The Spanish Promise Read online

  The Spanish Promise

  Karen Swan is a Sunday Times Top Five bestselling writer. She is the author of fifteen other novels, although she’s been a writer all her life. She previously worked as an editor in the fashion industry but soon realized she was better suited as a novelist with a serious shopping habit. She is married with three children and lives in West Sussex.

  Come to find her at www.karenswan.com, or Instagram @swannywrites, Twitter @KarenSwan1 and Facebook @KarenSwanAuthor.

  Also by Karen Swan

  Players

  Prima Donna

  Christmas at Tiffany’s

  The Perfect Present

  Christmas at Claridge’s

  The Summer Without You

  Christmas in the Snow

  Summer at Tiffany’s

  Christmas on Primrose Hill

  The Paris Secret

  Christmas Under the Stars

  The Rome Affair

  The Christmas Secret

  The Greek Escape

  The Christmas Lights

  KAREN SWAN

  MACMILLAN

  First published 2019 by Macmillan

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5290-0617-9

  Copyright © Karen Swan 2019

  The right of Karen Swan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  For Trish

  With love and thanks for giving this writer such a beautiful view whilst writing this book

  ‘The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him’

  G. K. Chesterton

  Prologue

  Madrid, March 1937

  He stared back at her with eyes that burned like black stars, his hands hot around hers as they stood there, joined together. Just a solitary candle flickered, their faces draped with a pale golden light; no more than that could be risked for fear of being glimpsed from the street.

  ‘. . . by the powers vested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife.’

  A smile of delight escaped her. It was done? He was hers and she was his? He stepped forward, cupping her face in his hands and staring down at her as though she was heavensent. ‘I will love and protect you always,’ he said with quiet fierceness.

  ‘And I you.’

  He kissed her, the tender press of his lips pushing a button inside her and waking her up. She didn’t need to be afraid any more. They had been together for only three days and four nights but already she knew she could face anything with him by her side. Their love was fiercer than any war, and now when she looked into the sky, it wasn’t to check for bombs but to follow the birds, to catch rainbows, to wish upon the stars.

  A nearby sound of metal on metal, like a door latch falling, made them all startle.

  ‘What was that?’ the priest whispered, looking around abruptly.

  No one replied, listening instead to the sudden and distinctive sound of feet, running; so nearly silent, but not quite. The two men instinctively closed in around her, scanning the windows for signs of lights, ropes, missiles, both reaching for the guns in their belts and pointing them around the chapel, weapons primed. Everyone was a soldier these days – the grocer, the carpenter, the locksmith, the priest.

  They waited but the silence held. Had the danger passed? Was it so improbable to believe it could have been a child playing?

  Yes.

  ‘Quick, this way,’ her newly minted husband whispered, grabbing her wrist and pulling her towards the back of the nave so fast her feet could barely touch the floor. ‘Get behind the choir,’ he said, pushing her roughly down behind the giant carved mahogany structure, the tenderness of the previous minute already lost to the art of war. She cowered behind the solid screen as he crept back towards the altar, his gun held in steady hands. She didn’t want him to leave her but she reminded herself he was skilled in stealth, able to creep like a cat, light-footed and sure. Her breath was coming hard as the adrenaline pumped and she fought to control it, eyes closed as she tried not to imagine the danger that was creeping around the chapel and encircling them.

  There! Her eyes flew open as she heard it, the tiny, single click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back. She looked around her wildly, paling as she saw the east door. It was supposed to be bolted – indeed an attempt had been made on their way in, but in their rush to be married, the tip of the bolt was barely nudging up to the barrel.

  She broke cover, running fast towards it with no time even to crouch, her terror growing with her speed as she saw the thin crack between the doors begin to widen. Open . . .

  ‘No!’ Her scream propelled her, she almost had a hand to it but as she threw herself forwards, it was suddenly flung back. She felt herself fly, the sound of a gunshot whistling through the air with her. But she had seen his face, and a single thought formed in her mind before the world went black.

  ‘You.’

  Chapter One

  Canary Wharf, London, 9 July 2018

  ‘Gentlemen. Ms Fairfax. We have a problem.’

  Charlotte watched as the president of the bank bestrode the room, his footsteps silent on the plush rug. He took his seat at the head of the table and looked down the long expanse of burred walnut at his senior team. She imagined it must look like a fairground hall of mirrors to him: matching navy suits and ‘short back and sides’ rippling all the way down, thighs splayed and broad hands on the table. She alone broke the rhythm – long dark hair held back in a Chanel-beribboned low ponytail, discreetly polished fingernails, narrow shoulders, putty-coloured dress.

  ‘Carlos Mendoza.’

  Even she knew the name. She didn’t need to be on the permanent payroll here to know he was one of the firm’s biggest clients, which was saying something for a private bank dealing only with ultra high-net-worth individuals. The family was Spanish aristocracy, with a dukedom or two and owning vast tracts of the Andalusian countryside. They had made their fortune many generations back breeding fighting bulls, diversifying over the years into large-scale fruit farming, property investment and, latterly, medical technology. Off the top of her head, having read a profile on them in the financial press a few months back, she recalled their worth as being somewhere around the £750 million mark.

  ‘I’ve just taken a call from his son, Mateo. I’m s
orry to say the old boy’s on his way out. Stage-four pancreatic cancer.’ He tutted with what was supposed to indicate pity but she heard the subtext too: his dying was in some way inconvenient to them.

  Hugh Farrer sank into his seat at the head of the table and stared back at them. At only fifty-four, he was the bank’s youngest ever president and its most ruthless. Profits were up by a third in the twenty-eight months since he had taken the helm but it had come at a cost: the labour force beneath him had been trimmed by 21 per cent and he had closed down four satellite offices throughout Europe, centralizing operations at their headquarters here in London.

  ‘The medics are saying he’s got a month, six weeks at most, which doesn’t give us much time.’

  Us? Charlotte saw how the backs along the line stiffened slightly at the words as though they were reined together. She tilted her head to the side, watching, waiting.

  Farrer took an exasperated breath. ‘On Friday evening, Carlos suffered a mini-stroke. He is currently being treated in hospital and is, I understand, still unconscious. They are cautiously optimistic that he will recover – or at least make some form of recovery – from this. However, during this crisis, when Mateo assumed power of attorney for his father, as has always been customary, he learnt his father had been midway through drawing up paperwork donating the entirety of his estate to one Marina Quincy.’

  Farrer let the name soak into the walls, raking his scrutiny over each of them in turn, like a pianist dragging his hand over the ivories. Marina Quincy. Marina Quincy. But it wasn’t a name with any obvious material connections – not a Rockefeller or Rothschild, Spencer or Goldsmith. She wasn’t Someone, a name they should automatically know. No green lights were flashing to make immediate sense of the directive.

  ‘Mateo had never heard of her. We’re awaiting a full report but all we know right now is that she’s forty-five and working in a cafe in Madrid,’ Farrer added.

  Forty-five? Charlotte frowned. Carlos Mendoza was very elderly, late nineties if she remembered correctly.

  ‘Could she be an illegitimate daughter?’ someone behind her piped up.

  Farrer gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. ‘According to Mateo, his father had a vasectomy in his late thirties which he understands to have been successful.’

  ‘So then she’s his mistress,’ Dan Milton stated beside her with characteristic frankness. It was the obvious assumption and Milton was nothing if not obvious. Thirty-one and already head of private banking for continental Europe , he wouldn’t know a euphemism from an embolism. Chicago-born, with a Harvard business degree and an MBA from INSEAD, he had joined the London team eight months earlier and the aftershocks of his blunt managerial style were still rippling through the office.

  Farrer settled his gaze upon his protégé, which was always a disconcerting experience. Almost albino-blonde, his eyelashes and brows were so pale as to appear bleached, creating a piscatorial impression. Milton had told her once, during a shared lift ride, that it was like being eyeballed by a trout. ‘Mateo Mendoza is adamant he’d met all his father’s mistresses. He’s put a researcher on to it and they’re working up a profile as we speak, but there’s got to be something more to her than just that. Dying old men don’t just give away their fortunes to hot women, no matter how much they fancy them.’

  ‘Well if she is the lover, then the family has a very strong case for contesting it,’ Milton said, confidently clasping his hands together and beginning to assert his authority. He had had a brief stint running the team in Madrid before this. ‘Spanish inheritance law strongly protects the immediate family. His wife would automatically get fifty per cent, with the rest parcelled up in forced shares or legitimas’ – he pronounced the word with a strong Spanish accent – ‘for both antecedents and descendants. There’s simply no way he can just dump the lot on his girlfriend and rob his legal family of their birthright.’

  Farrer arched an almost-invisible eyebrow. ‘You’re quite right, Dan, he couldn’t do this – if it was a bequest.’

  Milton’s mouth opened a little, as he realized too late he’d tripped up over semantics, his ego running away with him. ‘But as I said, it’s a donation. Or donación de bienes,’ Farrer said, matching Milton’s pretentious accent with one of his own.

  He pulled his gaze off him in a dismissive manner and invited other suggestions but the room stayed quiet: no one else wanted to walk into one of his booby traps; mines were laid everywhere, beneath every word.

  Farrer’s stare hardened. ‘It goes without saying what this potentially means for us. Mendoza is one of our biggest investors and with the shareholder meeting coming up in September and sterling weak against the euro right now, the timing could not be worse. Unfortunately, it is fully within Mendoza’s gift to part with whatever he likes, during his lifetime and if his money leaves the family—’ He stopped, giving everyone a sombre stare. ‘Then it may well leave this bank too.’

  The tension in the room ratcheted up a notch.

  ‘Having said that, Carlos’s lack of time might swing to our advantage – merely delaying the transfer may be all that’s needed to make this problem go away.’

  Charlotte felt a flicker of dislike twitch her eye. That he was actually suggesting Carlos Mendoza might oblige them all by conveniently dying whilst they placed just enough obstacles in his path to prevent him from fulfilling his dying wish . . . ? It was just another Monday morning at the bank but she shifted in her seat, glad her meetings here were infrequent. She always came away feeling grubby.

  Farrer looked at the guy sitting to Charlotte’s right, the head of legal. ‘Paul, get your team on to the small print now, they need to find something, anything, we can use to stall: agreements, tie-ins . . . We need to find a way to spin this out: if he dies before the donation can be signed off, then the wills will stand.’

  ‘Sure,’ Paul said brusquely but looking charged by the directive.

  Farrer looked back at Milton again. ‘Milton, I want a full work-up on the Mendoza trusts and assets. In the event we can’t block, what can we lock down and safeguard? We need to see what we can move, diversify, bury – now.’

  ‘On it,’ Dan nodded.

  ‘Ms Fairfax.’

  She looked up to find Farrer’s gaze on her.

  ‘Thank you for coming in at such short notice.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ she murmured.

  ‘Mateo Mendoza is going to feed back to us on this woman’s identity by the end of the day – which means I need you in Madrid.’

  Shit. ‘Okay.’ She kept her face impassive; this wasn’t going to go down well with her mother.

  ‘I need you to make contact with her, sound her out, bring her onside. It’s not yet clear what exactly she knows – no one knew what the old guy was up to. Although it seems unlikely, it may be she doesn’t know about the gift either, in which case make no mention of it while we spin things out this end and find out more. On the other hand, she probably knows exactly what she’s in line for and she’s sitting there with her hand out. Either way, we need you to be our eyes and ears on this.’

  Charlotte nodded. This wasn’t her usual brief. The windfall usually came first, then the counselling, not the other way round.

  ‘If the worst case does come to pass and Carlos gifts the bulk of the estate out of the Mendoza family, we need to be in position to make sure that, regardless, the money stays banked with us. Get close to this woman – she needs to trust you, listen to you, be guided by you. She likely won’t know the first thing about finance at this level and I don’t want our counterparts getting wind there’s a new heiress on the block.’ He looked straight at her with his pale gaze. ‘I want you doing that thing you do.’

  ‘Connecting?’ she asked, the wry note showing in her eyes only.

  ‘Exactly that,’ he nodded. ‘Bring her in to the mothership, Charlotte. Losing three-quarters of a billion pounds doesn’t look good on anyone’s CV.’

  ‘Was that a threat?’ Milton asked
her as they walked down the corridor together.

  ‘Naturally.’

  Milton missed a beat and she knew he was smiling. She also knew he found her intriguing, his braggadocio style in complete contrast to her quiet confidence and serene reserve. ‘You seem pretty calm, given that he’s putting it all on you to make sure she keeps the investment with us.’

  ‘You think it’s all on me?’ Her arms swung lightly as she walked, her back straight, chin up. Various people nodded at him – them – as they passed. ‘Funny. My take was he’s got to go through you first. You and Paul are my . . .’ She looked at him quizzically. ‘What’s the terminology in American football, when you put the battering rams in front to protect the guy running with the ball?’

  ‘Blockers.’

  ‘Right. It’s only going to come down to me if legal can’t find a way to block the donation, which I’m sure they can. And of course we all know you know exactly how to make his liquid assets infinitely more ‘fixed’, so that even if the donation actually did come to pass, I doubt there’d be much left for me to have to save.’

  ‘You’re flattering me again, Charlotte,’ he chuckled as they reached his office, the view of the oxbow meander of the Thames looking sluggish below the hazy sky. A tall, rangy man was already sitting on his velvet sofa and idly flicking through a copy of The Economist. ‘Oh, Lord Finch, apologies! My meeting overran.’ He strode across the room in four strides, looking important and dynamic, holding out a fleshy hand. ‘Good to see you. Good to see you.’ His eyes shone with the excitement that came from personally knowing a peer of the realm. ‘Hey, allow me to introduce you to Charlotte Fairfax. I’ve been wanting to put the two of you together, she’s our wealth counsellor. I think she could have some very timely advice for you in light of your recent . . . alimony woes.’

  The tall man met her gaze and smiled, bending down to lightly kiss her on the cheeks. ‘Lotts, how are you, you exquisite creature? It’s been too long. You said you’d visit in Klosters.’