They walked away and the boat began to move again.
Terry was talking to Alex in his office when the phone rang. Alex answered impatiently.
‘I told you not to interrupt me. What is it?’ He listened, then looked at Terry, one black brow lifting. ‘It’s for you.’ He handed the phone to Terry, who leaned forward to take it.
‘Hello? Yes, it is. Who . . .?’ He fell silent, his face suddenly blank. ‘You’re certain? Oh, right. So that’s that. Thank you. Well done.’
He hung up and leaned back in his chair as if exhausted. Alex stared.
‘Are you OK? You’ve turned very pale. That wasn’t bad news, I hope?’
Terry gave a long, unsteady sigh, lifted his hand, glanced at his watch. Got to his feet. ‘I’m afraid it means I must go back to London, at once.’ He held out his hand. ‘Sorry to break this up, but I hope you’ll be confirming this sale very soon.’
‘I’ll let you know before next week.’ Alex followed him to the door.
‘No need for you to see me out, I know the way,’ Terry said roughly, and walked off very fast, like a man who couldn’t wait to get away.
What had that phone call been about? Alex wondered. One minute Terry had been eager to go to Delephores, completely set on it. The next he was leaving to get back to London.
What had happened to change his mind?
A shaft of terror struck him. Miranda. Terry had come all this way to find her, Alex was sure of it. Had he just heard something that no longer made it necessary?
Alex picked up the phone, his hand trembling, and rang the hotel. ‘Give me Milo, will you?’
The switchboard operator recognised his voice. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Hello?’ Milo said in Greek. ‘Ya soo?’
‘Is Miranda OK?’ demanded Alex hoarsely.
‘We can’t find her,’ Milo admitted, his voice tense. ‘I was just about to ring you. She isn’t in her bungalow, she isn’t in the hotel, or in the grounds, we’ve just searched them thoroughly.’
Cold sweat stood out on Alex’s temples. ‘When was she last seen?’
‘A security man saw her going down to the beach to swim, as usual, at around six thirty. We found her robe, sandals and towel on the sand. But there’s no sign of her.’ His voice soothed. ‘She’s an excellent swimmer. The tide is running fast, but if she got swept off course she might have made land further along the coast and be trying to get back here on foot.’
Alex’s mind worked fast and anxiously. ‘Get some boats out, look for her, out to sea and along the coast. Get the coastguards involved and the police. Tell them why we’re very concerned. Tell them she’s a witness in a British murder trial, and someone could have harmed her. I’m coming back at once. I’ll fly, it takes too long by boat. I should be with you in a couple of hours.’
If she had been murdered he would never forgive himself.
Neil Maddrell arrived at the hotel to be met by Alex, looking pale and haggard. As their eyes met Neil felt fear strike him.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Miranda,’ Alex said, confirming Neil’s worst fear.
‘What? What?’
‘She’s vanished. We think she went swimming. She may have drowned, or . . .’
‘Or?’
‘A small boat was seen coming into our bay by a fisherman. They could have picked her up, abducted her.’
‘Or killed her,’ Neil whispered, white to his hairline.
Alex didn’t answer but his sigh said all that needed to be said.
‘Have you contacted the local police?’
‘Of course. They’ve searched the island too, but found nothing. And the coastguard have been up and down in their boat, looking out for any sign of her. It was them who got word of a strange boat coming inland. On a small island like this somebody always sees something. A fisherman, mending his nets outside his cottage, keeps looking at the sea – it’s their instinct, their habit. And old women, widows who’ve lost men at sea, they look too and talk to neighbours.’
‘Thank God they do. Nosy neighbours are a great help to the police.’
Alex smiled at Neil. ‘Thank God, yes. We need them. The police have been in touch with other islands, with the mainland, asking everyone to keep an eye open for this boat, but we don’t know where it came from or where it was going. If it slips back into some tiny port it left at dawn this morning, nobody will think twice about it.’
Neil hesitated, biting his lower lip, then blurted out, ‘I don’t like the Finnigan family’s way of drowning people who become inconvenient to them.’
Alex shut his eyes, groaned. ‘I know. Do you think that hasn’t occurred to me? Terry was in my office talking of coming over here to Delephores when he got a phone call and suddenly changed his mind, went rushing off to the airport. I wish to God I knew what he was told on the phone. Was the caller a man he had hired to deal with Miranda?’
Neil breathed hoarsely, ‘And is she alive now? That’s what I can’t stop thinking about, that’s what’s scaring the life out of me. Finnigan doesn’t want her testifying against his boy.’
‘Will the case collapse if she isn’t there to give evidence?’
‘It will be a nuisance to us, but not a disaster. There’s too much forensic evidence to show motive and probability. After all, who else had the opportunity to wrap the girl’s body in carpet left over when the Finnigans had it laid in their flat? Oh, the boy won’t get off, but Terry Finnigan may think he will. He may believe if he gets rid of Miranda he will save his son.’
‘If that boy gets off and Miranda was killed, I’ll kill him myself,’ Alex grimly said.
Neil said nothing but his expression was just as bleak.
Terry Finnigan flew home and went straight to the office to do some work. He rang Edward Dearing first and heard that Sean was now in prison but he could visit him at certain times.
‘You have to ask permission, first. I’ll take care of that, get you an appointment.’ Edward paused. ‘How did your trip to Greece go? Everything settled satisfactorily?’
‘Yes,’ Terry said curtly and rang off a moment later.
The atmosphere in the office was charged. Nobody was looking at him, people’s eyes slid away when he spoke to them. His son’s name was not mentioned, yet he knew what they were all thinking about, no doubt whispering about, when he wasn’t around.
An hour after he arrived his secretary walked in rather self-consciously and handed him an envelope.
‘What’s this?’ Terry opened it, read it, dropped it on the desk. It was her notice, handwritten. ‘Have you got another job?’
She nodded, eyes down, her face cold.
‘More money?’
‘No, about the same.’
He did not ask her why she was going; he could guess, she had a tight-lipped face, her eyes disapproved of him and his son. She did not want to be mixed up in murder. Clear off, then, he thought – and anyway he hadn’t been satisfied with her work, he wasn’t sorry to see her go.
Crisply he said, ‘Clear your desk, take all your possessions, and leave immediately. You can settle what you’re owed with Accounts later.’
He turned away contemptuously, reached for the phone to ring an agency and ask for a temp.
She banged the door deliberately as she went and the next time he went past her office the room was empty. She had gone. And he could not even remember her name, try as he might.
The only name he remembered was Miranda’s.
It rang in his head like a bell across the sea. Miranda, Miranda, Miranda.
When he left the office late that afternoon the press were waiting. Terry didn’t understand at first, blinking in the first battery of flash-bulbs, deafened by the shouting of his name, the crude insolence of the questions.
‘Terry, Terry . . .’
‘Did you know all about it? Did you help Sean murder the girl? It was your plane he used to dump her in the sea, wasn’t it?’
Where did they get that? Who gave them informat
ion that should not be public property, at least until it came out during the trial? Did they bribe policemen on the desk in stations? Did they have a source inside the force? It had never occurred to him before – he had read the gutter press without thinking about the way they gathered their stories, whether what they wrote was true or not.
‘Terry, look this way . . . hey, Terry . . .’ they cooed like bilious pigeons, ducking and diving in a flock, cameras levelled his way. He ignored them, fighting his way through to get to his car.
It took him some time, but at last he was in the car and driving off. But if he thought he would get away from them all he soon saw he was over-optimistic. They got into cars, too, and followed him.
He decided to go to his country home – if he had realised the press were outside he would have stayed in his flat in the office building.
Or would he?
He hadn’t used it since the murder. The idea of sleeping there made the hair rise on the back of his neck. He had been over there; the atmosphere was . . . he hesitated to use the word, but how else could he describe it? Haunted. The flat was haunted. You almost felt you could hear the screams of that girl, the violent splashing, the gasps and smothered groans of someone drowning.
Was that how Miranda had felt after her husband drowned? Had she kept thinking she heard him . . .
Terry put his foot down, accelerating away from the pack of reporters on his heels.
He was being stupid. The flat wasn’t haunted. He didn’t hear that girl drowning. He was just letting his imagination run away with him, and it had to stop. He would go mad if he didn’t forget all about her, that girl he had never even met.
What had she really been like, the girl who would have been the mother of his grandchild? Would he have liked her? Would she have made Sean a good wife?
And the baby – had it been a boy or a girl? He would never know, unless it was mentioned during the trial. No doubt they had found out the sex of the child when the autopsy was done, but it might not come up in court. Why should it? That had no bearing on the case.
The only person interested was himself. He groaned, his eyes fixed on the road ahead and burning with unshed tears.
He wanted to know, he needed to know. He had always dreamt of grandchildren; of having them climbing on to his lap, warm and comforting, with their talcum smell and their open, innocent faces, calling him Grandpa, giving him hope for the future.
But the child had died with its mother. Murdered by its father.
He drove even faster, half hoping he would crash and end all this misery. How could you live with these thoughts churning round in your head?
But he didn’t crash. He reached his house at dusk and let himself in with his front door key a minute or so before the hounds behind him arrived.
They prowled around the locked gates, some tried to climb over the walls, cameramen with long distance lenses took photos of the house, reporters peered up the drive, shouting his name.
But Terry was upstairs in his bedroom, taking off his clothes. He had a long, hot bath for half an hour, feeling the warmth seeping into his chilled flesh, staring at nothing, listening to the distant uproar which the press were making outside.
When he climbed out he put on a towelling robe, brushed back his wet hair, and made a phone call to the local police.
His son might have been charged with murder, but Terry had always had a good relationship with them, contributed to their benefit society, bought tickets for the police ball, gone along to watch them play rugby at the police sports ground.
They arrived quite promptly. He watched from upstairs as they talked to the reporters, wondering exactly what they were saying.
The other cars moved off after a few minutes. Soon there was only the police car left. The uniformed officers rang the bell. Terry opened the gates electronically, went down to the front door to talk to them. He knew them both. Decent guys, polite and sympathetic.
‘They will probably camp outside your gates, Mr Finnigan, we can’t stop them parking on the highway, but they won’t invade your grounds, we made it clear that we wouldn’t stand for them trespassing. You’ll be all right, so long as you don’t leave the house.’
‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much, I’m very grateful to you.’
They drove away and he went into the kitchen to make himself supper. First, he pulled down all the blinds so that nobody could watch him. He heated up some vegetable soup and ate it at the kitchen table, listening to the radio. The programme played old pop classics, songs he knew and remembered from his youth. It seemed so long ago, a place he had visited once, briefly. He had thought he was happy. Now, with hindsight, he saw he had merely been content enough.
He had never been happy. Never, in his whole life, except the day Sean was born and he thought he had glimpsed a future for them.
The future was never within sight, though. You never saw what was coming, and just as well, or you wouldn’t want to live to meet it.
He made himself a toasted sandwich – filling it with grated cheese and brown pickle. Comfort food, reminding him of his childhood. His mother had made these sandwiches at the fire, on a long-handled toasting fork, first toast, then cheese inside, then she pressed them together and cut them into triangles. He had loved them. He had loved his mother. But he had to get away from the sordid muddle of that life. He had escaped to safety and reassurance, had thought he would always be safe.
You never were.
The phone rang; he answered it warily, afraid it would be the press, but it wasn’t. It was Francis Belcannon, sounding harsh and angry.
‘My daughter is breaking off this engagement, she’ll send her ring back to your son. Just make sure you keep our names out of this. I don’t want to see my daughter splashed all over the gutter press, is that understood?’
‘Yes,’ Terry wearily said. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Francis . . .’
Belcannon hung up so violently that Terry’s ears were almost shattered.
Well, he couldn’t blame the man. That poor girl, how she must be suffering; she had loved Sean. Why, why, why, couldn’t Sean have loved her, been faithful to her?
A sob choked in his throat. The engagement was over; there would be no marvellous marriage. Sean had killed that girl for nothing. Had murdered his own child for nothing.
The phone shrilled again. He sat staring at it, not wanting to talk to anyone, but eventually picked it up again.
This time it was Bernie. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. Where have you been?’
‘Greece.’
‘Ah.’ A significant pause. ‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Did you deal with your local problem?’
‘Yes.’ Another pointless, stupid death. He regretted Miranda almost as much as he did his dead grandchild. He had liked Miranda; had liked and admired her. She was beautiful and good at her job. She hadn’t deserved what happened to her.
None of this need ever have happened.
‘Well, good,’ Bernie said briskly. ‘Now, my boys tell me we would do well to move into your line of business, they were very impressed by what they saw. We need to have a meeting, soon, to discuss terms.’
Whose terms? Terry thought with dreary resignation. The last thing he wanted was to have a partner forced on him, to lose control of the business he had taken years to build up.
But to fight Bernie would use up energy he needed to fight for Sean.
Well, why should he fight for Sean? His son had cost him his business as well as his grandchild and his peace of mind. He wasn’t worth fighting for.
‘Next Wednesday, two o’clock, here?’ Bernie suggested. ‘Easier for you to come up to Manchester than for all of us to come down to London.’
‘Very well,’ Terry accepted. ‘If I can’t make it for some reason I’ll let you know the day before.’
‘I hope you will make it,’ Bernie said with cool insistence. ‘Be there, Terry.’
Terr
y replaced the phone, his teeth gritted and his whole face aching with tension.
Miranda knew she must not struggle, if she were to have any chance of survival. As her body sank she tried to stay calm, to think rationally. Her fingers fumbled with the heavy weight on the chain. How was it fastened? If she could only shed it. Fish swam around her in the blue water. Up above light glowed; the distant sun penetrating the waves.
She did not want to die.
The weight had been hooked on to the chain; she dragged at it, fighting to lift it up, and off.
It resisted, then suddenly she felt it coming upwards, managed to force it away and felt it fall. Released, her body bobbed up like a cork, surfaced in the warm Aegean, and she felt the sun shining down into her face. She blinked, trying to look around, searching for a sign of the boat from which she had been flung.
Ah, there it was – heading off into the distance, leaving a shining track behind it, like some great water snail. The sea was calm here, there was little wind, the weather was different to the weather when they left Delephores.
Where was she? How far from land?
Nobody would ever know what had happened to her – except Alex, perhaps. Had he known she would be drowned? Had Terry told him?
Her body was chill, despite the heat of the sun. She wished she could hate Alex, but her Angel of Death had got under her skin, she loved him more than life itself, which was ironic. How else could you love the Angel of Death?
She would have to float. She had learnt to do that when she was taking a rescue badge at school. You had to wear pyjamas, with the jacket sleeves tied to stop you using your hands, and float until your partner rescued you.
She would do that now. Relaxing, she let her body bob up and down on the gentle waves, turning her head from side to side slowly, to look round the horizon. If another boat came along she would be picked up, saved from death. All hope was not over.
But there were no other boats in view. How long could she keep up, stop herself sinking?
Panic rose in her throat; she felt herself grow heavy, dragged down under the glittering, blue, sunlit water. Oh God, Oh God, she thought, prayed, terror streaking through her. Please don’t let me drown.
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