by Susan Lewis
Rhiannon’s eyebrows went up and looking past Lizzy to where the Safari Suite was nestled in the small enclave of its own garden she said, ‘It’s OK. I’m not expecting you to fake misery just to please me. And anyway, it wouldn’t please me.’
Knowing where Rhiannon was looking, Lizzy said, ‘Do you ever hear from Oliver now?’
Rhiannon grimaced. ‘No,’ she answered. Then sighing, she shook her head, as though slightly baffled by the extraordinariness of being where she was and talking about Oliver that way when the last time she was here it had been such a very different story. ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how things turn out? I mean, I can’t even remember what it was like making love with Oliver now – in fact, the very thought of it turns me cold.’
Lizzy turned back to the waterhole and watched the fiery reflection of the sun playing over the surface. She wondered if Rhiannon was deliberately avoiding the subject of what had been on the news last night, or whether she genuinely didn’t yet know. Actually, there was a very good chance Rhiannon didn’t know, for there were only two TVs in the camp and she certainly hadn’t been at the house with Lizzy when Lizzy had heard what had happened in Gstaad, and as far as Lizzy knew she hadn’t been in the guest shop either, where the other TV was located. The trouble was, if she didn’t know, Lizzy was going to have to tell her and right now she was completely at a loss how to put it. Deciding to leave it for the moment she said, ‘I keep forgetting to ask, but are you sure you don’t mind about not staying at the house? I just thought you’d be more comfortable in a chalet, what with the decorators making such a mess . . .’
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Rhiannon assured her. ‘I just hope you haven’t turned anyone away because you’re full up.’
Lizzy grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t have minded turning that bloody English couple away,’ she retorted, referring to a couple from Slough who had spent the past three days trying to work out where they had seen Rhiannon before. Fortunately they’d left now and a new batch of guests were due to arrive at any time. ‘Still, I suppose we just have to be grateful they had Alzheimers,’ she continued, ‘or we could be dealing with a bunch of human baboons right now rather than sitting here watching the real thing.’
Leaning back too, Rhiannon said, ‘Do you ever get any newspapers out here? I haven’t seen one since I arrived.’
Lizzy’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Sometimes Doug or someone brings a couple in from Jo’burg, when they remember,’ she answered, ‘but they’re usually a week out of date by the time they get here.’
‘Don’t you miss hearing the news?’ Rhiannon asked. ‘I mean, don’t you want to know what’s going on in the world?’
Almost certain now that Rhiannon didn’t know, Lizzy said, ‘We get CNN if you’re feeling in need of a fix. And Sky News.’
Rhiannon looked up to where the Cessna air-taxi was starting its descent towards the runway. ‘I have to confess I do miss the outside world,’ she said, ‘but the idea that I’ve only got a few days left here is too depressing for words.’
‘What will you do when you get back?’ Lizzy asked.
‘Carry on where I left off, I suppose. It’s not going to be easy because the temptation to ring Max is growing every day and to be honest I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I know it probably wouldn’t be the right thing to do, but I just can’t make myself accept that this is it, that there can’t be any more.’ As she spoke her heart was churning with the longing that all but consumed her and feeling the pain starting to swell, she turned her head away to allow the tears a moment to recede. ‘It’s just getting harder,’ she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
Lizzy’s eyes were squinting against the sun as she tried to steel herself to break the news that she knew was going to shatter Rhiannon’s heart. She glanced over at Rhiannon and seeing how very close to the edge she was, Lizzy searched her mind desperately for as gentle a way of doing this as she could muster. ‘Has it ever occurred to you’, she began hesitantly, ‘that some of the stuff they wrote about Max . . . Well, that there might be an element of truth in some of it? I mean, from what you told me, it was pretty strong and . . . Well, I can’t see Susan Posner or anyone else going to press without being sure of their facts – not in a case like this.’
Rhiannon’s face was cold with anger as turning to look at Lizzy she said, ‘I don’t believe this! Are you saying that you do believe it? That you actually think he’s a monster and a pervert who killed his first wife and cheats on his second . . . Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
Lizzy sighed. ‘No, that’s not what I’m trying to say,’ she answered. ‘I’m just asking you to be honest with yourself . . .’
‘Let’s drop this now, before one of us ends up saying something we’ll regret,’ Rhiannon interrupted tightly.
Lizzy sat forward and hugged her knees to her chest. She wasn’t handling this at all well and she still hadn’t managed to get to the point. ‘There’s a wildebeest,’ she said lamely, as a cautious young gnu wandered out of the shelter of the trees, its tail switching the flies on its back and its snout down ready for water.
Her face still pinched with anger and her heart thudding with misery, Rhiannon sat up to take a look. Several minutes ticked by as the wildebeest drank its fill, then wandered away. A while later the hippo sank luxuriously into the water and floated out to the middle. ‘He didn’t do any of that to Galina,’ Rhiannon said in a whisper. ‘I swear to you, Lizzy, it just isn’t in him to do something like that. I’m not trying to make out he’s some kind of saint, because he’s not, but he’s not a monster either. And before you say anything else, think how you would feel if I were doubting Andy this way.’
‘But Andy hasn’t been written about in the press the way Max has,’ Lizzy protested, ‘and I’m only thinking of you. My God, Rhiannon, you wouldn’t be the first woman to be taken in by a man, to be so blinded by her feelings that she can’t . . .’ She stopped as she realized what she was saying.
‘I was taken in by Oliver,’ Rhiannon said brittlely, ‘so why not Max too? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I made a fool of myself once and now I’m doing it again. Poor, stupid Rhiannon, she can’t see a liar, a cheat, a wife-batterer or a murderer even when the rest of the world is yelling “behind you”. Well, OK, I made a mistake with Oliver and I’ll be the first to admit it, but I’m telling you now that I’m not wrong about Max. He’s never done anything to Galina except care for her. He stood by her when no one else would; he got her the help she needed and he still tries to get her help even though she rejects it. He married her for God’s sake, he’s given her his children, his name, he’s sacrificed his entire fucking life for her and you’re sitting there trying to tell me that he did all those things that sick, warped woman wrote about him. Well, I don’t want to hear it, Lizzy, not from you, least of all from you. Nothing’s going to change the way I feel about him, I love him, I want him and I know I might never have him. That’s enough to be dealing with without my best friend believing all the crap they’re saying about him just because I made a mistake in the past. He’s never laid a single damned finger on Galina except in affection and . . .’
‘She’s disappeared, Rhiannon,’ Lizzy interrupted softly. ‘They don’t know where she is.’
Rhiannon’s breath froze in her lungs as her heart pounded with the fear she might have heard right. Then suddenly she was seized with an overwhelming urge to be with him, to get away from Lizzy, from all those who doubted him and lock herself in the safety of his arms.
‘I heard it on the news last night,’ Lizzy said, turning to look at her. Seeing how ashen Rhiannon’s face had become, she reached out for her hand, but Rhiannon pulled it away.
‘What do you mean, they don’t know where she is?’ she whispered brokenly.
‘Just that,’ Lizzy answered. ‘Apparently she went off-piste a couple of days ago and she hasn’t been seen since. They’ve had all the rescue services out looking for her, b
ut so far there’s no sign of her.’
‘And Max? What are they saying about Max?’
‘According to the news he’s out there looking for her too. The brief shot I saw of him showed him getting out of a search-and-rescue helicopter and into a police car.’
Rhiannon’s eyes widened with terror. ‘You mean he was being arrested?’ she cried.
‘I don’t think so. That’s not what they said.’ She paused and when Rhiannon said no more she went on quietly, ‘They’ve more or less given up hope of finding her alive now. She’s been missing for too long in temperatures that are too low to survive in.’
‘Oh God,’ Rhiannon murmured, her throat so tight she could barely speak.
‘There are two theories at the moment,’ Lizzy said, ‘suicide and murder. You won’t need me to tell you which is the favourite.’
Rhiannon looked out across the wild bushy plains to where the sun was glowing red on the horizon. ‘I have to speak to him,’ she said softly. ‘I have to go to him, Lizzy.’
‘Why don’t we wait to see what they say on the news tonight?’ Lizzy responded. ‘You never know, they might have found her, she might have turned up somewhere safe and well and it’s all blown over by now.’
But Galina hadn’t turned up and though no body had either the authorities in control of the search had decided that there was no more to be gained by continuing, so pending any new information they had called off the search. Max Romanov and another man, so far unnamed, were currently helping police with their enquiries at police headquarters in Geneva. ‘The police are keen to stress the fact that no arrests have been made,’ the reporter said from his overcrowded spot at the foot of one of the ski slopes in Gstaad, ‘and none are expected tonight. The children are reported to have been flown back to the States and Max Romanov is expected to follow some time in the next day or two. We’ll keep you informed of events as they unfold. In the meantime, back to you in the studio in London.’
Walking through the decorators’ debris of ladders and canvas sheeting, Andy handed Rhiannon a drink and turned to look at the small black-and-white TV screen that was perched on the edge of an untiled work surface. The programme had moved on to other news stories now, so picking up the remote control he flicked off the TV.
‘I’ve got to tell you, I’m with Rhiannon,’ he said, glancing at Lizzy. ‘He’s not going to finish her off now, when the ink’s hardly dry on the paper after all that fuss in London, and when half the world knows his motive. He’d have to be crazy.’
Lizzy turned to look at Rhiannon. ‘What do you want to do?’ she said softly.
Rhiannon’s eyes moved uncertainly about the room. ‘I don’t know,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I mean, I want to go to him, but how will it look if I do?’
Lizzy glanced at Andy.
‘I’m going to be honest with you, mate,’ Andy said, putting a hand on Rhiannon’s shoulder, ‘it wouldn’t look good if you did turn up, ’cos like I just said, as far as the rest of the world’s concerned, you’re his motive. If you take my advice you’ll stay put for a couple of days. Try to reach him by phone if you like, he’ll tell you the best thing to do.’
Rhiannon nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said, her voice echoing through the terrible numbness inside her. Then pressing her fingers to her mouth, she said, ‘I know he’ll handle this, that somehow he’ll get through it, but I wish to God I could be there with him if only to let him know that there’s someone on this godforsaken planet who doesn’t believe he did it.’
Susan Posner’s fingers lay idle on the computer keyboard. She was gazing blindly out of her hotel-room window to where the glorious sunlit slopes of Gstaad sparkled like sequinned mantles from the heavens. She’d never been to Switzerland before and she was beginning to wish now that she’d never come, for as beautiful as it was, the two pieces of information that had just reached her were overshadowing everything.
For the moment she was too stunned to properly assimilate the meaning of what she had heard, though whatever it was she knew, because of the way her heart was thudding, that it wasn’t good. The first piece of news was that a body had been found in a ravine some ten miles east of Gstaad; the second was that Max Romanov and Ramon Kominski were flying back to LA some time in the next couple of hours.
As the minutes ticked by and the relevance of the information and its disturbing reality settled in layers of dread around her heart, she tried to make herself look at what was bothering her the most: the fact that there was now a body, or that Max Romanov looked like he was going to get away with it again? She couldn’t believe it, or more to the point, she didn’t want to believe it, for if Galina was being hauled from a gully in the cliffs while the murdering bastard who had done it was on his way home, then all her efforts had been in vain.
Dropping her head in her hands, she tried again to make some sense of what was happening and what she was feeling. God knew, she had done everything in her power to prevent this murder; she’d exposed his affair with Rhiannon, she’d published photographs of the violence he systematically perpetrated on Galina and she’d warned him, publicly, that there was new and incriminating evidence regarding the murder of his first wife. She’d stuck her neck right on the line for this one, for the evidence Maurice Remmick had given her had been based wholly on hearsay. But it had all added up, it had made so much god-damned sense that she could only wonder why she hadn’t seen it before. And when put together with Remmick’s sworn statement that he would stand by the information he had given her in a court of law, she reckoned he had to be pretty sure of his ground. So Susan didn’t see any cause for sleeplessness there; what she was having a real hard time with, though, was her own inbuilt sense of knowing when something wasn’t right – and something wasn’t right here, she just knew it.
She considered the arrogance it would take for Romanov to believe that he could get away with it again, when he had to know that the world’s press still had him in their sights. Her heart took a sickening dive as she looked down at the box files beside her that contained so many details of his life. It just didn’t make any sense that he’d have done it now, when she, personally, had splattered his motive all over the press and when she’d warned him, all but told him, that he wouldn’t get away with it twice. Yet he’d gone ahead and done it anyway – and god-damnit, it looked like he was going to get away with it again too. She blinked, looked down at her keyboard and tried to bolster her indignation with more conviction. It wasn’t working, though; in fact the whole god-damned business was unnerving her in a way it never had before.
Hearing a commotion downstairs in the car-park, she got up and walked over to the window. By the time she’d arrived in Gstaad all the village hotels had been full, so she and the other late-comers had checked in to the luxurious Grand Chalet a few minutes away which offered one of the best views and best restaurants in Switzerland. Several news crews had set up their satellite and cable links from there and as the flurry of activity down below increased, Susan picked up her room key and forced herself to go and find out what had happened.
Common sense was telling her that the TV guys were responding to the news that a body had been found and Romanov was on his way back to the States, but she had to be sure. If there were any further developments, she needed to know before she filed her story across to the LA Times. It wasn’t until she reached the outside door that she realized how badly she was shaking. Trying to ignore it, she pushed her way through the tangle of steel cases and tripods to an NBC stringer whom she’d met a couple of times before.
‘What’s going down?’ she shouted above the din.
Glancing up from where he was scribbling something on a pad, the reporter said, ‘Romanov’s just left police HQ. They say he’s on his way back to LA.’
Susan stared at him, then realizing that was precisely what she’d expected to hear, she felt herself start to relax. ‘And the body?’ she said. ‘Any news on the body?’
He frowned. Then suddenly enlightened
he tapped his pencil against the page and proceeded to give her the very answer she now realized she had been dreading the most. As he spoke, telling her that it had been the body of a Belgian woman who had gone missing the day before, Susan felt the world starting to tilt. She turned as someone called her name, telling her there was someone on the line from the States. It was the airline office clerk she’d contacted the day before, checking on flight and passenger information for the day Carolyn Romanov had died.
When finally the call was over Susan knew that her earlier hunch had paid off. But instead of the euphoria she generally felt at such moments, she simply stood where she was, staring blankly into the horror of it all. Fear began to slide through her as chillingly as the rivers that ran through the hills. Then panic seized her as though to force her to her knees, as the nightmare that had been gathering focus fast since Galina had vanished began turning into a reality she never wanted to face. She’d got it wrong about Max Romanov.
Night had chased them across an entire ocean and continent and was now finally catching them as the engines of the Romanov jet were thrown into reverse on a private runway just north of Malibu. Minutes later, Max and Ramon disembarked the aircraft and got into a waiting limousine. Both men looked haunted with fatigue, though they’d slept fitfully during the flight and had showered and changed before arriving in L.A.
Max had spoken to Ula and Ellis just prior to landing. His instructions had been short and to the point. He wanted Maurice at the house when he arrived and the children out. If Maurice showed any signs of resistance they knew whom to call.
Whether Maurice had needed any persuasion was impossible to tell as Max and Ramon walked into the family sitting-room at the Malibu mansion. He was standing with his back to the flaming log fire, his thumbs hooked casually on to the pockets of his golfing slacks and the arrogant smile of a man who knew he’d won curving his long expressive mouth. Ellis and Ula were on one of the couches that flanked the hearth, but though both got up as Max came in, neither even attempted a greeting as Ramon closed the door and Max’s presence in the room filled the air with danger.