Next of Kin Read Free

reason entirely and if that got into the hands of the reporters, well it was anyone’s guess how the whole business would resolve itself then. There were spies everywhere and no one except his wife could be trusted; he’d learned that over recent months.
    Two framed photographs sat on either side of his desk and he looked at them tenderly. The first was of Jane, taken two years earlier on the occasion of her fortieth birthday party. She had barely changed in all the years he’d known her and even in that picture she could have passed for a woman ten or twelve years her junior. She was as strikingly beautiful—and difficult—as she had been when they had first met, when he was a barrister in his late twenties and she a debutante ten years his junior, the daughter of an ageing colleague on the lookout for a potential husband and a comfortable lifestyle.
    The second was of their son, Gareth, a picture taken the summer before when he’d gone sailing with a friend of his from Cambridge, a boy who’d been the cox in the boat race if Roderick remembered correctly, when they’d won by about four lengths. He was grinning madly in the photograph, Gareth’s arm wrapped around the other man’s shoulders, his hair too long for a boy, his attitude too carefree for someone who had yet to settle down and find suitable employment. He’d been considerate over the previous few months, however, knowing the pressure that his father had been under. He’d made the odd supportive comment whenever he’d been around but that was a rare enough thing these days. Roderick found that he could go almost a full week at a time now without laying eyes on his son, who kept unusual and antisocial hours with his set, a group that seemed bent on achieving nothing else from their twenties other than the pursuit of hedonism and gaiety. Roderick knew that the boy kept out of his way so they wouldn’t have to finally engage in the conversation which would lead to his finding work; he had been neglectful as a father in this respect in recent times. That too would have to change after today.
    It was all so different from when he had been that age. He’d always wanted to study the law but hadn’t come from a particularly wealthy family so it was a struggle to see his studies through to their conclusion. Certainly, once he began to practise he had quickly made a name for himself as one of the brightest of the new men at the Bar, but then every day of his twenties had been put into building his reputation, achieving success in a variety of trials and impressing Sir Max, who hinted that he might head chambers himself one day in the distant future, long after Sir Max was dead of course, if he kept up his volume of cases and didn’t allow distractions to enter his life. And publish of course. Publish or perish.
    And distractions had been few and far between until the arrival of Jane, who had made him realize there was more to life than work; how it all meant nothing really, without love.
    Now, all these years later, he was indeed head of chambers and a wealthy and celebrated man; wealthy enough, it seemed to him, for his own son to assume that he was under no obligation to find a life or career of his own when his father’s bank account could support him forever. A twenty-three-year-old man needed a career, though, Roderick was sure of that. And weekly mentions in the social pages could not be considered as an alternative.
    But what right had he, he thought, to debate how a young man should live his life? For after all, at the same moment that he sat there in his elegant home surrounded by luxury and symbols of his own success, debating the merits of how his son frittered away his time, another twenty-three-year-old man was no doubt awake in his prison cell, nervous and frightened at what the morning might bring, for in a few hours’ time Mr Justice Roderick Bentley KC would be taking his seat in the