Ivory (36 page)

‘Yes, by Estee Lauder.' She felt her neck start to redden.

Jane looked back towards the gents, fearing George would reappear at any moment. Instead, she saw a blonde woman in her early twenties, part of a gaggle of pretty young men and women in designer surf wear, smiling at them. When she turned back she saw the corners of Alex's mouth straighten out. The girl was half his age, yet she was eyeing him off – or was it the other way around? She wondered how many women's hearts he had broken. She was mildly annoyed that he was still glancing at the poppet. ‘It was good of you to come.'

‘I'm intrigued,' he said. He held his complimentary glass of champagne up to the light, inspecting the company's logo – the letters RVR. ‘Nice crystal. I wonder who does the monogramming for them.'

She sidled closer to him and whispered, ‘George mustn't see you. He's still carrying the photo with him.'

‘I thought he might be. I'll be discreet.'

‘What are you looking at now?'

He was running his hand along the back of an armchair. ‘Nice fabric. What do you think of wing-backed armchairs?'

‘What?'

‘Whenever I travel I look at furnishings, fabrics, wallpapers, carpets . . . for the hotel. How do you think these would look in the bar? I'm thinking the colonial look might be nice.'

‘Are you serious?' How could he be talking about interior decorating when George might walk out of the bathroom at any second and catch the two of them together? She looked at the chair. ‘Um . . . I don't know. Too stuffy for a beachside location?'

He pursed his lips. ‘You're probably right. Here comes your employer. Perhaps I should go get another drink.' He left via the French doors.

She turned on her heel and navigated her way back through the crowd. That had been close. Her heart beat faster, but she smiled to herself thinking of Alex standing there admiring soft furnishings and monogrammed glasses while a man who wanted him dead was in the same room.

‘Are you all right?' George asked. ‘You look a bit pale.'

‘Fine. It might be the heat, or drinking booze so early in the afternoon.'

‘Speech time, I fear,' George said.

A man in a suit had taken position behind a lectern at the end of the hall. The passengers walked or shuffled – some needed walking sticks, Jane noticed – inside obediently. While the speaker outlined the itinerary for the train Jane nonchalantly looked about the room for Alex. He was nowhere in sight.

To her horror, when Jane tuned back in to what the railway company man was saying she realised he was calling passengers out by name. If he said Alex's name George might pick up on it.

‘Mister George Penfold and Ms Jane Humphries,' the man said into his microphone.

‘That's us,' Jane said. ‘Let's go.'

‘What's the rush?' George was halfway through his glass of champagne.

‘I want to get settled in. Come on,' Jane hooked her arm in his, and George grinned and winked at her, setting down his unfinished drink.

As they walked through onto the platform, where their hostess was waiting for her group of passengers to assemble, Jane heard the man inside call Alex's name.

‘Mister Alex –'

The rest of Alex's name was drowned out by another loud blast of the steam engine's whistle.

‘Christ, I hope they don't keep that up through the whole trip,' George said.

Jane forced a laugh and reminded him about the diesel and electric locomotives as she led him down the platform. When she risked a glance backwards she saw Alex standing head and shoulders above a group of octogenarians. He was helping an elderly woman into her carriage when he caught Jane's eye, and even far down the platform she could see him wink. Was he scared of nothing?

 

The hostess for their carriage, a young Afrikaner woman named Liszette, showed Jane to her suite in the second carriage of the train. Liszette pointed out the light switches and the airconditioner's remote control. Jane thanked her and began unpacking for the two-night trip to Cape Town.

The suite was lovely, she thought, though she viewed the permanently made-up queen-sized bed with suspicion. Jane had been expecting a single bed or a bunk, which would need to be made up for her each evening. She wondered if the bigger bed was a sign that George intended visiting her cabin. The rest of the living space was taken up with a small table, beneath which was a cupboard hiding the minibar, and two dining chairs. The interior of the carriage was panelled with polished red timber and above the bedhead were prints of watercolour paintings from the 1930s, showing people bathing in a pool on the edge of the Victoria Falls, and a group of overdressed flappers sitting around a bushveld bonfire. The ensuite contained a shower and toilet. There was a knock on her door.

‘Are you decent?' George called. She opened the door. ‘Hey, this isn't
bad, not bad at all. Come see mine. You know, it would have been nice if we could share, but as the company's paying I had to get Gillian to book two suites to keep up appearances, for the time being at least.'

She frowned at his back, but followed him down the narrow corridor that ran alongside the suites. The train started to move, then slowed, producing a jolt that caused her to reach out in order to stop from careening into George. He turned as her hand landed on his shoulder.

‘You saucy minx. Can't you even wait until lights out?'

Jane shuddered.

George slid open the door to his suite. ‘Ta-dah!'

At one end of the suite was a queen-sized bed, permanently made up, just like hers. The suite was larger, though, as were the two armchairs and the table. The main difference that Jane could see was in the bathroom, which boasted a freestanding white claw-footed bath on the black and white chequered floor. It would have been perfect for a romantic interlude, though that was now clearly out of the question, despite George's presumptions.

‘How about a pre-dinner tub?'

‘I've got a headache, George. Maybe later.'

‘Seriously? I thought you were coming on to me in the corridor.'

‘I nearly tripped, George, that was all. I'll see you later.'

‘That you will, gorgeous. That you will.'

Jane went back to her suite, slid the door closed and slumped back against it. She kicked off her new shoes, which had been rubbing painfully on her heels, and opened her minibar. She took out a bottle of water and unscrewed the cap. Her mouth was dry from the champagne she'd had at the station. Her mobile phone beeped in her handbag.

Meet me in observation car in 1 hour
, read the text message. She recognised Alex's number.

 

Alex was travelling in a Pullman Class sleeper which, while the cheapest available, was still tastefully fitted out. The trick, he realised as he ran his fingertips over the polished timber panelling, was to make people
feel they were travelling first class, even when they weren't. Timber, even varnished, would be hard to maintain in a coastal climate, though. He sat down on the wide couch, which would be converted into his bed in the evening.

He hung his suit in the wardrobe and undid the padlock on his dive bag. The lock wouldn't stop a thief, but it would tell him if someone had tampered with his luggage.

Steam swirled low along the platform. The whistle sounded again and the train started to move. Alex looked out the window. A knot of maids in green dustcoats laughed among themselves, probably glad to see the back of the train once more. Porters smiled and waved.

The staff he had seen in the station building and on board were attentive and friendly – just what one wanted in a top-class hotel. He realised he would need to spend money on training his own people once the resort was up and running. A few of the older people on the island had worked for his mother and father and would recall the etiquette of waiting on tables and dealing with guests, but most of those only spoke Portuguese and Xitswa. He would have to find an English teacher. Perhaps he could offer one free board and meals in exchange for providing lessons to his staff.

He thought about Jane.

He pictured her in the resort, showing a maid where to cut some fresh bougainvillea to put on a guest's pillow; tasting a soup in the kitchen; straightening a waiter's tie; showing Jose how to make the perfect martini; picking up a guest's toddler while the mother gathered up dropped toys.

He'd put on his best cool, calm, collected exterior for her in the departure hall at Capital Park, but inside his heart had been pounding. He wasn't scared of confronting George Penfold, but knew that if he did he would blow Jane's cover and neither of them would find out what was in the hidden package.

It was being in her presence, he realised, that had temporarily unnerved him. Ridiculous. He'd been with almost too many women to remember, and while he loved them all, in general, there had never
been one who had so deeply unsettled him. Though she looked alluringly cool and sexy in her business clothes, he knew it was the layer below that continued to attract him to her. She might be nervous, but she was risking her career – and possibly her safety – by plotting to uncover her boss's crooked dealings and, for reasons of her own, seek revenge on Penfold. She could be principled and ruthlessly calculating at the same time. Danni walked out when she didn't get her way and Kim complained about the fallout from the choices she'd made. Jane went for the jugular of a problem.

Jane's scheming had also nearly got Lisa Novak killed twice. Yet here she was, conning him into shelling out a fortune for a train trip to help her find out if the man who had asked her to marry him was worthy of her. What he should have been doing, he knew, was rendezvousing with his men and planning the most important heist of his brief criminal career. That should have been the focus of his life at this moment, not a girl with strawberry blonde hair and green eyes.

It was irrational.

It was stupid.

It was dangerous.

He checked his watch, left his compartment and walked through the now gently rocking carriages to the rear of the train.

Most of the other seventy-odd passengers were still getting settled into their cabins, and the observation car was nearly empty when he arrived. There was a barman with sideburns and a wispy moustache, and one other passenger, a redhead in an emerald green dress who sat in a deep wing-backed armchair reading a magazine, a glass of red wine beside her. She looked up as he entered and smiled a greeting. The windows here were larger than the suites and golden afternoon light flooded the carriage. The last third of the car, accessed via a sliding door, was open to the elements on the sides.

‘Good afternoon, sir. Something to drink?'

‘Scotch and ice,' Alex said to the barman.

He took his drink to the end of the carriage and opened the sliding door. Stepping out into the open he took a breath of fresh air tainted
slightly with diesel fumes, courtesy of the more modern loco that had replaced the Puffing Billy at the front of the train. It was nicer, though, to have the warmth of the sun on his back than the chill airconditioning inside.

Most of the people waiting on platforms raised a hand in silent greeting or smiled politely as the train passed them by. Some young boys in beanies called out a few angry words, but they were lost to Alex beneath the clicking of the bogies and the occasional hoot of the diesel's horn.

Tactically, it was a bad place to be waiting, at the very end of the train. If Jane showed up with George Penfold and there was a confrontation, he had nowhere to move except off the back of the observation car onto the tracks.

There was no way he would give an inch to that bastard. Part of him wanted the showdown to come sooner rather than later. The Glock bulged reassuringly in the waistband of his jeans. He didn't think Penfold would be armed. Thinking on it, the back end of a train wasn't such a bad place after all for the dispatch of a dead body.

He'd never met the man, but he hated George Penfold already. Hate was a dangerous emotion. Like love, it brought on irrational behaviour and compromised one's judgement.

Did he hate Penfold because his men had tried to kill the wife of a close friend? Maybe. He loved Lisa as a good friend and the attack on her had outraged him, though he hadn't confided his concern to Novak that perhaps Lisa's strong will had forced her attackers into a corner. She'd been found with a gun in her hand. If she and her maid had meekly surrendered to the robbers and let them ransack her home, perhaps they would have escaped uninjured.

Alex told himself he would never harm a woman in the course of his work, but then he remembered the torn bodies of women and children after an ill-judged American air strike on a village in Afghanistan. Alex had called for support to neutralise a house where a squad of Taliban armed with two heavy machine-guns were keeping his men pinned down. He'd requested Apache helicopter gunships, reasoning that a precision-guided
Hellfire missile fired from a low-level hovering helo would do the job, but the only aircraft available was a US Marine Corps Harrier jump jet. The gung-ho pilot had wiped out the machine-gun post, and two houses either side of it, with a brace of five-hundred-pound bombs. The pilot didn't have to clear the village and hear the wailing of the surviving womenfolk, or see the cold hatred in the eyes of the young men.

Whatever it was that Penfold was missing was so important to him it was blinding his judgement. He had obviously ordered Van Zyl to track down the pirates at any cost. Alex didn't hate George Penfold for trying to reclaim his property, even if it was stolen.

Jane appeared at the far end of the carriage.

Her hair was down and she'd taken off her business suit. Instead she wore a dress made of stretchy grey fabric that clung to all her curves. He felt himself start to stir, and knew it would be worse when he smelled her perfume again.

And he knew right then why he hated George Penfold so much.