Murder Undercover

by Claire McNab

  Relief washed across Jen’s face. “She’s old, then? And too tall. Good.”

  “Not his type at all, unless she’s got a lot of money.” My dry tone was lost on Jen, who was leaning forward to examine her face closely in the nearest mirror. “I’m thinking of getting tinted contacts,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “I’d go for purple, if I were you.”

  I didn’t move fast enough. Jen’s elbow jabbed me in the ribs. “Oh, you!” she said.

  It was hard to visualize Jen and Quint Aylmer together, romantically or otherwise, although rumor had it that she was sensational in bed. That could have been very true, for all I knew, and certainly explained Quint Aylmer’s interest.

  A little girlish heart-to-heart wouldn’t hurt, I decided. Steeling myself, I said, “What do you and Quint talk about?”

  After checking that no one was nearby, Jen said, “Oh, you know.”

  “Well, I don’t actually. Do you discuss the resort? The weather? Football? Your future together?” I felt a bit guilty about that last one, as I was sure that the likelihood of Jen accomplishing a lasting relationship with Quint Aylmer was close to a snowball’s chance in hell.

  She was back regarding her reflection. “He talks about family stuff,” she said. “Like, what goes on, and how he wants to run the business himself, but his dad and mum won’t give him a chance.”

  “What about Harry?”

  “Harry?” Her voice was loaded with scorn. “Like, he puts Quint down, every chance he gets. Says Roanna’s the smart one.”

  Smart enough to get an advanced degree, I thought. “So Quint and Harry don’t get on?”

  Jen licked a finger and carefully smoothed one eyebrow. “Sort of. Their mum makes them. That’s the problem, you see. Everyone in the family is scared of her. What she says, goes. Quint’s afraid she won’t approve of me, so we’re keeping it really quiet. Secret.”

  Since I’d bet that every single staff member knew about Jen’s affair with the youngest son, I had severe doubts that this would remain hidden from his mother much longer.

  Swinging around to face me, Jen said, “Where are you going this morning? I’ve been told to fill in for your ten o’clock shift.”

  “Sorry I had nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s okay.” Her glance sharpened. “So what are you doing?”

  It wasn’t a classified information. Besides, I might get some interesting response. I said, “I’m going sailing with Roanna.”

  “Are you?” Jen looked thoughtful. “Of course you know she’s a lesbian. You’d think the Aylmers would care, wouldn’t you, but they don’t. She has affairs all the time.” She gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Good luck!”

  * * *

  The little vessel flew over the pastel water like a dragonfly, seeming barely to touch the surface. “Hey,” I said, “shouldn’t we be wearing life jackets?”

  “I thought you’d be the kind to live dangerously.”

  “It’s the living part of that I’m interested in.”

  She brought the yacht about, and the boom nearly scalped me as I ducked. She said, “So am I.”

  I’d lost the point. “What?”

  “Interested in living to the full.”

  I didn’t bite, although she seemed to be waiting for some response. In silence, we headed for one of the tiny islands. It consisted of a knot of greenery, a narrow crescent of beach and a collection of palm trees. “Has this been artificially created?” I asked. “I mean, it’s just like an island in a cartoon.”

  “It’s natural,” said Roanna, “but there’s no water, so it’s pretty, but useless.”

  “Ah,” I said, “just what my mother always said about me.”

  Roanna shot me a sudden, delighted smile. “I really like you, Denise,” she said. “You’re not quite like anyone else.”

  “Nor are you, I suspect.”

  For some reason, that light comment sobered her, and our inconsequential banter came to a stop. Then she was fully occupied with sailing as the yacht heeled over to a stiff breeze from the east. I contemplated her: she was sexy as hell, and had a brooding quality that was probably a pain in real life but added to her allure at the moment. She hadn’t kissed me last night in the garden, just said a cool good-night. This omission had annoyed me no end, but I’d decided she had to make the first move. It was always better in these situations to be the pursued, rather than the pursuer. Besides, for someone like Roanna, it was likely the chase was the exciting thing, and she’d tire of me once she caught me.

  I leaned back in the little cockpit and enjoyed the day. The water hissed under the keel, the sail thrummed, the ocean glittered. As if on cue, two dolphins broke the surface beside us. Overhead, white seabirds sailed on an updraft.

  I glanced at my watch. “I’ve got to get back.”

  My contact, Malcolm Endicott, would have arrived on the island by now. He would go to the cocktail lounge, see I wasn’t on duty, and fill in time by walking on the beach or visiting one of the little boutiques that sold outrageously priced items to a captive audience or sitting in the trendy coffee shop, irritatingly named Jitterbug Café, where caffeine was similarly expensive. He’d return to the bar for the beginning of the next shift, and I intended to be there to meet him.

  “I’ve got to get back,” I said again.

  “You don’t.”

  “My shift starts soon.” I was emphatic. “Please.”

  Her mouth settled into a sulky line. I imagined kissing her lips into a smile. Without a word she tacked, then tacked again, beating our way back to the brilliant green of Aylmer Island.

  She ran us expertly up to the mooring, dropping the sail at just the right point so that we slowed enough for me to snag the buoy with a boat hook. She signaled imperiously to the guy on the dock, who immediately swung down into a dinghy and started for us. Roanna frowned at me. “I wasn’t ready to come back.”

  “You can go out again by yourself.”

  “No.”

  “Do you expect to always get your own way?” I asked.

  “Usually. I didn’t with you.” Her cool expression dissolved into a warm smile. “At least, not this time.”

  * * *

  Malcolm was in a group of day-trippers who spilled into the bar, talking in loud voices. It was a comfort to see his familiar face. His sunburned nose was peeling, and he wore a bright Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandals. This was such a contrast to the sober suit I usually saw him wearing that I had to repress a smile.

  “Beer, love,” Malcolm said, elbowing another generic day-tripper out of the way so he could settle at the bar.

  “Foster’s okay?” I said. It was a simple code. If I nominated Foster’s beer, it meant that I had something to pass to him.

  I gave him his beer and served the others lining up along the bar. When I got back to Malcolm he was wiping his mouth with the back of one reddened hand. “I’ll have the same again.”

  When I came back with his second beer, he said, “Hot enough for you?” That indicated that he had written information to pass to me.

  In training we’d been through the next bit a hundred times. Malcolm fished around for his wallet in his back pocket, taking it out with a creased white schedule for the ferry service to the mainland. He extracted a twenty from his wallet and slapped it down for the drinks. “Love, can you point out the time for the next ferry for me?”

  “Sure. I’ll get your change first.”

  When Malcolm and I had been practicing, I’d seen myself on video doing the changeover until it looked completely natural. I got the change, fumbled with the schedule and dropped it, bent down to scoop it up, and went back to the counter. “Here,” I said, pointing to the schedule I’d exchanged, “you’ll see the next one leaves in twenty minutes.”

  The report I’d passed to Malcolm gave the details I’d overheard regarding the shipping of illegal immigrants and stated that I’d had some social contact with Roanna. I asked for any additional inf
ormation on Snead and requested deep background on Biddy, Oscar, and Lainie Snead. As an afterthought I’d added Cynthia Urquhart to the list.

  Malcolm stayed in the lounge for a few minutes, getting into a friendly argument about football with a couple of other guys. He didn’t look at me again, and I felt oddly abandoned when he walked out the door.

  I continued smiling brightly and providing drinks to an apparently endless succession of touristy people. Instead of feeling pleased that the contact had gone off without a hitch, I felt restless and impatient. The ASIO communication seemed to glow in the pocket of my shorts, as though advertising its illicit presence. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to look at it until later, and anyway, I was fairly sure it would contain a reminder that one of my major tasks was to find out more about the upcoming international conference the resort was hosting.

  The conference was scheduled to start in two days, and I was no closer to getting information on the program or the guests. I knew that most attendees were coming from Asian countries, and that the conference was billed as an exploration of the future applications of the Internet to international trade, but that was all. I’d been cultivating Vera because of her position of convention facilitator, but all I’d got so far was a litany of her problems and a life history that was, if possible, even more boring than her complaints about the people she worked with in the convention center. Unfortunately Vera had total recall, and she was able to resurrect at a moment’s notice every slight and upset she’d suffered, even from years before.

  Girding myself to do my duty, I called her on the internal phone when my shift ended. I suggested that we meet at the hideously expensive coffee shop in the middle of the row of trendy boutiques, thinking that if I had to put up with Vera, at least I could treat myself to some elaborate caffeine kick.

  “Coffee?” she whined. “I don’t think so. I’ve got so much work to do, it just isn’t fair.”

  “I’ll come over.”

  Although I’d studied the layout of the resort, I’d never been inside the convention center. All wood and glass, it was built on an octagonal design, with conference rooms radiating from a central core that held the hospitality areas. One segment of the wheel was reserved for administration, and I had to sign in before I could enter that section.

  “Who are you here to see?” asked the guard, checking my signature and then my name tag. “Denise,” he added. His tag indicated that he was Doug. I’d never seen him before, so I guessed he was part of the Big House security.

  “Well, Doug,” I said, “I’m here to see Vera Otterlage.”

  “And your business with her?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  A look of mild astonishment crossed Doug’s face, which told me he knew Vera well enough to wonder why anyone would chose to be friends with her. “That way,” he said, pointing. “Third office on the left.”

  I found Vera in a small cubicle, peering with a vexed expression into a monitor. “I don’t know why they can’t have normal spelling,” she said. “I mean, you can’t even pronounce half of their names.”

  Looking over her shoulder I saw information set out in columns. “This for the conference the day after tomorrow?”

  She nodded absently. “I’ve got to do the name tags for the attendees,” she said, “and I daren’t make a mistake with the spelling, you know. People are just so particular about that.” Her tone made it clear she considered this demand for accuracy unreasonable.

  Pulling up a spare chair, I said, “Can I help?”

  Vera’s protruding blue eyes mirrored astonished gratitude. I had to believe she rarely, if ever, had anyone offer to assist her. She was so irritating, I doubt I would have, under normal circumstances. “Denise, that would be rilly nice of you.”

  At least she didn’t call me Den. I sat down with a printout and started going through the list with her, checking spelling against application documents. I was alert for anyone I might recognize. It was clear that there was a wide selection of Asian business people, but one name leapt out at me: Farid Sabir. He was an immensely influential Indonesian entrepreneur who had international business interests. Lately there’d been rumors that he was testing the water for a political career, and this had caused quite a lot of turmoil in backrooms in several Asian countries.

  I swore to myself, wishing that I’d known this in time to give the information to Malcolm. Almost certainly the authorities had been alerted that Sabir was about to enter the country, but I was uneasy about his presence on Aylmer Island. He’d survived one assassination attempt in London earlier in the year, and Britain had got plenty of flack about that, so there was no way the Australian government wanted to cope with even a minor incident here.

  My next contact was with an agent called Alice Beher, but she wasn’t due until Wednesday, three days away, so unless I had an urgent enough reason to risk a phone call, it would have to wait until then.

  “What an interesting job you have,” I said to Vera as I corrected yet another of her spelling errors.

  She seemed surprised. “You think so?”

  “Well, you meet all these important people.”

  “Usually I don’t meet them. I mean, I do practically everything for them, but I never get thanked.”

  I could almost see the bitter resentment that swirled around her. I imagined it would be a sort of pea green, perhaps with red streaks.

  Vera was building up steam. “Like, I make sure the accommodations are ready, any special diets are in place, the equipment for the sessions is all there. And if anything goes wrong…Well! Just guess who they blame!”

  She flicked the edge of a folder with one finger, the nail of which, I noticed, was bitten to the quick. “And there’s all those extras, for instance, the cruise out to see the reef and snorkel round the coral, and all that stuff. I have to make sure that Tim puts the diving equipment on the cat, and then there’s the refreshments and the drinks…” She trailed off, apparently overcome with the responsibility of it all.

  The cat referred to the catamaran ferry that Aylmer Resort owned. George Aylmer had named it Moreen in honor of his wife, and I’d come across from the mainland on it. My first sight of the cat had reminded me of an elaborate toy, rather than the deep sea vessel that it was. Dazzling white with blue trim, it had rocked gently at the wharf, its outsize pontoons looking awkward, like feet that were too large. This impression of clumsiness disappeared as soon as the craft was underway and had gained enough speed to rise up on its floats: Then it attained an awesome speed, skimming on white foam over the crests of the waves. Seb had told me that a larger version held a trans-Atlantic record, and I had no trouble believing him.

  It took us the best part of an hour to correct the list, print out the tags and slide each name into a burnished metal holder. Vera wasn’t very adept at fine motor tasks, so I did most of them.

  “They’re not getting hibiscus tags,” I said, tapping my own monstrosity on my left breast. I’d always liked hibiscus, but Aylmer Island was spoiling my former enthusiasm for the flower.

  “I know,” said Vera. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t roll my eyes this time, but being with Vera did, I found, tend to give my eyeball muscles a good workout. Determined to make my suffering with Vera worthwhile, I decided to ask her about Eddie Trebonus, mainly because he was a guest at the Big House, but also because Roanna obviously disliked him, and that was reason enough for me to be interested.

  “Do you know Eddie Trebonus?”

  “Eddie? Oh yes.”

  “I’ve seen him in the bar a lot,” I volunteered. “He’s always asking for these weird cocktails.”

  “Eddie’s a bit weird himself,” said Vera emphatically. “Like, he’s always coming ’round here and getting in my way, and making jokes I don’t get. But I can’t tell him to get lost, you see, because he works for Moreen Aylmer.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I know she sends him off to differen
t places because I often I have to do the travel arrangements, which isn’t fair, because it rilly isn’t part of my duties, you see.”

  I had to get her back on track before she wallowed in the injustice of it all. I said bracingly, “Obviously you’re asked to do the arrangements because you’re so competent.”

  Vera blinked. “I suppose…”

  “So where does Eddie go?”

  “All over. I guess it’s something to do with drumming up clients for conferences, because he always comes back and gives a report to Harry and his mother. He usually goes overseas, but this time I booked his flight to Darwin.”

  A couple of further casual questions showed that Vera didn’t know anything more about Eddie, so I filed his name away to add to my list of background requests on the communication I would pass Alice on Wednesday.

  “You know Jen?” said Vera.

  I felt like snapping “Never heard of her,” but instead I gave Vera a heartening smile.

  “Well…” Vera stared at me, clearly expecting encouragement.

  “What about Jen” I asked, obediently.

  “She’s going to be upset.” Vera was pleased. “Quint Aylmer’s practically engaged to someone else.” Before I could ask who, Vera went on, “It’s a guest.”

  “Cindy Urquhart?”

  Vera was crushed. “You knew!”

  “I have my sources.”

  Looking at me with new respect, Vera said, “So what do you think?”

  “About Quint Aylmer? Gosh, I don’t know. Have you seen this Cynthia Urquhart?” When Vera shook her head, I said, “She’s very tall, and older than him, I think.”

  “No! Taller than him?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Gee,” said Vera, chagrined. “Kay must have got it wrong, then.”

  Feeling that I had to stand up for tall sisters, I said, “Why couldn’t Quint be having a relationship with someone taller than he is?”

  “You know men. They don’t like to feel smaller.” Vera brightened to add, “But you’re right, it could still be true. He does play the field, unlike his brother.”