The Hunt and the Kill

by Holly Watt

  But Loelia was shaking her head. ‘Elias never discussed these things with me. I never even knew what all his drugs were called.’

  ‘So why,’ Casey pivoted, ‘did you go to the Argus?’

  ‘It was because I was so angry,’ said Loelia. ‘I was absolutely furious at the time.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Casey. ‘Why were you so furious?’

  Loelia Bailey stared at the blue of the mountains, far in the distance.

  ‘It was that little bimbo,’ she said. ‘It was that little slut, Jeanie.’

  ‘We couldn’t have children.’ Loelia Bailey stood and walked over to the sunbed, skirting the swimming pool. She picked up the bottle and poured herself another glass of wine. She stood, framed against the beautiful house. ‘Back then, the science – it wasn’t where it is today.’

  ‘That must have been hard, Mrs Bailey.’

  ‘Loelia, please. And it was,’ she said. ‘It was very hard for both of us.’

  ‘When did it start?’

  ‘His affair with Jeanie? I don’t know precisely. I suppose I never really wanted to know. It must have been a long time ago, though. We married young, Elias and I. Not long after we left university. And after a few years, it became clear. It wasn’t going to happen for us.’

  ‘But you stayed together.’

  ‘We did.’ Loelia stared intensely at her wine glass. ‘That was why I was so angry. We had decided to stay together. To build a life so that it didn’t matter if we couldn’t have children. We spoke about it, and we decided that is what we wanted to do. We had everything else. Everything we could ever possibly need.’

  Loelia walked back towards the table where Casey sat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Casey punctuated the monologue.

  ‘If he’d told me, I could have moved on years ago.’ The sense of grievance bubbled up again. ‘I would have lived a very different life.’

  ‘It’s all very unfair.’ Although Casey wondered if Loelia would have, really. Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not.

  ‘I wish it had been different.’

  ‘How did you find out about the affair?’ Casey asked.

  ‘It was so stupid,’ said Loelia. ‘The school got in touch. About a scholarship. They were wondering if Elias might want to fund one.’

  ‘The school?’ Casey was lost.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Loelia. ‘I assumed you knew about that. Jeanie McElroy had a son. With Elias.’

  48

  ‘A son?’ Casey felt her mouth go dry. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘We didn’t,’ Loelia said sourly, ‘exactly take out billboards.’

  ‘That must have been very difficult to accept, given your circumstances.’

  ‘It was.’ Loelia stared at the sky, refusing to let the threatening tears spill down her cheeks. ‘I was devastated.’

  ‘Can I ask?’ Casey said slowly. ‘What is his name?’

  Loelia Bailey’s mouth curled. ‘Garrick McElroy. Stupid name. She didn’t have the nerve to give him the Bailey surname, thank God.’

  Casey felt as if her stomach had been punched. Garrick McElroy, the golden boy in Miami, still occasionally flirting with Madison on Tinder.

  She forced herself to stay still, to smile blandly.

  ‘Garrick McElroy is the son of Elias Bailey?’ she repeated.

  ‘That’s what I’ve just said, isn’t it? Why? Do you know him?’

  ‘No,’ Casey said hastily. ‘I’ve met him briefly, once. He wouldn’t remember.’

  ‘I see.’

  Casey sat back in her chair for a moment.

  ‘When did you find out all this, Loelia?’

  ‘Five years ago,’ Loelia said precisely. She stared at her wedding ring again. ‘Evidently, Elias had been paying Garrick’s school fees back in England, for all those years, and God knows what else. The boy went to Drewsteignton school in Norfolk. It costs something like £40,000 a year. But Elias must have known that I would get to hear about it if he was sent to school in Cape Town. I know the McElroys, of course. Not well, but enough. So Jeanie … ’ Loelia hesitated at the name, not wanting to say it aloud, ‘went to England to bring up the boy.’

  ‘Did Elias see much of Garrick as he was growing up?’

  ‘He says not. Elias and Jeanie—’ Loelia broke off, eyes wet for a second. ‘I hate saying their names together like that. Hate it.’ She cleared her throat, went on, ‘As far as I know, Elias didn’t see Garrick at all while he was growing up. I guess what might have happened is that Jeanie gave Elias an ultimatum: if he wanted to know the boy, he had to divorce me. Be a proper father.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And once she had given him the ultimatum, Jeanie decided to stick by it.’

  ‘Yes, that seems plausible,’ Casey sounded sympathetic.

  ‘But I suppose it’s also possible,’ Loelia nodded an unwilling acknowledgement, ‘that Jeanie didn’t want her boy growing up knowing that he was a secret. Decided to protect him from that, at least.’

  It was a blade, running gently over the skin.

  ‘Yes, that might be it.’

  ‘Or maybe,’ Loelia’s eyes hardened to spite, ‘Elias just got bored with her. There was never very much to Jeanie McElroy.’

  ‘Did you know her well?’

  ‘No.’ Loelia shook her head, rejecting the idea. ‘Not at all. She was a pretty little thing, sure. But … ’

  She flicked her hand dismissively, then lit another cigarette too quickly. Casey thought of Loelia Bailey speculating over the possibilities for hundreds of hours, too proud to ask, too angry to move on.

  ‘And then … ’

  ‘Five years ago, someone from Drewsteignton rang this house.’ Loelia took another sip of wine. ‘Fundraising for some science block. I can still remember the woman’s voice. All bubbly and friendly, probably reading from some script. Working her way down her list to the fiftieth call of the day. Ringing round all the old boys, all their parents.’

  Loelia paused, ground out the cigarette.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She was all jolly and happy.’ Loelia made her face into an ugly caricature of gaiety. ‘Asked how Garrick was doing? What was he up to these days, because he’d left a few years ago now, hadn’t he? “Garrick who?” I asked. “Oh, sorry, wasn’t I the mother of Garrick McElroy?” And then she must have noticed the surnames or something. Maybe there was a note on the file. I don’t know. And her chirpy little voice changed so fast. I beg your pardon! Wrong number! Down went the phone. But I’d heard the name of the school, hadn’t I? And I started researching.’

  Casey could imagine Loelia Bailey making her way slowly to her desk. There must be an office somewhere in this pretend fairy castle. Rarely used, dusty even, but there all the same. Clever Loelia, with the wasted mind. All there, ready to go. Casey could just see her putting on her unfamiliar reading glasses, firing up the computer, and then starting to search: picking at the scab.

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘I couldn’t find anything online,’ said Loelia. ‘So I contacted the local photographer in Norfolk and ordered all the school photographs from the time. Using Elias’s name, of course. They posted copies down to me a few days later. Including a photograph of Garrick in a rugby team. Drewsteignton’s first fifteen, or something.’

  Of course, Casey thought. She remembered the blond jock bounding into that mansion in Miami, with all that ebullient self-confidence, that self-assurance so easily pierced.

  Because now she considered it, she could see the similarities between Garrick and Elias. Jeanie McElroy must be blonde, she thought. Elias had dark eyebrows to Garrick’s gold. Garrick had a mop of blond hair, while Elias’s had been clipped short as it retreated. But they had the same brown eyes, the same distinctive shape to their jaw and a particular tilt to the planes of their cheekbones. Elias was older, tougher, wearing the carapace of success, where Garrick was oddly brittle. But the resemblance was clear.

  Casey imagined Loelia stari
ng at that photograph, and coming back to it again and again, the next day and the next. Seeing the smile, the eyes, the mouth. She wouldn’t need a photograph of Elias Bailey to compare, of course. One face known for every day of her adult life, the other seen for the very first time. One face more familiar than any other in the world, and one that should never have existed.

  ‘What did you do next?’

  ‘There’s a private investigator,’ Loelia said. ‘He works here in Cape Town. He was good. Very efficient.’ She shrugged. ‘You know, some days I wish I had just ignored that phone call. We were happy, Elias and I. Most of the time. I could have forgotten about it all, couldn’t I? Just got on with life.’

  The genie back in the bottle, thought Casey. It rarely worked.

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘The PI got everything I needed,’ said Loelia. ‘He’d done it before. Will do it again, no doubt. We’re his bread and butter, I suppose, us embittered wives.’

  ‘And then you confronted Elias.’

  ‘I did.’ Two small words, the wreck of a marriage.

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘Elias left,’ she said. ‘He flew back to England. Adsero was going through a rough patch anyway, and he was very stressed about the business. And he was not well, don’t forget. He’d been struggling with his heart for years. I guess the stress of it all didn’t help that either. But I was angry. So angry. I filed for divorce while he was still in England, and we never spoke again.’

  ‘He didn’t fight it?’

  ‘No.’ Loelia poured another glass of wine. ‘He did not. Maybe with his heart problems, and the difficulties with Adsero, he just couldn’t. Or maybe he just didn’t care enough. Who knows? Either way, later on I found out that Garrick went to work for Adsero around that time. So Elias must have got to know him, and quickly too.’

  ‘Garrick went to work for Adsero?’ Casey felt the gears shift again. ‘When?’

  ‘About four years ago?’ Loelia was less certain. ‘Not long after I started divorce proceedings. But it didn’t work out, I don’t think.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘I do not. Garrick left the company about the time that Elias had the heart transplant.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Casey thought back to the article she’d read on the flight back from Mauritius. ‘Where did he have the heart transplant?’

  ‘He had it back here,’ Loelia said. ‘At Groote Schuur.’

  Groote Schuur, Casey remembered from the article Ross had ordered her to write, all those weeks ago. Groote Schuur, the world-famous South African hospital, where the first ever heart transplant had taken place back in 1967.

  ‘Did you see him then? When he was here for the operation.’

  ‘No.’ Loelia’s mouth was a thin line. ‘He never asked for me, as far as I know. Maybe Jeanie was by his side. He was very ill before the operation, by all accounts. But the operation went well, and he was back to work at Adsero long before the doctors recommended, certainly.’

  ‘And when did you go to the Argus?’

  Loelia blew out his cheeks. ‘It was after the heart transplant, and that was just over three years ago. I was still so furious at him. It was while we were negotiating the divorce. He is a tough negotiator, that man, hey?’ There was the hint of pride again. Pride in her husband, before it disappeared like a trapdoor snapping. ‘I just saw red one day, and rang the Argus. Elias never even mentioned the call to me. But in the next version of the divorce papers that my lawyer received, there was an NDA attached. A non-disclosure agreement. So Elias must have known about me going to that journalist.’

  ‘Mrs Bailey.’ Casey leaned forward through the haze of cigarette smoke. ‘This is an odd question, but I have to ask. Were you ever scared of Elias Bailey?’

  Loelia blinked at her. ‘Scared of Elias? No, he never hit me, or anything like that.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ said Casey. ‘But he is a very ruthless businessman. Did you ever feel threatened by him?’

  ‘No.’ Loelia was still confused. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  Casey took a sip of the iced water, watching Loelia carefully.

  ‘People linked to Mr Bailey,’ said Casey. ‘They have accidents. Several people connected to Mr Bailey … Well, they are dead now.’

  ‘Dead?’ Loelia Bailey looked across at the hazy blue of the mountains, as if she was hearing a voice far in the distance. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I was never scared of Elias.’

  49

  ‘Did you know?’

  Zac had his eyes shut and his face tilted up to the sun. He was sitting in the hotel courtyard, a small fountain tinkling beside him. Pale pink roses bobbed their heads in a raised flower bed next to the fountain.

  ‘What?’ Zac’s eyes snapped open to find Casey standing over him. ‘Did I know what?’

  ‘That Garrick McElroy was the son of Elias Bailey?’

  ‘What?’ Zac blinked very slowly, a flurry of emotions crossing his face. ‘No, of course I didn’t. Is he?’

  Casey stared at him in a fury. ‘Why else would I ask?’

  There was a long pause. Zac folded his arms and looked up at her, his eyes slits against the sun. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re very attractive when you’re angry, Casey Benedict from the Post?’

  He was laughing.

  ‘Stop playing bloody games, Zac! I’ve had enough, and I know you’re lying. Tell me what you know about Garrick McElroy and Corax and sodding Elias Bailey. Tell me, right now.’

  Zac glanced at his watch. ‘He can tell you himself.’

  ‘What? Who can?’

  ‘I told Garrick we had to work out what was going on with Corax. His plane landed an hour ago.’

  They met at Camps Bay, just to the south of Clifton, as the afternoon began its surrender to the evening, the blue of the sky slowly deepening.

  As Garrick jogged down the beach towards them, a small group of women turned to watch him.

  ‘Zac!’

  ‘Garrick!’

  Even in the circumstances, Casey could see there was a genuine affection between the two men.

  ‘And this,’ Zac waved towards her, ‘is Carrie.’

  ‘Can we trust him?’ Casey had pressed Zac beforehand.

  ‘Yes,’ Zac was confident. ‘I’ve known Garrick for years. He hates Bailey.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He can tell you himself.’

  ‘And he never mentioned Elias Bailey was his father? That’s quite a thing to not mention.’

  ‘But Loelia told you that Elias Bailey and Jeanie McElroy kept their whole affair a secret,’ said Zac. ‘When something’s been a secret since you were a child, it becomes a habit.’

  ‘You can break it.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I don’t like it, Zac. We don’t know anything about Garrick’s loyalties. And don’t tell him my name.’

  ‘Casey—’ Zac had laughed at her.

  ‘Not my name.’

  ‘He’ll have to know,’ Zac said reasonably, ‘that you’re a journalist. You don’t have a choice about that. Why else would you be asking all these questions?’

  ‘Just call me Carrie.’

  ‘You,’ he said pointedly, ‘were quite happy to call me Zac.’

  Now Garrick bounded forward with a broad grin, but as he shook her hand, he hesitated. ‘Have we met somewhere before, Carrie?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Casey said briskly. Madison had hastily deleted herself from Tinder a couple of hours earlier, and Casey had decided against trying to explain the Miami escapade. ‘I can’t think of anywhere we would have met.’

  ‘Great to meet you anyway,’ Garrick nodded.

  ‘You too,’ Casey said automatically.

  Garrick was nervous, she could tell. He was edging from foot to foot, and glancing round at small groups of teenagers, as if they might be spies. There was a screech of brakes up by the waterfront, and Garrick jumped, too late to hide his fear. Casey smiled at him, tr
ying to calm him down.

  The three of them turned to walk along the beach, Zac in the middle. The north end of the bay was dominated by the jagged shape of Lion’s Head. To the west, Table Mountain stood proud, picture perfect, green slopes sweeping nearly to the ocean.

  Huge rollers crashed into the bay, blasted all the way across the south Atlantic just to smash into this golden sand. In the distance, at the north end of the beach, a scattering of surfers were bobbing, splashing, waiting for a wave. Occasionally, Casey could make out a shout, a laugh, a hello. Garrick stared at them longingly.

  Casey looked down at her flip-flops, sinking into the sand, and couldn’t think where to begin. But as she debated, Garrick began to speak, the words tumbling too fast from his mouth.

  ‘I should have told you, Zac. About Elias. I’m sorry … I should have—’

  Zac kicked at some sand. ‘It certainly puts a different flavour on things, you git.’

  ‘What?’ asked Casey. ‘What did Garrick tell you before?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him much at all,’ admitted Garrick. ‘I could never tell him about how I had found Corax, for example.’

  Corax. Casey forced herself not to rush, not to pounce on Garrick and demand he tell her everything he knew.

  ‘Didn’t you wonder?’ Casey turned to Zac, taking the pressure off Garrick for a moment. ‘Where Garrick had found out about it?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Zac. ‘But I wanted to work on the drug, and Garrick wouldn’t tell me where it came from, so what else could I do?’

  Casey crushed the furious words back down into her throat.

  ‘I stole the Corax information.’ The words spilled out of Garrick, as if he couldn’t keep them in. ‘I stole it from Adsero.’

  He stopped, almost shocked by his own words, then glanced around, automatically checking for danger. He took a few more steps, gouging his feet into the sand, then came to a halt again.

  ‘How?’ asked Casey, after a short pause.

  ‘Elias Bailey,’ said Garrick slowly. ‘He just appeared out of thin air one day, and turned everything in my life upside down. You have to understand … ’ Garrick hesitated, then carried on, his voice slightly lower, ‘When I was growing up, my mother wouldn’t ever say who my father was. She refused to talk about it at all.