Diamond Fire

by Anne Mather

But in the darkness she became prey to other fears, and the sounds of contracting metal assumed other guises. Were there rats on board? she wondered anxiously, convinced she could see beady eyes staring at her in the gloom. Was that a spider trailing its long legs across the back of her neck? From sagging with weariness, she came alert to every tiny movement in the cabin, and only the plaster across her mouth prevented her from screaming out loud. Eventually, however, exhaustion overtook her. She was so tired, and, almost without her realising it, her head tipped back against the hull, and she slept.

  * * *

  The rocking of the yacht woke Camilla to the awareness that it was daylight. She opened her eyes, sticky with the salt of her tears, to find that her prison was dimly illuminated again. Amazingly, she had survived the night unscathed, and only the biting pull of the ropes, and her own physical needs, remained to torment her.

  But the feeling of relief she experienced didn’t last long. The realisation of what had disturbed her was reinforced by the continued movement of the vessel, and she panicked again as its implications dawned on her: someone was on board the boat. Someone was walking across the deck above her. Grant must have come back, and in no time at all she was drenched with sweat.

  However, he wasn’t alone. Straining her ears, she was sure she could hear voices, and her heart faltered at the thought that he might have brought an accomplice with him. Against Grant she had little chance. Against him and someone else she was helpless.

  Tears gathered in her eyes again, but she fought them back. God, was she a total coward? she chided herself disgustedly. Tears would achieve nothing with a man like him, only prove what a weakling she was. Did she want Grant Blaisdell to think he had broken her spirit? Even if he had, he shouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing.

  With her hands clenched over her knees, she waited for them to come down to the engine-room. By her reckoning, it should take no more than a couple of minutes to reach her. Two minutes in which she had to steel herself to face an uncertain future.

  But nothing happened. No one came near the engine-room. And as she sat there, rigid with fear, she realised that one of the voices she could hear was feminine; and not only feminine, but a little girl’s. A little girl’s! Bewilderment gripped her. Who else could it be but Maria? But what was she doing here? Why had she come back? And, more significantly, who was with her?

  She concentrated on the voices, on their whereabouts. One was definitely a man’s, and she tried to identify it. Was it Alex? Could it be? It sounded like Alex to her aching ears. But was she just hallucinating? Superimposing what she wanted to hear on to what she could?

  The voices were closer now, but her knowledge of the yacht was so minimal that she could only guess where they might be. She had been unconscious when Grant had stowed her in the engine-room. She didn’t know where it was in relation to the other cabins. Was she fore or aft? A bitter smile tugged at her sealed lips, at her brain’s acquisition of the correct nautical terms. What did she know about a yacht’s specifications? she thought wretchedly. She just knew she was trapped, unable to reveal her whereabouts, unable even to open her mouth.

  She closed her eyes against the awful hopelessness of her position. It was ironic—or, in her case, rather more than that—that Grant was the only person who knew where she was. If something had happened to him, if he had been forced to flee, what would happen to her then? His plans for her might not have been pleasant, but at least they would have been swift. If she was left to die here by degrees, dehydrating in the heat, it could take days.

  The horror of this scenario filled her with despair. It couldn’t be happening, she thought. It must all be a dream—like the dream she had had that Alex loved her. But when she opened her eyes the gloomy walls of her cell were still around her, and the sob that rose inside her burst out in a keening groan.

  And then she heard the footsteps, the pattering sound of a child’s shoe, and the more hesitant tread of a man’s.

  ‘It must have been a cat,’ Camilla heard Alex say, practically outside the door, and for a moment she was too shocked to move.

  ‘It didn’t sound like a cat, Daddy,’ a doubtful feminine voice answered him, and Camilla thought she had never heard anything so sweet. ‘What’s in here?’ Maria added, and rattled the handle of the engine-room door.

  ‘It’s just where the diesels are housed,’ Alex replied, and Camilla could imagine him taking his daughter’s hand and drawing her away.

  She went wild then, somehow managing to move her feet, and scrape them against the floor. At the same time she made a series of grunting noises through her nose, and when Alex opened the door she practically tumbled at his feet.

  ‘God!’

  Alex stared down at her in horror, and she had a moment to register the lines of strain that etched his cheeks. And then Maria, a small dark miniature of her paternal grandmother, squatted down beside her, and touched the plaster that covered her mouth.

  ‘Is this the lady you were looking for, Daddy?’ she asked. ‘You’ll have to tell the policeman I found her, won’t you?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE hotel stood in Piccadilly. Large and impressive, it was one of the accepted pillars of the establishment, and although Camilla had passed it often enough she had never been inside.

  The client must be wealthy if he could take up residence in such a hotel, Camilla thought wryly as the taxi she had hired outside the law office set her down outside the hotel. The wonder was that Mr Bayliss hadn’t insisted on dealing with this client personally. Everyone in the office knew he kept the plum assignments for himself.

  But on this occasion he had asked Camilla to handle it. Mr Victor, the client, wanted to change his will, and Mr Bayliss had suggested Camilla should deal with it. And, because he was such an important client, she had been asked to go to him, rather than the other way about. Mr Victor apparently kept a suite in the hotel. So much easier, Mr Bayliss had said, than having to bother about the upkeep of a house, or staffing problems.

  Camilla hadn’t been too keen to accept the assignment. It wasn’t normally her brief to draw up testamentary documents. Mr Bayliss usually dealt with all of that. He liked being appointed executor, and handling the financial bequests.

  But, for once, Mr Bayliss had insisted he was too busy to leave the office. Besides, he said, the experience would be good for her. Her attitude towards their more affluent clients needed to be refined.

  Which meant he thought she was too keen to handle the less lucrative cases they took on, Camilla acknowledged. But the stream of harried men and women, whose lack of forward thinking had landed them with bills to pay and no money to pay them, always aroused her concern. And, because she had compassion, they were invariably shunted into her office. In fact, Camilla had compassion for anyone who found themselves obliged to seek the advice of a solicitor. However, most often it was the fact that they had little money that had brought them there in the first place.

  Drawing up this will was something else. It wasn’t that Camilla didn’t consider it important. She did. It was just that she had other cases, back at the office, that she would have preferred to deal with. Cases that didn’t involve going to large hotels.

  Not that she had anything against large hotels, she thought ruefully. Large hotels, like large houses and large cars, were simply not important to her. She supposed the godmother who had provided for her in her youth was mostly responsible. Aunt Rebecca, as she had liked to be called, had had everything that money could buy, but she hadn’t been content. Camilla’s own parents had enjoyed a much more satisfying life. And, although their tragic deaths had left their daughter an orphan, they had left Camilla with the intrinsic belief that happiness couldn’t be bought.

  Camilla sighed, and pushed through the revolving door into the lobby of the hotel. Who was she kidding? she asked herself impatiently as she crossed the discreetly carpeted foyer to the reception desk. She hadn’t thought about her parents’ precepts in years. It wasn
’t their mandate for a good life she was thinking of. It was Virginia’s attempted destruction of her own.

  ‘My name’s Miss Richards,’ she said to the man behind the reception desk. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Victor in Suite 904. Will you let him know I’m here?’

  She looked around the foyer as the clerk consulted with his superior. Whether she wanted to think about it or not, the last time she had been in a hotel of this size she had been in Honolulu, and the associations it engendered were the real reason she hadn’t wanted to come.

  ‘Ah, yes. Miss Richards?’

  An older man behind the desk attracted her attention, and Camilla managed a thin smile. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Victor has left instructions that you are to go straight up, Miss Richards. The lift is just on your left. If you take it to the ninth floor Mr Victor’s valet will meet you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Camilla was glad of the activity, but, riding up in the confines of the somewhat less than high-speed lift, she was again forced to confront the memories that plagued her. Memories of riding the metal capsule to Alex’s office; memories of Alex making love to her in that huge, sunlit room…

  No, not making love to her, she corrected herself firmly. He hadn’t made love to her then; indeed, he had never made love to her. Their relationship had been confined to two rather frenzied encounters, neither of which had ended very satisfactorily.

  Which was just as well, she conceded steadily. Their alliance had been unwilling at best; at worst, it had been a disaster. There had never been any future in such an association. The circumstances had been unnatural, to say the least, and she had been merely the recipient of Alex’s frustration.

  That it hadn’t been that way for her was just too bad. It wasn’t as if she had ever not been aware of the true situation. Alex had never deceived her; he had never made any promises. They had just been two people caught up in an emotional hurricane. And hurricanes had casualties, didn’t they? She was simply one of them.

  Of course, the eleven weeks and six days since she had left Hawaii should have been sufficient time to provide for her complete recovery. The horror of the night on Alex’s yacht, and Grant’s subsequent arrest for attempted murder, were not things she wanted to remember—but she couldn’t forget. Maybe if, like Virginia and Maria, she had been able to share what had happened with somebody, if she had had the chance to try and rebuild her life on the basis of those past mistakes, she, too, could have learned to live with what had happened. But she was just a bystander, an outsider who had inadvertently become implicated in events that had no bearing on her life. Whatever happened to Alex and Virginia in the future, she would not be involved. Hers had been only a minor role, anyway. The unwary catalyst who had altered everyone’s life except her own.

  Still, she was glad Virginia had survived Grant’s treachery. She would never have forgiven herself if she had been the innocent cause of her friend’s death. But then, when she’d flown out to Hawaii she had had no idea that Virginia was playing such a dangerous game. Or that Grant might be desperate enough to try and kill her friend when he discovered she herself had turned against him.

  It was easy enough to explain his motives. No one but Virginia knew of his involvement in her disappearance, or of the fact that he had used her addiction to seduce her into doing what he wanted. Even Maria had been kept in ignorance of his identity. It had been a carefully planned scheme to rob Alex of his control of the Conti Corporation.

  Oh, Camilla didn’t understand all of it. The explanations she had been given—mostly by Alex’s father—had hinged on the fact that, after his sister’s husband had deserted her, Alex’s father had transferred ten per cent of the shares he had inherited in the corporation to Grant’s mother, and ten per cent to Grant himself. It appeared that, at present, the majority of the shares in the corporation were divided between Alex, Alex’s father, Grant’s mother and Grant, with Alex holding the controlling interest. However, if Virginia had been able to persuade Alex to make ten per cent of his shares over to her, as part of a divorce settlement, Grant would ultimately have married Virginia, and with hers and his mother’s shares he would have had the power to take over the company.

  It had all sounded highly speculative, and Camilla hadn’t honestly been able to see Alex allowing such a thing to happen. But then she remembered that Grant had had control of his daughter, and, obviously, if Maria’s future was in jeopardy, he might have had no choice.

  Which explained, in part, Virginia’s growing fears for her and Maria’s safety. Grant had been playing for high stakes; and not just for money, as Camilla had at first imagined. He wanted wealth, but he also wanted power, and Virginia’s addiction had given him the perfect weapon.

  It was only when Camilla had come on the scene that he had had problems. Until then he had believed that Virginia was completely in his thrall, that she would do whatever he wanted so long as she continued to get the drugs she craved. But in her more rational moments Virginia had realised how fragile her position would be once Grant had what he wanted. And she was already beginning to suspect that he was more ruthless than she had ever thought.

  Her letter to Camilla hadn’t been as unthinking as Camilla had thought when she’d arrived to find Virginia was missing. It hadn’t just been a letter: it had been a cry for help; a desperate attempt to deter Grant before it was too late.

  Camilla supposed Grant must have begun to have suspicions even then. He must have realised that Virginia had written to her friend while he was setting up his plans for her supposed disappearance. The fact that he had kept the actual date of her departure from Virginia, and Camilla had arrived too late to effect any last-minute hitch, had been fortuitous. But when he had discovered that Virginia had phoned Camilla, and that she was obviously having second thoughts about what they were doing, the situation had deteriorated rapidly.

  By the time Virginia had followed Camilla into the Hyatt Regency that day she had been really scared. Grant was getting desperate, partly because Camilla’s arrival had complicated matters, and partly because Virginia was proving such an unreliable accomplice. He was beginning to realise that the longer this went on the less likely Virginia was to go through with it, and without her participation his plans would come to nothing.

  And, unless he could rely on Virginia’s total commitment, his own future was in jeopardy, Alex’s father had told Camilla sadly. It had obviously hurt Vittorio to talk of his own family in this way, but Grant’s behaviour had destroyed any love he had felt for his nephew. There was no way Grant could abandon the scheme and let Virginia go, he went on ruefully. Knowing what she did about him, she would always be a threat.

  Then, when Virginia had told him—for protection, Vittorio thought—that she had actually seen Camilla, and talked to her, Grant had panicked. That night he had returned to the yacht. While she had slept he had administered what he’d believed to be a fatal overdose, imagining, no doubt, that everyone would think Virginia had inadvertently killed herself. It was only when Alex had phoned to give him the news that Virginia and Maria had been found that he’d realised he had made a mistake. Virginia wasn’t dead; she was alive…if only barely. She had dragged herself to the phone and told Alex where she was before she had collapsed. That was when she had been rushed to the hospital in Honolulu, and the doctors had told Alex she stood a chance of making it.

  Camilla shivered now, even in the rococo splendour of the lift. Remembering that morning, and her own subsequent imprisonment on board Alex’s yacht, still had the power to chill her blood. Would Grant have killed her? she wondered. It was a question she didn’t want to answer. Sufficient to say that when he left her without food or water it was a possibility he must have considered.

  Of course, Alex had had no notion that Grant might consider using Camilla as a hostage. At that time his suspicions of Grant had been only that—suspicions. Virginia was saying nothing…yet; and Maria was mercifully innocent. But Grant knew it was only a matter of
time before the truth came out, and his abduction of Camilla had been a last desperate attempt to avoid being arrested.

  He might have got away with it, too, if Maria hadn’t left her doll on the yacht. When he had arrived at the hospital no one had questioned the fact that he was alone, and it was not until some hours later that Alex had discovered Camilla was missing. Grant’s story then, that she had asked him to drop her in town, could only be accepted. Short of calling him a liar, there was nothing Alex could do, and, with Virginia in Intensive Care, his priorities were obvious.

  That he had been worried about Camilla was apparent from his reactions when they’d found her. But then other matters had claimed his attention, not least the police’s issuing a warrant for Grant’s detention.

  That was how Camilla came to hear most of the story from Alex’s father. After she’d left the hospital, after undergoing a thorough examination to ensure she suffered no physical ill effects from her night’s imprisonment, Alex’s parents had insisted she stay with them until her return flight to England could be arranged. They knew nothing of what had taken place between her and their son, of course, but they had never been really happy with her staying in Alex’s house.

  And Camilla had been eager to comply. Now that her ordeal was over, and Grant had been arrested, Alex was spending every moment at Virginia’s bedside. It was obvious that her brief involvement in their lives was over, and she couldn’t wait to leave the island and put it all behind her. Indeed, she had tried not to think about that aspect of the affair. To do so was too painful to be borne. All she really wanted was to get back to London, and normality. To forget Alex Conti and the traumatic effect he had had on her life.

  So, here she was, she thought now, three months later, and almost entirely her old self again. She interviewed plaintiffs, prepared briefs, went to court to defend her clients against social injustice and sex discrimination—and cried herself to sleep most nights…