Life Less Lived Ch. 14

As they walked past the end of the barn nearest the house, she continued, "This end must have once been used as a kitchen, with a tiled floor inside and discovered the postholes of a covered walkway to the house, so have turned that area of the barn into a café for now. Many of the oak beams and uprights in the barn were so old and hard that they were virtually untouched by the flames. The swift action of getting the fire service here at an early stage meant that much of the original timber was saved and it was only the roof and part of the North Wall that collapsed."

"So this barn will open to the public for a while?" Lauren asked.

"Yes, certainly until the end of autumn, as long as the interest lasts. Actually, we are fully booked by individuals and small groups from tomorrow until the end of September, then by mostly school parties with just a few gaps during the last couple of weeks of October, coinciding with half-term. We are not currently taking bookings from November, but we are getting lots of enquiries. The local dramatic society would like to put on a pantomime here in December and January and there is a Mummers group who would like to put on something traditional for the Christmas season on Boxing Day. So it is all rather exciting."

"Has your father put you in charge of this?"

"Not my father exactly. This is my baby, my grandfather has put me in charge of promoting this and already told me that in his Will, the trust of the Underhill Estate will pass to directly to my control. It makes sense, as Daddy intends to retire next year and my sister Ginny and husband Giles are already starting their planned two- or three-child family this year and Ginny will be returning to their general practice eventually, while I will continue to run the farm business with the Hammonds, along with the stabling, riding school and this heritage offspin. There's also a opportunity to resurrect a working pottery as there is an unlimited seam of suitable clay in that site. As well as making ceramics, we could put in classrooms for people to learn pottery and ceramic arts through short courses."

They reached the kitchen at the back of the old house and entered. Daniel was at the double oven, grilling bacon in one and baking more fresh buns in the other. On the hob he had mushrooms, tomatoes and poached eggs in various pans. He looked up as they arrived.

"Hello Lauren and Colin, glad you could make it this early. Pat tells me it will be a good half hour before we are ready to broadcast. What can I get you for breakfast?"

"We'll both have bacon butties," Colin replied, holding out a hand to grab the open one proffered by Daniel. Lauren just smiled and nodded.

"Egg on top?" Dan asked.

"Not for me," Lauren said, "but Colin will. Maybe a couple of those tomatoes would be good for me."

"Coming up," grinned Daniel.

"Hello again, Lauren," Marina said, as she came over to greet them, giving both Lauren and Colin a hug in turn. "And it is a pleasure to meet you too, Colin. Let me introduce you to all the gang here today."

"Oh, Marina, I didn't know you'd be here today," Lauren said, "I so wanted to thank you -"

"No need for thanks, you are honoured guests today."

She pointed round the table, around which were ten chairs, seven of them already occupied. One man stood up, a broad red-faced man with a friendly face.

"Right," he said, "I must be off on me rounds, Nice to meet you Lauren, Colin, I'm Paul, I manage the farm with Sophie and gotta check on what those outside broadcast studio guys are getting up to." He turned to Daniel, "Thanks for the breakfast, Dan, it were champion."

"Don't forget to send Helen and the kids over from the stables when they've finished their chores, plenty of bacon and baps left, oh, and sausages."

"Will do," and he was gone out the door.

"Everybody, this is Lauren Taylor." Marina announced. "I think you all know that Lauren has just joined SandRock as our future Environment Team Leader and will be taking over from Samantha in a few months. Lauren was the only member of the WWAG team who tried to stop the Johnsons and their campaign of revenge on Daniel, his family and myself, and they almost killed her."

"Oh, I didn't think you knew, Marina. I never said anything to anyone about what happened to me, other than in my statement to the police."

"We have inside sources with the police, who we worked closely with during their investigations, and helped them keep it quiet, which is why you were only asked to testify on the initial WWAG planning." Marina explained. "Daniel and I have followed you all the way through your outstanding college career."

Marina hugged the girl again and whispered in her ear, "and your friend Mandy sent us a recording she had secretly made of you telling her that you were hanging on with the WWAG group to find out exactly what they planned, and know all about the horrible time you had at the hands of those two monsters." Marina turned back to the table, "And this is her beau, Colin, who is due to be working as one of the South Down Rangers in a few weeks."

"Well," said Colin, "I've applied, so fingers crossed."

"Oh, I am sure you will be successful, Dan is chairman of the County Environmental Committee and already put in a good word for you. This is Ginny and Giles, our eldest daughter and son-in-law and, as you can see, they are expecting our first grandchild in early December."

The happy couple waved to Lauren and Colin.

"This fine fellow is Matthew Jameson, depot manager for SandRock, who was on site with a cherry-picker and helped save the day. His wife Patty and daughter Judy were whisked off to the maternity ward in Southampton at three o'clock this morning, so he is awaiting a phone call any time now."

"Ey up, Lauren, Cole," the red-faced man nodded, "Thee can call us Matt."

"Hope it all goes all right for your daughter," Lauren said.

"Aye, Jude's calm as a cucumber, her man's in t'Army overseas so she were all prepared to go it on 'er todd, but me missus, tha's another matter, Patty's a nervous wreck, so Ah'm stayin' well clear 'til t'bahrn's popped."

Marina continued to point round the table, "Lord and Lady Sands, you probably know from the company brochures, employee documentation and reports. Together they are the main face of SandRock."

"Hello, Lauren and Colin, just call us Philip and Barbara," Lord Sands said, "all of us here suffered at the hands of the Jimmy Johnson clan of half-brothers and half-sister. I mean, look at me, just a shadow of my former self, and lost control of my own -"

"Don't believe a single word of it Lauren," Lady Barbara interjected with a smile, her hand squeezing Sir Philip's shoulder affectionately, "when it was clear what the total value of the bribes and the extensive criminal damage was to the company due to Phil's rogue PA, Phil stood down as chairman. However, once the lawyers dug their heels in and Phil spent time talking to all the clients and rivals concerned, he was free of all the company business to concentrate on winning back many of those lost contracts and the rivals were only too happy to concede by giving up illegal contracts and sacking their top staff to protect themselves from promised crippling legal costs. Well, when Phil lays it on thick, with the determination of his reputation, we did very nicely out of it. Hence the life peerage he earned in the last birthday honours."

"I think it was intended for both of us." Lord Philip grinned.

"Right, Phil, let me understand this correctly," Barbara chided her husband, who continued to smile affectionately at her. "You changed from Sir Phil to Lord Sands and what did I change to? Lady Barbara to Lady Sands, a Lady before and a Lady after. So how is you joining the peerage any benefit at all to me? Anyway, Lauren, top of the agenda on Monday, we will both want lunch with you and Samantha, along with Dan and Marina. I want us to go over what we expect from you over the next five years. I know you have already seen the dry details on paper, but we want to be sure that we are all going forward as a united front for this motorway to become the most ecological and energy efficient civil engineering project in the world."

"That would be great, Lady Sands -"

"Barbara, please."

"What you have already outlined looks too fantastic -"

"Oh Lauren, wait until you see the legacy that we have from Johnson and Page-Turner, the world will be your oyster."

"Page-Turner?"

"Not her real name, Lauren. Come on, sit down. Coffee? Tea?" Marina insisted.

"Tea, white no sugar for me, Col will have a white coffee with three sugars. So I heard all about Johnson at the trial and in the newspaper reports, how he was a monster who had contacted his children from prison and got them to prepare their revenge."

"That's right," Marina agreed, "And you knew two of them, Andy Robertson and Mark Clark."

"Yes, regrettably. Colin knows all about Mark and what the pair subjected me to." Colin held Lauren's hand.

Daniel put a hot filled plate in front of each of the new arrivals. "Tuck in while it's hot, sauces in front of you." Then generally asked the rest of the table, "Anyone want another roll? There's still plenty left."

The large middle-aged woman with spikey, vividly-dyed red hair sitting immediately to Colin's right, beamed at Daniel and held up her plate. "Go on, Dan sweetheart, you've twisted me arm, so I'll have a bacon butty, extra crispy, with an egg on top."

Colin only vaguely recognised the extremely attractive woman sitting the other side of this rather coarse woman from somewhere he couldn't place, but Lauren knew her immediately as Jessica Martin, who used to be a local TV broadcaster who interviewed Daniel Medcalf at Wicket Wood, but had been the star on the national breakfast news programme for the last couple of years. Lauren had met the loving couple, Jessica and Patricia, earlier in the week at a really fun outside broadcast from a Kent school.

Jessica had her left arm tucked into the right arm of the broad, red-faced woman, who Colin estimated was double the younger woman's age, spoke up, trying to make her face look angry, but it was clear that she held the woman in affectionate regard, making it clear that they were in fact lovers.

"Pat, you are incorrigible!"

Then, to the rest of the room Jessica said, "I'm trying to cut Patricia down before we go see the adoption agency next month, I want them to imagine that she isn't almost certain to develop Type 2 diabetes any day now!"

"Hey," Patricia grinned back, patting the back of Jessica's hand now that Daniel had temporarily relieved her of her plate, "We've got a long day ahead of us Sweetie, so I need to stock up."

Turning back to Daniel, she added, "Make sure you keep enough for Dave our cameraman, though, sweetheart, he can be a right grouch if we leave him out."

"Don't worry, Pat," Daniel laughed, "Dave gave me his order plain and clear before he went off to meet your Outside Broadcast Truck when it arrived, one roll and four crispy rashers with brown sauce."

"So, who was this Page-Turner and what does Page-Turner's legacy have to do with me?" Lauren asked the room.

"She was my PA, for nearly three years," Philip said, "and a damn fine one she appeared to be but..."

"... but," continued Barbara, "she was the daughter of Jimmy Johnson and was just as much a monster as her father. She was so clever, with a fantastic start in life, with great adopted parents, she could have done anything and been anything she wanted, but she turned away from her adopted parents, and set out to find her natural mother and father."

"You see," Marina said, "she had been the result of her underage mother being drugged and date raped. The victim didn't want anything to do with the baby so she let the baby go as soon as she was born. Her adopted parents were super rich and rather self-possessed socialites in the movie business, with homes in London, New York and Hollywood. Patience Page-Turner was an alias that she adopted and we have signed an agreement with her adopted parents not to reveal her real name in exchange for them not contesting her Last Will & Testament."

"Her Will?" Lauren asked. "I was in hospital for quite a while after my ordeal, suffering mentally as well as physically, but I did hear snippets about Lord Philip's secretary. I was really worried how my testimony in the witness box would go, but it was actually not the agony I thought it would be."

"A lot of it came out in the trial," Daniel said, "Page-Turner went to the best schools, had perfect contacts with the right people through her parents, had a nine-figure Trust Fund and, with her parents childless, the future promise of more to come. She was told early in life that she was adopted and she became obsessed to find her natural parents. She got hold of her birth certificate and managed to find her mother, a feminist lawyer who refused to acknowledge her existence, eventually snapping how she had been conceived. Page-Turner tracked down Jimmy Johnson from the trial notes and visited him in prison. She was a very resourceful girl and her adopted parents had little time for her so were not even aware of her activities. She was starved of affection by her adopted parents, left to be looked after by paid nannies, then rejected by her birth mother. Her natural father, prison with twenty years left of his sentence took one look at her and said he loved her. It was enough to win her total loyalty."

"She didn't have to work for a living," Ginny said, "but she was an outstanding student, so she studied biochemistry, and, using Johnson's rape drug formula he gave, refined it so it was virtually untraceable and could adjust the dose to calibrate how long the effect could be. I shudder to think who she must have experimented on. She had studied medicine but never took a degree, she did take a law degree which eventually gave her the access she wanted to see Jimmy Johnson as his lawyer and started applications for parole, which Daddy and Kathryn Stewart opposed time and time again."

"She was able to take on a range of aliases, cloning details as she needed from the few selective clients she took on for minor legal cases," Daniel added, "That's how she managed to become a pharmacologist at my wife's clinic, handling and testing tissues for cancer cells, while smuggling samples home and growing her own cultures and infecting patients with catastrophic results. Much of this came to light during my research into Penny's notes, she was working day and night to find out how and where these new and virulent strains were affecting her patients, spending night after night at the clinic until one day Page-Turner drugged her and injected her with her cocktail of cancer cells, which within a matter of months rendered our Penny a terminal case."

"Meanwhile, she moved on to socially befriend and then get rid of my long-term private secretary," Lord Sands chipped in, "who had a succession of serious health problems and had to retire early. Page-Turner was personally recommended by my secretary, and so I took her on."

"She didn't have any reason to interfere with my family," Barbara said, "but she was aware from her observations and conversations with Penny at the clinic that we were old friends and had a close relationship with the family, both girls being my godchildren, and our children had Dan and Penny as godparents. Almost the first thing she did when she joined the company was to break up Phil and I by arranging that photoshoot with the hooker -"

"- who supposedly came from a respectable escort agency that we had used before." Philip interjected.

"Well, it threw Daniel and I together, who were sharing the pain of caring for and eventually losing Penny."

"Meanwhile," Philip continued, "that bitch secretary was using the insider access she had to all the tender bids and preparatory work that we were working on and she used that information to obtain bribes from rival companies and ensure we lost key projects, while leaving the South Coast Motorway Extension as being the only worthwhile project left on the company books."

"By this time," Daniel took up, "Penny had passed on and I retained only the county council seat I had held for about 30 years and the planned route for the motorway went right through my ward."

Just then the kitchen door opened and Helen Hammond and her two children, Morris and Mandy came in, and were introduced all around. Then they had to have their breakfasts served up. Also Dave the cameraman came in and Jessica and Patricia, still grasping her second bacon buttie, left their seats for the Hammonds to sit down. Dave collected his bacon buttie and waved to all as he went outside, with the pair of TV colleagues following immediately behind him.

The conversation continued, Marina picking up the thread, "Seeing Helen and the kids, reminds me, that even before Penny's illness, Page-Turner's evil plan was under way."

"Oh," interjected Helen, "was this when we were forced to move out of the Grange?"

"Yes," Daniel answered. "I was in Brussels at the time and, with Ginny at Med School and Sophie away at school, Penny was sleeping at the clinic most of the week coping with her increasingly ill patients and tired all the time because of the tiny amounts of the date drug that Page-Turner was daily dropping into her tea. She complained to me in our nightly conversations how constantly tired she was and we agreed that we would have a break when we could get away, but then we never did get a chance."

"The first thing I remember was coming home from the market garden and finding most of our kitchen ceiling on the floor of the kitchen," Helen said, "sorry, not this kitchen but the kitchen in the other half of this farmhouse. It had been raining hard overnight and the bedroom above the kitchen was also a mess, although the ceiling there was just showing a steady stream of dirty water. I rang Penny at the hospital about it, and she said her pharmacologist had only just been speaking about her engagement to a plumber who handily lived in Worthing. Within half an hour, this really slim guy came round, saying he had been sent to have a look at our leak. After some time in the loft, he came down and showed me a lump of rotting wood that he said he had just pulled up from the floorboards by hand. He told me the roof had been probably leaking for years and everything holding the roof up was rotten and we had to get out of our side of the house immediately before it collapsed. He said it was too dangerous to stay there even one more night."

"That's when Penny told Paul to move immediately down to one of the empty cottages that were being used as holiday cottages during the summer season," Daniel continued. "She had rung me and at first I insisted they be put up in a hotel, but Helen and Paul didn't want to do as they only have the one car and it would have made getting to both work and school impossible, which I think is what Page-Turner's plan was, to get them to look for another job and for Alex, this so-called fiancée, who was a rogue builder that had rolled up at Page-Turner's legal practice told us that this side of the building was sound, but part of the roof needed new beams and replacement floorboards in the loft. A couple of check prices came through the post; Penny thought I had contacted the companies and I assumed Penny had; they were much more expensive that Alex quoted so we paid Alex to do the job and ordered all the oak timber needed, which held back our plans to expand the market garden, another reason they hoped the Hammonds would leave."

"We wouldn't have done that, Daniel," Helen said, "We just love it here and the kids are settled in school. And it has all worked out grand in the end."

"Yes," Daniel said, "Well, the plan all along had been for Alex and his builders would have found someone to replace the Hammonds with the idea to turn one of the polytunnels into a cannabis factory. This was why Alex had been involved with Page-Turner, but then we heard no more from Alex because his case came to court and he was sent down for two years. We found this out after the fire when we were given access to all of Page-Turner's very comprehensive notes. By this time Penny was gravely ill, at home all the time and first I came home to stay, then Barbara joined us, but Penny went down fast."