Sidney Sheldon’s The Tides of Memory. Сидни Шелдон

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      SIDNEY SHELDON’S

      THE TIDES

       of MEMORY

      Tilly Bagshawe

      For Heather Hartz

       With Love.

      CONTENTS

       Title Page

       Dedication

      Prologue

      Part I

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Part III

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

       Chapter Twenty-Three

       Chapter Twenty-Four

       Chapter Twenty-Five

       Chapter Twenty-Six

       Chapter Twenty-Seven

       Chapter Twenty-Eight

       Chapter Twenty-Nine

       Chapter Thirty

       Chapter Thirty-One

       Chapter Thirty-Two

       Chapter Thirty-Three

       Part IV

       Chapter Thirty-Four

       Chapter Thirty-Five

       Chapter Thirty-Six

       Chapter Thirty-Seven

       Chapter Thirty-Eight

       Chapter Thirty-Nine

       Chapter Forty

       Chapter Forty-One

       Chapter Forty-Two

       Chapter Forty-Three

       Epilogue

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by

       Read more Sidney Sheldon novels

       The Original Novels by Sidney Sheldon

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       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 a bastion of the Westminster political establishment, Manning was tall and gray and as 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 aerie of a room perched high in one of the Gothic 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, unread 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 and 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 rigueur.

      There was her daughter, Roxie, at eighteen, her blond head thrown back, laughing. How Alexia missed that laugh. Of course,