“Well, we made it,” said Brian as they walked into Terminal 5 at Heathrow a few minutes after 6pm that Saturday Evening.

Kim didn’t say much. She hadn’t had much time alone with Brian since he’d picked her up at her home some three hours earlier. For one thing, her lack of sleep the previous night didn’t help. She wasn’t looking forward to delaying getting to bed for another eight or nine hours especially after being in a crowded aircraft and suffering the horrendously uncomfortable seats.

Suddenly, she became a lot more alert as Brian steered them towards the Business Class Check-in.

“We can get some sleep on the flight. You look as if you need some,” he commented.

Kim just grunted her agreement. Her mind was totally on getting some sleep-in preparation for the garden party that Brian was taking her to the next day.

---

Both of them managed to get at least a few hours of sleep on the flight but having to get up and go through US Immigration and Customs at what was effectively the early hours of the morning according to their body clocks was not the best way of starting a new day.

Nevertheless, they both cleared the last bit of ‘officialdom’ and walked out of the terminal into a warm and humid New York night. Brian hailed a cab which took them to their Hotel on Long Island.

Just before 02:00 local time, Kim said goodnight to Brian and went into her room. She literally fell onto the bed fully clothed and fell asleep. She remained there until Brian knocked on her door some six hours later.

“Go away,” she called out.

“Kim? Breakfast in half an hour,” came a voice from beyond the door.

Kim didn’t say anything. She just remained on the bed with her eyes tightly shut. Eventually, the call of nature intervened and she had to move.

When she saw the haggard face in the mirror she recoiled in horror.
“Enough!” she cried.

---

Kim was only ten minutes late for breakfast. Brian was waiting patiently for her.

“Good morning, Kim,” he said as she sat down.

“It isn’t morning and it isn’t good,” came her grumpy reply.

Brian chuckled.

“I take it that you didn’t sleep very well then?”

“I slept all night but I was still wearing the clothes I travelled in…”

“You really were pretty dead on your feet by the time we got here.”

“Well, it was some ungodly hour wasn’t it? Plus, I’d not had much sleep the night before thanks to my editor calling me in the small hours.”

“Humph!” replied Brian with a grin on his face.

Kim was beginning to understand Brian’s body language but this time, his reaction totally confused her.

---

“How does this look?” asked Kim as she tried on the fourth dress in the Nieman Marcus department store.

“That’s more you,” replied Brian.

She could see that he was enjoying her trials and tribulations of getting a dress suitable for the next four or five hours. She could not see herself ever wearing it again but it did look nice. The price was nice as well. She did a quick conversion from USD to GBP. The price tag was more than three hundred pounds but Brian was paying for it which made it a little more palatable. She’d never spent more than one hundred pounds on any item of clothing in her life. Her usual haunts were more at the Primark/Matalan price level than the decidedly up market store they were now in.

She managed a smile before saying,
“I’ll take it.”

Then they moved to the shoe department and the game began all over again.

With the purchases made, she headed for the Ladies Restroom to get changed and apply some makeup. She hoped that the bags under her eyes would be covered by the small amount of concealer that she’d brought with her. If they weren’t then there was little that she could do about it.

Putting some polish on her nails would have to wait for the cab ride. She only hoped that it wasn’t too bumpy.

Half an hour later, they walked out of the Mall ready for the meetings ahead. She’d spent another hundred and fifty pounds of Brian’s money on a pair of high heeled sandals. They were already playing havoc with her feet but she gritted her teeth and managed a smile whenever Brian looked in her direction.

He hailed a cab and gave the driver an address.
“That’s at the other end of Long Island. It will cost you?”

“That’s fine,” said Brian.
He gave the driver a fifty-dollar bill to make sure that he was interested in taking them to their destination.

Kim resisted asking Brian who they’d be meeting. She knew better than to talk shop in a cab, on a train, bus or plane. Instead she got him to hold the bottle of polish while she tried to put some on her nails. Her hand was shaking so much that Brian took pity on her and did it for her.
“I used to do this for my ex,” he muttered quietly.

It was soon evident that he was telling the truth. The end result was far better than she had ever done on the rare occasions that she wore anything but clear polish.

---

After what seemed an eternity, cab drew up outside the entrance to a large house. The gates swung open and Kim got a view of a very imposing building. She was under no doubt that they were in the presence of money. At that point in time she didn’t know how much money but she was sure that she’d find out very soon.

As the cab drove off, the front door of the house opened and a man of more mature years emerged.

“Brian! So glad that you could make it,” he said as he shook his hand.
“And you must be Kim. Brian has told me so much about you. Welcome.”

Kim looked a bit bewildered. The man standing in front of her was none other than Garth Samson. She guessed that he was possibly the tenth or eleventh richest person in the USA. He was worth billions, many, many billions. He was also a man that eschewed journalists with a vengeance.

“Mr… Mr Sansom, pleased to meet you,” stuttered Kim.

“Garth please. We are all friends here,” came his reply with a smile on his face.

“Come on through. Lunch is almost ready.”

Kim tried to remember if he had ever given an interview to a reporter. She singularly failed to recall one at direct quote from him in the past ten or so years. Then she had a bit of a panic attack as she wondered if Brian had told him about who she worked for?

After a deep breath, she followed him deeper into the house. It was getting a bit late to back out now.

They were led by their host through the huge house, and out into the back garden. The place was landscaped to within an inch of its life. Not a blade of grass was out of place and a weed would be asking for trouble if it dared poke it’s head above ground.

There were three women sitting at a table on a terrace waiting for them. Kim recognised one of them. She wondered why a former supermodel would be here.

“Kim, please meet Natalie Deschamps and this are her good friends and neighbours, Hélène Harris and her wife Isabelle.”

For the second time in as many minutes, Kim was struck dumb.
[1]

“Hi Brian,” said Hélène.
“We are glad that you could make it. It was fortunate that we were still in the country. We are going back to France tomorrow.”

“You must be Kim. We have been expecting you,” said Isabelle.

Kim felt totally out of her depth. These people were all A+ list celebrities. There were a lot of people at ‘The Herald’ who would give their right arms to be where she was standing right now. Getting an interview with Hélène Harris was… well an impossibility. The only in-depth interview she’d ever given was to her now wife. She almost pinched herself to see if she was still fast asleep in their Hotel.

Still in a daze, she sat down. Brian sat opposite her. Their host Garth, sat next to Kim.

“I don’t normally let Journalists set foot inside my home but Brian tells me that you are somewhat different. After his call yesterday, I looked up your bio and you have a reputation for getting to the truth. In this day and age of fake news, that is an admirable quality. It is a real shame that you work for the Sunday Herald. They have really gone down into the gutter these past few years since the previous owners sold out.”

He smiled at Kim who was still feeling totally out of her depth but she felt relieved to know that he’d done his homework on her.

“Don’t worry Kim these are all good friends of mine. I hope that you will become one as well given time.”

She’d already realised that Brian was well connected but had no idea that these were the people behind the company. Suddenly a load of things that had been a total mystery started to become an awful lot clearer.

Then she pinched herself for thinking like she was on an assignment. No one would believe her if she told them where she was and who she was with. She decided to enjoy the moment and not let the reporter in her cloud the day.

---

As they ate Lunch, Brian began to tell a tale.

“I was a student of Hélène at Cambridge. She wrote a book on Mathematics in Production Engineering. I helped out a little bit with the research which earned me a Masters. When she revealed herself at the Oscars, I was there in the Audience as one of her guests. Garth was sitting in the row behind us with his late wife. Together, they rescued some of our party from the hordes of press who were acting more like a pack of wolves in the chaos at the end of the event. He was ever so kind to give us a lift to the Airport in his Limo. Ever since that night, we have all been friends.”

Kim looked at her host. She knew that Garth was infamous in his hostility to the press which made at least some sense given the group of people sitting around the table with her. Hélène had been the target of a lot of people after she’d come out to the world at the Oscars.

After that momentous evening, she’d simply disappeared off the face of the map after the event. As she ate her first course, she also remembered that she’d made a very brief few appearances on TV over the three or four years since that day but had remained an intensely private person. All requests for personal interviews had been firmly denied.

Then she realised that Garth was not much different from her when it came to privacy. Their being friends was not that strange once you knew the facts about their dislike of the media.

Brian carried on.

“Two years ago, I was working in Automotive Industry at a Formula 1 Racing Car company who had a base not far from Silverstone. My marriage was breaking up and I was bored trying to make a car go a tenth of a second faster every two weeks when Garth gave me a call out of the blue.”

He looked at Garth who took up the story.

“Brian got on the next flight out here much like you two did yesterday. He came to listen to a business proposal that Hélène had pitched to me. Naturally, Hélène wanted to keep out of the limelight as much as myself. These days, most of my investments are done on the quiet. I think you Brits have a very good expression for this. ‘Softly-Softly’ you call it which is far better than our ‘QT’. Anyway, the company that you both work for and that he is the boss off was about to come onto the market and Hélène here thought that it would be a great platform for the new safety system. A type of new black box but with a load of special stuff inside that makes it unique in the world. She’d designed it and built a prototype that when she showed me a video of a trial literally blew my socks off. It was all done in her spare time I might add yet she was still producing one Novel every twelve to fourteen months. Amazing.”

Then Hélène pitched in.

“I knew that with enough capital we… as in the three of us could buy the company and put the device into production. I also knew that an American company was working on something similar but were, to put it bluntly, years behind where I was. By years, I mean at least three or possibly four and that, if they got wind of what we were doing before we were ready to go public, they’d move heaven and earth to not only slow us down but make sure we never went public. Before you say that this is fantasy, the man behind that company has a well-documented but, as yet, unprovable record of doing just that in the past.”

Garth took his cue.

“The company in question is owned by a shell company based in the Bahamas, which in turn is owned by another that is based in some goddam tiny island in the Pacific. But, the real owner of this organisation and I have locked horns many times over the years. I know only too well from first-hand experience how he works. He has indeed cost me many millions over the years but that is not the issue here. Business is Business but their way of doing business is not business especially if it means Intellectual Property Theft and asset stripping in a big way. This thing, that Hélène has designed, has been protected by patent applications, but that won’t stop them from doing their utmost to stop us getting the device to market.”

Then he looked Kim right in the eyes.
“The thing is Kim, that company is also the one that owns the shell company in the Bahamas, that in turn owns your newspaper, the Sunday Herald.”

Lightbulbs started to go on in Kim’s mind. Her reaction was visible to everyone around the table.

“I guess from your reaction Kim, at least some of this starts to make sense?”

Kim just sat there wide eyed and not for the first, second or third time that weekend she was dumbstruck.

Brian carried on with the story.

“That weekend, we came up with a plan to buy the company and install me as the boss and then take over the development, production and marketing of the new black box.”

Then Brian added,
“But all those good intentions went up in smoke when I got home, I found that my wife had left me. She’d taken our children to my Mothers and disappeared into the night. My sudden departure for the USA was the straw that had broken the Camel’s back in our relationship. My old job meant that I often went to race meetings at short notice even though I tried my hardest to get out of it. Then I thought that this plan might just save my marriage. It didn’t and we divorced on amicable terms. We are still friends and as you know she lives next door so we share the care of our children which is why I was able to drop everything and come here with you.”

Garth carried on the story.
“I have an associate in England who is very much like me in that he works in the background investing in companies as a form of shared ownership. I struck a deal with him and via a company I own in Ireland, he received the money to buy the company on my behalf. I guess that is where the thing about ‘money laundering’ came from. The money I used is perfectly legit, kept offshore but inside the EU for tax reasons. It does mean that I can invest overseas without breaking all sorts of Federal Tax Laws and importantly having to make the dealings public in my filings to Wall St. The only people outside my organisation who know about them are the Tax People.”

“Once the deal was done I took over and brought three good, no, make that brilliant engineers from the racing car company with me. They do all the hard work but I’m the boss,” said Brian.

“Who is this associate?” asked Kim who was suddenly back on the boil.

“His name was Adrian Forsythe.”

“Was?”

“Sadly, he died at the back end of last year. Hélène, Isabelle, Natalie and I went to his funeral. His wife, Maxine has taken over the business. She is a formidable woman. I’m sure that Brian can arrange a meeting if needed, but she shuns publicity as much as I do if not more so.”

“How did you find out about him and let alone meet him if he shuns publicity as much as you do?”

Garth let out a small laugh.

“A few years ago, Adrian was involved in a deal to buy a Hotel in a place you call Devon from a certain business rival of mine. Anyway, he put one over on my rival which made him one of the good guys in my opinion. When I was over in Europe about a year after that, I made a point of looking him up. That business rival is none other than the owner of the company that is trying to make the same sort of device as we are and is your current employer a few times removed.”

Garth smiled again.

“Adrian turned out to be quite a character. Getting one over on my rival piqued my interest so I did my research and I was very impressed by what I found. His way of doing business was pretty unique in my eyes. As time went on I realised, that while I had more than enough money to last a dozen lifetimes, his way of investing was still a way of making money, but in a different and less visible way. With my hatred of the media and my record of taking companies private just so the gamblers of Wall St can’t bet on my failure, I’ve adopted his methods for a lot of my dealings now. On the bright side, his widow is carrying on the good work and is, if anything, going to be a lot more successful than he ever was.”

Brian saw Kim’s eyes light up.
“As Garth said, she is even more publicity shy than her husband ever was so don’t go getting any ideas about a scoop.”

Kim looked at him.
“I don’t think that I’m going to be in the media business for much longer. Remember that I was summoned down to London?”

“Even so, don’t go getting any ideas. You know the sort of thing I mean… A blockbuster exposé as your parting gift or something like that.”

“I won’t, don’t worry. Writing an expose of anyone is about the last thing on my mind at the present moment. No one at the paper would believe me if I said who I was having lunch with. They’d all think that I’d taken some form of illegal substance if you know what I mean.”

After, briefly looking down at her hands she said,
“Thank you all for sharing everything with me. When Brian told me yesterday… Yes, it was only yesterday that we were coming to this neck of the woods, I wondered if we were going on a wild goose chase. It has most certainly not been the case. For that I thank you all.”

Garth stood up after looking at his watch.

“Our other guests will shortly be arriving. Hélène, do you need to prepare?”

Kim looked a bit puzzled.

“Hélène, is giving a reading of her latest thriller, ‘Crime does pay. Sometimes!’. All the proceeds are going to a local women’s shelter. That was Natalie’s idea I’m afraid.”

Kim looked at her watch and then at Brian as if to say, ‘don’t we have a flight to catch?’.

“Didn’t Brian tell you?” said Garth.

“There seems to be an awful lot that people are not telling me at the moment,” said Kim in a matter of fact manner but with a smile on her face.

Hélène laughed.

“You have found a good one there Brian.”

Brian glared back at Hélène.

“Mr Reynolds will be landing here for you at five. You will be at JFK in less than twenty minutes. The LIE, can be a nightmare on Sunday evenings.”

“LIE?”

“Long Island Expressway. The main road that we used to get from the Mall to here.” answered Brian.
“Thousands of New Yorkers come up to this part of Long Island for the weekend. They will be heading back to the city at around the time we need to be going in the same direction hence the need for an alternative way to get to JFK.”

“Ok, but who is Mr Reynolds?”

It was Garth who replied.
“He’s my Helicopter Pilot. If my Lear Jet was not undergoing its annual service, I’d let you borrow it to fly home. So, the least I can do get you to JFK in time for your flight.”

Kim felt rather inadequate. These people moved in circles that she could only dream about or read about in a Tabloid Newspaper or on Social Media, when they had been caught doing something wrong.

“Come on Kim, let’s get some seats for the reading?” asked Brian.

She followed him with a bit of a wobble in her heels. She swore to herself that she’d never wear heels like this again especially on grass.

Despite her previous misgivings, Kim enjoyed the reading. It was hard to reconcile in her mind that Hélène had once been a stuffy University Professor let alone a man. She had the audience in fits of laughter as she read part of her book where the heroine falls flat on her face in a terribly embarrassing event but still manages to come out on top. Kim listened avidly to it and realised that she could very well be the heroine in the story given the way things were shaping up. She knew that it couldn’t be and that the prose must have been written months before but it was an interesting end to the afternoon.

Her regard for Hélène grew and grew as the story unfolded. Kim now knew that there was no way on earth that Hélène deserved the hostile reaction to her and her coming out had had in some parts of the world. Then she remembered the framed picture that hung proudly on the wall in her Editors Office. It was the front page of the paper Sandy worked for at the time. It was dated from the day after the Oscars. It had been a feeble attempt at a character demolition. It backfired miserably and led to Sandy being fired from the paper.

Watching Hélène read from her latest book made Kim admire her even more. To be so good in two fields was truly amazing. Then she thought, not amazing but exceptional.

At the end of the reading, Hélène gave her a couple of signed copies of her book.
“Keep one of them for yourself. Let it always be a reminder that you were not dreaming on your lightning trip to this part of the world.”

Kim took the volumes and looked inside. She was surprised to see that Garth had added a note to the dedication stating the time and place of the reading.

All too soon it was time for their journey home to begin. Kim watched Long Island beneath them and the Pilot was following the ‘LIE’ towards the City. It was indeed very busy with traffic heading towards the city. The views of the New York skyline as it got closer was even better. It had been a weekend to remember in so many ways but the trip that they were on was only half over.

---

They’d waltzed through the check-in and everything else at JFK and they were soon in the Business Class Lounge waiting for their flight home. Neither of them wanted anything to eat so they found somewhere quiet to sit.

“Well Kim, what do you think of Garth, Hélène and everything? Do you have a story?” asked Brian.

Kim chuckled.
“I have lots of stories but none can be told. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Brian grinned.
“I thought it might be something like that. But… wasn’t it better for you to hear things from the people involved than just for me to tell you something that you may well not believe.”

“Yeah. You got me there. I would never have believed what we’ve experienced today in a million years.”

Brian was patiently waiting. Kim eventually got the message.

“Ok, I admit it. I was sent on a hack job. I had my suspicions right from the start so don’t go gloating about it?”

“Me? Gloat?” asked Brian in a slightly hurt voice.

“Yes you!”

Brian wiped the smile off his face.

“What are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to get on that plane and take these sodding shoes off. That’s what. Then I’m going to get changed and hopefully get some sleep before we get to Heathrow.”

“I happen to think you think you managed those shoes very well.”

“Well, Mr expert, you wear them then!”

Brian laughed.
“Fair enough. Why not come over and spend the day next Sunday and I’ll get some like yours but in my size. The only condition is that you will wear that outfit including the shoes. Do we have a deal?”

“You just won’t give up, will you?”

“Sorry my dear, I won’t. Do we have a deal?”

“You forget one thing. I have a job in London.”

“And for how long eh? From what you said your bosses are none too happy with you. Why not give them the finger and come and work for me. I happen to think that we make a good team. How about it then Kim? Want to get a steady job and an escape from the dirt and noise of London? After all, those were almost the words you used in your interview with me, weren’t they?”

She didn’t reply straight away so Brian did it for her.

“There is no need to give me an answer right away. The offer is on the table. Just remember that when you go into to see your boss on Wednesday.”

Just then, they were asked to board the plane. As they lined up to walk down the gangway, Kim said in a virtual whisper,
“Thanks Brian. I won’t forget.”

[to be continued]
[Note 1]
These are characters from “Promises Can Get you into Trouble”.
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/46574/promises-can-ge...

[Note 2]
Adrian Forsythe and how he does business is the subject of the ‘Forsythe Saga’ Stories.