No Escape

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Listening to other people’s problems is up there too,’ Parry had confessed, candidly. ‘Helps put all this—’ he’d motioned towards his legs‘—in perspective.’ And then he’d grimaced. ‘Sometimes.’

  Case No. 6/201074

  PATSTON, J.

  Study/Review

  Pending

  Action

  Resolved

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘Christopher rejoining us tomorrow, I gather?’ Arden said to Lizzie at the end of their first day’s filming on Kefalonia, while the crew packed up and Wilson and Gina went over notes. ‘Nice for you, darling.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘You all right, Lizzie?’ Susan asked just moments later.

  Always Susan – most often, Susan – detecting her troubled soul.

  Careful, Lizzie.

  They’d been out on location in Argostoli, the capital, with Lizzie seeking out fresh local produce or specialities as usual, chatting to traders, buying several bottles of Gentillini wine and a locally-produced honey, and checking out ingredients for the dishes she would prepare in the following days.

  ‘Sure you won’t have dinner with us, darling?’ Arden asked.

  Most of the crew were eating together that night at the Hotel Boulevard Pyllaros half an hour or so away – where Arden, Wilson, Gina and Susan were also staying – but since the hotel had been unable to offer suitable facilities for Jack’s needs, Christopher had rented a house closer to Sami in the north of the island, more convenient in any case for much of the scheduled filming.

  ‘I really want to get back before dark, if possible,’ Lizzie told him.

  ‘Good idea,’ Susan said, ‘with those alarming roads.’

  Lizzie smiled at her. ‘The driver I had this morning was pretty sane, and he said he’d pick me up.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘He’s probably waiting.’

  Arden waited till she’d vanished from sight. ‘Do you know what’s wrong with her?’ he asked Susan quietly.

  ‘Nothing,’ Susan said, ‘so far as I know.’

  ‘Hm,’ Arden said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ Susan asked.

  The producer shrugged. ‘Hubby back tomorrow. Wife glowing till she found out. Trouble in paradise, I’d say.’

  ‘So long as you don’t say,’ Susan said.

  ‘Think the same, then, do you?’ Arden said.

  ‘Not at all,’ Susan said, slightly too sharply. ‘Not remotely.’

  Arden raised both eyebrows, then shrugged. ‘Jolly good,’ he said.

  Gilly opened the door the instant Lizzie’s taxi rattled to a halt outside the villa, a red-roofed, pink stone house with creamy shutters and jasmine and other heavenly-scented flowers in the surrounding gardens.

  ‘You look shattered.’

  ‘I am.’ Lizzie dumped her bag on the cool stone floor, handed the two large flattish boxes she’d been carrying to Gilly and raised a finger to her lips.

  ‘The boys are playing one of their awful computer games and Sophie’s in bed.’

  ‘She all right?’ Sophie seldom willingly went to bed early.

  ‘Absolutely fine,’ Gilly reassured her. ‘But she swam for quite a while, and then she played volleyball with the boys for ages, so she was exhausted.’

  ‘Jack okay?’

  ‘Very happy, I’d say.’ Gilly smiled. ‘Excited about his dad coming back.’

  Sophie’s room was on the upper floor, her parents on one side, Gilly on the other, while Jack and Edward were sharing the bedroom-cum-sitting room and bathroom on the ground floor.

  ‘I’ll just nip up first,’ Lizzie said.

  She tiptoed in, found Sophie asleep, watched her for a few moments, as she loved to do most nights wherever they were, then kissed her golden hair very gently and crept back out.

  Jack and Edward were in the sitting room.

  ‘Starving, Mum,’ Edward told her the instant she appeared.

  ‘No food tonight,’ Lizzie said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Jack said.

  She went over to plant a kiss on his cheek.

  ‘Gilly said we had to wait,’ Edward said plaintively.

  ‘No real food, anyway,’ his mother said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ her older son asked.

  Jack wrinkled his nose. ‘Wow.’ He sniffed, to double-check. ‘Pizza?’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Edward said. ‘I thought you’d be doing that mousse thing.’

  ‘Moussaka,’ Lizzie said. ‘Why would I make that when I know you don’t like it?’

  ‘Pizza,’ Jack said again. ‘Wicked.’

  ‘It’s rather a dull island on the mythological front,’ Christopher said the next evening over dinner on the terrace at the back of the house.

  The cover explanation for his sudden return to London had been a hospital emergency, but the truth was that after the ugliness in San Remo, Lizzie had asked him – guiltily, but resolutely – if he’d mind giving her a short breathing space, and he had told her that he did mind very much, but had still given in, leaving her, the children and Gilly to travel with the Roadshow to Palermo and, from there, to the largest of the Ionian islands for the next segment.

  He’d arrived that afternoon and promptly – to Lizzie’s surprise and discomfiture – invited Arden and Susan, Bill and Gina to join them for dinner.

  ‘No cooking,’ he’d said, seeing her expression. ‘All arranged with one of the better fish restaurants in town. They’re driving it over later.’

  ‘What about the children? They were expecting to have you to themselves.’

  ‘All sorted too,’ he’d replied, equably. ‘Gilly’s making supper with something light for you and I – a sort of appetizer, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t think I do like,’ Lizzie had said. ‘It all sounds very tiring.’

  ‘I think it sounds sociable,’ Christopher had said crisply, ‘and good PR, frankly, given that everyone’s been made to think I ran out on them. Anyway, our guests won’t be here till getting on for ten. Most people dine late in this part of the world.’

  ‘Most people don’t have to get up early and be filmed all day.’

  ‘My,’ Christopher had said. ‘Aren’t we starting to sound like a film star?’

  ‘I fancied shooting this segment,’ Bill Wilson said now, several hours later, after the children had gone to their rooms, ‘on one of the more Dionysian islands like Naxos, so that Lizzie could focus on wine.’

  ‘Kefalonia has some of the best wine in Greece,’ Lizzie said, prodding the rather limp grilled fish that the restaurant had delivered.

  ‘But no scope for orgies,’ Christopher said.

  ‘Sad little story,’ Gina said, ‘about that lake we’re scheduled to visit.’

  ‘Lake Melissani,’ Arden said.

  ‘Where Melissanthe, the Nymph, drowned herself when the great god Pan rejected her,’ Christopher said. ‘Though some would have it she was just a shepherdess looking for some sheep who’d fallen in.’

  ‘You’ve done your homework,’ Susan said, impressed.

  ‘Always liked Greek myths,’ he said.

  ‘Crammed with sex,’ Bill said to Gina.

  ‘Pan’s father, Hermes,’ Christopher said to the table in general, ‘is said to have raped his mother Penelope in the guise of a goat.’

  ‘So that’s why Pan’s painted half-man, half-goat, is it?’ Gilly said.

  ‘His grandmother,’ Christopher said, ‘was called Maia.’

  ‘The fire goddess,’ Arden said.

  Christopher looked directly at Lizzie. ‘Also known as the goddess of sexual heat,’ he said. ‘As Bill said, crammed with sex, these myths.’

  ‘Was that strictly necessary?’ Lizzie asked later, when the visitors had gone and Gilly was in the kitchen.

  ‘What precisely?’

  ‘The one-track conversation.’

  ‘You picked Kefalonia,’ Christopher said. ‘Hardly my fault Pan sowed some of his wild oats here.�
�

  She looked at him for a moment, then turned away. ‘I’m going to help Gilly, and then I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Am I permitted to join you?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and then added, unable to help herself: ‘No real alternative, anyway, with no spare room.’

  The visit to Melissani, the subterranean lake within a cave, was on the agenda for the last day on the island, but before that the plan was for Lizzie to bring her latest recipes to life on a barbecue to be set up somewhere in another cave just a few kilometres from Sami.

  Drogarati, said by locals once to have been a dragon’s lair, was, according to experts, a hundred and fifty million years old, a truly remarkable, vast cavern filled with thousands of multicoloured stalagmites and stalactites.

  ‘It’s so big,’ Lizzie had told the children during the journey from Palermo, ‘that there’s a concert room at the back where they can seat a thousand people.’

  ‘Wicked,’ Jack had said.

  ‘Can I come?’ Edward had asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘You promised I could come to a shoot,’ her oldest said.

  ‘It depends,’ she said.

  Arden thought it a fine idea, though not just for Edward. A barbecue in a cave, he told Lizzie, was precisely the right setting for the family-oriented segment he’d had in mind all along.

  ‘Though the company might need you and Christopher to sign an insurance waiver.’ He saw Lizzie’s expression. ‘Problem?’

  ‘Not with that,’ she’d said. ‘You said family-oriented, Richard, but Jack couldn’t possibly come to Drogarati, not with all those steps. I shouldn’t think he could even get close.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Arden said. ‘Stupid of me.’

  ‘Not in the least,’ Lizzie hastened. ‘It was a lovely idea.’

  ‘Would Jack mind missing out, if we went ahead without him?’ The producer shook his head. ‘He always seems very laid-back about his limitations.’

  ‘He is,’ Lizzie confirmed. ‘I just hate leaving him out of things.’

  Less than two hours later, Arden called from his hotel to tell Lizzie that the company had shot down the whole plan.

  ‘Not because of family involvement,’ he explained. ‘It’s the whole shebang – cooking in that place – too dangerous, apparently.’ He paused. ‘But it’s not all bad news, Lizzie, because we’ve found another cave.’

  ‘As good as Drogarati?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘A very ordinary, dull-as-ditchwater cave.’

  ‘Why’s that so good?’

  ‘Because we can still shoot footage in the original place, but since it’s Lizzie Piper and her food the viewers are most interested in, the cave’s fairly irrelevant. So now you’re going to do your barbecue thing at this other little cave – or rather, just outside the cave on a charming little beach which even happens to have a decent enough path for Jack’s wheels.’

  ‘Richard, how lovely.’ Lizzie was touched. ‘How did you find this place?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Arden said. ‘Gina went off location hunting yesterday, and your pal Susan went with her.’

  Down to Susan then, Lizzie decided, unable, perhaps unfairly, to picture Gina caring too much about anything so unglamorous as DMD.

  It was all delightful – the most enjoyable shoot of the trip so far, from Lizzie’s point-of-view – until disaster struck.

  ‘Action,’ Bill Wilson said.

  ‘Mummy!’

  Sophie, impeccably behaved till then, but spotting a rather large lizard just feet away, became unnerved and made a sudden dash for her mother, grabbing hold of Lizzie’s T-shirt and distracting her at precisely the instant that an unexpected gust of wind blew off the Ionian Sea.

  The flames on the big stone barbecue flared startlingly high, making Sophie shriek and back into Edward, who stumbled sideways, knocking a rack of white-hot shellfish, octopus and oil over his bare right arm and leg.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Lizzie pushed Sophie out of the way.

  ‘Water!’ Jack spun his chair and started for the bucket behind his mother, but Christopher got there first.

  As Edward began screaming.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Joanne was in the back garden hanging a pile of Tony’s shirts on the clothes line – he liked his shirts hung out to dry rather than put in the tumble drier because he claimed they smelled better – when Irina, playing on their small rectangle of lawn, stopped bouncing her red ball, ran to her mother and grasped at her jeans.

  ‘Man,’ Irina said.

  Joanne looked first down at her daughter, then up towards where she was pointing, and her heart began to pound, for there was indeed a man standing on the far side of the brick wall that separated their property from the common land beyond.

  ‘Mrs Patston,’ the man said, ‘please don’t be alarmed.’

  ‘Go inside,’ Joanne told Irina. ‘Go on, darling, quickly.’

  ‘Mummy come too,’ Irina said.

  ‘Mrs Patston, my name is Michael Novak, and I’m here to offer you help.’

  Joanne stared at him. His head and shoulders – all she could see of him above the wall – looked respectable enough. Which meant, she knew, nothing.

  ‘Please go away,’ she told him.

  ‘I will,’ Novak told her, ‘as soon as I’ve passed on a message.’

  ‘Mummy come.’ Irina tugged at Joanne’s jeans again.

  ‘Irina, go inside,’ Joanne said again. ‘I’ll come in a minute.’

  ‘But Mummy—’

  ‘Now!’

  The child, startled at being spoken to so sharply by her mother, ran through the kitchen door into the house. Joanne waited a moment, then took two steps closer to the wall. The man was breaking no laws she could think of and, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, she found she was not sufficiently disturbed by him to consider phoning the police.

  ‘My card.’ Slowly and deliberately, anxious not to scare her off, Novak laid his business card on top of the wall.

  ‘I’ll take it when you’ve gone,’ Joanne said.

  ‘Good idea,’ Novak said. ‘Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Joanne looked back at the house, saw Irina at the kitchen window, gazing out. ‘Please tell me quickly,’ she said, and fixed her eyes on the man again. ‘I don’t like leaving my daughter alone for long.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Novak said. ‘I’m a private investigator, Mrs Patston.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’ Joanne felt confused, hot and bothered, as if she’d had too much sun, though it was in fact a cloudy day.

  ‘A client of mine, a solicitor who knows a little about your predicament—’

  ‘What predicament? Who says I need a solicitor?’

  ‘No one.’ Novak went straight on, slowly, clearly. ‘My client would very much like to meet you to discuss the possibility of helping you break away from your problems.’

  ‘Break away?’ The hot, confused feelings intensified.

  ‘If that’s what you would like. It’s your call.’

  ‘Who are you? I don’t understand how you know anything about me?’ The word ‘solicitor’ scrabbled its way to the forefront of her mind, made her scared. ‘Who is this solicitor? Why didn’t you – he, she – just phone me, or write?’

  ‘He thought this might be better for you,’ Novak said. ‘He thought you might prefer it if your husband wasn’t involved.’ He paused. ‘This help,’ he said slowly, carefully, ‘is for you and Irina, not your husband.’

  Joanne said nothing, just stood very still.

  ‘Take my card, Mrs Patston, and think about it.’ Novak’s smile was gentle. ‘I realize this is an unusual approach, and you’re quite right to be wary, but this whole thing really would be in your hands.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘A way out,’ Novak replied.

  Joanne looked back, saw Irina still waiting, watching. ‘I have
to go inside.’

  ‘Right,’ Novak said. ‘If you want to get in touch, we’ll be waiting to hear. If not, we won’t trouble you again. Like I said, it’s your call.’ He nodded towards the card on the top of the wall. ‘Might be better not to leave that lying around, don’t you think?’

  Swiftly, gingerly, like a wild animal snatching at a piece of food, Joanne stepped forward and grabbed the card, then backed off again.

  ‘Great,’ Novak said. ‘I’ll be going now.’

  It came to her, suddenly, like a punch in the stomach. ‘Was it the hospital? Is that how you know?’

  Novak read the terror behind her eyes. ‘This isn’t official, Mrs Patston. You don’t have to worry about that, not from us.’

  ‘So what is it then?’ Joanne asked desperately.

  ‘Just help,’ Novak said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  In the days following the accident, from the chaos of casualty in Argostoli to the Athens hospital where Edward spent one night before being flown home to the Beauchamp, Lizzie saw Christopher yet again at his very best. While she feared and fretted over her son and, riddled with all kinds of guilt, forced Richard Arden to accept that she had no intention of returning to the Roadshow for the foreseeable future, her husband operated on Edward’s burns, eased his pain and comforted him, still making time to console Sophie and Jack.

  Observing Christopher, Lizzie felt in awe, thankful, and ashamed.

  This was, just as he had told her, what really counted. That other, single aspect of their life together was minor by comparison. This was not just a good father she was seeing; this was a remarkable, brilliant, valuable man, a man capable of taking care of the most important people in her life.

  So now, Lizzie did what mothers always did when their children were ill or in trouble: she made pacts. If only Edward would recover completely, be swiftly out of pain, be not badly scarred – if only Sophie didn’t feel guilty about her part in the accident – if only Jack’s condition wasn’t affected by his shock and distress, Lizzie swore she’d try not to care what Christopher was occasionally driven to do to her in bed. Never complain again.

  Never again threaten to leave.