Deception and Desire Read online

  Maggie parked on the perimeter road and started across the field, wondering what she would do if Mike was actually umpiring. A cricket match could go on for hours and she could hardly interrupt. But as she approached she recognised his tracksuited figure standing under the wall of the pavilion.

  Engrossed in the game, he did not notice her until she reached him.

  ‘Maggie – what are you doing here?’

  ‘Mike – thank goodness! I have to talk to you.’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  She told him, the words tumbling out.

  ‘She couldn’t have been the last person to drive the car, Mike. She couldn’t have reached the pedals. Whoever parked it outside the station, it wasn’t Ros.’

  ‘You’re sure the seat didn’t slide back when you were poking about?’ His face seemed to have frozen.

  ‘I don’t think so, no. I’d have noticed, I’m sure. Mike, I think we should tell the police about this.’

  ‘You haven’t yet?’

  ‘No. All I could think of was telling you. But it must make a difference, mustn’t it? It’s a piece of hard evidence. Perhaps they’ll take notice now. I mean, I couldn’t see anything in the car to suggest who might have been driving it, but they could get their forensic people to go over it, couldn’t they? And just the fact it was dumped at the station is suspicious.’

  ‘How do you mean – suspicious?’

  ‘Someone wanted us to think that Ros had left it there and gone away by train. I’m frightened, Mike.’

  ‘Calm down now.’ He laid a hand on her arm. She resisted the urge to cling to it.

  ‘I don’t feel very calm. The more I find out the more certain I am something terrible has happened to her. Brendan …’

  ‘You think Brendan might be behind it?’

  ‘Well, yes, I do. He’d be capable of anything, and I know Ros was afraid of him. Brendan’s tall, the seat could have been in the correct position for him to drive. Then there was her scarf at his flat. And there’s something else I didn’t tell you. Brendan told me he’d seen Ros a few weeks ago in Clifton with a man.’

  Through the touch of his fingers she felt him stiffen slightly.

  ‘A man.’

  ‘That’s what he said – though I’m not sure if I believe him. He could have said it to divert suspicion away from himself. I think we should go to the police again, Mike, with all these fresh bits of evidence. I think …’

  A roar from the cricket field made them both turn. One of the batsmen had been dismissed and was stomping bad-temperedly back towards the pavilion.

  ‘Look, Maggie, I can’t really stay talking now,’ Mike said. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll ring the police station. And if you want to, give me a buzz when you get back from Dinah Marshall’s.’

  ‘I don’t actually have your number.’

  ‘Don’t you? Oh, I suppose you don’t …’ She found her diary and a pen and he wrote down the number and handed it back to her. ‘ I’ll hear from you, Maggie. Right?’

  He squeezed her hand and turned away, and she was suffused with a sudden longing to beg him to give her a little more time, as if just by his continued presence he could make the nightmare go away. She knew she was being ridiculous, that Mike was as helpless as she, and there was nothing to be gained by going over and over it – nothing but the comfort that she drew from sharing her fears. Or was there more to it than that? When she had made her disturbing discovery she had been able to think of nothing but telling Mike. She could have gone to the police herself but she hadn’t – she had raced straight to him. And why? Was it more than anxiety to tell him about her discovery? Was it simply that she had wanted to see Mike?

  The thought shook her to the marrow, filling her with guilt and horror. Maggie hitched her bag up on her shoulder, turned and walked back to where she had left her car.

  Mike checked the score, held a brief conversation with his opposite number from the visiting team and went back to watching the cricket match. But his mind was no longer on it – if it had been before. Now he could think of nothing but the pieces of information Maggie had imparted.

  Most damning, he supposed, was the position of the driving seat in Ros’s car. From experience he knew that what Maggie had said was true; Ros always kept it pretty far forward. On the few occasions he had driven the car he’d had to move it back quite some way to accommodate his long legs. It was possible, as he had suggested, that it had somehow slid back when Maggie had been foraging about, for clues, but he would have thought she would have noticed.

  So, if Ros hadn’t been driving when the car was parked outside the station, who had? Maggie suspected Brendan but Mike couldn’t see it somehow. His solidly unimaginative and logical mind couldn’t accept that the man would suddenly take it into his head to do her some harm now, when they had been separated for so long. But of course there was the fact that Maggie had seen Ros’s scarf in his flat to add weight to the suggestion; if it really was the one she had sent Ros for her birthday then he must have been lying when he said he had not seen her since before Christmas.

  Except that he hadn’t said that, exactly. He’d said he’d seen her in Clifton with a man.

  A muscle tightened in Mike’s stomach. Had that been another lie, or was it the truth? As Maggie had remarked, Brendan could have been trying to throw in a red herring. But somehow he didn’t think so. Though it made him both angry and sad, he was almost inclined to believe it might be the truth. There had been something about Ros in the weeks before he went away that had aroused his suspicions, a feeling that she had withdrawn from him slightly, that there were things she was leaving unsaid, perhaps secrets she was keeping. He hadn’t wanted to believe it then and he didn’t want to believe it now, yet he was unable to dismiss out of hand the possibility that she was seeing someone else.

  The almost unexplored possibility that had nevertheless been nagging at him reared its head suddenly, striking at the most vulnerable spot in his armour – his male pride – and reopening old wounds which had nothing to do with Ros but which had been inflicted by Judy, his first wife, who had left him for another man.

  Across the years the remembered pain reached out to engulf Mike. He had loved Judy with the simple, straightforward, total love of a trusting and uncomplicated man. He had believed in her, been completely faithful to her, and it had never for one moment crossed his mind that she might not respond in exactly the same way. Blind, blind, blind!

  Tony Finlay had been his best friend. As schoolboys they had been inseparable and even when life took them on different courses they had kept in close touch. He would have trusted Tony, too, with his life. But that hadn’t stopped the pair of them from having an affair behind his back. And one day Judy had told him, almost without preamble, that she was leaving him for Tony.

  The blow to both his heart and his pride had been terrible; for a long while, hurt and bitter, Mike had thought he would never get involved with another woman. He had changed jobs, got himself a bachelor flat, made a new life. And then he had met Ros.

  Ros was all kinds of things Judy was not. Where Judy had been soft and funny Ros was sharp and sophisticated, where Judy had been unambitious and apparently home-loving, Ros was the epitome of the career girl, totally wedded to her job. Her independence had fascinated Mike – there was an honesty about it that he felt had been sadly lacking in his marriage.

  It was an attraction of opposites – Ros liked socialising, Mike preferred the quiet life, Ros’s agile mind was scarcely ever idle, Mike could sit in silence contemplating nothing more demanding than the latest rugby result or test match score. But they were surprisingly compatible, each effortlessly complementing the personality of the other, and they fell gradually into a closer and closer relationship which Mike supposed, if he thought about it at all, must be love, though it was quite different from the way he had felt about Judy.

  But although they were soon lovers and constant companions neither wanted to move the relationship on to
a more formal footing. Both had failed marriages behind them, both were reluctant to commit themselves again. They enjoyed each other’s company, but they also enjoyed the personal freedom that came from having their own, quite separate, homes.

  Now, with a sense of shock, Mike realised that whilst rejecting commitment he had expected fidelity. Jealousy, creeping up on him unawares, gave him a brief empathy with Brendan. Had Ros cheated on him, he wondered, as Judy had cheated? Was she cheating now, with someone else? Perhaps it was just past experience that was making him overly sensitive – Ros had, after all, never given him the slightest cause to seriously believe she might be two-timing him – but the pieces of information Maggie had imparted so innocently were resurrecting old hurts and making him increasingly suspicious of Ros’s motives.

  Maggie had taken the position of the driving seat to mean that someone with much longer legs than Ros’s had driven the car to the railway station and left it there to allay suspicion. Little pleasure as it gave him, Mike could think of a much simpler reason – that whoever it was driving Ros’s car had left with her for wherever it was she had gone. Brendan had said he had seen her with a man in Clifton – this man and the person who had driven her car could be one and the same. The moment Maggie had told him about it he had seen the possible connection. That was why he had talked her out of going straight to the police with the fresh evidence. He could imagine them making the same assumption and if they were right he would end up looking a bigger fool than ever. If she had walked out on him he didn’t want anyone, least of all the police, to know how much he missed her.

  Mike swore under his breath and went back to concentrating on the cricket match.

  Chapter Ten

  Drew Peters-Browne was in his studio in what had once been a hayloft at the rear of the converted barn where he lived with Jayne, his wife. He had spent the day painting but an hour ago had decided he had done enough. He had cleaned his brushes and packed up his oils – the tools of his trade were one thing Drew was careful about – then he had put a heavy-metal tape into the sound system, fetched himself a warm beer, rolled a cannabis reefer and thrown himself down on the battered Chesterfield to smoke it.

  This, he reckoned, was the best part of the day, when he could relax, the glow of satisfaction that came from knowing he had done a few hours’ better-than-average work supplemented by the high that came from the music and the cannabis.

  Some days it was not so good, of course. Some days when his work had gone so badly that he was depressingly certain he would never again turn out a painting that wasn’t a crock of shit, the music and the drugs had the opposite effect, reminding him of glory days gone by and showing the future painted either in sombre hues or the vermilion splashes of eternal damnation. But not today. Today had been good and Drew felt good also.

  He stretched himself comfortably on the Chesterfield, a lanky man in check shirt and paint-stained cords, his long hair tied back at the nape of his neck into a wispy pony-tail, and contemplated the evening ahead.

  Perhaps he’d walk into the village and spend an hour in the pub. He enjoyed drinking with the locals, who called him ‘arty’ and treated him as a slightly eccentric celebrity. Or perhaps he’d drive into town and visit Cliff and David, friends of his at whose ‘marriage ceremony’ a few months ago he had been best man. They had a young man over from the States staying with them and Drew was anxious to meet him. He was hesitating over the delicious decision when suddenly he was aware he was no longer alone.

  ‘Jayne – darling – you frightened the life out of me!’ he drawled.

  ‘If you didn’t play your music so loudly you’d have heard me calling.’

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t want to hear,’ he said a trifle petulantly.

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t. Nevertheless, it’s time you were getting ready.’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘For Dinah’s dinner party.’

  ‘Oh shit!’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’d forgotten!’

  ‘I had. Completely. Do we have to go?’

  ‘Yes, Drew, we do.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said again. They are the most boring bunch of farts ever. One of these days I shall tell them so. That should liven up their pissing stupid dinner party.’

  Jayne crossed to the Chesterfield, took the can of beer from Drew’s hand and stood over him threateningly.

  ‘You can stop that, Drew, and stop it right now. You are coming to Dinah’s dinner party with me and you are going to behave yourself. That boring bunch of farts, as you call them, keep you in the manner to which you are accustomed, and don’t you forget it. What is more, if we play our cards right they will keep us in luxury for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘They offend my artistic nature.’

  ‘Haven’t you always fancied a château in France or a palazzo in Italy? I will tell you here and now, you’ll never make enough from your painting to buy even a hovel! Yes, darling, I know you are good, but artists are never appreciated until they are dead and that won’t do either of us much good. So, be a good boy, come and have a shower and make yourself presentable and then contain your dislike of the boring old farts for a couple of hours. Right?’

  Drew sighed. ‘I suppose I don’t have any choice.’

  ‘No, darling, you don’t.’ In the doorway she turned and smiled back at him indulgently. ‘Anyway, if you gave them the chance you might find out that they are not all quite as boring as you think.’

  ‘Which one, exactly?’

  Jayne’s lips curved and grew full as she remembered her midday assignations. ‘Never you mind, darling. And you don’t, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind,’ he answered truthfully.

  ‘I still don’t understand, Steve, why you invited Ros’s sister to dinner tonight,’ Dinah Marshall said.

  ‘I thought I’d explained,’ Steve returned easily. ‘ She wanted to talk to you about Ros. She thinks you might know where she’s gone.’

  ‘Well I don’t. I’m as much in the dark as anybody.’ She hesitated, a tiny frown puckering her forehead. ‘Is the sister seriously worried? She doesn’t think something might have happened to her, does she?’

  ‘What could have happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s so unlike her to go off in this way. I must say I am a little concerned myself …’ She was silent for a moment, then she went on: ‘ I don’t see what is to be gained, by inviting her here, though. She won’t know anyone – and what if we want to talk business? We won’t be able to with her here.’

  ‘I thought putting people at their ease was one of your specialities, and you know you hate talking business at social gatherings. In any case, Jayne’s husband will be here. He’s an outsider.’

  Dinah reached across the table to rearrange the posy of rosebuds and spray carnations that made up the centrepiece.

  ‘Not really. Jayne is fanatical about fashion and totally involved in Vandina. She must talk to Drew about it at home.’

  A wry smile twisted Steve’s mouth. He was looking forward to the evening. The edge of danger that came from sitting across the table from his lover and her husband gave him a buzz of the adrenaline that he now knew was his life’s blood, and tonight Ros’s sister would be here too.

  ‘You worry too much, Dinah,’ he said lightly. ‘Let me get you a drink. Gin and tonic?’

  ‘Mm, I could murder one.’

  She stood back, running a quick practised eye over the table settings, making sure that Joanne, who came in from the village to cook for her dinner parties, had got it right. Joanne had a degree in catering but she could at times be amazingly slaphappy about the small details that were so important.

  Tonight, however, everything seemed reasonably correct. Dinah adjusted a couple of pieces of heavy silver cutlery, moved a crystal glass a few millimetres to the right and crisped the fold on a linen napkin. Then she straightened, taking the glass Steve was offering her and sipping gratefully.

  He was pr
obably right. She did worry too much, but she couldn’t help it. She was a worrier by nature – that was why Van had been so good for her; he had done the worrying for her. Now she was beginning to allow Steve to do the same. She looked at him over the top of her glass and felt her heart contract with love. Oh, it was good, so good, to have a man one could rely on, and when that man was the son you thought you would never see again it made it that much better. Steve didn’t totally understand the business yet, of course – how could he? It was a world totally removed from the one he had been used to. An oil rig and a fashion empire could hardly be more different. But she had every confidence in him. Already, in the short time since he had arrived, he had learned so much about the running of Vandina and she was sure he was capable of taking on a good deal more yet.

  It would be so wonderful, Dinah thought, to be able to relinquish the onerous mantle of responsibility and get back to what she loved best – designing and planning; wonderful to be able to dump the paperwork and the troublesome shop stewards and the worries about tardy suppliers on to someone she trusted, not only because of his ability but because he was family, and surround herself again with sketch pads and source sheets and inspirational samples of exciting fabrics and materials. And what a luxury it would be to be able to see an idea through from start to finish instead of having to turn it over to Jayne, competent though she was. And to have time to think ideas through and create during the day instead of having to burn the midnight oil as she had done last night.

  ‘I’ve asked Don to come a little early,’ Dinah said now. ‘I wanted to have a word with him about costings before the others arrive.’