He played it only halfway through before he had to stop. He found that he was so monumentally tired that his hands fell from the keys and his eyes closed. But still he could see Michael's face.
“You shouldn't have died,” he told his partner. “I thought a success would make everything different, but it only makes the prospect of failure worse.”
He took up his drink again. He left the room. He tossed back the vodka, set the tumbler next to a travertine urn in a recessed alcove, and didn't notice when he failed to push the glass in far enough and it fell to the carpeted floor.
Above him in the enormous house, he could hear a bath running. Ginny would be soaking away the stress of the evening and the tension of the months that had preceded it. He wished that he could do the same. It seemed to him that he had so much more cause.
He allowed himself to relive those glorious moments of triumph a final time: the audience rising to its feet before the curtain call had begun, the cheers, the hoarse shouts of “bravo.”
All that should have been enough for David. But it wasn't. It couldn't be. It fell, if not on ears that were deaf, then on ears that were listening to another voice entirely.
“Petersham Mews and Elvaston Place. Ten o'clock.”
“But where … ? Where are they?”
“Oh, you'll work that out.”
And now when he tried to hear the praise, the excited chatter, the paeans that were supposed to be his air, his light, his food, and his drink, all David could hear were those last four words: You'll work that out.
And it was time.
He climbed the stairs and went to the bedroom. Beyond, behind the closed door to the bathroom, his wife was enjoying her soak. She was singing with a determined happiness that told him how worried she actually was: about everything from the state of his nerves to the state of his soul.
She was a good woman, Virginia Elliott, David thought. She was the very best of his wives. It had been his intention to stay married to her till the end of his days. He simply hadn't realised how abbreviated that time would turn out to be.
Three quick movements did the job neatly.
He took the gun from a drawer in the bedside table. He raised it. He pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 1
Julian Britton was a man who knew that his life thus far had amounted to nothing. He bred his dogs, he managed the crumbling ruin that was his family's estate, and daily he tried to lecture his father away from the bottle. That was the extent of it. He hadn't been a success at anything save pouring gin down the drain, and now, at twenty-seven years of age, he felt branded by failure. But he couldn't allow that to affect him tonight. Tonight he had to prevail.
He began with his appearance, giving himself a ruthless scrutiny in his bedroom's cheval glass. He straightened the collar of his shirt and flicked a piece of lint from his shoulder. He stared at his face and schooled his features into the expression he wanted them to wear. He should look completely serious, he decided. Concerned, yes, because concern was reasonable. But he shouldn't look conflicted. And certainly he shouldn't look ripped up inside and wondering how he came to be where he was, at this precise moment, with his world a shambles.
As to what he was going to say, two sleepless nights and two endless days had given Julian plenty of time to rehearse what remarks he wished to make when the appointed hour rolled round. Indeed, it was in elaborate but silent fantasy conversations—tinged with no more worry than was enough to suggest that he had nothing personal invested in the matter—that Julian had spent most of the past two nights and two days that had followed Nicola Maiden's unbelievable announcement. Now, after forty-eight hours engaged in endless colloquies within his own skull, Julian was eager to get on with things, even if he had no assurance that his words would bring the result he wanted.
He turned from the cheval glass and fetched his car keys from the top of the chest of drawers. The fine sheen of dust that usually covered its walnut surface had been removed. This told Julian that his cousin had once again submitted to the cleaning furies, a sure sign that she'd met defeat yet another time in her determined course of sobering up her uncle.
Samantha had come to Derbyshire with just that intention eight months previously, an angel of mercy who'd one day shown up at Broughton Manor with the mission of reuniting a family torn asunder for more than three decades. She hadn't made much progress in that direction, however, and Julian wondered how much longer she was going to put up with his father's bent towards the bottle.