The White House Connection. Jack Higgins

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      Born in Boston in 1933 to one of Boston’s wealthiest families, Helen Darcy was raised as an only child as her mother had died giving birth to her. Fortunately, her father truly loved her and she loved him just as much in return. In spite of his enormous business interests in steel, shipbuilding and oil, he took the time to lavish every attention on her, and she was worth it. Enormously intelligent, she went to the best private schools, and later, Vassar, where she found she had a special flair for foreign languages.

      To her father, only the best was good enough and, himself a Rhodes Scholar as a young man, he sent her to England to finish her graduate education at St Hugh’s College at Oxford University.

      Many of her father’s business associates in London put themselves out to entertain her and she became popular in London society. She was twenty-four when she met Sir Roger Lang, a baronet and one-time lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards, now chairman of a merchant bank with close associations with her father.

      She adored him at once and the attraction was mutual. There was one flaw, however. Although he was unmarried, there was a fifteen years’ age difference between them and, at the time, it simply seemed too much for her.

      She returned to America, confused and uncertain about the future, for business held no attraction for her and she’d had enough of academia. There were plenty of young men, of course, if only for the wrong reason – her father’s enormous wealth – but no one suited her, because in the background there was always Roger Lang, with whom she stayed in touch once a week by telephone.

      Finally, one weekend at their beach house on Cape Cod, she said to her father across the breakfast table, ‘Daddy, don’t be mad at me, but I’m thinking of moving back to England…and getting married.’

      He leaned back and smiled. ‘Does Roger Lang know about this?’

      ‘Dammit, you knew.’

      ‘Ever since you came back from Oxford. I was wondering when you’d come to your senses.’

      She poured tea, a habit she’d acquired in England. ‘The answer is…he doesn’t know.’

      ‘Then I suggest you fly to London and tell him,’ and he returned to his New York Times.

      And so, a new life began for Helen Darcy, now Lady Helen Lang, divided between the house in South Audley Street and the country estate by the sea in North Norfolk, called Compton Place. There was only one fly in the ointment. In spite of every effort to have a child, she was bedevilled by miscarriages year after year, so that by the time her son, Peter, was born when she was thirty-three, it seemed a major miracle.

      Peter proved to be another great joy in her life, and she took the kind of interest in his education that her father had taken in hers. Her husband agreed he could go to an American prep school for a few years, but afterwards, as the future Sir Peter, he had to finish his education at Eton and the Sandhurst Military Academy. It was the family tradition – which was fine with Peter, for he had only ever wanted to be one thing, a soldier like all the Langs before him.

      After Sandhurst came the Scots Guards, his father’s old regiment, and a few years later, a transfer to the SAS, for he had inherited his mother’s ability with languages. He saw service in Bosnia and in the Gulf War, where he was awarded the Military Cross for an unspecified black operation behind Iraqi lines. And in Ireland, of course, the one place which never went away. Hand-in-hand with his ability for languages was a flair for dialects. He spoke, not with some stage Irish accent, but as if he were from Dublin or Belfast or South Armagh, which made him invaluable for undercover work in the continuing battle with the Provisional IRA.

      Because of the life he led, women figured little. The odd girlfriend now and then was all he had time for. The fear was real, the burden immense, but Helen bore it as a soldier’s wife and mother should, until that dreadful Sunday in March 1996, when her husband answered the phone at South Audley Street, then replaced the receiver slowly and turned, his face ashen.

      ‘He’s gone,’ he said simply. ‘Peter’s gone,’ and he slumped into a chair and cried his eyes out, while she held his hand and stared blankly into space.

      If there was one person who understood her grief that rainy day in the churchyard of the village church of St Mary and All the Saints at Compton Place, it was Lady Helen Lang’s chauffeur, Hedley Jackson, who stood behind her and Sir Roger, immaculate in his grey uniform, as he held a large umbrella above them.

      He was six feet four and originally from Harlem. At the age of eighteen, he’d joined the Marine Corps and gone to Vietnam, emerging at the other end with a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. Posted to the American Embassy Guard in London, he’d met a girl from Brixton who was housekeeper to the Langs at South Audley Street. They had married, Hedley had left the service and been appointed the Langs’ chauffeur, and they had lived in the spacious basement flat and had a child, a son. It was an ideal life for them, and then tragedy struck: Jackson’s wife and son were involved in a multi-car pile-up in the fog on the North Circular Road, and were killed instantly.

      Lady Helen had held his hand at the crematorium, and when he had disappeared from South Audley Street, she had hunted him down through one bar after another in Brixton until she found him, sodden with drink and nearly suicidal, had taken him to Compton Place, and slowly, patiently, brought him back to life.

      To say that he was devoted to her now was an understatement, and his heart bled for her, particularly since Sir Roger’s words to her, ‘Peter’s gone,’ had hidden a horrific truth. The IRA car bomb which had killed him had been of such enormous strength that not a single trace of his body remained, and, standing there in the rain, all they could commemorate was his name engraved in the family mausoleum.

       MAJOR PETER LANG, MC,