by A. E. Radley
“Apologies, Ms Hastings.”
She turned to see the manager of the hotel rushing down the steps. He waved his arms frantically to hurry the black limousine up. The moment it came to a stop in front of the steps, he opened the back door and gestured into the car.
“Thank you for your stay. I do hope you found everything to your liking?”
Victoria hummed half-heartedly. While the Shangri-La was slightly above average in some respects, there had been some issues. For starters, the intolerable noise of the fan in her room and the maintenance imbecile who said he couldn’t even hear the noise when she had been positively deafened by it.
She passed the grovelling man and got in the back of the limo.
“We do hope to see you again next year,” the man continued, holding the door open and looking at her with a pleading expression.
Victoria felt that it was very unlikely that she’d ever come back should he continue to delay her. She wanted to get to the airport and take a few private moments to call her children to see how they were doing. She travelled a lot, but she never stopped missing them.
She was about to instruct the driver to go, regardless of the position of the passenger door, when she noticed the manager looking up the driveway with a frown. She could hear some kind of commotion from behind the car.
"Excusez-moi, Madame Hastings!"
She glanced out of the back window. A scruffy-looking man was running towards the car. It looked like he had run through the gates as they were being closed. He held up a piece of paper and was running determinedly towards her. Two doormen and a security guard were chasing after him.
She turned around and called out to the driver in a bored tone, “Go.”
The hotel manager closed the passenger door and the car slowly started to edge forward, the sharp turn of the driveway making a quicker departure impossible.
She heard shouts behind the car and rolled her eyes. It seemed nothing was going to go right during this trip.
There was a thump on the window. The scruffy man stood beside the car, holding up a Polaroid photograph. Victoria felt her mouth fall open in shock at the image.
It was Holly Carter. Her former assistant. The one who had abandoned her without a word exactly one year ago. However, there were vast differences between the Holly she had known and the woman in the photograph.
In contrast to Holly’s long locks, the photograph showed a woman with short hair. Victoria’s artistic sensibilities balked at the change. Long hair was finally back in fashion and the girl had chopped all of hers off. Not that Holly was ever one to toe the line when it came to fashion trends.
But the real shock was the unresponsiveness in her eyes. They no longer sparkled, there was a dullness to them that Victoria had never seen before. And Holly’s already pale skin seemed paler, almost sickly in appearance. The forced smile failed to distract from the fact that she looked quite frightened.
As quickly as the photograph had been slapped onto the glass, it was pulled away. Each doorman grabbed one of the scruffy man’s arms and dragged him away from the car.
“Wait,” she instructed the driver.
Victoria felt the brakes being applied, and the car came to a jolting stop. She opened the door and stepped out of the car.
The man was now on the tarmac, the two burly doormen on top of him, trying to hold him down. He looked up at her.
“You know her?” he asked, his voice thick with a French accent.
“Let him go,” she commanded in a soft tone.
The doormen looked in confusion at the manager who was standing helplessly by. He quickly waved his hands up to indicate that they should let him go.
Slowly, the man climbed to his feet. He clutched the photo in his hand and looked at Victoria expectantly.
She looked him up and down. She had no idea who he was or what he wanted, but he seemed to know Holly. And that was enough to grant him a few moments of her time. Even if she was running late.
She pointed to the car.
“Get in,” she instructed.
Published by Heartsome Publishing
Staffordshire
United Kingdom
www.heartsomebooks.com
ISBN: 9781912684168
First Heartsome edition: November 2018
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
A.E. Radley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2018 A.E. Radley
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.