Nathan Armstrong had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with a cloth that he had removed from his dapper suit. Across from them, the Roth clan and their lawyer were engaged in deep conversation, and Kris was sure that Armstrong glanced across at them nervously a couple of times. As he replaced his spectacles, however, he flashed Daniel a rather timid smile.
“Well, that was the outcome we were hoping for at this time, I guess,” he remarked. “It shows they’re taking things seriously.”
Daniel nodded slowly but said nothing. He did not look at either Kris or his lawyer for a while, but instead stared intently at Maximilian. At last, his hypnosis broke and he looked down at Kris, smiling somewhat sadly.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
As they began to shuffle sideways out of their seats, Armstrong picking up various papers, Kris looked up to see the Roths and Dohertys also beginning to emerge. One of the men and Francis’s mother looked at her hatefully, but the expression of Jane Malberry was much more ambiguous while that of Maximilian was as fixed as it had ever been, not recognising her at all. Indeed, he seemed entirely stone cold to the entire affair and yet, as Daniel passed in front of him, he reached out one hand and gently tugged on Daniel’s sleeve.
“Well,” he said in a soft voice that seemed to belie his stern features, “I hope you got what you wanted. Just remember, ye shall reap what ye sow.”
Daniel opened his mouth as though to speak, but instead closed it, his expression pained.
“You bitch!” hissed the younger, blonde woman, her eyes red with anger and grief. “How dare you! How dare you!” Her voice was starting to rise, but Jane placed a hand on her elbow and began to guide her out of the court. At this, Maximilian smiled, a wry expression, and watched her depart before looking at Kris with a cool, dispassionate stare. His eyes, grey and unblinking, began to unnerve her.
“What we do for love, eh Daniel?” he said quietly. “What good ever comes from it?” Without waiting for a reply he followed the two women.
Outside the courtroom, the security men Daniel had hired were waiting for them, guiding them towards the entrance where they could see a crowd already gathered on the steps. Daniel’s own walk grew slower as he realised that one of the men with Maximilian Roth was addressing the reporters outside, and Nathan Armstrong looked up at him briefly, flashing a nervous smile.
“No need to rush out just yet, eh?”
Daniel nodded at this and placed one arm subconsciously around Kris, though whether to protect her or himself she was not entirely sure. At last, however, the Roths appeared to make their way down the steps and Daniel once more began to lead her outside, the three large men forming a partial cordon around them.
As they opened the door onto the Californian afternoon, once more Kris was assaulted by the hubbub of questions and eager, demanding faces, hungry for scandal.
“Was it true that Mister Roth first met your wife in a sex club in New York?” she heard someone cry out, a young woman in a green blazer and a ferocious gaze. Kris’s mouth opened in shock, but she could not reply.
“Let’s not hang around here,” said Daniel, holding her closer to him.
Before she could say anything, however, one of the guards in their cordon grunted and, looking up, she saw two police officers coming towards them. The security man nearest to them looked towards Daniel, his body poised to intervene, but Daniel simply shook his head. “Let him pass,” he said, resignedly.
The nearest officer was a man in his forties, a slight paunch showing beneath his shirt but with a confidence that indicated he would brook no interruption of his duties, no matter who lay between him and his target. The other, slightly younger, man held back slightly, one hand on his waistband where a gun remained in its holster.
“Daniel Stone?” the older officer said, coming to a rest just before the two of them and between two of the security men. Daniel nodded.
“I have a warrant for your arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to be speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”
As he spoke, the other officer came forward with a pair of handcuffs. Daniel looked stunned, his arm frozen around Kris while the three security men stood waiting what to do next. Kris, however, was suddenly full of rage.
“On what charge?” she asked indignantly.
“Assault, ma’am, and intent to cause grievous bodily harm.”
“No!” Kris began to shout. “No! He was defending me! This isn’t right!”
“We can make this difficult, sir,” the older officer said quietly, ignoring her and speaking directly to Daniel, “or you can just come quietly.”
Kris felt Daniel’s arm lift from her shoulder. His expression now was one of resignation, and the security men scowled as he placed his hands in front of himself, extending them out so that the second officer could slide his pair of cuffs around the wrists.
“Take care of her,” Daniel said to the main guard as he was led away. “Take her back to the hotel—make sure no-one disturbs her.” He was calling the final words out as Kris, full of horror, was gently restrained by one of the men. She wanted to scream, to shout and race out of him, but everything was happening so quickly that she felt herself frozen in despair.
As he was placed in the car that was waiting by the steps at the bottom of the main entrance to the court, camera crew and reporters flocked beside him, a feeding frenzy for this unexpected and dramatic delight. Immediately around Kris, the air seemed too hot, the sun too bright, and she thought she would have collapsed had not one of the security men taken hold of her arm.
Watching Daniel being driven away, her eyes swept along the pavement. Two large, black limousines were waiting for members of the Roth family, but Maximilian had not yet entered one of them. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the police car, his expression stern and unyielding. Slowly, he turned around and, as he did so, his eyes caught Kris standing on the top of the steps. His smile as he looked at her made her shudder uncontrollably.
Chapter Thirteen
Upon returning to the hotel, Kris was utterly distraught. She had expected difficulties to face her from Maximilian Roth and his family, but in her worst dreams she had never anticipated that something like this would happen. In the car as it drove from the Courthouse she had been in a daze, hemmed in by the security personnel who kept a careful watch over her: it wasn’t until she closed the door to her suite, accompanied by the lead member, that she finally started to break apart.
“What can we do? What can I do? I have to get his lawyer, Armstrong—yes, Nathan Armstrong. We have to get him out of there as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the man replied. “Mister Armstrong will be with your husband now at the station.”
“Then we must get there immediately!” she said, her voice starting to rise. She could feel that she was becoming hysterical, yet at the same time she could not control it—did not want to control it. “What are we waiting for?”
The man looked at her. He had removed his sunglasses in the room, and his eyes were light brown in shade, a darker hue than Daniel’s and of course lacking her husband’s weird asymmetry. Nonetheless, she had the same sense of determination and calm grit that she had often seen in Daniel’s face. The crisis inside her head and heart slightly eased itself.
“We’ve been... instructed not to take you there.”
“Wait a minute,” almost immediately the gentle ebb of calm was replaced by a surge of anger and panic. “Instructed? Who told you that?”
“Mister Armstrong, ma’am, and he is in direct contact with your husband. He’s worried about you, that’s all, and if he worries too much about what’s happening to you then he won’t be able to concentrate on what needs doing.”
Kris opened her mouth to contradict him, but the meas
ured gaze he levelled at her held back the turmoil inside her. Unconsciously, she began to fiddle with the two rings on her hand, the diamond engagement ring and her wedding band.
“We’re here to protect you, ma’am, from any unwanted incursions into your privacy. Mister Stone and his lawyer were very clear about that.”
She nodded, feeling utterly miserable. What she wanted more than anything was to see Daniel, to be with him, and yet she also knew that her resolution could crack at any moment: too much had happened, and the careful tranquillity that she had built up inside her over the previous months was now threatened by events that were out of her control.
Another thought crossed her mind, a trivial realisation that until an hour ago had not mattered to her at all.
“I don’t know your name,” she said. “Nor the others.”
“Willard,” he replied. “Willard Bray. My colleagues are Tony and Kurt.”
She smiled, nervously, reaching out for any snippet of information that might take her mind off her current situation. “No last names?”
“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m hoping we won’t be around long enough for you to have to bother about our last names. I’m sure your husband will be back with you tomorrow, and if the trial arrangements go smoothly you can be back home to London before you know it.”
But things did not go smoothly, and Daniel did not return with her the following day.
At the arraignment, although there was still some media interest it was clearly a follow-up story to the main show in town, the arrest of Francis Roth. Whatever Daniel’s standing in the corporate world, he was evidently a much smaller fish than one of the members of the powerful Roth tribe, and Kris had the disturbing and increasingly frightening sense that she had involved her husband of only a few days in a David and Goliath contest which he could not win. She had been so used to seeing him as a giant of the world, a master of the universe, that she had only realised with a shock how relatively insignificant he was among the ruling class of America.
And yet Daniel gave no indication that he was suffering the anxieties that afflicted Kris. With terrible hindsight, she realised that he had seen this event bearing down on them, that as soon as he relented to her demands for justice he would also be the one on trial. When he was brought out before the judge, the same bold, Hispanic woman who had presided over the previous arraignment hearing, and who could not resist one ironic raise of her eyebrow when she saw the new defendant before her, he had looked out for Kris and smiled stoically, his eyes clear and bright.
The rest of the courtroom was relatively empty. None of the Roth clan was here, only their lawyer who clearly enjoyed seeing the tables turned on Daniel and Nathan Armstrong. At one point, when Kris turned around she saw a woman seated in the back row who, upon witnessing the direction of Kris’s gaze, pulled her hat down over her face. The flash of green at her wrist indicated this was the same woman who had been at court before, but when Kris said something to Armstrong the lawyer shook his head and indicated that there were more urgent demands on his attention.
In contrast to Francis, however, who had been shaking with fear, or Matthew Doherty, who had barely registered any of the proceedings around him but had kept his face sullenly withdrawn, Daniel looked about him with calm assurance, answering questions politely and from time to time glancing across to Kris. He smiled at her, and at one point he silently mouthed “Don’t worry”.
Yet she did—how could she do otherwise? And indeed, this inner strength that he displayed was itself touched by pain when the judge announced that bail would not be set for him because of the real fear that he would leave the country. Nonetheless, while Kris felt that her entire world was collapsing around her and that chaos threatened her senses, Daniel recovered quickly as though from a hidden blow. As he was led away by officers, he looked back towards her and shouted towards the lawyer: “Nathan, take care of her! Nothing is to happen to her—you hear me?” He was also calling out to Kris, but the guards pulled him away, yanking at his handcuffs so that he stumbled and she could not hear his words.
Devastated, she sat in silence for a few moments as the judge departed, unable even to stand in her grief. When she looked up, Nathan Armstrong was staring down at her, a frown on his face and kind concern in his eyes, and as she glanced up towards the other lawyer she realised, her heart suddenly full of irrational hate, that he had a smirk on his fat face, obviously glad that he had been able to deal a return blow to Armstrong’s client.
As he left, Kris suddenly remembered the other woman and quickly turned around, but the visitor was gone.
“Who was she?” she asked Nathan.
“Who?” he was shuffling his papers and quickly glanced towards the back of the room.
“The woman, who was sitting behind us.”
He shrugged by way of reply. “I’m afraid I didn’t pay attention.” With a sigh he sat down next to her. “I’m afraid that Democrat judges like our dear Justice Rodriguez are having a field day here with people such as Francis Roth and Daniel Stone. The ability to make sure that they’re locked up for a few days at least is something of a blow for class war.” He shook his head. “I’ll put in an appeal, of course, as soon as possible, but I’m afraid that Daniel won’t be with you for a week at least—and that’s if we’re lucky.”
“What happens now?” she asked.
What happened then, as she soon discovered, was that Daniel was to be “processed”, stripped of his individuality and transferred to a correctional facility in San Francisco county jail. Armstrong would have to begin work on an appeal as quickly as possible: the trial would be delayed for a while, but his concern was that Daniel would then be taken to San Quentin to be held for any longer period of time.
After imploring the lawyer to do his utmost to free her husband, she had returned to the hotel with Willard and the other security men. Most of the reporters were less interested in her as a woman alone, although she did catch sight of herself on a news bulletin leaving the Courthouse. Glancing through news items on Daniel’s tablet, she realised with a sense of disgust that the arrest of Francis and counter arrest of Daniel was providing a feeding frenzy for the local media, providing all kinds of tawdry stories. One of the most disgusting that she read, seeing the headline on a gossip site, implied that Daniel Stone had killed his first wife and wondering how long the second one would last. For so long her husband had sought to keep himself away from the media glare, yet now he was thrust into it without any choice, subjected to all its gossip and lies.
She wanted to see him as quickly as possible, but Nathan told her she must bide her time, that within a couple of days she would be able to visit him—that with any luck she would not even have to visit a jail. As such, she felt like a caged tiger, prowling in her hotel room with its views across the bay and Golden Gate Bridge. With a grim and savage sense of irony, she often found herself staring ruefully at Alcatraz. There was no way Daniel could ever end up there of course: it was merely a tourist site now. But as the waters of the bay crashed upon the barren rock, she was reminded how the golden state treated its prisoners.
When Willard came to her the next day with news that a woman was in the lobby and wanted to see her, Kris’s thoughts immediately went out to the stranger who had been seated in the Courthouse on the day of Daniel’s arraignment. As she followed the heavy set man down to the hotel lobby, at first she thought that the elegant figure in a grey, two-piece suit with her back to the elevators was indeed the woman from the Court, but very quickly she realised something was not right. That woman had dark hair, but she could see a flash of blonde beneath the hat and wondered if it was Francis Roth’s mother. Her stomach churned sickeningly at this, but as the woman turned around to glance towards Kris, smiling as she did so, her dread took on a very different form.
For a second she halted—simply stopped. All she needed to do was to ask Willard or one of the other security men to escort Maria Gosselin from the hotel and she would not have to deal
with that woman ever again. At the same time as she thought this, however, she realised that this would never happen. Her hatred towards Maria, which at one point had been so visceral when she thought that the French lawyer would drive her and Daniel apart, had in truth almost disappeared the day that she had been stripped of that ruby ring which she had worn as a kind of totem to her worship of Daniel Stone. Indeed, that day Kris had learned to feel something like pity for Maria Gosselin.
Nonetheless, it was not easy to see her sitting in this hotel now, yet at the very least she had to find out what Maria was doing in San Francisco. For six months, she had heard nothing about her nor had she sought out any information as to her whereabouts: for her to turn up here was more than coincidence.
Maria nodded as Kris came around the table and sat in front of her, somewhat stiffly. The French woman looked nervous and, still wearing her sunglasses even inside, and her smile was taut.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said as Kris smoothed her skirt over her knees. Maria looked as elegant and beautiful as ever, but to Kris it seemed that her slender grace was more fragile than it had been before, the attempt to fight off the advances of approaching age rather than accept the life that lay before her. For some bizarre reason, pity struck her again: in contrast to Maria Gosselin, Kris was a somewhat plainer woman and yet her love was allowing her to blossom in a way that the lawyer would never experience.
“I understand that I should offer you congratulations,” Maria began hesitantly. Her mouth twitched as she spoke, suppressing the jealousy that she evidently felt.
Kris nodded briefly, barely acknowledging the sentence. For a moment, she allowed a heavy silence to sit between them before abruptly asking: “Why are you here, Maria?”
Refracted Crystal: Diamonds and Desire Page 12
