Cold Heart

by Lynda La Plante

  ‘But Harry must have loved you, even at the end,’ Lorraine said, conscious that she was perhaps pushing the other woman into deep water. ‘You were the constant in his life.’

  Sonja shook her head. ‘Vallance was the constant. I realize that now. He was there before me and he was there after me.’

  ‘But Harry left Vallance nothing in the will. He must have wanted to recognize something in leaving the entire property to you.’

  ‘It comes to me only by default,’ Sonja said. ‘Neither he nor I could ever have predicted that both Kendall and Cindy would drop dead.’ She turned round. ‘And, of course, who knows? I might drop dead. I have another day to go, don’t I?’ There was a strange, hunted look in the back of her cat’s eyes that chilled Lorraine, as if she were waiting for an executioner to arrive, for an axe to fall.

  Lorraine realized that she had been sitting very still, barely blinking. She made herself move now, swirling the ice in her glass as though to chase away ghosts with the sound. ‘I think that’s correct – but you’re most unlikely to die.’

  ‘Well,’ Sonja said, and again Lorraine had the sense that she was listening to the expression of thoughts that had been considered and rearranged many times, ‘there is life and life. Or, rather, there is life and there is existence without dignity, which one betrays oneself to endure. I used to think that there was some kind of other dignity in endurance, but it is better to be dead than betrayed, I think now.’ She had been talking rapidly and fell silent just as suddenly, then turned back to the sea again.

  ‘Who do you think killed Harry Nathan?’ Lorraine found herself asking, without really meaning to do so, as though it were the only chance she would ever have.

  ‘Harry Nathan killed himself,’ Sonja said, her voice low, resonant, beautiful. ‘He became a thing that someone would destroy.’

  The screen door banged at the front of the house, and Sonja started and looked round. ‘Arthur,’ she said, with a smile. ‘He doesn’t trust me alone for too long.’

  No wonder, Lorraine thought, glancing at her watch. He hadn’t been gone long and Sonja was already circling round the subjects of killing and death.

  Sonja walked back into the kitchen and called upstairs, ‘We’re down here, Arthur.’

  Did she want to warn him that she wasn’t alone: Lorraine wondered.

  The big man lost no time in joining them and Lorraine saw his eyes go immediately to Sonja, as though trying to gauge her mood. ‘Mrs Page, how nice you’re still here,’ he said, with a polite smile. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I join you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. He sat down beside her and Sonja disappeared inside, murmuring that she would bring out some wine. ‘Do you work out here?’ she asked, pretending to be making small-talk but, in fact, trying to place the man, as he well knew.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do, on and off.’

  ‘Are you a writer?’ She knew she sounded pushy now but she didn’t care: it was the only way she could do her job.

  ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m a painter.’

  Well, that was interesting, Lorraine thought.

  ‘I don’t suppose I’m allowed to see any of your work,’ she said, with a fake, girlish laugh she suspected didn’t fool him for a minute.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve just packed virtually all of what I have out here for a show,’ he said evenly, as Sonja came back with glasses and a bottle. What a surprise, Lorraine thought, but decided to have one last try at getting into the studio.

  ‘I’d love to see any of your work before I go, Mrs Nathan,’ she said, ‘Though, of course, I know all artists are very private.’

  ‘I’m afraid even I wasn’t allowed to see the last thing Sonja did,’ Arthur said. ‘She kept me right out of the studio for a month. Fortunately I have another room at the top of the house.’

  ‘Do you work mainly to commissions, or speculatively?’ Lorraine asked Sonja.

  ‘I rarely work to commission – or, at least, not to an exact commission,’ Sonja answered, carefully opening the bottle. ‘This last piece is to open a series of shows – a women’s thing, in the new gallery in Berlin. They indicated a few months ago that they would appreciate it if I had something new, but it was up to me what it was.’

  ‘And what will you do next?’ Lorraine said, conscious that she sounded like some vapid celebrity interviewer. ‘Do you have any plans, or will you just wait and see what comes?’

  ‘I have stopped working,’ Sonja said, in an odd, unnatural tone. ‘That part of my life is over.’ Suddenly she gave a light, sweet laugh. ‘It went on far too long.’

  ‘I’ll drive you back into town, Mrs Page,’ Arthur said quickly. ‘I think you said you had to go.’

  ‘Arthur!’ Sonja said, now laughing as though she hadn’t a care in the world. ‘That’s not very hospitable – I’ve just opened the wine.’

  ‘No, I really must be getting back – and, in any case, I’m sorry, I don’t drink,’ Lorraine said, getting up. ‘Thank you so much for your time – and it’s been wonderful to meet you.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Sonja said simply, with a slow, almost childlike smile.

  Arthur led Lorraine out to an old Blazer jeep, and began to make determined small-talk as they drove the few miles into town.

  ‘Will you be returning to New York tomorrow or staying over?’ he said, as they pulled into the Maidstone Arms car park.

  ‘I haven’t decided,’ Lorraine said. ‘I may stay another night.’

  ‘It’s just that if you were thinking of seeing Sonja again, we do have to pack to go to Europe and Sonja needs to prepare for Berlin – she’s expected to make a speech and she needs to concentrate on that.’ It was more than apparent that he was trying to deter Lorraine from making any further visits.

  ‘She’s a very unusual woman,’ Lorraine said, unable to resist the temptation to fish just a little.

  ‘She certainly is,’ Arthur said carefully, pulling up. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed rude, hustling you away, Mrs Page, but the truth is, Sonja is not quite . . . herself at the moment. You know that she and Harry parted on bad terms, and she pretends that his death didn’t touch her – but, of course, that’s not true. She has been very shaken. She cared deeply about him, and, God knows, sometimes I think he was the only man she ever loved.’

  Lorraine was surprised at this personal and clearly heartfelt revelation. She realized that Arthur did not dislike her, he was merely trying to protect Sonja.

  ‘For that reason she is blocked in her work and she imagines she will never work again. As her work is everything to Sonja, she is in a low state of mind at the moment. So, please, if I can ask you a favour, she needs to avoid strain. Going over all this stuff about Harry is just about the most painful thing there is for her. If you’ve asked her everything you need to know I’d be grateful if you’d just leave her be.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything else,’ Lorraine said, preparing to get out of the jeep. ‘Goodbye – it’s been nice meeting you.’ She smiled and waved as she watched him drive out, wondering what exactly he and Sonja Nathan had to hide.

  Sonja was still sitting at the table when he returned. ‘I’m tired. I think I’ll go and lie down for a while.’

  He looked at her, saying nothing, though he hated the hours Sonja spent locked alone in her room. Then he reached over and touched her face lovingly. ‘If you should see Mrs Page again, don’t talk too much.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said, tilting her head like a little girl making a promise, suddenly seeming young, vulnerable.

  ‘I love you,’ he said softly, and she smiled. He adored the way she smiled, and it always made his heart lift, even though he knew that though she was with him and was caring and loving towards him, he was not her true love. Arthur envied Harry Nathan even though he was dead, envied that he had shared Sonja’s youth, that the mere mention of his name made Sonja’s face fill with darkness and grief.

  ‘You know, I think I’m too tired to go to the deer m
eeting tonight,’ she said. ‘I don’t really feel like going into town.’ Arthur’s heart sank: sometimes Sonja would not leave the house for weeks, withdrawing into her private shadowlands in a way that frightened and excluded him. He had been counting on the deer, a cause she cared about, to get her into town: social interactions with neighbours would do her good. ‘You go, though,’ she said, with a smile, already moving towards the stairs. ‘One of us should.’

  Arthur knew, too, what that meant: she wanted to be alone, and if he didn’t leave the house she would go and range about alone outside, or take the car and drive. She was gone increasingly often, sometimes disappearing for a couple of days at a time.

  ‘Sonja,’ he called after her, ‘did you say you’d finished packing your thing for Berlin? If you have I’ll call the freight company – the paintings are ready to go.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Take it.’

  She disappeared from sight and he heard the door of her bedroom close.

  She stood at her windows, which overlooked the bay, where she watched the sun rise each morning. Another bedroom had windows that captured the sunsets and the moon’s rising: to see the beginning and end of the day made each day special, each one different. She tried to convince herself that that ought to be enough for her – just to enjoy the beauty of the seasons, to drift along with the current of time instead of trying to hold it back.

  Certainly she had no intention of taking any more steps to reverse the physical signs of ageing, and booking into the clinic had been an act of folly induced by Harry’s leaving her for Kendall. She had fought the impulse to recapture physical youth for some time but finally she had chosen a surgeon and clinic with care, had known exactly what she needed doing. She had wanted a complete face-lift but with a small implant in her chin, and her nose lifted.

  The clinic had been discreet, but Sonja was confident anyway that no one knew she was there because, under heavy bandages and dark glasses, she had been unrecognizable. However, the name of one patient had stuck in her memory. She had discovered that the woman was a private investigator and although she never spoke to her, she had heard a good deal of a conversation the woman had had with someone else. When she had come across the advert in Variety for Page Investigations, she had been amused by the coincidence.

  She reached for the silver-backed mirror to check her profile. She was fifty-two years old and should be content to spend her time surrounded by this beautiful calm. She should be glad that the compulsion to work fifteen or sixteen hours a day was now gone, that the long torment was over. Odd that she had never realized she would miss it so much. She would go down to the studio later in the day and see if perhaps she couldn’t do something about that.

  CHAPTER 14

  LORRAINE WALKED back into the hotel, cold despite the warm sunlight, after the encounter with Sonja Nathan. She had been chilled by the woman and her obsession with the past. If it was a kind of death to be unable to move on from one stage of life to another then Sonja Nathan herself was dying by inches.

  The woman had seemed on the verge of confessing to Harry Nathan’s murder, but it was obvious, as Arthur had said, that she was also on the verge of a clinical mental illness, her talk moving in and out of reality and symbolic meanings. It was clear Sonja had hated Nathan, had seen herself as a moral guardian, saving him from his own worst self – embodied in Raymond Vallance – and that after he had left her she had considered him to be on an inexorable slide into the pit. Whether she had taken the pitchfork and pushed him in was another matter.

  What about the paintings scam? Arthur was a painter, but that didn’t mean anything – half the population of the Hamptons claimed to be artists of one sort or another. Sonja had seemed to have so genuine an aversion to Harry Nathan that somehow Lorraine could not see her coolly masterminding a fraud with him.

  The dark world of poisonous emotion, betrayal and killing, the wrecks of lives, the semblances and fragments of people left drifting afterwards hung around Lorraine like a foul smell, and she was glad to sit in the conservatory and remind herself that there was a world elsewhere. Suddenly she could not wait to be out of the Hamptons, back home among people who loved and cared about her, with Jake and Tiger in her own apartment, and out of this whole dirty business for good. Rosie and Rooney had got it right, she thought, take the money, get out and get a life, and she had an overwhelming impulse to call Jake and say she was coming home. She would tell Feinstein his paintings were untraceable: neither work nor money was going to run her life.

  Lorraine was walking across the lobby towards the stairs when she heard a voice she recognized at once, a professionally trained and pitched voice. ‘My companion finds the room inadequate and we would like to move to a suite,’ he was saying.

  It was Raymond Vallance, looking old and eccentric in a crumpled, not entirely clean white suit, black polo-neck sweater and black Chelsea boots. He caught sight of her at once. ‘Why, I see some of my friends from LA are here already – good to see you, Lorraine,’ he called across the lobby, and began to advance on her. ‘How’re things at Fox?’ The manager sidled smartly away, murmuring that he would see what he could do.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Lorraine said stonily. ‘Why don’t you call and ask?’

  ‘Sorry about that, Lorraine.’ His intrusive use of her first name irritated her and he had been drinking. He seemed madder, closer to the edge. ‘Fucking bell-boys. No idea of service.’

  ‘No, none,’ Lorraine agreed, her mind racing and her previous suspicions about Sonja tumbling down like a house of cards. Vallance’s presence here was virtually an admission of guilt, she thought. It could not be a coincidence that he had suddenly showed up in the Hamptons, of all places, on the last night that Sonja Nathan had to remain alive to inherit Harry Nathan’s estate. Lorraine was certain that he was warped enough to want to prevent Sonja from receiving it. He had been, as Sonja had said, the constant in Harry Nathan’s life, the one who had loved him most. Harry Nathan had been his life. He, Lorraine was now certain, had been Harry Nathan’s death, and the death of the two women who had displaced him in Nathan’s life. He had nothing more to live for – but, of course, there was one woman left . . .

  ‘What brings you out here?’ Vallance went on. There was a note of malice under the smarm. ‘Not that I can’t guess.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you guessed right.’ Somehow she didn’t want to mention Sonja to him. ‘Excuse me, I’m just about to check out.’

  ‘Sonja still out in the Springs?’ Vallance went on, ignoring her. ‘Thought I might pay her a call.’ He rambled on drunkenly.

  He was about to descend into maudlin reminiscence, and Lorraine cut him short. ‘Well, I happen to know Mrs Nathan isn’t home this evening,’ she said, wondering if Vallance was deliberately playing dumb in telling her he planned to see Sonja if, in fact, he intended to kill her. Or did he just want someone to know he was going to be with Sonja? Could he imagine that she might harm him? ‘She and the gentleman she lives with have an engagement here in town.’ She turned on her heel before he could say another word and walked rapidly upstairs. So much for calling Jake and flying home: everyone had stood aside and watched Cindy die; she was going to call Sonja Nathan and tell her to call the cops if she saw Raymond Vallance.

  The sense that the final act of the drama that had centred on Harry Nathan was about to be played out, and the acrid scent of danger, cut through her.

  The phone rang endlessly but at last Lorraine heard Sonja’s voice.

  ‘Mrs Nathan, it’s Lorraine Page,’ she began, suddenly feeling silly.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Page, did you forget something?’ Sonja said. Her voice was normal, friendly.

  ‘Well, no. I ran into Raymond Vallance here in the hotel. He said something about coming out to see you and I thought I’d let you know. He was pretty drunk . . .’ Lorraine realized she was babbling and made an effort to speak more slowly. ‘I just got the idea he was planning to bother you in some way.’r />
  Sonja laughed. ‘What more can he do to me? I’d say he’s done his worst by now.’

  ‘Mrs Nathan, I know this sounds foolish,’ Lorraine persisted, ‘but I really feel Raymond Vallance may have some idea of harming you. He seems to feel a personal grievance towards you.’

  ‘Tell me something new,’ Sonja said, but her voice was more serious now. ‘He doesn’t change. I’m bigger than Vallance – I always was, that was why Harry chose me. If Raymond wants to come round, he can.’

  ‘Well, I just thought I’d let you know. It wouldn’t hurt to have the number for the police next to the phone.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Page,’ Sonja said, ‘we have a gun in the house. Many thanks for your concern.’ She rang off.

  Well, Lorraine thought, she had done her best. If Sonja shot Vallance, good riddance – perhaps she’d get a call in the morning from another of Harry Nathan’s wives facing a murder rap.

  She could not face hearing the disappointment in Jake’s voice when she told him that she had decided to stay another night, so called Rosie instead.

  ‘Hi, darlin’.’ Rosie’s familiar voice, warm as a hug. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Still in the Hamptons. I figured I might stay another night.’

  ‘What for?’ Rosie asked. ‘Didn’t you get to see Sonja Nathan?’

  ‘There’s something going on. Raymond Vallance just showed up out of nowhere.’

  Well,’ Rosie sniffed, ‘you must be the only woman who’d hang around to see Raymond Vallance these days. Bill’s been looking in on the office and he says someone’s been calling and calling and hanging up after the machine kicks in. I bet it’s Jake – just wants to hear your voice.’

  Lorraine felt a pang of conscience – but what difference could twenty-four hours make? She’d tell Jake as soon as she got back that she was winding up the office for good, that he would be her top priority from now on. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ she said. ‘And then I’m getting right out of this business. I’ll be home baking cupcakes and we’ll have coffee and watch the shopping channel every day.’