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‘What is it...are you ill...? Dad, please...’ she begged him.
‘Ill...?’ His voice cracked harshly over the word, sharp with bitterness and contempt. ‘I wish... Blind, that’s what I’ve been Dee, corrupted by my own pride and my vanity, my belief that I knew...’ He stopped, and Dee realised that the tremors shaking her own body were coming from his. It shocked her immeasurably to see him like this, her father, who had always been so strong, so proud...
‘Dad, please—please tell me what’s wrong.’
‘You shouldn’t have come here. What about your finals...? Where’s Hugo...?’
‘He...he had to go out.’
‘So he isn’t here with you?’
She could see the relief in his eyes.
‘At least I’m spared that, although it can only be a matter of time and then everyone will know.’
‘Know what?’ Dee demanded.
‘That I’ve been taken in by a liar and a cheat, that I’ve given my trust to a thief and that he’s... Gordon Simpson rang me last week,’ he told her abruptly.
Gordon Simpson was the manager of the local branch of their bank, and a fellow committee member with her father on the local branches of two national charities.
‘He’s been going through the charity accounts with the accountant, and certain anomalies have come to light.’
‘Anomalies...what, accounts mistakes, you mean?’ Dee asked him, perplexed. She knew how meticulous her father was about such matters, and how annoyed with himself he would be at having made a mistake, but surely not to this extent.
‘Accounting mistakes? Well, that’s one way of putting it.’ He laughed bitingly. ‘Creative accounting is how the gutter press prefer to refer to it—or so I’m told.’
‘Creative accounting.’ Dee’s blood ran cold. ‘You mean fraud?’ she asked him in disbelief. ‘But that’s impossible. You would never—’
‘No,’ he agreed immediately. ‘I would never...but Julian Cox... He deceived me, Dee, took me in completely. He’s cheated the charity out of a good few thousand pounds already, and all under my protective aegis. Oh, Gordon told me that no one would hold me to blame...he said he’d been as convinced of the man’s honesty as I was...but that doesn’t matter. I am still the one who was responsible for allowing him to become involved. I am still the one who vouched for him.
‘Of course, I’ve repaid the missing money immediately, and Gordon and Jeremy, the accountant, have given me their assurance that the matter won’t go any further.
‘I tackled Cox immediately, and do you know what he had the gall to say to me? He told me that...he tried to blackmail me, Dee. Me! He threatened to go to the press and tell them that I’d supported him, encouraged him, unless I agreed to let him get away with it.
‘Gordon and Jeremy said there was no point in pursuing him legally, and that to do so would bring the matter into the public arena and damage people’s faith in the charity. They said that since I’d offered to refund the money the best thing to do was to simply keep the whole thing quiet.’
‘Oh, Dad,’ Dee whispered helplessly. She knew how strongly her father felt about matters of law and morality, and how much it must be hurting him to have to tell her. It wasn’t just his pride that had been damaged, she knew, it was his whole sense of self, his whole belief about the importance of honesty.
Dee tried her best to comfort and reassure him, but she felt helplessly out of her depth. He was, after all, her father, and a man, and he was also of a generation that believed that it was a father’s and a man’s duty to shield and protect his womenfolk from anything that might cause them pain.
He had, Dee recognised, always sheltered her from the unpleasant things in life, and it frightened her to see him so vulnerable, so alarmingly unlike himself.
She spent the night at home with him. When she rang Hugo to tell him what she was doing there was no reply to her call, and, illogically, some of the anger and resentment she felt against Julian Cox she transferred to Hugo, for failing to know of her need and thus failing to meet it.
In the morning her father’s air of restless anxiety made her feel equally on edge. He had someone he needed to see, he told her evasively when he came back downstairs for the breakfast she had prepared, but which neither of them ate, but when she asked him who he refused to answer her.
Since she had last seen him he had lost weight, and his face looked gaunt. Dee’s heart ached for him. How could Julian Cox do this to her father?
‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ she told him fiercely. ‘It’s Julian Cox and not you.’
‘Nothing wrong legally, maybe, but I still let him make a fool of me. I trusted him and, what is worse, I trusted him with other people’s money. Who’s going to believe that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t a party to what he was planning to do?’
‘But Dad, you don’t need the money.’
‘I know that, Dee, and so do you, but how many other people are going to question my honesty? How many are going to believe there’s no smoke without a fire?
‘You’d better get back to Lexminster,’ he told her wearily. ‘You’ve got your finals in four weeks.’
