THE HEIR OF HARTWELL

Chapter 3

He got into the car because it was cold and because there was nowhere else to go, and because the man in the back seat had kind eyes and spoke in the careful, measured way of someone who understood that the thing he was about to say might break something.

They drove in silence for a minute while Alexander looked out at the river.

"How long have you been looking?" he asked.

"Eighteen years," Bernard Ashford said. "Since you were ten years old."

Alexander turned to look at him. The man was perhaps sixty-five, with the straight spine of someone who had served in some formal capacity for decades. His clothes were impeccable without being ostentatious. He held a folder on his knee and had not opened it.

"Eighteen years," Alexander repeated.

"We believed you were dead," Bernard said, with the quiet of a man who has rehearsed this sentence many times and still finds it unbearable. "After what happened, we searched. For years. Your father—"

"Do not," Alexander said.

Bernard stopped.

"I know who my father is," he said. "I know what he did. I was there."

****Years back****

He had been ten years old, which is old enough to understand what is happening and too young to be anything but terrified by it.

He remembered the smell of the place before he remembered anything else: damp concrete and cigarette smoke and something chemical, like cleaning fluid that had been left to go wrong. His hands were bound behind him with what felt like electrical cable. There was a blindfold, though it was loose, and if he tilted his head back he could see, through the gap at the bottom, the scuffed shoes of the men standing around him.

There were three of them. He had counted their voices.

The one who made the call had a London accent that kept slipping into something Eastern European. He remembered the number being dialled. He remembered the ringing. He remembered holding his breath.

His father answered on the second ring.

The man, Webb, he would learn that name years later when the newspapers reported the arrest, had explained the situation in a tone of complete practicality. Eight million pounds. Not negotiable. They had the boy and the boy was unharmed but that could change.

And his father, Edmund Hartwell, the man whose name was above the door of three London hotels and a country estate in Gloucestershire, had listened, and then said: I have another heir. Keep the boy.

Alexander remembered every word. He had been ten years old and he had pressed his face into his knees and tried very hard to make no sound. One of the men, not Webb, the third one, the one with the gentler voice, had said, quietly and without explaining himself, that they should not touch the boy again.

The next morning, while Webb was asleep, that man had unlocked the cable around Alexander's wrists and walked him to a bus stop and given him enough cash for the fare and said: Do not go home.

And he obeyed!

***Flashback Ends***

* * *

"He is ill," Bernard said, when the silence had gone on long enough. "I will not pretend it is more serious than it is. But he is ill. And he is old. And I believe, if I know him at all, which I have spent forty years trying to do, that he has not spent a single day since then without regretting what he said."

"That is between him and his conscience," Alexander said.

"He wants to see you."

"I heard you."

"He wants to give you what is rightfully—"

"I heard you, Bernard." Alexander pressed his fingers against the cold window glass. "I will go. I am not saying I will forgive him. I am saying I will go."

Bernard exhaled. "Thank you."

"Do not thank me yet." Alexander turned to look at him. "Tell me about my mother."

The folder on Bernard's knee shifted slightly. He was quiet for a long moment.

"Your mother," Bernard said carefully, "was the best person in that house by a considerable distance. Her name was Catherine. She waited for you for two years after. She would not accept that you were gone. She hired investigators. She wrote to every relevant authority. She—" He stopped. "She did not wait long enough. She died when you were twelve. A stroke. The doctors said it was stress-related. I have always believed they were right."

The city moved past the window. The Rolls was very quiet. Somewhere in Alexander's chest, something that had been closed for a very long time tightened and then, fractionally, cracked.

He did not speak again until they reached the hospital.

* * *

His father was smaller than he remembered. That was the first thing. Edmund Hartwell had been, in Alexander's child-memory, enormous, a big-voiced, big-shouldered man whose presence altered the atmosphere of a room. The man in the hospital bed was still broad-shouldered, still upright even in illness, but the enormity was gone. He looked like a man who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and was, at last, putting it down.

He looked at Alexander and said nothing for almost thirty seconds.

"You look like her," he said finally. "Like your mother."

Alexander stood at the foot of the bed. "I did not come here to talk."

"I know." Edmund reached toward the bedside table. On it was a manila folder, thick with paper. "I want you to have this. All of it. The hotels, the estate, the shares, everything. It was always meant to be yours. I—"

He stopped. He tried again.

"I made a decision on the worst night of my life and I have been paying for it ever since. I do not expect you to—"

"Not tonight," Alexander said. "Whatever you want to say to me, not tonight."

Edmund closed his mouth. He pushed the folder across the bed. Alexander looked at it. He picked it up.

He did not say anything further. He turned and walked out of the room, and Bernard, waiting in the corridor, fell into step beside him without being asked.

In the lift going down, Alexander stood with the folder tucked under his arm and stared at the closing doors.

"Was any of the illness real?" he asked.

Bernard was quiet for a beat too long.

"Some of it," he said.

Alexander almost smiled. "Of course."

"He did genuinely want to see you," Bernard offered.

"I know." The doors opened. Alexander walked out into the hospital foyer, the folder under his arm. "That is the part I am still deciding what to do with."