The Vow (11 page)

Lucy smiled, pleased he remembered.
‘She’ll be with James of course. He’s an architect and a real poppet.’

‘
How long have they been married?’

‘
Since I was thirteen, so fifteen years.’

‘
Your mother obviously has more staying power than your father,’ Marcus commented.

‘
Yes, well that wouldn’t be difficult,’ Lucy answered candidly. ‘Then there will be both of my stepmothers.’

‘
One of those is a well known model, isn’t she?’

‘
Yes, that’s Ellen. She was his third wife but it didn’t last very long of course, a bit of a whirlwind thing.’

‘
Interesting idea, having all your ex-wives at your wedding.’

Lucy laughed.
‘I suppose it does seem a bit odd but we are all still close, like an extended family really. Except maybe Ellen and Catherine, there’s a little bit of needle there.’

‘
So what does Catherine do?’

‘
She’s the editor of the magazine you were reading this afternoon.’

‘
Catherine Davis?’

He did not allow it to come through in his voice but Marcus was seriously annoyed that this information had not surfaced in Yates’s report; it was just the sort of thing he paid him to find out. Ms Davis had a well deserved reputation for being an indefatigable seeker of the truth, originally as an investigative reporter and latterly as editor of a magazine which regularly brought inf
ormation into the public domain that some might have preferred remain buried.

‘
Yes, and Marcus she rang me Friday evening…’ Lucy began.

He guessed what she was going to say and decided on a pre-emptive strike.
‘And she told you about my possible knighthood.’

He laughed at the expression on Lucy’s face and went on,
‘She’s a remarkably well informed woman. How have you managed to keep that to yourself all weekend?’

‘
I hoped you might tell me yourself,’ she said quietly.

‘
I would have told you earlier, but I had been asked to keep it under wraps for a while. You never know how these things are going to go, it may still come to nothing.’

‘
You must be excited, a knighthood, that’s quite a big deal’.

‘
Well, I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be very pleased. What about you Lucy, would you like to be Lady Delacroix?’

Lucy giggled.
‘I think I’d be lying if I said no, but I’m not sure I’m Ladyship material.’

Marcus laid his hand on hers and told her,
‘Oh I’m sure you will be perfect.’

She curled her fingers around his and he squeezed them gently.

‘I shall be rather tied up this week, what with the American trip, but a gallery I sometimes buy from is having an exhibition of an artist I rather like, and I’ve been invited to the opening on Thursday evening.’ Then in a teasing tone, he told her, ‘If you don’t like the art I’m sure you’ll enjoy dinner afterwards.’

She came back with,
‘I’m sure I will. I can see now why you want me to be better dressed and not turn up on the number nine bus. I shall spend shed loads of your money tomorrow. What time shall I expect Saule? See, I’m getting the hang of it all!’

Marcus smiled, nodding approvingly and released her hand only because he needed to change gear.

Just as the last time they had stood together on Amy’s doorstep, the night of the ball, Lucy told Marcus what a good time she’d had and waited expectantly. This time he did kiss her, his hand on her shoulder and his lips on hers. It wasn’t a lingering kiss but it did seem warm and affectionate. Lucy rather enjoyed it and found herself wondering what the full-blown version might be like.

‘
Good night, little Lucy, thank you for your company, I’ve enjoyed it.’

He looked as if he were going to say more but then changed his mind and walked away calling over his shoulder,

‘I’ll see you Thursday evening. Happy shopping!’

Watching him go Lucy felt a little wave of happiness but wasn’t exactly sure why.

Lucy found Amy and Alex in the sitting room watching television. Standing at the door she said, ‘Hello there, have you two had a good weekend?’

Alex waved his arm in greeting and Amy replied,
‘Fine thanks, how about you?’

‘
Really nice actually,’ Lucy said with a yawn. ‘I think I’ll turn in, I’ve got to be up early to buy a cart load of frocks before I go to the workshop.’

Amy laughed.
‘Lucky you! Good night then. Oh by the way, a parcel came for you after you’d left Saturday morning. It’s on the side in the kitchen.’

As soon as she saw the handwriting Lucy knew the parcel was from Laurent. Coming into the kitchen ten minutes later to make some tea
, Amy found her friend sitting at the table, head in hands, and quietly sobbing.

‘
Oh Luce, what’s wrong!’ she asked pulling out a chair and sitting down beside her. Lifting her tear stained face Lucy swept her arm across the unpacked parcel.

‘
That’s what’s wrong, the remnants of the love of my life,’ she uttered tragically. ‘He even sent back the Saint Christopher I made for him. He used to wear it all the time.’

As Lucy started to cry again Amy looked at the pathetic little collection of items strewn across the table. A pair of woolly bed socks, a toothbrush, a hair slide, several photos of Lucy with Laurent and the beautifully tooled little pendant on its silver chain.

‘He didn’t even bother to write a note,’ Lucy managed to get out between sobs.

Amy put her arms around her.
‘Why don’t you ring him or better still get on a plane and go to see him? He’s obviously hurting too. You can’t leave it like this.’

‘
What, and give him the chance to be horrible to me again? No, it’s clear he wants to move on and I’m going to have to as well, but I miss him so much, Amy.’

Lucy buried her face in Amy’s shoulder and all the pent up pain came flooding out. She had tried so hard. Tried to put him out of her mind, to forget the past, to move on. And she’d been doing okay, not brilliantly, but holding it all together. Now this. It was like a slap in the face. The final rejection. It was so hard to bear. Clinging to Amy she mourned the death of a love she had thought would last forever.

Eventually her weeping subsided, she sat up and dabbed at her red-rimmed eyes with an already soggy tissue. She looked into the sympathetic face of her friend and said defiantly, ‘No doubt he’s seeking comfort in the arms of that henna-haired French stick of a woman, and I shall do the same with Marcus. Not that I’ve managed to get into his arms yet, but I shall be Lady Delacroix and that will teach Laurent a lesson.’

Amy, bemused by this somewhat incoherent outpouring, stared at her and asked,
‘Lucy, what are you talking about? Lady Delacroix?’

Lucy managed a watery smile and told her proudly,
‘The Prime Minister is going to give Marcus a knighthood and I shall be Lady Lucy Delacroix!’

Monday was destined to be the hottest day in May for more than thirty years. Early morning television weather readers stood in front of cloudless maps describing the warm weather front arriving from the south. A
heat wave was here, and it was here to stay. They spoke of the long hot summer in prospect and, inevitably, of a threatened hosepipe ban and other water restrictions. Commuters arrived to start their day’s work already hot and bothered, and those in offices without air conditioning thought about changing jobs.

Clive Yates’s office was air conditioned but it couldn’t stop him feeling hot under the collar as he listened to the man on the other end of the phone who was making known, forcibly, his displeasure. Yates rarely made a mistake; errors in his line of work could be both costly and dangerous. That one of his most valuable clients was now pointing out a glaring omission in a recent report was both embarrassing and potentially bad for business. This was not a good way to start a new week. When he got off the line he would go and shout at his assistant, unfair of course, but it would make him feel better.

Joining the force straight from school Yates had served with the Metropolitan Police for twenty-five years; his progress through the ranks hampered by his unorthodox methods and often blatant disregard for the rules. His superiors were prepared to overlook these failings when he achieved results, which he invariably did, but not when it came to promotion. He was regarded as too much of a loose cannon. That he had won the respect, trust and unfailing support of all those he worked with counted for nothing.

Over the years he had worked hand in hand with all the various agencies that quietly monitor and record the lives of the unsuspecting population. When, in his late forties, he took his pension and left the force to set up his own business the contacts he’d made continued to serve him well. By virtue of the occasional off the record investigations he carried out on their behalves, he kept the goodwill of these organisations, his former colleagues and indeed even Interpol. It allowed him access to a huge pool of information; credit ratings, banking details, medical and criminal records, political affiliations, sexual persuasions, in fact everything that would make him of immense value to his new clients. Ostensibly his agency offered credit and security screening but in reality to people like Marcus Delacroix he was providing much more.

He did not make the mistake of trying to excuse the omission. ‘My apologies, Mr Delacroix, an unfortunate oversight, it won’t happen again.’

Opening the manila folder in front of him, he went on,
‘I have a couple of updates for you. The gent whose casting vote you need has a waster of a son who is running up some alarming debts and an extravagant new young wife whom he will refuse nothing. I don’t think you will have any trouble buying his vote. Will you deal with it or shall I make the first move? Fine, I’ll get straight on it. And the latest on the French lawyer, Laurent Casteran, is that he has started seeing a woman called Innes Monferran-Sentenac. She’s from a family with influence in both government circles and the judiciary. The word is that Casteran wants to move up in the world and he’s using her to do it.’

Laughing at Delacroix’s response, he added,
‘Yeah, nice work if you can get it! I’ll continue to monitor the situation.’

~

Ginny Danford, her regular golfing partner at Oakwood, was the nearest thing Alicia had to a girlfriend. A few years older than herself, Ginny was a wealthy widow. Well bred, well spoken and well dressed she was just the type of woman with whom Alicia liked to be seen. Good natured, if a little frivolous for Alicia’s taste, she was popular and their friendship ensured the less well liked woman was included in things she may not have been. When the telephone rang Alicia was in the process of explaining, in great detail, the correct way of cleaning antique silver to her daily help; a woman who had cleaned more silverware in her life than she cared to remember.

‘
Oh hello, Ginny. Hang on a tick.’

Mrs James was dismissed with a fluttering gesture of the hand and went off muttering to herself about people who tried to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs.

Ginny asked, ‘Where were you at the weekend? I thought you’d be coming down with Marcus as usual.’

‘
Oh, something came up which kept me in town,’ Alicia replied airily. She was not about to tell Ginny how Marcus had made it very clear he wanted to spend the weekend alone with Lucy, thus condemning his sister to a long boring two days in the sweltering heat of the city.

‘
Marcus turned up at the club on Sunday with a young woman called Lucy, she had a lesson with Greg while he played a few holes with Charles and they had lunch afterwards,’ Ginny informed her. ‘She seems awfully young, is there something going on between them?’

Still smarting from being excluded at the weekend, Alicia was now incensed to hear everyone at the club had met this wretched girl before she, Marcus’s own sister, had even set eyes on her.

‘Whatever it is it won’t last long, I think he must be having some sort of mid-life crisis. I suppose she was dreadful?’ Her tone was hostile.

‘
Well no, she seemed perfectly pleasant. We had a nice little chat about where she lived in France until recently. Tom and I had a
maison secondaire
down that way for several years and we knew a lot of the same places.’

Laughing, she continued,
‘Mind you, I’m not sure some of the members were ready for the sight of Marcus walking into the bar engrossed in conversation with a young woman whose hipster jeans showed off her pierced belly button!’

‘
Goodness, how vulgar! I really don’t know what’s got into the man. Helena must be rotating in her grave.’

Ginny, who had known
Helena well for many years, disagreed. ‘You know Helena only ever wanted Marcus to be happy, Alicia.’

‘
I really don’t think that some girl young enough to be his daughter, and almost certainly only interested in his money, is likely to be my brother’s best route towards happiness,’ retorted Alicia sharply.

Knowing as she did how her friend’s marriage had ended, the soft hearted Ginny felt a wave of sympathy. Alicia was obviously afraid of being supplanted again, this time in her brother’s life, by another much younger woman. She decided it was time to change the subject.
‘Anyway, you’ll be down next weekend, won’t you?’

‘
I’m not sure. Marcus leaves on a business trip to America on Friday, I may not be down again until the tournament.’

‘
Why don’t you come on your own?’ Ginny suggested.

‘
Well, I could, but I don’t really fancy rattling around Graylings on my own, like a pea in a drum.’

Just as Alicia had hoped, Ginny immediately invited her to stay and her mood lightened as they went on to discuss their chances of victory in the forthcoming competition.

~

Amy was crossing the quadrangle between the physiotherapy department and the main hospital block when her mobile phone rang. Scooping it out of the pocket of her white coat, she slowed her pace and listened to the cheery greeting.

‘Good morning, Amy. Martin Culver here.’

‘
Now there’s a happy coincidence,’ she told him. ‘I was going to try to contact you today.’

‘
Really, why’s that?’

‘
Well, I thought it may interest you to know Marcus Delacroix has been promised a knighthood in the New Year’s honours.’

There was a slight pause and Amy heard his sharp intake of breath.

‘Now that is interesting! Just goes to show they will knight any old riffraff these days.’ His voice was derisory.

‘
You don’t much like Delacroix, do you?’

‘
I despise him and all the others like him. They claw their way to the top, trampling everyone on the way and then when they’re rich and powerful they think they can do just as they please, that they’re not answerable to anyone. Delacroix sits there in his ivory tower, won’t give interviews or even speak to a journalist. If you try to get within twenty feet of him you have to contend with that black thug he calls a chauffeur. And then we’re all expected to call a man like that Sir!’

Amy thought how bitter he sounded and when the tirade was finished simply said, ‘I don’t know about all that, but I certainly don’t like the influence he’s having on Lucy.
’

Culver noticed there was no longer any pretence that in speaking with him Amy was doing anything but mischief making. He wasn’t bothered, many of his informants were the so-called close friends of his targets. At least this one wasn’t asking to be paid.

‘If I print this will it queer your pitch with your friend?’ he asked.

‘
I don’t see why,’ she replied. ‘Before Delacroix told her she had already heard it from one of her ex-stepmothers, Catherine Davis. She is…’

‘
I know exactly who she is,’ he interrupted.

‘
Well, surely if Catherine has a source for this kind of information then you could have as well?’

I bloody well do, thought Culver crossly, and pay well for it too. If that bitch Davies has been told then why haven’t I?

‘Quite so,’ he agreed. ‘I’d rather like to get another photo of the happy couple. I don’t suppose you know where I’d be likely to catch them?’

‘
He’s off to America on Friday but they are going to some opening Thursday evening at the Albany Gallery, it’s in Frith Street, I think.’

‘
Yes, I know of it. Well, thanks for this, Amy. I’ll keep in touch.’

~

Blissfully unaware that she was the topic of so many conversations that morning, Lucy swung through the doors of the department store only minutes after they opened for business. Making her way up to ladies-wear she was pleased to find the assistant, Sally, tidying rails of garments. She looked up and immediately recognised Lucy.

‘
Hello again, how did the ball go?’

‘
It was lovely and the dress was a great success. Now I need half a dozen cocktail dresses and another evening gown. Ellen is in Paris this week so I’m depending on you for some good advice.’

Lucy disappeared into the changing room and Sally picked out a selection from the rails, remembering her size and not to include anything in black. Without Ellen’s valuable, but lengthy deliberations, the dresses were soon chosen; the decision on the full length one made simple by going for the russet coloured organza creation which had been the runner-up last time. Lucy signed for what seemed to her to be an indecent amount of money, and bid Sally goodbye.

Out on the pavement juggling with several huge carrier bags she was just wondering if she would be able to manage with them on the tube when the black Mercedes pulled up alongside her.

The window slid down and the deep voice of Saule enquired,
‘Can I drop you somewhere, Miss Weston? You seem a little laden down.’

As he put her purchases in the boot Lucy asked,
‘Can I sit in the front with you? I feel a bit like the Queen sat in the back on my own, like I should be waving regally as we go along.’

Saule smiled and opened the front passenger door for her. As they pulled away he suggested,
‘Shall we drop the shopping off at your home? Then I’ll take you on to your workshop, if that’s where you’re heading.’

‘
Are you sure that’s ok, shouldn’t you be doing something for Marcus?’

‘
Mr Delacroix is in a meeting all morning and he would want me to be of service to you.’

Well, you know your boss a lot better than I do she thought, grateful not to have to fight her way through the crowds in the increasingly hot sunshine. As Saule navigated his way through the heavy traffic, she stole a glance at his profile wondering about the parallel lines etched into his cheeks.

‘I’ve had them since I was fourteen; it’s something my people do to mark the passage of boy to man,’ he said without taking his eyes off the road.

Lucy blushed, embarrassed to have been caught staring.

‘I’m sorry, Saule. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘
No problem. I’m used to it.’

This was the closest thing to a conversation she had ever had with him so she decided to try to keep it going.

‘Where is it you come from?’

‘
Nigeria, Benue Province. My people, the Tiv, have lived there for many generations.’

‘
Do you go back at all, to visit your family?’

‘
Never. This is my home now.’

Looking again at the tribal markings Lucy couldn’t help herself.
‘Did it hurt?’

His laugh was deep and melodious.
‘Yes, it certainly did! But you don’t let it show, it’s a matter of honour.’

She thought for a while and told him,
‘It must be good to be from an ancient tribe like that, to know exactly where you come from, to belong.’