Gold Digger by Frances Fyfield

age gap. Raymond and his wifewere a mere decade apart, both middle-aged, so at least they sang from a similar hymn sheet and had some national history in common. Surely there could not have been similar reference points between Thomas Porteous and his incredibly young wife, Diana, as named in the will. They could not have known the same songs, or even the same rhythms. Impossible, with almost two generations between them, even allowing for one being preternaturally youthful for his years and she being unnaturally old for hers. And yet she was the inheritor, and Thomas always knew what he was doing. Or so it had seemed. He should have lived for ever, because no doubt about it, Thomas had been happy; they had been as happy as a pair of singing birds, even if some of the songs had been sad.
    Striding on his short legs, Raymond Forrest looked forward to the meeting. He paused, because he was early, a bad habit, although a valuable one for an eavesdropper. There was a moment of regret that he had not been here more often in the last month, listening to the words between the lines, when Thomas, however ill and speech-afflicted, had still seemed immortal and even relatively healthy. Cancer of the oesophagus had decimated his life, but he could still walk and communicate although with increasing frustration. Perhaps Raymond himself might have influenced the current plans Thomas was rehearsing with that deeply suspicious agent of his, Saul, if he had been here more often, and he might have warned his client that it did not do to be too complicated or rely on anyone who was not a lawyer. Thomas had been formulating plans for all sorts of contingencies in the event of his own demise and it was better for Raymond not to know every detail.
Just prove the will, Ray, do your bit.
Ever the messenger boy.
    Pausing for breath, he reflected that nothing he might have said would have made the slightest difference. At least he had been there often enough to bear witness to the man’ s mental health. Extremely robust, he would say in any court of law. Agile, even. The man wanted everything left to his absurdly young wife and he was absolutely determined about that. Keep things away from the rapacious and the destructive: those were his instructions. He meant, of course, his children, Thomas’s children by his first wife, Christina. Di did not come into the category of the treacherous, yet. Perhaps her treachery would be in indirect proportion to the colossal trust Thomas had placed in her.
    Raymond puffed a cigarette, as he often did before a meeting, in anticipation of it not being allowed indoors. Then he remembered that it was Di he was appointed to see, and there were no such rules in a house too large, convoluted and downright draughty to allow the lingering of toxins. Smoking was mandatory in Thomas’s palace, anyway: it was the first thing he had done when released from hospital, encouraged
    by his wife. Too late for self-denial, he said.
    Raymond walked on, remembering also in his approach that the grand front entrance to this grand old house was not the point of entry. Access was via the door in the side street at the back, the one the children would use when the building had been a primary school, full of stately rooms as well as some mean ones. Most rooms were full of pictures, paintings, drawings, sketches, but that was the man’s hobby, and what he and Di held in common was an obsessive love of art and the acquisition thereof. They responded with the same intensity to visual things, and that transcended all the differences there might have been. Raymond frowned. This child, Di, was about to be thrown if not to the wolves,certainly among them and she was far younger than his own daughter.
    He reached the house, via the narrow street at the back. A fence faced him with a small door in it, leading on to a back yard full of pots and iron steps up to the raised back door. There was a steel grilled entrance to the basement that could