Tommy's First Year at College Pt. 02

"BRILLIANT! Thank you for a great idea!" said Jon. "This may well be the answer to all our problems. I ought to buy you a drink, but you're not old enough to drink! What present would you like?"

"A promise to fund me for three or four years at an Italian University!"

"Done!" said Jon and kissed her.

Their task at Loxton complete, the three went back to Getheringthwaite, while David and Jon were remaining for another week at Loxton before returning to Camford.

One evening, Dom's brother invited them to dine at the Hall. To the boys' delight, Susan, their sister-in-law, was pregnant. They were even more delighted when she informed them that she was expecting a boy. "He'll only be a 'Mr', but one day he'll be the fifteenth or sixteenth Marquess!" said Dom. "Please may I be his godfather?"

"Of course!" said Michael. "We were planning to invite you in any case. The baby is due in February, and we hope to have the baptism at Easter, if all goes well."

"Susan," said Dom, "would you mind very much if we carried off your husband to the pub? Sandro and I are so delighted that we want to celebrate your future happy event! It means that we are off the hook. We need have no worries about the future of the peerage, as the male succession is now well assured, without me feeling guilty at not having children who can succeed to the title!"

So the three men walked out of the Hall grounds into the village and entered the Ovenden Arms. Dom ordered three pints of beer. When they were ensconced in a corner of the bar, Dom lifted his glass and said to his brother, "Here's not just to your health but to the health and future happiness of Susan and her future son!" The beer was soon consumed, and so was a second pint and then a third...

Chapter 28 Subtlety succeeds

As soon as he got back to Camford, Jon Singleton-Scarborough telephoned his man of business, Tim Ingledown. "Tim," he said, "I want you get costings for an identical fitness centre building to the existing one in Camford." He explained to Tim what the intention was. Within a couple of days, Tim was back with a figure of £3M plus the cost of the land. Jon told him to instruct their anonymous trust to announce that it was prepared to make available the sum of £2M for the construction of a Women's Fitness Centre in Camford, subject to the remaining costs being met by funds raised by Women's Equality in Sport and Fitness, the group of agitators who were picketing the Men's Fitness Centre. Tim saw to it that the announcement was made in a press release sent to the Camford Gazette as well as to the national press.

"We'll see now if the WESF can put its money where its mouth is!" he said.

The next time that Jon and David went for a swim at the Men's Fitness Centre, there was a young woman sitting on the steps with a placard reading YOU CAN'T BUY US OFF! EQUALITY, NOT MONEY!

"Clearly, they are a nuisance group, not women who want to keep fit!" said Jon. "Tim contacted me last week. The offer of £1.5M was made a month ago, and there has not yet been a reply. But that placard means that they have got the message. I will tell Tim to get in touch again and give them a time limit of sixty days to reply. If they don't, then the offer is to be withdrawn."

A month later a news item appeared in the national dailies and the Camford Gazette. It was headed "Women's Fitness group fails to reply to offer." It reiterated the fact that the group had one month to reply to the offer or lose its credibility. A month later, the offer expired, and several newspapers published items saying that clearly there was no demand in Camford for a women's fitness centre. Soon afterwards, the pickets disappeared from the entrance to the Men's Fitness Centre. The governing body of the Centre, though secretly delighted, made no public comment. Jon was just relieved that a piece of pointless agitation should have created a political and organizational upheaval that had lasted far too long. He did however ask Tim to hire a private investigator to find out who was involved in the WESF. In particular, he wished to know how the group had managed to get questions asked in Parliament.

It took some months before the investigator had any concrete information. WESF was neither a registered charity, nor a company listed at Companies House. Since the pickets had disappeared, there was no way of finding out about the organization's meetings. They were never advertised. It turned out that the Labour MP and the life peer who had asked questions in Parliament had never met any member of the organization. They had merely received a letter with an illegible signature from a person describing him- or her-self as the Secretary. The address claiming to be the office of the company turned out to be an accommodation address in Maidenhead, Surrey. Several letters sent there received no reply. The telephone number on the letter was a 'disposable' mobile number no longer in use. The web site of the organization had not been updated since it was first set up several years before and the domain name, whose original owner had used the Maidenhead accommodation address, had now expired. No reply was obtained from the E-mail address on the web site, and it turned out that it in turn was an E-mail forwarding service to another E-mail address that no longer existed. Whoever had been behind WESF had covered their tracks extremely well.

Tim came to Camford to see Jonathan. "I think you should be concerned about this occurrence," he said. "Someone or some organization is interested in you and your financial empire. In spite of our anonymous trusts, I fear that someone is trying to identify you publicly. I know that you have nothing to hide, and without being a recluse, keep a very low public profile, but you are the recipient of income from a very wealthy trust, as well as possessing a large personal property portfolio world-wide. Although, as your financial manager, I know that you have always paid every penny of tax due from you without any attempt to deceive the tax authorities in any countries, someone is trying to dig up dirt on you. The fact that you are gay may well have something to with whatever it is that is going on!"

"But I've been gay all my life, I have never attempted to hide it. I have no interest in underage boys. My partner is a talented singer with national honours, and my children are all happily independent. What can they want?"

"I suspect either an anti-gay movement, an islamist terror group or a Russian oligarch. The ultimate aim has to be to obtain access to your financial assets by disgracing you in some way. I think we must pay our investigator to carry on trying to dig deeper. It might be worth asking Dom if he knows anyone close to the security services who might be of help in the investigation. There must be an internet involvement somewhere."

TO BE CONTINUED...