Unfinished Business

by W. Soliman

  “Well, Mr. Monk’s offered us a fast boat. We could take her with us and—”

  “Wake up, Kara! She can’t just walk out of there and come back to Brighton with us. We both know how far the tentacles of her husband’s organisation reach. Besides, I doubt if she’d leave her children behind.” I caught sight of my eyes, flat and hard, in the galley mirror as they bored into her face. “Give it up, Kara, and get on with your life. There’s nothing you can do to help your sister.”

  “Mr. Monk thinks there is. Why would he have followed us here otherwise?”

  “Monk isn’t thinking about you. He only cares about stopping Kalashov and is prepared to use you, to put your life in danger, in order to get to him.”

  “Yes, but I still think we ought to—”

  “Sorry, Kara, but no dice.” I locked the salon door with a finality that deterred further discussion and dimmed the cabin lights. “Let’s turn in. Good night.”

  She swirled away from me and headed to her cabin without saying a word. I’d upset her, but she’d get over that in time. Far better she was annoyed with me than harbouring unrealistic fantasies about saving her sister.

  I lay on my bed, fully clothed, staring at the framed picture of my mother on the wall opposite as I waited for Kara to use the head. I wondered, as I always did when looking at Mum’s image, what path my life would have taken if she’d lived. If I hadn’t been walking beside her when someone blew her brains out. The Mozart sonata she’d played in concert on that final night of her life drifted unbidden into my mind. I tried to tune it out, but it obviously wasn’t going anywhere—a sure sign that I was stressed.

  “What have I got myself into, Mum?” I said aloud, pushing myself off the bed. Kara’s door had just closed, not especially quietly, so I guessed she’d finished with the facilities.

  Sleep was a long time coming that night. What would Monk do when I told him we weren’t prepared to do his dirty work? I experienced a moment’s guilt at the prospect of disappointing him. But no more than that. James Bond I wasn’t. I’d leave the resolution of world terrorism to those better qualified to handle it in exchange for living long enough to see my son grow up.

  Something woke me. It took me a moment to recognise it as to the sound of Gil’s tail thumping against the teak floor of my cabin. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, wondering if we had more uninvited guests.

  “What is it, boy?”

  “It’s only me.”

  Shit! I should have anticipated something like this. If nothing else, I’d learned over the past few days that Kara was no quitter. Something as insignificant as being bumped off by a gang of Eastern European thugs was unlikely to stop her from reaching out to her sister. And it was obvious she’d do whatever she had to in order to enlist my help.

  She stood in the open doorway to my cabin, wearing nothing more than an oversized T-shirt with the picture of a kitten on the front of it. I knew that was all she was wearing because the light from her own cabin was immediately behind her, shining straight through the flimsy garment. Jesus!

  “What is it, Kara?” Bloody stupid question, Hunter.

  “I can’t sleep. Are you still awake?”

  “I am now.”

  “Sorry.” She shivered. “I’m scared.”

  “No need to be. We’ll go back to Brighton tomorrow and you can get on with your life. No one will hurt you if you leave Jas alone.”

  “I can’t.” Her expression defied me to argue and right now I was all out of arguments.

  The cold was making her nipples stand up, pert and inviting against the fabric of her shirt. Somehow I couldn’t seem to drag my eyes away from them.

  “Don’t you understand? I can’t just walk away from her when she might need me.” She moved to the bed, her bare feet soundless on the teak, and knelt beside me. “But I can’t do it alone. Please, Charlie, come with me to that school. I just want to talk to her once, make sure she knows about Brett and see what she has to say. That’s all I want to do.” Her face was now inches from mine, determination and strength of character reflected in her expression. “If she says she’s happy, then I’ll leave it at that. I promise.”

  “Like you promised you’d give up the search once we’d spoken to Sally and Ramsay.”

  “Come with me.” She reached out and touched my face. Her fingers were cold but seared my skin in the places where they made contact with it. “Please.”

  Her lips met mine and I was powerless to resist. Just one kiss, then I’d send her back to her cabin. I told myself I’d earned that much. But somehow my arms closed around her without my being aware of it, and before I knew what was happening I was kissing her back. One of us pulled the covers aside. I can’t remember which of us it was. Not that it matters. The result was always going to be the same.

  She finished up in the bed beside me. The physical attraction between us had been building for days and what followed was a foregone conclusion. I always sleep in the buff and she only had to glance down to see for herself just how pleased I was to see her.

  Her T-shirt finished up on the floor, her breasts finished up in my hands, Bill Evans’s interpretation of “My Romance” flooded my mind, and the rest, as they say, is history. Not that it surprised me. As soon as I started thinking with an organ situated farther south than my brain, it was inevitable that I’d agree to go to that bloody school with her.

  When Igor returned to the house for dinner, Monika was with him for the third time that week. Nadia’s suspicions were aroused because she could think of no reason for his daughter to be in Weymouth. The Spanish delegation had gone home and Monika’s business was in Chelsea. Something was going on and Nadia was determined to find out what it was. She withstood her stepdaughter’s spiteful glares across the dining table, adopting a drowsy demeanour and trying hard to treat her husband the way she always had since he’d started feeding her narcotics. As soon as the meal was over, he insisted that she go to bed. Suspecting he had business he wanted to discuss with Monika, Nadia didn’t protest and allowed him to support her up the stairs.

  “Get some rest, my darling.” He brushed the hair back from her face with a gentle hand.

  “I have to talk to Viktor and Monika and some other people whom I’m expecting. It will take a long time I’m afraid.” He sighed. “It’s very tedious. I would much rather stay here and hold you in my arms until you fall asleep.”

  Nadia snuggled beneath the covers, holding the pill Igor had given her under her tongue and hoping he’d leave again before it dissolved. “Good night,” she muttered sleepily.

  “I shall try not to wake you when I come to bed.” He kissed her brow. “You’re so beautiful, Nadia, that sometimes it takes my breath away. I wish I had time to show you how much I love you.”

  Nadia mumbled something deliberately incomprehensible, wondering if she dared slip the pill from her mouth and hide it under the pillow. No, it was probably better not to risk it.

  “Soon, my darling,” he said, sighing, “all this will be behind us and I can have you to myself. Always know, everything I do is for you. I have to go to Russia on Monday…”

  “Monday?”

  “Yes, darling, just for four days. When I come back it will only be another week or two and then we can start making plans to settle in Spain.”

  “I don’t want you to leave me, Igor,” she said, knowing it was what he wanted to hear.

  “Sleep well, my love.”

  The moment he slipped through the adjoining door to his study, Nadia sat up and spat out the remnants of the pill into a tissue. She sped across to the bathroom, gargled and cleansed her mouth of all traces of the medication. Then she cleaned her teeth, just to be sure. Locking the main door to the corridor to ensure that no one barged in on her, she sat close to the connecting door and listened. The sound of several voices reached her but she strained to hear what they were saying. Unlike last time, they were speaking in muted tones and it was next to impossible for her to follow what was being said.r />
  Giving up and trusting to luck that Anton was faring better, Nadia returned to bed, wondering how Monika could be involved in Igor’s plans. Was it anything to do with his need to go to Russia, something he seldom did nowadays? If Monika wanted more girls for the agency, Igor had an established method of smuggling them into the country that didn’t involve his direct input.

  Nadia flushed with guilt when she thought about the women who worked for Igor’s daughter. It had been one of her first jobs, before she became personally involved with Igor, to help bring them in. She’d readily agreed, thinking she was being useful. A couple of women handling an ordinary-looking forty-foot sailing boat excited little attention, and they were easily able to conceal two or three girls in the cabins until they made shore. When darkness fell, Igor’s men came to take them away. Looking back, Nadia found it hard to credit her naïveté. She had believed Igor when he said the girls were being brought to England to start a better life. They would learn the language and get good jobs. Perhaps she believed it because the girls themselves did.

  Monika spitefully told her the truth when it became obvious that her best efforts to keep her father and Nadia apart had failed. Nadia had been appalled to think of the bright, enthusiastic girls she’d met being forced into prostitution, and she tackled Igor on the subject. He’d been furious with Monika but overcame Nadia’s objections by taking her to the elegant premises in Chelsea where Monika ran the operation. It certainly didn’t resemble her mental image of a brothel. Igor explained it was merely a centre of operations from which dates were arranged for the girls.

  Nadia spoke to a couple of the ones she’d brought in herself and they seemed happy enough with their situation. Igor told her the girls accompanied rich businessmen to dinners, the theatre and so forth. Anything else they chose to do was up to them, and there was no question of coercion. Nadia believed him because she wanted it to be true. She couldn’t live with herself if she thought the girls she collected from Igor’s luxury yacht anchored off the Italian coast were being forced to do anything they didn’t want to.

  She drifted in and out of sleep, aware of the soft hum of voices coming from next door but no longer trying to eavesdrop. She was woken from a deep sleep by the fierce rattling of the door to the corridor. Sitting bolt upright, she glanced at the digital clock and covered her mouth with her hand to prevent herself from crying out in terror. She’d ruined everything.

  It was almost three in the morning. Igor thought he’d left her in a drug-induced sleep, and now the door was locked from the inside.

  Chapter Twelve

  I awoke at first light. Kara was still fast asleep beside me. The sight of her luscious body rekindled my ardour with a vengeance. She must know I wouldn’t go back on my word to take her to that school, so I was interested to see if she’d still be as keen on the physical as she had been the night before.

  She was.

  We lay side by side afterwards, limbs entwined, her fingers twisting the hairs on my chest and tugging them gently.

  “Is that your mother?” She nodded towards the framed photograph on the wall opposite.

  “Yes.”

  “You look like her.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take that as a compliment.” I tensed, anticipating her next words.

  “It was meant as one. What happened to her?”

  “She died.”

  “Charlie!”

  “She was murdered,” I said after a long pause.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No wonder you understood about Brett. You’ve been through the agony too. Did they get who did it?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why you became a policeman?”

  I raised a brow. She was the first person ever to ask me that question. “Yes. At sixteen I couldn’t understand why the police seemed to have stopped looking for the people who’d taken away the centre of my universe.” Answers were what I needed and I hadn’t given up hope of getting them. Not even after all this time. “I thought if I became one of them I’d be able to carry on looking from the inside.” I let out a mirthless laugh. “Much good it did me.”

  “What happened?” She was leaning up on one elbow, looking directly into my face, seemingly unaware of her breasts dangling over my chest, brushing against it. “Why would anyone want to murder your mother?”

  I paused, waiting for my brain to shut out her intrusive questions and sympathetic expression. I couldn’t handle sympathy in connection with my mother’s death. To my surprise, instead of closing down and changing the subject, I found myself answering her.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to find out for over twenty years now,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “My mother was a concert pianist.”

  “Ah, that’s why you played. And let me guess. You gave up when your mother was killed and took to sleuthing instead.”

  Her refreshing lack of tact was cathartic. “Yeah, to my teacher’s enduring regret.” I chuckled. “He still hasn’t given up trying to get me to play again. When he heard I’d left the force, he plagued me for days. Even the sight of my battered fingers didn’t deter him. He helps out at a place for underprivileged kids and has one who shows great potential as a pianist. He wants me to help bring him on.”

  “You must have been quite a player for him not to have given up on you.”

  “Evidently he thought so, but he’s wasting his time. I’m too old to make a career out of it, even if I wanted to. Music isn’t part of my life anymore.”

  “Isn’t it?” She grinned, like she thought she knew more about it than I did. “Then how come you sing jazz in the shower?”

  “That’s hardly the same thing.”

  “Of course it isn’t.” She kissed the end of my nose. “Tell me about this kid he wants you to help.”

  “Brendan found him on the Whitehawk estate, of all places. I took my life in my hands and went there to hear him play.”

  “And is the kid as good as Brendan said or is it all just a ploy to get you near a piano?”

  “You have no idea! When I heard that scrawny black kid playing an old Bill Evans number on an acoustic piano, I got pretty excited. His jazz chord voicing isn’t something you hear every day, his right hand playing octaves in lockstep with the left like it’s no big deal. But, trust me, it is. The scrawny black kid responsible for producing that masterpiece in syncopation couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. There was no music on the stand and I got the impression that he wouldn’t have known how to read it even if it had been there.”

  “So, will he keep it up?”

  “Well, I think he wants to. There’s no hiding that sort of passion. But he’s being pressed by his mates to join their gang and he’s torn between doing what he wants to do and being accepted.” I sighed. “For the first time I understand why Brendan was so upset when I quit. Perhaps that’s why he invited me there. Anyway, I’ve offered to help with the kid if I can. If he doesn’t exploit his talent, he’ll finish up living like the rest of them up on that estate, and that really would be criminal in all senses of the word.”

  “So, you’re back into music then.”

  “No,” I said emphatically, “I’m not.”

  “Have it your way.” She offered me a mischievous grin, as if she knew something I didn’t. “But you still haven’t said what happened to your mother.”

  I took a moment to decide whether or not to answer her. “She was soloing with a regional orchestra at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon, on the night she died. I was with her and so was Jarvis Goldsmith, her manager. I liked going along and soaking up the atmosphere, even though I’d decided classical music wasn’t for me and that I preferred jazz.”

  “Did that upset your mum? I imagine she envisaged you following in her footsteps.”

  I considered the question. “No, I don’t think it did. My father was the one pushing me in that direction. Mum rather enjoyed jazz too and thought I had more chance of mak
ing a living that way. She knew how hard it is for concert pianists to make the grade.”

  “A pragmatic lady then.”

  “Yes, she was. She believed that children should find their own way. Unlike my father, she had no intention of achieving her own ambitions vicariously through me.”

  “Which is what your father was doing?”

  “Yeah.” I spoke with finality. It seemed I was ready to talk about Mum but no way was I getting onto the minefield that was my father. “Mum played Mozart the night she died.” I closed my eyes and let both the haunting melody of the sonata and the memories I usually blocked out flood my mind. “There was something about her performance that made me sit up and take notice, some edge I suppose I’d not been astute enough to notice before. It was as though some secret was inspiring her. Anyway, I obviously wasn’t the only one to pick up on it because she took six curtain calls.”

  “What happened after that?”

  I didn’t realize my words had trailed to a halt. Obviously I was subconsciously debating whether or not to tell her more. I glanced in Kara’s direction. Her eyes, soft with sympathy, and the gentle feel of her fingers dancing over my chest, decided me.

  “We left the concert hall at about ten thirty by the stage door. We were in a gaggle with the orchestra, who were getting onto buses. The three of us were going to walk the short distance to East Croydon station and were just saying our goodbyes when a scooter screeched along beside us and the pillion opened up with a gun.”

  “My God!” She covered her mouth with a hand.

  “Jarvis was closest to the gunman, with Mum next to him. Being on the inside probably saved my life,” I said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Jarvis was hit in the shoulder and Mum had her brains blown out all over me.”

  I could see she was shocked, both by what had happened and the bland voice in which I’d related the incident, but none of the inadequate expressions of sympathy I’d come to loathe, and which usually prevented me from speaking about my mother’s murder, were forthcoming. Instead, Kara merely rested her head on my shoulder and sighed. I felt her tears sliding onto my chest and knew I’d confided in one of the few people who actually understood how I felt.