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At first such terror enveloped her that she collapsed into a chair, her stomach quivering with panic, her mouth moving as she said aloud, ‘He wouldn’t—surely?’
Of course he wouldn’t.
No one, not even a man who had repudiated his son, would willingly put a child in jeopardy.
Not even Drake Arundell.
But although she tried to reassure herself, she couldn’t. The loss of her job meant that her days, once busy to the point of bursting, were now long and too full of empty hours—hours in which she could spin fantasies of Simon being torn from her arms by a vengeful Brian Harley. She even went so far as to get all their clothes out onto Simon’s bed and make them into parcels in case they had to flee from the flat.
Reason prevailed and she put them away, but she began to look nervously about her, seeing a threat in every stranger.
There followed two of the most worrying days of her life. In the evening of the third day after she’d sent the letter the knock she’d been expecting came. Swallowing, deliberately steadying her voice, she said, ‘Yes, who is it?’
‘Open the door, Olivia.’
Wiping suddenly damp palms down her thighs, Olivia did as she was told. Cool, clammy air rushed into the flat, its petrol-scented breath evocative of too many people trying to get home through the rain. Drake loomed in the entrance, yet it wasn’t so much his size that disturbed her as that mysterious thing called presence. Drake had too much, and in his case it was spiced with enough danger to impress even the most foolhardy.
Her eyes flicked across to the child who had curled up on the old sofa-bed and fallen asleep with the unexpectedness of childhood. It was too late now to turn back. All she could hope was that she didn’t show just how nervous she was; Drake would pick up any signs and use them to his advantage.
‘Come in,’ she said quietly.
He looked around, once more taking in the landlord’s cheap furniture, the total lack of anything that looked as though money had been spent on it. His eyes came to rest on Simon, snuggled under the blanket Olivia had draped over him. He frowned. ‘Is that where he sleeps?’
‘No,’ she said evenly. ‘He has a bed in the bedroom.’
‘With you?’
Biting off the words, she retorted, ‘I sleep out here on the sofa-bed.’
Astonishingly he said, ‘The last time I saw you, you were seventeen years old, gleaming golden with the gloss that money and confidence and a good school gave you. Your stepfather was the town’s only accountant—and comparatively rich—and you intended to go to university and become a lawyer. You’ve come a long way from there.’
She pressed her lips together.
He said impatiently, ‘You can tell me about it tomorrow morning at eleven in my office.’
‘I can’t come in to your office—’ she began, indignation edging the words.
‘Keep your voice down. You’ll wake the boy.’
‘His name is Simon, and he won’t wake.’
‘It makes no difference what his name is,’ he returned curtly. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a wallet and opened it, removing a card. ‘Eleven tomorrow morning,’ he reiterated, setting it down on the table. ‘Make sure you’re on time. If you don’t turn up, Olivia, the next person on your doorstep will be a policeman with a warrant for attempted extortion. That second letter was not a good move.’
He turned and went down the stairs, moving swiftly and gracefully. Shivering, Olivia switched off the inside light and walked out to the edge of the balcony.
‘His car was parked in the light of a streetlamp. As she watched he opened the door and got in beside a woman clad in some crimson material. Blonde hair gleamed like satin as she turned a smiling face away from Olivia. Then the car door closed behind Drake and the internal light blinked out.
Shaken, Olivia turned and went back inside.
The next day was fine, one of those brilliant days when the sky was a cool, polished blue so deep that it seemed like a lapis-lazuli bowl inverted over the city. After leaving Simon at school, Olivia set off to walk as far as she could into Auckland before exhaustion forced her to catch a bus.
Five minutes early, she presented herself outside Drake’s office in Grafton, her feelings raw with outrage, her head held so high that her shoulders ached. The building was an elegant block guarded by security men and glossy receptionists, all of whom looked at her with variations of the same smug astonishment.
She knew why Drake had insisted she come here. He’d wanted to intimidate her. And after she’d trekked over an acre or so of slippery marble she had to admit that he had succeeded.
‘This way, please,’ murmured his secretary, a rather large but superbly groomed woman of middle age, as she headed off across more expensive flooring, this time a carpet whose close velvet pile made Olivia’s hot, tired feet curl.
Seated behind a huge, dark wooden desk, Drake was checking through a sheaf of papers. He got to his feet and said, “Thank you, Maria.’ After a narrow-eyed scrutiny of Olivia he added, ‘Bring a tray, please, with something to eat.’
When the door had closed with an expensive lack of noise behind the woman, he said, ‘Sit down, you look worn out.’ He waited until she’d obeyed before resuming his seat behind the desk.
‘I am,’ she snapped, furious with him for making her come all the way here.
That unpleasant smile curled his mouth. ‘Bad night, Olivia?’
‘Not particularly,’ she lied, wondering what he’d say if he ever found out that her sleeplessness had been caused more by the glimpse of the woman beside him than by his threats.
He’d probably laugh; he’d certainly use such knowledge against her.
Her letter and the torn cover of the magazine were in front of him, a jarring, tawdry note in that expensive, restrained room. Drake’s lean, tanned forefinger didn’t quite touch the cheap sheet of writing paper. He said, ‘You have nerve, Olivia, but extortion is a serious crime. And I’m starting to get just a bit sick and tired of this harassment. Push me any further, and I’ll see you in gaol.’
He meant it too. Olivia knew that she’d let her anger override common sense, but she couldn’t back down now. She looked at him steadily.
‘If that’s all you wanted me to come in for, you’ve wasted both my time and yours,’ she said, making no attempt to hide her disdain as she got to her feet. ‘I despise men who think they have some macho right to get women pregnant and then abandon them. Simon needs your help now more than he’ll probably ever need it again. If you never do anything else for him, you can do this. You had your chances; you had loving parents who did their best for you. Simon only has me.’
‘Sit down,’ he said without any inflection.
She shook her head.
‘Sit down, Olivia, or I’ll call the police right here and now.’
She looked into eyes so lacking in anything but an inflexible determination that they froze her right through to her soul. With an enormous reluctance—and only, she told herself, because she was so tired—she sank back into the chair.
‘And if I do this for him,’ he said coldly, ‘what will you want the money for next time? Because blackmailers never stop, Olivia. Even when they believe their reasons for extorting the money are impeccably moral.’
Maria came in with a tray, setting it down in front of Olivia.
‘Thank you,’ Drake said, waiting until the older woman had left the room before commanding, ‘Pour yourself a cup of tea. And eat something, for heaven’s sake. You look like death.’
‘I’ll just have milk,’ she said. ‘I don’t drink coffee or tea.’
‘Still?’ His smile was thin and too perceptive. When she had poured a cup of milk he resumed, ‘Go on, have a sandwich. They’re very good.’
‘How do you know?’ They looked delicious, but pride forbade her to eat anything that he’d paid for.
He laughed softly. ‘I quite often have them for lunch.’
Hoping sourly that one day he’d understand how lucky he was to be able to afford them, Olivia drank some milk. The cool liquid slid down her throat, but instead of soothing the rawness it inflamed it. She took a deep breath and had to hold it to stop an incipient cough; when she finally breathed out, her chest wheezed faintly. Hoping that it wasn’t too audible, she took another sip of milk. She didn’t want to betray any weakness at all—not even physically.
‘All right,’ Drake said calmly, ‘exactly how did you come to be looking after Simon? Why didn’t you go on to university as you planned?’
She finished the milk and looked down at her hands. The sandwiches intruded into her line of sight. Firmly ignoring their seductive appeal, she said with enormous reluctance, ‘I couldn’t leave my mother.’
‘Why not?’
‘She—relied on me. She needed me. She was ill.’
It told the relevant details; it hid so much more.
Eyes the wind-driven grey of an arctic sea scanned her face. ‘Your mother told you that I was the boy’s father?’
‘No,’ she said stiffly, holding herself erect. ‘I overheard her tell my stepfather.’
Drake’s eyes were fastened on hers, as though he could chisel out the truth by merely looking at her.
She had washed her hair and put on lipstick for this interview, and something had driven her to don her one reasonably good skirt and blouse and put up her hair in a French knot. Disgust at the realisation that she was primping for him had made her brush her hair out of the knot so briskly that tears had stung her eyes, and tether the long locks into their usual ponytail.
When he spoke it was in a voice that was cool and dispassionate. Yet she sensed steel beneath the judicial words—the leashed strength of emotions held rigidly in check.
‘You seem to do a lot of overhearing. Why are you so convinced that your mother was telling the truth about Simon’s father?’
‘Because she was my mother,’ she retorted, angry at the slur on her behaviour. She had overheard one quarrel of many. ‘Don’t you believe your mother?’
He gave her a sardonic look. ‘I’d believe my mother if she said I was born an alien on Mars—but then, she has an obsession with the truth. I’ve never known her to perpetrate even a white lie, whereas your mother had a fund of pleasantries she didn’t expect her listeners to believe. How did your stepfather react when your mother flung this bombshell at him?’
‘How would you react?’ she asked bleakly, hating him for his merciless assessment of Elizabeth Harley—an assessment that was, alas, almost true. Her mother had been a superb hostess, eager to make sure that everyone enjoyed themselves in her home. Sometimes that had meant she’d welcomed people she’d disliked. Yet her sincerity had never seemed forced.
‘Badly,’ he said.
A note in his voice sent a shiver chasing across Olivia’s skin. Brian Harley had shouted and blustered and hit her mother with his clenched fist at least once before Olivia had rushed into the room, but at this moment she was more afraid of Drake Arundell than she had ever been of her stepfather.
Contempt cut through the slight roughness of his voice. ‘I wonder why she hated me so much.’
Fire gleamed beneath Olivia’s dark lashes. ‘Perhaps because you abandoned her,’ she said between her teeth. ‘You left her to my stepfather’s tender mercies—’
‘Why the hell did she stay?’ he interrupted, looking at her with an oblique, shuttered watchfulness. ‘Why didn’t she go home to her father?’
Olivia had asked herself the same question a hundred times. But when Drake had abandoned her something had gone out of Elizabeth Harley; it had been as though she’d embraced her life with her husband as a penance.
Shaking her head, Olivia said, ‘My grandfather was ill—he died a couple of months after Simon was born. I don’t know why she stayed at Springs Flat. She just—withered away, lost the will to live.’
‘So what made you run? And the truth this time.’
She sent him a fleeting glance. There was no softness in his face, nothing that gave her any hope that she might be able to fool him.
‘I think my stepfather killed her,’ she said baldly. ‘And I was afraid he would kill Simon.’
The words resounded with ugly significance in the spacious, elegant room. The last time she’d said them had been when she’d asked for refuge with her best friend in Wellington.
She had expected to shock him, but no muscle moved in the harsh, austere face. ‘What makes you think he killed Elizabeth?’ he asked.
‘Two nights before she died he—he came home slightly drunk; I wanted to stay up, but my mother made me go to bed. I heard them quarrelling downstairs and then she came up alone. She was crying and I didn’t go into her—she hated me to see her cry. In the morning I found her unconscious on the floor. She died a couple of days later. At the post mortem it was decided that she’d fallen and hit her head on the bedside table.’
‘You didn’t tell anyone about the quarrel?’
She said, ‘No. I didn’t think then that he’d killed her, otherwise I would have. And the doctor said that although the blow had been enough to send her into a coma, he was surprised that it had been bad enough to kill her.’
‘But—?’ he prompted.
She swallowed and drank a little more of the milk. ‘After the inquest I cleaned up her bedroom and found his tie—the one he’d worn that night—curled up under the bed. I remembered he’d had it on that night because it was his school tie. So I knew he’d been in her room.’
‘There are a hundred different reasons why he could have taken his tie off in her room,’ Drake said.
‘Not the way things were with them,’ she said, knowing that it was hopeless, but compelled to continue.
Her belief in her stepfather’s viciousness was based on much more subtle evidence than the brutal results of a blow, or a tie in the wrong place. But a look, an expression, wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. And it wouldn’t convince Drake.
Nevertheless, she had to try. ‘Anyway—about a fortnight after the funeral, I went in to check on Simon, and my—stepfather—he—’ She stopped, her throat working as she tried to get the words out.
‘Go on,’ Drake said mercilessly.
She looked down at the hands writhing in her lap. It took considerable expenditure of willpower to stop their involuntary movement.
In a remote, brittle voice she said, ‘He was standing by the cot with a pillow in his hands. I said, “Was he restless?” And he said, “Yes. I thought he might like a pillow.” But Simon was never restless; he slept like a log every night. He still does. And there was a look in my stepfather’s face... I knew he didn’t like Simon, but I never knew he hated him. A little boy, and he hated him...’ With an effort she kept her voice steady. ‘So I took him and ran away.’
‘Did he follow you?’
She shivered. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘To a friend—my best friend from school. She was going to Victoria University. In Wellington.’
‘I know where Victoria is,’ he said, smiling lethally. ‘I didn’t go to university myself, but I do read newspapers. And some of my best friends graduated from Victoria.’
‘Yes, well,’ she said, feeling exactly the way he wanted her to—as though she’d tried to patronise him. ‘Emma has a brother, Neil. He was there that night. They didn’t believe me at first, but Emma knows me; she knew I wouldn’t lie. So she suggested that I hide in Neil’s house-truck with Simon while we went across Cook Strait on the ferry. That way my stepfather wouldn’t know we’d left the North Island.’
‘Where did you go then?’
‘I decided to stay with Neil,’ she said. ‘He wanted someone to look after the house and cook meals while he made jewellery.’
It had worked perfectly. For two years she and Simon had wandered with Neil, a kind, gentle man who had made no demands on her. He’d taught her how to cook and she’d earned a frugal living by picking fruit and doing other seasonal jobs. Gradually she learned how to survive legally in a world where she couldn’t risk claiming any benefit other than unemployment for fear of having Simon returned to the man who hated him.
‘And what ended this idyll?’
She flashed him a suspicious glance, but he looked merely a little bored. ‘Neil wanted to go to Australia,’ she said stiffly. ‘I couldn’t go—I didn’t dare get Simon a passport.’
And she had longed for a settled home. Here, in New Zealand’s biggest city, she’d been sure they’d be safe. The flat had been her dingy little haven.
