by Susan Lewis
‘The air-conditioner’s on,’ he told her, starting up the engine.
As he reversed back over the gravel he was punching out a number on the phone. He let it ring on the speaker for a moment, then picking up the receiver he spoke in what at his end was a series of non sequiturs, ‘Bob?’ he said. ‘Yeah. No, it was no good. Get onto Erik if you can and have him meet me at the Valhalla in half an hour. He can take me to the airport. What!’ he hissed. ‘When did it happen? Where’s Morandi now? OK, find him, tell him I want to see him. Sure, I’ll be right there,’ and he rang off.
‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said, glancing over at Louisa as they drove back through the village.
‘What’s that?’
‘I want you to promise me you’ll stay away from Consuela. And, if you can, I want you to keep Danny away from her too.’
Louisa’s heart gave a twist of unease. ‘Am I allowed to ask why?’ she said.
He didn’t answer straight away so she turned to look at him. ‘Do you know the story of Pandora?’ he said.
‘I think so,’ she answered, curiously.
‘Well I’ll tell you just in case,’ he said glancing at his watch. ‘She was sent by Zeus as a punishment to Epimetheus. She came with all the gifts of the divinities and with all the beauty of the goddesses. But in her mouth were lies and in her heart was perfidy. That is Consuela.’
Louisa turned to look straight ahead, not knowing what to say.
They continued in silence as they rejoined the main road and the refreshing breeze from the air-conditioner cooled them. She looked over at him and though she couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses she could tell from the tightness of his mouth and the hard set of his jaw that whatever was going through his mind now was causing him a great deal of anguish, if not anger. She desperately wanted to lighten the atmosphere for these last few minutes, but couldn’t think what to say.
‘When are you coming back from Mexico?’ she ventured and immediately wished she hadn’t when she saw the strain in his face increase.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered abruptly.
She shrugged awkwardly. ‘Whereabouts are you going in Mexico?’ she asked trying to sound chatty.
‘Look, Louisa, I don’t need this right now, OK?’ he snapped. ‘Just get off my back with the questions. I told you I’ll tell you everything just as soon as I can, so quit hassling me.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that!’ she retorted angrily. ‘I was merely trying to make conversation.’
‘Then don’t.’
For a moment she was lost for words then, quite suddenly, without her even knowing how it had happened, they were in the middle of a blazing row.
‘I did what I could to put your mind at rest,’ he was raging, ‘but right now I’m not doing any more. And if you’ve got a problem with that then maybe you’d better get out of my life now!’
‘Of course I’ve got a problem with it,’ she shouted back. ‘I can’t stand all this deceit, all this …’
‘Make the decision, Louisa, because it’s all the same to me.’
She gasped. ‘Well if that’s how you feel,’ she seethed, ‘then I’ll say goodbye now.’
‘That suits me just fine.’
For a second or two as alarm threatened to get the better of her anger she smouldered in silence. ‘So you are a liar!’ she suddenly cried. ‘One minute you say you can’t let me go, then the next it suits you just fine.’
‘OK, I’m a liar!’ he yelled furiously. ‘It’s what you’ve been trying to get from me ever since I turned up today, so you got it. I’m a liar. Does that make you happy? Is that what you want to hear?’
‘If it’s the truth, then yes, it’s what I want to hear.’
‘Then you’ve got it!’
Louisa turned to glare out of the window while he swore under his breath as he took a bend too fast and had to swerve to avoid an oncoming car.
‘Why don’t you slow down?’ she snapped. ‘You’re going to get us both killed at this rate and I don’t see why I should die just because you can’t control your temper.’
His face was still stony, the knuckles of his left hand white as he gripped the wheel, but he did ease off the accelerator at the same time as he punched the CD and drowned the car with music.
Louisa immediately sat forward and punched it off again.
He let it go, glancing in his rear-view mirror as he made a right turn into Valanjou. A few minutes later he pulled up at the end of the lane leading to the villa.
When Louisa merely sat there he looked pointedly and impatiently at his watch.
‘Is this how we’re going to leave it?’ she said curtly.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he responded, sounding only fractionally less angry. ‘I’ll call you when I get back, OK?’
‘Suit yourself,’ she said through clenched teeth and throwing open the door she got out and slammed it behind her.
It was just after midnight. Jake was furiously pacing the deck of the Valhalla while Erik stood leaning against a stanchion calmly smoking a cigarette.
‘How much goddamned longer are we gonna have to wait?’ Jake growled. ‘And who the hell called the police, is what I want to know?’
‘Aphrodite?’ Erik suggested, tilting his head so that it was in the glow of the lamp on the foremast.
Jake glowered at him, then resumed pacing.
‘Look, if it had been a straightforward burglary the police needn’t have been involved,’ Erik pointed out. ‘But there’s no way he can cover up the fire.’
‘How much longer are they going to hold him?’ Jake demanded.
‘They’re not holding him, they’re just carrying out their investigation.’
‘At this time of night?’
‘No one could find him before,’ Erik reminded him. ‘Now, for God’s sake roll yourself a joint and calm down, will you?’
‘Did you get me on a flight out tomorrow?’
‘Yes. And Fernando’s been contacted, he knows you’re not coming in on schedule.’
Jake turned and hammered his fist against the coach house. ‘This is all we fucking need right now,’ he hissed.
‘Hey up, here they come,’ Erik said, spotting Morandi and Bob getting into the dinghy over at the harbour.
Jake stood at the edge of the deck watching them come and barely waited until Morandi was on board before laying into him with: ‘Who the hell called the police?’
Morandi’s face was pale, his hair and clothes were in disarray, his eyes were tired and filled with foreboding. ‘Apparently it was a neighbour,’ he answered. ‘She saw that the office had been burgled so she called the police and by the time they came the place was going up in smoke.’
‘Did they manage to salvage anything?’
‘I think so. They acted pretty quickly, but I haven’t had a chance to go and look the place over yet. You needn’t worry about all the records though, they weren’t there.’
Though it was minimal, Jake appeared mollified by this answer. ‘Where’s Aphrodite?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since this morning.’
‘Where were you when the police contacted you?’
‘On location, where I’ve been most of the time since Monday.’
‘And Aphrodite?’
‘She was with me until this morning.’
Jake glanced at Erik who shrugged and lit another cigarette.
‘OK,’ Jake said, ‘fill me in on what happened just prior to the burglary. Yeah, yeah, I know you were on location, but what about Consuela? Did you have any contact with her over the past couple of days?’
‘Yes,’ Morandi answered, wiping a hand over his mouth as the troubled look in his eyes deepened. ‘I had a video she wanted, but I refused to hand it over.’
‘What video?’ Jake demanded.
Morandi looked at him, glanced at Erik then back again. There was something akin to real fear in his eyes now.
; ‘What video?’ Jake said through clenched teeth.
‘The one of Danny Spencer’s mother,’ Morandi sighed defeatedly.
Jake gave a bark of laughter. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘What a fool. I should have known. Did she say what she wanted it for?’
Morandi seemed to shrink as his eyes once again moved between Jake and Erik. ‘She said she was afraid you’d use it to try and get money out of Danny,’ he answered, already wincing at the explosion he knew was about to come.
But it didn’t. Instead, for several seconds, the only sound was the gentle wash of the waves against the hull.
Morandi waited, watching Jake closely, deeply unnerved by this lack of reaction. In the end it was Erik who spoke.
‘The question now,’ he said, ‘is did she get the video out before she had the place burned?’
‘We have to assume she did,’ Jake answered, ‘otherwise she’d never have burned it.’ He turned to Morandi. ‘Tell me you didn’t mention anything about her to the police.’
‘Not a word,’ Morandi assured him.
‘OK. You’d better try and find Aphrodite, make sure she doesn’t start singing either.’
‘Oh, she won’t,’ Morandi said confidently.
‘Just make sure of it. Now I’m for bed, because if Consuela’s already got that video then there’s nothing any of us can do about it now. Where’s Danny?’ he added to Erik.
‘At the villa.’
Jake nodded. ‘Do what you can to see that she stays there. I know she’s as slippery as a barrel of eels, but try,’ and leaving them to it he swung himself in through the hatch, his mind now totally focused on Mexico.
17
SINCE THERE WAS still no sign of Aphrodite Sarah agreed to help Morandi clear up his office. He’d called her early that morning – the morning after it happened – sounding so exhausted and so utterly dejected that Sarah hadn’t even bothered to question why he hadn’t called her before. In light of what had happened it seemed both irrelevant and petty to be thinking of her own injured pride.
Now, as they stood among the charred debris, overturned furniture and smoke-blackened walls still dripping with water, trying to make some order of the chaos, Sarah was watching him, wishing she knew how to comfort him. He looked so downbeaten and weary she couldn’t help wondering how close he was to breaking.
Looking up and catching her watching him he forced a smile, but it didn’t make it to his eyes for they were too steeped in worry and helplessness to brook any other emotion.
‘Have you been in touch with the insurers yet?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I did it just before you arrived,’ he answered. ‘Someone’s coming over later.’ Then, to her dismay, he sat down heavily on a chair and dropped his head in his hands.
‘This is all such a mess,’ he muttered. ‘Such a fucking mess I don’t know which way to turn.’
Sarah went to him, put a hand on the back of his neck and started gently to massage it. Knowing that the fire had been arson, she wondered if she dared voice what was in her mind. In the end she decided to chance it. ‘You don’t suppose,’ she began tentatively, ‘that Aphrodite was behind this, do you?’
He shook his head without looking up. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he answered.
‘Then where is she?’
‘I wish to God I knew.’
Sarah went to kneel in front of him, took his hands from his face and looking at him with her clear, sensible blue eyes said, ‘I think it’s time you told me what’s really going on here, don’t you?’
He nodded, and kept on nodding for some time, before saying, in a voice that rasped with fatigue, ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’
She waited, holding his hands in hers and watching the way he seemed to be searching his mind for where to begin.
‘You must have guessed by now that it’s blackmail,’ he said forlornly.
Sarah nodded.
He laughed dryly, as though despising himself, then in a tone that was brutal and self-punishing, he said, ‘I take the cameras to Consuela’s whenever she asks me. I set them up in hidden niches of the guest rooms in the bathhouse – she always tells me which rooms to go into – and then we video her rich friends and all they get up to with the boys. Then, needless to say, the videos are used to extort money from the women with threats to show their husbands, or fathers, or God knows who, if they don’t pay up.’
‘But that’s terrible,’ Sarah murmured, disappointed with the inadequacy of the word, but unable to think of another.
‘Oh, it’s worse than that,’ he said, injecting his voice with a biting revulsion. ‘Some women have paid up and the videos have been put into the wrong hands anyway, just for the hell of it. Just to see the women suffer and in some cases lose everything.’
‘Dear God,’ Sarah muttered, thinking of the women she had met at the bathhouse the one time she had been there and wondering if any of them had yet been made to pay such a dreadful price for what they’d assumed to be after-dinner relaxation. ‘But why are you doing it?’ she said. ‘You don’t seem like a man without morals, but …’
‘I do have morals,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s just not wise to show them too often when you’re dealing with people like Consuela Santini and Jake Mallory.’
‘So Jake is behind it,’ Sarah murmured, her heart going out to Louisa for how horribly she’d been duped.
Morandi shook his head. ‘Depends who you’re talking to,’ he answered. ‘Consuela claims it’s all his idea. He says it’s hers.’
‘So how did you come to be involved?’
Morandi sighed heavily. ‘Now that’s a long story,’ he said. ‘It started about two years ago when Peter, my youngest brother, came down to the Riviera to get a job. He didn’t have anything particular in mind, you know what kids are like, he just wanted to bum around for a while and have a good time. Which is what he did. Then he called me one day after he’d been here a couple of weeks and told me he’d landed himself a real cushy number with some rich lady. He said the pay was out of this world and the perks were even better. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what the perks were, Peter’s a good-looking boy, keeps himself in good shape and has always had a certain way with the ladies. I didn’t see any harm in him being a bit of a gigolo for a while, I’d have probably done the same thing at his age given half the chance, so I didn’t think too much about it. That was until he stopped calling. Two months or more went by with no letter, no postcard, no phone call. He’d never told me this rich woman’s name, nor given me her number and knowing that the Riviera is virtually littered with them I didn’t know where to start. My sisters were frantic with worry, so I got myself on a plane and came down here to see if I could find him. Needless to say I got nowhere. I didn’t even know which town the woman lived in, never mind the street. I contacted the police, but there wasn’t much they could do – students are passing through all the time, taking on temporary jobs before moving on somewhere else and forgetting to tell their families where. In the end I went back to England none the wiser and feeling twice my age with worry. It wasn’t like him not to be in touch for so long, so I knew something had to have happened.
‘Then suddenly one day there was a knock on my door and there he was. I could hardly believe it. I’d never said anything to the rest of the family, but I’d almost given up hope of ever seeing him again. There were two men with him, one was Jake, I forget the other one’s name now, but it isn’t important. They’d brought Peter back, that was all that was important to me.
‘Anyway, it seemed that Peter had told Jake something about me – I’d made a few low-budget movies by then, mainly for the European market, much like I’ve been doing down here. There’s money in it and, like I told you, I have two ex-wives and an army of kids to support. It didn’t take Jake long to get around to offering to set me up in business down here, he’s not a man to hang around as I’ve since found out. He was prepared to set me up, he said, in return for a few small favours. Well, since
he’d just brought Peter back I felt it was I who owed him a favour and I was right, I did, because it wasn’t until Jake had gone that Peter told me where he had been and what had been happening during the past three months. Apparently, it took him several weeks to catch on to what was going on at Consuela’s, but as soon as he did he told her he wanted out. She didn’t seem to mind, he said, in fact quite the reverse, she seemed to want to help him find another job, or pay for his flight back to England, or whatever he wanted. Obviously she swore him to secrecy about what was going on, and it was only later that he realized what a mug he was to have believed that she was going to let him out of there with only his word as his bond when he knew all that he did.
‘That was where Jake came in. As Peter tells the story Jake arranged for someone to take a dinghy into Consuela’s private beach late at night, pick Peter up and take him to the Ile Sainte Marguerite where he stayed for two or three days before the Valhalla came to take him over to Corsica. Jake wasn’t on board, but he was in Corsica when Peter got there. That was when he told Peter what was going to happen to him.’
‘And what was that?’ Sarah asked clearing her throat.
‘He had a choice,’ Morandi smiled grimly. ‘He could either be shot right there and then and buried where no one would ever find the grave, or he could opt for being kept prisoner for the rest of his life in some place so remote he’d never even know which country he was in.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Sarah murmured ‘That’s monstrous.’
‘No, that’s blackmail,’ he corrected. ‘Or what happens to those who get mixed up in it, because innocent or guilty, someone almost always ends up paying with their life.’
Echoes of Louisa’s same observation passed chillingly through Sarah’s mind. ‘So how did Peter get around it?’ she said.
‘Jake got him around it. The choice wasn’t being offered by Jake, you understand, it was being offered by Consuela. Or that’s what Jake told Peter and Peter believed him. And who can blame Peter for believing him, as far as Peter’s concerned Jake saved his life. As far as I was concerned at the time, I believed it too, so of course I was prepared to do Jake a favour. He was perfectly straight with me, he told me it wouldn’t be legal, that there was every chance one or other of us, if not all of us, might end up in jail. But he said he’d do everything he could to get me off should it ever come to that and in the meantime I wouldn’t even have to think about how I was going to meet my alimony payments because he’d take care of everything. Which he has.