The Vow (29 page)

Listening to what she had to say Marcus had relaxed. Now he smiled for the first time and told her,
‘I’d guess the timing has to do with my forthcoming marriage and the rumours of a possible knighthood. Mr Culver seems to want to rain on my parade. Up until now he has been content just to publish snide innuendo, irritating of course but not particularly damaging, although it has been upsetting for Lucy, my fiancée. It sounds like he is ready to up the ante. He will have to be dealt with.’

Jenny looked at him thoughtfully and asked,
‘And how will you do that?’

Marcus’s expression became ugly and his voice steely.
‘I have, over the years, developed extremely effective methods of ensuring people’s co-operation. Mr Culver just needs to be shown the error of his ways.’

‘
Still like to hurt people, Marcus?’

His face cleared.
‘Not for fun. You?’

‘
No, I frightened myself out of it.’ As she spoke her hand went to her throat.

‘
Jenny, I’m so sorry. I…’ he began but she interrupted him.

‘
Don’t worry about it, it was a long time ago and I was a consenting adult.’ Suddenly she grinned and went on, ‘You know, when all’s said and done you’re still the best fuck I ever had, Marcus.’

He stared at her.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jen, I tried to kill you!’

‘
No you didn’t, not really. They were dangerous games we played back then, it just got out of hand that night. It was the drugs that tipped the balance,’ she replied.

‘
What drugs?’ he demanded.

‘
Oh you know, that designer stuff they were all using, I forget its name. It was meant to give you a real sexual high but made some people really aggressive. The drinks were spiked with it, but you knew that, didn’t you?’

It was her turn to stare at him.

‘Marcus, you haven’t spent all these years thinking you did what you did in cold blood have you?’

He sat for a long time after she’d gone, just staring into space. Without him being aware of it, his hand beat a steady tattoo on the edge of th
e desk. Suddenly he came to, reached for his mobile phone, made two short calls and then walked out of his office informing Angela he would not be back again that day.

~

Saule sat in the Mercedes watching Marcus as he walked through the big iron gates. They made this journey regularly and he often walked with Marcus, but today he had indicated he wanted to be alone. As always he was carrying yellow roses; the rose of friendship.

Marcus stood looking at the simple black marble gravestone. It bore just her name and dates;
Helena would not have wanted fancy words. He lay down the roses and from his pocket bought out a hand-written card which he slid in amongst them.

Life divided us from each other

Depriving friend of friend

Accept this leave-taking with my tears

For it is all I have to bring.

Helena Langham liked men. She liked the way they talked, the way they did business and she liked the arrogance of them. Working alongside her father for many years she had been part of a predominately male team in the family owned publishing company, and it had been an environment she felt at home in. She liked men but she had no use for them physically. She was not a lesbian; she was frigid. Looking up the word, she had recognised herself.
‘Lacking in sexual response; failure to become sexually aroused or passionate.’ The thought of close physical contact with a man, the exchange of bodily fluids, filled her with disgust and she remained a virgin throughout her life.

Langhams was an old and respected firm but her father was unable, or unprepared, to move with the time. At forty-six she inherited a business in serious trouble. The death of her father brought
Helena two sets of problems. Shy and unassuming she did not make friends easily and her life had always revolved around her father and the family firm. In the absence of his long dead wife John Langham took his daughter everywhere with him, and without him she realised her life was rather empty. Worse than this she could see how others viewed her – a frumpy old maid. She had heard the whispers at the funeral; ‘Poor old Helena, left on the shelf’, ‘She’ll never find a husband’, ‘Devoted her life to her father and all that’s got her is a business that’s about to go bankrupt.’

The publishing house was her biggest and most pressing problem. She knew she had to find someone who could come in and turn things around fast. Not without connections, she started to ask around and the name which kept on coming up was Marcus Delacroix. The young man was making quite a name for himself in the City with his drive and ambition backed up by an astute incisive business brain. He had a flair for making money, was innovative, forward thinking and prepared to take chances.

The first time they met Helena knew immediately that he was the right man for the job and also found herself susceptible to his good looks and charm. Marcus liked the softly spoken composure of the obviously intelligent and cultured woman who was trying to save her family business. But he wasn’t sure he wanted the job. They met on several occasions to see if a deal could be hammered out; he remained unconvinced but Helena became more and more determined to have this charismatic man in her firm and in her life.

When the investigator she had hired to find out exactly what lay behind his urbane exterior rang late one night to tell her Marcus was in police custody she saw the chance to have everything she wanted.

Whilst Marcus’s career was flourishing his personal life was less satisfactory. The punishing amount of hours he worked left him with little time, energy or inclination to forge meaningful relationships with women. All he really wanted was sex, but he had to sit through interminable dinners with feisty ball-breakers from the business world or pretty fluffy bunnies looking for a husband, all in the hope he could get in their knickers.

When a woman executive at an investment company he was working with asked him to her flat she had made it clear it was for sex. Some years older than Marcus she was not particularly attractive but had a burning sexuality which could not be hidden behind her shapeless business suits and sensible shoes. During meetings he found himself fantasizing about what underwear, if any, she might be wearing. In
him she recognised a man who might be open to new experiences. That night would change his life.

When he arrived she had a friend with her and they had started without him. Blindfolded and naked the younger woman was
spread-eagled, face down, on the bed and held by chains around her wrists and ankles. Dressed in a black leather basque with peep-holes at the nipples, skin-tight but crotch-less leather shorts and stiletto heeled boots, his hostess produced a small cat-o’-nine-tails and began to whip her friend’s ample buttocks with gusto. Marcus looked on in fascination, and with increasing arousal as red welts began to appear on the bound woman’s skin and, crying out in pleasure, she begged for more. When invited to sodomize both women he did so with an enthusiasm which proved just how accurately he had been weighed up.

When he left much later that night he had crossed a line, and there was no going back. An invitation was extended for him to join an exclusive group of people who met to honour the life and practices of the eighteenth century libertine, pervert and sadist Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade. They met in a club which bore his name and afforded them privacy, confidentiality and an array of slave collars, restraints, gags, hoods and instruments with which to inflict pain that would have delighted the French aristocrat.

There were over sixty members but a maximum of fifteen met at any one time. Marcus became a regular, as was the young redhead Jenny. He became adept at using the whips, insertables, and pinwheels with their rotating heads of sharp shiny metal pins so loved by the masochists amongst them. It didn’t trouble him to give pain and he came to enjoy the dominance but it wasn’t why he was there. He came to get laid three or four times a night, because two women at a time were so much better than one, because he liked to watch and be watched, and because there was always a room full of people more than happy to give him head, although his preference was for the women. All this, and no need at the end of the night for empty promises about being in touch again. It was gratification without involvement or responsibility.

He never understood what happened the night he nearly killed Jenny Wren. A strange feeling of dislocation had come over him in the course of that evening; it was as if he was there but not there, he seemed to be watching what was going on around him from a distance and yet he was aware of every little detail. The sex he had with a thin dark haired woman he hadn’t encountered before had seemed very intense; it was as if he had felt it in every fibre of his body. Jenny was on her knees in front of him, doing what she did best, and as he stroked her beautiful red hair he had suddenly become very angry. The anger boiled up inside him like a raging torrent. He saw the metallic glint of a pinwheel, reached for it and the rest was a blur. He remembered the red of the blood as it flowed from her neck, the screams of the women, the clamour of raised voices and the strong arms which restrained him. He remembered her blood on his hands.

At the police station he had felt as if he was in a trance, there was a fog in his brain which would not clear but he remembered the code of silence. They took his belt, tie and shoelaces before the heavy door of the holding cell slammed behind him and he sunk down on the hard coverless bed. Slowly his head began to clear a little and the horror of what he had done swept over him. When they took him from the cells back to the interview room at three in the morning he was very afraid it was to tell him Jenny had died, and to charge him with her murder. But it was not a police officer waiting for him in that grim little room with its battered furniture and naked light bulbs. It was Helena Langham.

He had no idea how she knew he was there and he never asked, neither did he ever know about the call she had made to her godfather who was Chief Constable of a neighbouring force. She sat calmly waiting for him, looking unconcerned to be in such alien surroundings. Marcus slumped in a chair across the table from her and said nothing.

She smiled at him and said gently, ‘Not perhaps your finest hour, Marcus.’

He forced himself to meet her eyes and asked wearily,
‘What are you doing here, Helena?’

‘
If this girl dies, or even if she doesn’t but there is a prosecution, your career will be over and you will quite possibly go to prison. I don’t want that to happen. And I can arrange that it doesn’t.’

‘
Why would you do that?’ He was finding it difficult to concentrate.

‘
Because it suits my purposes. Now here is the deal. I will clean up this mess and we will never discuss it again. You will be appointed CEO of Langhams and we will marry within three months.’

Marcus stared at her unable to take in what he had just heard.

She continued smoothly, ‘You will have a completely free hand with the company. It will be yours to develop as you wish. Our marriage will not be consummated. You will remain celibate inside and outside of it. I don’t wish to discuss the consequences should you break this condition because I believe you are a man of your word, but suffice to say I have taken steps to protect my interests. I think we could be a very good team, Marcus. I know decision making is considered to be one of your strengths, but this is a fairly major one and I’m afraid you only have ten minutes.’

It was Helena herself who swept into the hospital a few hours later posing as the injured girl’s mother. It did not take much to convince the weak but recovering Jenny that it might be a good idea to avoid police questioning, and she was happy to be whisked off to an extremely comfortable private nursing home. Remaining in character,
Helena telephoned the offices of a large City firm and told them that her daughter had been involved in a road accident and would not be returning to work for two to three weeks.

Initially Jenny did not want to accept
Helena’s cheque but the older woman insisted that she was entitled to compensation whilst also making it clear her continuing silence was expected, and there was to be no further contact with Marcus. Helena never mentioned any of this to her future husband and, apart from wanting to know if she had survived her injury, he never spoke of Jenny again.

The call came from on high that the enquiry was to be dropped and just before noon Marcus walked out of the police station a free man but knowing he had sold his soul.

Against all the odds it had worked. In an attempt to blot out the memory of that night Marcus had thrown himself into the job of reviving the ailing company which in time would become an international corporation bearing his name. He and Helena ignored the raised eyebrows and snide whispers caused by their marriage; they soon stopped as people saw what a close couple they were.

Marcus quickly came to appreciate his wife. She was cultured, informed and had a quick incisive mind. She made few demands of him and her support for whatever he did was complete and unfailing. As promised she gave him a free rein with the business and never in their twenty-two years together did she ever mention the incident with Jenny Wren. He treated her with a respect and consideration he accorded no one else, except for perhaps Saule.