The Siren's Sting

by Miranda Darling

  ‘Pull.’

  This time low—pulverised.

  Krok broke and reloaded, cartridges hopping out like grasshoppers onto the deck. He shot well, ostentatiously, a man obviously used to more powerful weapons.

  Clémence moved closer to Stevie, murmured, ‘I almost messed that up—the comment about London.’

  Stevie turned to her. The other woman’s skin, even up close, was unlined perfection. How was that possible?

  Clémence shook her head and added, ‘He can’t hear us. He has his earplugs in.’

  ‘Clémence, is this subterfuge really necessary?’

  The reply was edged with a sudden ice. ‘I can’t imagine it’s taken you long to get the measure of my husband, Stevie.’ The painted mouth was hard now. ‘How do you think he would have reacted if I had turned around and said, “Darling, I’d like a second opinion on your threat assessments. I really think you might be overdoing it. How about calling in my ex-lover from London?”’

  So Clémence and David Rice had been lovers. That stung a little. Stevie wanted to know more but could hardly ask.

  She laid a companionable hand on Clémence’s arm. Krok was the sort of man who noticed everything; that’s why men like him survived. ‘It just seems like you are running an unnecessary risk,’ Stevie said quietly but with a smile. ‘The tiniest suspicion, a careful background check, it wouldn’t be hard to find out what I do.’

  ‘Perhaps, but look at you. You hardly look like you belong in the risk-analysis business. It’s most unlikely that Vaughan will take any interest in you beyond the male perspective—and even so . . .’ Clémence lowered her glasses and looked Stevie pointedly up and down. She had startlingly violet eyes, hard as crystal. ‘You’re not his type.’

  No, Stevie thought, that would be unlikely. She wasn’t many people’s type, as far as she could figure out. Slight to the point of fragility, with the bones of a bird, she had a sharp face—not conventionally pretty, not a beauty. She was blonde, but her hair was cropped into a little bob that left the nape of her neck bare and sat just below her ears.

  Clémence pushed her glasses back up to cover her eyes. ‘Do you swim?’

  Stevie nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I rarely do, but feel free . . .’ Clémence gestured towards the pool.

  Shaded by an overhang, the deep blue tiles transformed the water into a mirror. Reflected in its surface was a centaur, rendered in tiny brown and gold tiles, and rippling gently as the ocean breeze disturbed the skin of the water. It looked to Stevie more like a sacrificial bath than a swimming pool—like one of the dreadful eel pits of Ponza.

  Once, when visiting the island, she had gone to explore the Roman remains. The ancient emperors exiled their unfaithful wives to the island; the women in turn amused themselves by ordering pools to be dug into the cliff face and a series of tunnels with water channels that flowed into them. The sluices to these channels could be opened and ravenous eels would swim down into the larger pools. Into these pools the disgraced noble ladies then hurled their slaves. It was an amusement.

  Stevie, walking the tunnels and too fascinated for words, had missed her step and fallen into the pool. Never had a bird moved so swiftly as Stevie, leaping out of the eel pond. She had been assured that the eels had long since gone, but how certain could you be of something like that?

  Stevie felt suddenly claustrophobic, swaddled by the luxury of the yacht, the empty decks, the periodic explosions of the shotgun.

  ‘Thank you, Clémence, but I prefer the sea.’

  Quickly she unwound her turban and slipped off her kaftan. Underneath she wore her favourite navy blue swimsuit—Eres— with its modest boy leg and scooped back. It was elegant enough for the yacht, but you could swim seriously in it if you had to.

  Stevie stepped onto the railing, three storeys up, and held the nearest pole with one hand. Then she raised herself onto her toes and fell in a perfect swan dive into the glittering sea below.

  For a moment all was silent and cool and still. She opened her eyes. There was nothing but blue—deep blue bleeding into navy, into the black below. No fish, no rock, only the gleaming hull of the behemoth.

  The yacht extended a further two storeys below the waterline. And there was some sort of bulge . . .

  Stevie would have liked to swim down and find out just what it was, but her lungs were burning and she turned and kicked her way up to the surface.

  ‘Steve!’ Krok was leaning over the parapet, his eyes yellow behind his shooting goggles. ‘Get up here and have a shot. I have a four-ten here—a real ladies’ gun. I bought it for Clem but she won’t touch the thing, hates guns.’

  Stevie began to protest but there was something about Vaughan Krok that pulverised protest as fast as his shotgun did clays.

  Stevie found herself, still in her swimsuit, cropped hair hastily towel-dried, with a loaded shotgun in her hand.

  ‘How much more time have you got, Steve?’ Krok’s grating voice was close to her ear. ‘Do you hear the clock ticking in your sleep? An unmarried woman after twenty-eight has gotta be having a few sleepless nights . . .’

  Stevie slowly raised the gun to her shoulder and closed an eye.

  ‘Pull.’

  Two clays, one high, one low, zipped across the aft deck. She knew the four-ten had a small shot spread and aimed accordingly. Stevie tracked them with the tip of the barrel—one, two, smashed to smithereens.

  She broke the gun and breathed in the smell of gunpowder, now feeling remarkably better. She turned to Krok and found his yellow eyes hard on her.

  Stevie realised it might have been more prudent to miss.

  Clémence and Stevie strolled along the bottom deck to the prow. The ship was almost 400 feet long, so it was a good walk. The wind blew their voices out into the open sea.

  ‘I’m no innocent, Stevie. I knew what I was getting into when I married my husband. He’s powerful—I’m attracted to power— and generous with his money; he provides the funds, and I provide the lifestyle.’

  She stopped and lit a Vogue Slims menthol cigarette, her feathered jacket ruffling in the ocean breeze. ‘Does that shock you?’

  Stevie shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t be the first couple to have bonded over such an arrangement.’

  Clémence took a long hard look at Stevie Duveen. ‘You’re one of the romantics of the world, aren’t you? I can see it in your face. You believe in true love—well, perhaps you’re still young enough for it . . . just. But I’ll tell you this: money can buy happiness, if you know where to shop. Oh, it’s not in the clothes and diamonds and cars per se; it’s everything. It’s all this.’ She waved her hand over the Sardinian coastline, glowing pink in the afternoon sun. ‘It’s never having to fly commercial, it’s linen napkins at breakfast, it’s never having to wait for a table anywhere, ever; it’s feeling totally cocooned in the most marvellous way from the rest of the world. Who wouldn’t want that?’ Clémence stared out to sea. ‘When you marry a man with money—and I mean serious money—there is nothing you can’t do.’

  Stevie watched a small wooden fishing boat chug past, nets aloft, gulls wheeling in its wake. She turned to Clémence, her voice soft. ‘Then why am I here?’

  For a long while Clémence said nothing. Then the rumbling of the engines started up and the anchor chain began to disappear noiselessly into the prow. The Hercules would be docking at Porto Cervo tonight.

  ‘Vaughan is my third husband, Stevie, and my richest— although I haven’t done too badly out of the other two. The reason I have always been so successful is I see my marriages as work, a job, and I take them very seriously. I cater to my husband’s every whim. I make him happy. If I didn’t, I know there are plenty of other women who would. I obey the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. My husband, Stevie, has the gold.’

  Now the Hercules was underway; surprisingly quiet, it (she?) seemed to glide across the surface of the deep blue sea.

  ‘I’m still not sure I see the pr
oblem, Clémence.’

  ‘He has the gold, and he also has my son.’

  ‘Emile.’

  Clémence nodded. ‘He’s at the villa today with his tutor. My husband is very concerned for his safety—to the point of what I would call paranoia. Emile can’t go anywhere without bodyguards, he’s not allowed friends, and this spring my husband pulled him out of his school. Said it wasn’t secure. Now he’s tutored at home. Emile is being crushed. He barely speaks. It’s no life for a child.’

  Stevie glanced aft; the wake was a wall of white water roaring out behind them. ‘Does your husband have reason to fear for your son? Anything specific?’

  Clémence shook her head. ‘I don’t really know. I mean, I ask but he won’t tell me. He says it’s for my own good. He just talks about dangers, risks, situations . . . Sometimes I think it’s his way of controlling me. My husband is, I’m afraid, growing more erratic every day, his moods more unpredictable, more explosive . . . I know he has a lot on his mind—his work is extraordinarily taxing— but I feel like I am going mad.’

  She turned back to Stevie and took her sunglasses off to emphasise the point. ‘Of course, I can’t argue with him—that would go against the golden rule. And in any case, you don’t argue with a man like Vaughan. I could handle it for myself, but Emile . . .’

  The Hercules slowed down as it steamed through the narrow heads of Porto Cervo. It could just fit on the very end berth of the old port. All the others would have been too small. Two grey Zodiacs zoomed out to meet it like gadflys on a pond.

  Clémence stared up at the little church perched on the hillside high above the marina, with its curved white walls and softly undulating roof. ‘Stevie, I need you to find out if there really is a terrible danger hanging over Emile, or if my husband’s delusions are taking over. I’m too afraid to do anything myself—too afraid for me, and too afraid for Emile.’

  Stevie felt a wave of compassion for this self-confessed hardened fortune hunter, but the whole thing still puzzled her. ‘Clémence, I’m not a private investigator; I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know what David Rice has told you but I can only offer you a limited amount of help. I could do a basic risk assessment for you and Emile and see how it compares to the situation your husband has painted for you. Beyond that, I’m not sure what I can do.’

  Clémence turned to Stevie. Her eyes were blazing—they were not the eyes of a defeated woman.

  ‘There’s no one but David I can trust. He told me I could rely on you, that you had principles and courage and knew when to keep your mouth shut.’

  Stevie blushed, flattered by David’s description, by the fact that he had described her that way. She liked to imagine him thinking of her when she was not there, talking to other people about her. It was a silly vanity she would never have confessed to anyone.

  The men in the grey inflatables—the Zodiac cowboys—were guiding the boat in, stern first. One pressed a soft nose against the prow of the yacht, the other on the opposite side of the stern, like supercharged thrusters. Their drivers stood, guiding the outboard motors with one foot on the tiller, the propellers churning the clear water white.

  Clémence turned away, her gaze now on the Aga Khan’s villa, spreading discreetly between the church and the old port, with its low white walls, green lawns and riotous bougainvillea.

  ‘I’ve always felt invulnerable and in control,’ Emile’s mother continued. ‘Sure, a lot of the time I pretend to be weak because it pays off when it comes to getting your way with men, but I’ve always known I wasn’t. And then I had Emile.’ Clémence glanced quickly behind her. The crew, darting about with ropes, were too far away to overhear their conversation. ‘Do you have children, Stevie?’

  Stevie shook her head.

  Clémence put her sunglasses back on. ‘When you have a child, you give a hostage to fortune. There are suddenly so many more ways that fate—or someone—can hurt you. Do you understand now?’

  Stevie nodded slowly. She did see the picture, and it was very unlovely.

  6

  It was with no small measure of relief that Stevie, flying along in her ancient emerald green jeep, turned into Via Cappucini. She loved the old car—her grandmother’s—the doors on their leather hinges long gone, the canvas rotted away. She felt so glad to be away from the claustrophobic luxury and quiet madness of the Kroks; life at Lu Nibaru was a whole lot simpler.

  The house had been built in the early 1960s by her grandparents. A whitewashed beach bungalow cooled by the sea breezes, it was surrounded by friends and family, and a stone’s throw from the little beach.

  It was a place full of memories for Stevie, full of ghosts—her mother and father had lived great summers here before they had been taken from her. When she was five, they had spent a glorious month by the sea; then that fateful trip to North Africa that had turned Stevie’s world upside down . . .

  But on an evening like this one, heavy with the smell of the sea-salted bushes, the green foliage popping with oleander pinks and whites and hibiscus reds, the last of the light turning everything an impossible gold, it was almost as if nothing had changed, as if time had not passed and all the shattered pieces were whole again.

  Stevie was just finishing a phone call to Josephine Wang, head of the Confidential Investigations department at Hazard, when she turned into the gravel driveway of the house and stopped dead. A white station wagon was parked in the bamboo-roofed carport.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mark, I must have forgotten all about you. I’m sure Didi would have told me . . . she’s always so organised. I just can’t remember her mentioning . . .’ Didi had certainly not mentioned Mark’s visit because, had she known, Stevie might have taken some precautions, like booking a cruise in Scandinavia for a week.

  She saw little of her very distant cousin who lived in Leeds and had never shown any interest in Lu Nibaru—or Didi, for that matter.

  ‘Mark, there are mosquitoes everywhere! Can’t you get in here and do something?’ The voice drifted up the tiled stairs to the kitchen.

  Simone.

  ‘Coming.’ Mark disappeared.

  Stevie sat down at the table, her head in her hands.

  Disaster.

  Suddenly a smooth furry warmth at her feet—Ettore. Stevie had never been so glad to receive her visitor. ‘What am I going to do, Ettore?’ She stroked his lovely fur and then felt ashamed. Mark was family, however tenuous the bond, and she should make an effort. That was what Didi would do, she reminded herself.

  I’m going to be nice, she told herself. Nice, hospitable Stevie. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t all share the house. Possibly, I’ve remembered them all wrong.

  Stevie drew in her stomach and raised her chest and breathed deeply, hoping it was all a dream. Good manners start with good posture, she reminded herself, and poured out two inches of good gin. On second thoughts, she poured two more glasses, added ice and lemon, arranged a plate of olives.

  Unfortunately, good posture was not enough to get Stevie through the next hour. Simone had allergies, it turned out, to lemon rind, green olives and dogs. She also hated gin. Ettore was sent home early, much to his bewilderment and Stevie’s dismay. They headed up to the roof terrace to view the setting sun.

  As soon as they reached the terrace, Simone flashed her hand at Stevie—a large square-cut diamond. ‘We’re getting married. Did Mark tell you?’

  ‘Ah, no . . . um, how lovely. Congratulations.’

  Mark, a proud smile on his face, put his arm around his fiancée.

  Simone was a Manila girl, every inch of her groomed, plucked, plumped and polished: the most beautiful fingernails, gleaming white teeth and jewels, improbably blonde-streaked hair falling in perfectly straight lines to her chest. She wore towering cork wedges and the latest Gucci minidress—slinky black satin against her dark skin. The overall effect was not unpleasant but oddly artificial, as if perhaps there might be a slot for two double-A batteries somewhere down the back of the hot little dress.


  At least they looked happy, thought Stevie.

  Simone was staring at Stevie, still in her turban and sitting cross-legged on the stone wall—dark, hungry eyes that missed nothing.

  ‘What kind of pearls are they?’ she asked bluntly.

  Stevie looked down at her chest. ‘I inherited them from my mother when she died—they were her grandmother’s. They have great sentimental value.’

  Simone was staring at a dark blue enamelled egg the size of a large raindrop that hung from the lowest strand. A tiny diamond embedded in it drew the light.

  ‘Is that Fabergé?’ Simone’s voice rose an octave.

  Stevie blushed a little. ‘It was a gift from a friend, after a Russian adventure.’

  Henning. Dear, handsome, sexy, exciting Henning.

  He had given her the jewel after their first night together—she remembered he had rather quaintly called it a ‘love token’—with that wonderful crooked smile of his. They had been bonded by their wild adventures in Russia and beyond, by their strong physical attraction—it had felt like love. But that sort of bond was impossible to sustain. If they had stayed together, their whole story might have been a Great Romance and, to paraphrase Wallis Simpson when she became the Duchess of Windsor, Great Romances are very hard to live out. Stevie was afraid to give her heart to someone as mysterious and magnetic as Henning. Her life was too full of uncertainties without also entertaining emotional turmoil. And so she had allowed them—forced them—to drift apart. She missed his touch now and ran her hand lightly over the pendant at her throat, the memories still vivid.

  ‘I guess it’s only small.’ Simone tossed her mane disdainfully. ‘You know, you can’t swim in your pearls.’

  Stevie shrugged. ‘I never take them off.’

  ‘The salt water will ruin them,’ Simone declared.

  ‘I figure, they come from the sea and are probably happy to return to it.’ Stevie smiled, seeking to lighten her contradiction.

  Simone ignored both the comment and the smile and stared at the antique clasps. ‘You should have them valued. They might be worth more than you think.’