An Uncomplicated Man

by Colette McCormick

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Romance

Synopsis

An emotional, uplifting story about one man split between two lives... Perfect for fans of Amanda Prowse. What if the man in your life isn't who he says he is? Daniel Laither is a mild-mannered and uncomplicated bank manager, but when his boss asks him for a favour, things begin to get tangled. Introduced to businessman Arthur Braithwaite, Daniel reluctantly agrees to a financial arrangement that will create an unbreakable link between them. When Daniel meets Lucy, Braithwaite's daughter, he becomes a man obsessed. From the steamy afternoons spent together in hotel rooms, to evenings out with Lucy in fancy restaurants, Daniel's life moves a million miles from the one he'd had. He finds himself lying to his friends, his colleagues and, most importantly, his wife. He borrows money from a loan shark to afford this double life, but when the debt demands to be paid, he contemplates stealing from the bank. When Lucy falls pregnant and Braithwaite insists upon a marriage, Daniel has to choose between his two lives... Readers love Colette McCormick... 'Quite simply a brilliant read' Amazon reader review '' Extremely compelling' Amazon reader review 'As comforting as chicken broth on a cold afternoon' Amazon reader review

Release date: December 5, 2019

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 201

Sample

Can we just get one thing straight before we go any further? My name is Daniel. It’s not Dan and it’s definitely not Danny. It’s Daniel, Daniel Matthew Laither. Are we clear about that? My name is Daniel.

You might not think it’s a big deal, and maybe it’s not to some people, but it is to me. It was a big deal to my mum too. Mum said my name was Daniel.

She’d been pregnant with me when my dad went off to war at the end of 1914. He never came back; in fact he was dead before I was even born so it was just the two of us after that. My dad had been a Danny and while Mum wanted to name what would be their only son after him, she was determined that I would always be called Daniel. She said that Danny was the name of the factory worker who buggered off to war and got himself killed the first chance he got, leaving her high and dry with a son to raise.

We didn’t have a lot of money, but my mum did her best and she had high expectations for me, her only son. She used to say that with a name like Daniel I would have the chance to do something with my life. She said that I could be better than my father, and for a while I was.

Anyway, she said that I had been christened Daniel so that was my name and I wasn’t going to argue with her. No-one argued with my mother, not if they knew what was good for them.

My mum had a hard face – it suited her because she was a hard woman. I suppose she had to be, given the shitty hand that life had dealt her. I used to think that if she’d ever been short of food she could have chewed house bricks and not even chipped a tooth. She just had that sort of look about her. None of that mattered to me though, because she was my mum and I loved her.

She had a stand up argument with my dad’s mum one day because Gran insisted on calling me Danny.

‘His name is Daniel,’ Mum said to the woman she used to call ‘his mother.’ She didn’t shout because she didn’t have to. In all my life I have never heard my mum shout. She has this way of talking, in a voice that’s barely more than a whisper, and she dares you to defy her. That day she spoke slowly and quietly, but it had the same effect as if she was yelling. My Gran was doing all the screaming, not that it did her any good because my mum was adamant. ‘His name is Daniel.’

‘He should be Danny,’ Gran insisted, ‘it was good enough for his father.’

Mum pulled herself up to her full height of about four foot eleven and stared at her mother-in-law. ‘It might have been good enough for your son,’ she said each word slowly and separately, ‘but it is not good enough for mine.’ Gran opened her mouth to say something but Mum didn’t give her the chance, ‘and I swear, if I ever hear you call him Danny again, that will be the last time you see him.’

‘You can’t stop me from seeing him.’ Gran laughed as she spoke which didn’t help matters.

‘Just watch me,’ Mum replied. She didn’t laugh.

Gran always called me Daniel from that day on.

Personally I never wanted to be called Danny. Danny had left me. I know now that it wasn’t his fault but when I was a young lad I felt like I was the reason that Dad hadn’t come home from the war. I thought that Danny hadn’t wanted me enough to come home and if that was the case I didn’t want his name.

I got into a fight at school one day with a lad called Chris Metcalfe who kept calling me Danny for no other reason than he knew it would annoy me. He thought he was being clever and he would laugh as he did it, but one day enough was enough and I told him so. I told him if he ever called me Danny again I’d smack him. He did it again two seconds later so I smacked him.

Trouble was I smacked him a bit too hard because I broke his nose. On the plus side, he never called me Danny again. I got the headmaster’s cane and my mum’s slipper for it, but it had been worth it.

The last time I saw Chris Metcalfe, he called me Mr Laither. He was in my office trying to convince me that he was a good risk to give a mortgage to. He didn’t seem to recognise me as the Daniel Laither that he had gone to school with but I would have recognised that crooked nose anywhere.

That’s one of the good things about being a bank manager in a small town. Quite often you get to deal with the little shits that made your childhood a misery, but this time you’re the one in charge.

Sorry, I don’t suppose you care about any of that do you? You want to know about this other business, the one that started with Arthur Braithwaite.

I didn’t go to school with Arthur Braithwaite but within half an hour of meeting him I wanted to smack him, too.

Arthur Braithwaite opened his first factory in about 1921. Nobody really knows where his money came from but rumours are that he had something over Charles Matthews who had been his old boss. People said that he knew something about Charles that Charles didn’t want becoming public knowledge. Something that Charles was more than willing to pay for as long as Arthur kept quiet.

Just rumours of course, but you know what they say about no smoke without fire.

In the four decades since then Arthur Braithwaite has opened another two factories in town, and is now the single highest employer in the county. The whole town depends on his factories one way or another for its livelihood. If you don’t work for him directly, chances are that someone in your family does. Even before this I depended on him for my living. Not directly of course but through our customers. We rely on them having money in our bank and they get their money from him one way or another. I don’t have to tell you that he is the man around these parts, and that’s why I was helpless. We were all helpless when it came to dealing with Arthur Braithwaite.

I first met Arthur Braithwaite last November.

Actually, it goes back a bit further than that.

I was wrong when I said that this business started with Arthur Braithwaite, it really started with William Morris.

I was in my office one day in the middle of November last year when my phone rang and Mrs Warren said, ‘I have Mr Morris on the line for you, Mr Laither.’ I ran the name through my head, trying to remember who Mr Morris was. I couldn’t think of any of our clients with that name. Eventually she prompted me, ‘From Head Office.’

‘Oh.’ It just sort of popped out.

‘Shall I put him through?’ she asked. It was just a formality because there was no way that I could refuse to take a call from Mr Morris from Head Office, though for the life of me I had no idea what he would want with me. I was surprised that he even knew that I existed. Of course I’d heard of him, but I’d never had a conversation with him before.

I told Mrs Warren to put him through and coughed to clear my throat.

‘Danny,’ he said, ‘Bill Morris here.’ There was something about his voice that made me uneasy and it wasn’t just the fact that he had called me Danny. I was in two minds about correcting him but didn’t get the chance because before I could say anything he was telling me: ‘I need a favour, Danny.’ That set alarm bells ringing in my head for a start. It couldn’t be a good thing for a member of the board to ask you for a favour. They didn’t deal with branch managers, not directly anyway.

‘Of course Mr Morris,’ I said nervously.

‘It’s not a big thing, Danny,’ I opened my mouth with the intention of telling him my name was Daniel but nothing came out. ‘I need you to take a meeting.’ he said. He’d lowered his voice to little more than a whisper and I imagined him looking over his shoulder as he spoke.

‘Of course,’ I said, though the thought of it gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t see any situation where he would need to ask me to take a meeting rather than just tell Mrs Warren to schedule it into my diary.

So you see, on reflection, it all started with that phone call from William Morris. If I’d never spoken to him that day none of this would have happened.

It turned out that what he wanted from me was that I take a meeting with a friend of his. It seemed like a straight forward enough request, though I was curious why he had chosen to come to me. I was manager of the smallest branch in town, which made me the manager of the smallest branch in the company.. I was insignificant and I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t gone to one of the larger branches. It didn’t make any sense.

At that point I didn’t know who his friend was. All he had told me was that he would treat it as a personal favour if I would take the meeting. He said his friend was a ‘local business man who is looking for a line of credit to finance an investment.’

During the conversation that followed it became clear that William Morris wasn’t really asking me for a favour at all. He was telling me what to do – which was fair enough, I suppose, given our relative positions within the bank. I just didn’t understand the way he was going about things.

He didn’t use the word ‘expect’ but he might as well have done because he expected me to meet his friend and, what’s more, he expected me to give his friend whatever he wanted.

‘I’m not going to tell you where to set your rate Danny,’ he said, though it was obvious he was, ‘but if it were me, I’d be thinking about maybe half a percent less than what we give to the average customer.’ I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right but before I had the chance to check he was speaking again. ‘You won’t regret doing business with this man,’ William Morris let out a forced, false-sounding laugh. ‘Do you know what, Danny?’

‘It’s. . .’ I started to say but the words wouldn’t come out.

‘Sorry? What was that?’ he said quickly like I had interrupted his speech. I made the excuse that I’d sneezed rather than admit that I’d tried and failed to correct him. ‘Oh, bless you,’ he said, and I thanked him. ‘Anyway, Danny, as I was about to say,’ he paused for effect, ‘there’ll be an opening in the High Street branch in the next year or so and I think that would be right up your street. I think a man like you could do very well in our flag ship branch.’ He let that hang in the air for a second or two. ‘So, can I tell Arthur’s secretary to make an appointment?’

‘Arthur?’

‘Arthur Braithwaite, have you heard of him?’

Heard of him? Who hadn’t heard of him?

He called me Danny three more times before we actually said our goodbyes, the final time being when he said, ‘I really appreciate this Danny and. . .’ he paused before adding, ‘. . .I’m sure that I can rely on your discretion.’

Through clenched teeth I assured him that he could.

I was as annoyed with myself as I was with him.

I took a deep breath and called Mrs Warren into my office. I told her to expect a call from Arthur Braithwaite’s secretary with a view to scheduling a meeting. She mouthed the name but didn’t say it out loud. She was barely out of the door before the phone on her desk started ringing and, as I heard her talking, I sat back in my chair and wondered what on earth had happened in the last ten minutes.

I couldn’t see how William Morris could ever be friends with a man like Arthur Braithwaite. How would they even know each other? William Morris was the product of a private education and university, whereas it was well reported that Arthur Braithwaite left school when he was twelve years old and had worked his way up from the gutter. Yet Mr Morris had described him as a friend. And then it hit me. It was obvious, really.

There were only two ways that I could see. Either they both belonged to that funny handshake brigade and the boys were looking out for each other, or William Morris was in some way indebted to his ‘friend.’ There’d been a rumour that Arthur Braithwaite ran a money lending service alongside his more legitimate businesses and I wondered if that could be their connection. I thought that my first idea was more likely, but who knows? I’ve never got to the bottom of that one.

Mrs Warren came into my office a few minutes later and told me that I would be meeting Arthur Braithwaite in his office the afternoon after next.

You should see Arthur Braithwaite’s office. It’s got ‘I’m a rich bastard’ written all over it and right in the centre of it is this big solid oak desk. There’s nothing on it apart from a perfectly clean leather-edged blotter and a fountain pen sitting upright in a stand. All show. At least I’d been able to spread my papers out, not that I’d needed them because I might as well have just taken the contract with me. The deal had never been in any doubt. I’d done as Mr Morris suggested and offered an interest rate half a percent lower than our normal rate and there had been no quibbling. No need for negotiation. This deal had already been done between Braithwaite and Morris and I was just the piggy in the middle.

Arthur looked every inch the successful business man too, in his flash suit and golf club tie. He was a man in control of his life and he grinned from ear to ear as he signed on the dotted line. Why wouldn’t he? He was borrowing money, a lot of money, at practically no interest. I had to force the smile onto my face as he said, ‘Pleasure doing business with you, Danny.’

I’d told him my name was Daniel. I had been very specific about it but he’d insisted on calling me Danny all the way through the meeting. ‘Maybe we could do this Danny; perhaps could you get me that Danny.’ Every time he said anything he called me by name, except it wasn’t my name. He made it sound like he was suggesting things, but the tone of his voice made it clear that they were expectations and the fact that he called me Danny was his way of putting me in my place. He knew that he was in charge of what was happening and I could see that he was taking delight in calling me ‘Danny’ just because he’d worked out that I didn’t like it. In lots of ways he reminded me of Chris Metcalfe but this time my hands were tied. I didn’t think breaking his nose was a very good idea.

It irritated the life out of me that he called me Danny, I’m not going to deny it, but to be honest he could have called me d’Artagnan if he liked just so long as he signed on the dotted line. I didn’t much like the idea of getting on his wrong side. Plus, his mate ‘Bill’ had made it clear that I had to make sure I gave his friend a deal he could work with. And while he may have implied that the chair behind the desk at the High Street branch would be mine if I played my cards right the flip side of that was that if I failed I’d be out on the street.

After he’d signed the contract he carefully replaced the top on his pen and put it back on its stand. The deal was done. He held his hand across the desk and I took it. However, instead of the gentlemanly handshake that normal people have on these occasions I had to endure my hand being crushed. His hand was as flabby as the rest of him, but Arthur Braithwaite’s grip was vice-like and he smiled as I squirmed.

‘Let’s have a drink to celebrate,’ he said after he’d dropped my hand. He reached down and fished two crystal tumblers and a half empty bottle of whiskey from one of the lower drawers of his desk. He poured two healthy measures and handed one of the glasses to me. The blood had still not returned to my fingers and I had to be careful not to drop it.

‘You drive a hard bargain, Danny,’ he said lifting his glass in a salute, and I couldn’t help feeling that he was laughing at me.

I think I forced a smile onto my face but I didn’t feel like it. I felt humiliated.

I’d not had any lunch and the whiskey on my empty stomach left me a bit woolly headed. I tried not to let it show. You’ve got to have a good poker face in my line of work; you can’t let the other person know what you’re thinking. When there’s a man sitting in your office applying for a mortgage or asking for an extension on a loan that he can’t pay, you can’t let him know the decision too early. You have to be in control.

That’s how it is normally anyway, but that day was different.

I wasn’t stupid enough to think I was in charge of that meeting and I’d realised that long before I ever walked into his office. It might have looked like I had the upper hand because, technically, I’d arranged the loan on paper, but in this case Braithwaite was the one in charge and I was under no illusion about that. I let it wash over me though because that’s how these big businessmen like to behave – you know, the big I am and all that. I’d seen it all before and I was seeing it then.

He glanced at his watch before emptying his glass in two gulps and pushing it away indicating that, as far as he was concerned, the meeting was over. I drained my own glass much quicker than I would do normally, but it was either that or leave some, and it was too good to waste.

The whiskey was still stinging the back of my throat as he offered me his hand once again. I had no option but to take it even though I knew what was coming. His hand was twice the size of mine to start with and once again he squeezed rather than shook.

Luckily for me, the door opened and he immediately let go and walked around his desk to greet whoever had come in. I took the opportunity to shake my wrist and get a bit of blood circulating again.

I h. . .