Deception and Desire (3 page)

Suddenly Mike had had enough. He could see the way the policeman's mind was working and in a way he could almost understand the way it must look to him. An independent young woman, a divorcee, who had suddenly decided she had had enough of the pressures of her job, had perhaps grown tired of the man with whom she shared a relationship, and had decided to cut loose, temporarily at least. It was all too feasible. Probably all too common. Small wonder they were scarcely interested. To this rather jaded policeman it was all a routine domestic matter – fill in a form, find the lady, establish her right to her privacy, close the file.

Only they didn't know Ros the way he did. They didn't know how out of character it would have been for her to simply disappear of her own volition for no reason with no word to anyone.

Mike scraped back his chair and stood up.

‘Thank you for your time, Officer. I only hope someone will take this more seriously than you appear to be doing. And I have to tell you, in the meantime I shall be making a few enquiries of my own.'

He strode along the corridor. The foyer was still busy, milling with members of the general public all convinced their problem was the most important in the world at this precise moment. Easy to see how the officers dealing with them became complacent. He threaded his way between them and out into the street. It was still raining.

There was a parking ticket in a plastic envelope on the windscreen of his car. Mike swore and tore it off. That was all he needed. He stuffed it into his pocket without bothering to read it and got into the car, leaning back against the leather headrest and letting out his breath in a long sigh.

The feeling of frustration that had overcome him in the police station was still pressing in on him and he closed his eyes, rerunning the interview in his mind and wondering exactly how far the police would go in trying to find out what had happened to Ros. Presumably they'd get in touch with her mother, who lived in Wiltshire, but Mike knew they'd draw a blank there – he had already spoken to Dulcie on the telephone, asking, in a roundabout way so as not to alarm her, if she knew where Ros was. She hadn't and he had not been surprised. Ros was not close to her mother, who had married for the second time when Ros was in her late teens. According to Ros her stepfather resented both her and her younger sister Maggie and demanded total devotion from their mother. Maggie herself was married to a Greek and lived in Corfu so it was doubtful she would know anything and he found it almost impossible to believe Ros would have flown out to visit Maggie without telling anyone. Similarly he couldn't imagine her absenting herself to visit friends but he had given the police some names and addresses anyway – old college chums in London and a best friend named Annie who lived in Scarborough.

The police would make some enquiries at Vandina, too, he assumed, in the hope that she had said something which might give a clue to her whereabouts. But he thought it unlikely that she had. Ros was such a self-sufficient and private person he could not imagine her indulging in girlie chats or confidences with her colleagues, even Dinah, for whom she had worked for six years and to whom she was fiercely loyal. That loyalty was such that Mike had sometimes seen it almost as a threat to their relationship; though he was not by nature a jealous man he had felt that there was little doubt that he did not come first in Ros's scale of priorities. He had known from the beginning, of course, how important Ros's job was to her, but her protectiveness of Dinah, which now seemed almost an obsession with her, had stemmed from the death of Dinah's husband, Van Kendrick, who was also head of the company, in a light plane crash a little over a year earlier. From that moment on Ros seemed to have assumed responsibility for Dinah, in her own mind at least, and it was this fierce sense of loyalty that Mike found one of the most worrying things about her disappearance.

Little as he liked to admit it, he could almost believe Ros might have walked out on him as the policeman had suggested. Life had taught him that women were not always to be trusted, and recently things had been a little strained between him and Ros. There had been times when Ros had snapped at him impatiently, times when she had put off a planned meeting on the flimsiest excuse, times when something bad seemed to hang unsaid in the air between them, and Mike feared it might indeed be possible that she had taken the easy way out and simply left without bothering to tell him. But that she should have done so without telling Dinah was inconceivable.

Unless … Mike sat up suddenly, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel thoughtfully as it occurred to him to wonder if certain recent changes at Vandina might have had any bearing on Ros's sudden decision. He recalled the story of what had happened as Ros had related it to him.

Dinah had, it seemed, had an illegitimate son who had been adopted as a baby. About six months ago he had turned up, having obtained his original birth certificate and discovered that Dinah was his natural mother. Dinah had welcomed him with open arms, Ros had said, and the fact that she had found her long-lost son had gone some way towards making up for the fact that she had lost the Svengali-like figure of her husband. Was it possible he had upset Ros in some way, treading on her toes where Dinah was concerned? But even given her single-minded devotion to Dinah he would have thought she was too professional to allow something like that to drive her away without even a fight.

Mike sighed in exasperation. The visit to the police station had not, in spite of the constable's obvious scepticism, done anything to make him less worried. If anything it had strengthened his anxiety. He was so damned sure the policeman was wrong in blithely assuming she had simply taken off. Yet he had chickened out of actually putting his worst fears into words – that in fact there was something sinister about Ros's disappearance.

The hollow sickness that had been there in his gut to a greater or lesser degree ever since he had arrived home from camp and found her missing reasserted itself. He was not an imaginative man, but neither was he a stupid one. Less stable characters than Ros might walk out on a home, a relationship and a career because of pressures of one kind or another, and she had seemed a little preoccupied during the last weeks. But if she had intended to cut loose she would never have done it this way, leaving so many untidy ends. It just wasn't Ros. There was the telephone call to Vandina, of course, but he couldn't help wondering if she had made it under duress and that someone was perhaps holding her against her will – or worse.

The windscreen of his car had misted up against the rain. He wiped it with the back of his hand – and saw a traffic warden turn the corner of the street. Irritation momentarily displaced anxiety. Couldn't they leave him alone for five minutes? But he did not want to tangle with the law again today. He switched on the engine and pulled hastily away from the meter.

But the dark cloud of foreboding came with him.

Halfway home Mike thought again of Maggie.

Would the police get in touch with her in the course of their enquiries? he wondered. They might, and if so she should be forewarned. Mike could not imagine Dulcie would have taken the trouble to put her in the picture and it would be too dreadful to hear from official strangers that her sister was missing.

Mike had met Maggie only briefly on her infrequent visits home, when she usually stayed with her mother in Wiltshire. But he knew Ros had written her telephone number in the book beside his own phone when she had called Maggie once from his flat.

‘Just in case I should ever lose my Filofax,' she had said, doodling a little picture of a man in Greek national costume beside the number – doodles were a habit of Ros's, a throwback to her art school days.

‘I should think if you lost your Filofax you'd have a good deal more to worry about than your sister's telephone number!' he had teased her. Ros carried everything in her Filofax, from credit cards and passport to addresses of friends and business contacts and her all-important engagement diary.

Well, it wasn't only her Filofax that was lost now, Mike thought grimly. It was Ros herself too.

He put his foot down hard on the accelerator and manoeuvred skilfully through the now thinning rush-hour traffic and the rain.

He would ring Maggie as soon as he got home.

Maggie Veritos was drinking iced coffee on the patio of her home in Kassiopi, Corfu, when the telephone began to ring. She wriggled her feet back into her flip-flops, rose from her white plastic patio chair and went into the house, screwing up her eyes in an effort to adjust to the dim light after the brightness of the evening outside.

The telephone was on the farthest wall of the inner room. She unhooked it and pushed aside her thick fall of light-brown hair to put it to her ear.

‘Hello. Maggie Veritos.'

Nothing but a series of crackles came down the line.

‘Hello?' she repeated. Still nothing.

Maggie sighed. It wasn't unusual. The telephone system in Corfu was unreliable, to say the least. More often than not it was impossible to get through and conversations, carried on over a background of static, tended to fade or even get cut off altogether. But at least the telephone was in working order now, theoretically. For a year after it had first been installed it had remained unconnected, nothing more or less than an ornament. Maggie had accepted the fact with good grace – she had learned that the Corfiote workman couldn't be hurried. ‘
Mañana
' might be a word of Spanish origin but it also applied to the attitude of most natives of Corfu. She had almost given up hope of ever having the use of her own telephone when one day the engineers had arrived and to her amazement remained long enough to do the job. Now all that was needed was for someone to improve the lines.

‘Hello!' she said again, without much hope, and when the crackles continued unabated she replaced the telephone and shrugged.

If someone wanted her they would try again. It could be a wrong number, of course – very common – or it could be a friend inviting her round for the evening.

Or it could be Ari, telephoning from his office in Kerkira to say he'd be late home again …

Maggie's mouth tightened a shade. On balance that was probably who it was. Ari often telephoned these days to say he'd be late, and Maggie was all too horribly sure what lay behind the constant stream of excuses. For a long while she'd tried to talk herself out of her growing suspicion. Ari was kept very busy – as an architect on an island where development was springing up all over the place there was plenty of work, and with his own practice to sustain he took on every offer that came his way. Besides this, he was in many ways typically Greek. Though his sense of ‘ family' was very strong his attitude towards women tended to be macho. Maggie had realised early on that he had no intention of allowing himself to be tied down in the role of dutiful husband. After a long session at the office he liked to have a drink with ‘the boys' – friends from his old crowd and new business acquaintances.

Maggie had tried not to be hurt that he no longer rushed home to her as he had done when they were first married, tried to tell herself that as long as she didn't nag, as long as she let him have his freedom, he'd get over this restlessness. But it was cold comfort. She might have her own friends in the English community, and she certainly had Ari's family – close-knit and almost claustrophobic in the way the unit was constructed, with Ari's mother, the matriarch, ruling them all with a rod of iron – but it was
Ari
she wanted. It was for him, after all, that she had moved to a foreign land, a different culture. It was him she loved, him she wanted to be with.

And then she had found out it wasn't just ‘the boys' that Ari was seeing when he stayed late in Kerkira. There was a woman too. Her name was Melina. And Maggie did not know what she was going to do about her.

She stood for a moment with her head bowed. The knowledge that Ari had a lover was a constant weight on her heart; even when she was not actually thinking about it it was still there, an ache that refused to go away.

Perhaps, she thought sometimes, she should confront him with it – tell him straight out that she knew. If this had been England, if Ari had been English, she felt quite certain she would have done just that. But it wasn't England, it was Corfu, and Ari wasn't English; in spite of having been educated and trained in England he was Corfiote through and through. It was four years now since she had first met him, almost three since he had married her and brought her home to Corfu, yet sometimes his foreignness made her feel she scarcely knew him at all.

In spite of the temperature in the room, still pleasantly warm from the heat of the day, Maggie shivered. They had warned her, of course, everyone who knew anything about mixed marriages and a great many who knew nothing besides. They had pointed out the difficulties of the culture divide, drawn attention to the pitifully high failure-rate of marriages that tried to bridge it. She would be terribly homesick, they said. She would hate being part of a family unit so tight that they lived, if not all in the same house, then next door and next door and next door again, brothers and uncles and cousins, and all ruled over by the matriarch who would expect to have the last word on every aspect of family life, from the upbringing of the children to the menus for the traditional shared Sunday meals. And leaving all that aside, looking just at the man, he would be different to any man she had ever known, the way he thought and spoke and acted determined by a heritage that was totally, absolutely foreign to her. Oh yes, they had tried their hardest to dissuade her, those prophets of doom. And her mother had been the most gloomy of all.

‘I'm sure it all
seems
very romantic, darling. Ari is incredibly handsome and Corfu is a beautiful island – so long as you keep away from the dreadful touristy places. But what will happen when the gilt comes off the gingerbread? And it will … it will!'