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CHAPTER ONE
THEREWASNOone at Reception. It was totally silent but for the sound of her own feet on the parquet floor.
Anna dumped her carefully packed box on the big desk that took centre stage and peered over it, careful to avoid the vase of fragrant garden roses and lavender, and stood back with a sigh of relief before she twisted the leather-bound ledger around to face her.
Pen in hand, she bent over, pinning the curtain of thick dark chestnut waves from her eyes with her forearm as she signed the visitors’ book, her swirling signature a replica of many before it. You had to go back a lot of pages and many weeks to see any other signature next to the column beside her grandpa’s name.
One by one his visitors had fallen away and she couldn’t really blame them. Some days she approached her own visits with a sick feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach—she never knew what would await her...would he even know who she was?
Not that it would ever occur to her to not come. She owed her grandfather everything. Without him her life could have been very different—before he had stepped up to become her legal guardian, social services had been taking a lot of interest in her.
She huffed out a tiny preparatory breath before she picked up the box, her aching muscles complaining. As luck, or rather lack of it, would have it, there had been no room in the car park conveniently adjacent to the Edwardian building thanks to the shiny monster designer car that was taking up three spaces and attracting an audience of admirers.
So, courtesy of theridiculousflashy car, Anna was forced to park at the main entrance the other side of the Merlin’s park-like grounds, and the box that had seemed comfortably light when she had begun the trek had felt as if it weighed a ton by the time she reached the clinic.
Taking the now familiar route up to the first floor, she reached her grandfather’s suite without dislodging the carefully stacked pile, and she was relieved to see the door to his private sitting room was ajar. Wedging her chin on the photo album on top and shifting the box a little higher, she turned to back cautiously into the room, bumping the door with her bottom as she did so.
‘Hello, Grandpa, sorry I’m late,’ she called out, wondering with a little ache of her heart if Grandpa Henry would even know who she was today. ‘But wait until you see what I’ve got, some more photos, a lovely one of Dad and—’ Tongue now caught between her teeth as she concentrated on not bumping into anything, she placed the box carefully on the bureau that had once lived in her grandpa’s study at home. ‘And some more of your vinyl collection—’
‘You are not allowed to touch my collection. That was a very rare recording you scratched. Did you use gloves, Anna?’
‘Yes, Grandpa.’ The record-scratching incident had happened when she was ten.
Soren, who was standing with one hand on the headrest of the chair that held the man he had been searching for over the past twelve years, had turned at the sound of the door being opened. He had watched the entrance of the new arrival, who was totally unaware of his presence, and had seen no reason to alert her.
When Tor responded to her words, his attention shifted back to the man.
They were the first words that Tor had spoken.
He caught the flicker of intelligence in the faded blue eyes for a split second before it was replaced by a cloudy belligerence.
But it had been there, and it only confirmed Soren’s belief that this was an act; ithadto be an act. He would not contemplate another option. For the past twelve years he had never lost the belief that one day he would look into the eyes of the man responsible for the destruction of his family and see fear, see the despair that must have been in his own father’s eyes before he took his own life.
After years of trails growing cold and with the help of a small select team, he had finally tracked down his quarry and reached him before he pulled one of his vanishing acts. This time there would be no new identity, or new continent.
And just when you thought you had seen everything this man was capable of, that he could not get any more slippery and devious, he pulled this one out of the hat—dementia!
But when you thought about it, it made a perfect twisted sort of sense. What did a man like Tor do when he guessed the net was closing in around him and there was no place left to run? He picked out a nice place in the country with a sympathetic staff and waitress service and played his unfit-to-stand-trial card.
Soren was willing to acquit the clinic of collusion—they and the medical professionals were pawns in this latest scam. They might be unwitting accomplices but my God they had laughable security.
Soren had walked in without once being asked who he was, and his arrival had hardly been inconspicuous. Security—at least, that was what he assumed the uniformed pair had been—were more interested in his car than him.
Locating the suite of rooms occupied by Henry Randall had been straightforward too—there were names beside the numbered keys hanging on the wall. It was only when he’d entered the small sitting room that he had encountered any problem.
An unforeseen one.
Tor, ever the artiste, was deep in character.
Soren had been here ten minutes and tried everything he could think of to break through the facade. It was like coming up against a brick wall. By this point he was feeling a degree of sympathy for the professionals Tor had taken in. If Soren hadn’t known what Tor was, he would have fallen for the act himself.
Totally in character, the con artist had wholly occupied the role he had chosen to play, that of a fragile, innocent, broken old man.
Struggling against the frustration banging away like a hammer against his temples, he silently berated himself for being overconfident as he dealt with a very different scenario from the one he had envisaged—which had been Tor, shocked by his unannounced appearance, betraying himself.
His initial ‘Hello, Tor. It’s been a while...’ had drawn no response at all.
In fact Soren had seen nothing in those watery blue eyes except blankness illuminated briefly by a seemingly genuine confusion, until the disturbance in the doorway accompanied by the soft, husky voice.
