The reading of Julian Ashcombe’s will began at eleven in the morning and stopped being civil at eleven seventeen.
By eleven twenty-three, his eldest son was shouting.
By eleven twenty-five, his daughter had accused her stepmother of sleeping her way into a fortune.
And by eleven thirty, the family solicitor had stopped trying to interrupt anyone.
The room had been built for quieter forms of power.
Blackthorn Hall stood outside Bath, a grey Georgian estate surrounded by wet winter fields and bare elm trees. Julian had bought it thirty-two years earlier, when Ashcombe & Wren was still a regional investment firm with six employees and a rented office above a pharmacy.
Now the house had a heated orangery, a private library, seventeen acres of land and a wine cellar worth more than some London flats.
Julian had died there twelve days earlier.
Not dramatically.
No mysterious fall down a staircase. No poison in the brandy. No final whispered confession.
His heart had simply stopped during breakfast.
His wife, Elena, had been sitting across from him.
She had called the ambulance.
She had also been the one who closed his eyes when the paramedics stopped trying.
His three adult children had arrived later.
That fact would become important.
Everything became important after money entered the room.
