Jigsaw Lovers (27 page)

‘Take the rest of the day off. In fact take the week off, until this has blown over.’

‘It’ll never blow over. I’m finished. I can’t work with these people again. My staff, my customers. You saw how they looked at me, how they laughed. They’ll always be laughing.’ Smith saw his future plans of promotion and career success dissolve before him.

‘Let’s get out of here. Go and have some lunch and see how we can go about tackling this problem.’ Smith rose slowly to his feet, then slumped back down again in the chair.

‘I can’t go back there. I can’t face them.’ A look of panic and despair swept across his face.

‘Yes you can. You have to. No one will say anything in my presence.’ Stephanus tried to sound reassuring, but he had already witnessed a change in attitude towards his own authority.

‘I can’t,’ sobbed Smith.

‘Come with me, Mr Smith. Pull yourself together man.’ Stephanus’s tone snapped Smith out of his reverie, and he walked towards the door.

They walked down the stairs. Smith noticed that there was no sign of the presentation. It had all been cleared away, as if it had never happened. If only it hadn’t, he wished.

No one looked him in the eye; they looked down or turned away, or pretended to be absorbed in some otherwise trivial detail. As he walked out into the street he was sure he could hear them laughing, or was it only in his imagination? Was this the next step towards him losing his mind?

They went to a bar in Greenmarket Square, which was relatively quiet at lunchtime. Stephanus ordered two whiskies and they sat in a dimly lit corner away from the other patrons. Smith drank his whisky in one gulp, much to Stephanus’s surprise.

‘You’d better have this,’ he said handing Smith his own drink. ‘I’ll get a couple more.’

When he returned Smith was looking a little calmer. He sat down opposite him and gave him the whisky.

‘To go back to what we were discussing in my office, just before the card arrived,’ Stephanus begun.

‘You mean how you don’t necessarily think it’s a blackmail plot against me?’ Smith queried.

‘That’s right. If someone was trying to blackmail you, then you would have expected to receive some sort of demands, backed up with the threat of exposure, if you didn’t co-operate.’ Stephanus felt the warmth of the whisky trickle down his throat. It had been many years since he had last drunk alcohol.

‘There was nothing like that. No messages, no notes, no phone calls. Nothing. At first I thought it was some form of competition game.’

‘That’s exactly what it sounds like. Somebody’s playing a game with you. It seems impossible to think that anyone would go to such lengths, but I can think of no other reasonable explanation.’

‘You mean right from the beginning? The whole affair with Diana was a setup?’ Smith asked incredulously.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I can’t believe that. She was so genuine. Nobody could have acted out a part like that for so long, without me realising. I saw her almost every day for three months. I would visit her before work, and on my way home.’ He stopped as he noticed the look of embarrassment and discomfort that these further revelations were having on Stephanus. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t need to know those details. Why would anybody want to do that to me?’

‘To discredit you. So far they’ve succeeded quite well. Your career with the Bank is in serious jeopardy, and your position with regard to the entire staff and many of your customers has also been severely compromised.’

‘I’m ruined.’ Smith drained his glass. The reality of his position once again overwhelmed him. He slumped despondently in his chair. Stephanus went again to the bar. This time he returned with doubles.

‘I may have an idea for salvaging something out of this unholy mess,’ Stephanus began as he settled into his chair and lit his pipe.

‘Tell me.’ Smith was ready to clutch at anything.

‘I have to report this to head office. I don’t have any choice. But I can choose how I report it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was thinking that if I report it in such a way that it seems like a genuine case of blackmail, then, maybe, they might view it more sympathetically.’

‘What about the staff?’

‘Earlier, I suggested you take the week off. But now I think you should try and carry on as though nothing untoward has happened. As though you are an innocent victim.’

‘I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do that.’ Smith remembered the looks and the laughter.

‘You must try,’ Stephanus stated firmly. ‘I’ll call a meeting after close of business today, with you at my side, and explain that this was a vicious attempt to blackmail you, but because you refused to give in to their cowardly threats, and were prepared to suffer personally, the perpetrators sent the photograph, in an act of vengeance.’

Smith looked uneasy. He began to speak. ‘It’s very good of you to do that, sir, especially after the things you heard me say about you. The truth is I didn’t say them like that. There’s lots that’s missing, and as it stands at the moment it makes me look a lot worse than I am.’

‘I realise that. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and stand by you, no matter what.’ In reality, Stephanus knew only too well that, unless he was able to convince his superiors of mitigating circumstances, his own continued position with the Bank would be a very short-lived one. He had less than a year to go before retirement and he didn’t want to risk his pension.

‘We must work out a story between us. We’ll say you received a telephone call, threatening to expose you if you didn’t hand over another million. When you said no, the card was sent.’

‘But what about the video?’

‘Only you and I have seen it. I’ll destroy it. We’ll pretend it never existed. All you received was the jigsaw puzzle and the card.’ It seemed to make sense to Smith. Here was a simple way out. It was, after all, a more plausible explanation as to what had been going on in his life recently.

‘How are we going to account for the missing money I’ve already handed over?’

‘To you or me, in fact most people, a million is a lot of money. To the Bank it’s relatively nothing. There are contingency funds for events like this. The Bank would rather write the money off, than face the public embarrassment of admitting that it was the victim of a such a simple fraud.’ Stephanus’s cheeks had acquired a rosy glow from the unaccustomed consumption of alcohol, which also helped him clarify his own plan, and convince himself that it was morally correct to create such a cover-up.

Smith began to hope it might work. This could be a way out of the terrible predicament he had stupidly managed to enmesh himself in.

‘There’s just one other thing, John, which I don’t think will be as easy.’ Stephanus said as he stood.

‘What’s that?’

‘You must tell Catherine before she finds out from someone else.’

‘But there’s no reason for her to find out.’ He had been so preoccupied with the problems surrounding his own career, that he hadn’t considered the implications of this morning’s events on his marriage.

‘Don’t be silly. Too many people know. Far better she finds out from you, than that she hears some gossip. She’ll be a lot more understanding.’

‘You have a point there. I’ll speak to her this evening.’

The two men left. They didn’t pay any attention to the man sitting three tables away, with a hearing aid, leisurely completing the crossword in his newspaper.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, on the day of their fifteenth wedding anniversary, when the motorcycle messenger arrived at John and Catherine Smith’s house.

They lived in Cape Town’s northern suburbs, on a sprawling housing development that was built during the early eighties. They had lived in this single-storeyed four bedroom house since it was first built. At the time it had stretched their finances to the limit. They had only been able to afford it because John benefited from a preferential employee’s mortgage rate from the Bank. To the front of the house there was an unfenced lawn, with a paved drive-way leading to a double garage and the front door.

The messenger walked up the path, rang the doorbell and then stood back.

Catherine had just returned from dropping the children off at their ballet class and was in the process of beginning to prepare supper.

She wondered who would be calling as she wasn’t expecting anyone.

‘Who is it?’ she asked looking through the door-viewer.

‘Delivery for a Mrs Catherine Smith.’ The messenger, crash helmet in one hand, stood on the front step and held out a large brown package. Catherine opened the door, unlocked the security gate and took the package, turned it over and saw that her name was in fact on it. She was not expecting anything. In fact she couldn’t remember ever having received anything by messenger. She was very curious. She signed the receipt and went inside the house. This was a most unusual occurrence. She double-checked the name, to see that it wasn’t really for her husband, and then tore the perforated strip at the top to open it.

Inside she found an envelope and a DVD. A type-written note attached to the envelope advised her to watch the
disk prior to viewing the contents of the envelope. Intrigued she went over to the DVD player next to the television and inserted the disk. It slid in with a gentle whir and a click. She switched on the television and positioned herself cross-legged on the floor in front of it.

The disk began to play. A refined male voice spoke, whilst in the background the slow movement from Mozart’s twenty-third Piano Concerto played.

‘The scenes you are about to witness took place between the evening of March the thirty-first and the morning of June the thirtieth, this year.’

The screen filled with a view of Table Mountain taken across Table Bay from Bloubergstrand.

‘They occurred in and around the Cape Town area. The primary characters involved in the episodes shown here are: John Robert Smith, husband to Catherine Elizabeth, father of Anne and Fiona;’

Table Mountain dissolved to be replaced by a photograph of her husband, dressed in jacket and tie. She recognised it as the one that was taken on their tenth wedding anniversary, which sat on the side table in the dining room. This in turn dissolved into a family portrait of all four of them taken last summer.

The voice continued,
‘and Diana Johnston.’

The face of a beautiful young woman appeared. The name sounded familiar but she couldn’t remember from where.

‘The scenes tell a story of lust that turns into love, deceit that brings with it betrayal, and obsession that will ultimately lead to destruction.

‘If you continue to watch, Catherine Elizabeth, what you wi
ll see will change your life forever. You have been warned.’

She pushed the pause on the remote control. She was totally confused by what she had just seen and listened to. What did it mean? She was more curious than concerned. Then she realised. It was obviously from John to commemorate their anniversary. What a sweet man he was. She pressed the play button.

A date, 31 March, appeared in the middle of the screen. Then text slowly scrolled up from the bottom. It read: ‘
TELLS WIFE CATHERINE THAT HE WILL BE HOME LATE, AS HE HAS TO ATTEND A FOREIGN EXCHANGE CONFERENCE.
’

‘This is what he was exchanging with this particular foreigner.’

There appeared a scene of people standing around having drinks. A man walked into view and she recognised him as her husband. The woman he was next to was the same one whose picture had appeared on the screen earlier.

‘Your wife?’

‘I asked her but I’m afraid she couldn’t make it. It’s the girls’ ballet class this evening.’

But the girls never had ballet in the evening. They always went to the afternoon sessions, immediately after school.

The picture faded out and a new scene faded in. This one showed a bedroom, with a huge double bed, behind which in place of a headboard was an enormous mirror. There was no one in the room, but as she watched the door opened and in walked the same pretty woman leading a man, whose trousers were around his ankles, by the hand. As he came further into the room Catherine recognised him. It was John, her husband.

She gasped. At first she couldn’t believe her eyes. She paused the disk and went closer to the screen.

‘No!’ she cried. ‘It can’t be. I don’t believe it.’

Smith had spent most of the afternoon trying to work out in his mind how best to approach Catherine, and tell her about the last few months. He decided he would be completely honest, but emphasise the blackmail aspect of the whole affair. That had seemed to convince most people in the Bank, when Stephanus had spoken to them after closing. There would always be the knowing looks and laughing behind his back, but Stephanus’s plan of being open and supportive seemed to defuse the worst of the situation.

When Smith walked through the door of his home he found his wife, Catherine, kneeling in the middle of the living room floor. The children were not in evidence. They usually came running or greeted him in the front garden.

‘Darling, what’s wrong? Where are the children?’ he asked as he went towards her.