Illusions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 2)

by Jean Saunders

  ‘I’m sure it still is a nice town, Mrs Dooley. One bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch, does it?’ Alex said, wincing at the cliché, but sure that Mrs Dooley would appreciate it.

  ‘You’re a wise young woman, Miss Best, and so very pretty too. Is your nice young man coming to join you this time?’

  ‘Nice’ was clearly her favourite word, thought Alex, as she composed her face. And she was clearly the flavour of the month for booking in for a second time.

  ‘He’s not actually my young man, Mrs Dooley, just a friend, and a sort of colleague.’

  ‘Oh well, you’ve plenty of time for all that, I daresay. Just don’t leave it too late, will you, dear?’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said, not sure if she should feel insulted at the implication that at twenty-six she was practically over the hill already. But not compared with the folk she had just seen, she remembered soberly.

  She had been given the same room in the guest house as before, which was comfortingly familiar and that was an ageist thought too, she realized. She took a few deep breaths at the window overlooking the park, resolving to jog around it first thing in the morning. There and then she did a few aerobic exercises, just for the sheer joy of being young and healthy and still in control of her mind and body.

  Once she had done the minimal amount of unpacking, she looked through her day’s notes. Apart from the shock of learning how much money had been involved in the transaction between Trevor Unwin and his unknown benefactor, one thing stuck out from Graham Johnson’s rambling conversation.

  Trevor had been in the army. And so had Captain alias Major Harry Deveraux. There had to be a link. Her first instinct that maybe the major was involved in the stalking, or even the killing, was too strong now to be ignored.

  She kept remembering little things about him that hadn’t seemed important before. He had been dressed immaculately at the funeral, in a dark, unobtrusive suit that wouldn’t attract attention... and leather gloves. Gloves that had never been taken off, all the while he was poking around at Madame Leanora’s. Leaving no fingerprints...

  She decided to phone Nick for a little more information, knowing she had to tread carefully.

  ‘DI Frobisher,’ she heard him reply efficiently.

  However scratchy their relationship was at times, she had always been reassured by the sound of his voice. It was strong and rich. It could be as hard as necessary when dealing with crims, and yet there were other times when it could become as tender as... with a little shock at where her thoughts were going, Alex caught herself up short. This was no time for erotic memories.

  ‘Nick, I’m sorry if you’re busy—’

  ‘Never too busy for you, sweetheart,’ he said at once.

  But she knew that he was often far too busy to take calls when he was up to his neck in police work. So she must have caught him at a good time for once.

  ‘I’ve heard from my friend in Worthing again, and the man who murdered her mother has topped himself. All the extra publicity has disturbed her all over again, as you can imagine,’ she invented. ‘But she thinks he may have been in the same regiment as that major or captain I mentioned to you. Don’t ask me why she wants to know — something to do with her mother, I think but I said I’d try to find out. Is there any way of checking?’

  God, it all sounded so feeble, and she hadn’t thought things through before she called him. He’d surely know there was something in the wind... and had she really referred to Moira as her friend?

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Nick said casually. Too casually. She knew that. ‘Are you home this evening?’

  ‘No. Maybe. I’m not sure yet. Call me on my mobile, Nick, as soon as. OK?’

  ‘It may not be that quick, but whenever,’ he said, just as vaguely. ‘Take care, Alex.’

  She could almost see him smiling as he put down the phone. She could almost see that smug I-know-something-you-don’t and that I-know-you’re-up-to-something smile... and she tried to ignore it. She could probably have gone through channels and found out the information about Trevor herself, but it would have taken time. And Nick could do it far quicker. She had to hope he’d swallowed her story.

  Over dinner that evening the landlady bustled about supervizing her dining staff, and paused at Alex’s table.

  ‘Your young man telephoned earlier, Miss Best, to see if you had arrived safely. Perhaps he’ll be joining you for the weekend after all.’

  Alex felt her hands go rigid in the midst of putting a portion of broccoli on to her plate. So he’d sussed her out... but despite Mrs Dooley’s coy remarks she doubted that he’d come all the way down here just to give her a message. He’d rather play the cat and mouse game that was one of his stock-in-trades.

  She admitted that every new revelation in this case was making her nervous. She was already of the opinion that there were higher stakes at risk than she had believed at first, and wondering even more fervently whether or not it would be prudent to inform the police of her findings and hand everything over to them.

  There came a time when you had to weigh things up sensibly, and accept that there were some things you just couldn’t handle alone. But she wouldn’t do any of it without consulting Moira and getting her opinion. Moira was paying her fee and should be calling the shots.

  And she was in danger of talking out of the side of her mouth like a regular Hollywood gangster if she wasn’t careful, she thought, almost choking over her steam-hot roast potatoes.

  ‘Everything all right, dear?’ Mrs Dooley said anxiously.

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ Alex gasped, her eyes watering as she grabbed her glass of wine and nearly sank the lot in one swallow to counteract the ruination of her throat. How the hell did you get roast potatoes that hot? she wondered.

  She was embarrassed to have made an exhibition of herself in front of the other guests, and it didn’t help to hear the two small boys at the corner table being shushed up by their harassed parents. She made a mental note that if she ever had children, she’d insist on self-catering holidays...

  Her mobile was ringing when she returned to her room. She should really take an evening stroll to ward off the effects of Mrs Dooley’s hefty portions of food, but it could wait.

  The voice spoke as soon as she answered.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know that Captain Harry Deveraux died ten years ago,’ Nick said.

  ‘What?’ Alex said, her heart jolting, and forgetting all about accusing him of tailing her. ‘He can’t have done, unless I’ve been seeing ghosts—’

  ‘Whoever you’ve been seeing, his name isn’t Harry Deveraux, Major or Captain! So where does that leave you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ll have to think about it. What about the other name I mentioned, Nick? Any luck on that one?’

  She tried to be casual, though it was hard to keep her excitement contained. Why would anyone masquerade as someone who was dead? Nobody did that without a reason, and it had to be suspect. Either that or they were simply obsessed with delusions of grandeur, and remembering the way he had ponced about on the cruise ship, that certainly fitted Harry whoever he was.

  ‘Your murderer was a private in an infantry unit,’ Nick told her, ‘and get this. There was a Sergeant Harold Dawes in the same unit who was dishonourably discharged for falsifying army records very successfully over a period of months. He was a dab hand at forgery, it seems.’

  ‘So?’ Alex said expectantly when he paused for effect. ‘Am I supposed to infer something from that?’

  ‘You should, darling,’ he said drily. ‘I’d have thought the powers of deduction of one Alexandra Best, alias Audrey Barnes, might have got the significance of the initials.’

  She was there before he had finished speaking, but she didn’t intend letting him guess how her heart was pounding.

  ‘Thanks, Nick. The two of them probably don’t have any connection, but at least I can let Moira Wolstenholme know.’

  There was silence at th
e other end, and then he was curt. ‘When are you going to come clean with me, Alex?’

  ‘When I can,’ she said simply. ‘You know all about client confidentiality—’

  ‘I know when something’s really bugging you, and I’m always there if you need me. You know that too.’

  ‘I do,’ she said solemnly. ‘And if ever the going gets rough, you’ll be the first one I call.’

  She crossed her fingers as she spoke, knowing that pride and self-esteem wasn’t going to let her admit anything of the sort unless it was absolutely vital.

  She hung up and switched off her mobile for a while. She needed time to think. Nick had put an entirely new question in her mind now. If this Harold Dawes was in the same army unit as Trevor Unwin, the two men would almost certainly have known one another.

  And if Harold Dawes had been masquerading as Harry Deveraux, turning up in his obnoxious guise on the same cruise ship as Leanora Wolstenholme — who was later stabbed to death by Trevor Unwin — then she had to be on to something at last.

  She didn’t know what. It was a far cry from being hired to find out the identity of a stalker, but she just knew there had to be a strong connection. And then there was the money. Did Harry/Harold have that kind of money to pay off Trevor for doing his dirty work? Somehow Alex doubted it. An army sergeant’s pay couldn’t be so good that he’d throw away money as if it was paper — and for no special reason that she could think of.

  She was fairly certain that none of the Harry/Harold names were in Leanora’s notebook, so presumably he couldn’t have been one of her clients. So if he hadn’t forked out the pay-off to Trevor Unwin for killing her, who had?

  The words MISTER BIG? loomed up in her mind, and she felt herself groan. It was all so gangsterish. And it was so very feasible too. Leanora — Madame Leanora — had had some amazingly influential clients who would have consulted her and given her far more information than they realized.

  And if one of them was being seriously blackmailed by the Wolstenholmes, then he could have paid an acquaintance — a known con man — to find a guinea-pig with nothing to lose. Trevor Unwin with a cancer death sentence already hanging over him — to kill Leanora and pocket a handsome fee for his aged mother’s comfort.

  The rush of possibilities was so great that it was hard for Alex to think logically and not to let her imagination streak away with her. Such a Mister Big, whose name she couldn’t get out of her head now, had to be stinking rich to pay both men for their silence. Because she was damn sure the middle-man would want a handsome payment for his services as well. Whoever Mister Big was, he had to be a top dog somewhere.

  And he had been stalking Leanora and Moira for some time, trying to frighten them off, which apparently hadn’t worked, since the threats were continuing. And not only to them.

  Alex felt a chill like ice run down her back. These people had dealt coldly and clinically with Leanora. They were continuing to threaten Moira, and now they knew she was involved. The burglary at her office, the packet with the dead lilies, and the guttural phone call told her that.

  Why the hell hadn’t she taken down that phone number? It was one of the first things she should have done, if she hadn’t been so bloody unnerved by it all. Some private eye she was...

  She felt suddenly stifled, if not overwhelmed with nerves, and she had to get out of doors. She left her mobile switched off and walked around the park opposite the guest house for half an hour, breathing deeply and trying to make sense of what she knew so far. It had seemed so simple at first.

  Someone was sending Moira hate mail and making the occasional obscene phone call. It wasn’t surprising if Leanora had been in the habit of scaring the daylight out of people, despite her dreary appearance on the cruise ship. But that had to have been an illusion too, Alex realized. In her psychic garb in the cloying atmosphere of her business premises, she’d no doubt have held the whip-hand over any gullible person who entered it. She was a far tougher nut than she appeared, and probably wouldn’t have been fazed by anonymous threats.

  Moira was an easier target. Especially if the stalker was half inclined to believe everything he had learned from Madame L. Taunting Moira would be a way of getting rid of his own nerves, and proving he was still in control. But was that all there was to it? Or was there a far more sinister meaning behind all the threats?

  Alex knew she had to confront Moira. If she had a duty to do her best for her clients, then so should they be honest with her. She knew that they frequently weren’t, but she had to find out if the two women really had been up to no good, and if blackmail had been involved.

  It was going to be a bloody sensitive confrontation. If she was wrong, she would be thrown out on her ear, and she could say goodbye to any further fees from this case. But did it matter?

  With a shudder, Alex knew it was developing into one of the most unsavoury cases she had handled. Or could be, if her suspicions were right. She had always trusted her instincts, and she had a gut instinct about this one. It was growing stronger all the time, and she didn’t need any of Leanora’s psychic powers to tell her when something was seriously bad.

  And right from the start, she had known Harry Deveraux was bad news. She had despised him on the cruise, and she had mistrusted him when he’d turned up at Leanora’s funeral.

  But she couldn’t put off seeing Moira for ever, and she left the park and went across to her car. She slid inside it and gripped the steering-wheel for a few minutes. She wasn’t looking forward to the next half hour one little bit, and there was something more than a gut feeling inside her now.

  There was a gnawing, uneasy sensation, the kind you got before you went to the dentist, knowing damn well it was going to effing well hurt, no matter what they said! Only this feeling was ten times worse. A hundred times worse.

  ‘Damn it, Leanora, get out of my head, can’t you?’ she muttered, almost without thinking.

  And then she felt her skin crawl at even fantasizing for one second, that she could be influenced by a psychic — especially a dead one.

  She crunched her gears and the car shot forward, narrowly missing a van coming around the corner. She mouthed an apology at the obscenity she saw coming from the driver’s lips and just managed to resist returning his two-fingered salute.

  Instead, she somehow got her jittering nerves together and drove away as steadily as possible.

  The sun was setting low in the sky now, and throwing a golden sheen over the waters of the Channel as she climbed the hills towards Moira’s house. The advent of a lovely summer sunset had the effect of making the whole town look serene and beautiful, which was more than the way Alex was feeling.

  Because how the hell did you challenge a recently bereaved daughter to ask if she and her mother had been operating a blackmailing scam?

  Chapter 8

  Despite all her intentions, Alex found it impossible to go straight to the house. She had to get her thoughts in order, knowing she must be as tactful as possible or she would get nowhere. And what if she was wrong? What then? Moira was hardly going to be best pleased to know that she and her mother were being suspected of a serious crime.

  She drove around for a while, her mind muddled with indecision. Before she realized it, she had headed out of Worthing and was well on to the Brighton road. It was a while before it dawned on her that something her father used to say kept intruding into her thoughts. If there was a problem to be solved, it was far better to confront it head-on. He had been so strong, mentally and physically — and she had never felt more feeble or insecure about what she was doing right now. And she knew he wouldn’t have been proud of her dithering.

  Unconsciously she straightened her shoulders, reminding herself that wasn’t the way Nick Frobisher would be handling things either, and that thought was enough to send her back the way she had come.

  By now it was dark, and once at the Wolstenholme house, she turned off her engine and sat in her car, staring at the place for a few minutes before
she walked purposefully across the gravel to the front door and rang the bell.

  The house was very quiet, eerily so, since there was a blaze of lights streaming out from the uncurtained windows, but there was no answer to Alex’s persistent ringing.

  Perhaps Moira was entertaining, she thought, feeling half-resentful on Leanora’s account, since she knew that not even a recent bereavement seemed to have the same effect on anyone in this family and their acquaintances as it did on normal people.

  Perhaps there was a séance going on somewhere in a back room, while they all waited expectantly for Leanora to COME ON DOWN out of the ether, as if they were all contestants in some ectoplasmic TV game show... Perhaps Moira was conducting a proper ouija board experiment for Leanora’s believers and giving them the benefit of tapping into her mother’s psychic powers for a fee, of course…

  ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ Alex muttered to herself. ‘I don’t like all this stuff and never did.’

  And she deliberately pushed away the crazy feeling that Leanora was hovering somewhere near, and that if she looked over her shoulder she might well see her floating a foot above the ground, smiling benevolently at her new convert...

  ‘Not in a million bloody years!’ Alex said savagely out loud. ‘Pull yourself together, woman, and find Moira.’

  And if nobody was answering the front door, then she would find her way around the back. It was still a mellow evening, and maybe if there was a party, albeit a pretty quiet one, it would be taking place around the swimming-pool.

  After the blaze of lights streaming out from the front windows, it took a moment or two for Alex’s pupils to refocus to the darkness of the kidney-shaped pool in the tree-lined garden. There was no party going on then…

  And then there was no need for her eyes to adjust to darkness as the electronic lights that sensed the warmth of someone’s presence flooded the whole garden with light. She blinked as the brilliance hurt her eyes and she had to shield them for a few seconds.