A Woman of Courage (29 page)

The doorbell rang.

Now what?

She was down to pants and bra. She dragged a dressing gown over them and went to answer the door.

‘I hope you like red wine,' Lance Bettinger said.

6

A week later Lance turned up out of the blue. She thought he might be lonely so invited him in. They sat in the living room, drank a decorous cup of tea while he talked about birds.

‘Into bird watching, are you?' she said.

‘Certainly am. Both types. And you?'

‘Maybe the ones with feathers.' Truth was she had never thought about it.

‘Come spring I like to get out to Rottnest Island. A great place for birds, Rottnest.'

‘Plenty there?'

‘Stacks of them: curlew sandpipers and dozens of others.'

The name meant nothing to her. ‘And these curlew sandpipers are special?'

‘You could say so. They're tiny creatures, yet every year they migrate here all the way from Siberia.'

‘Why would they do that?'

‘Nobody knows.'

Rottnest was not just birds, he said; there were lots of beaches too, and places to eat. Bike tracks: everyone rode bikes because vehicles weren't allowed. You could go swimming.

‘Christmas there are stacks of visitors but this time of year it's almost deserted. Only a hundred or so people live there full time so you can have the beaches to yourself. They have quokkas too.'

‘Quokkas?'

‘Marsupials about the size of cats. Look a bit like kangaroos.'

‘Are they special too?'

‘About the only place in the world you'll see them. On the mainland cats and foxes have almost wiped them out. They can climb trees.'

A kangaroo in a tree would be something to see.

‘How do you get there?'

‘Ferry takes half an hour. You could come with me if you were interested.'

‘That would be nice.'

‘I'll give you a hoy,' he said.

After he had gone she sat and thought. Lance was interesting and pleasant to be with; she thought she could come to fancy him quite a lot. Unfortunately that would be asking for trouble. She had drummed up the courage to ask and he had told her yes, he was married.

‘But we broke up six months ago.'

Perhaps, but it was still dangerous territory.

‘Will you and your wife be getting together again?'

‘No chance.' He said between one day and the next she'd upped sticks and left him. ‘No notice, no discussion. She's in north Queensland now.'

‘What's she doing there?'

‘Living with some cane farmer. They met when he was over for a conference. First thing I knew about it she'd moved out and taken the kids with her.'

‘How many have you got?'

Three, he told her: Debbie, aged nine; Charlie seven and Michael, just six.

‘You miss them?'

‘Very much.'

‘It must have been quite a shock. You getting a divorce?'

‘We haven't discussed it.'

‘Because you can, can't you, after you've been separated a year?'

‘Why should I make it easy for her to marry him?'

‘Is that what she wants?'

‘Maybe. I don't know.'

‘Have you asked her?'

Silence.

Dangerous ground indeed but Hilary was reluctant to leave it there. ‘Would you take her back if she wanted?'

‘After what's she done? Never!'

It was crazy to get involved with him. Yet she did not care. Lance was there now; her feelings for him were now. She would settle for that. The alarm bells could ring as much as they liked; she would not listen.

On the way to inspect a site the next day she thought about it some more. Rebounds from failed relationships, from what she'd heard, mostly ended in disaster. Hopefully not this time but that was all you could say: there was no certainty.

In the meantime Lance had his work at the Lands Office. It was a nine to five job with no earth-shaking future but it suited him. He wasn't ambitious but Hilary's life was a whirlwind.

The lawyers were carrying out the funeral rites of her failed marriage; business and Jennifer were her only concerns now and business was booming. They'd finished their second mall and were well ahead with number three. They had housing developments under way; the meetings with councils and town planners seemed endless. They had employed more staff; Sandy had an assistant now and they'd taken on a couple of draughtsmen and a young woman to give them a hand. They were thinking of employing an architect. Hilary had thirty hours work to get through in every twenty-four but she thrived on it. She and Haskins were twin dynamos; the work was rolling in and the money. They had the world at their feet. The pain of the marriage break-up was mostly behind her and she told herself she was happy.

Jennifer was thriving too. A young woman called Agnes came in every day to look after her when Hilary was at work – to take her with her all the time was impossible – but she was determined not to be one of those women who neglected their children because of their jobs. It took a bit of juggling but she made a point of walking Jennifer in her pushchair every day. Exercise as well as time with her daughter: what was there not to like about that?

Jennifer was a remarkably pretty child. When Hilary did her shopping at the Majestic Plaza – where else? she said to Lance – she always took the child with her and it delighted her how many passers-by, complete strangers, complimented her on Jennifer's looks. Her pretty daughter's existence filled her heart. Surely that should be enough?

What did she need with additional complications in her life? With a married man called Lance Bettinger?

2004

BURGLARS GO TO GAOL

Sara and Andrea stared at each other. The sound of the approaching lift filled the silence. For a moment shock froze them, then Sara came to life in a rush.

‘We're burglars: if they catch us they'll put us in gaol! We must hide. Quick!'

Andrea's slant eyes were as round as moons. For an instant she did not react.

The whine of the lift was very loud now.

Sara grabbed her, shaking. ‘Where can we hide?'

Andrea came to life. ‘In here.'

She grabbed Sara's hand and ran, Sara stumbling after her. There was a small kitchen with toilets beyond.

‘In here.'

They crowded into the cubicle and pushed the door to. Breath was in short supply now. They stared at each other, listening. Now the lift was silent. There was no other sound.

A sign was hanging from a hook above the toilet cistern.

OUT OF ORDER

Sara took it down and looked questioningly at the other girl. Who nodded. Sara listened to the silence. She inched open the door, propped the sign open on the tiled floor and closed the door again. Carefully she shot the bolt. They waited, listening.

For what seemed a long time Sara heard nothing. Then came the sound of a telephone lifting; a man's voice.

‘Charlie Lennox,' Andrea whispered.

‘I came into the office to get some papers and found the security system had been switched off.'

The two women stared at each other in horror.

‘The thunderstorm? So if I reset it when I leave it'll be OK? I'll do that then. But maybe you could send someone round to check? Just in case. That's fine.'

The phone went down. There came the sound of a man humming.

Stop messing about, Sara implored him silently. For God's sake… If the security men arrived while they were still there…

Terror renewed itself as they heard the sound of heels approaching on the tiled floor. The sound of Charlie Lennox relieving himself. The gush of a tap as he washed his hands. He went out and a minute later they heard the click of the outer door followed by the sound of the lift going down. Relief made Sara weak. Only now did she realise how she and Andrea had been clutching each other's hands so tightly that it was hard to separate them.

‘Let's get out of here,' Andrea whispered.

‘Not until we get hold of those papers.'

‘We shall have to turn off the alarm again.'

‘So let's do it.'

Now they were running. Out of the toilet section, into the office, switch off the alarm, open the desk drawer, grab the file of papers, aware that at any minute the security goons might turn up…

‘No time to copy them,' Andrea said.

‘Take the whole file,' Sara said.

Andrea opened the door, Sara waiting outside as she reactivated the alarm system. She came out in a rush and locked the door behind her. The two of them turned to summon the lift when they once again heard it on the move. Mesmerised, they watched the winking lights as the monitor above the lift gate charted its progress up the shaft.

If we get out of this place alive it'll be a miracle, Sara thought.

Andrea was breathing fast. ‘Down the stairs,' she said.

Their heels echoed in the stairwell as they ran down to the next level. They waited, once again holding hands, until they heard the lift sigh to a stop on the floor above them. The security detail had arrived.

‘We'd better get moving,' Sara whispered. ‘They've only got to come down one flight…'

No need to finish the sentence.

‘They'll hear the lift.'

‘We'll keep going this way.'

To be as quiet as possible they took off their shoes and continued down the endless-seeming staircase, bare feet soundless on the cement, until they reached the ground level and the exit into the lobby. Sara opened the door an inch and looked cautiously out. Nothing.

‘All clear,' she said.

Andrea unlocked the outer door and they went out into the street, the deserted pavements shining with water after the storm. They heard the diminishing sound of an engine as a car sped down a neighbouring street. They looked in both directions but saw nothing. Where was Martha?

‘I know a place we can wait,' Andrea said.

They stood in a narrow passage between two high-rise buildings one block down the street. From there they could see the entrance to the building they had just left. As a hiding place it was far from perfect but would probably do.

‘How long?' Andrea asked.

‘Another ten minutes.'

Charlie Lennox's unexpected arrival had thrown their schedule into chaos. They waited until, with a cataclysmic crash of thunder, the storm returned. Within seconds the world was water as the rain beat down on their unprotected heads.

ANGELS OF RETRIBUTION

1

‘Did you get everything we need?' Martha said.

She had picked them up in the midst of the deluge and driven them both to the hotel. They had crept into the foyer before the bemused eyes of the night staff, who were unaccustomed to accepting drowned rats into their five-star establishment.

Martha, the only presentable one of the three, had summoned help in the form of towels to mop up at least some of the wet.

‘Otherwise we shall have them dripping all over the lift floor. And we wouldn't want that, would we?'

Now Sara and Andrea were sharing the massive shower and returning inch by slow inch to the civilised beings they had been two hours earlier.

Civilised burglars? Sara thought. Isn't that something of a contradiction?

But who cared, with hot water and perfumed shower gel to help ease away both the chill and trauma of their adventure?

With Andrea wearing clothes borrowed from Sara – ‘I've never been able to afford anything like this,' she said – the three of them spent hours going through agreements; statements from banks in Jersey, the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein; deposit receipts and copies of emails. They examined each one carefully; they discussed them in detail; they filed them in sequence.

At two o'clock in the morning Martha pushed her chair back from the table where they'd been working. ‘You have done well. Enough here to hang the Lennoxes from the top of the 2ifc building.'

They lay down for a while; may even have slept if you could call it sleep when Sara found herself, terrified breath and pounding heart, fleeing down the avenues of nightmare from vast and unknowable figures whose outstretched talons reached out to rend her screaming flesh…

Andrea had to get back to Kowloon, change into her office clothes and office face and present herself at the normal hour for a normal day's work, so she left while it was still dark.

‘I am feeling sick,' she said and smiled apologetically. ‘Nerves…'

It was hardly surprising yet her face, as grave and beautiful as ever, showed nothing of the night's terrors.

2

They weren't the only ones who'd worked late; lights were burning in the Lennox offices, where Charlie and Damian Lennox were looking into the night's alarms.

‘I am not happy,' Charlie said. ‘Something doesn't smell right.'

Damian was grumpy. He disliked being phoned by his over-assertive brother in the small hours, yanked from his bed and ever-charming companion in response to a crisis that was almost certainly a figment of Charlie's imagination. ‘Sounds like a storm in a teacup to me. You said you were here, for God's sake. Did you see anything? Anyone?'

‘The security boys say that after I left the alarm was switched off and then on again. Something must have caused it.'

‘Power failure, most likely. There was a storm, remember? Did the security people find anything?'

‘No, but –'

‘I'm going back to bed.' And to the delights of Miss Oh's welcoming body.

But Charlie had opened the filing cabinet. Now he turned to his brother. ‘The bank statements file…'

‘What about it?'

‘It's not here.'

They stared at each other.

‘Nobody broke in,' Damian said.

‘So someone had a key. And knew how to turn off the alarm.'

Again they stared at each other.

‘Andrea Chan,' Charlie said.