‘What money?’ David asked, suddenly interested.
‘I think, Miss Robinson, this is a matter we really should discuss in confidence.’
‘I’ve nothing to hide from David,’ Lisa said.
‘The world,’ Wiseman said evenly, ‘is full of fortune hunters.’
David contained his annoyance. ‘I am not a fortune hunter, Mr Wiseman.’
There was just the hint of amusement in Wiseman’s eyes. ‘Then you won’t be disappointed to discover that the young lady has not inherited a fortune.’ He turned back to Lisa. ‘But it is a sizeable sum.’
Lisa shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. My mother didn’t have any money.’
Wiseman clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. ‘When your mother divorced your father there was a settlement. A small monthly sum. She opened an account into which she had the money paid direct. The payments have been made, unbroken, for almost sixteen years. But for the last nine or ten years there have been additional, if infrequent, payments of considerable amounts. Your mother always refused to touch the money in that account. She told me that one day it was to go to you, but you were never to know its source.’ He paused, picking his words carefully. ‘She seemed to feel that the money was somehow... dirty. And that by denying it to herself she was in some way cleansing it for you.’
Lisa’s thoughts were confused and uncertain, as though all this was, or should have been, happening to someone else. She had grown up in a cocoon of ignorance, and now that she was breaking free of its protective shell, discovering that she wasn’t who she thought she was.
‘She did make one exception,’ Wiseman went on. ‘About four years ago. She lifted enough from the account to pay off the mortgage on the house. Naturally, she has left that to you.’
‘So what’s the balance?’ David asked.
Wiseman sighed, reluctant to impart the information in this young man’s presence. ‘I do not have an exact figure, but it is somewhere in the region of one hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds. With the house, and various other bits and pieces, the young lady should be worth over four hundred thousand.’
David whistled softly. Lisa sat motionless, filled with a great sadness. It wasn’t right, or fair. She had done nothing to deserve this. She didn’t want the money or any part of it. She wanted her mother back, along with the lost belief that her father was dead. She wanted to climb back into her shell and hide. But it was broken now and there was no way back. Wiseman cleared his throat discreetly. ‘Miss Robinson...?’
She looked at him. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I know all this must have come as a bit of a shock to you...’
She cut in. ‘What about my father?’
‘I’m afraid I know very little about him. You’ve read the newspaper reports. You know he spent five years in a military prison after the court martial. You know as much as I do.’
‘But how did he make the payments during the years he was in prison?’
Wiseman spread his hands in a gesture that told her he could not help.
‘I want to find him,’ she said.
David looked at her, shocked. ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s my father.’
‘It might be difficult after all this time,’ Wiseman said.
Lisa looked at him defiantly. ‘You’re a lawyer. You find him. I can afford it.’
Wiseman sighed. ‘I can try, I suppose.’
David shook his head. ‘Lisa, this is ridiculous.’
Wiseman headed off a row. ‘There is one more thing you should know.’ Lisa looked at him, wondering what more there could possibly be. ‘After the divorce your mother reverted to the use of her maiden name. She was ashamed and humiliated by what your father had done, and wished to protect you. But you are still, strictly speaking, Lisa Elliot. It’s the name on your birth certificate. It was never legally changed.’
Outside, a watery winter sun cast pale shadows in the street. ‘You’re mad,’ David said, trying to keep up with her. But he had seen that determined set of her jaw before and knew she would not be argued with. For a young woman of eighteen years she could be frustratingly immature, almost childlike, with a child’s blindness to reason. The result, he knew, of an obsessively shielded upbringing. Her mother had been a strange woman locked away in a world of her own, a world of protective darkness in which she had forced her daughter to live too. He had wondered why she should unlock the door to him. Perhaps she had known she could not hold on to Lisa for ever. Perhaps she had seen him as her successor. Lisa kept walking, hardly aware of him. She just wanted to walk and walk, run if she could. He said, ‘I mean, along with the rest of them he killed a whole bunch of innocent civilians in cold blood.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘He was found guilty, wasn’t he? They put him in prison. What more do you need to know?’
‘I want to know why.’
‘Does there have to be a why?’
‘Of course there does.’
‘What, just because he’s your father?’
She stopped suddenly, turning to face him, tears of frustration welling in her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said defiantly. ‘Just because he’s my father!’ And she turned and ran off through the shoppers as the tears began to spill.
Chapter Seven
A rare blink of winter sunshine sparkled on the slow-moving waters of the Thames. The slightest breeze rattled among the leafless branches of the willows that wept along the embankment. London seemed a long way away here, in the quiet affluence of this Upper Thames village. In the summer, lovers would pass idly by in punts, drifting gently among the backwaters, somnolent and languid in the afternoon sun. Picnics on the embankment, the murmur of bees. But now it was cold, deserted, save for one old man swaddled in coat and scarf walking an equally old dog along the riverside.
Elliot watched them absently from the warmth of the sun lounge, large windows that in hot weather would open on to the garden, now providing a winter panorama across the river. ‘You still take lemonade in your whisky?’ Blair turned from the drinks cabinet.
‘Nothing changes,’ Elliot said.
Blair grinned. ‘Heathen!’ He turned back to pour lemonade with reluctance into a generous measure of amber liquid. He was a tough, wiry, old Scot approaching his middle fifties, a fine head of grey hair over a lean, tanned face. He wore a faded army-green pullover, leather patches at the elbow, and a pair of baggy trousers that concertinaed over dirty white tennis shoes. ‘How’d it go in Africa?’
‘Bloody disastrous.’ Elliot ran a finger gently along the line of his scar. Even after all this time it still occasionally hurt, like toothache. ‘Lost nearly half my men before we crossed the border.’ He snorted his disgust. ‘Freedom fighters! A rabble. No training, no discipline, no balls. Last time I’ll take on a job like that. Barely got out alive myself. Didn’t get bloody paid, either!’
Blair chuckled. ‘Times are tough, eh?’ He handed Elliot his whisky and Elliot noticed he hadn’t poured one for himself.
‘You not joining me?’
‘Too early.’ Blair eased himself into a deep leather armchair. He paused, his smile fading. ‘I saw the death notice in the paper.’ Elliot nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It was all too long ago to mean anything now.’
Blair eyed the younger man with affection. ‘What about the girl?’
‘She’s well provided for.’ Elliot sipped his drink. ‘I need weapons and kit.’