Teschmaker picked up the photograph and studied it again. It was hard to imagine that he was the same person as the freckle-faced young man. In contrast, Jane at fifteen was no longer a girl but a young woman and he could imagine how she must look now. No, he told himself, you have no idea. She may even be dead. She may have developed leukaemia, died in a car crash or been disfigured and lived a short life in dreadful isolation. A more likely scenario was that she had grown up into a beautiful and successful woman, married, had two point three children and returned to whatever career she had carved out for herself. Teschmaker remembered her as self-confident, bright and with an at-times acerbic tongue. She was probably even more sensual as an adult than she had been as a provocative teenager.
There was something more, another memory, less well remembered, from his later teenage years. They had met once, by accident. He had been playing pool in a pub and had seen Jane at another table, had gone over and said hello. For some reason she had treated him very coolly. He remembered trying to get her interested in playing but she didn’t know the rules and was, he realised, only spending time with him in order to infuriate the man waiting for her at the bar. He was a bit player in someone else’s movie. There had been stories too about Jane being a hot little number in the ski hut with the older boys from university, but he couldn’t recall the details. He sat with the photograph for a long time and eventually decided that, having nothing better to do, he would see if he could locate her and make contact. An amusement? A distraction? It didn’t really matter; it was something to do.
In the morning Teschmaker awoke feeling better than he had in weeks. As if to complement his mood the weather had improved. It was the first day of summer. Where to start in his search for Jane Morris? The natural thing to do was to use the same spiral technique he had always employed in his insurance investigations — start at the centre and work outwards. But where was the centre?
A quick glance in the phone book showed him there were hundreds of people with the surname Morris. And, he counted carefully, forty-two with the initial J. He dismissed the notion of simply phoning them all. Her parents? Then he remembered the other bond between them: they both had fathers who had absconded. Jane’s had gone not long after their short romance, vanishing in some quickly hushed-up scandal. Teschmaker’s father was less decisive, disappearing for long periods to make his special pilgrimage to the bottle. On the odd occasions he returned home it was courtesy of the unfriendly constabulary or the over-friendly social workers who saw him through his seasonal dry spells in some clinic. Eventually his father had settled into a Salvation Army hostel in the small country town of Austin-on-Lees which, by happy coincidence, shared a wall with the local pub.
Alexi Teschmaker’s initial dismay at the strict instruction that no inhabitant of the hostel was to cross the threshold of the hotel was soon forgotten when, employing some long-hidden talent for joinery, he constructed a small hatchway that opened onto the side wall of the saloon bar where the tall bottles of beer were always chilled and ready. ‘It even saves on having to buy a fridge. They keep the milk for my cornflakes in there as well.’
Teschmaker retreated from the recollection. He didn’t mind memories as long as they remained ice-thin and over the years he had become a master at skimming over them. Darkness lurked beneath that surface and he had no intention of voyaging down in that direction. The Morrises had lived in Hitchon — his mind skipped adroitly back to the problem of tracing Jane — Hitchon, the suburb he had grown up in. Jane’s mother had survived whatever scandal had engulfed her husband but she would probably be dead now. Jane’s father had never reappeared and Teschmaker had grown up knowing that his whereabouts was not a subject discussed in polite society. He was probably dead as well. Then it occurred to him that Jane had suddenly switched schools. She had received a scholarship to Milton.
There were four residential suburbs that saw themselves as being a cut above the rest. Charlottewood, Milton and Drayfield boasted old money, old homes and tree-lined streets, and then there was Lakeside. You could buy your way into Lakeside, or be posted there to one of the embassies. And if you lived in any of the suburbs, there were only two schools: Milton and Drayfield. Nothing else came close. Milton College was an exclusive girls’ school. The name was etched into his memory because of the scandals that had rocked the private school sector at the time. Three members of the equally exclusive Drayfield Boys’ College were caught in a compromising situation in a girls’ dormitory at Milton. The boys were suspended for a term, escaping expulsion as much on the grounds that they were members of the rowing eight as that their fathers were old boys and pillars of the society. The entire affair would have been hushed up by the tight-knit conservative establishment if it had not been for the incident in the chemistry lab. Three weeks after the initial incident a girl from Milton was rushed to hospital after an accident which the newspapers described as being of ‘a sexual nature’. The broken test tube was removed from her vagina and she was quietly transferred to another school. The female chemistry teacher who — so it was stated in a leaked report — had been involved in the incident retired from teaching and moved overseas. At the same time several other girls were removed from the school by concerned parents who felt that the scandal might harm their daughters’ career prospects. Unfortunately the media turned the scandal into front-page news which included an embittered disclosure from an unnamed girl who claimed that she was not the first to be expelled for pregnancy and yes, the father was a student from Drayfield. She wasn’t certain which one because, so she claimed, it had been dark at the time and they had all consumed a fair amount of alcohol. The final blow was the death of the headmistress. She gassed herself in her car, leaving an extremely explicit diary which recorded her distress not only at general events but at the fact that the chemistry teacher with whom she had been having a liaison for five years had been betraying her with several of her students. Paradise lost.
‘Good morning, my name is Jeremy Barclay, I’m phoning from Barclay, Lim & Brean. I’m currently handling an estate that includes a bequest in favour of a woman who is only identified as “my good friend Jane Morris from Milton College”. I wonder if you would oblige me by putting me through to someone who can confirm that a woman by that name did indeed go to Milton, and if so possibly apprise me of a way of contacting her?’
The administration office at Milton was most obliging. Within minutes Teschmaker had more information than he had bargained for. The loquacious librarian knew everything there was to know about Jane Morris.
‘Of course we are all very proud of Jane. Not only was she school captain and dux but she went on to get the university medal and . . .’
‘Actually all I —’ Teschmaker began but the librarian was in full flight.
‘There are so few girls who excel right across the spectrum but even back then Jane showed she was one out of the box. Do you know, her two hundred metre butterfly record still stands?’ Teschmaker had to admit he had been unaware of that. ‘And the three years she was in the debating team are still the only time that we won the inter-college debating three years in a row. And of course we have all followed her career with great interest.’
‘I’m sure you have. But all I really need to know is how to get in touch with Miss Morris.’ Teschmaker repeated his story about the bequest from a deceased estate.
‘Unfortunately we don’t give out our old girls’ addresses but I believe she now runs her own company.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. A very successful consultancy firm, from what we hear. Mind you, she no longer goes under her maiden name. After graduation she married Oliver Sinclair. That is the Oliver Sinclair . . .’ The librarian allowed a generous pause into which Teschmaker inserted appropriately appreciative clucking noises. ‘They were married in the College Chapel and there is the loveliest photograph in the yearbook.’
‘And they are still married?’
He vaguely remembered Sinclair suing on
e of the tabloids for running a series of paparazzi shots of the magnate with some anorexic starlet or model, and of course there had been the famous incident with the Bulgarian diva. Sinclair could never have been called good looking but his wealth and power ensured that nobody ever used the word dumpy, at least within earshot. His face, round and full, was graced by the most outrageous walrus moustache that Teschmaker had ever seen. Mind you, as they hadn’t been fashionable for as long as he could remember, he had seen very few. So Jane had married The Moustache . . .
‘I should certainly say so.’ Marriage breakups obviously were not a Milton thing. The woman’s tone indicated how much she disapproved of even the veiled suggestion of divorce. ‘After all, she is a Milton girl and I’m sure you are aware we strive to instil the highest standards of behaviour in our charges.’
‘Thank you,’ Teschmaker said. ‘You have been of great help.’
‘Not at all. It’s been a pleasure.’
Oliver Sinclair? Well, she certainly had done okay for herself. Sinclair was one of the national success stories. Having taken on his family’s already booming tube-making business a couple of decades back, Sinclair had diversified and, with the assistance of some canny takeovers and a measure of good luck, now had an empire with offices in three continents and interests in everything from telecommunications to aerospace industries. The magnitude of his wealth was a well-kept secret but his very public partying was as legendary as his trademark moustache. There had been an incident a few years ago which had captured the headlines. Sinclair had thrown a huge birthday bash for himself, the centrepiece of which was a private concert at one of the most upmarket resorts on an island famous for the opulence of its hotels. He hired a full orchestra and at great expense flew in a brace of internationally renowned opera singers. Apparently his birthday concert went off without a hitch. The trouble began with the after-show party. It had been billed as an enormous beach party but the five hundred or so musicians and guests soon spilled over from the beach. Someone decided that the sea was a little chilly for skinny-dipping so started the move to an adjoining resort which boasted the biggest outdoor pool on the island. The resort’s unsuspecting guests were awoken in the middle of the night and peered over their jasmine and bougainvillea-draped balconies to witness what one journalist described in a frenzy of purple prose as ‘an orgy that would have made Petronius blush’. All attempts by the resort’s outnumbered staff to bring proceedings to a halt failed and — according to dozens of eye-witness reports — they, along with many guests and onlookers, actually joined in the debauchery. There was no police presence on the island and so it was only the natural limitations of the human body and the advent of dawn that brought things to a close.
It is doubtful that even Oliver Sinclair’s vast wealth would have been sufficient to cover up such an event. Over the next few days it seemed that almost every visitor at the resort had video footage of what the tabloid press labelled the Birthday Bonkathon. One academic achieved his five minutes of fame on the talk-show circuit when he proclaimed the event the largest sustained mass copulation in modern times. The police played down reports that traces of methylenedioxymethamphetamine had been found in the punch served to guests on the night.
For his part Oliver Sinclair made no public comment. He made no comment at all; a fact that led several critics to suggest he had friends in high places covering up for him. It was only when the Minister for Immigration became involved that it came to light that Sinclair was missing. It transpired that one of the opera singers, a Bulgarian soprano travelling on a restricted visa, had failed to leave the country. Further investigation revealed that, as far as anyone could tell, she had even failed to make it down for breakfast on the morning following the party. On inspection her room was found to have been trashed in a manner the visibly shocked resort manager described as ‘worse than the excesses of a certain notorious rock band’. The sheets were taken away for the forensic teams to examine and, to the embarrassment of everyone involved, the amateur video footage of the orgy in and around the pool — which up until that point had been digitally manipulated to disguise individual faces and genitalia — was revisited in an effort to establish the presence of Sinclair or the singer. Though it produced extraordinary evidence of both human inventiveness and stamina, it failed to reveal a single body part identifiable as belonging to either of the missing couple. The only result from the exhaustive police investigation was that three officers were recommended for immediate stress leave.
When a local fisherman’s wife reported her husband’s failure to return from a four-day fishing trip the police were slow to connect the events. By the time they did the woman had gone to the media, who were not as slow on the uptake and soon had several helicopters searching the area.
Nobody who saw the initial footage would ever forget it. It was hard for even the most politically correct to ignore the Bulgarian soprano’s ample bosom and propensity for displaying an over-generous cleavage in her operatic performances. So the sight of her stark-naked imposing figure at the prow of the fishing boat raising a single defiant finger to the TV crews ensured massive ratings for the nightly news. ‘The Flight of the Valkyrie!’ the tabloids gleefully chorused. Most of the time Oliver Sinclair remained well below decks and as neither the fisherman nor the soprano seemed inclined to heed the attention of the media or instructions from the police helicopters a ‘Bulgarian Stand-Off’ ensued. In the end it took a boarding party of immigration officials with a warrant for her deportation to bring the tryst to a close.
Sinclair’s enemies complained that the magnate had bought his way out of trouble and that the poor fisherman, in jail awaiting trial for obstructing the police in the course of their duties, was taking the rap for him. This point of view gained some credence when, a couple of days later, the singer was very publicly deported. She was farewelled at the airport by Oliver Sinclair and a small string quartet he had hired for the occasion. In a particularly poignant gesture he had bailed the fisherman and flown him and his wife down for the occasion.
Teschmaker’s most enduring memory of the event was a remark made by Sinclair at the impromptu press conference held after the flight had departed. ‘What were her final words to you?’ asked an eager reporter, at which Oliver Sinclair had laughed long and hard. Finally, wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes and tweaking the ends of his moustache, he looked straight down the barrel of the TV camera and said with a perfectly straight face: ‘I wouldn’t know, would I? I mean, you have to understand the Diva speaks not one word of English and I not one of Bulgarian.’
Oliver Sinclair . . . Teschmaker wondered how Jane Morris fitted into such a world. Finding her would not present much of a problem as the Sinclair mansion — or ‘Oliver’s Taj’ as it was referred to with varying degrees of sarcasm or envy — was a city landmark. Though he had been born and bred in a blue-blooded Charlottewood family — the Charlottewood Sinclairs — he had caused a scandal by eschewing his birthplace and buying a large plot of land on a rise overlooking the city’s Botanical Gardens. A flurry of writs and protests ensued as various groups objected to what they saw as the bypassing of numerous planning and zoning regulations. In the end money and highly paid lawyers won the day for Sinclair. There were also those who objected on aesthetic grounds, but their arguments — based as they were on subjective judgments or architectural philosophy — soon retreated from the front pages and found themselves a home in obscure textbooks and university lecture notes. ‘Palladio meets Gaudi — conceptually a postmodernist nightmare’, as one professor of architecture so succinctly put it, was hardly the news grab the TV cameras were after.
As he did a web search for Jane and Oliver Sinclair, Teschmaker paused to wonder what it was in him that was fuelling his desire to find Jane. The initial stimulus had been the photograph and his natural curiosity. But now he realised his aim had grown; no longer was it simply the desire to locate and meet her. In fact, meeting her was slipping further and further down his age
nda. What he really wanted was to know who she had become. They had both started from a shared base, socially, educationally, financially. Was discovering who she was now going to give him a clue about himself? He dismissed the notion. It would have made a nice neat piece of socio-psychological profiling, but it wasn’t true. He was simply curious. And as long as he remained focused on her, his own demons would stay where they belonged — fettered deep underground in his subconscious.
‘It’s only because she’s there,’ he said out loud. ‘Just like a mountain.’
The WebFerret search engine signalled that it had reached the outer limit of its parameters and recovered five hundred sites that contained references to Oliver Sinclair. That would be more than enough, Teschmaker thought. He refined the search, excluding the business and financial references, seeking only newspaper reports. Again there were five hundred. He clicked on Find key word within results and typed in the name ‘Jane’. This time the WebFerret returned one hundred and eighty-three matches. Teschmaker poured himself a small glass of scotch and sat back to begin the long task of sifting through them.
The extraordinary thing about the articles on Mrs Sinclair was her absence. If the social columnists were to be believed, she was something of a mystery woman. Right from the early days, following the much publicised and photographed wedding, she seemed to have retreated into her husband’s shadow. There were very few photographs that showed the couple together. This was even commented on by one society columnist who cattishly ascribed it to the disparity in their height and shape: Why would a pretzel pose with an olive? One photograph, a paparazzi shot, was of the two of them boarding a plane for a high-level meeting that Oliver Sinclair was to attend at a trade delegation in Moscow. Then there was a gap of several months before she was captured again at her husband’s side as he received an award from the President for services to industry. Teschmaker peered at it. Even in this photograph Jane appeared to be a reluctant participant. Her dress and pearl choker spoke of wealth and style, but there was something about the averted eyes that drew him in. He slid the cursor over Jane’s face and clicked to zoom in, but the image lacked definition. He returned it to normal size and stared at the photo. He had kissed those lips. His eyes went down to her neck. He must have touched it but he had no conscious memory of doing so. The breasts. He remembered her breasts. In the photograph they were obscured partially by shadow, partially by her husband’s shoulder as she clutched his arm. Teschmaker remembered her nipples. He tried to imagine how they might be now. Had they been suckled by children? Did her roly-poly husband suckle them? Teschmaker felt the stirring in his groin and the thrill of pleasure as his erection pressed against the confines of his clothing. Do you still like them being touched, he wondered. He gulped at his scotch and clicked down to the next article.
Delicate Indecencies Page 8
