A Chance Encounter by Rae Shaw (e manga reader TXT) 📗

I'm meeting him for dinner.

Have a good time.

She sent him a barrage of silly emojis. It was how she ended all of their conversations, lampooning their relationship in a series of codified affections. Freddie wasn't really her dad, just a bloke who cared.

  4

Julianna

Julianna strolled into Mark's office, having announced her arrival with a rattle of the door handle. He rose to greet her, offering a firm handshake, then a chair at the table.

Mark had an affable face, which delivered a genial, if brief smile. His skin was slightly swarthy, as if he had inherited some distant gene from a hot country, like Spain or Southern France, which had lost a little of its dominance under the weak English sun. He had chocolate hair to match the olive skin and cappuccino eyes that were dusted with speckles of light. When he opened his mouth and spoke, he was pure Mancunian. It didn't ruin his image. The northern accent added a little twist of surprise. She wondered what he would make of her nutmeg skin tone and ironed straight hair. Her ethnicity went further west than Cornwall, to her grandfather in Trinidad.

Given he was a businessman, and not royalty, Jackson liked to vet newcomers to an unnecessary extent. However, she had learnt nothing about Mark from her privileged position of being on Haynes’ security team. Mark's file was innocuous, almost sanitised, which seemed odd, because he clearly knew Hettie Haynes: the evidence was hanging on the wall of his office.

‘Thanks for dropping by. I hope you can clear this one up quickly for us.’ Mark opened his dossier. For the next half an hour they formulated a plan to capture the offending employee.

‘Let’s catch the idiot in the act.’ She smirked, pleased that the case was more than a little background check. She would book the long lens out of the store cupboard and buy some gum to chew – something not permitted when driving.

Julianna flipped shut her notepad and scanned the room, before returning once again to the painting. It couldn’t be ignored.

‘Your predecessor left quickly. Ill-health, unfortunately for him. You’re new to the company?’ she asked, tentatively, watching to see if Mark resisted the line of interrogation.

‘Not quite. I worked as an accountant at Daneswan, a subsidiary of this firm. This internal post came up and I grabbed the opportunity to transfer.’ A cordial response and encouraging. She edged further, determined to fill in the blanks.

‘And promotion, no doubt.’ She wished she had tried asking awkward questions with Alex. Her mistake was giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever he arrived home late from work. She had bought his excuses like a naïve teenager instead of an intelligence officer. Any one of her mentors would have been disappointed with her infatuation with a gallant man with no backbone. Alex had laughed in her face when he confessed to adultery. He had basked in his achievement, while denigrating his and Julianna's love life with puerile jibes.

Bastard.

She had to get over him.

‘Yes. My office floor space seems to have quadrupled in size,’ Mark said sardonically, waving his hands at the less than spacious room; his smile broadened. He had an eye-catching grin and it held her attention, which she supposed was his intention. A well-packaged man with good dress sense. Something to applaud; she had a penchant for smart uniforms, which must run in her family – Alex was dashing in a tux. Mark assumed a confident manner, but perhaps a little wary, too; he twirled his pen between fidgeting fingers. There had to be more to Mark than charm. She would wait. In her opinion, people eventually showed their true colours after a couple of meetings. Except Alex. He might as well have studied drama at Oxford rather than law. And Jackson, too. Damn them both.

She walked over to the two pictures hanging side by side on the wall. One was of a bloody hand clutching a thorny rose and the other a paler watercolour showing a sapling with variegated ivy strangling its boughs and branches. The swirly signature of the artist was in the bottom corner.

‘One of Mrs Haynes’.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘You bought it from her gallery?’

There was an awkward pause. ‘Er. No. A gift. It’s called ‘The Bower”.’ He blushed and squirmed in his seat. He obviously hadn’t expected anyone to look that closely.

Julianna was the kind of inquisitive so-and-so that did look. Details were everything, and not to be missed. Like a delicate painting, the brush strokes revealed the nature of the artist as much as the composition.

‘A bower is also a lady’s apartment. A stark contrast to the other picture. She wouldn’t like that one.’ She gestured at the gory rose picture.

Mark stood next to her, scratching his chin. ‘Why not?’

‘Oh. Blood, you know. She has a phobia about blood.’ Julianna turned in time to see his eyes widen. ‘Shit, you didn’t know. I thought, having a gift, you knew her well. Don’t mention I said that, will you?’ The lie worked well; his mouth twitched nervously, weighing her up, no doubt.

‘No, of course not. I’m more of a friend of Mr Haynes,’ he said, slowly, a marked emphasis on “mister”.

Another one of Jackson Haynes’s friends. She hated the old boys’ network. There must be some secret cadre with a connection to Oxford; Alex had been at Christchurch.

Mark had only recently arrived in London, initially working at a different, smaller office, then suddenly he had been transferred to headquarters. The gift of the painting must have happened prior to his move. Where had Hettie met him? She was a talented artist who’d studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Before her marriage to Jackson, she fulfilled commissions for famous clients. She didn’t just give her artwork away to anyone