Vicious Circle (28 page)

‘She’s what?’

‘Crawling! You know, hands and knees. We are talking about the next Olympics already,’ Nastiya told him with pride.

‘Congratulations, Heck!’ Paddy laughed.

‘Thank you, Padraig. Clearly, my daughter is an infant prodigy.’ He spoke in tones of awe. ‘I have to see this.’

‘Your reception committee is anxiously awaiting your arrival at Seascape Mansions. I warn you that the preparations have been quite extensive,’ Paddy told him.

They rode up in the private elevator and when the doors opened the entire household was drawn up in the entrance lobby, under an elaborate banner that had been strung from one wall to the other. The slogan in gold glitter paint read W
ELCOME
H
OME
, D
ADDY
!

At the rear of the lobby were the ranks of house servants. The chefs were wearing spotless whites with their traditional tall hats. The uniforms of the lesser members of staff were clean and freshly ironed, and maids wore frilled white aprons over their navy blues. In front of them were the security operatives in their number-one dress uniforms, shining belt buckles and highly polished boots. In the forefront were the three nursemaids. Bonnie was front stage centre, and in her arms she held Catherine Cayla Bannock-Cross.

Catherine was dressed in an embroidered pink romper suit, and enough of her fluffy blonde hair had been scraped together to support an enormous pink bow.

The assembly burst into applause as Hector stepped out of the elevator. Catherine swivelled her head, looking around at them in astonishment, and then her eyes came back to Hector as he approached. Hector saw that her eyes had changed colour. They were a deeper and brighter shade of blue. They were Hazel’s eyes. Their gaze was steady and focussed. Hector realized that she was actually seeing him, possibly for the first time.

Hector stopped in front of her and she thrust her thumb into her mouth and regarded him solemnly.

‘You are very beautiful,’ he told her. ‘You are as beautiful as your mother.’

He held out his arms towards her and he smiled.

‘May I hold you, please?’

He knew she was still too young to remember or recognize him. They had told him that it would only happen when she was one year old. But he kept smiling and looking into her eyes.

He saw her thoughts coming to the surface like pretty little fish in a deep blue pond. Suddenly she echoed his smile and held both her arms towards him, leaning forward in Bonnie’s arms and bouncing so violently that the nurse almost lost her grip.

Stone the experts!
Hector thought joyfully.
She does so recognize me!

He took her up, and she sat erect in the curve of his arm, balancing herself easily. She was light and soft and she smelled like fresh warm milk.

He kissed the top of her head and she said clearly, ‘Ba! Ba!’

‘We mean Dada.’ Bonnie supplied the translation. ‘We have been working on it, but it’s a rather difficult word for us.’

He carried Catherine to her nursery and her three nurses trooped after them. He placed her in the centre of the floor, and backed away to the door.

‘Okay, you little beauty,’ he said to her. ‘Let’s see you crawl.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Come, Cathy. Come to Baba, my baby!’

She rolled over onto her belly and then came up on her hands and knees and shot towards him at a flying crawl. When she reached him she grabbed a double handful of his trouser leg and tried to haul herself to her feet. She flopped back on her nappy-cushioned bottom, and all three nurses burst into excited cries of, ‘Did you see that?’

‘She tried to stand on her two feet!’

‘She’s never done that before!’

It was lunchtime and Hector played his part by spooning a mush of minced chicken and pumpkin into her mouth. Most of this was returned. It dribbled down her chin and splattered her bib and Hector’s shirt front. As she swallowed the last spoonful her eyes closed, her chin fell on her chest and she was asleep where she sat.

Hector worked out in the gymnasium for two hours while Catherine took her nap, then he changed into his running shoes and retrieved Catherine’s papoose and went to find her. When she saw the papoose she kicked her legs and uttered sounds of strongest approval.

They ran along the almost deserted beachfront, followed at a discreet distance by two of Dave Imbiss’s best men. Hector sang to her and pulled faces that made her laugh. She explored his face. She stuck her chubby pink fingers into his mouth to see where the strange sounds were coming from, and she tried to emulate them. She blew spit bubbles and chortled.

She soothed the loneliness. It no longer hurt so badly when he thought of Hazel.

Too soon he had to return to London.

*

Against all the odds, the estate agent had found a buyer for No. 11. Ronnie Bunter on behalf of the trustees asked Hector to oversee the takeover. So he had to be there when the removals company packed up the contents of the huge house. The purchaser was an Indian steel magnate. He was giving it to one of his sons as a wedding present. Hector was able to unload most of the furniture from the great house onto them. He sent the antiques and artwork that Hazel had accumulated to Sotheby’s to be sold at auction, and felt a sense of almost physical relief as the last heavily laden removal van pulled away down the driveway.

The astute estate agent had a list of a dozen replacements for No. 11 at hand. He took Hector on a viewing tour. Third on the list was a lovely mews house in Mayfair. It had been completely renovated, and the paint had hardly dried on the walls. It comprised all the usual offices together with four large bedroom suites, underground garaging for three cars and accommodation for five servants in the basement. It took Hector forty-five minutes to make the decision to buy it.

As he signed the documentation for No. 4 Lowndes Mews, Mayfair, he had already chosen a name for his and Catherine’s new home: ‘The Cross Roads’. And it occupied a little more than twenty per cent of the floor area of the Belgravia mansion.

He called in his usual firm of interior designers and gave them a deadline of six weeks to have the property completely furnished and ready for occupation. He began to feel that at last he had succeeded in putting the past behind him and he was ready to start living his own life afresh.

*

The trial at the Old Bailey of the two thugs who had fire-bombed Brandon Hall was set down for a few weeks later. It lasted six days.

Between them, Nastiya, Paddy and Hector spent two of those days on the witness stand, and their combined testimony combined with that of Paul Stowe, the gamekeeper, was overwhelming.

The jury returned from their deliberations in only two and a half hours with a ‘guilty on all counts’ verdict.

When the list of previous convictions was read out to the judge, he brought the full might of the law to bear on the accused.

He sentenced them each to twenty-two years’ detention, and ordered that they must serve a minimum of nineteen years of their sentences.

They had attempted to burn Catherine Cayla and Hector felt only partially mollified by the severity of the sentence. He consoled himself with the thought that, lacking the death sentence, it was about as steep as the feeble current laws allowed.

*

When the three of them flew back to Abu Zara, Paul Stowe went with them at Hector’s invitation. He no longer needed a head keeper at Brandon Hall, but Paul was too good a man to lose so Hector had found a new job for him at Cross Bow Security.

Hector was able to devote himself to Catherine and to following up the paper trail that he hoped might eventually lead him and Agatha to the shadowy assassin.

However, doubts were rising in the recesses of his mind. The list of suspects was dwindling rapidly as the negative reports came in from his field operatives. He began to experience bouts of helplessness and inadequacy. Those were sensations to which he was unaccustomed.

He tried to fight off these swings in mood by heavy physical exercise and hours spent on the firing range. He also had the distraction of having to fly to the US for the annual general meeting of Bannock Oil, Inc., of which he was still a director.

Then news came from his interior decorators in London that they had completed the refurbishment of The Cross Roads in Lowndes Mews only five days past the deadline he had set for them.

With relief he returned to the bustle and excitement of London.

*

The interior decorator and two of his assistants showed Hector over The Cross Roads. It was complete in every detail. The dominant colour scheme Hector had chosen was light blues and yellows, with shades of brown as counterpoints. It was welcoming, functional and masculine.

His carefully selected team of domestic servants from No. 11 and Brandon Hall were already in occupation of the servants’ quarters. Cynthia, the chef, was in the kitchen, busy with her pots and pans.

A new Bentley Continental and a brand-new Range Rover were parked in the underground garage, with their pristine bodywork gleaming.

The bar and the wine cellar were stocked with his favourite wines and liquors.

In his study the lighting was easy on the eyes and his computer was online.

The master bedroom was a work of art, with an emperor-size bed. The bed was made up with his favourite silk duvets. There was a gleaming white-tiled boy’s en suite bathroom, and a soft-pink girl’s bathroom with, naturally enough, a bidet. His suits and shirts were ironed and hanging in the master dressing room. His shoes were on the racks and polished to a high gloss.

Across the passage was Catherine’s nursery suite.

Before Hector moved in he had Dave Imbiss fly out from Abu Zara with his box of electronic tricks. Dave swept the house from the basement to the roof loft and declared that it was free of bugging devices or any other nastiness.

He had decided that in future he would live between The Cross Roads in London and Seascape Mansions in Abu Zara, spending ten alternate days in each. That way he could indulge in both the excitement of the metropolis and the tranquillity of the desert kingdom.

The first evening Hector was in residence in The Cross Roads he invited three of his old comrades-in-arms from his SAS days and their spouses to dine with him. It was a convivial evening and he only fell into bed well after midnight.

*

The next morning as he stepped out of the shower his mobile phone rang. He dried his right hand on the towel, flicked the water from his sodden hair and picked up his phone from the top of the washstand.

‘Cross!’ he barked into it. His head was still paining him a little from the previous evening’s jollifications.

‘Oh, I do hope I am not disturbing you, Mr Cross?’ a woman’s voice said.

‘Jo?’ he asked cautiously. ‘It is Jo Stanley, is it not? Or should I have said Miss Stanley?’ He knew it was her, of course. For almost a year now he had been aware of the musical strains of her voice echoing softly in the backwaters of his memory.

‘Jo sounds better to me than your second choice, Hector.’

‘This is a surprise. Where are you? You’re not in England by any strange chance, are you?’

‘Yes, I’m in London. I got in fairly late last night.’

‘Are you staying at the Ritz, as before?’

‘Goodness gracious, no!’ He smiled when she said that. It was so old-fashioned. ‘I can’t afford that kind of extravagance.’

‘You can if you send the bill to Ronnie Bunter,’ he suggested.

‘I don’t work for Mr Bunter any longer,’ she replied, and it caught him off balance.

‘Then, who are you working for?’

‘To use the well-travelled euphemism, I am currently between jobs.’ Again she had him stumped.

‘So what are you doing in London Town?’

‘I came to see you, Hector.’

‘I cannot bring myself to believe that. Why me?’

‘It’s complicated. Besides, there are better and safer ways to discuss it than over the telephone.’

‘Your place or mine?’ he asked, and she laughed again. It was a sound that pleased him.

‘Would it sound forward if I said yours?’

‘We’ll never get anywhere if we don’t move forward. Where can I find you? Where are you staying?’

‘In a rather cute little hotel with a cute name, just at the top end of Chelsea Green.’

‘What’s the name?’

‘It’s called My Hotel.’

‘Okay, I know it. I’ll pick you up at the front entrance in forty-five minutes. I’ll be driving a—’

‘You’ll be driving a silver Bentley with licence plates CRO 55, am I correct?’

‘An inspired guess, Miss Stanley,’ he chuckled. ‘But that was my old jalopy. The new banger is black. However, the number plates are the same.’

‘Goodness gracious! Only the angels can understand men and their motors.’

*

Jo was standing outside the hotel entrance, wearing denim jeans and a navy windcheater over a roll-neck white cable-stitch jersey, and she was carrying a leather briefcase. She had changed her hairstyle; now it was bobbed and fringed. It suited her even better. It made her neck seem longer and more swanlike. He had forgotten how tall and elegant she really was, even in denim pants.

When he reached across and opened the passenger door for her, she slipped into the seat and fastened her seat belt before she turned to face him.

‘I don’t have to ask how you are. You are looking very well, Hector.’

‘Thank you, and you are looking pretty good yourself, Jo. Welcome back to London.’

‘How is Catherine Cayla?’

‘Now you have pressed the right button. I could go on about her all day. Catherine Cayla is fifty leagues beyond gorgeous.’

‘Never mind the small print; just give me the headlines.’

‘She has blue eyes and already she can crawl. She can even say Dada, however she pronounces it Baba, which proves to me beyond any shadow of a doubt that she is a prodigy.’

‘Do you think I will ever get to meet her?’

‘Now that is a rare and beautiful thought.’

After they’d parked in the cobbled mews outside The Cross Roads he carried her briefcase to the house and then ushered her into the entrance lobby. She looked around at the sweeping circular staircase and the open doors into the sitting room.