The Perfect Match?. PENNY JORDAN
Platt?’ Jenny queried, frowning again, then her expression clearing. ‘Oh yes, I know who you mean.’
‘Yes,’ Guy went on. ‘By all accounts he virtually drank himself to death.’
‘Oh, poor man,’ Jenny sympathised compassionately.
‘Poor man nothing,’ Guy told her grimly. ‘He was the biggest con man in town. His parents publicly disowned him. He died leaving debts all over the place.’
From the tone of his voice, Jenny wondered if Guy was one of the people he had owed money to. If so, she doubted that Guy would admit, even to her, that he had been taken advantage of.
Normally an easygoing, compassionate man, generally inclined to judge others gently rather than harshly, he also possessed a surprisingly fierce streak of pride, accentuated, Jenny suspected, by the fact that his family, the Cooke clan, various members of whom were spread throughout the town, had originated, so local history had it, from the unsanctified union of one of a band of travelling Romany Gypsies and the naively innocent daughter of a town schoolmaster. They were generally held in a mixture of awe and contempt by their less enterprising and energetic peers.
The girl had been married off in haste and disgrace to a local widowed tavern keeper desperately in need of someone to take charge of his sprawling brood of existing children.
Dependent upon where you stood in the local hierarchy, there was a tendency to regard the activities of the Cooke clan, both professionally and privately, as extremely suspect or extremely enviable.
Over the generations, the name Cooke had become synonymous, not just with the local taverns and public houses that they ran, but also with such disparate activities as poaching, gaming and other enterprising methods of increasing their income, a habit the more God-fearing local folk were inclined to put down to the genes they had inherited from their roving-eyed Gypsy forebears.
Not that any members of the family went in for poaching or its equivalent these days. That practice had died out with his grandfather’s generation, Guy had once wryly told Jenny, along with the bulk of his then-adult male relatives, most of whom had been with the Cheshire Regiment during the First World War.
‘But that kind of reputation is hard to lose,’ Guy had told Jenny. ‘Once a Cooke, always a Cooke!’
‘And having those brigandish dark good looks of yours doesn’t help,’ Jenny had teased him gently.
‘No,’ Guy had agreed shortly. He had lost count of the number of fathers who had sternly admonished their daughters against dating him when he had been younger. He thought now that he must have been the only teenage boy in the locality to have gained the reputation of being wild and dangerous whilst still possessing his virginity.
It was half-day closing, and after Jenny had left and Guy had locked up the shop, he went home to work on his other business interests, which ranged from a half share in the very popular local restaurant owned by one of his sisters and her husband to a smaller share in a firm of local builders owned by yet another relative.
He had recently been considering the validity of investing in small local properties that could be renovated and then let out on short-term leases to employees of one of the large multinationals that had recently started to move into the area.
Antiques, especially furniture, were his first love but the business he shared with Jenny was hardly sufficient to keep him fully occupied.
He frowned as he studied the post. He and Jenny were the prime motivators behind the Antiques Fair that was due to be held at Fitzburgh Place the following month, a combined event to promote the area and hopefully raise money for Jenny and Ruth’s pet charity, the single mothers homes scheme, which Ruth had started as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried mother.
As Guy started to check off the list of exhibitors to the fair against the list of invitation letters he had sent out, he remembered what Jenny had said about Charlie Platt.
He and Charlie had been at school together... just. Guy had entered the school just as Charlie was on the verge of leaving it to move up to the seniors.
A thin, pale boy, who had suffered badly from childhood asthma, which thankfully he had later outgrown, Guy had shown no signs then of the fact that as an adult male he would grow up to be strong and muscular. He had been small and vulnerable-looking, the youngest of his mother’s brood, a quiet, studious boy whom his female siblings had mothered and whom Charlie Platt had immediately and instinctively focused on as an ideal victim for his practice of blackmailing the vulnerable into parting with their dinner money.
Guy had tried to resist, refusing trenchantly to hand over the money—he was, after all, well used to being cuffed and teased by his much larger and far more boisterous male cousins—but he had had one fear he kept hidden from his family and that was of water. Because of his asthma, he had never been allowed to learn to swim or to play in the river that bounded the town in case the cold water brought on an attack.
Charlie Platt had very quickly discovered Guy’s fear, both of the river and, even more importantly, of other people’s discovering how he felt. Predictably he had made use of it.
Guy knew he would never forget the day Charlie Platt had held him under the water for so long that Guy had really believed he was going to die, probably would have died if one of his bigger and older cousins hadn’t happened to come along, seen what was happening and treated Charlie Platt to the kind of rough justice that boys of that age could mete out to one another, blacking his eye, bruising his pride and putting an end to Guy’s torment.
That summer, Guy had taught himself to swim, and after Charlie had left the school Guy hadn’t come across him again until they were both adults, by which time Charlie was already drinking heavily and gaining something of an unsavoury reputation for himself.
And now Charlie was dead. Guy couldn’t feel surprised, nor sorry, and he certainly had no desire to accommodate the terse telephone instructions he had received via his answerphone from the young woman who had announced herself as Chrissie Oldham.
Who exactly was she? She had sounded too crisp and businesslike to be one of the steady stream of women who, at one time or another, had shared Charlie’s roof. She must have been employed to sort out the estate.
Guy’s frown deepened. One thing Charlie’s death had done was to focus his own mind on the fact that he was close to forty with little to show for his life other than a healthy bank balance and a small group of friends.
Avril, his next to eldest sister, had complained to him at Christmas that it was high time he got married and produced a family of his own, as she watched him playing with her own grandchildren. Grandchildren!! But then Avril was fifteen years his senior.
He had no plans to follow her advice, though. There was no way he could share his life, commit his life...his self to another person without loving her to the point where life without her would quite simply be an untenable option.
And he had only once come even close to feeling like that and she... He got up and walked across to the window, then stood staring out at the view in front of him.
He had moved to his present house six months earlier. In a prestigious part of town, it was one in a small close of similar properties originally built to house local members of the clergy. Ruth, Jenny’s aunt-in-law, lived there, three doors down; several highranking executives from the town’s largest corporate employer, Aarlston-Becker, owned adjacent properties.
There were those who, Guy suspected even now, felt that such a house was far too grand, far too good, for a mere Cooke, even one like himself who had gone from grammar school to university and from there to all the art capitals of Europe before returning home to set up in business.
He glanced at his watch. He still had another hour before he needed to leave for Charlie Platt’s house, but he had a good two hours’ worth of paperwork on his desk in front of him, he reminded himself sternly.
Chrissie groaned as she straightened up and her aching back muscles protested.