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As soon as she saw it was not, she killed it. But not soon enough.
The message was the same as always. The words changed. But the theme was constant.
U R MYN.
CHAPTER TWO
JEMIMA let herself into the apartment. It was dark and silent. She dropped her overnight bag and closed the door.
‘Pepper?’ she called, without much hope.
But there was no answer. Well, it was only what she had expected. Izzy was away in the ice fields, helping her love with his training. She had hoped that her cousin might be here, though.
Jemima hefted the bag over her shoulder. Switching on lights, she made her way to the kitchen.
It was the heart of their shared home. Here they sat at the table and laughed and argued and made plans. Now it was unnaturally tidy. No flowers on the table. No scribbled messages on the memory board. All the work surfaces were clear and gleaming. Even the answering machine was neatly aligned in the corner, with what looked like a week’s post in front of it. The last person in here had clearly been the cleaning lady.
Jemima shivered and dropped her trim flight bag. She flicked on the radio and bopped gently to the music as she opened the fridge.
Lots of water. A couple of bottles of wine. Some elderly cheese. It didn’t look as if Pepper had been here for days.
‘With her Steven in Oxford,’ said Jemima aloud.
Just like Izzy, with her Dominic.
‘And I could be out on the town with Francis Hale-Smith,’ she mocked herself. ‘Holding hands whenever we spotted a camera.’
It was even more chilling than the empty flat.
She started to make coffee, although she didn’t really want it, and hacked off a small corner of the dying cheese. Not because she wanted that either, but because Izzy always made her some food when she came in late. Or she’d always used to.
‘Hi, Jay Jay. How was Paris? And how have you been?’ she said to the empty chair.
She walked round to the other side of the table and answered herself. ‘Oh, you know—busy, busy. And my ex-manager won’t leave me alone. Hounding me seems to be his new career choice. He’s really putting his back into it, twenty-four-seven.’
In the silence she did not sound anything like as ironic as she’d meant to.
‘Damn!’ Her voice broke at last.
She sank down on a kitchen chair and dropped her head in her hands.
The phone started to ring. She ignored it. She had not cried, not once, since Basil started his campaign. And now it didn’t seem as if she could stop. She didn’t even try to answer the phone.
The answering programme clicked onto Izzy’s voice. She sounded as if she were laughing.
‘We can’t take your call at the moment. But talk nicely and we might get back to you. Here come the beeps.’
Jemima gave an audible hiccup. They had laughed so much when Izzy recorded that. It had been airlessly hot. All the windows open. They’d been drinking white wine spritzers and they had juggled ice cubes to decide who got to record the message. Izzy had been wearing a tee shirt and nothing else, and she said you could hear it in her voice on the recording.
Now Jemima reached across and pressed the outgoing message button, just to remind herself of that night. Now Izzy had Dom, and Pepper was getting married. And Jemima?
Jemima had her very own stalker, she thought with savage irony.
She gave herself a mental shake. This was stupid. Besides, she hated being so sorry for herself. It made her feel a wimp.
She stood up, looking for kitchen roll to blot her streaming eyes.
And again the phone burst into shrill life.
She jumped so hard that she knocked over the kitchen roll. While she was retrieving it the answering programme kicked in. Izzy’s lovely laughing voice, and then…
‘Welcome home, Jemima,’ said a voice she knew.
She stopped dead. Her hand stilled on the paper roll. Suddenly the self-pitying eyes were dry. Dry as her mouth.
‘Pick up. I know you’re there.’
Slowly she straightened and put the kitchen roll back on the fitment very precisely. Her throat hurt. She swallowed, looking at the telephone. She did not move.
The voice got impatient. ‘Come on, pick up. Don’t be stupid. I saw you put the lights on.’
Could he see her? The kitchen window was three feet away. Slowly Jemima backed to the door and out into the windowless corridor. She could hear her own breathing.
The voice pursued her. ‘Pick up, Jemima. We need to talk. You know we do. Come on, pick up. You owe me that.’ It sounded so reasonable, put like that.
Only she knew it wasn’t reasonable. And neither was Basil any more.
She backed up against the wall. Her hands were slippery with sweat.
Think! she told herself.
‘I bloody made you, you bitch,’ he spat, fury overcoming that spurious reason at last.
Jemima blocked it out.
He must have been waiting outside, she thought feverishly. Or he might have followed her. She hadn’t seen him when she’d left her interview with Madame. But then half the time she didn’t see him. He would just step out of the crowd, smiling except for those mad, angry eyes.
And he would say…
He would say…
‘You are mine.’
Just as he was saying it now.
The flat had never felt so empty. Jemima looked round and took a decision.
I have got to get out of here.
It was actually surprisingly easy. She had a ticket for New York in her bag which she didn’t need any more. And one of the great things about first class air tickets is that they are as transferable as it gets.
All she had to do was get out of the building without the watcher following her. What she needed was a veil, thought Jemima dryly. Or, failing that, a crash helmet.
A crash helmet…
The pizza delivery guy was so intrigued he would probably have lent her his helmet and jacket anyway. But the fistful of notes certainly helped. She parked his bike in front of the all-night pharmacy and waited to hand over the key. She called a cab while she was waiting. It arrived as he came strolling down the road.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Hey, no sweat. Pleased I could help.’
She had told him it was boyfriend trouble. Clearly dazzled, he had not doubted her for a moment. It was going to be all round the pub this weekend, thought Jemima.
She did not care. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘My hero.’
He beamed. And held the door of the taxi cab open for her with a gallant flourish.
‘Good luck.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jemima with feeling. ‘I can do with it. I really can.’
And she could. Change the flight? The booking clerk was helpfulness personified. Yes, certainly, no problem. Where did she want to go?
‘Ah.’
For a moment Jemima’s mind went completely blank. Wildly, she scanned the posters behind the desk. They all looked like the sort of photographs she was used to starring in, only without the high fashion.
She shrugged. Oh, well, if you’d been everywhere, what else could you expect? This was an escape, after all, not a proper holiday.
She played the eeny-meeny game in her head, and it landed on silver sand and palm trees beside an improbably jade sea.
She nodded to the poster. ‘There.’
‘The Caribbean? Yes, madam. Which island?’
On the point of saying she didn’t care, Jemima stopped. From somewhere out of the well of memory a name surfaced.
‘Is there somewhere called Pentecost Island?’ The moment she said it she felt a tingle, as if this was somehow meant. She stood up straighter. ‘Do you go there?’
The clerk smiled. ‘We can get you there, Ms Dare. Via Barbados. First class again?’
And that was how easy it was.
No one in the world would know where she was. So not even Basil could bribe or bully or spy on anyone to tell him.
Alone in the bathroom in the first class lounge, Jemima studied herself in the mirror as narrowly as Basil had used to study her. She looked fine. Tired under the harsh lighting, but as well as anyone else would look on this overnight flight. She had beaten Basil!
‘Gotcha!’ she said, punching the air.
She almost skipped onto to the plane.
Her euphoria lasted through the night, through the long, dull early-morning wait at Barbados airport, through the trip on the far from first class local island hopper. It lasted right up to the moment she disembarked at Pentecost.
The airport was small. Shiny and modern, and clean as a new machine, but tiny. Jemima had never seen an airport like it. Once through passport control, she found a concourse that would just about take a row of plastic chairs and a small coffee stall.
She stared round blankly.
‘Toy Town Airport,’ she said aloud.
The coffee stall boasted a steaming urn and some delicious slices of home-made cake. And a friendly woman as wide as the stall.
‘We’re not a big place,’ she agreed.
Jemima jumped and blushed. Damn, she had got to stop talking to herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
But the woman was not in the least offended. ‘Small and proud of it,’ she beamed, serving Jemima with a generous wodge of banana bread.
Jemima bit into it with pleasure. She had been too tired to eat on the plane. This warm spicy-smelling stuff was ambrosial.
‘I guess I’ve got used to airport malls,’ she said ruefully, licking her fingers. ‘Oh, well, I’ll have to go shopping in town. But there must be a tourist desk somewhere around?’
The woman shook her head placidly. ‘No call for it. The tourists all know where they’re going before they get to Pentecost.’
‘Oh.’
The friendly coffee-seller looked Jemima up and down assessingly. Jemima could have groaned aloud. She knew what the woman was seeing and it wasn’t very impressive: the cheap jeans had been a great disguise when she’d wanted to look like a pizza delivery person, but they hadn’t survived the flights too well. And the tee shirt, with its glitter logo that had been amusing in metropolitan London, now looked simply slutty. Add to that a too tired, too pale face, and red hair scragged back in two disintegrating plaits and you had a pretty unimpressive picture. Not a desirable import at all, thought Jemima wryly.
She had forgotten her luggage. The little island hopper planes didn’t have any seating differential, but the gold and silver identity label on her swag bag gave her away. It just screamed ‘First class’.
The woman’s eyes lingered on it. She gave a small nod. ‘You’ll be for Pirate’s Point.’
Jemima followed her eyes and looked down at the label. ‘W-will I?’
The woman waved a hand at one of the few posters on the single advertising hoarding. And there it was, sandwiched between a notice about prohibited foodstuffs and an out-of-date cinema schedule, a photograph she recognised. Turquoise sea, palm trees, surf topped with white like soft meringue.
It clicked into place like the last piece of a jigsaw.
Abby’s friend! The mysterious N, who had sent her a postcard but wasn’t a danger to her marriage because he had known her when she wore braces on her teeth. That was where Jemima had heard of Pentecost Island before.
Pirate’s Point Casino. All the holiday you’ll ever need.
Jemima went over to look at it.
‘“Luxury development, gardens, beaches, international cuisine. And the chance to win your fortune. Everything you need in one complex,”’ she read.
It sounded exactly what Jemima would have paid good money to avoid. She turned back to the coffee-seller.
‘Well, I was hoping to stay in town. See a bit of local life,’ she said tactfully. ‘Would it be difficult to get a room?’
