Buch lesen: «The Perfect Sinner»

Table of Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

The Crightons

Title Page

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Copyright

1

Max Crighton, thirty years old, married, successful, sexy and the father of two healthy, energetic play school age children, and right now thoroughly disenchanted and bored with his lot, surveyed the other occupants of the ballroom of Chester’s Grosvenor Hotel—presently the scene of his sister’s wedding reception—with cynical contempt.

Louise, the bride and the most dominant of his two younger twin sisters, was laughing up into the handsome face of her new husband, Gareth Simmonds, while various members of the collective Crighton and Simmonds clans looked on in what to Max was grotesquely irritating sentimentality. Louise’s twin sister Katie stood to one side of the bride, and slightly in her shadow.

Twins!

Twins ran through the genealogical history of the Crighton family. His own father was the younger one of one pair and his grandfather, Ben Crighton, the lone survivor of another.

Twins!

Max was eternally grateful to his parents for the fact that his life had not been overshadowed; that he had not been overshadowed by another half, another self, threatening his position of sole supremacy, and it was about the only thing he was grateful to them for.

As he glanced around the large room, Max was coolly amused to observe the way so many of his relatives failed to meet his gaze. They didn’t like him very much, but he didn’t care. Why should he? Having people like him had never been one of Max’s ambitions.

The brand new Bentley Turbo convertible car he was currently driving, his position as a partner in one of London’s most prestigious sets of legal chambers; they hadn’t been acquired because people liked him. To be one of London’s foremost barristers had been Max’s driving goal in life, ever since he had been old enough to learn from his grandfather just what the word barrister meant.

Max’s uncle David, his father’s twin brother, had once been destined for that same golden future, but Uncle David had failed to make it. There had been a time, too, when Max had feared that he also might fail, when despite all the promises he had made himself, all the promises he had made to his grandfather, he might, through no fault of his own, have the prize he so desperately wanted snatched from him at the last minute. But he had found a way to turn the situation to his own advantage, to show those who had tried to bring him down just how foolish they had been.

He glanced across the room to where his wife, Madeleine, was sitting with his mother and his grandfather’s sister, his great aunt Ruth.

While not one of his female cousins of his own generation, nor the wives of his male ones, could ever be said to be the kind of high-profile trophy wives that their partners could take satisfaction in flaunting beneath the envious eyes of other men, they were certainly attractive enough—very attractive indeed, in fact in the case of Luke’s wife Bobbie—to underline Madeleine’s dreary, boring plainness.

Max’s mouth curled cynically as his wife glanced up and saw that he was watching her, in her eyes the look of a rabbit momentarily trapped in the dazzle of a car’s headlights, before she quickly looked away from him.

Madeleine did, of course, have one redeeming feature as his wife. She was extremely wealthy and extremely well connected, or at least her family was.

‘What do you mean, you don’t want our baby,’ she had faltered in shocked disbelief when she had so humbly and so adoringly brought him the news that she was pregnant with their first child.

‘I mean, my oh-so-stupid wife, that I don’t want it,’ Max had told her callously. ‘The reason I married you was not to procreate another generation of little Crightons, my cousins can do that….’

‘No … then why … why did you marry me?’ Madeleine had asked him tearfully.

It had amused him to see the dread in her eyes, to feel the fear she was trying so hard to conceal.

‘I married you because it was the only way I could get into a decent set of chambers,’ Max had told her coldly and truthfully, and cruelly. ‘Why so shocked?’ he had taunted her. ‘Surely you must have guessed….’

‘You said you loved me,’ Madeleine had reminded him painfully.

Max had thrown back his head and laughed.

‘And you believed me…. Did you really, Maddy, or were you just so desperate to get a man, to get laid, to get married, that you chose to believe me?

‘Get rid of it,’ he had instructed her, his glance flicking dispassionately towards her small, round stomach.

But Maddy hadn’t done as he had demanded. Instead she had defied him, and now there were two noisy, squalling brats to disrupt his life—not that he allowed them to do so.

It had been a positive stroke of genius on his part to encourage his grandfather to become so dependent on Maddy that the old man had insisted that she was the only person he wanted around him.

Persuading Maddy to virtually live full-time in Haslewich, the Cheshire town where he had grown up and where his great-grandfather had first begun the legal practice that his own father now ran, had been even easier, a move that had left him free to pursue his own life virtually unhindered by the interference and responsibility of two turbulent children and a clinging wife.

Max felt not the least degree of compunction about the affairs he had enjoyed during his marriage, relationships that in the main, had been conducted with female clients for whom he was acting, on whose behalf he had been instructed by their solicitors to ensure that their divorces from their extremely wealthy husbands allowed them to continue living in the same financial comfort they had been accustomed to during their marriages.

It was not unusual for these women—rich, beautiful, spoiled and very often either bored or vulnerable—to feel that a relationship with the handsome young barrister who was going to make their husband part with as much of his fortune as he could was a justifiable perk of their divorce, as well as an additional small triumph against their soon-to-be ex-husbands.

It was not to be hoped, of course, that they would keep the details of such a delicious piece of vengeance a secret.

Confidences were shared and exchanged with ‘girlfriends,’ and Max had very quickly become known as the barrister to have if one was getting a divorce—and not just because of the wonderful amounts of money he managed to wrest from previously determinedly ungenerous husbands.

Even his marriage to Maddy, which initially he had intended should last no longer than the time it took to get himself established, had begun to be a bonus. After all, marriage to Maddy and the existence of two small dependent children meant that all his lovers had to appreciate right from the start of their affair that it could only ever be a temporary thing, that no matter how desirable, how enticing they might be, he as a man of honour could not put his own needs, his own desires, above the security of his children. For their sakes he had to stay married.

‘If only there were more men like you …’ more than one of his lovers had whispered. ‘Your wife is so lucky….’

Max totally agreed, Madeleine was lucky. If he hadn’t married her she could have been condemned to a life of being the unmarried daughter.

There was currently a whisper that her father was being considered for the soon-to-be-vacant post of Lord Chief Justice, and it would certainly do his own career no harm at all if that whisper should become a reality.

Max knew that Madeleine’s parents didn’t particularly care for him, but it didn’t worry him. Why should it? His own parents, his own family didn’t like him very much, either. And he didn’t particularly like them. The only member of his family he had ever felt any real degree of warmth for had been his uncle David, and even that had been tinged with envy because his grandfather doted on David. Max also felt contempt for David, because for all his grandfather’s talk and praise, David had, after all, still only been the senior partner in the family’s small-town legal practice.

Love, the emotion that united and bonded other people, was an alien concept to Max. He loved himself, of course, but his feelings for others veered from mild contempt through disinterest to outright resentment and deep hostility.

In Max’s eyes, it was not his fault that others didn’t like him, it was theirs. Their fault and their loss.

Max glanced at his watch. He’d give it another half an hour and then he’d leave. Louise had originally wanted to get married on Christmas Eve, but the wedding had actually taken place a little bit earlier, primarily because it was the turn of Great-aunt Ruth and her American husband, Grant, to fly to the States to spend Christmas with Ruth’s daughter and her husband.

Great-aunt Ruth’s granddaughter, Bobbie, and her husband, Luke, one of the Chester Crightons, were going with them, along with their young daughter.

* * *

Several yards away, Bobbie Crighton, who had observed the way Max had looked at poor Maddy, reflected grimly to herself that Max really was detestable. She had once heard his cousin Olivia remark very succinctly, ‘Max is the kind of man who, no matter how attractive the woman he’s speaking with is, will always be looking over her shoulder to see if he can spot someone even better….’

Poor Maddy, indeed. Bobbie didn’t know how she could bear to stay in her marriage, but then, of course, there were the children.

She patted her own still-flat stomach with a small, secret smile; her second pregnancy had been confirmed only the previous week.

‘I think this time it could be twins,’ she had confided to Luke, who had raised his dark eyebrows and asked her dryly, ‘Women’s intuition?’

‘Well, one of us has got to produce a set,’ Bobbie had pointed out to him, ‘and I’m the right age for it now. Mothers in their thirties are more likely to have twins….’

‘In their thirties? You are only just thirty,’ Luke had reminded her.

‘Mmm … I know, and I rather think that these two were conceived on the night of my thirtieth birthday,’ she had told him softly.

Luke was one of four children—two boys and two girls. His father, Henry Crighton, and his father’s brother, Laurence, were the senior partners, now retired, in the original solicitors’ practice in Chester. Over eighty years ago there had been a quarrel between the then youngest son, Josiah Crighton, and his family, and he had broken away from them and gone on to found the Haslewich branch of the Crighton firm and family.

While Luke’s brother and sisters and the other Chester cousins and their Haslewich peers were extremely good friends, Ben Crighton, the most senior member of the Crighton family in Haslewich, was still obsessed by the family tradition of competitiveness with the Chester members, even if it was now in spirit only.

It had been a burning ambition of Ben’s all his life that initially his eldest son and then, when that had not been possible, his eldest grandson, Max, should achieve the goal that had been withheld from him and be called to the bar.

All through his growing years, Max had been alternately bribed and coerced by his grandfather to fulfil this goal, his naturally competitive spirit sharpened and fed by his grandfather’s tales of the injustices suffered by their own branch of the family and the need to restore the family’s pride by proving to ‘that Chester lot’ that they weren’t the only ones who could boast of reaching the higher echelons of the legal profession.

When Max had announced to his grandfather that he was to join one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers, he had made Ben Crighton’s dearest wish come true.

As Bobbie surveyed the Grosvenor’s ballroom now, she couldn’t help remembering the first time she had attended another family occasion—Louise and her twin Katie’s coming of age, an event to which she, as a stranger then to the family, had been invited by Joss, Louise and Katie’s younger brother.

Max had behaved very gallantly towards her then. Too gallantly for a married man, as Luke hadn’t hesitated to point out. Conversely, she and Luke had clashed immediately, equally antagonistic towards each other.

She was glad that Louise had brought her wedding forward from Christmas Eve so that they could all attend. She would have hated to have missed the celebration, but she was looking forward to spending Christmas with her parents and sister as well. Her mother, Sarah Jane, would be thrilled when she told her about her pregnancy, and so, too, she hoped, would Sam…. A small frown touched her forehead as she thought about her twin sister.

Something was wrong with Sam’s life at the moment. She knew it, could sense it with that extraordinary magical bond that made them close….

In a small anteroom just off the ballroom, the youngest members of the Crighton family were having a small party all of their own, not so much by design as by accident. From her seat within watching distance of the door, Jenny Crighton was keeping a motherly eye on the events, though she knew they could come to no harm.

Who would have thought in such a short space of time that the family would produce so many little ones, a complete new generation.

Olivia, her husband’s niece and the eldest of his twin brother David’s two children, had started it all, and now she and Caspar, her American husband, had Amelia and Alex. Saul, Ben’s half-brother Hugh’s elder son, had Jemima, Robert and Meg from his first marriage and now a baby from his marriage to Tullah, and of course her own daughter-in-law, Maddy, had Leo and Emma.

Maddy … Jenny could feel her body tensing as she took a quick look at her daughter-in-law, who was seated between her and Ruth, her head bent down. Maddy might seem to the unaware onlooker calm and serene, but Jenny had seen the tears sparkling in her eyes several minutes ago and she had known who had been the cause of them.

Even now, after all these years, she still hadn’t come to terms with the reality that was her eldest son, and it hurt her unbearably to know that it was Max, flesh of her flesh, hers and Jon’s, who was the cause of so much hurt and pain.

She ached to ask her son why he behaved in the way he did. Why. What it was that motivated him to be the person he was, but she knew that if she even tried to talk to him he would simply give her that half mocking, half sneering contemptuous little smile of his and shrug his shoulders and walk away.

She had never been able to understand how she and Jon had ever produced a person like Max, and she knew that she never would. She knew, too, that every time she looked at her daughter-in-law and witnessed the pain her marriage was causing her, she was overwhelmed by guilt and despair.

Maddy was everything that she, Jenny, could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, or a daughter, and as such she was dearly loved by her, but Jenny would had to have had far less intelligence than she did have to be able to convince herself that Maddy was the kind of wife that Max should have gone for.

Max thrived on opposition, challenge, aggression. Max wanted most what he could have least, and poor Maddy just wasn’t … just couldn’t … Poor Maddy!

At her mother-in-law’s side, Madeleine Crighton had a pretty fair idea just what Jenny was thinking and she couldn’t blame her in the least.

Max had only arrived home at Queensmead this morning, the lovely old house that belonged to his grandfather and where Maddy and the children had now virtually made their permanent home, with only an hour to spare before the wedding began, having assured Maddy that he would be there early the previous evening. Not an auspicious start, and to make matters even worse, Leo was going through a belligerent and rather touchingly possessive phase where his mother was concerned. Unlike his father, Leo didn’t seem to realize that her looks made it a visible implausibility that any man could ever feel possessively jealous about her—and he had glowered at Max when he had arrived, refusing to leave her side to go to his father.

In private Maddy knew that Max couldn’t care less whether the children ignored him or not. In fact, if the truth were known, the less he had to do with them, the happier he was. After all, he had never wanted either of them.

But in public, it was different. In public, in front of his grandfather and others, his children had to be seen to love their father, which Leo, quite plainly at the moment, did not. And then Emma had been sick. Not, fortunately, badly enough to harm her dress, but certainly enough to cause the kind of delay that had Max swearing under his breath and telling Maddy with chilling cruelty that she was as useless as a mother as she was a wife.

Maddy knew what the true cause of his anger was, of course. It was a woman. It had to be. She knew the signs far too well now not to recognize them. Max had left a woman behind in London whom he would far rather be with. And no doubt she was the reason he had not come down to Haslewich last night as they had agreed.

Maddy told herself that his infidelity didn’t have the power to hurt her any more, but deep down inside she knew that it wasn’t true.

Maddy knew that her mother-in-law and the rest of Max’s family felt very sorry for her. She could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices, and sometimes, when she looked at Max’s cousins and their wives with their families and saw the love they shared, she felt positively rent with pain for all that she was missing out on, although she tried to tell herself stoically that what you never had you never missed. She had certainly never been loved as a child as she had longed to be. Her mother was a peer’s daughter who had always given Maddy the impression that she considered her marriage, and with it her husband and her daughter, as somehow slightly beneath her. She held herself slightly separate from them and spent most of her time on a round of visits to a variety of relatives while Maddy’s father, a career barrister, made his way via the Bench towards his goal of being appointed Lord Chief Justice.

Maddy, their only child, had not featured very significantly in her parents’ lives. Now that she was married she hardly saw them at all, and to come to Haslewich and discover that there was not just a home waiting for her with Max’s grandfather, but also a role to play where she was really genuinely needed had, for a time at least, been a comforting salve on the open wound of her destructive marriage.

Maddy was, by nature and instinct, one of life’s carers, and when other people grimaced over Max’s grandfather’s tetchiness, she simply smiled and explained gently that it was the pain he suffered in his damaged joints that caused him to be so irascible.

‘Maddy, you are a saint,’ she had been told more than once by his grateful relatives, but she wasn’t, of course, she was simply a woman—a woman who right now longed with the most ridiculous intensity to be the kind of woman whom a man might look at the way Gareth Simmonds, her sister-in-law Louise’s new husband, was looking at Louise, with love, with pride, with desire … with all the things Madeleine had once mistakenly and tragically convinced herself she had seen in Max’s eyes when he looked at her, but which had simply been mocking and contemptuous deceits designed to conceal his real feelings from her.

Max had married her for one reason and one reason only, as he had told her many, many times in the years since their wedding, and that reason had been his relentless ambition to be called to the bar; an ambition that she had discovered he might never have fulfilled without her father’s help.

‘Maddy, why do you put up with him? Why on earth don’t you divorce him?’ Louise had asked her impatiently one Christmas when both of them had sat and watched Max flirting openly and very obviously with a pretty young woman.

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.