Daughter of Riches

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• Janet Tanner
  
• Chapter one
  
• Chapter two
  
• Chapter three
  
• Chapter four
  
• Chapter five
  
• Chapter six
  
• Chapter seven
  
• Chapter eight
  
• Chapter nine
  
• Chapter ten
  
• Chapter eleven
  
• Chapter twelve
  
• Chapter thirteen
  
• Chapter fourteen
  
• Chapter fifteen
  
• Chapter sixteen
  
• Chapter seventeen
  
• Chapter eighteen
  
• Chapter nineteen
  
• Chapter twenty
  
• Chapter twenty-one
  
• Chapter twenty-two
  
• Chapter twenty-three
  
• Chapter twenty-four
  
• Chapter twenty-five
  
• Chapter twenty-six
  
• Chapter twenty-seven
  
• Chapter twenty-eight
  
• Chapter twenty-nine
  
• Chapter thirty
  
• Chapter thirty-one
  
• Chapter thirty-two
  
• Chapter thirty-three
  
• Chapter thirty-four
  
• Chapter thirty-five
  
• Chapter thirty-six
  
• Chapter thirty-seven
  
• Chapter thirty-eight
  

Janet Tanner is a prolific and well-loved author and has twice been shortlisted for RNA awards. Many of her novels are multi-generational sagas, and some – in particular the Hillsbridge Quartet – are based on her own working class background in a Somerset mining community. More recently, she has been writing historical and well-received Gothic novels for Severn House – a reviewer for
Booklist
, a trade publication in the United States, calls her “ a master of the Gothic genre”.

Besides publication in the UK and US, Janet's books have also been translated into dozens of languages and published all over the world. Before turning to novels she was a prolific writer of short stories and serials, with hundreds of stories appearing in various magazines and publications worldwide.

Janet Tanner lives in Radstock, Somerset.

The file was at the very bottom of the cupboard, coated with a thin layer of dust and securely tied with pink legal tape, a fat file with a few bits of paper sticking out of it, creased over on the edges and clearly marked in thick black ink as well as with a typed stick-on label.

ATTORNEY GENERAL v. SOPHIA LANGLOIS – November 1972

Dan Deffains pulled it out and sat back on his heels looking at it with interest. He had been hating every moment of the job he had to do. Bad enough that his father, successful advocate and thoroughly decent human being, should have been struck down so unexpectedly in what had still been his prime, worse that it had fallen to Dan to turn out the office around which his father's whole life had revolved. For one thing it was a painful duty – he had thought the world of the old man although they had not always seen eye to eye – and there was so much of the essence of the man stilt there, so much that had refused to die with him. But besides this the task was also time consuming and tedious. Daniel Deffains Senior had worked from the same office for more than thirty years and it seemed he had never thrown anything away. The strong room was full to bursting, every cupboard and drawer, even the odd corner of floor space, overflowed with masses of old letters and documents that had long since ceased to have any importance. Mostly they were the legacy of long forgotten and, truth to tell, not very interesting cases and everyday law business, and Dan had had little hesitation about consigning them to the shredder.

But not this one. This one was different.

Dan straightened up, dusting down the file with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and sneezing explosively as the resulting cloud tickled his nostrils.

ATTORNEY GENERAL v. SOPHIA LANGLOIS. It had been one of his father's hobby horses, he knew, a case that had never ceased to haunt him even though it had happened almost twenty years ago.

He himself had only been a boy at the time, of course, only eleven years old and far more interested in football, conkers and his beloved bicycle than any murder case, however mysterious, and however glamorous, the leading characters. Later, when he had joined the island police force, against the wishes of his father, who had desperately hoped Dan would follow him into the family law firm, he had wondered about it briefly, remembering his father's preoccupation with Sophia Langlois almost as one remembers a half-forgotten dream – mostly flavour, little substance – and it had not been long before day-to-day policing and current enquiries had driven out all thought of the Langlois case which, even at the time, had been an open-and-shut one. Now, however, it was different. Dan was no longer a policeman. Fate – and a drunken driver – had brought his career to an untimely end two Christmases ago and nowadays Dan earned his living as an investigative reporter. As the label on the file jogged his memory so his interest quickened.

What was it his father had always said? ‘ She didn't do it. I'm damned sure she didn't. But how could I defend her when she was dead set on proving that she was guilty?'

A corner of Dan's mouth lifted as he saw the glimmerings of an excuse to give himself a break from the tedium of sorting the old files. He got up, a tall athletically built man in denim jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and depressed the button on the intercom that connected with the downstairs office.

‘Any chance of a cup of coffee, Carol?'

‘Oh I should think so. I'll be right up.'

‘Well done.'

He crossed to the window, stretching his legs while he waited for her to arrive. The street below was busy with a constant stream of traffic and he thought that if it was like this now, in April, heaven only knew what it would be like when the season really got under way. That was the trouble with Jersey. The narrow winding lanes had never been meant for thousands of hire cars, all driven by people without the first idea of where they were going.

And they hadn't been meant for drunken drivers either. Not that anywhere on God's earth was meant for them. Swine.

Once upon a time – two years ago – Dan would cheerfully have played executioner to the criminally irresponsible idiot who had spent his Christmas Eve getting steadily legless, then got into his car, ignored, or perhaps not even noticed, a STOP sign at a junction, and driven straight out into the path of Dan's motor cycle. That piece of criminal carelessness had meant the end of Dan's career, for one of his legs had been so badly broken that he was considered no longer fit for active duty.

But Dan's disabling injury had been only part of what the drunken swine had done. There had been worse. Dan's wife of five months, Marianne, had been on the pillion when the accident had happened. Severe as the consequences for Dan had been he knew he had escaped lightly. Marianne had not. She had sustained terrible head injuries and after lying in a coma for almost a month she had died without ever regaining consciousness.

Sweat still rose in a clammy sheen on Dan's skin when he thought about what had happened but he did not want to kill the drunken driver any more; his hatred had burned itself out. Nowadays his bitterness and resentment was reserved for the police force that had thrown him onto the scrapheap just when he had most needed his career to fill the empty days, some semblance of normality to cling to in the midst of his grief and self-recriminations for, in spite of knowing the accident had not been his fault, he had not been able to help blaming himself for what had happened.

In those black days his father had tried once again to talk him into becoming an advocate and joining the law firm of which he was so proud. It wasn't too late, he had insisted. Dan could still train at Caen, as he himself had done, in the old traditional manner. But Dan had refused – rather gracelessly, he now admitted as he mourned his father – though he was still certain he had done the right thing. Sorting these mounds of files had convinced him of that if nothing else. Studied arguments and the finer points of law were not for him. To his less academic mind and impatient nature they held no fascination and certainly no satisfaction. He needed action, excitement or the thrill of the chase to set him alight. He had told his father that at the age of eighteen and nothing really had changed.

‘Coffee up.'

Dan turned back from the window as the door swung open and his father's secretary entered bearing an enormous breakfast-sized pottery cup and saucer and a jug of coffee. As the aroma reached him he sniffed appreciatively.

‘That smells wonderful,' he said, failing to notice the pleased flush that rose in her cheeks. Members of the opposite sex invariably found Dan attractive and the fact that Carol was an old married woman of thirty-three did not render her immune. Dan was, as she said to her best friend, Sheila, ‘all man – not good looking exactly but with the sexiest eyes you ever saw and a smile to turn your spine to water. But,' she usually added, ‘ to my knowledge he's never so much as looked at another woman since his wife was killed. What a waste!'

Dan turned that famous smile on her now.

‘I think I'm making some headway up here at last. How are you doing?'

‘All right I suppose. Not that I'm in any hurry. You realise once we get this all cleared up I shall be out of a job?'

His smile died. ‘Yes. I'm sorry, Carol, I wish there was something I could do for you but I can't – except of course put in a word for you if I hear of anyone wanting a reliable secretary. Would you be interested if anything of the sort came up?'

Carol grimaced. ‘I don't really know. I think it's probably high time I started thinking about staying home and having a family. Bob's been hinting as much for a long while but I couldn't face telling your father I was leaving. I've been here since I was seventeen, you know, and I like to think he depended on me.'

‘He did,' Dan said truthfully.

‘It's funny, you know, I still can't believe he's dead … that I'm not going to see him any more. I keep thinking he's going to come bursting in, looking the way he always did when he'd had a good day in court, and asking me what's new.' She turned away, close to tears suddenly. ‘I'm sorry, I don't want to be I sentimental. It's just that I was very fond of him.'