Deception and Desire Page 2

  ‘Dinah Marshall.’ The policeman looked up, eyes narrowing. ‘You mean … ?’

  ‘Yes – the Dinah Marshall. Vandina – you know?’

  The policeman nodded, looking interested for the first time, and Mike experienced a moment’s grim satisfaction. Even he would have heard of Vandina – worldwide fashion leaders in quality leather accessories and beautiful silkscreen-printed scarves, whose headquarters was just a few miles from the heart of the city, yet set in the open countryside that was its inspiration. Twenty-five years ago Dinah, together with her husband and mentor, Van Kendrick, had opened the first little factory in a barn at the rear of their farmhouse home and in a success story that might have rivalled a fairytale they had gone on to take the world by storm. Vandina bags, belts and wallets were sold now in exclusive stores from London to New York, Paris to Hong Kong (only the most exclusive stores were allowed to market them – a deliberate policy of Van’s which had undoubtedly paid handsome dividends in terms of desirability). Vandina scarves graced the necks of the rich, the titled and the famous wherever they gathered at races or horse trials or point-to-point meetings. The Vandina slogan, ‘A Touch of the Country’, appeared on double-page-spread advertisements in Vogue and Harpers as well as commercial publications such as the prestigious Peninsula Group magazine, distributed to those who patronised the most famous and luxurious hotel chain in the Far East, and fashion editors fell over themselves to get a scoop on details of the new season’s collections or some fresh avenue Vandina planned to branch into.

  ‘Ros has been with Vandina ever since she left college and she takes her responsibilities as Dinah’s assistant very seriously,’ Mike said. ‘I contacted the company on Monday after I got home, and found her missing. They don’t know where she is either. It seems she phoned the office first thing in the morning on Tuesday of last week and said she wouldn’t be in. She wanted to take some emergency leave. They haven’t heard from her since.’

  The smirk was back on the policeman’s face but it was a smirk of weariness rather than humour.

  ‘Well there you are then, sir. She decided she wanted a bit of a break and took it. There’s no law against that, you know.’

  Mike felt his exasperation growing.

  ‘You’re not hearing a word I’m saying, are you? That’s not like Ros either. She lives for her job, thinks she’s indispensable, and knowing what she puts into it she probably damn near is. When she takes her holiday, twice a year, she makes certain everything is set to run smoothly and she still frets about it while she’s away. She’d never just leave them in the lurch unless something pretty catastrophic had happened. But she gave no word of explanation, no reason for wanting to leave, no indication of where she was going. Nothing. That phone call, as I say, was on the Tuesday morning. They haven’t heard from her since. Frankly I’m extremely worried about her. There is something very odd about all this. That’s why I’ve come to report her missing.’

  The policeman sighed. He still looked unconvinced but he nodded resignedly and lifted a flap in the counter.

  ‘All right, sir, you’d better come through to the interview room and we’ll take a few details.’

  Mike followed him along a corridor to a small interview room furnished only with a bare table and two or three chairs. A clock on the wall showed 5.10, but the grey light filtering in through the small high-up window made it feel, somehow, much later. The constable flicked a wall switch and the room flooded with harsh white light.

  He fetched a form and sat down, indicating Mike should sit opposite him.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Rosalie Newman. Rosalie Patricia Newman.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Woodbine Cottage, Stoke-sub-Mendip.’

  The policeman stopped writing.

  ‘Stoke-sub-Mendip. That’s not our patch.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It comes under the jurisdiction of another division. This is the city. You should be reporting this to your local police station.’

  ‘This is my local police station, damn it! I don’t live in Stoke-sub-Mendip. And what the hell difference does it make anyway?’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone, sir. I’m pointing out that if the lady lives in Stoke-sub-Mendip this should be reported to her local police station.’

  ‘But since I am here …’

  ‘Since you are here I’ll take the details and pass them on. Now, do you have a photograph?’

  Mike reached into his jacket pocket and extracted his wallet. This, at least, he had anticipated. The photograph was the best one he had been able to find of Ros, taken by a commercial photographer at the Vandina dinner-dance last Christmas. He looked at it for a moment, at Ros’s wide-set blue-green eyes and lovely clear-featured face framed by sharply bobbed dark-brown hair, and the smooth shapely line of her shoulders bare above the line of her strapless emerald-green evening gown. She was half smiling in that typically enigmatic way of hers, looking straight at the camera with a hint of challenge in her eyes. It was almost, he felt suddenly, as if she was reaching out to tease him. Abruptly he pushed the photograph across the desk and saw the policeman’s mouth twist in wry appreciation.

  ‘This is her?’

  ‘Yes. It was taken about six months ago. It’s a good likeness.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The policeman eyed Mike, taking in his waxed jacket and tracksuit, and Mike imagined he could read his thoughts: What’s a girl like that doing with a bloke like him? No wonder she’s disappeared!

  With an effort he controlled his irritation as the policemen fired off a seemingly endless list of questions. What sort of car did Ros drive, what was its number and was it also missing? Mike confirmed it was and the questions continued. What family did Ros have? Who were her friends? Names? Addresses? Was there anywhere she might have gone? Had she ever gone missing before? Any known problems? Debts? Family crises? Disagreements or even outright quarrels?

  Perhaps amongst this plethora of information there was something relevant, Mike thought. And what had he expected anyway? He had been annoyed at not being taken seriously, then annoyed because they were doing their job. What had got into him?

  At last it was over. The policeman put down his ballpoint pen.

  ‘Right, sir, I’ll pass this on for enquiries to be instigated. But I think I should explain – if we do find Miss Newman there’s no guarantee we shall be able to tell you where she is.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ Mike exploded.

  ‘It could be, sir, that Miss Newman doesn’t want you to know,’ the policeman said darkly. ‘ Often when people disappear it’s for the very good reason that they want to cut contact with someone. And that, of course, is their right. We have to respect that in the case of adult persons.’

  Suddenly Mike had had enough. He could see the way the policeman’s mind was working and in a way he could almost understand the way it must look to him. An independent young woman, a divorcee, who had suddenly decided she had had enough of the pressures of her job, had perhaps grown tired of the man with whom she shared a relationship, and had decided to cut loose, temporarily at least. It was all too feasible. Probably all too common. Small wonder they were scarcely interested. To this rather jaded policeman it was all a routine domestic matter – fill in a form, find the lady, establish her right to her privacy, close the file.

  Only they didn’t know Ros the way he did. They didn’t know how out of character it would have been for her to simply disappear of her own volition for no reason with no word to anyone.

  Mike scraped back his chair and stood up.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Officer. I only hope someone will take this more seriously than you appear to be doing. And I have to tell you, in the meantime I shall be making a few enquiries of my own.’

  He strode along the corridor. The foyer was still busy, milling with members of the general public all convinced their problem was the most important in the world at this precise moment. Easy to see how the
officers dealing with them became complacent. He threaded his way between them and out into the street. It was still raining.

  There was a parking ticket in a plastic envelope on the windscreen of his car. Mike swore and tore it off. That was all he needed. He stuffed it into his pocket without bothering to read it and got into the car, leaning back against the leather headrest and letting out his breath in a long sigh.

  The feeling of frustration that had overcome him in the police station was still pressing in on him and he closed his eyes, rerunning the interview in his mind and wondering exactly how far the police would go in trying to find out what had happened to Ros. Presumably they’d get in touch with her mother, who lived in Wiltshire, but Mike knew they’d draw a blank there – he had already spoken to Dulcie on the telephone, asking, in a roundabout way so as not to alarm her, if she knew where Ros was. She hadn’t and he had not been surprised. Ros was not close to her mother, who had married for the second time when Ros was in her late teens. According to Ros her stepfather resented both her and her younger sister Maggie and demanded total devotion from their mother. Maggie herself was married to a Greek and lived in Corfu so it was doubtful she would know anything and he found it almost impossible to believe Ros would have flown out to visit Maggie without telling anyone. Similarly he couldn’t imagine her absenting herself to visit friends but he had given the police some names and addresses anyway – old college chums in London and a best friend named Annie who lived in Scarborough.

  The police would make some enquiries at Vandina, too, he assumed, in the hope that she had said something which might give a clue to her whereabouts. But he thought it unlikely that she had. Ros was such a self-sufficient and private person he could not imagine her indulging in girlie chats or confidences with her colleagues, even Dinah, for whom she had worked for six years and to whom she was fiercely loyal. That loyalty was such that Mike had sometimes seen it almost as a threat to their relationship; though he was not by nature a jealous man he had felt that there was little doubt that he did not come first in Ros’s scale of priorities. He had known from the beginning, of course, how important Ros’s job was to her, but her protectiveness of Dinah, which now seemed almost an obsession with her, had stemmed from the death of Dinah’s husband, Van Kendrick, who was also head of the company, in a light plane crash a little over a year earlier. From that moment on Ros seemed to have assumed responsibility for Dinah, in her own mind at least, and it was this fierce sense of loyalty that Mike found one of the most worrying things about her disappearance.

  Little as he liked to admit it, he could almost believe Ros might have walked out on him as the policeman had suggested. Life had taught him that women were not always to be trusted, and recently things had been a little strained between him and Ros. There had been times when Ros had snapped at him impatiently, times when she had put off a planned meeting on the flimsiest excuse, times when something bad seemed to hang unsaid in the air between them, and Mike feared it might indeed be possible that she had taken the easy way out and simply left without bothering to tell him. But that she should have done so without telling Dinah was inconceivable.

  Unless … Mike sat up suddenly, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel thoughtfully as it occurred to him to wonder if certain recent changes at Vandina might have had any bearing on Ros’s sudden decision. He recalled the story of what had happened as Ros had related it to him.

  Dinah had, it seemed, had an illegitimate son who had been adopted as a baby. About six months ago he had turned up, having obtained his original birth certificate and discovered that Dinah was his natural mother. Dinah had welcomed him with open arms, Ros had said, and the fact that she had found her long-lost son had gone some way towards making up for the fact that she had lost the Svengali-like figure of her husband. Was it possible he had upset Ros in some way, treading on her toes where Dinah was concerned? But even given her single-minded devotion to Dinah he would have thought she was too professional to allow something like that to drive her away without even a fight.

  Mike sighed in exasperation. The visit to the police station had not, in spite of the constable’s obvious scepticism, done anything to make him less worried. If anything it had strengthened his anxiety. He was so damned sure the policeman was wrong in blithely assuming she had simply taken off. Yet he had chickened out of actually putting his worst fears into words – that in fact there was something sinister about Ros’s disappearance.

  The hollow sickness that had been there in his gut to a greater or lesser degree ever since he had arrived home from camp and found her missing reasserted itself. He was not an imaginative man, but neither was he a stupid one. Less stable characters than Ros might walk out on a home, a relationship and a career because of pressures of one kind or another, and she had seemed a little preoccupied during the last weeks. But if she had intended to cut loose she would never have done it this way, leaving so many untidy ends. It just wasn’t Ros. There was the telephone call to Vandina, of course, but he couldn’t help wondering if she had made it under duress and that someone was perhaps holding her against her will – or worse.

  The windscreen of his car had misted up against the rain. He wiped it with the back of his hand – and saw a traffic warden turn the corner of the street. Irritation momentarily displaced anxiety. Couldn’t they leave him alone for five minutes? But he did not want to tangle with the law again today. He switched on the engine and pulled hastily away from the meter.

  But the dark cloud of foreboding came with him.

  Halfway home Mike thought again of Maggie.

  Would the police get in touch with her in the course of their enquiries? he wondered. They might, and if so she should be forewarned. Mike could not imagine Dulcie would have taken the trouble to put her in the picture and it would be too dreadful to hear from official strangers that her sister was missing.

  Mike had met Maggie only briefly on her infrequent visits home, when she usually stayed with her mother in Wiltshire. But he knew Ros had written her telephone number in the book beside his own phone when she had called Maggie once from his flat.

  ‘Just in case I should ever lose my Filofax,’ she had said, doodling a little picture of a man in Greek national costume beside the number – doodles were a habit of Ros’s, a throwback to her art school days.

  ‘I should think if you lost your Filofax you’d have a good deal more to worry about than your sister’s telephone number!’ he had teased her. Ros carried everything in her Filofax, from credit cards and passport to addresses of friends and business contacts and her all-important engagement diary.

  Well, it wasn’t only her Filofax that was lost now, Mike thought grimly. It was Ros herself too.

  He put his foot down hard on the accelerator and manoeuvred skilfully through the now thinning rush-hour traffic and the rain.

  He would ring Maggie as soon as he got home.

  Chapter Two

  Maggie Veritos was drinking iced coffee on the patio of her home in Kassiopi, Corfu, when the telephone began to ring. She wriggled her feet back into her flip-flops, rose from her white plastic patio chair and went into the house, screwing up her eyes in an effort to adjust to the dim light after the brightness of the evening outside.

  The telephone was on the farthest wall of the inner room. She unhooked it and pushed aside her thick fall of light-brown hair to put it to her ear.

  ‘Hello. Maggie Veritos.’

  Nothing but a series of crackles came down the line.

  ‘Hello?’ she repeated. Still nothing.

  Maggie sighed. It wasn’t unusual. The telephone system in Corfu was unreliable, to say the least. More often than not it was impossible to get through and conversations, carried on over a background of static, tended to fade or even get cut off altogether. But at least the telephone was in working order now, theoretically. For a year after it had first been installed it had remained unconnected, nothing more or less than an ornament. Maggie had accepted the fact with good
grace – she had learned that the Corfiote workman couldn’t be hurried. ‘Mañana’ might be a word of Spanish origin but it also applied to the attitude of most natives of Corfu. She had almost given up hope of ever having the use of her own telephone when one day the engineers had arrived and to her amazement remained long enough to do the job. Now all that was needed was for someone to improve the lines.

  ‘Hello!’ she said again, without much hope, and when the crackles continued unabated she replaced the telephone and shrugged.

  If someone wanted her they would try again. It could be a wrong number, of course – very common – or it could be a friend inviting her round for the evening.

  Or it could be Ari, telephoning from his office in Kerkira to say he’d be late home again …

  Maggie’s mouth tightened a shade. On balance that was probably who it was. Ari often telephoned these days to say he’d be late, and Maggie was all too horribly sure what lay behind the constant stream of excuses. For a long while she’d tried to talk herself out of her growing suspicion. Ari was kept very busy – as an architect on an island where development was springing up all over the place there was plenty of work, and with his own practice to sustain he took on every offer that came his way. Besides this, he was in many ways typically Greek. Though his sense of ‘ family’ was very strong his attitude towards women tended to be macho. Maggie had realised early on that he had no intention of allowing himself to be tied down in the role of dutiful husband. After a long session at the office he liked to have a drink with ‘the boys’ – friends from his old crowd and new business acquaintances.