Sue for Mercy - Veronica Heley Page 0,25
always been a favourite of John Brenner’s — the conspirators’ choice fell on Charles rather than on Ronald. Julian and Bianca visited him when he got back from Paris, and threatened him with publication of letters similar to those which had broken his father, unless he left his job and went to work for John Brenner on their behalf.
Apparently Charles conceived a counterplot even while they were detailing their plan for him to fleece John Brenner of a considerable sum of money each month. Charles was not frightened by their threats, although he pretended he was; in reality he was eager for the opportunity to work with them, so that he might collect evidence to clear his father. He asked for time to consider. They gave him a week, during which he threw up his job, and turned practically everything he owned into ready money. Then he went to John Brenner and asked him for a job.
I think it must have been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do in his life, for even while he told me about it he ground his teeth. At first John Brenner had refused to believe that Charles was serious, so Charles had to spin him some yarn about having dropped a packet on the Stock Exchange, and wishing to gain experience in J.B.’s employ so that he could recoup. He made it clear to his future boss that he would use any information that came his way, while working for J.B., to make money on the side. J.B. had laughed, angry and disillusioned with his favourite, and dared him to try. Perhaps, too, some of the poisonous hints Julian had dropped in his ear had been absorbed.
“He wanted to punish me for letting him down,” said Charles, starting to pace the room. “He probed for my weak spots, and I’ve got plenty. He considered it a day well spent if he could make me slam out of the room to avoid losing my temper. He really did have me licking stamps and... I saw it did no good to take it quietly, so I started to hit back. We threw words at each other like hand grenades. He abused me till he learned I would give as good as I took. But he didn’t give me notice, and I stuck it out somehow, until he saw that I really was the same person, even if I had come a cropper on the ’Change. I do have a feeling for the way money moves. I do have the sort of background, and the training to work for, and even with him. He began to trust me again, and then to test me out... and then to wonder if I meant to stay with him or to leave as suddenly as I’d come. He tried to get me to talk about my financial affairs, and the real reason why I’d gone to work for him, but at the time I couldn’t...
“He began to fret because he felt he had no hold on me. He’d been so lonely; fighting with me was the best thing that had happened to him for years. Like you, he knows when I lie. He knew from the beginning that I hadn’t really gone to him to learn how to make money, although he saw that I was short... He tried bribery; he offered me a directorship in one of his companies, a new car. He tried to give me things — a valuable picture I’d admired, clothes, and so on. I returned them all at first, but... not the watch he gave me at Christmas. You see, he’d given a beauty of a watch when I was twenty-one, and I’d had to sell it with the rest of my things. He noticed that at once. He gave me another at Christmas, and I couldn’t even thank him for it!”
He clasped and unclasped the watch angrily, staring into space. I was beginning to wonder if John Brenner cared for Charles in the same way that Charles seemed to care for his boss.
He slid over that part of the story which covered his “business” arrangement with Julian and Bianca, only assuring me that although he had managed to satisfy them, he had not cheated his employer while doing so. The flicker of his eyelids and a half smile told me he would lie if I pressed him on the subject.
He wasn’t sure whether Bianca and Julian had intended to murder J.B.