Deception and Desire (60 page)

‘He would be, wouldn't he, if he was anxious to keep you from trying to make contact again?'

Mac shook his head. He was feeling depressed and fed up with the whole episode.

‘Let's just forget it, Steve. Whatever the reason, the message was very clear. Dinah does not want to know. And I have not the slightest intention of forcing myself in where I'm not wanted.' He pulled out his wallet, extracted his birth certificate and looked at it for a moment. ‘ This might just as well go out with the rubbish.'

‘Don't be so stupid!' Steve said. ‘You can't do that!'

‘Why not, for all the good it's done me?'

‘You might need it some day.'

‘I don't know what the hell for. But I suppose you're right. I'd better not destroy it.' He fished out Van's letter to him, still in its envelope, and put the birth certificate inside. Then he pulled open a drawer in the sideboard and pushed it all into the compartment out of sight. As he did so a pack of cards caught his eye. ‘ OK,' he said, in an effort to change the conversation. ‘How do you fancy a hand of gin rummy? And the loser buys the first round when we get to the pub!'

When his contract with Excel Oil came to an end Mac decided he would like a change of scenery.

‘I'm going to South America,' he told Steve and Des.

‘South America? You must be bloody mad! They're a load of cowboys down there!'

‘Not cowboys – gauchos!' Mac quipped.

Des looked at him blankly and Steve laughed.

‘Joke. Never mind, Des, forget it. Anyway, I know what you're saying. Safety measures come pretty low down the list of priorities when you're way out on a limb like that. But the company I'm going to work for is American – Tristar US – so they should know what they're doing, and at least it should be a bit warmer than it is here.'

‘Well,' Des said prophetically, ‘it's your funeral.'

‘Too right.' Mac couldn't explain the way he felt. He had had itchy feet ever since the episode with Van Kendrick when he had discovered once and for all that his mother had no wish to meet him, let alone try to form a relationship to make up for the lost years.

Knowing this had affected him more deeply than he would ever have imagined possible. Though he rarely thought about it consciously any more it had struck at the very core of him, aggravating the basic insecurity he had felt ever since the day his adoptive parents had told him the truth about himself. Though he still kept in touch with them, still loved them, yet he felt distanced from them by the deceit they had practised for whatever reason over the years, and that unintentional resentment refused to go away. He did not belong with them, or with anyone. He was obsessed with the need to carve out a new life for himself, recreate himself. Only then could he be at peace with himself again – and with them. He did not stop to analyse the restlessness, he only reacted to it. He wanted to see the world – and why shouldn't he do so? South America beckoned, a strange wild country where no one knew him or had any preconceived ideas about his origins. The secretive streak in his nature hated the fact that Steve and Des knew so much about him, though his visit to Bristol had only been mentioned once or twice more. In South America he could begin again, losing himself in the diving that was his life.

‘They employ every blasted nationality under the sun,' Des said when he left. ‘Just watch out for those bastards.'

‘Don't worry, I will,' Mac said, and did not mention the fact that the word bastard now had unpleasant connotations for him.

‘Why the hell won't this drawer shut properly?' Bill Tynan asked irritably. Bill was the diver who was now sharing with Steve the house which he had once rented with Mac, and he was fiddling with the top drawer in the sideboard, trying to make it run smoothly.

‘I never noticed anything wrong with it,' Steve said.

‘It's sticking.' Bill jerked the drawer open again and ran his fingers along the back of it. ‘There's something here, that's what it is.' He straightened, an envelope in his hand. ‘Looks like it's something the last fellow left behind. It's addressed to him.'

‘Mac, you mean?' Steve took the envelope, recognising it at once. He opened it and drew out Van Kendrick's letter and the folded birth certificate. Mac had obviously forgotten all about it and the top drawer of the sideboard was not one they used much.

‘I'll take it,' he said. ‘ I'll keep it for him. I expect I'll catch up with him sometime.'

‘Friend of yours, was he?' Bill asked.

‘You could say that,' Steve replied.

Six months later news of Mac reached the Excel rig, brought by a diver who had just returned from Rio.

‘I heard there was a nasty accident down Mar del Plata way. The bloke involved used to work on this rig – Mac something, his name was.'

‘Not MacIlroy?' Steve asked.

‘That's it, MacIlroy. He and his partner were on the sea bed when the bell shifted, turned right over on top of their air line. The bell man couldn't do a damn thing and the crew were all bloody foreigners – you know how they mix nationalities in these outfits. The Germans and French are all right, but if you're working with the locals – forget it. This crew were Argentinian from what I heard and they didn't understand or didn't give a monkey's cuss if they did. God knows how long it was before the poor bugger of a bell man could alert them to what had happened.'

Although in the world of deep-sea diving accidents of all kinds are not uncommon Steve was shocked. One thing to hear about near-misses and violent death when one didn't know the men concerned, quite another to learn that someone as close as Mac had been involved.

‘You mean they were both drowned?' he asked.

The diver shrugged. ‘No air supply at six hundred feet? What do you think?'

Shit, Steve thought. Poor old Mac. Well one thing was for sure. He would never need his birth certificate now.

Six months passed. Steve rarely thought about Mac now, though when he did it was with regret. He had made few real friends in his life, and he was sorry Mac was dead. Sorry – but nothing more. The first shock had long since passed and Steve had grown used to the knowledge that Mac was no more, grown used to it and filed it away in the recesses of his mind from which it occasionally rose to surprise him again. But never with the same force, never hitting him in the guts the way it had when he had first heard it. Mac was dead and that was that – end of story.

Winter had come to the North Sea once more, intensifying the biting cold with gale-force winds that whipped the sea around the rig into mountainous waves and howled angrily around the ugly structure, testing both men and metal to their limits. Often, returning chilled to the marrow and dead tired after a dive, Steve thought about moving on, but somehow he never did and he realised he had come to look on the rig and the rented house in Aberdeen as the closest thing he had to a home.

One day he would have to move on, one day he would go back to pursuing his goal, but not yet. His bank balance was growing but it was still not enough to set himself with confidence on the road he wanted to take. Would it ever be? With the passage of time it seemed he always wanted more – and still more. Diving was a way of getting it, besides being a way of life. Yet somehow Steve never doubted that one day he would achieve his ambition, though he had no clear idea how he would do it.

And then one day he read in the newspapers of Van Kendrick's death – and he knew.

At first the idea that came to him was vague and unformed, but as he turned it over in his mind his excitement grew, driving out all the tiredness, making him forget the bone-aching cold and the depressions that came sometimes along with the isolation and the knowledge that out there in the real world he was a man with a record.

Mac had been Dinah's son but Mac was dead. Mac had been Dinah's son but no one in the world except he and Des knew it – and Des was no real threat. He never read a newspaper and he did not know that Steve was in possession of Mac's birth certificate. This was his chance, Steve thought, to start afresh with a new identity – and what an identity!

Steve had always harboured the suspicion that Van had not been speaking for Dinah when he had turned Mac away; now he turned the idea over in his mind again. Everything he had read about the partnership suggested that Van had been totally dominant, deciding the course their lives should take, manipulating and coercing. Van had been a fixer and Steve was convinced he had fixed Mac for some reason of his own. But now Van too was dead and Dinah was alone. What better moment for the reappearance of that other man in her life, her son? When Mac had gone to Bristol he had met no one but Van – if Van had told anyone about the meeting they would have no idea what the mystery son had looked like. And in Steve's possession was Mac's birth certificate – the one thing he would need to prove his identity.

It was possible, of course, that Dinah would reject him. She might refuse to see him, let alone accept him. But conversely she might welcome him with open arms. It was a gamble Steve was all too ready to take.

Steve sat down and wrote to Dinah, a carefully worded letter, and whilst he was waiting for a reply he went into Aberdeen, kitted himself out with a new wardrobe, spending lavishly from his savings and counting it an investment.

When her answer came it was everything he had hoped it would be. At her invitation he headed for Bristol – not for the impersonal flat in town where Van had interviewed Mac, but for the family home in its acres of beautiful grounds. His mouth watered as he stood on the drive looking around at what might very well be his – if only he played his cards right. Then he rang the bell.

She answered the door herself, a slim blonde, past the first flush of youth but still quite beautiful. She was pale, she was nervous, and for a moment he could not tell from her face whether she was going to laugh or cry.

‘Stephen?' she said. Her voice was trembling.

‘Yes,' he said.

And she opened her arms and took him into them, there on the doorstep.

‘Oh Stephen, Stephen!' The tears were falling now; he could feel them wet on his cheek. ‘Is it really you? I thought I'd never see you again!'

‘But now I'm here,' he said.

It had been easy – so easy. He need not even have had the birth certificate – she never asked to see it. In her joy at being reunited with the son she had given up as a new born baby she accepted him completely.

There were questions, of course, later, and plenty of them, as they sat, Dinah holding tightly to his hand as if she was afraid he might disappear again if she let it go. Questions, questions and more questions – not because she doubted him but because she wanted every detail of the years between, the years she had lost.

And he gave her what she wanted. Lying had always come easily to Steve. He told her the couple who had adopted him had emigrated to Canada and that they had both been killed in a car crash when he was fifteen years old. She wept then, hugging him, saying how dreadful it must have been for him, but at least now he had
her
– at least they had each other.

And she begged him to stay.

‘Don't leave me again, please. I couldn't bear to lose you again!'

He hesitated. He had no intention of going far, but he did not want her to know that.

‘I have to earn a living. Diving is all I know.'

‘You don't have to earn a living, not now. Look, I realise you have your pride and I don't want to patronise you, but everything I have is yours too.'

‘I couldn't take it. It wouldn't feel right.'

‘Work for me then! Join the company! I see how you feel, I respect you for it – only please, don't go away again!'

‘I'm a diver, I'm not a businessman.'

‘But you could be, I know you could! And diving is so dangerous. If something happened to you I couldn't bear it.'

He'd almost smiled at the irony of it. He'd let her go on and on, putting up token resistance until he judged he had done enough to make her believe the whole thing was her idea, and then he had capitulated. He had moved to Somerset and everything had gone so smoothly he felt like laughing. He was Dinah's son, heir to a business that would keep him in comfort for the rest of his life. He had everything he had ever wanted. And he was safe – or so he had thought.

But when the security of his position was threatened Steve did not hesitate. The ruthless side of his nature, well hidden beneath the easy charm, came swiftly to the fore. All that mattered to him was preserving his charade.

Steve acted swiftly, unconcerned by the enormity of what he was doing. There was only one thought in his mind and that was that he had no intention of letting anything – or anyone – deprive him of the new life he had made for himself.

Maggie was feeling edgy though she could not have identified the reason. She finished tidying the cottage, made herself a sandwich and went outside to check on the washing she had hung out on the line. It was still not quite dry. Back in the house she looked at the clock. Liz Christopher had said that Ros's things would be ready for her in about an hour, and that was more or less up.

Maggie took her hired car and drove through the leafy country lanes to Vandina. The girl on the reception desk recognised her at once.

‘You've come for Ros's belongings. Liz told me Jayne was sorting them out and would leave them with me but she hasn't done that yet.'

‘Jayne. Is she about?'

‘No, she's gone to lunch. Hang on, though, I'll go and look in her office and see if the things are ready for you.'

Maggie stood in the foyer waiting and a few minutes later the girl was back carrying a manila envelope, a pink cardboard file and a scarf – how Ros loved her scarves!

‘These are the things, I think. They were stacked up on Jayne's desk and labelled with Ros's name. Jayne forgot to give them to me, I expect. But I'm sure it will be all right for you to take them.'