by Susan Lewis
As she brought the gun out Galina’s eyes were shining with humour. The single barrel was pointing at the ceiling, the butt plate was resting in the crook of her arm, her fingers circled the trigger guard.
Rhiannon’s heart was thudding like a fist. Her chest was on fire, a blinding panic swept through her head. Galina moved towards her, edging her back around the bed, pushing her away from the door.
‘You know, I wasn’t sure I would do this,’ Galina said, a faint echo of surprise in her voice. ‘When I stole it, I didn’t know if I would use it.’
Rhiannon’s eyes widened in horror as the barrel of the rifle came down to her face. She was only three feet away, there was no chance of Galina missing and no way she could get to the door. Strange colours clouded her eyes. She tried to speak, but her voice wouldn’t come. A thousand images crowded her mind. Carolyn dead. Marina with the gun. Galina whispering to a child. Max holding the gun. Galina’s finger hooking the trigger. Rhiannon’s heart pounded through her ears, deafening her, swallowing her into a void of terror. Her throat closed over. She was against the wall. She couldn’t move. There was nowhere to go.
Then suddenly Galina’s eyes dropped to the gun and without thinking Rhiannon lunged. Galina screamed. Her finger tightened on the trigger and the gun exploded. Rhiannon flew back against the wall as Galina was thrown into the chair. The gun clattered to the floor and the dying echoes of the explosion reverberated around the room.
Long minutes ticked by; the ceaseless chorus outside continued. The room remained deathly still.
The only sound Galina could hear was that of her own heart as she struggled to her feet and crept to the edge of the bed. For a moment she was confused as she realized she could see the outside – there was a hole in the wall as big as her fist. Then she looked down at Rhiannon.
Rhiannon’s body lay sprawled on the floor; the nightstand was on top of her, broken glass and sodden books all around her and the dark mass of her blood was staining the wall.
Galina knelt down beside her and lifting the night-stand out of the way, pulled the hair from Rhiannon’s face. She fumbled for a pulse, pressing her fingers to Rhiannon’s neck, searching her wrist. Then noticing the blood pooling on the floor beneath her, she let her go and stood up.
Somewhere in the distance she could hear a telephone ringing. The sounds of the wild drowned it as the beckoning cry of hyenas spiralled through her heart. She looked down at Rhiannon’s tangled, lifeless body. Then lifting her head, she looked around as though she might find someone standing in the shadows. She smiled vaguely to herself, then going to the door, she put out her hand and turned the key.
Still dazed with shock and tiredness, Lizzy was finding it hard to come to terms with what had happened through the night. She shuddered to think how long Rhiannon might have lain there had Max not called when he had, for the sound of a single gunshot in the bush at night might only have alerted them to poachers, or to a guard heading off an intruder. Certainly none of them would have thought of Rhiannon, because none of them had known that Galina was in the camp, and even if they had, they would never have dreamt that the gunshot had meant what it had.
Andy was already yelling for Doug even before he’d put the phone down on Max. Ordering Lizzy to stay where she was, he and Doug had raced through the camp to find Rhiannon lying in a pool of her own blood and an empty noose hanging over the bed. What had looked like blood spattering the wall behind Rhiannon had turned out to be the contents of the decanter, and finding a faint flicker of a pulse in her wrist, Andy had carried her swiftly back to the house, while Doug and Elmore had gone in search of Galina.
By then the other guests were coming out of their chalets, wanting to know what all the fuss was about. One of the rangers tried to calm them, while Andy bathed and stitched the gash in Rhiannon’s head that had knocked her unconscious and Lizzy worked on stemming the flow of blood from the bullet wound that had mercifully and miraculously only grazed her shoulder. If it had entered her body there was no way in the world she’d be alive now, for the bullets in those guns were designed to stop elephants.
Doug and Elmore had returned in the early hours with Galina. Whether she had been attempting to escape, or whether it had been some grotesque kind of suicide mission, Lizzy guessed none of them would ever know. All they did know was that of all the beasts that could have killed her, it was a snake that had in the end claimed her.
Now Lizzy was sitting with Rhiannon, watching her as she slept. God only knew what kind of nightmare she’d been through in the lead-up to what had happened, and Lizzy could only feel relieved that Max was on his way, for probably only he could deal with this now.
Hearing a landrover pull up outside, she let herself quietly out of the room and went to see who it was.
‘How is she?’ Andy asked, climbing down from the jeep, his unshaven face gaunt with fatigue.
‘OK, I think,’ Lizzy answered. ‘Why don’t you come inside now and let me make you a drink?’
‘How are you?’ he said, putting a hand on her belly as they walked into the house.
‘I’m fine,’ she answered. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘But I do,’ he said softly.
Lizzy smiled and turned into his arms. ‘What’s all this going to mean?’ she asked.
He stared past her for a while, his eyes focusing on nothing in the paint-splattered decorator’s yard of a kitchen. Then slowly he started to shake his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It could be that the publicity will draw in more people than we can handle, but it’s the kind of people that bothers me.’
Lizzy lifted her head and looked into his eyes. ‘Where’s Galina now?’ she asked.
‘In Rhiannon’s chalet. There’s a guard on the door to stop all those fucking ghouls out there trying to get one for the album.’
Putting a hand on his cheek, Lizzy turned him to look at her and as his eyes rested on hers he gave a rueful smile.
‘Sorry,’ he said, dropping his forehead against hers. ‘I know getting mad about it isn’t going to help.’
‘Did you speak to Max again?’ Lizzy said.
He nodded. ‘He should be here any time.’
Rhiannon was looking up at Max’s face, tracing every line, every crease and shadow and feeling her heart stir under the weight of love. His dark, penetrating eyes, with their thick black lashes, were watching her; his brows, his long aristocratic nose, his wide pale-lipped mouth and his unshaven jaw all showed signs of the stress he was under. He smiled and trying to smile too, she said, ‘They told me you’d be here when I woke up.’
‘Did you believe them?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know. I think I only came round for a few minutes.’
‘You did,’ he confirmed. His eyes moved anxiously over her face. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.
She considered it for a moment. ‘OK, I think. My head aches, my shoulder’s numb, but OK.’ She paused and feeling her heart contract, she said, ‘Galina told me about Marina.’
He swallowed hard, then nodded. ‘She’s going to be fine,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some work to do, but we’ll get there.’ His eyes closed and he took a moment before speaking again. ‘I never wanted to believe she did it,’ he said, ‘but the evidence was there . . . When I got back that night . . . I saw the gun. I heard the things she’d said to her mother, but I still didn’t want to believe she did it. So I didn’t let myself believe. We never discussed it. I just told her it would be all right and then I did what I thought, what seemed like the only thing I could do.’ Sighing, he shook his head. ‘You make a lot of mistakes at a time like that,’ he said. ‘The shock . . . You just can’t think straight. She was so young . . . I couldn’t let her go through it. So I made a decision and by the time I realized . . . it was too late to turn back.’ He smiled grimly. ‘If you knew the things I’ve been thinking all this time,’ he went on. ‘I knew I’d handled it all wrong, but I didn’t know what to do to put it right. I was scared out o
f my mind that maybe she’d had some kind of black-out, something that might come over her again. I didn’t want anyone to know what she’d done, I didn’t want her to go through that. But then I didn’t know if Aleks was safe . . . Christ, I didn’t know if any of us was . . .’ He shook his head and his face darkened with anger. ‘I should have listened to Carolyn. She tried to warn me, I should . . .’
‘Sssh,’ Rhiannon said, putting a finger over his lips. ‘Blaming yourself isn’t going to change anything now. We have to look forward and find the best way to repair it. Marina loves you, and you and your love is all she needs to get her through this.’ She paused for a moment, then said, ‘How do you think she’ll take what’s happened to Galina?’
Max shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘She’s pretty much cut herself off from Galina lately, but there’s no knowing how this is going to affect her.’ His eyes were concentrated on hers as though somehow, through her, he could find the answers. It was odd, he was thinking to himself, how never before in his adult life had he felt the need to share so much of himself, or to trust and to love as he did now.
‘Did you know about the violence?’ Rhiannon asked. ‘How Galina used her grandmother as an excuse and a way to make you feel sorry for her?’
‘Yes, I knew,’ he answered, ‘but it was a lie we’d all lived with so long that I guess it just felt like the truth. There are plenty of people around like her, who get pleasure out of pain, I just wanted to make sure she didn’t go too far. Which she did a couple of times, but on the whole it never got too out of hand. And Maurice? Well, Maurice just saw it as another way of complicating my life, so he took it. They both knew about Marina . . .’ His breath caught and he moved his eyes back to Rhiannon’s.
Rhiannon smiled. ‘There was nothing to know,’ she reminded him.
He smiled too and the relief in his eyes turned Rhiannon’s heart over.
‘So are you saying that Galina was blackmailing you?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘No. I made sure it never came to that. It wasn’t something I wanted to live with, so I made it clear before I married her that if she ever made a single threat of blackmail she’d be out of my life faster than she could pack her bags.’
Rhiannon was shaking her head. ‘Then I don’t understand why you married her?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Neither do I, now,’ he said. ‘But I guess there were a lot of reasons. Like, it was what Marina and Aleks wanted; it was something my grandfather and her grandmother had always worked towards, something that just seemed to be in the natural order of things. And’, he shrugged, ‘I really did care about her. Despite everything I knew about her, the violence and the lies, I cared about her. She was on her own. She didn’t have anyone else and she’d been a part of my life for almost as long as I could remember. This is sounding like it was something I really thought about, but it wasn’t. She was there, the kids were there and it just seemed like the natural thing to do. And by the time you came into my life things had gone too far to turn back. All the arrangements were made, the kids were happy, Galina was happy . . . I just didn’t see that I could pull out.’
Rhiannon’s eyes were locked to his as he gazed down at her and brushed his fingers over her cheek. ‘Lie down with me,’ she whispered. ‘I want to feel you next to me.’
They lay together for a long time, talking about everything that had happened and holding each other, until hearing a landrover rev up outside, Rhiannon glanced over to the window. ‘I wonder what’s happening out there?’ she said.
‘I guess I’d better go find out,’ he said. ‘Get some more sleep, I’ll be back in a while.’
As Max walked outside Ellis and Ramon were coming across the camp towards him.
‘The coroner, or whatever they call him in these parts, is still with her,’ Ellis said. ‘She’ll be taken over to the plane when he’s finished. The cops want to speak to you.’
Max’s eyes moved to the direction of the chalet where Galina’s body was undergoing a preliminary autopsy. Then, as Andy came to join them, he said, ‘I won’t be giving any statements to the press, so what you say, how you handle this, is up to you. My guess is the biggest headache, initially anyway, is going to be dealing with the sightseers when they get to hear that this is where Galina Casimir lost her life.’
‘We can handle that,’ Andy told him. ‘What I need to know is whether it’s going down as an accident or a suicide.’
Max sighed, as the implications of both crowded his mind. ‘Could you live with an accident?’ he asked. ‘Would it hurt the camp?’
‘Probably more than a suicide would,’ Andy answered frankly.
‘Then I’ll talk to the coroner.’
‘When do you want to leave?’ Ellis asked.
Max turned to look at him. ‘As soon as we can,’ he answered. ‘Before tonight.’
Ellis’s surprise showed. ‘What about Rhiannon?’ he asked. ‘Is she OK to travel?’
‘Rhiannon’s not coming,’ Max answered.
When he returned to the house, after speaking to the police, Rhiannon was lying just as she had been when he’d left her, her pale, tired face looking up at him from the pillows.
‘Hi, how are you feeling now?’ he asked, sitting down beside her and lifting her hands into his.
‘I slept for a while,’ she answered. ‘I’m more worried about you, though. You should be with Marina.’
He nodded. Then lowering his mouth to hers, he kissed her gently. ‘We’ll get through this,’ he whispered. ‘You know that, don’t you? It’s just going to take a while.’
‘I can wait,’ she answered.
‘We’ll stay in touch,’ he said, ‘but let’s try not to let the press get ahold of it.’
She gave a splutter of laughter. ‘But the whole world knows about us, Max,’ she protested.
‘And very soon the whole world is going to know that Galina died here, at Perlatonga, with only you and your closest friends to say that it happened the way it did.’
‘And a coroner,’ Rhiannon reminded him.
Max’s smile was sardonic. ‘It won’t be the first time I’ll have been accused of paying someone off,’ he stated.
Rhiannon’s face paled. ‘Oh God, I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ she murmured.
‘It might not happen that way,’ he said. ‘I just want you to be prepared in case it does. Besides, I’ve got to think of Marina. She already knows you’re in my life, but she’s going to need some time adjusting to everything else, before she can take on something as important as a new mom.’
Rhiannon’s eyes widened. ‘Was that a proposal?’ she said.
He smiled and kissed her again. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We’ve still got a way to go before we get there.’
‘But we will get there?’ she prompted, feeling suddenly more nervous than she’d care to admit.
‘We’ll get there,’ he promised. ‘But I want you to get on with your life, and don’t put anything on hold for me, because I don’t have any idea how long all this is going to take.’
Chapter 29
IT WAS SEVEN months later, almost a year to the day that Max and Rhiannon had first met, that Rhiannon was getting ready to launch the In Focus series and Lizzy, a ten-week-old baby boy sleeping in a crib at her side, was helping to send out invitations to the screening. Not realizing what he was setting himself up for, Andy had grumbled continuously throughout the morning about how bored he was stuffing envelopes, so had now been dragged off to the Tower of London by Sharon to get himself ‘inspired, fired and altogether wired’. His face upon departure had kept Rhiannon and Lizzy chuckling for hours after.
On the floor below the In Focus office the Check It Out team were preparing for a new season of programmes with Rhys Callaghan as their producer and Fergus McCavey, a zany, stupendously knowledgeable and quirkily good-looking Oxford drop-out, as their presenter. Morgan and Sally Simpson had returned to early retirement only days after Mervyn Mansfield had bee
n axed as commissioning editor back in May, and Austin Wicklow, an unknown entity from a northern independent channel, had been appointed in Mansfield’s place. Wicklow had had no problem at all in accepting Rhiannon as executive producer of Check It Out, nor with commissioning her new series, In Focus.
Though Rhiannon was maintaining overall control of both programmes, Lucy had taken charge of In Focus on a day-to-day basis, while Rhys Callaghan was doing the same for Check It Out. Rhiannon’s office, for the time being, was in the new suite they had taken over for the In Focus series, but having so many more projects in the developing stages now, she was operating more and more from home so as not to interfere with, or indeed be sidetracked by, the work going on around her.
Today, however, they were all in the office as Austin Wicklow had contacted Rhiannon yesterday to inform her that he wanted the first episode of In Focus to be ready for transmission at the end of September, rather than the third week of November. As luck would have it, the first programme needed only to be dubbed, but it had left them with next to no time to organize promotions, publicity, screenings and all the other hundred and one things that had to be done before the launch of a new series. Added to that was the problem of getting the follow-up episodes in the can ready for their transmissions, though Lucy was on it and Sharon was all set to begin shooting six days a week for the next five weeks – starting tomorrow.
Lizzy and Andy were in London visiting Lizzy’s family and showing off Dominic – or Nick, as Andy preferred to call him. It was easy enough for them to extend their stay, with Doug running things back at Perlatonga, so they would definitely be there for the launch. But with such short notice to all the reviewers and diarists Rhiannon was feeling anxious about how many would be able to make it.
‘Are you kidding? No one’s going to miss this launch,’ Lizzy cried. ‘Not only is it a new Rhiannon Edwardes brainchild, it’s the official debut of the nation’s favourite whacko.’
