“I do not love you,” he said. “You little hypocrite, you want that, too?”
She had been staring at him all the while. Now she closed her eyes, dropped her head. She put a hand to her eyes and felt tears drop into her palm. Why didn’t anybody ever tell you that a broken heart was real, not just a phrase, that it hurt so horribly? Why hadn’t she been warned that the pain would make it impossible to speak?
“I love you,” she sobbed. “Math, Math!”
He snorted furiously. “What the hell are you after now? Get out of here before I tear you apart with my bare hands. Get out of my hotel. Get out of my life.”
“Where will I go?” she asked desperately, almost incoherent.
“Wherever people like you do go when your job is over or you’ve been found out. Back to the hole you crawled out of in the first place. Get out of my sight!” he shouted, as the tight rein he had on himself suddenly snapped, and then his fury was a very palpable, very frightening presence in the room. “I’ve had as much as I can take!”
She tore the door open and ran out into the void.
* * *
“And he threw you out? In the middle of the night?”
Elain hiccuped on a sob. She had run from him, run from the house, not stopping for anything except her handbag, where her car keys were. How she had driven the mile to Pontdewi without going off the track and down the gorge must be attributed to other hands than her own.
“Oh, how awful it all sounds.” Sally’s voice had pulled her back to sanity, her caring a lifeline. She had listened to the disjointed recital, not asking questions, though she could scarcely have understood more than the essentials.
“It is awful,” Elain said. “I’m awful. What I did was awful.”
There was no denying that, and Sally didn’t try. “God, honey, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” She hiccuped again. She had pretty well stopped crying now, but it had been a long half hour of abandoned weeping before she had pulled herself into sufficient shape to phone. She had rung the club first, till common sense kicked in and reminded her it was Monday and Monday was Sally’s day off. She had wakened Sally from the only good night’s sleep she got in seven.
“God, what a mess! I wish I could—oh, what a mess! I just feel so helpless. He must be so angry, so hurt.”
“He is as cold as arctic ice,” replied Elain flatly.
“Where are you now?”
“In the phone booth in the village.”
“Elain, it’s so late. Where are you going to spend the night?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try the pub here, or go into Dolgellau. I must be able to find something.”
“Hang up now before it’s too late to find something. Call me in the morning. Never mind how early. I won’t be able to sleep anyway, worrying about you.”
“I’ll be all right, Sally. Thanks for listening.”
But it wasn’t easy to find a place to stay at midnight in a small Welsh town in the high season. The pub at Pontdewi had no rooms, and in Dolgellau, the nearest town, most places were locked up for the night, and the one that wasn’t was full.
She would have to spend the night in the car, and the thought terrified her. Crime was not so high in the Welsh countryside as in other places in the world, but a woman sleeping alone in her car overnight anywhere these days was a fool. She drove for awhile through the dark night, looking for some little haven where she might feel safe; then, like a homing pigeon, she was wearily forced back to the White Lady. When she passed through the last gate, she shut off her headlights and drove as quietly as possible around the dark building, along the drive and over to the outbuildings. She pulled inside the doorway of an old barn, turned off the engine, dragged a rug over herself and, deeply exhausted and determined not to think, settled for sleep.
* * *
A harsh knocking on the window behind her head woke her. She sat up, confused for only a moment before everything flooded into her brain. Then she dropped her head forward, rubbing gritty eyes. It was morning. Her shoulders ached from her awkward sleeping position, her head ached with crying, but her heart, thank God, seemed numb.
The banging came again, and she turned abruptly. Math was bent impatiently over the car. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, when she had rolled down the window.
“You said get out. I couldn’t find a room anywhere.”
He swore. “So you came back here?” he said incredulously. “You thought you’d be safe here?”
“I was afraid to—” She broke off helplessly.
He smiled the devil’s own smile, cold, heartless. “You’re a fool if you think yourself safe with me. Anywhere near me.”
She knew that was no more than the truth. She said, “Anyway, I have to pick up my things, pay my bill.”
“Honourable to the last, I see.”
She was suddenly angry. “And I’m going to get cleaned up and changed before I go, so don’t expect me to be out in five minutes. You’ll just have to put up with me polluting your property for awhile.”
“I’ll be out for an hour,” he said. “Be gone before I get back.”
He strode away, and a minute later she heard the sound of hooves. Of course Balch was stabled in the other damn barn. She hadn’t thought of that. Of course he had noticed her car on the way past.
* * *
“I didn’t know you were leaving us today.”
“No. It’s a sudden decision.”
Olwen looked sideways at her. “Math knows about this?”
Elain snorted mirthlessly. “Oh, yes, he knows.”
“Well, there’s nothing to pay anyway. He said you weren’t to be allowed to pay your bill,” Olwen told her with a smile. “He told me that a few days ago. See? I’ve marked it here on your card.”
She had to hold herself together by main force. She looked down, pressed her lips together, then looked up again. “I think you’ll find he’s changed his mind about that,” she said, as levelly as she could.
There was a short pause while Olwen absorbed that. “Oh, but shouldn’t I—”
“Olwen,” she said. “Just let me pay the bill and go. Please.”
She looked at her, and Olwen knew that it was one of those times when one woman just has to listen to another.
“Will it go on your credit card?”
Elain nodded and handed over her card, then tucked the receipt away.
“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to the others? Not even to Vinnie?”
Guilt smote her at the thought of how Vinnie would look at her if she knew. She had betrayed Vinnie, too, checking up on her, finding out things that were none of her business, none of anyone’s business. “I’ll write Vinnie,” said Elain. “Tell her I’m sorry.”
* * *
“Hell,” said Raymond. “Who told him?”
“I don’t know. He said he had a phone call to make, or coming in, something like that. Half an hour after that, he—he told me. He threw me out.”
“Where are you now?”
“In Dolgellau.”
“Right. Well, you’d better come back to town. They’re going to be very sorry about this, but it’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. It’s mine. I had a query from a prospective client the other day—I told him too much about you. I said you were on a job and wouldn’t be available for a week or so. He wasn’t a client at all, of course. It was somebody checking up, to see if you were working for me. Fool that I am.”
“But who knew I might be working for you in the first place?”
“Ah, hell, anybody, Red. An old client. Your roommate, your friends. You’re an artist, right? Tell anybody there you’d been to the Slade?”
“No—yes! But—” She started to speak and then stopped.
“Yeah, you leave a trail a mile wide, easy for a professional. Somebody probably went down and bought a drink for that roommate of yours, got her ta
lking. Easy enough. I should have seen that one coming.”
“Yeah,” Elain agreed lifelessly.
“I’ll get on to the client and tell them. You get driving. Come here as soon as you get in, yeah?”
* * *
There was a coffee shop close to the phone box in Dolgellau, and she went there to think. Something was nagging at her, and she wasn’t going to start driving till she had it nailed down.
* * *
From the moment she had learned that the tapestry hadn’t burnt, she had been looking at it from only one angle—that Math must be guilty of something. Fraud, if not arson.
Because nothing else seemed to make sense. If a thief had wanted the tapestry, he had only to take it. Indeed, he had successfully taken it, if the forensic experts were right. It was insane to think that someone would set fire to the hotel, with possible loss of life, in order to disguise the disappearance of something worth at most $50,000. Surely no one would risk a possible life sentence for that kind of money.
Why steal the tapestry anyway? It wouldn’t be easy to pawn, like a diamond ring. Unless you had a client who had seen or heard of it and ordered it stolen. That would mean its going straight into a private collection; no need to disguise the theft, because no one but the new owner would ever see it. The thief wouldn’t have to worry about being caught trying to sell it.
So why set fire to the place?
Only Math could benefit from both the disappearance of the tapestry and the hotel fire. That was why suspicion of him had been virtually forced on her—and, no doubt, on the insurance company.
But she knew that Math did not feel he had benefited from the fire. Things that he valued had been lost forever—like the seventeenth-century woodwork in the burnt-out rooms. She believed Math innocent. Her head had cleared. She simply knew that Math could not have risked human lives for personal gain, knew that he had not been lying to her when he said the tapestry had burnt. He had believed it.
And suddenly a very ugly pattern was emerging from what had been stupid confusion.
To set fire to a hotel with potential loss of life in order to disguise the theft of a tapestry worth $50,000 would be the act of a madman. So, unless they were dealing with a psychopath, the hotel had been torched for another reason.
Someone had wanted to burn down Math’s hotel. But more than that. There was the tip-off to the insurance company. They also wanted Math suspected of arson. Suppose the tapestry had even been removed not because someone wanted it, but because they knew the insurers would discover that it hadn’t burnt? Suppose they had taken the tapestry merely to cast further suspicion on Math?
They couldn’t be expected to know that it was undervalued. But Math did. He’d had an appointment to have it valued by Sotheby’s in October. If he was going to torch his own hotel for the insurance money, why wouldn’t he have waited till the tapestry was valued for the full amount?
Someone had wanted to burn down the hotel. They had access through a secret tunnel that no one knew about. So, late at night, they had come down the tunnel, through the door, up into the kitchens. They had gone and collected the tapestry, carried it down into the tunnel. Then they had dragged the petrol cans through into the cellar and set some kind of timed wick alight. They closed the secret door, ran down the tunnel, stuffed the tapestry through the gap and climbed up inside the old fortress. Then they went over the wall and down the public footpath.
Did they go into the village, or the other way? In the other direction, where did the path lead?
Now they had the tapestry, and they had the hotel out of commission. And Math under suspicion.
If you looked at it that way, other incidents since the fire were more sinister. The burning coal on the carpet in the lounge, only discovered because of the dog. The broken tap, also discovered by chance before it could do real damage.
And those stupid psychic sisters, with all their talk of sinister ghosts, had blinded them all to what was really going on. Somebody was sabotaging Math, and didn’t care whose life got in the way.
* * *
“I’m not coming back,” she said.
“What? They want you to. They want to debrief you,” Raymond said in surprise.
“Who’s talking like a movie now? I don’t care what they want. Something’s going on here, and I’m not leaving till I find out what it is.”
“What’s going on is arson by the owner,” said Raymond. “Clear as daylight. You keep your nose out, or I’ll have an angry client on my hands.”
“I’m here, Raymond, you’re not. And I’m telling you, no.”
He digested that in silence. “The client’s not going to like it, Red. And they sure won’t be paying your expenses beyond today.”
“I don’t want them to. I quit.”
“Going over to the enemy? Be careful what you tell him. You’re not above being sued for conflict of interest, you know.”
“I’m not going over to anybody,” Elain said doggedly. “I’m looking for the truth. Or isn’t the client interested in that?”
“Very few people are, Red. Where are you going to be? Not still at the hotel?”
“No. At the moment, I’m driving around with my luggage in my car. I’ll find somewhere, I guess.”
“Let me know,” said Raymond. “And Red...”
“Yes?”
“Keep me posted, eh? Call if you need help.”
* * *
Something else had been bothering her, too. The only person she had mentioned the Slade School of Art to was Math.
* * *
The door opened, and he stood there, cold as justice, his eyes hooded. “What are you doing here?” he asked in soft savagery.
She quailed, but stood her ground. “I want to talk to you.”
“No, you do not. Not if you know what’s good for you.”
“Oh, Mr. High and Mighty,” she jeered. “‘Dear Kettle, yours sincerely, Pot’?” She hadn’t meant to say this. She had meant to outline her suspicions in a calm, reasonable way, convincing him. She hadn’t meant to accuse him of investigating her as she had investigated him.
“Get away from me, Elain,” he said steadily.
“Who asked someone to check up on me, Math? Who knew I’d been to the Slade? Who knew about Sally? Only you! You’re the only way someone could have got a lead on me.” She pushed past him, and he let her do it, closing the door after she was in. But he stood there, his hand on the knob, cold and still.
“I did not ask anyone to check up on you.”
“They just did it off their own bat? They gave it to you as a friendly gesture? But you listened to the report, didn’t you? You believed it!”
He smiled grimly at her, and she saw something terrible behind his eyes, but couldn’t name it. “Are you suggesting it wasn’t true?”
This was ridiculous. She was getting nowhere like this, shouting her hurt at him. “Math,” she said urgently. “Don’t you see something’s going on? Don’t you see there’s danger? The tapestry was stolen, Math. It didn’t burn in the fire, there was no trace of it. I’m not supposed to tell you that. Somebody’s out to get you, or to get this place, can’t you see it? I want to help!”
“Is that what you came to say?”
“Who told you about me? Who phoned that night?”
He was silent, gazing tiredly at her.
“Don’t you see it’s important? Whoever did it must have seen that I would find out the real facts if I carried on. They wanted to stop me. They want you charged with arson.”
He looked resigned, like a man buttonholed by some intolerable bore at a party, waiting till she had finished and would move on.
“Who’s Brian Arthur?” she said desperately. “Have you ever asked yourself that? What’s he doing here? I can tell you, he’s not what he says he is.”
“Few people are, apparently.”
Her heart was breaking all over again. She had tried not to hope before she came, but she knew now she hadn’t succeeded.
She couldn’t stand him looking at her like that, his eyes and his voice so cold, hating her in that cold, terrible way. She threw herself against him with a pleading cry, and then gasped at the utter lack of response she felt in his body.
He was absolutely stiff, and his hands came up and clenched on her upper arms as he pushed her away from him with a slow, dreadful force that not all her strength could have overcome. His hands hurt; she knew she would bruise. Her skin bruised easily.
“Math!” she pleaded, when he had let her go.
“If you come near me again, I will not be responsible for the consequences.”
“Math, I love you!”
He looked at her without a shred of response, and unconsciously her hand stroked the hair at her left ear. “I don’t know anything uglier than you with that lie on your lips,” he said, and that word was enough to drain all the blood from her heart, all the hope from her future.
She stood shaking, hopeless, helpless, as he opened the door. Her heart was stone now, unfeeling, but she knew when she was alone her heart would be flesh again, and she would feel the razor of his hatred cutting through her....
“Ah! What timing! I was just about to knock!” said Theresa Kouloudos. “You got my message, then. Hi, Elain.”
“Oh...Theresa. Hi. I’m just leaving.”
“Oh, don’t do that! It’s both of you I need to speak to. We’ve got a contract.”
* * *
Theresa Kouloudos wasn’t anyone you would want to meet in a dark alley, Elain thought. She let absolutely nothing get in her way. Somehow she was inside the flat, sitting at the table with them.
“But I’ve got the car loaded,” Elain protested. “I can’t do this just now. I’m going to travel around, do some painting.” Any lie rather than tell her that Math had kicked her out. She looked at Math. Why didn’t he say something to reinforce her? He didn’t want her here.
But Math said nothing. He sat watching the two women as if he were at a play.
“I wonder if I could convince you to stay on just for...well, for however long it takes you to give them what they’re asking for?” Theresa responded in a tone that made it clear she had no intention of letting anything else happen. “Henrietta wants to make this book part of a package she’s offering the U.S. publishers, and she wants to go over there next month. The more complete the book we show them, the better chance there is of their buying it. Much as she loves the idea, Henrietta can’t go into an expensive production like this on her own. She needs the Americans in on it.”
Dearest Enemy Page 20
