It was a long drive down to Liz’s country cottage. With Liz she knew she was always welcome and she knew that Liz would keep her mouth shut. And she even knew where her friend kept her spare key—under the second tub of pansies to the left of the back door. The policeman was appalled, but to her he didn’t feel like a policeman any more. He had become Maurice during the drive.
‘I’ll stay until your friend gets home,’ he told her.
‘I want to be on my own.’
He studied her and then sighed. ‘If he asks where—?’
‘No!’ she interrupted, with helpless force.
‘I’ll keep you in touch with developments,’ he asserted, and took his leave with a touching reluctance to leave her alone.
Liz wouldn’t be back until far later than she had admitted to him. This was her night with the art club. She dined in town those nights and went straight to the college for her class. Liz was an accountant, several years Bella’s senior, who painted great, vibrant canvases of the flowers she loved and enjoyed a lucrative sideline from their sales. She joked that her clients would be unnerved by that flamboyant side to her nature and only ever signed her creations with her initials.
Gramps had enrolled Bella in the art club long before she’d attended art college at seventeen. She had been the youngest in the class and had had no training whatsoever, but from her first visit the instructor had been excited by what he’d called her ‘raw talent’. More worried than pleased by his enthusiasm, her grandfather had got in touch with Hector through the medium of one of Cleo’s fleeting visits. It had been Hector who had advised them on what art college and which course, Hector who had taken charge of her artistic development.
She made a dive for Liz’s phone, suddenly desperate to hear Hector’s querulous but familiar voice.
‘I was worried sick when those nosy policemen landed on the doorstep,’ he complained furiously, making her smile. ‘And I don’t want any blasted reporters following them!’
‘I’ll stay here until the fuss blows over. I’ll ring the restaurant and tell them I’m sick,’ she muttered, speaking her thoughts out loud on the subject of her job.
‘That Griff character has been calling too. Give him a ring,’ Hector advised irritably, and then added as an afterthought, ‘You didn’t damage your hands, did you?’
‘Just my heart.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Never mind. I’ll keep in touch.’
‘Phone calls cost a fortune,’ he reminded her in dismay. ‘The Royal Mail is expensive but considerably cheaper in comparison.’
She came off the phone and laughed until she cried. Through her tears she picked up Liz’s sketch-pad and began to draw, her agile fingers moving at speed over the paper. Only when she registered what she was drawing did she stop. With a choking sensation in her throat she looked down sickly at the slashing lines of Rico’s impassive face as she had last seen him.
She threw the pad aside, in more turmoil than ever. She would work through this, get her feet pinned back down hard to ground level and gather her common sense if it killed her! After all, a week ago she hadn’t even known Rico da Silva walked the same earth. But he didn’t, she reflected with sudden fierce anger; he didn’t walk the same earth at all.
‘I feel like an idiot… a total, absolute idiot!’ Griff complained for the third time. ‘Every one of my partners is sniggering behind his hands. So what did happen in that blasted container between the two of you? I have a right to know!’
‘The same way I have the right to know who was with you the night of my birthday?’ As soon as she said it she regretted it. Griff was very handsome but suddenly, betrayed by his fair skin, he looked like a guilty beetroot that had been stabbed unexpectedly in the back by a pickle fork.
‘Well, I… I don’t know what you’re talking about! I was working that night.’
He lied so badly that she was embarrassed for him. Why was he being so possessive all of a sudden? Why was it that even an unfaithful man suddenly hung on like grim death when he sensed that you were ready to break it off? It crossed her mind that Rico hadn’t hung on…Rico had been off like an Olympic sprinter… Only good manners had made him let her out of the door in front of him.
‘OK.’ Griff heaved a constricted sigh. ‘Guilty…but it was only a flirtation… I was tempted, that’s all. Unforgivable, I know, on your birthday—’
‘Don’t you think that date was subconsciously chosen to hurt most?’
He looked blankly back at her. She was too clever for him, could practically tell him what he was about to say before he parted his lips, and whatever had been between them had evaporated entirely on her side. She decided to let him off the hook.
‘Look, it doesn’t matter, does it? We’re finished. Good friends still, I hope,’ she stressed gently. ‘But that’s all, Griff.’
‘I didn’t sleep with her!’ He startled her by surging across Liz’s tiny lounge with an amount of emotion she would never have expected from a male usually so cool and controlled. ‘And I’m sorry; I’ll never do it again,’ he swore, grasping both her hands.
He had slept with that other woman. She could tell, but it was not her place, after what had happened with Rico, to stand in pious judgement.
‘Let’s go out to dinner somewhere very public,’ he urged tautly. ‘You have to come out of hiding some time. Da Silva’s “no comment” is beginning to fall pretty hard on my ears! You’re my girlfriend, for God’s sake, but all that trash in the tabloids and your disappearance is giving everyone the idea… well, that you’ve got something to be ashamed of!’
Liz walked into the tiny bedroom where she was changing. ‘You’re going out with him?’