Quentins (25 page)

“No, it's not that.”

“And people say you should remember the good, there was some good, Dad. I had a bit of a time trying to drag it up, but I have, so—”

“Ella, stop. Let me speak.” His voice was like a cry.

She paused.

“He sent you a letter.”

“What?”

“A letter was delivered here last night by hand.”

“No, Dad, it can't be from him . . . he was drowned out in Spain. How could he have . . .”

“It was an e-mail, put through the door by someone when we were asleep.”

“But how do you know it's from him?”

“It was open, not in an envelope.”

“It's not from Don. Dad, there's a mistake.”

“I don't know what to do, Ella. I've told your mother. She didn't read it on her way out . . . she said I could take it to her office and she would fax it to you.”

“Is it long, Dad?”

“No, it's quite short.”

“So could you read it to me?”

“But perhaps you wouldn't want me to . . .”

“You've read it already, Dad, and you've read it to Mother. Just once more. Please.”

She could hear him putting on his glasses and rustling the paper. It probably took a couple of seconds. It seemed like infinity.

“ ‘Dearest Angel,' ” he read.

“ ‘By the time you get this it will all be over. Maybe you won't care at all. You refused to get in touch with me through the many, many messages that I sent you, so perhaps you never cared. But I can't believe that. I can't believe those hours and hours of love meant nothing to you. So I want to say a special good-bye and a great thank-you for making my life so happy, and to tell you three things.

“ ‘There was room in my heart for you all, you
and
my family. I couldn't leave them when the crisis hit. I was always trying to come back for you too, but you wouldn't listen. The briefcase doesn't matter now. I won't be there to face what it reveals. If you have the generosity to throw it away on the grounds that I trusted it to you and that you would like to show me some trust too, then that would be great. But it's up to you. And lastly, I really liked your father and I know he lost clients' money because of my advice. I arranged some bank drafts, things that can be easily cashed. It's to say sorry to him and to you. This is the number of the deposit box. I wish I could give everything back to everybody. But then, I wish a lot of things, mainly that I had years ahead with you, Angel Ella. You made me feel young and happy, you made my heart sing. Please know I loved you. Don.' ”

Her father's voice trembled as he came to the end. There was a silence.

“Thank you, Dad.”

“I wish you weren't so many miles away, Ella. We wish you were at home.”

“I'm better off working hard, Dad. Believe me, I'm fine, and tell Mother, won't you?”

“He did love you, Ella.”

“Of course he did, Dad.”

She sat for a while and looked at her reflection in the mirror. None of this was happening. She would wake up soon, back at a time before she had even met Don Richardson. When conversations like she was having this morning were totally impossible. But meantime she had to get on with what the rest of the day was going to throw at her.

She went down to the lobby and asked for a taxi to Derry and Kimberly's office. She was shown into their
boardroom, where they sat close together at the far end of a table. They jumped up when she arrived.

“Ella!” Kimberly said as if surprised.

“You're here?” Derry was definitely surprised.

“We did say nine o'clock, didn't we?” Now Ella felt suddenly anxious. Maybe the shock had wiped everything out. They reassured her, that was what they had said. There was something odd about the way they looked at her, as if they hadn't expected her to make it. Had Nick disobeyed her and told them? No, he wouldn't dare.

She sat at the table and Kimberly poured coffee for them all.

“Have you been on to Dublin . . . um . . . this morning?” Derry began.

“We were just wondering if you'd been able to talk to anyone back there,” Kimberly asked.

They did know something. But how?

Ella was determined not to weaken or to put her head down on the shiny table and cry her heart out to these people about her dead love. The man who had written her a letter and e-mailed it some hours before he killed himself.

“I spoke to Nick,” she said brightly. “He said to tell you that those clearance forms are standard.” She looked from one to the other. They didn't seem to be listening to her. “So if that's all right, then . . .” She waited for them to get on with the meeting.

“You know, if you don't feel like working or concentrating today, then that's fine, there are many other days.” Derry's eyes were very kind, and he actually patted her hand in a gesture you don't see outside the movies.

Kimberly was offering the same kind of sympathetic reassurance. “No need to force yourself,” she pleaded. “It can be done when you're feeling more up to it.”

“You know,” Ella said slowly. “Someone told you about me and Don and what happened.”

“We always knew about you and Don from the outset,” Derry said simply. “We just read what happened to him this morning.”

“How did you know?” She felt cold.

“Same way as you knew I liked dogs. We looked up the files.”

“That's different. You're a public person. There's no file on me,” Ella said with spirit.

“There's plenty of information. We're not going to take up with a tiny outfit like Firefly Films, make a movie about a place we never heard of called Quentins, unless we have someone on the ground to advise us.”

“And who did you ask to advise you?”

“A lawyer. Nice guy. He marked our card, everything you said all checked out. This is about four months ago, remember, so you were a bit in the news.”

“And he bothers with tittle-tattle like that!” Ella was stung.

“To be fair to him, I think he was just letting us see everything that was on the table about everything. It has never had the slightest relevance to anything, only today we wondered . . .” Derry's voice trailed away.

“You know Don was thorough to the end,” Kimberly said.

Ella wondered how they could work together so amicably after a long spell of marriage. Once there must have been a time when they had both wished for years ahead together . . . and what were Don's words when they had felt young and happy and made each other's hearts sing.

Ella tried to lift her coffee cup but her hand was shaking so she put it down again. She
must
pull herself together, banish the sound of his voice. She must. But at this point she could almost
hear
Don saying, “I want to
say a special good-bye, a special good-bye, special good-bye . . .” It was booming through her head.

She gripped the sides of the table very hard, but she felt herself falling down. Right down into a great black pit with the voice still there in her ears. When she saw shapes, they were vague shapes first, then they turned into legs. They were legs of chairs and Kimberly's amazing, shapely ankles in their high dark shoes, and also legs in brown trousers, and eventually she saw Derry King's face only inches from her own. The square, lined face that gave nothing away. Except now it was worried and full of concern.

“She's coming round, Kim,” he said with relief.

“Keep her head down. You're meant to let the blood flow to the head.” Kimberly was authoritative.

“We'll have to lift her back onto a chair, then, to get her head down.”

Gently they did that, and she actually did feel something happening to her head, as if everything really was sliding back into place.

“What happened?” she began, but by the time she asked the question, she knew the answer. She had fainted. She struggled to sit up, but she could feel Derry's hand on her neck and she could hear his voice speaking urgently.

“You're just fine. Keep your head down. Breathe deeply, you'll be okay in ten seconds.”

Ella counted to ten and then sat up. They were both looking at her anxiously. She managed a weak grin. “Textbook lesson on how not to present your case,” she said weakly.

“We've all the time in the world. Stop fussing,” Derry said.

“You've had a shock,” Kimberly said.

“But I was fine and suddenly everything tilted.”

“Could you be pregnant?” Kimberly asked.

Derry seemed startled by her question, but Ella
wasn't at all put out by it. “No, when you consider all the disasters that have happened . . . and there have been many . . . that's not one of them.”

“Maybe you had no breakfast?” Derry wondered.

“I can't really remember if I had or not, but that wouldn't be it.”

“Your color is coming back a little,” Kimberly said. “Have a glass of water.”

“You're both so kind.” She sipped the water.

“Would you like us to contact a doctor for you?”

“No, Derry, thank you. It was just a silly faint. Just nerves, I imagine. At all this. And how much depends on me.”

“You're not nervous, Ella. We were saying that about you just as you came in. You have no real filmmaking experience, yet you're very confident and calm . . .” Kimberly was admiring.

“I hope I didn't pretend to have more experience than I do . . .” Ella began.

“No, indeed, you've been very open and frank, but you didn't come over as nervous to us,” Derry said.

“I was fine yesterday,” she said without meaning to.

They looked at each other as if unsure what to say. “And now?”

“And now if you'll forgive me for collapsing on your floor . . . I'll try not to do it again, now I'll try to get back to where we were.” Ella's eyes were very bright.

“We don't have to . . .”

“But we do have to, Derry, or I have to. This is my chance. There will be others who will get their time. Others who won't waste it by fainting on the carpet . . . so I must tell you.”

“Slowly, Ella, catch your breath.” Kimberly laughed gently.

Ella's face was agitated. “No, there's no time for me to go slowly. I've talked to Nick about those release and
disclaimer forms you spoke of. He's on top of all that. Apparently they have the same legal standing as here. And I have my notes all here, all ready when you are.” She opened her file with shaking hands. She could see them watching as she tried to pull the right piece of paper out, it was protruding from the others but it still wouldn't come out properly. It seemed to take forever.

Eventually Derry leaned over gently and took it out for her. He placed it on the table. “It's all right, Ella,” he said. His voice was very gentle.

So was Kimberly's voice when she said, “Ella, you've got it, you've convinced us.”

“What?” She was confused.

“It's all right,” Derry said. “No more pitching, we're going to give you the grant. All we do now is talk about how we make it.”

She looked at them wildly. In the middle of all this terrible nightmare, one thing had turned out as she had hardly dared to hope. “Seriously?” She checked in case they might only be teasing her.

“Very seriously,” he said with a smile.

It was the smile that did it. She put her head down on the table and cried until they all thought her heart would break.

E
lla could barely remember how she got back to her hotel. She knew Derry and Kimberly stood together smiling at her from the foyer as the Yellow Cab pulled out into the New York traffic. Somewhere she heard a bell ring. Or a clock strike. It was only ten o'clock in the morning. She got to her room and called Firefly Films.

“How did it go?” She could hear the raw anxiety in Sandy's voice.

“It's over, Sandy,” she said. “It's finished. Would you believe it?”

There was a silence and then she heard Sandy speak to Nick. “Okay, Nick, she did her very best but it didn't work. She says it's over. Nick, she gave it all she could.”

Kind, good Sandy, so loyal and supportive. Trying to say something to take the bleak look off the face of the man she loved.

“
No,
Sandy . . .
no
 . . . we got it, they're giving it to us. We won, we won the grant.”

Ella could hear the gasp and then the phone was handed over. “Is this possible?” Nick's voice was shaking.

“Open up the e-mail in a half hour. They're sending you a confirmation, Nick.”

“I don't believe you were able to go out and pitch today with everything . . . with all you had to cope
with. You're a hero, Ella, a bloody hero. How did you do it?”

“Don't ask too much about it. Let's just thank the Lord or someone that it worked out.”

“What did you say to them, Ella? Tell us, we want to know every word, every heartbeat.”

“You don't want to know.”

“But we do. We've been sitting here rigidly for the last hour and a bit . . . now she's going in. Now she's saying this, now that.”

“Yes.”

“Ella,
please,
we're only here in a panic, you're there on the spot. You've done it! Tell us!”

“I fainted on the floor first, and when they lifted me back into the chair and then when I was starting the pitch proper they said we'd got it and I cried for what seemed like an hour but may have been only fifteen minutes.”

“She's totally unhinged,” Nick explained to Sandy. “Probably drunk as well. We're going to get nothing out of her until she calms down.”

“Brenda?”

“Is that you, Ella? Everything all right?”

“Yes, fine . . . I just rang.”

“I'm so sorry about Don. It must have been a terrible shock to you.”

“Yes, it was.”

“And of course people who do something as terrible as that don't really know what they're doing . . .”

“No, he knew exactly what he was doing, but that's not what I'm ringing about . . .”

“Are you in . . . well, where you went.”

“Yes, I'm in New York. It doesn't matter anyone knowing now. He can't send anyone after me. Actually, of course, he never would have.”

“No, of course not,” Brenda murmured reassuringly.

“It's just that we've got the funding. We can go ahead with the project now,” she said proudly.

Brenda seemed astounded that she could speak of such things. “Well, now. That's wonderful. Well done. And thank God you got it over before you had all this other thing to upset you.”

“Well, in fact, I didn't. I did it this morning, just after I heard about Don. I told you I'd call the moment I knew.”

“You are remarkable, Ella. That's all I can say.”

“No, I'm only hanging on by a thread, if you must know.”

“None of us knows what's in people's minds.”

“No, I'm okay, because I do know what was in his mind. He loved me. He really did. You know, he wrote me a letter just before he died. Imagine, Brenda!”

“That's . . . that's . . . extraordinary,” Brenda stammered.

“It's amazing,” Ella said, and hung up.

“I think she's having a nervous breakdown,” Brenda said in a low voice.

“Well, she's certainly right about the documentary. Sandy was in half an hour ago to get me to sign some forms. It's all going ahead.”

“But she couldn't suddenly think that guy could have loved her,” Brenda said. “She spent over four months getting over him. She can't possibly believe he had a change of heart two minutes before he killed himself. It seems too simple, too easy. And not a word about what happened to Margery and the children, not to mention Ricky Rice.”

“I sound more like my old father every day, but it's not over by a long chalk,” Patrick said.

“Deirdre, she got us the funding,” Nick said. “She'd have called you from New York but it's too expensive.”

“Proper order,” said Deirdre. “If you're going to be tycoons, first step: you must become as tight as tics with money.”

“Very funny. Anyway, she may be home earlier than we thought. There's no need for her to be in hiding anymore if the guy is dead.”

“If he's dead,” Deirdre said.

Tim and Barbara Brady got a three-minute call from Ella. “I can't speak long, but the
great
news is that the movie is up and running.”

“Well done, Ella,” her mother cried.

Ella's father sat there in his chair. It had not been a good day. The death of Don Richardson had drawn a final line under the hopes that some of his clients might have nourished about ever seeing any of their money again. Several had been in touch with him. They had not been easy conversations. He watched his wife's pleasure as she told him with delight how Ella had managed to make the King Foundation underwrite the project. And now that Don was no longer a threat, she was going to come straight home. Rather than hiding out in New York.

“Why aren't you cheerful, Tim? It's wonderful news,” Barbara complained.

“It's great news,” he said, forcing a smile on his face. Quite a few of the people he had talked to today had expressed the view that Don Richardson might have faked his suicide. By the following morning, the newspapers had begun to express the same doubts. They reprinted stories of those who had folded their clothes, left farewell notes on beaches and had turned up in different countries with different passports years later. But then, the Richardson family was
already
in a different country at the time of the drowning. There were a lot of things that didn't quite fit together, causing a great deal
of vague and uninformed speculation in the various feature articles of the newspapers.

What had happened to his family? The wife, sons and father-in-law whom he was meant to adore? They had not come out of hiding to mourn his death. Why had Don Richardson left his wallet and documents to be readily found in a car that he had rented only that morning? What had happened to the missing money? He must have used an alias for the past four months. Was his family still living in this disguise? And if his family still had the embezzled funds, then what did Don Richardson's suicide actually achieve? It hadn't restored any livelihood to those who had lost it.

The press carried on for a few more days. The mystery of the months spent in Spain. The possible lifestyle the Richardsons might have lived on what was once called the Costa del Crime. The whereabouts of the grieving family. As always, Spanish authorities said they were cooperating closely with Irish law forces to track them down. Efforts to find the family had been intensified among British and Irish expatriates in the area of the drowning tragedy. They had led to nothing. Nobody had ever heard of this family. There had been no trace of any of them since that morning four months ago, when they had arrived in Spain using their own passports, and simply never been seen again.

And gradually, as other things happened, the story and speculation about Don Richardson disappeared from the papers. And public opinion began to revert to the thinking that he really had drowned. Brenda noticed from hearing people talk in the restaurant that the pendulum had swung back to where it was before. There had been no sightings of Don back in Dublin. And surely, if he had staged his own suicide, it would have been to get away from the mindless anonymity of being in a Spanish resort, back to where he had been king of
everything. To Dublin, where he was a somebody. Don, the great risk-taker, would have known enough people who would have hidden him. And yet there had not been a whisper.

Ella was in control again. She was alert and interested when Derry had introduced her to some of his financial people, the section where Firefly Films would direct their final budgets. She concentrated hard so that she would be able to put a face to each name.

Kimberly suggested she see some films already made on similar themes, and got her in touch with a viewing theater. It was all very simple if you had an entrance through the Kings. Ella realized more each day how important they must be and was glad she had not really understood this at the outset.

Most evenings she ate in a restaurant with Derry. He chose all kinds of different places for her, and seemed pleased with her company. He said he hated to eat alone in restaurants and usually wound up with takeout and ate at home, so she was saving him from indigestion. They talked easily. She never asked him why a man so wealthy, so single and obviously very eligible, managed to escape the prowling New York ladies. She told him tales about her childhood, and though she mentioned that they lived in what had been a garden shed in their old house, she never said why.

Derry told her tales of holidays in Alberta when he was a child; the three children went to his Canadian grandparents for the whole summer. Five years they had done that, it had always been magical. He never said why his mother had not gone with them, and she never asked.

She told him about Deirdre, who had been her friend since she was ten, and how Nick and Sandy were going to get married. She said she missed teaching, but that
she had needed to make herself free to make money this summer.

He seemed to think that this was a perfectly normal thing to do. He himself had left school at fifteen and had worked in a variety of jobs. When he was twenty, he realized he'd need qualifications if he were to try to give his brothers any kind of start in life. So he got a job as a cleaner/janitor in a college and arranged his hours so that he could do business studies as well. It hadn't been easy, of course, mopping the floors and clearing the litter bins when other kids were going out to ball games or bowling alleys. But then, nobody had it easy all the time, and he got a few good night-watchmen stints too, which of course made it very easy for him to study. So he had done well in his examinations and won scholarships to college. And he put his brothers through college as well.

So Ella didn't ask questions. She told how she would have loved brothers and sisters, and how Deirdre had said that they were vastly overrated and that rabbits were a much better idea.

He had laughed. “She sounds like a character, this Deirdre.”

“Oh, you'll meet her in Dublin.”

“I'm not going to Dublin, Ella,” he said.

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Ella had decided not to push it. And maybe they'd be much better if he didn't come. They would be freer to get on with things.

He very rarely talked about his work as the head of a hugely successful office supplies company, one of the biggest in the United States. He said it was a team effort, that he had been lucky to identify a need at the right time, something that wouldn't change every few hours, as computer software seemed to do. Kimberly had been brilliant on the marketing side, and almost everyone had been there from Day One, so in many
ways it ran itself without his having to be there every day. That's what gave him so much time to deal with the foundation, which was what he really enjoyed.

Yes, of course he had to be ruthless sometimes at work, make decisions that he hated in his heart. When he had to close down a division of his company he made sure the employees were retrained or given early retirement. He was indeed easy company. Kimberly must have met someone very special in Larry if she were able to walk out on Derry King.

Every night when she came back from her dinner with Derry King, Ella sat down at the computer and looked up the Irish papers of the day. She read with horror how there had been a thought that Don was not really dead. If only this were true. If only it were possible. She would go to any part of the earth to tell him she loved him. That she understood why he had to do what he had done. But she knew that he was dead. He had written to her to say good-bye.

Then she would read about Margery and the children. And where they could be hiding. Only Ella knew where they were. In Playa dos Angeles, using
her
name. Calling themselves Brady. It was strange to think that she could lift a telephone and give their address to the authorities. But she would never do that. He deserved better than a girlfriend who would blow everything. He had looked after those who needed to be looked after. His children and their mother and their grandfather.

And Ella. He had sent her those bank drafts, which she could cash and get her father out of trouble. Oh, if only he were alive, even for an afternoon, she would tell him how glad she was that he had loved her after all.