Next of Kin Read Free Page B

don’t believe in it. Think you can do whatever you want and hang the consequences. Duty’s exactly what it’s all about. I’m with you, sir.’
    â€˜Nothing will come of it anyway,’ said Thomas. ‘You mark my words. There was that other woman, a year or two ago. What was her name again?’
    â€˜We believed in duty once,’ said the older man, drifting off into contemplation and blurred memories.
    â€˜Seven-day wonder, she was. And yet the society gossips would have had us believe that an announcement was imminent.’
    â€˜If you ask me,’ boomed the oldest man in the room, a retired Home Secretary whose voice carried more weight than anyone else’s present and for whom everyone remained silent; even the shot on the black was held up for his pearl of wisdom. ‘The whole thing is a lot of stuff and nonsense dreamed up by chaps like Beaverbrook for public titillation. He should simply do what his ancestors have been doing for years. Take a wife and keep a mistress, like any decent man would. An honest to goodness whore.’
    â€˜She’s no oil painting, though, is she, sir?’ asked Alexander, the whisper of a smile breaking out around the corners of his mouth.
    â€˜I am led to believe,’ said the old man in a perfectly serious tone of voice, ‘that love is blind.’ He arched an eyebrow for this was a statement that he considered to be humorous and one that might outlive him and be replayed at his own funeral one day. ‘And if that’s true, then one can only assume that the king is in need of eyeglasses.’
    â€˜A seven-day wonder,’ repeated another young man, shaking his head and laughing. ‘I say, I rather like that.’
    â€˜Well that’s what it will be, you mark my words. Next week it’ll be some other floozy. Another man’s wife, another man’s daughter, another divorcée.’
    â€˜Where’s the damn girl with the damn brandies?’ asked the former Home Secretary, whose alcohol level was becoming dangerously low.
    â€˜I’m here, sir,’ said the damn girl, all of nineteen years old, who had been standing right beside him, holding the damn tray all along.
    *   *   *
    SIR DENIS TANDY STOOD alone in the library and ran his fingers appreciatively across the spines of a leather-bound collection of the complete Dickens. The room was in astonishing order, mahogany bookcases lining the walls, each one a dozen shelves high with ladders positioned to run along a top rail to help the ambitious reader stretch ever higher in their pursuit of knowledge and entertainment. The books were separated around the room into categories, with histories of London occupying almost six shelves of their own on a left-hand wall. In the centre of the room stood a heavy oak reading table with a couple of lamps on either end. Bound folio editions of maps were gathered underneath, some of which contained references to the many plots of land, whole streets at a time in fact, that were owned by the Montignac estate, their value enormous, their annual income difficult to calculate with any accuracy.
    He had known Peter Montignac for almost forty years and had slowly moved from the position of lawyer to close friend and confidant in midlife, before returning to the role of functionary and employee during Peter’s final years as the old man grew grouchy and despondent. It was the death of his only son, Andrew, that had brought this on; anyone with even a slight acquaintance with the older Montignac knew that he had never quite got over the tragedy. The boy’s death in a shooting accident at the age of eighteen had never been explained to the father’s satisfaction; Andrew had been an experienced marksman after all, Peter pointed out whenever the subject came up. And he knew how to clean a rifle. It was too ridiculous to suggest that he would have made such a fatal error.
    The relationship