style and understated elegance.

The question being asked today – along with the inevitable ones as to how Van Kendrick died – is: Will Vandina survive without him?

‘Of course it is business as usual,' a spokeswoman for the company told our reporter. ‘ Dinah was always the inspiration and guiding light. At the moment, naturally, she is in deep shock, but she has no intention of letting Vandina fail.'

But the fact remains that the company will sadly miss its dynamic and innovative boss. And Dinah, his wife of twenty-five years, will be fighting an uphill battle without him at her side. The couple have no children and have always been known to be inseparable. ‘They complement one another absolutely,' this paper once declared after an exclusive interview. ‘They are the perfect partnership.'

Now Dinah, a glamorous but somewhat reclusive figure, has lost her perfect partner. Somehow she must carry the flag of Vandina alone.

The young man straightened up, rasping at the week-old stubble on his chin with fingers that shook slightly. The adrenaline was flowing fast now; every inch of his skin seemed to be crawling with it.

So – the man behind one of the most successful and innovative designers in England was dead. Dinah Marshall had lost the husband who had so often been described as her Svengali, and she was totally alone.

Or so she, and the world, believed.

Only he knew different.

Barely able to contain his excitement he crossed to the small chest where he kept his personal possessions, getting out a manila envelope, extracting the strip of official-looking paper and spreading it out.

A birth certificate. Everyone has one and thinks nothing of it, but to him this one was special; not an original but a copy of an original, obtained from the registers of St Catherine's House as a result of the Act of Parliament which allows adopted children to discover the truth of their origins.

Thoughtfully the young man allowed his eye to run along the line from left to right.

He knew it by heart, of course, but he still wanted to look at it again.

Date of birth: 2 September 1961.

Sex: Male.

Name: Stephen John.

District of registration: Watchet, Somerset.

There was a dash in the space where the father's name should have been, and the word: Unknown.

But there was a name on the certificate, as both informant and mother.

Dinah Elizabeth Marshall.

The young man straightened again, smiling slightly.

The papers did not know it but Dinah Marshall had a son. He had known it for more than two years but he had not told another living soul. He had kept his own counsel, waiting for the right moment to present itself.

Now he rather thought that moment had come.

Mike Thompson crawled his silver Citroen ZX through the early evening rush-hour traffic that congested the Bristol city-centre streets with an endless slow-moving stream, keeping a sharp look-out for somewhere to park. As he passed a side road close to the Central Police Station he saw a car move out from a meter and grabbed his chance. That was a piece of luck – the first he'd had all day. Mike reversed into the space, jumped out slamming the door impatiently behind him and fished in his pocket for change to feed the meter. Then he sprinted along the street in the direction of the police station.

Rain was falling from an overcast sky, a thick, unseasonal downpour that was also surprisingly cold. Flaming June, Mike thought, and wondered briefly what had happened to the summers of his youth, when the sun had seemed to shine endlessly from a sky of unbroken blue on to the ‘ rec' where he and his friends had played cricket every evening when homework was done until it was too dark to see the ball. There had not been much cricket so far this year for anyone. Most of the matches he'd arranged for the First and Second XIs of the comprehensive school where he was head of PE had been rained off, and so had the practices. He had had to spend almost every day in the gym with his classes of eleven- to sixteen-year-olds, organising basketball and volleyball instead and hoping vainly to work off some of their unquenchable and often destructive energy.

Today had been no exception. Six periods of one lot after the other, all yelling and shouting, jostling and fighting amongst themselves – because most of the lads in the part of the city his school catered for were handy with their fists – and Mike had thought he'd go crazy. Had they been worse than usual? Probably not. It was just that today, unusually for him, he had not wanted to be bothered with them. He'd had other things on his mind. Perhaps they had sensed that, with that infallible instinct students have for a chink in the armour of a teacher, and thought they could get away with the sort of behaviour he usually came down on like a ton of bricks.