Vengeance in the Sun

by Margaret Pemberton

  Bradley whirled round, the knife still held in his hand. Max filled the doorway, his shoulders tense, his hands clenched into fists.

  “To do that,” Bradley said breathlessly, “You need a knife.”

  “Yes,” Max said with certainty. “Yours.”

  They stood measuring each other up and then Bradley laughed.

  “You’ll never get it! I’m going to give you the pleasure of seeing your girlfriend die in the most painful way I can devise. Drowning is too good for her. And you.”

  With sudden momentum he rushed towards Max, the knife held high, its point piercing downwards towards Max’s heart. Struggling to move I saw Max side step, but not soon enough. The knife missed, but Bradley’s body lunged into his, sending them both crashing across the salon, coffee tables and object d’art scattering in their wake. Max hit out with his fist, catching Bradley on the chin, sending him sprawling, the knife still gripped in his hand. As Max hurled himself upon him, Bradley forced the knife blade upwards. Max had both hands on Bradley’s wrist forcing the wavering tip aside, while Bradley’s muscles strained to their utmost to keep his grip firm, the knife unyielding.

  Helplessly I watched, pushing up with all my might to stand. To do something. Anything.

  Grunting and cursing Bradley kicked Max off him, sending him sprawling, only to be knocked half senseless as Max leapt back, seizing the knife and forcing Bradley’s arm back till the knife fell in a silver crescent to the floor. He had no chance to reach it himself.

  They were locked in a bloody, swaying fist fight. The cut on Bradley’s temple had re-opened, blood pouring down his face, and blood gushed from Max’s lip, smearing the walls, the carpet, as they lurched and swayed about the room, only inches from Mario’s inert body, and feet from where I sat, my breath hurting my chest, screams rising in my throat.

  Both of them were panting, their clothes torn and ripped, and then Max kneed Bradley in the groin and as Bradley’s hold on him slackened and he groaned with pain, Max thrust his arm forward with a sharp right to the chin, and then another and another. Reeling, Bradley fell back against the wall and then, his face a mask of blood, he seized the whisky decanter, hurling it into Max’s face, lunging down on top of him.

  My eyes were fixed on the knife lying near the open doorway, still out of Bradley’s reach. If I could only force myself to move, to crawl round and get it myself … but though feeling and movement had returned to my arms, my legs would still not support my body and I sat useless and helpless as Bradley rained blows down on Max’s head, forcing him onto his back, reaching for his throat. I could see the expression on Bradley’s face. The blazing triumph beneath the blood and sweat.

  Then Max gouged viciously at his eyes and Bradley’s grip loosened for the fraction necessary for Max to twist away, and as both men stumbled to their knees, Max sent Bradley flying backwards with a hard punch just below the heart. Bradley lay where he fell, his breath rasping, saliva running from his mouth and as Max tensed for one last spring, Leonie said silkily: “ Very entertaining. Would you like to see the little surprise I’ve got?”

  Danielle’s eyes were glazed and uncomprehending. I remember thinking thankfully. She’s drugged. She doesn’t realise. Leonie stood behind her, her left arm reaching across Danielle’s body and grasping Danielle’s right wrist. In her right hand she held the knife. It’s tip rested unwaveringly at Danielle’s throat.

  Max took one look at the expression on Leonie’s face and froze. Dazedly Bradley heaved himself first to his elbows, then to his feet, gasping lungfuls of air.

  “Out to the cars,” he gasped painfully, clutching his chest, kicking viciously at my legs.

  “I can’t move,” I lied, aware of feeling easing down my veins, spreading in tingling warmth.

  “Then stay here and be burnt with the villa and the rest of them!” he said, still struggling for breath. “Do as you’re told Wyndham or we’ll kill Danielle here and now before you all!”

  Danielle began to cry. Slowly Max turned to me. My eyes flickered, sending an unspoken message across the room in a way we had done for the past fifteen years when speech had been impossible. Then, it had been the harmless understanding of Uncle Alistair and Aunt Katherine we had sought to avoid. Now our lives depended on that unspoken oneness of minds.

  He turned from me, his body sagging as if in defeat, stumbling across to the open door, Bradley only feet behind him. Danielle stood in her nightdress, her eyes wide and frightened. Leonie, svelte and confident, still held the knife at her throat with tapering, well manicured nails. Bradley’s narrow shoulders as he walked away from me, were those of a victor. Every movement he made betraying the triumph he felt.

  As Max reached the doorway and Danielle, I summoned up all my strength and with a prayer on my lips, sprang from my chair, leaping for the light switch, plunging the room into darkness.

  There were screams and cries and the sound of fist meeting bone, and I was running wildly to where I had last seen Danielle. A silk clad body reeled past me in the blackness and I could feel Leonie’s long fingers clutching desperately for something to break her fall. My skirt rent and I was screaming, “ Danny! Danny!” and then she had hurtled into my arms and I was clasping her to me and sobbing, and now it was Leonie who was screaming, and in the dark the two men lurched and swayed and I caught the deadly flash of steel held high but could not see whose grip it was held in. Feverishly I ran my hands over the blood-smeared walls. The light switch! Dear God! The light switch!”

  Leonie’s hysterical screams tore the darkness as the men grunted and gasped for control of the knife. Briefly, as they fell against the windows, I glimpsed Bradley’s face, the blatant murder in his eyes, the knife in his grasp as he tried to force it down into Max’s chest, and Max, his wrists grasped round Bradley’s, forcing it away, his face and neck distorted with strain. Then they were in the dark centre of the room again and there was the sound of falling furniture as they fell to the floor. Then a brief gasp. Then nothing.

  Sobbing, my fingers closed on the switch, plunging the room into garish brilliance.

  Bradley lay on the carpet, face down, impaled by the weight of his body on the knife he had held. Blood seeped from beneath him, soaking into the carpet, spreading in ever widening circles.

  Leonie was a woman transformed. White and haggard she huddled in a corner, staring with transfixed eyes at the body of her husband, making no movement towards him. Making no movement at all.

  Max walked wearily across to her, leading her unprotesting from the room. She stood in the shadowed hallway, gazing from one to the other of us, saying like a frightened child: “ Can I go? Please let me go?” her voice a mere whisper.

  Max nodded, letting his hand fall from her arm. With one last, glazed look at the closed doors behind which her husband lay dead, she fled down the darkened corridors and out of the villa.

  “She won’t be able to get away, will she?” I asked Max, as his bloodied arm closed round my shoulder.

  “No. The police will pick her up tomorrow. And the air here, will be a little purer tonight.”

  I said hesitantly: “ The night she spent away from the villa … were you … was she.…”

  “Lucy, Lucy,” his voice was thick with love. “No, she wasn’t. My only reason for even passing the time of day with Leonie was the chance it gave me to see you. To know what you were doing.”

  “And she told you nothing but lies.”

  “Leonie would have been incapable of anything else. God knows what will happen to her now.”

  I remembered the knife tip at Danielle’s throat. “Whatever it is, she’ll deserve it,” I said, feeling no compassion for her at all. My arms closed round the shivering Danielle. “What happens now?”

  “First you put Danny back to bed and then,” he grinned at me grotesquely through a sea of blood, “then I really do go for the police!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  With Danielle finally asleep beside the still drugged Peggy, we
had hauled Mario out of the carnage of the main salon and onto a chair on the terrace, covering him with a blanket. Then, while Max had taken a much needed shower I had made coffee and now, two hours later, we were sat in the peace and stillness of Helena Van de Naude’s study.

  “What made you come back?” I asked, feeling the hot liquid steadying my overwrought nerves, relaxing after what seemed an eternity of fear and tension.

  “I never left, Brat. I knew Bradley was still alive.”

  “How? I’d told you he was dead. I was sure he was dead.”

  “And you were sure Steve’s body was still lying in the road.”

  “Yes.…”

  “Which was very strange,” Max said, ruffling my hair. “Because when I drove round the Devesas a short time later there was no body at all. Not a thing I would be likely to miss.”

  “Bradley had already moved it?”

  “Yes. He was probably still legging it up the road when I drove past.”

  “So you knew. All along you knew!”

  “I guessed.”

  “And the bit about going to Palma for the police was all bluff?”

  He nodded. “ I was damn sure it wasn’t coincidence that the telephone wasn’t working, and when Leonie came back into the room her eyes gave her away. I knew Bradley was there. Just waiting for me to make my exit before he showed himself.”

  “Well, I wished you’d let me know!” I said feelingly. Another second and I would have been a cripple for life!”

  “My timing,” Max said firmly, “ is always perfect.” And proceeded to prove it.

  Much later he said huskily: “I love you, Brat. I’ve always loved you. I always will love you.”

  My arms tightened around his neck. “I’ve been a fool, Max. But I never stopped loving you. Not for so much as a second!”

  “Just see that you don’t!” and he pulled me to him, kissing my eyelids, my mouth, my throat.

  Gradually the pearl grey of early morning filled the room with ethereal light and he said at last.

  “Time I woke Mario. I’ll be back with the police in under the hour.”

  Mario was sleeping soundly. He stared, puzzled and tousel-headed as Max woke him, gazing at his surroundings uncomprehendingly.

  “We had to put you to bed out here,” Max said with a grin. “No easy task I can assure you!”

  “I wasn’t drunk!” Mario began indignantly. “I never get drunk!” he stared down at his clothes and then his expression changed. “The police! You were going for the police!”

  He stumbled to his feet, his eyes alarmed. “What has happened? Why did no-one wake me?”

  Max laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  “The coffee Leonie gave you last night was drugged. It knocked you out completely, and then you fell into a natural sleep.”

  “Drugged?” Mario stared at Max as if he were mad.

  “She was his wife,” Max said, and then, seeing that the bewildered Mario still did not understand, said again: “Leonie was Bradley Van de Naude’s wife. That cat she said she heard was Bradley. He was flung from the car before it went over the cliff.”

  Mario swallowed hard, his brain struggling to keep up with Max, his eyes registering Max’s bruised face and torn shirt.

  “He came back,” Max said simply. “ There was a fight and in the dark he fell on his knife.”

  “Is he dead?”

  Max nodded. “So now I’ll go for the police and you can take care of Danielle and Lucy.”

  Mario hurried after him, saying: “ Leonie. Where is Leonie?”

  “She got away,” Max said briefly. “ It was all very confused…”

  “But she must be caught.…” Mario protested excitedly. “She must be made to tell what happened.…”

  “Don’t worry,” Max said reassuringly. “She’ll be caught. Without Bradley, Leonie isn’t going very far.”

  Pacified, Mario went into the kitchen to start cooking us all a substantial breakfast, and I went upstairs and gently woke Danielle. She complained of horrible nightmares, but otherwise seemed her usual, cheerful self. Peggy was impossible. For a start, despite a raging headache, she wouldn’t believe that she had been drugged. Even Mario couldn’t make her understand, and it took him all his strength and marital authority to prevent her from unlocking the salon door to see for herself.

  “I don’t believe it,” she repeated time and time again. “ I simply don’t believe it!”

  At seven o’clock, with Danielle playing ball on the terrace, Peggy still repeating that none of it was possible, Max and the police arrived at the villa.

  For the next couple of hours Mario came into his own. Translating and re-translating, whilst Bradley’s body was covered with a sheet and removed on a stretcher. Peggy watched, her face bloodless. Then, hesitantly she walked to the open door, surveying the destruction and carnage of what had been the most elegant room in the villa.

  “Now do you believe it?” her husband asked grimly.

  She nodded her head, and with unusual tenderness he helped her away, sitting her down on a kitchen chair, pressing a cup of hot tea into her hand.

  A squad of men had already gone down to the bay and a tight lipped officer came back with the news that Ian Lyall’s body had been washed ashore with the morning tide and that there was a single bullet through the heart.

  Peggy began to cry quietly and I took Danielle upstairs on the pretext of looking for Mr Sam, while the police toiled to bring Ian’s body up the steep cliff path, through the villa and into the waiting ambulance in the courtyard. Then, murdered and murderer were driven off together.

  The officer was surprisingly kind. Gently he questioned Danielle, making her repeat time and time again what had happened to her. Who had been with her on the yacht? How long had she been there? What had she seen when Bradley arrived? What had she seen and heard when I had arrived? What had happened to Mr Lyall?

  Then, with Mario as interpreter, I repeated as clearly as I could the succession of events that had led to the deaths of Steve Patterson and Bradley Van de Naude.

  The officer’s face was expressionless as Max gave his evidence of how Bradley had died. How Leonie had come down with the knife at Danielle’s throat, how I had plunged the room into darkness, and how he had wrested the knife from her grasp, only to have Bradley leap on him and wrench it from him. How they had fought. How they had overbalanced and Bradley had fallen with all his weight on the knife in his hand.

  Danielle told of her ‘nightmare’. Of Miss Blanchard going to cut her throat and Bradley frightening her and everything going black till she found herself in my arms, and of how there was blood everywhere and then of how she had woken up in her own bed, not the yacht, and could she go back and play ball again as she was getting rather good at it and needed to practice.

  Grimly our statements were taken down, the salon searched minutely and locked, and then the officer asked that we go with him down to Police headquarters where we would be questioned yet again.

  Mario turned to me with a reassuring smile.

  “It will be all right. The little one’s evidence will see to that. They will match the bullet with the gun owned by Bradley. All will be well.”

  Max looked at his watch. “ Nine-thirty. Would you ask the officer if we have time for a fifteen minute detour on our way to Police headquarters, Mario?”

  Mario, no longer puzzled by any request, asked. The officer frowned.

  Mario said to Max: “He wants to know the reason. Cannot it wait till later.”

  “Afraid not,” Max said, not sounding the least regretful.

  Mario and the officer conferred again in rapid Spanish.

  Mario said: “He wants to know where it is you wish to go that is so important?”

  “The British Embassy.”

  The officer was voluble in his assurances that the Embassy would be immediately informed of the circumstances its nationals unfortunately found themselves in. But there was no need for Max to go there
before going to Police headquarters. As officer in charge he must insist.…

  “Tell him,” Max said unperturbed, “that our reason for going to the Embassy is not to complain or seek help.”

  Mario did so. The officer grew more and more puzzled.

  “He wants to know for why?” Mario said, raising his hands palms upwards in a gesture of bewilderment.

  Max glanced at his watch again. “Tell him that in exactly two hours, Miss Matthews and myself are due to be married at the British Embassy and that our witnesses will be awaiting our arrival.”

  I tried to speak and failed. Mario tried and succeeded. The officer’s frown became less prominent, the conversation more excitable.

  I said at last: “You can’t be serious, Max!”

  “I’ve never been more serious in my life,” he said, grinning down at me. “ The minute Claudette spoke to me I asked the British Ambassador to arrange the quickest wedding he could. He has done and it’s going to take place in exactly one hour and fifty-five minutes so perhaps you’d like to change your dress!”

  I didn’t wait to hear if the officer had given his permission or not. I was already racing up the stairs to my room and scrambling into the prettiest dress I owned.

  Peggy and Danielle rushed after me, Danielle jumping up and down and squealing: “Oh do let me be a bridesmaid! Please let me be a bridesmaid!”

  “Yes,” I gasped, zipping my dress up, brushing my hair, searching for sling backed high heels.

  There was a knock on the door and Mario came in, sheepishly holding a posy of hastily picked flowers.

  “It is all right. The officer understands. He and his men will have to attend the ceremony and then you will both have to go straight to Police Headquarters, but he will allow the marriage.…”

  “How on earth did Max persuade him?” I asked breathlessly, applying eyeshadow and mascara.

  “He is a romantic man,” Mario said grinning. “Besides, he is a racing fanatic. How could he refuse the future world champion permission to marry!”

  Danielle had her party dress on and Peggy was brushing her hair, incoherent with excitement.