Love, Honour & O'Brien

by Jennifer Rowe

  As the hearse oozed off the highway and purred into the leafy depths of Medlow Bath, Holly told herself it didn’t matter what Eric thought. As signs of habitation became rarer, then disappeared altogether, she sustained herself with the knowledge that Eric would soon discover that she wasn’t in fact O’Brien’s partner or a blackmailer—just a penniless, homeless victim of Andrew McNish’s perfidy. But as Eric swung the hearse into a narrow, bush-lined lane and a big old house surrounded by a very high, very familiar, black railing fence loomed into view, her stomach turned over sickeningly and her palms began to sweat.

  Eric slowed the hearse to a crawl, took his phone from the dashboard, punched in numbers one-handed and put the phone to his ear.

  ‘Comin’ in,’ he drawled.

  Before he had clicked the phone off, the black iron gates ahead had begun to swing inward. By the time the hearse reached them they were fully open. Eric’s timing had been perfect.

  He turned the wheel languidly and gravel crunched as the hearse cruised through the gateway, passing smoothly over the place where Andrew McNish had stood in O’Brien’s photograph. Holly surreptitiously blotted her hands on her skirt and stared straight ahead, preparing for action.

  A broad apron of pristine white gravel fronted the house, and gravel drives swept gracefully around to the back on both sides, skirting discreet black light poles. Infant lavender hedges flanked the stone front steps, the individual grey bushes still less of a feature than the mulch heaped lavishly at their roots.

  Having taken in this scene and registered ‘new work’ plus ‘must have cost a bit’, Holly raised her eyes and was disconcerted. In O’Brien’s photograph the Maggott house had been merely the vine-clad backdrop to the image of Andrew McNish, dressed to impress and cosily collecting someone else’s mail. The photograph had given the impression that Andrew had fallen very much on his well-shod feet. The backdrop house had reeked of grandeur and money—qualities that were right up his street. Close up, it reeked of other things.

  Bulging with streaked green copper domes, writhing with decorative ledges, arches and palisades, it reared dark, vast and feral above its neatly ordered frontage. The creeping fig that smothered its rendered face had overwhelmed window frames, sealed French doors, clogged the rusty wrought-iron wreathing the balconies, and even crept across the dormer windows of the attic. The ridge of the steeply pitched slate roof was spiky with weather vanes and lightning rods. Every visible window was barred, French doors included.

  Number 9 Horsetrough Lane was, in fact, exactly the sort of house in which the teenage stars of a slash movie might have spent the night for a dare, despite knowing, surely, from their own movie-going experience, that this could only lead to mass slaughter, with one traumatised soul left alive to tell the tale.

  The hearse swept around in a curve and stopped in front of the steps, which led up to a verandah and a massive front door that was an extravagance of carved wood, speckled brass fittings and leadlights featuring lyrebirds, ferns and waratahs. The engine idled almost silently. Eric idled similarly, looking straight ahead. Clearly he didn’t intend to move. Bloodsuckers, presumably, didn’t deserve to have their doors opened for them.

  ‘Thank you,’ Holly said crisply. She removed herself from the hearse, closing the door behind her with thoughtful gentleness. The dignity of her exit was slightly marred when the lock didn’t catch. Without changing expression, Eric leaned over and pulled the door properly shut before easing the hearse on around the house.

  Holly looked around, getting her bearings. The grounds of the house were level and park-like, an impression reinforced by the black railings and the fact that there was nothing to be seen beyond the gravel apron but grass and a few massive old trees in full autumn colour. The grass was thick and weedless—not a dandelion or patch of moss to be seen. It had obviously been laid recently. Faint lines still showed between the sods. Holly noted with spiteful pleasure that around the trees the turf ’s hopeful green was already sickening to yellow beneath circular shrouds of fallen leaves.

  She turned back to the house and saw a face move behind the lace curtain of the bay window to the left of the front door. Someone had been watching her. Her heart fluttered painfully.

  She took a firm grip on her shoulder bag and walked up the steps. In three strides she crossed the patterned tiles of the verandah, the heels of her shoes tapping purposefully. The crazed white button to the right of the door was marked ‘Press’, so she pressed it.

  The button sank deep into its elaborate wooden surround, taking half her finger with it. There wasn’t a sound. No one came. Holly wrenched her finger free. She lifted the heavy brass knocker fixed to the centre of the door and slammed it down. Once, twice, three times. She could hear the crashes echoing on the other side of the door.

  She waited tensely, listening for approaching footsteps, making plans. If Andrew were the one to open the door, how would he react? He’d be shocked, of course, but how quickly would he recover? Would he attempt nonchalance? (Holly! Hi! Tracked me down, did you? ) Or, appalled at the idea of a squalid scene, would he panic and slam the door in her face?

  She clutched her bag to her chest and turned slightly sideways, poising herself to shoulder charge her way into the house the moment the door opened.

  A shadow loomed behind the lyrebird glass. A key turned in a lock. The door opened a little. An exquisite face appeared in the gap, intricate earrings swinging like miniature chandeliers, huge dark eyes mildly enquiring. Holly’s blood boiled, but the shoulder charge no longer seemed an option.

  ‘Ms Maggott?’

  The young woman stepped back, pulling the door wider. She was a head taller than Holly, and ballerina slim. Her perfect skin was the colour of milk coffee. Her glossy black hair was caught back in a craftily negligent knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyelashes were so long and thick that they actually cast shadows when she blinked. She was wearing a calf-length tunic of peacock blue silk over softly pleated scarlet trousers, and soft red shoes with sequinned toes. Reflecting sourly that if she had worn an outfit like that she would have looked as if she were standing in a hole, Holly clumped into the house.

  The woman closed the door behind her and turned the key protruding from the lock. Holly suppressed a mild twinge of panic. She was doing nothing wrong. She had nothing to fear. But still, she was relieved when her hostess left the key where it was when she turned away from the door, faintly smiling.

  The floor of the vast, dim entrance hall was tiled in chessboard black and white. The walls were cedar panelled to shoulder height and hung with dark, elaborately framed paintings, the largest of which was a portrait of a black-suited middle-aged man with the mad, cunning little eyes of a wild boar. A cluster of brass chains, from which presumably a light fitting had once hung, dangled from the ceiling, swaying and chinking together in the draught as the front door closed. Through a doorway to her right, Holly could see floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a long table. Directly ahead, a grand staircase rose into dimness.

  A shadow stood motionless at the top of the stairs. Holly’s skin prickled. She took a step, squinting up. The shadow retreated, melting away into darkness. Holly lunged forward.

  ‘Ms Cage!’

  Holly froze in mid-stride and looked around. A door to her left stood partly open. The voice, unmistakeably that of Una Maggott, had come from the room beyond that door. Holly glanced in confusion at the beauty in peacock blue, who returned her gaze serenely.

  ‘Here!’ snapped the voice, as if Holly were a recalcitrant terrier.

  Reining in her irritation, reminding herself that this was Maggott’s house, and that it would probably be unwise to go rampaging after Andrew without at least explaining what she was doing, Holly walked to the open doorway and looked in.

  Directly opposite the door, a gigantic snake raised its head and looked back at her. Vast, scaly coils shifted lazily, black mottled with yellow. A dull roaring began in Holly’s ears. Through the roar she heard herself
give a little squeak.

  ‘Don’t worry about the python,’ Una Maggott’s voice said impatiently. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

  Holly tore her eyes from the snake, which she now saw was enclosed in a glass cage with a wire netting lid, and looked to her left.

  A woman sat there, behind a large, uncluttered desk that had been set squarely in the centre of the room, at right angles to an elaborately carved marble fireplace. The woman was impeccably groomed, and ferociously plain. Her clothes were exquisitely cut, but classic to the point of looking slightly out of date. Her smooth cap of hair, with its ruler-straight centre parting and uncompromisingly short, straight fringe, was iron grey. Deep furrows scored the space between her eyebrows and dragged down the corners of her mouth. She must have been at least sixty. And she was sitting in a wheelchair.

  Holly gaped, all her assumptions flying apart. Struggling to re-form them into a pattern that made sense, she looked quickly back over her shoulder, but the young woman in blue had vanished.

  ‘Lily creeps around like a cat,’ Una Maggott said, noting her startled expression. ‘I dislike it intensely. Fortunately, after Sunday she’ll be gone. I’ve had enough of her. Shut the door, please. I don’t want to be overheard.’

  Holly did as she was told. She found herself in what had once been a grand double parlour, the sort that could be divided into two rooms by folding cedar doors. In its present incarnation the front room, where Una Maggott sat, was part office, part sitting room, and the back, only partly screened off by the folding doors, was a bedroom disfigured by a partitioned corner that was probably, Holly thought vaguely, an ensuite bathroom.

  It was all very practical and understandable, given Una Maggott’s wheelchair status. Less easy to accept was the python—and the fact that the front room had been painted to resemble the interior of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Pharaohs, queens, jackals, cats and numerous sinister-–looking animal and bird-headed gods marched around the walls in a hail of hieroglyphics, all apparently intent on escaping through the bay window at the front of the house.

  ‘Hideous, aren’t they?’ Una Maggott remarked, regarding the stalking figures dispassionately. ‘My father got some local artist to come in and paint them. He was a great enthusiast, but he had appalling taste.’ She gestured imperiously at an armchair that faced the desk.

  Holly didn’t want to sit down. She felt an instinctive antipathy to Una Maggott. She knew in her bones that the woman was alien to her—one of those cold, dominating people who, like school bullies and saleswomen in certain dress shops, had always seemed to her to be members of an enemy species. But Una was in a wheelchair. It would be churlish to insist on standing, looking down at her. Besides, Holly had no desire to stay where she was, so close to the snake.

  It was still watching her intently. The black and yellow coils had become perfectly still, and it had occurred to her that the creature could very well be poised to spring. She didn’t know much about the attack methods of pythons, but she had an idea they could strike surprisingly quickly. She wondered how thick the glass of the cage was, how secure the wire netting lid.

  The chair Una Maggott had offered was covered in aged red velvet that had split here and there exposing puffy worms of white stuffing. It had short, bowed brown legs and a low, spreading seat that sagged so dramatically as Holly sat on it that her nose ended up about level with the edge of the desk top.

  Una opened a folder and picked up a gold fountain pen. ‘Now, your terms?’ she asked crisply.

  But the subsiding chair had been the last straw for Holly. It was time to seize the initiative. She cleared her mind of hearse, python, mural and wheelchair. She sat forward, trying to gain some height by perching on the front rail of the chair’s barely concealed wooden frame.

  ‘I’m not here to extort money from you, Ms Maggott,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m only interested in finding Andrew McNish.’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of that, Ms Cage,’ Una snapped. ‘Why do you imagine I contacted O’Brien’s in the first place?’

  Holly felt her jaw drop. She made a huge effort to pull it up again, but it seemed to have frozen. Her thoughts scuttled round in her head like rats in a trap. Una had contacted O’Brien, not the other way around! Holly made a mental apology to O’Brien, wherever he was. O’Brien hadn’t been a blackmailer. He hadn’t sold Holly out after all. But what did this mean? Had Andrew somehow found out that Holly had hired O’Brien to track him down? Had Andrew persuaded Una to ring O’Brien and offer to pay him off?

  Una slid a mud-smeared business card from the folder in front of her. It was O’Brien’s card, with the Mealey Marshes address scrawled on it in blue biro. Holly’s lost talisman.

  ‘Eric found this on the front path of Andrew’s house in Springwood on Thursday, when he dropped in to clear the letterbox.’ Una tapped the card with the end of her pen. ‘Rather careless, I must say, for a detective who promises discretion to leave his business cards lying around for all to see.’

  She threw down the pen, clasped her hands and regarded Holly severely. Holly stared back at her, stony-faced.

  ‘However,’ Una went on, ‘in this case the carelessness could work to our mutual advantage. Obviously your company is working for one of the people trying to trace Andrew. It was therefore sensible to make contact. I have a proposition for you.’

  Holly waited.

  ‘Presumably you will be receiving your regular fee from your original client, irrespective of results,’ said Una Mag–gott. ‘I don’t feel, therefore, that my payment needs to be a particularly large one. Shall we say two hundred and fifty dollars? In cash?’

  Holly had been expecting something like this, of course. But the offer had been so bald, so businesslike, that it took her breath away. The woman obviously had no doubt that Holly (and O’Brien Investigations!) would be quite prepared to sell out a client for a bit of cash on the side.

  Once, at Gorgon Office Supplies, a sales rep for a company that provided spring water dispensers and paper cups to businesses had hinted to Holly that he would ‘make it worth her while’ if she took one of his water coolers for the Gorgon’s display area on a six-month trial.

  Holly had told Anne, Paola and Justine about this on their return from lunch, and they had been satisfyingly scandalised. But over the following weeks the attempted bribery, and the suggestion that Holly would have succumbed to temptation if only the rep had offered something worth having, had turned into a running joke that Holly had found rather wearing. She couldn’t help feeling that there was an undercurrent to the teasing, and that Anne, Paola and Justine were looking at her with new eyes, now they knew that the rep, with his shiny suit, his dandruff-dusted shoulders and his insinuating voice, had confidently summed her up as being as venal as he was. Now Una Maggott had without hesitation summed her up the same way.

  Holly heaved herself from the embrace of the chair and stood up, squaring her shoulders. It was time to throw off her cloak of sleaze and reveal herself as the squeaky clean champion of justice.

  ‘Ms Maggott, I’m afraid you don’t understand—’

  ‘The two hundred and fifty dollars would be merely your retainer, of course. If your search is successful you will walk away with two, three or four times that. I believe in paying for results.’

  Search? Thrown off balance yet again, Holly stared at the woman across the desk and suddenly realised that Una Mag–gott wasn’t as calm as she seemed. She was holding herself rigidly under control. The veins were standing out on her tightly clasped hands.

  ‘Let me explain,’ Una said, leaning forward a little. ‘Hidden somewhere in this house are three items—a black bag of clothes, a flat blue case containing a dozen sterling silver teaspoons, and a red-glazed pottery mug with Andrew marked on it in white. You will receive a two hundred and fifty dollar bonus for each of these items you find. Naturally, if you find Andrew himself, I will pay a great deal more, but it’s only fair to tell you that possibility is remote. You’ll want to ch
eck his room, of course, for clues. In fact, you’d better do that first.’

  Holly’s skin crawled. The woman was mad. She was proposing some sort of game. Hunt-the-Andrew. Holly had read about people like this. She’d seen movies about them. She never thought she’d actually meet one.

  ‘Well?’ Una snapped. ‘What do you say?’ Her small grey eyes were avid. Suddenly her resemblance to the man in the entrance hall portrait was very marked.

  Eric tried to warn me. The thought slid into Holly’s mind like a sliver of ice. She shook her head slightly, trying to dislodge it. Una Maggott might be unhinged, but it was ridiculous to think she posed any kind of a threat. She was in a wheelchair, for a start. The deadlock key was still in the front door. And there were other people in the house. Eric himself. The silent young woman, Lily. And even if they couldn’t or wouldn’t interfere with their employer’s bizarre games, Andrew was here too.

  Andrew. Who took my money.

  Holly pulled herself together.

  ‘That’s fine, Ms Maggott,’ she said, using the breezy, efficient voice she had found useful when dealing with troublesome or confused customers in her old job at the bank in Perth. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll make finding Andrew my first priority. I might get lucky. Where should I start looking? Can you give me a tiny hint?’

  The furrow between Una Maggott’s eyes deepened. Her top lip twitched. ‘He must be upstairs somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Oh, right!’ chirped Holly. ‘Well, I’ll just pop up and have a little look-see . . .’ She made for the door.

  ‘Stop!’ Una called after her, her voice sharp with exasperation. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? You have to check Andrew’s room for clues, then look for the bag, the spoons and the mug! Forget about Andrew! If the police couldn’t find him, how do you think you’re going to?’