TENDER DECEIT (Mystery Romance): The TENDER Series ~ Book 1

by H. Y. Hanna

  Leah cupped the hot drink, savouring the heat that seared through her fingers. It was good to feel something. She thought of that still body lying back in the mortuary and waited for the tears, the horror, the anger to hit her—but there was nothing.

  Lunch was done on autopilot and then Leah looked down at the keys that Stanford Lim had given her. She didn’t remember taking the taxi to her father’s house—her old home—but somehow, Leah found herself standing on the verandah of the villa where she had spent most of her childhood. Letting herself in, Leah stood in the cool, dark hallway, feeling like she had stepped back in time.

  She walked slowly through the house, her eyes searching for signs of change, but she was surprised to find that it was almost exactly as she remembered. In the kitchen, she stopped as something stuck to the fridge door caught her eye. A childish drawing of a lion, done after a daytrip to the Singapore Zoo—one of the few outings Leah could remember going on with her father. She stared at the drawing. He had never mentioned the trip again and never given the impression that he had enjoyed it much—and yet he had kept that silly drawing all these years and given it pride of place in his kitchen.

  Her mind churning, Leah continued through the rest of the house. At the rear of the villa, she came to a closed door: David Fisher’s study, which looked out onto the gardens at the back. She hesitated as she reached for the door handle. How many times had she stood here in her childhood and teens, listening and wondering what her father was doing in the still silence inside?

  Leah took a deep breath and pushed the door open, stepping into the room. Then took another breath in sharply. The leather executive chair was tipped on its side; papers were scattered across the surface of the glossy, mahogany desk and books were tossed carelessly from the shelves; a giant Chinese porcelain vase lay shattered by the door; and the contents of the filing cabinet had been emptied onto the floor.

  Her father’s study had been ransacked.

  CHAPTER 5

  Leah went into the study and walked cautiously around, stepping over the papers and books strewn across the floor. As she rounded her father’s desk, she could see that all the drawers had been pulled out, the contents rifled with. The doors of the cabinet alongside the desk had been flung open, items spilling out carelessly, and even the cushioned seat of the deep, leather armchair by the windows had been slashed. Someone had been making a quick and rough search for something.

  But what had they been looking for?

  Leah glanced at the glass doors leading to the garden. One of them was partially open and, on closer inspection, she could see that the lock had been jimmied. So this was how the intruder had got in.

  She turned back to look at the mess in the room again. This was no ordinary burglary—the computer was still at the desk and her father’s sleek Macbook Air was resting undisturbed on the top of the side cabinet; his collection of Chinese jade carvings lay untouched on one of the shelves; the framed sefer—an antique Hebrew manuscript—still hung on the wall and the valuable Tang horse statue stood safe in its glass case. No, the intruder had been searching for something specific.

  Leah sank into the torn leather armchair and tried to think. Money? She didn’t think her father ever kept large sums of cash in the house. Besides, if they had been after money, why hadn’t they stolen the antiques and computers? No, it had to be something else. Her gaze wandered over the walls again and she noticed that several of the paintings were askew. As if they had been moved or taken off and replaced in a hurry. What did people look for behind paintings? The answer came to her suddenly.

  A safe.

  They had been looking for her father’s safe. Leah shut her eyes as a memory suddenly assailed her. She had been little—only slightly taller than her father’s desk—and she had stood here in this study, clutching her doll, watching as he had put something into a safe. He had turned back and smiled at her as he had done it. It was the smile that had stuck out in her memory. David Fisher had rarely smiled.

  Leah opened her eyes, stood up quickly, and went around, lifting each of the paintings. Behind the third one, she found the square metal door with the round dial. She set the painting down on the floor and touched the safe door. It moved under her hand. Someone had cracked it open and not bothered to lock it again.

  Leah swung the door aside and peered inside. A stack of notes in various currencies, a soft pouch containing a gold Rolex, a folder of documents that looked like certificates, a pile of bearer bonds, David Fisher’s passport... She couldn’t tell if anything had been removed, but somehow, she felt the intruder had not found what he was looking for here.

  Leah stepped back from the safe, frowning. Something was niggling at her. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure up the memory again. Her father had been crouching down to the safe, not stretching up at the wall. She opened her eyes again and looked around the room with fresh interest. It had been a different safe in her memory, she realised. A concealed safe, which hadn’t been discovered by the intruder. A safe no one knew the existence of—except her.

  Leah walked back to her father’s desk and stood at the corner, just like she did in her memory. Crouching down, she tried to view the room as her seven year-old self would have seen it on that day. Her eyes flicked over the bookcases, the side bureau, the potted bamboo, then halted on the antique gramophone cabinet in the far corner. Another of her father’s purchases—David Fisher had been quite a collector of antiques—and something that she remembered seeing in her childhood.

  Leah approached it eagerly. The top raised to show the turntable and stylus, covered in a fine layer of dust. She dropped to her knees in front of the cabinet and pulled the doors open. Neatly divided brackets for storing vinyl records filled the space inside. Her father had used them for storing papers and folders. She inserted her hand into one of the brackets and felt around, her fingers touching the solid wood at the back of the cabinet. Nothing.

  She swung the double cabinet doors shut again and sat back on her heels, disappointed. She had been so sure… Leah stood up with a sigh and was about to lower the lid down on the turntable when she paused. Looking down at the cabinet from above, it seemed to her that it looked a lot deeper than the space she had just seen inside.

  Leah crouched down again, but this time, instead of pulling at the double door handles in the centre, she ran her hands over the sides of the cabinet. She could feel hinges on both sides, but when she looked closer, she also saw something else. A very faint line—like a deep crack—running up one side, just behind the hinges, across the top and down the other side of the cabinet. She dug her fingernails into the crack on the left side and pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again, pulling harder.

  Still nothing.

  Leah blew out a breath of frustration. Then she ran her fingers over the cabinet again, this time sliding them down to the bottom and into the gap underneath, where the four short legs raised the cabinet off the floor. She was about to give up when she felt it. A tiny lever, tucked alongside the front left leg. She depressed it and, at the same time, dug the nails of her right hand into the crack again and gave the front of the cabinet a good tug.

  The next minute, Leah nearly fell back as the entire front of the cabinet, including the hollowed-out compartment for the brackets, suddenly swung outwards and sideways. She gaped at the space revealed at the back. The cabinet had a false back inside, she realised, with additional space built into the structure behind the normal compartment. It wasn’t a large space—she pulled out the few items stored inside. A small album of photographs, a hospital ID bracelet, a jewellery box containing two gold rings, a small, pink square of paper with some faded numbers printed on it, and a thick bundle of what looked like handwritten letters.

  Carefully Leah turned the items over, looking at each in turn. Her heart stuttered as she suddenly saw her mother’s name printed on the hospital ID bracelet. Was this what she had been wearing the night she gave birth to me? The
night she died, giving birth to me, Leah reminded herself bleakly. She flipped open the album and found that it contained photos of her mother. She had rarely seen pictures of her mother. Aside from the treasured one Leah had in her possession and her parents’ wedding portrait, there were no other pictures of her mother in the house. Now, she looked at the images hungrily and was shocked to realise how much she looked like her mother. The same startling deep blue eyes in a heart-shaped face, the same dark brown hair falling in waves down past her shoulders. Her mouth was wider and her body less petite than her mother’s, but the resemblance was uncanny.

  Was this why her father had never seemed able to look at her? Feeling her throat tighten suddenly with tears for the first time since she had left London, Leah set the album aside and opened the jewellery box with the two gold rings. They were her parents’ wedding rings, she realised, as she saw the date and their names engraved on the inside. She picked up the bundle of letters last and carefully slid the elastic off, fanning the letters out on her lap. Her eyes widened as she realised that they were written in her father’s slanting handwriting and that they were all addressed to her.

  Dear Leah…

  From the dates in the top right-hand corners, they went back months, years… all the way back to the year her father had sent her to boarding school in England. Letters written and never sent. Thousands and thousands of words from the father who had hardly ever talked to her. Leah’s hands shook slightly as she picked up one of the letters, but her eyes blurred with tears when she tried to read the first sentence. She put it down again abruptly, then gathered all the letters together with jerky movements. Suddenly, she was scared—scared of finding out what her father had been keeping from her all these years. She bundled the letters together and snapped the elastic around them again with a final gesture.

  Leah drew a long, shuddering breath and looked up. She didn’t know how long she had been in the study, but the light was fading in the garden outside and she was sitting in semi-darkness. She got up stiffly and switched on the desk lamp. The orange glow flooded the room, making the windows go dark. Carefully, she put all the items from the concealed safe into her handbag, then swung the front of the cabinet back into place, hearing the faint click as it latched.

  Leah looked around the room again. She would have to report the break-in to the police, she realised, but not today, she decided. She had had enough of questions about her father and confronting the past. She went over to the windows and slid the door shut as well as she could with the broken lock, then turned to switch off the desk lamp.

  As she did, a movement outside the window caught her eye. She whirled around and stared into the darkness.

  Nothing.

  But she hadn’t imagined that feeling. The feeling of being watched. Her eyes searched the darkness outside, looking for shapes among the shadows of the bromeliads in the garden. She was certain that somebody was out there. With the darkness outside and the lamp glowing brightly in here, everything inside the study would be lit with even more clarity. How much had they seen? Had they seen her shutting the hidden safe?

  Cursing herself for not thinking of it earlier, Leah yanked the string to draw the blinds and shut the world out. Then she gave the study one last look, switched off the lamp, and left the room. The darkened villa felt oppressive now and she didn’t linger.

  He watched as a taxi pulled up in front of the villa and Leah hurried out of the front door. She was clutching her handbag tightly to her chest, in a protective gesture that was more revealing than any tell-tale bulge on the side of the bag. Toran wondered what she had in there.

  Leah threw a furtive look behind her, back at the villa, and although dusk had sunk everything in a purple gloom, he caught the glint of fear in her wide eyes. Something tightened inside him. He fought a sudden urge to reach out and soothe her.

  But even as he shifted his weight, he saw something else that made him freeze in the shadow of the rattan palm, where he was hidden. A figure was stepping out of the side gate of the villa gardens just as Leah climbed on board and the taxi door slammed shut. A figure of a man, with greying brown hair, in a navy suit.

  So I’m right—they are following Leah, Toran thought grimly as he saw the man move stealthily forwards to watch the taxi drive away. What do they suspect she knows? What will they do to find out?

  He thought again of the way Leah had clutched the handbag to her chest and wondered if the man had seen that too. He knew instinctively that Leah had found something—something that had drawn her deep into this web of deceit and danger. He had to learn what she’d found—to know whether it changed things. Toran set his jaw. He would find out tonight.

  CHAPTER 6

  The red message light was flashing when Leah entered her hotel room. She picked the phone up and pressed the button to retrieve the message, her nerves tightening as she wondered if it might be Toran. It wasn’t. It was Julia, sounding a bit aggravated. Leah remembered guiltily that she had cut Julia off last night with the promise to phone her this morning, but she knew that if she called her friend now, she would be faced with a hundred questions she didn’t want to answer.

  Leah put the phone back down. Julia would have to forgive her. Quickly, she powered up her laptop and sent Julia an email, assuring her that she was fine and asking her not to worry. Then she clicked over to her Facebook page, but there was no new message from Toran. Leah switched the TV on, watching eagerly as the news channel filled the screen. But somehow she knew the answer to her question, even before she saw it confirmed on the screen. There was no announcement of a mistaken identity. To the rest of the world, Toran James was dead.

  Leah stood in the middle of her hotel room, wondering what to do. After what she had learned this afternoon, she was crazy to go see Toran alone. Or the man who said he was Toran, Leah reminded herself. Whatever the police thought, her father’s death was definitely much more than a simple hit-and-run accident—there was something much bigger going on here. And somehow, she felt that Toran was involved too. It was just too much of a coincidence that he should be in this suspicious yacht explosion and also want to see her again, just after her father died. Of course, she could simply report everything to the police and let them deal with it. In fact, she could tell them about her date with Toran tonight and let them go to meet him.

  Leah sighed. She knew she wouldn’t. Call it recklessness, call it curiosity, call it some lingering sense of loyalty to a boy she had once loved, but she had to go see Toran herself tonight.

  A few hours later, freshly showered and changed into a silk maxi-dress, Leah left her hotel. She decided to forgo the taxi for once and make her way to the HarbourFront Centre by the MRT—Mass Rapid Transit—the metro-railway network that spanned the city-state. It would give her the chance to get some fresh air and exercise, she decided. Wasn’t that the advice for the best way to deal with jet lag?

  Once she set out, though, Leah wondered wryly just how much fresh air she was going to get. The humidity hadn’t let up despite the setting sun, and walking down the wide shopping boulevard of Orchard Road was a bit like wading through a thick broth. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck and silently grumbled at the Singapore climate. She could feel her carefully applied make-up already starting to melt on her face. She quickened her steps, eager to get to the air-conditioned interior of the Wisma Atria shopping mall which was the street-level entrance to the Orchard MRT Station.

  A few minutes later, though, all thoughts of the climate left her mind as Leah turned to take the few steps up to the mall entrance. From the corner of her eye, she saw a familiar figure walking several yards behind her. He wasn’t wearing a navy suit this time, but she would have known him anywhere. It was the man who had followed her at Heathrow Airport.

  Fear wrapped its cold fingers around her throat. Leah whipped through the double glass doors of the shopping mall and hurried across the main lobby, heading for the escalators down to the basement. Murmuring excuses, she pushed
her way past the people leaning against the handrail and hurried down the moving steps, jumping off at the bottom. She glanced at a nearby sign. The station concourse was on B2, the next level down. She darted onto the next escalator, not daring to look back to see if the man was following.

  Once on the concourse, she ran over to the ticketing machines and scanned the MRT map frantically. She was at Orchard… she would need to change at Dhoby Ghaut for the North-East line, which would take her down to the HarbourFront MRT station. Leah threw a glance over her shoulder. He wasn’t here yet. Quickly, she bought a ticket and headed for the gates. She saw the man riding down the escalator from above just as she slipped through the barriers.

  He had seen her. He moved directly towards the barriers. Leah realised with horror that he must have some kind of smartcard with credit already loaded so he wouldn’t have to stop to buy a ticket. She turned and dived for the next set of escalators, which would take her down to the platforms on B3.

  Stumbling off at the bottom, Leah risked a look behind her to the top of the escalator. She could see his head at the top, but for the moment, he was being delayed by a smartly dressed young woman assisting a frail amah onto the escalators. Leah saw the young woman scowl at him as he tried to push his way past the old granny and he was forced to take a step back and ride down on the step behind her.

  It bought Leah a few precious moments. She heard the loud hum and whoosh as the train arrived and she hurried to join the throng of people waiting on the platform, letting the movement of the crowd bear her into the waiting car. The doors beeped rapidly, then slid shut, and Leah felt the train begin to move. She craned her neck to look back through the windows as they pulled away. She couldn’t see the man on the platform.