A Suitable Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  She nearly missed the office block as well, and she had to backtrack on herself to get there.

  But then, once she was inside the building, she felt her mind moving on to what was waiting for her and she ran up the stairs and let herself into her office, checking first to make sure that there were no nasty shocks in store for her, like Angela lurking around, which she wasn’t.

  In the smallest drawer in her desk, which she had cleared of its usual rubbish of paper-clips and rubber bands and now kept locked, Suzanne had been storing photocopies of everything she uncovered.

  Now she set to work, and for a while Dane was forgotten.

  Angela’s office held the key to the riddle and she went there immediately, making sure beforehand that she checked every nook and cranny on the entire floor, including the stationery cupboard, to make sure that the nasty shock wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  And, re-igniting her near-forgotten skill, learnt when she was thirteen at school from one of the boys in her class whose father made safes and could open locked ones just as easily, she clicked open the one locked drawer in Angela’s desk with her credit card and set to work.

  She took photocopies of everything. Later, alone, she would analyse it all. For the moment she just didn’t want to get caught. But, glancing at some of the figures that she saw, neatly drawn into columns, she had a sickening feeling that things were far worse than she had imagined.

  She worked quickly and noiselessly, her ears open for the slightest sound of a door opening, or the pad of footsteps along the corridor.

  It was nearly seven o’clock by the time she returned to the apartment, and well after eleven before she finished reading and rereading all the documents that she had assiduously copied.

  At midnight she heard Dane return. Hadn’t he said that he was going to spend the night out? She frowned, pausing in her perusal of the papers spread on the bed, and then quickly gathered them up together and shoved them into the drawer of the bedside cabinet.

  She didn’t expect him to come into her room and when he did the first thing that flew into her head was, Thank God I’ve hidden the stuff. Then that instantaneous feeling was immediately replaced by surprised outrage. He hadn’t even knocked! He had just pushed open the door as though he had every right in the world to invade her privacy, and was now standing there, darkly silhouetted in the doorframe.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked, sitting up on the bed and crossing her legs under her. Her nightshift left a great deal of thigh exposed, but there was nothing that she could do about that and she contented herself with a frosty expression. ‘Do you want something or have you come into the wrong room?’

  A dark flush crept along his cheekbones and for the first time that she could remember, ever, he looked ill at ease.

  ‘You’re still up,’ he said flatly. His hand was still on the doorknob and he made no attempt actually to come inside the room.

  ‘That’s right. I’m still up.’

  ‘What are you doing, sitting up in bed like that? Reading? I don’t see a book anywhere.’

  He was looking at her sharply but there was still something inexplicably awkward in his manner, which puzzled her.

  ‘I wasn’t reading a book,’ she said coldly. She thought of the incriminating documents stuffed into the bedside drawer and flushed guiltily. Sooner or later she would have to tell him—in fact, sooner rather than later, but not now. She had to think first about what she had seen. Think very carefully and decide what move to make next.

  ‘Then what are you doing?’

  Was there no end to this man’s arrogance? she wondered.

  ‘Practising the ancient art of Transcendental Meditation,’ she said scathingly. In the dark he was fairly forbidding standing there, looming. She wished that he would go away. ‘Now, do you mind?’

  ‘What’s going on here? Why are you looking so secretive? ’

  Which immediately made her feel even more guilty. ‘Nothing’s going on and I’m not looking secretive. Have you been drinking by any chance?’

  ‘Don’t tell me that you’re hiding a man in your closet?’ His mouth twisted crookedly and underneath the cool sarcasm was something else, some other emotion which she couldn’t quite put her finger on, as elusive as a wisp of smoke. What was he getting at?

  ‘The bathroom, actually,’ she said. ‘The poor, shy fellow scurried off the minute he heard the front door slam. He thought, as I did, that you were going to be out for the night’

  There was a tight silence and she followed his eyes as they travelled away from the innocent closet to the innocent bathroom. He didn’t really suspect that she was concealing a man in the bathroom, did he? The thought of that nearly made her burst out laughing.

  She opened her mouth to tell him that it was a joke, for goodness’ sake, but he didn’t give her the time to utter a syllable. He stepped back and closed the bedroom door very quietly behind him and she heard his footsteps disappearing along the corridor back to his own quarters.

  And Suzanne had too much on her mind to think further about that perplexing little interchange. She switched off the side-light and wondered what she was going to do now about those bits of paper lying in the bedside drawer.

  There was, she thought with resignation, only one thing to do—only one thing that would tell her which way she should jump.

  At five-thirty on Monday evening, when the office was beginning to clear of employees, she stopped Angela who was on her way out with her tan briefcase and asked if she could talk to her for a moment.

  She had expected the relative silence of the place, now empty apart from a couple of managers who were working behind their closed doors further along the corridor, to be morally boosting, but now she wished that there were more noise around, more sounds to take her mind off what she had to do.

  ‘What is it?’ Angela’s mouth turned down in irritation at the interruption to whatever plans she had made for the evening.

  Suzanne looked at her, as she had looked at her for days, trying to trace some semblance of regret over her prematurely severed plans for her career, and now, as then, she could read nothing of the sort on the other woman’s face.

  ‘Unless it’s important, whatever you have to say will simply have to wait until tomorrow morning.’

  Her voice was icily off-putting, but Suzanne smiled pleasantly and said, ‘I’m afraid it is rather important.’

  ‘Five minutes.’ Angela swept back along to her office, fully expecting Suzanne to follow her. ‘Then I shall be leaving.’

  Five minutes should do it, Suzanne thought, running back to fetch the file which she had found behind the cabinet, and which still carried only the original papers that had been there. Nothing had been added to it, nothing extracted.

  If Angela scanned through the file and came up with something that could prove her innocence, if what was in there could be laughingly explained away, then Suzanne would let the matter drop and she would be more than happy to. She had decided from the start that she would let the other woman prove that there was nothing suspect about what had been discovered.

  She shut the door behind her. ‘I know you’re busy,’ she said without preliminaries and without sitting down, even though Angela had, behind her desk with its fax machine and computer and telephones—the desk of a woman on the up and up. ‘However, I think you might be interested in seeing this.’ She produced the file like a magician flourishing a bunch of flowers from a top hat. ‘I found it a few days ago stuffed behind the filing cabinet in the office.’

  ‘Why should I be interested in seeing that?’

  ‘Because,’ Suzanne explained, looking at the porch lain-like face intently, ‘your handwriting is all over it. It appears to concern a company which doesn’t exist. I know. I’ve checked it out.’

  Angela didn’t take the file. She stood up and walked over to the window and looked outside with her back to Suzanne. The lines of her body were rigid.

  Now Suzanne realised that she had more than half
hoped that this matter could be satisfactorily put to rest, that all her suspicions would be groundless, that an explanation would be provided. She watched the stiff back with dismay because none of these hopes was going to materialise.

  ‘I also found other papers,’ she said quietly, not mentioning where those other papers had been found. ‘It appears that something is very wrong here and I think you know what I’m saying.’

  Angela turned around and looked at her. She looked older, harder. Suzanne could see each line etched on that exquisite face; she could read the chilling admission on those narrowed lips.

  ‘You have been a busy girl, haven’t you?’ Angela paused. ‘Put that file on my desk and leave.’

  ‘Of course.’ Suzanne stepped forward, placed the file on the desk, and then said, in passing, ‘I have photocopies of everything, naturally.’

  They stared at each other like opponents at opposite sides of a boxing ring. The tension in the air was thick and Suzanne had a moment’s light relief when she thought that if it came to a fist-fight, which she knew it never would, then Angela wouldn’t stand a chance. There were, she thought, some advantages to being well-built.

  ‘You were, I take it, prying behind locked doors?’

  ‘I felt that the gravity of this warranted it.’

  ‘I could have you sacked for that.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Suzanne said, sounding far braver than she felt. ‘You’re working your notice; and anyway, there’s no way that you could risk sacking me, knowing what I do.’

  A muscle was working in Angela’s jaw—a furious little tic that she couldn’t control. Her long scarlet nails were digging into her arms.

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘What?’ Suzanne looked at her in bewilderment.

  ‘How much? For keeping your mouth shut’

  Suzanne backed towards the door. ‘I don’t want money. This needs to be sorted out between you and Dane. It’s up to him what he does with you.‘ She looked at the other woman with dislike and horror. The palms of her hands felt clammy and she wiped them on her skirt, edging all the while to the door.

  ‘In that case,’ Angela said with a coldness that couldn’t conceal the white fury underneath the tightly controlled surface, ‘let me get one thing absolutely clear. I shall be out of here within a week. If you make the mistake of breathing a word of what you’ve found to anyone—anyone—then you have my word that your beloved Dane will pay the price.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s only one thing that he wants,’ Angela said, smiling without humour, ‘and I shall make damn sure that he doesn’t get it if you tell him about this.’

  ‘What thing?’ She tried to insert some bravado into her voice and failed.

  ‘Didn’t he tell you? You do surprise me. And I thought that the two of you were inseparable.’ There was an ugly twist to her lips as she said that. ‘He doesn’t want you, my dear, just like he never wanted me. The only thing Dane Sutherland wants is his father’s company and revenge on that stepmother of his.’ She saw the shocked expression on Suzanne’s face and smiled. ‘Why do you think he returned when he did? Because the foundations for the takeover of Martha’s company are almost complete.’

  ‘He told you this?’ Suzanne whispered. Her hands felt clammy again.

  ‘Hardly. Dane only reveals what he wants to, as you must have discovered by now, my dear. No, when I worked for him in New York, I had access to his files. A couple of opportune calls alerted me to one particular file and I did a few rudimentary checks and discovered it all by myself—information which I intended to keep to myself, or else store for a rainy day. The rainy day has arrived, unfortunately. Dane made it quite clear that he never wanted me—’ the beautiful face contorted with the rage of a woman spurned ‘—and now I have the wherewithal to destroy the one thing he prizes most highly.

  ‘The point is this: you expose me and you will also risk destroying everything he’s worked towards for the past three years. If you do, then he will never forgive you, and where—’ she smiled again—the same reptilian smile that carried an element of menace behind it ‘—would that leave you and your silly love? Not that you stand a chance of marrying the man. Oh, no. But do you want him to hate you?’ The question dangled provocatively in the air. ‘I hope we understand one another.’

  Suzanne neither confirmed or denied that one. She had finally reached the door and she opened it and let herself out, then she fled down the corridor and down the flights of stairs, ignoring the lift, just in case she found herself confined in there with Angela.

  Her mind was reeling from an overload of information. Outside, in the open air, she still felt trapped and suffocating. The choice was simple: let Angela get away with fraud or else ruin Dane’s stealthy takeover of his father’s company.

  She made her way back to the apartment, let herself in, prepared her meal, which she couldn’t eat because it tasted like cotton wool, and then waited for Dane to get back.

  It was after eleven when the front door slammed. She had had time to have a bath, change into her jeans and shirt, time to think about how she was going to handle this. She sprang to her feet and confronted him as he was about to head off towards his bedroom.

  ‘Yes?’ he enquired coolly, taking her in with one sweeping glance.

  ‘I have to talk to you.’

  ‘Not now.’ He prepared to move on and she sprinted towards him and circled his wrist with her fingers.

  ‘Please,’ she said stubbornly, ‘it’s important.’

  Dane looked at her face, then at the slender fingers curved around his wrist, then back at her face. He shrugged and she led him into the sitting room and then began pacing the floor until he snapped impatiently, ‘Will you sit down? I’m getting seasick looking at you walking up and down like that.’

  Suzanne sat down, leaning towards him with her elbows on her knees, and he crossed his legs, his ankle resting on his knee.

  ‘Now what do you want to talk to me about?’ he drawled in a vaguely bored manner. To cap it all, he yawned.

  ‘If you could struggle to keep yourself awake,’ Suzanne said acidly, ‘you might be very interested to hear about what I’ve got to say.’ He responded to that statement with a marked lack of interest.

  ‘There’s an off chance of that, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ she said, ignoring his tone of voice. She stood up, began pacing once again, then sat back down and said sarcastically, ‘Sorry, I forgot that my walking about makes you seasick. We can’t have you seasick and racked with tiredness, can we?’ She frowned slightly. ‘The fact is that I’ve been working rather hard at the office.’

  ‘If it’s about a pay rise, then you’ll have to discuss that with your boss. I should wait until Angela leaves, though. I don’t think that you’ll find her very obliging in that respect.’

  He began to stand up and she said quickly, ‘Nothing to do with a pay rise. It’s about Angela, actually.’

  There was silence and he sat back down, only now there was nothing sleepy or bored in his expression.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’ve been doing a lot of overtime,’ Suzanne said, moving on quickly so that she didn’t lose his attention, ‘digging into a lot of files, mostly out of curiosity, and also using them as sort of test cases to see whether I would have handled the account in the same way.’

  ‘And...?’

  ‘And I came across a file, quite by accident. It had been shoved behind the filing cabinet. One of Angela’s files, as a matter of fact, with no input by anyone else. All her handwriting—just a few scribbles and notes and mention of a company which I discovered doesn’t exist.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a deadly calm in his voice.

  ‘She’s been embezzling money, Dane. I’m sorry. I have other documentary proof which I’ve photocopied. It hasn’t been going on for very long but the amounts of money involved have been increasing steadily.’

&
nbsp; ‘I see.’

  ‘I can fetch all the stuff for you,’ she said, standing up.

  He looked at her and said in the same chilling voice, ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitated, then blurted out, ‘She told me that if I went to you with this then she would make sure that your plans to take over your father’s company were destroyed.’

  ‘She told you that, did she?’ His face darkened and he stood up suddenly.

  ‘Apparently she uncovered some of it by accident and then dug around until she found the proof she needed to confirm it.’

  ‘I see.’ The calm, the stillness was more frightening than an explosion of anger. ‘Thank you for coming to me,’ he said, his thoughts somewhere else, then he looked at her for a long while.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we’re going on a little trip. The time has come to go back home.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  THEY ended up leaving shortly after lunch, with the sun pouring down out of a blue sky. Not the sort of day for confrontations, but there would be one. Suzanne could sense it. The current quiet was like the eye of a hurricane slowly shifting position, presaging a storm ahead.

  Dane didn’t go to work in the morning. Suzanne got up early, at seven-thirty, to find him on the phone, his voice low and rapid, with a stack of papers in front of him. He glanced up as she entered but he didn’t seem to see her at all, and almost immediately he returned to his conversation and she left the sitting room, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  She had had time to think about what was going on, time to piece together his abrupt departure to America, his return to England, his knowledge of what had been happening to his father’s company, which at the time had struck her as peculiar but not now. He had needed to know, as he’d waited on the sidelines—watched and waited, and prepared his trap.