Krysalis: Krysalis (22 page)

By the time she had toweled herself dry, she was ready to think again. She knew what she had to do. She must find out about his real intentions. Then, if she had to, she would find a way to escape.

“Tell me what you’re planning,” she said.

“Lunch, followed by a siesta.”

“Planning to do about me, I mean.” She let him see she was in earnest. “It’s all such a mess.”

“I’ve already got in touch with London. We can’t do anything until my people reply, so you might as well relax and forget about things for a while.”

“I must ring David, make sure he’s all right.”

She waited in suspense. How would he deal with that?

“I’ve been thinking about David,” he said. “Your Islington phone is almost certainly being monitored. If you try to make contact, you could put him on the spot in a very big way, you know.”

“Mm-hm.”

So. He didn’t want her to contact David. Her heart produced a sickening thump. Anna felt the onset of rage. The fear was still there, yes, but more than anything now she was
angry.

They lunched simply on fresh fruit, cheese, and luscious “black” wine before sunbathing awhile, scents of
jasmine and resin deep in their nostrils and the drone of nearby bees soothing Gerhard to the verge of sleep.

Anna opened one eye. He seemed relaxed, unapprehensive. She had come up with a theory; now was the time to test it. “Holidays,” she murmured drowsily. “When I was a child, I never liked them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It always seemed like water behind a dam, a holiday. You’d think about it for ages, savoring every minute before it happened….” She carved out a ball of sand and squeezed it hard.

“Then on the first day there was a trickle of water through the dam, just a few drops that first day, because there were still thirteen more left, weren’t there? And tomorrow was going to be the same as today … but the trickle became a flood … and suddenly all that was left of the water was tears on your face … and you’d lost it.”

Anna raised her head, pretending to be struck by a thought. “Therapy’s a grown-up holiday, isn’t it? You have sessions, life becomes perfect, but then it fades. Like our affair …”

She was conscious of him sitting up. “Any regrets?” he said lightly.

“No. And yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I love David. But the times with you were … were so outside normal human existence. So exhausting.”

He chuckled. “Thanks.”

“You know what I mean. Those days were heavenly. But they faded.”

“I … hated losing you, you know?”

“I didn’t want you to divorce Clara.”

“I know. But love, real love, doesn’t ‘fade,’ to use
your word. It petrifies. Becomes a monument to something wonderful that was but can no longer be.”

Anna squeezed her eyes tight shut. She was analyzing every note, each timbre of his voice, and she knew, she could have cheerfully sworn an oath, that he meant what he said. Somewhere inside he was conscious of personal grief, an emotional ulcer that refused to heal.

Her theory was right. He wanted her all to himself. Wanted her
back.

After their siesta she swam again, investigating strange channels carved in the rock by the currents of a luminously turquoise sea. Gerhard fetched the boat and they ventured further out.

He sat in the stern, watching Anna alternately swim and dive. The current took her gently away from him, toward the shore. She drifted so far that he did not hear her first scream. Only when she yelled a second time did he jolt upright, his heart thumping. A scream filled with salt water and terror. It fired him to action. He gunned the Johnson 50 and put the
Medina
hard about.

Gerhard grasped everything in a second. Fifty yards of sea separated him from the beach. Anna was racing for the shore. Close behind and swiftly gaining was a long, sinuous shadow.

There were two empty wine bottles left over from lunch. As the
Medina
sped off, Gerhard flung them one after the other, timing each to fall ahead of the shadow. Then he picked up an oar and began to beat the water with it.

The engine was howling. He dropped the oar, grabbed the spare petrol can and threw it at the shadow as hard as he could before again starting to thrash the sea. The world wrenched sideways, there was a sudden crack, and Gerhard was falling backward.

He pulled himself up with the aid of a thwart. Not ten feet away from him, the remains of his oar were floating in two pieces. Something had bitten through one and a half inches of seasoned wood as though it were a breadstick.

He scanned the water for yards around, but it was empty. The black shadow had gone. As the pounding in his ears died away he heard Anna start to sob. He saw her crouched on the sand. Thank God …

He waded ashore. She ran to him, knocking him over, so that they collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs on the sand.

“I was swimming out there, by the cave….” Her voice sounded flat and low, her eyes looked straight through him. “I dived a couple of times. As I was coming up, I saw …” She gnawed her hand. “It was terrible … such teeth, such
jaws.
I could
feel
it catching up.”

Gerhard chafed her hands, spoke meaningless things.

“What
was
that?”

“I think … I’m sure, it was a moray eel. They don’t normally attack unless … a freak …”

She felt herself in a whirl of confusion. Gerhard had somehow become her enemy. But when compared with this terror of the sea, that scarcely seemed to matter anymore. Almost without realizing what she was doing, she hugged him tightly. Gerhard laid her down on a towel and began to massage her shoulders with deep, firm strokes. His hands ranged to and fro along her back until he was tired.

You’re a fool, she told herself. You shouldn’t let him do this. It’s wrong. But, oh! how wonderful, how soothing to feel those hands on my skin.

“It’s been ages since I massaged you,” he murmured. “Do you remember the first time?”

She said nothing, unsought sensual pleasure competing for superiority with a deep-seated fear.
You’re such a fool….

“It was after one of your first dates with David.” In spite of herself she smiled. “The Beethoven concert.”

“When you spent all evening wondering what this dry old civil servant would be like in bed.”

She tried valiantly to suppress the memories, but they fought through. “And when I got home, and he’d said goodnight, I called you.”

“I told Clara one of my patients had been admitted to emergency care. I came … and I grabbed you.” He laughed softly. “I could sense that all evening you’d been making love to David, in your mind … his body, but with my face.”

His voice was caressing, scarcely louder than her own. Her affair with Gerhard had all but run its course; it was autumn on the streets and in her life, too…. You loved this man once, she reminded herself. In those days he was real.

When Gerhard loosened the strap of her bikini top it felt like being jolted awake in the middle of a macabre dream. Anna tensed. “No.”

He began to massage her inner thighs. She pulled herself away, and sat up.

“Really no?” His smile was teasing.
“Really?”

“That was over, long ago. You know that.”

A part of
her
still didn’t know it. No man understood how to touch a woman as Gerhard did.

“It wouldn’t be important if we made love. Bodies,
that’s all. Bodies.” His voice was agonized, matching his expression.

“And the minds? The emotions, what about them?”

He looked away. He might almost have been ashamed.

“You don’t believe people can change, do you?” she snapped. “You—a psychotherapist!”

“You’ve changed.”

“Good.”

“Changed enough to come and spend a few days here, on the island. Not many people are privileged to be invited.”

“Really? What about the other women? What about …?”

He completed the sentence for her in a whisper. “Robyn.”

“My best friend!” Anna wailed. Then, almost immediately—“God! As if that mattered!”

“When you married David you made it clear that you didn’t want our affair to continue. Friends, you said, let’s just stay good friends. And Robyn was recent—1987.”

“There were others in between, you mean?”

“Isn’t that as presumptuous as my asking if you love David?” He embraced their idyllic surroundings with a long, slow look before once more facing her. “Do you, by the way?”

His question outraged her to the point where words ceased to flow. “Are you implying,” she said at last, “that I set this up? This … crude little seaside seduction, you think it was my idea?”

His laugh had degenerated into an uncertain smile. “All I’m saying is that you’ve changed.”

“Yes. I’ve grown. I’ve got some self-respect.”

“And don’t I get any credit for that?”

“You know what you did.”

“Certainly, I showed you how to—”

“Make love.” She dashed something from the corner of one eye with the back of her hand.
“Fuck.”

Anna snatched up her towel and marched off down the beach. She was angry, she was frightened, she felt utterly exhausted. But at the bottom of that violent, thundering waterfall of emotion, in a cool, protective lagoon of sanity, lay fragments of knowledge that might yet save her life.

The therapist she had put her faith in for sixteen years had no intention of either letting her contact David or releasing her. This marvelous island was nothing but a picture-postcard Alcatraz. If forced to it, he might even use the gun inside his pocket.

Anna could not understand why she felt so certain that the good doctor whom she trusted more than any other man, apart from David, had betrayed her, but her instincts would not be denied. It was as if Christ had invited the disciples to walk on water … and then laughed while they sank.

Yet Anna could see a gleam of hope, just one. Gerhard no longer loved her, because you didn’t imprison someone you loved. But his hands had told her something important, as they worked along her back.

He still desired her with a passion that was terrible.

CHAPTER
17

Albert had an easy journey to Cornwall; it was a Wednesday, and too early in the year for holiday traffic jams. Once he’d passed Bodmin, the roughly turfed, unfenced moor stretched out in every direction, and occasionally he caught sight of dirty sheep grazing by the side of the road, or sheltering in the lee of crude but strong stone walls. Ahead of him, a pale blue sky descended to meet the black moor in a hem of pink and yellow. Puffy clouds danced along, their fat fleeces thinned by the breeze, like balls of cotton being teased into strips. The sun often shone in his eyes, but he did not mind, for after the gloom of London, this was bliss by comparison.

David Lescombe obviously did not know that Albert was following him. The assignment looked as straightforward as could be. Albert’s cassettes of
La Bohème
provided the only distraction from what would otherwise have been a boring journey.

He had found New Pendoggett Farm on his Ordnance Survey map and that clearly was David’s destination,
so he wasn’t worried at the prospect of losing him. Now that the country lanes had grown narrow and cars were scarce, it would probably be best if he dropped out of sight for a while. In such a rural district, even Lescombe would eventually manage to figure out that someone was on his tail. Albert looked at his watch. Lunchtime. What he needed now was a pub, a sandwich, and a pint of real ale. He would drive on to the coast. Perhaps he might even find a fish stall, where he could buy a nice slab of freshly caught cod for Montgomery’s supper.

But as they were approaching a village called St. Breward, Albert realized for the first time that someone else might be shadowing his quarry, and he swiftly had to revise his plans.

Parked down a side road on the outskirts of the village, near where the road forked, was a black Audi with tinted glass windows. It made little impression on Albert until the other car pulled out almost into him and he hooted angrily. The Audi accelerated, taking the same branch of the fork that David had followed a moment ago.

Albert had to make a split-second decision. He elected to leave them to it and drove on as far as the village post office, where he stopped the car and got out. He put a call through to Fox, quickly establishing that no western intelligence agency was on Lescombe’s tail.

“Stay away,” Fox warned him. “We don’t want you figuring in the opposition’s frame, not yet.” When Albert said nothing, he went on, “I
said—”

“I heard you. So long, then.”

Albert left the post office, got back in his Morgan and roared away in pursuit of the black Audi.

*  *  *

New Pendoggett Farm proved easier to find than David had anticipated. He parked in the yard, got out, and stretched, tired after his long drive. The wind was blustery here; it smelled of the sea. Gulls hovered overhead, calling their penetrating, repetitive cries. A rich smell of horse dung arose from a pile of steaming straw in one corner of the yard, next to the entrance to a corrugated iron barn, piled high with straw.