PROLOGUE

      ‘GIVE me one good reason why I should help you.’

      The man sitting in front of him gave a tiny, helpless shrug. He was a proud man at the end of his rope, and it gave Nick no pleasure to push him, but he needed to get to the bottom of this request, and pussy-footing around wouldn’t cut the mustard.

      ‘Mr Broomfield?’

      Another little shrug. ‘I can’t—I can’t give you a reason. I don’t even know why I’m here—’

      ‘So why did you come to me?’

      ‘Gerry told me to. Gerry Burrows—you helped him out last year.’

      ‘I remember. We bought his company.’

      ‘Oh, you did more than that. You saved his life. He was suicidal and his wife was on the point of leaving him, and you turned his life around.’

      And this man looked in need of the same kind of rescue package. Nick shifted in his chair and wondered how many more desperate friends Gerry Burrows had. One at a time, he told himself wearily. Surely there couldn’t be that many?

      ‘Gerry Burrows had a business worth buying. As yet I know nothing about you or your business, or even what you want from me, so why don’t you start there and tell me what exactly you have in mind?’

      Andrew Broomfield’s laugh was bitter and self-deprecating. ‘I haven’t even thought that far—’

      ‘Then perhaps you should. If I’m going to help you, Mr Broomfield, I need a reason.’

      ‘There is no good reason. Only a lunatic would consider it.’ His laugh cracked in the middle. ‘We buy and sell bankrupt stock, of all things. It was doing really well, but then we overstretched ourselves, bought several shops so we could open retail outlets, and things went from bad to worse, really. They’re all mortgaged to the hilt, and our only real asset is draining so much cash it’s brought us to the brink. It was meant to save us, but it’s taking us under. We can’t go on—and if I can’t find someone to intervene, then I guess the receivers will.’

      ‘It might be the best thing.’

      ‘No.’ He closed his eyes, his head shaking slowly from side to side. ‘For me, yes, it’s what I deserve, but my wife’s pregnant, and we’ve just been told the baby’s got something wrong with him and he’ll need a whole series of operations, starting as soon as he’s born. She has no idea the business is in trouble, and I can’t do that to her—make her homeless just before the baby’s born, with all we’ve got to face there, but I just can’t see any way out of it—’

      Oh, hell. He’d just hit on the one thing calculated to get to Nick, but curiously it didn’t look calculated. It looked as if it came from the heart.

      ‘Homeless?’ he prompted.

      Broomfield nodded miserably. ‘I put the house up as security, like an idiot. It’s nothing special—just an ordinary little three-bedroomed detached house like millions of others and a drop in the ocean compared to our other debts, but it’s home, and I can’t take that away from her—’

      Nick sat back, twiddling a pen in his fingertips and watching the man struggle with his emotions. God, he was getting soft in his old age. He knew he was only going through the motions here, knew he’d help Broomfield even though he didn’t know him from Adam and shouldn’t care a jot about his pregnant wife or the sick baby or the mess he’d got them in.

      He stuck to the facts. ‘Tell me about this asset.’

      The man shrugged again. ‘It’s just a building site—a tatty, near-derelict old school with a disused chapel and other bits and pieces, and a handful of temporary classrooms scattered about the site. I bought it a few years ago and sat on it, and last year we got planning