No More Lonely Nights (5 page)

‘She’ll blame herself,’ Sian told William Cassidy as Annette and Rick came towards the car. ‘She mustn’t; it could haunt her for the rest of her life if her father dies now. Don’t make it harder for her.’

‘Damn you, what makes you think I will?’ he muttered furiously, then got out of the car to greet the other two. A moment later they were in the rear seats and the limousine was sliding away from the kerb. There were still lights on in the little terraced house; no doubt Rick’s parents were up now and distressed over the events of the past few hours.

Nothing was said on the long drive back, along the motorway, passing very few cars, the wide road unwinding in a strange yellow glare while overhead the starlit sky had a melancholy beauty. Sian leaned back and listened to the brooding silence in the car. Beside her Cass drove without a flicker of expression on his lean face; his hands resting lightly on the wheel, his gaze fixed always ahead. In the back, Annette seemed half asleep, but every now and then she made a sound which wasn’t quite a sob, yet wasn’t ordinary breathing either. Each time Sian felt Rick stir, felt him move, tightening his hold on her, half murmuring to her.

It was not a comfortable drive, and Sian was relieved to see the dark bulk of the New Forest looming up. It had certainly never entered her head when she set out from here this morning that she was going to be driving back again quite so soon. It was probably just as well that human beings couldn’t see into the future.

Cass swung the car round a corner suddenly, and Sian leaned forward to glimpse a hospital just ahead of them at the end of a drive. It blazed with lights even at this hour; she saw an ambulance standing on a forecourt, saw two nurses in dark capes going through swing doors, their white uniforms shown up by the light from a window.

‘Will they let me see him?’ Annette suddenly whispered.

‘You may have to wait a while,’ Cass told her quite kindly, and she gave another of those funny little sobs.

‘He’ll be OK,’ Rick muttered, his arm round her and his chin on her hair. ‘You’ll see. They can do wonders these days.’

Cass pulled up on the hospital drive outside a double-doored entrance. ‘I’ll go and park—you had better get out here,’ he said, and they all began to get out. Annette didn’t really need Sian, but somehow Sian was reluctant to leave her. She had become inextricably involved in this; she felt she had to stay, see it through. Annette had Rick to lean on for the moment, but she might still need another woman around, especially as Cass was there, too. The two men weren’t overtly hostile, but on the other hand they had a guarded wariness which came close to out-and-out hostility. At any moment they could start acting belligerently, and that was the last thing Annette needed. It would help if Sian was there to stop any trouble before it became serious.

Cass was wrong; Annette did not have to wait to see her father. As soon as they arrived she was taken upstairs to the ward in which he lay, while Rick and Sian sat in a glass-walled waiting-room. When Cass joined them he asked if either of them wanted a drink of coffee or tea.

Rick shook his head, his face averted, but Sian said she wouldn’t say no to some coffee—it would help her to stay awake.

‘I’ll show you where the machine is,’ Cass said, turning on his heel, and she followed him along the corridor. When he reached the vending machine he just leaned on the wall beside it, his grey eyes sharp as he watched her read the instructions.

‘I was so preoccupied with Annette that it didn’t impinge on me that you had somehow managed to stay with us,’ he said coolly. ‘Let me warn you, if you have some notion of getting further copy out of this, you’re mistaken. You’ve taken advantage of Annette once, you aren’t doing it again while I’m around.’

Sian ignored that, hunting for a coin in her purse. His hand suddenly shot out and grabbed her wrist.

‘Do you hear?’ he snarled, and she looked up, icy with affront.

‘Let go of me, you big bully! I’m not deaf, I heard, and I’m here to help Annette, not make copy out of her, so leave me alone.’

She shook his hand off and he pushed it into his trouser pocket, his face grim. ‘I have half a mind to make you go.’

‘You and whose army?’ mocked Sian furiously. ‘I’m staying and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Don’t provoke me,’ he said through his teeth, black-browed. ‘If I choose to have you thrown out of here, you will be, don’t worry, but Annette may need to have another woman around, it’s true. For the present, you can stay, but take one step near a telephone and you’re out.’

She gave him a seething look, but merely asked, ‘Have you got any change? This machine wants coins I haven’t got.’ She offered him a pound coin and he pushed it aside, producing some smaller coins which he fed into the machine. Sian got her black coffee and stalked back to the waiting-room without another glance in his direction.

She sat down next to Rick, but Cass stayed outside in the corridor where she could see him pacing up and down, head bent, his hands thrust into his pockets and his face shuttered, unreadable. This must have been a hard day for him; Sian had to admit he was taking it pretty well on the whole. Few men could be trusted to behave generously after they’d had the sort of kick in the teeth which Annette had inflicted on him this morning. Sian might find him overbearing, if not downright unbearable. He might be under some delusion about his right to push people around. But he had some good qualities.

Two nurses, hurrying past with their caps a little askew and flushed faces, gave Cass a curious, grinning look, then giggled at each other. It wasn’t often that they saw a man in full morning dress with a wilting buttonhole, stalking their hospital corridors like Hamlet’s father on the battlements!

Cass was too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice them; his jaw showed stubble deepening and his brows were heavy with a frown. What was he thinking? Nothing cheerful, by that expression.

Rick was watching him, too, and seemed to like what he saw even less than Sian did.

‘I wish he’d clear off!’ he burst out suddenly, and Sian looked at him, green eyes sympathetic.

‘He seems genuinely concerned about Annette’s father. I think that’s why he stays.’

Rick scowled, but shrugged. ‘Oh, maybe. Her dad was at school with his, you know. Old Mr Cassidy died a few years back, but he and Annette’s father were always good friends; they used to play chess once a week. Her dad worked for the firm when it only employed a handful of people; he worked there all his life, until he retired early. He was only fifty-six, but I think he took voluntary redundancy. He was a bit aimless once he’d stopped work. No wonder he had a heart attack when Annette ran away. He had nothing in his life but Annette, and that’s Cassidy’s fault. He must have asked Mr Byrne to retire early, and now he probably feels guilty.’

Sian frowned. ‘I gathered that this heart condition was already known—are you sure that isn’t why her father retired early?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Mr Cassidy.’

Rick laughed scornfully. ‘And you believed him? Annette didn’t tell me that. She said they were laying a few older members of staff off, giving them a lump sum to retire early, and her father had been asked to go voluntarily. She never mentioned ill health.’

Sian screwed up the empty paper cup which had held her coffee and threw it into a waste-paper bin, where it rattled around. What was the truth? Had William Cassidy lied to her? Or had Annette been kept in the dark about her father’s state of health? Sian remembered her saying that her father was worried about leaving her alone if he died—why should he have been worrying about death unless he was ill? If he was in his middle fifties that wasn’t so very old, and in the natural course of events Annette should have been married with children long before her father had to face death.

‘Of course,’ said Rick with a faint sneer, ‘it could be that Cassidy didn’t want his future father-in-law working on the factory floor. He didn’t really know Annette until he took her on as his secretary eighteen months ago. That was around the time her dad was asked to retire, now I remember it. Then Cassidy started showing an interest in her and dating her. He swept her off her feet—can you blame her? He could give her such a good time: flashy cars, night-spots, expensive dinners. Once he flew her to Paris in a private jet just to have lunch—showing off, dazzling her with his money. Of course she couldn’t resist it. What girl could?’

‘Very few,’ agreed Sian drily. Nobody had ever swept her off her feet in that style; she just wished they would. It must be great to be flown to Paris in a private jet for lunch! Take me to it, she thought, grimacing.

Rick’s hands balled into fists. ‘So I quit,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t staying around to watch. If she preferred him and his money, well…’

‘But she changed her mind and ran away to you,’ Sian gently reminded him.

He smiled then; his face changing. ‘Yes, she came to her senses. She wouldn’t have been happy with him, you know. Annette didn’t grow up in that high-powered world of his, and she wasn’t very easy in it. The longer it went on, the more she realised she didn’t fit—with him or his friends and family.’

Sian glanced again at Cass, who was still prowling to and fro, like a tiger measuring his new captivity in a cage. Even at a distance he had a restlessly energetic air and a total assurance.

‘What on earth did he see in her?’ she thought aloud, then shot Rick a horrified look, but he didn’t seem insulted by the question, just shrugged as though it was one he had often asked himself.

‘If you want my opinion, I reckon it was a whim—she was different and he was bored. He’d have realised he had made a mistake sooner or later, but by then he might have ruined Annette’s life.’

‘His family didn’t approve, anyway?’ Sian couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Rick hadn’t rung Annette on her wedding morning. Would she have gone through with the wedding? What exactly had Rick said to her? Hinted at suicide? Wasn’t that what Annette had said? Had Rick meant it? Or had he just been talking wildly? Whatever he had said, it had had quite an effect; it had broken off Annette’s marriage plans, but Sian was unconvinced that Annette knew what she was doing or what she really wanted, even now. She was too volatile, too easily influenced. She wasn’t old enough to have a real relationship with a man. She ought to be by now; she was in her early twenties, wasn’t she? Sian began to be curious about this father who lay seriously ill up in the wards. What was he like? And how much influence had he had on his daughter?

Rick shook his head, laughing shortly. ‘You must be joking! No, they did not approve—especially his sister, Magdalena. She married last year, some guy with a long pedigree, a lot of money and a face like a Pekingese. Ever since, she’s acted as if she was too good to walk on the same ground as the rest of us. You’d have thought that Annette was insulting her by just breathing the same air. She went out of her way to make it clear just what she thought about the marriage.’

‘Didn’t you say Mr Cassidy’s father was dead?’

Rick nodded. ‘So is his mother—there are only the three Cassidys left. The sister, his younger brother Malcolm, who works in the design department, and him.’ Rick jerked his head sideways to where Cass was standing in the corridor, then jumped to his feet as he saw that Cass was talking to a man in a white coat.

‘That could be the doctor! He looks as if he’s telling someone bad news, doesn’t he? Why is he telling Cassidy?
He
isn’t marrying Annette, I am! It’s me who should be talking to the doctor.’ Rick headed for the door angrily, squaring his shoulders ready for battle, but before he reached them the man in the white coat began to walk in the opposite direction and Cass turned, his face grave.

Sian had followed Rick. She felt her interference might be needed if the two men came to blows.

‘What’s happened?’ Rick demanded belligerently.

Cass looked at him with cool, grey eyes. ‘His condition is still serious; it isn’t hopeless, though.’ He glanced sideways at Sian. ‘Would you go and talk to Annette? She’s very upset, it seems, but she won’t leave the ward and she can’t stay there. The ward sister insists that she can’t see her father again tonight.’

‘Of course,’ Sian said, but Rick shouldered past her.

‘I’ll go. It’s my place to be with Annette.’ He glared at Cass, defying him to argue, but Cass shrugged.

‘OK. Maybe you’re right.’

Rick almost ran and Sian watched him, frowning. Cass watched
her
, thoughtfully. ‘And what were you talking to him about? I wonder if I was wise, allowing you to come along. I keep forgetting you’re a reporter. I hope you weren’t milking him for information, because if you print any of this…’

‘Yes?’ she queried, lifting her brows at him. ‘What will you do? Huff and puff and blow my house down?’

He laughed shortly. ‘Something like that.’

‘I’m shaking in my shoes!’

He considered her with his head slightly to one side, his mouth wry. ‘I wish I was sure I could trust you.’

Green eyes alert, Sian asked, ‘Oh? Why?’

‘I’m faced with something of a problem. Annette can’t sit up in the waiting-room all night, and they won’t let her see her father even if she does, but where else is she to go? She can hardly spend the night in her own home, alone, and in the circumstances I don’t think Wesley should stay there with her.’

‘I don’t see what this has to do with me—’

Sian began, and he suddenly snapped, his face dark red with temper.

‘If you let me finish, you’ll understand what it has to do with you!’

‘Sorry,’ she said drily. He was jealous, of course; he wanted to keep Rick away from Annette, and was that surprising? He didn’t want Annette to spend what should have been
their
wedding night with another man.

He ran a hand through his dark hair, mouth twisting. ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m dead on my feet. This has been quite a day for me, remember.’

She nodded. ‘You must be very tired.’ And miserable and angry and a lot of other things, she thought, watching him with sympathy. In fact, on the whole he was behaving very well. Many men in his situation would have been quite different; bitter and vindictive, to say the least. William Cassidy was being positively saintly. Viewing the hard angles of his face, the cool assurance of those eyes, Sian suddenly wondered about that. Was his generosity entirely without motive? Surely he didn’t still hope to get Annette back?