A Matter of Trust (22 page)

Eventually, one of the waitresses approached them with trepidation, egged on by a waiter and the manager, who stood on the sidelines, watching avidly.

‘Er, excuse me. But you are Marcheta, aren't you?' the young girl said tentatively. She was about twenty, with rather too much weight about her middle and a mass of rather badly-dyed blonde hair. Her face was just slightly awe struck.

Markie smiled at her brightly. ‘Yes, I am. Thank you for noticing.'

The waitress half-laughed and half-gushed at this ingenuous response and held out her order pad. ‘Could I please have your autograph?'

This, of course, opened the floodgates for all the others, and Callum watched in
amused
exasperation as she quickly became surrounded by admirers. He let himself be willingly pushed to the sidelines, and watched her work.

Such attention would have driven him mad within moments, but she dealt with them all kindly, and with patience. One of the older men she even kissed on the cheek and allowed his almost incoherent daughter to take their picture thus. She flirted with the young men, but never let them get out of hand, and won over the slightly-jealous women with her easygoing friendliness, handling them with an ease that an experienced psychologist could only admire and marvel at.

After twenty minutes or so, she graciously extracted herself, and they walked out to the car park.

Callum got behind the wheel and drove out of town. Beside him, Markie Kendall used her compact to artfully repair her make-up. It should have only confirmed her image to him of a bubble-headed shallow woman who earned too much money for doing something utterly ridiculous.

But it didn't.

‘Tell me about your new perfume,' he heard himself asking. ‘I heard someone say you were in Oxford to check out the labs who are making it?'

Markie nodded, and told him about choosing the kind of fragrance she wanted.
From
that, he skilfully segued into getting her talking about her long-term plans.

Although he was no genius when it came to finance, as like with most very clever men, he tended to live and breathe only in his own area of expertise, it quickly became apparent to him that this young woman had a remarkable grasp of both reality, finance and business.

In fact, by the time they came within sight of the sea, and he turned off into the small hamlet where Sir Vivian kept his holiday cottage, Callum Fielding was rapidly revising a lot of his misconceptions about Miss Marcheta Kendall.

*           *           *

‘Here it is,' he said, pulling up outside a small, stone-built cottage with a grey slate roof. Beyond it was a panoramic view of the sea, and gulls wheeled noisily overhead.

‘Vivian said he always liked this garden,' he mused.

Markie looked at the cottage bemused. ‘But it hasn't got one. It's just wild flowers and grassland right up to the front door.'

Callum smiled wryly. ‘Exactly. He said he could escape the tyranny of weeding here.'

Markie laughed, then quickly sobered. ‘I'm sorry. You really miss him, don't you?'

Callum got out of the car and stretched his long legs with a sigh. ‘Let's just say that I'm
really
angry about what's been done to him and leave it at that, shall we?' he said grimly.

Markie nodded wordlessly, and followed him as they approached the front door. The cottage looked to be the only habitation for miles, and when he used one of the keys on his keyring to let them in, the cottage had the echoing, empty sound of an abandoned building.

‘I always think that houses somehow know when their owners have truly left them,' she said quietly. They were standing in a tiny hallway, with a set of steep stairs leading off one side, and two doors opening out into rooms on the other.

Callum, who'd been thinking much the same thing, glanced at her quickly. He hadn't expected her to be so sensitive to atmosphere. ‘Yes, I know what you mean,' he said softly.

For a moment, the two of them simply stood in the quiet cottage in silence. Then Callum shrugged his broad shoulders, and said briskly, ‘Right, let's get searching. I'll take his study area, through here in the living room,' he indicated one of the doors. ‘You take the bedroom upstairs. See if you can find any diaries, personal papers, anything that might give us a clue as to who might have wanted him dead.'

‘Right,' Markie agreed just as resolutely, heading for the stairs and sprinting up them with the grace of a gazelle. She was wearing
a
plain stone-coloured skirt, with a deep rust top. Her hair was held back in a ponytail, and tied with a chiffon silk scarf of the same rust colour. With the minimum of make-up and flat rust-coloured shoes, Callum thought that she couldn't look more strikingly perfect if she'd been wearing Dior and diamonds.

He pushed open the nearest door and found himself in the familiar living room. In one corner, bookcases lined the walls at a forty-five degree angle and a small kneehole desk housed a simple computer. It was where he'd done his own work whenever he came down here to write some papers in peace, and now he made his way over to it and sat down in the old-fashioned swivel chair.

He offered up a brief prayer of regret to his old mentor and asked his forgiveness in desecrating his privacy in this way, and then with a stiffening of his spine he opened the first drawer and began to take out the folders he found there.

It didn't take him long to find what he was looking for, and he soon found himself looking down at what was obviously a photocopy of an old thesis. The name of the author, Brian Aldernay, was unfamiliar to him, but when he began to read it, he found that the contents of the work most definitely were not.

He felt a cold chill creep down his spine as he continued to read.

*           *           *

Upstairs, Markie was sitting on the edge of a double bed and was reading just as intently. But she had in
her
hands an old fashioned, leather-bound journal, and she was reading Sir Vivian's own handwriting as he described his first meeting with a young woman called Nesta Aldernay.

She read it all—feeling every emotion that the old psychology Don must have felt as she read his account of Nesta's story. She understood at once why he'd been so appalled and hardly able to believe or credit her story.

She could see instantly, from his words of pain and regret, how much it hurt him, when he began to do his own research into the matter and slowly, inexorably, came to the heart-breaking conclusion that she was right.

‘Oh you poor old soul,' Markie said, closing the journal and unable to read on any further. She needed to get this to Callum.

But when she went downstairs, she saw him hunched over at the desk, reading something with such a ferocious scowl on his face that any words died in her throat. Every now and then he would stop and stare unseeingly out of the window, obviously deep in thought, then he'd bend his head once more to the pages in his hand.

He was so deeply absorbed that she made her way, as quietly as a mouse, to the sofa
opposite
him, and curled up on it, watching him silently, Sir Vivian's journal placed carefully on the floor in front of her.

With his mind so fully occupied elsewhere, she was able to study him and think. And she had plenty to think about.

Why was she so deeply attracted to this man? Because she most definitely was! Their first meeting couldn't have been less auspicious, and since then, it seemed to her, he'd done nothing but rebuff every attempt she'd made to get closer to him.

OK, she sort of got the whole Oxford thing. He was an old-fashioned man, with a brilliant mind, who was into living life in the ivory towers of academe. But did that have to mean he lived life like a monk?

Her lips twisted into a grim smile as she remembered the blonde woman who'd been all over him back in his College rooms. Obviously not!

So he had a love life. He was not so crusty and staid that he was gathering dust, like some of the books on his shelves. So was it just that he didn't fancy her in particular?

The thought made her smile ruefully. For all the adoring fan mail she got, and all the proposals of marriage from moon-struck men, she didn't regard herself as irresistible.

Let's face it, she told herself, some men just preferred blondes!

But for all that, she didn't think it was the
case
here. For once or twice she'd caught that unmistakable gleam of desire in his stormy eyes. He might not
want
to, but Dr Callum Fielding desired her all right.

The thought gave her some comfort.

She sighed and stretched, and suddenly the sun came out and shone through the window directly onto his face, highlighting his classic features and turning his hair into the colour of old-gold.

Good grief, he was gorgeous. Big, brainy, brawny, and determined to keep her at arms length.

Take last night. How many men, given the opportunity to spend the night in a four-poster bed with ‘Marcheta' would do absolutely nothing about it? Markie almost laughed out loud as she remembered her own chagrin when she realised he actually had fallen asleep.

Still, the question remained, why? Why hadn't he even made the most basic attempt at seduction?

And she could only conclude that it had to be because he wasn't interested in having a relationship with her. Was it intellectual snobbery that was the problem? Did the great man think she was beneath him?

If so, she had the feeling that he was beginning to realise there was far more to her than just a pretty face. But to be fair to him, she didn't think that he was that arrogant.

No, she was more and more convinced that
Callum
was determined to remain cold and aloof as a form of self-defence. Which was flattering, since it meant that he saw her as a distinct threat to his way of life.

Her mind turned back to her first view of his rooms at College. So masculine and academic. So lifeless. And she realised that he was right to be afraid. She
did
want to shake him up a bit. He wasn't getting any younger, and the thought of him becoming middle-aged and then old and alone, still stuck in those rooms like a fly in amber, made her want to cry out in anger and denial. He was a deeply attractive and intelligent man. And, she felt sure, beneath that carefully controlled exterior, lurked a vibrant and passionate man.

It gave her a peculiarly feminine ache, deep inside, that insisted she be the one to rouse the male animal in him.

She simply wasn't going to give up. No matter what it took, no matter how prickly he got or standoffish. She was going to find a way under his guard and under his skin if it was the last thing she did!

At that moment, Callum turned the last page of Brian Aldernay's thesis and shut the folder with a precise neatness that underlined, rather than concealed, the cold anger he felt.

He'd been skim-reading it of course. He'd need to study it in far more detail before he was sure, but he'd read enough to get the gist of it.

And
recognise it.

He should. After all, he'd read the same thesis, published under the name of Rosemary Naismith, whilst she had been his tutor.

He sensed movement, and his head shot around in alarm, but it was only Markie. She was curled up on the sofa opposite, looking at him curiously. He felt the tension in his shoulders instantly ease.

‘You were so intent on what you were doing, I didn't like to disturb you,' she said gently.

Callum nodded wordlessly.

‘Found anything?' she persisted.

‘Yes. A thesis from a student called Brian Aldernay.'

‘That ties in with the journal of Sir Vivian that I found upstairs,' Markie said, and, reaching down, she retrieved the volume and got lithely to her feet, walking over to him and handing it across. ‘Start here,' she said, finding the entry where Sir Vivian first met the young woman from Durham.

As he read, Markie stood beside him, and slowly raised her hand to touch his hair. When he made no demur, she slowly ran her fingers through the thick silver/gold mane, his scalp feeling warm beneath her fingers.

Callum found the words in front of him beginning to blur. It was almost impossible to concentrate when she was touching him.

‘The thesis was stolen, wasn't it?' Markie
said
softly. ‘At least, that's what Sir Vivian thought. I read enough of his journal to find that out. He was researching it at the rary. He came to the conclusion that someone called Dr Naismith had stolen it and taken the credit for the work someone else had done. That's, like, the worst thing that someone in your world can do, isn't it?'

Callum nodded, again wordlessly.

Slowly, Markie slid down to kneel beside him and put her hand comfortingly on his arm. ‘Are you all right?' she asked softly.

Callum smiled grimly. ‘Not really, no.'

Markie looked down at his big hands, cradling the old man's journal. ‘Do you know who they're talking about? Nesta Aldernay and Sir Vivian—do you know who this Dr Naismith is?'

Callum slowly closed the journal and turned to look at her bleakly. ‘Yes. And so do you. You met, briefly, in my room.'

For a second, Markie couldn't think what he was talking about. She certainly couldn't remember being introduced to any Dr Naismith. And then she realised the mistake she was making. She was assuming that Dr Naismith was a man.

But he wasn't.

‘The blonde woman who was kissing you,' Markie whispered, appalled. Her face went pale with distress for him.

‘Oh Callum! They were talking about your
lover.'

‘No!' Callum denied fiercely. ‘Rosemary and I are not lovers. We never were lovers. She was my supervisor, when I was doing my own thesis, that's all. We were never that close.'

‘And does she know that, I wonder?' Markie asked darkly, unable to help feeling jealous. ‘From the way she was all over you, you seemed pretty close to me.'