by Susan Napier
‘He thinks I’m too old for you, as well.’ “Not enough child-bearing years left” was the delicate way Kevin Riordan had actually put it!
‘It’s a wonder Mum didn’t brain him with his bedpan—seeing she’s three years older than him herself!’ Matt said wryly. ‘He’s just blowing smoke in your eyes, Rachel, like he was with all that rot about my shining political future. He knows I have no interest in public office, but it pleases him to pretend to his pals that he’s a potential king-maker.’
He took her in his arms and kissed her. ‘Stop worrying so much about what other people are thinking. We both know that life is too precious to waste storing up grief for ourselves—let’s just enjoy what we have while we have it…’
That sounded ominously like a warning against building castles in the air, and a few days later Rachel’s nebulous doubts and fears were given a devastating credibility.
She had arranged to meet Matt after work at his apartment, for which he had given her a key, and, having brought some paperwork to work on until he arrived, she absently answered the phone when it rang instead of leaving the answer-machine to pick up.
It was Neville Stiller, returning a prior call from Matt letting him know that Kevin Riordan was now convalescing at home.
‘I didn’t know you two had moved in together,’ he probed, when Rachel told him that Matt wasn’t home.
‘We haven’t,’ she told him coolly.
‘We never did get around to having that lunch…’
‘No.’
She didn’t say anything else, but he had no difficulty in reading her silence. ‘And never will, either, huh? Not even as a thank-you to me for giving you that contract you and your partner have been busting your buttons for?’
She didn’t like the implication. ‘That was a purely business decision on your part, not a personal favour. You should be thanking us for all the money we’re going to save KR Industries over the next two years.’
‘Does that mean our lunch is on, after all?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Give it up, Neville, you’re just trying to use me to get at Matt.’
‘Maybe I’m concerned for you? After all, you haven’t known him as long as I have—you probably haven’t seen the dark side of his personality yet. Anyone who spent time in prison for rape and then had a wife who killed herself is bound to have psychological problems, wouldn’t you think?’
Rachel collapsed in the chair by the telephone. ‘What did you say?’ she whispered in agonised disbelief. ‘About his having been in prison?’
‘Oops. I suppose that’s something that never came up in your conversations. Of course, since he was charged as a minor the information is sealed by the records—so he would have no incentive to tell you, would he? I guess no man likes to admit to a new girlfriend that he served time for raping a fifteen-year-old…’
Rachel hardly heard the rest. Her hand was shaking so badly she dropped the receiver into the cradle and then staggered into the bathroom to be violently sick in the basin.
It couldn’t be true; it just couldn’t, she told her ghastly white face in the bathroom mirror. That would make everything he had told her—everything he was—everything that she loved—a lie!
She looked down at the ring on her finger and shuddered, pulling it off and letting it clatter onto the bathroom cabinet.
The sound of the key in the door of the apartment gave her no time to reorder her splintered thoughts. Nor did she give Matt any time to take her in his arms for their usual greeting.
‘Neville called. He said—I—Please, just tell me it’s not true?’ she pleaded, the instant he walked in the door.
‘What isn’t true?’ Matt asked warily, his eyes on her distraught face as she backed away from his embrace.
‘That when you were young you were arrested for raping a girl—a fifteen-year-old girl. That you went to prison for it?’ She put a hand over her mouth to hold in the choked sobs.
To her sick horror Matt didn’t leap in with an instant denial. His face was suddenly as white as hers. ‘Rachel, it’s not what it seems—’
‘What it seems? Don’t tell me how it seems—I just want to know if it’s true!’ she demanded hysterically.
‘Rachel, I was going to tell you—’
‘Is it true?’ She screamed. ‘It’s a simple enough question: were you or were you not charged with rape?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘And you went to prison?’
‘Yes, I was remanded in custody, but—’
‘My God…’ Tears of shock and misery spurted out of her eyes. She felt as if she had been violated all over again. ‘My God, it’s all true…’
‘No! For God’s sake, Rachel, listen to me—I didn’t do it!’
He reached for her and she backed away, shaking her pounding head. ‘I believed you. Like a fool I believed all that stuff about you being a virgin,’ she said hysterically, ‘a man of honour. I fell in love with you and actually believed you…’
Blood darkened his face as he confronted her bewildered horror. ‘Then believe me now,’ he pleaded hoarsely. ‘You know I wouldn’t lie to you.’
She pressed her hands against her temples. What ghastly irony. Had she fallen in love with a man who had done to another young girl what had been done to her? ‘I don’t know—I can’t think. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because I was afraid. I wanted you to get to know me first, so you wouldn’t have any doubts when I told you—so I took the coward’s way out…’ His desperation turned to a kind of tortured anger. ‘For God’s sake—I’m in love with you, Rachel, I would never do anything to hurt you! I know I made a mistake not telling you, but is your faith in me really so fragile? You really think I just pretended to be sexually inexperienced as part of some sick charade? Believe me—as God is my witness—I never committed any rape…’
‘I don’t know what to believe anymore,’ she choked, snatching up her purse. Nausea churned in her belly as she plunged for the door. Now he talked about being in love with her? Not in a moment of passion or tenderness, but hitting her with it while she was weak and wounded? And only after she had betrayed her own wretched vulnerability…
‘Rachel—’
‘No, I have to go. Don’t try to follow me—I have to be alone!’
She knew it was dangerous to drive her car in the state she was in, but she didn’t care—the homing instinct was paramount: the need to find a place of safety in which to lick her wounds.
Yet before she’d turned thankfully into her own driveway her shocked brain had begun to function again, feeding her the questions that she should have stayed to ask, separating fact from assumption, logical thought from unreasoning emotion.
Think! she urged herself. Follow the chain of evidence.
What had Neville actually said amongst all that sick innuendo about Matt’s ‘dark side’?
That Matt had been charged with rape, her memory dredged up. Being charged was very different from being convicted, and surely Neville would have used the stronger word in his accusation if that was the case.
Matt admitted he had been in prison, but he had said he was remanded. Remand meant pre-trial.
Matt claimed he had never committed rape.
Given the choice, who would she pick as the more self-serving individual: Neville or Matt?
Which man did she most trust to tell her the truth?
She knew which one she wanted to trust, and it was because she had wanted it so very much that she had been afraid to trust her own instincts. That was the crux of her dilemma.
Trust.
All this time she had thought it was Matt holding back on their relationship, but maybe it was really herself who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now it had, and instead of picking it up and inspecting the clue, like a good detective, she had run away.
She had condemned the man she loved without a hearing.
Turning off the engine, she rested her weary forehead on the steering
wheel and closed her eyes.
He had been a minor himself at the time. A boy. And he had grown into a man whom she liked and respected…and loved…
A tapping on her window made her jerk her head up, her heart soaring with relief, but it wasn’t Matt’s face looking in at her.
‘Miss Blair? I wonder if I could have a word with you?’
Rachel scrubbed at her salt-encrusted cheeks and fussed around with her bag, waiting for her heartbeat to settle before she got out of the car to face the thin, wiry figure of Max Armstrong.
‘What about?’ she asked warily, wondering if he was going to berate her for the loss of his job, or plead with her to intercede in getting it back.
After one curious look at her blotched complexion Armstrong said dourly, ‘Don’t worry, I have no grudge against you—that’s why I’m here. I’m off to Aussie, where the pay’s better. I just thought I’d better warn you that you might get some aggro down the line from that partner of yours.’
‘Frank?’
‘Yeah. Remember that high-society party gig we did a few weeks ago…the one with the silver cabinets?’
Merrilyn’s! How could she forget? Max Armstrong had been one of two guards dressed as a waiters.
Rachel stiffened against the impending blow. ‘Maybe you’d better come inside—’
He wagged his head, his thinning ponytail catching on the collar of his denim jacket. ‘No, thanks. As far as I’m concerned I’m not even here. I just wanted to tell you that Weston asked me to keep you under surveillance that night, to see how you handled things…said he wasn’t sure you were up to it and he wanted evidence if anything chancy happened—any sort of stuff-up that could be put down to you. He gave me a camera, one of those new, ultra-lowlight, long-lens jobs, and, well…after that guy fell in the pool, I followed you and him to the guest-house…’ He tailed off and Rachel tersely picked up the thread.
‘You took photos of us?’ She didn’t need to ask, but she was still struggling to accept that her recent suspicions had yielded bitter fruit.
‘Look, it was no big deal as far as I was concerned—but a job is a job. I reeled off a few shots. I don’t know how the photos came out, or even if they did, I just handed the camera over to Weston the next day. I told him that there was nothing to it—that you’d had a falling-down drunk on your hands—and he said OK.
‘But you were always pretty decent to me, and after Weston suddenly decided I was surplus to his requirements I had a hunch that maybe he was blowing me off because he was afraid I’d let on about his secret agenda. I always play my hunches, so there you are—that’s all I have to say.’ He shrugged, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his jacket.
‘Thanks for the information,’ Rachel roused herself to croak as he turned away.
He gave her a sour grin. ‘Yeah, well—consider it my farewell gift. With partners like him, who needs enemies, huh? I’d watch my back, if I were you.’
‘Oh, I intend to…’
Rachel watched him walk away into the gathering dusk. She didn’t even bother to go into the house. She got back into her car and called Frank on her cellphone, hanging up as soon as he answered. Then she drove over to his place and parked outside, trying to dredge up the courage from her battered soul to take charge of the part of her life that she did have the power to control.
As she sat there, staring at the lighted windows in Frank’s downstairs flat, the passenger door of the car snicked open and a shadowy figure slid into the seat beside her.
The breath stuttered in Rachel’s chest. ‘What are you doing here? Did you follow me?’ She tried to summon some outrage, but all she could achieve was a faint echo of reproach.
Matt’s silver-rimmed spectacles glinted in the gloom as he turned his face to hers, his expression sober.
‘Lucky for you that I don’t take orders well. Were you planning to confront a blackmailer without any back-up?’
She raised her hand to her tight throat. ‘You know?’
‘It’s no real big surprise. I’ve had feelers out with a few contacts—and found out that Frank’s the one who’s been causing all your petty problems with bureaucracy. It seems that he’s been trying to make your private life more stressful on top of loading you up with unnecessary business worries—’
‘I went through some back files—found that he’d padded out the quotes on some of the jobs we missed out on in the past couple of years, deliberately pricing us out of contention,’ Rachel interrupted numbly. ‘But I had no idea that he was behind all that other stuff…’ No wonder Frank had been so keen to investigate her mysterious harasser—he never would have tracked down himself!
Matt continued implacably, ‘After you left me I called Neville—I threatened to tell Mum and Dad about the real reason Leigh married me if he didn’t lay off. He knows that would seriously damage his image with Dad, so he threw me the bone about Frank—said Weston had told him he had compromising photos of you and me but he’d considered it too risky to get involved other than to make an under-the-table agreement that he would hold off granting the security contract he intended to give to WSS until Frank had stirred up sufficient trouble to ease you out of the company. Neville didn’t care about Frank’s motive—all he was interested in was the by-product: me being humiliated in front of my father, and anyone else he could leak the juicy details to…’
Rachel hunched her shoulders, shivering in the light summer shirt-dress she had donned with such joyous anticipation that morning. ‘But…it always seemed so generous of Frank to be willing to buy me out if things went wrong…’
‘What appears to be generosity is sometimes only ambition disguised. He obviously didn’t want to alienate you into a costly open fight over ownership of the business. Instead he kept the value of it carefully depressed. You’d probably have found that after you’d sold out business suddenly picked up again…’
Rachel looked straight ahead, her hands clenched in her lap. She wanted nothing more than to bury her face in Matt’s shoulder and bawl out her compound misery. ‘I can’t put this off. I have to have it out with him.’
‘I know. But you’re not going in there alone.’
Matt was offering her the kind of bedrock support that she had denied him. She was stricken with shame. ‘Thanks, but I don’t need you—’
‘Oh, yes, you do, Rachel,’ he said, with a quiet certainty that skewered her heart. ‘You just don’t want to admit it yet…’
She turned her head jerkily. He had been brave enough to seek her out after her betrayal of faith; she owed him a similar courage in return. ‘I’m sorry,’ she choked. ‘I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did. I know you didn’t rape that girl.’
The gravity of his smile was challenging. ‘Know? You’ve discovered some fresh evidence in the last half-hour?’
Yes, the irrefutable evidence of her love. ‘Believe, then…’
She searched for the words to convince him. ‘Matt, I don’t have to know the details, I—’
He stopped her with a slight gesture of his hand. ‘Wait. Let’s tackle one problem at a time. First, let’s tidy away this business with Frank…’
Her partner took one look at the two of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the doorstep and grimaced.
‘So you were the hang-up,’ he said to Rachel, his blue eyes cynical. ‘Checking I was home?’
‘Can we come in?’ she asked, ignoring his redundant remark. ‘We’d like to talk to you about a communication problem you and I seem to be having.’
Frank looked as if he was debating refusing, but he eventually stood back and let them in, following them through to the cramped lounge.
Rachel indicated the computer, scanner and printer in one corner. ‘I suppose that would be the gear you used to alter the photos Armstrong gave you. I noticed you purchased some pretty sophisticated image-handling software through the company a few months ago…’
To make sure there was no misunderstanding, she angrily challenged him with th
e discoveries that she and Matt had made.
To her shock Frank produced no belligerent bluster to dispute the facts. If anything he looked relieved to have it out in the open.
‘I guess you’re a better detective than either of us ever thought, then, huh?’ he said.
‘You’re not even going to try to deny it?’ Rachel asked painfully, aware of Matt’s solid warmth at her back.
‘What’s the point? To tell you the truth, I’m sick of the whole mess,’ he said, running his hand through his sun-streaked blond hair. ‘I never expected to go this far…things just seemed to escalate when you wouldn’t bloody well give up the notion of being a full partner…’
Rachel groped for Matt’s hand behind her back and held it tightly as Frank continued his self-derisive monologue.
‘I was stupid. I don’t even know why I did it.’ He pulled himself up with a jerk. ‘Yes, yes, I do…of course I do.’ He mocked himself with an angry laugh. ‘It was because I worked damned hard to get where I am today. Dave and I started Westons—the two of us—and we agreed that it would always be just the two of us…And then Dave went and got himself killed and pulled the rug out from under me. He knew I’d left him my share of Westons in my will!’
‘You weren’t married,’ Rachel pointed out.
‘Neither was David! He could have waited, couldn’t he?’ he said, with a logic that didn’t bear examination. ‘He should at least have asked me about it first! So, I thought, OK, a silent partner, I can handle that…but then you started insisting on “helping”. So I figured to let the business slide just enough that it wouldn’t cost me too much when you decided it was all too hard—but, no, instead you announced that you were going try stepping completely into Dave’s shoes. I couldn’t stop you while you had the deciding share, but I figured if I kept the pressure on I might eventually be able to persuade you it was a bad idea—especially if you were also having hassles with people like the council and the IRS.
