Dr. Gunter SiebeL Schering A. G., Berlin
The Criminal Investigation Divisions of Scotland Yard, Zurich and Berlin
Charles Walford, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London
And to Jorja, who makes all things possible.
An Excerpt from
Sidney Sheldon’s The Tides of Memory
By Tilly Bagshawe
On Sale April 9, 2013
Prologue
“Was there anything else, Home Secretary?”
Alexia De Vere smiled. Home Secretary. Surely the most beautiful two words in the English language. Except for Prime Minister, of course. The Tory party’s newest superstar laughed at herself. One step at a time, Alexia.
“No thank you Edward. I’ll call if I need you.”
Sir Edward Manning nodded briefly and left the room. A senior civil servant in his early sixties and bastion of the Westminster political establishment, Sir Edward Manning was as tall and grey and rigid as a matchstick. In the coming months, Sir Edward would be Alexia De Vere’s constant companion: advising, cautioning, expertly guiding her through the maze of Home Office politics. But right now, in these first few hours in the job, Alexia De Vere wanted to be alone. She wanted to savor the sweet taste of victory without an audience. To sit back and revel in the profound thrill of power.
After all, she’d earned it.
Getting up from her desk, she paced around her new office, a vast eyrie of a room perched high in one of the baroque towers of the Palace of Westminster. The interior design was more functional than fabulous. A matching pair of ugly brown sofas at one end (those must go), a simple desk and chair at the other, and a bookcase stuffed with dusty, un-read tomes of political history. But none of that mattered once you saw the view. Spectacular didn’t begin to cover it. Floor to ceiling windows provided a panoramic vista of London, from the towers of Canary Wharf in the east to the mansions of Chelsea in the west. It was a view that said one thing and one thing only.
Power.
And it was all hers.
I am the Home Secretary of Great Britain. The second most important member of Her Majesty’s Government.
How had it happened? How had a junior prisons minister, and a deeply unpopular one at that, leapfrogged so many other senior candidates to land the big job? Poor Kevin Lomax over at Trade & Industry must be spitting yellow, coffee-stained teeth. The thought made Alexia De Vere feel warm inside. Patronizing old fossil. He wrote me off years ago, but who’s laughing now?
Pilloried in the press for being wealthy, aristocratic and out-of-touch with ordinary voters, and dubbed the new Iron Lady by the tabloids, Alexia De Vere’’s sentencing reform bill had been savaged by MPs on both sides of the house for being ‘compassionless’ and ‘brutal.’ No parole sentences might work in America, a country so barbaric they still had the death penalty. But they weren’t going to fly here, in civilized Great Britain.
That’s what they said. But when push came to shove, they’d all voted the bill through.
Cowards. Cowards and hypocrites the lot of them.
Alexia De Vere knew how unpopular the bill had made her, with colleagues, with the media, with lower income voters. So she was as shocked as everyone else when the Prime Minister, Henry Whitman, chose to appoint her as his Home Secretary. But she didn’t dwell on it. The fact was, Henry Whitman had appointed her. At the end of the day that was all that mattered.
Reaching into a box, Alexia pulled out some family photographs. She preferred to keep her work and home lives separate, but these days everyone was so touchy-feely, having pictures of one’s children on one’s desk had become de rigeur.
There was her daughter Roxie at eighteen, her blonde head thrown back, laughing. How Alexia missed that laugh. Of course, the picture had been taken before the accident.
The accident Alexia De Vere hated the euphemism for her daughter’s suicide attempt, a three story leap that had left Roxie wheelchair bound for the rest of her life. In Alexia’s view, one should call a spade a spade. But Alexia’s husband, Teddy insisted on it. Dear Teddy. He always was a soft touch.