Wonder Women (14 page)

Damon announced he had been working too hard and was taking a week off. He was around the house every day, and was sweetly and patiently interested in the goingson in her sewing room. He drove her to the suppliers, carrying her bags and waiting patiently while she agonised over fabrics, buttons and trimmings. He also spent a long time chatting to Jonathan, Holly's business manager, and looking at the financial side of Doradolla. In the evenings, he cooked for Holly or took her out for dinner. He was calm, even-tempered and in fact very much his old, sweet, romantic self. He talked about holidays, and even suggested that they pick a date for the wedding, so her family could begin to plan or book flights. That weekend, they went to a chalet in the Drakensberg. It was winter, and they spent a picture-perfect weekend, walking, drinking red wine and watching films, and making love in the big old wooden bed and in the living room in front of the fire.

On the Monday morning, back in Jo'burg, Damon was up and dressed long before Holly. She stirred and gazed at him in his crisp shirt and beautifully cut suit. He was looking at
himself in the mirror, his face expressionless and, as always, beautiful. He saw her watching him sleepily from her nest of pillows and he came to kiss her on the top of her head. ‘Go back to sleep, lovely,' he said softly. ‘I'm off to the office. A million emails to catch up on.'

She smiled and drifted back to sleep. Later that morning, she supervised the seamstresses finishing a set of skirts that were going to a boutique in Pretoria, but they didn't have enough of the gold braid that was a feature on the pocket. Holly jumped into her car and went to her haberdashery supplier to get more. She also collected some pretty buttons for a new design she was working on, as well as an assortment of reels of cotton and some lovely cream-coloured lace trim. She took her selection to the till and handed over her business debit card. The shop assistant, who knew Holly well, chattered about the weekend as she put all the items through the till. Then she frowned, surprised. ‘Your card's been declined,' she said, embarrassed.

‘That's crazy!' said Holly. ‘There's plenty of money in the account. Could the card have got damaged?'

‘I suppose so,' said the assistant, but she didn't look convinced. ‘Maybe you just had a big payment go out and you forgot about it.'

‘Don't worry,' said Holly, and paid with her personal card. ‘I'll sort it when I get back to work.'

On the way back to her car, she glanced at her mobile and saw that she had four missed calls from Jonathan. She rang him straight away. ‘Hi, Jon,' she said cheerily. ‘Such a weird thing just happened. My card got declined at the button shop. Any idea what's going on?'

‘You need to get back here. Now,' he said, and his voice sounded raw and strangled.

‘What do you mean? What's going on? Jon, you're scaring me.'

‘Look, Holly, they won't let me explain. Just come back, okay?'

‘Who? Who's “they”? Jon, are you being held up? Do I need to ring the cops?'

‘No. Just come. Okay? Please.'

Holly drove well above the speed limit all the way back to the house. It took her about ten minutes and she felt sick with fear all the way. There were four or five cars in the driveway, and somehow she knew that it was the police. She leapt out of her car and ran up to the open front door. There were people all over the house, walking around with clipboards. A tall, burly man walked up to her. ‘You are …?'

‘Holly … Holly Evans. I live here. And you are …?'

‘Detective Tshabalala. Are you the owner or part-owner of this property?'

‘No … It belongs to my fiancé.'

‘Damon Vermaak.'

‘Yes,' Holly said faintly. ‘Is he okay? Has something happened to him?'

‘To the best of our knowledge, he is all right. But you might be able to tell us more. Where is Mr Vermaak?'

‘He went to the office early this morning. I can give you the number …' She reached for her phone.

‘Mr Vermaak is not in his office. His staff have all been dismissed, and the lease on the office was terminated some time ago.'

‘What?'

‘I am sure you'll be able to tell us more, Miss Evans,' he said insistently. ‘Where is he?'

‘I don't know! He left this morning, as normal, and I was expecting him back tonight.'

‘Did he take a bag with him?'

‘No … well, I don't think so. I was asleep when he left.'

‘Could you check his personal effects for me and tell me if anything is missing?'

They went up the stairs to the bedroom. There were more police officers in there, cataloguing everything. Damon's wardrobe door stood open, and at a glance, Holly could see most of his clothes were gone. She started to cry, big tearing sobs, and she turned on Detective Tshabalala. ‘What's happened? What is going on? Who are you? And where's Damon?'

‘We're from the fraud squad, and if anyone is going to tell us where he is, it's you.' There was no gentleness in Tshabalala's voice. He clearly thought that Holly's fear and heartbreak was an act.

‘You won't be able to stay here tonight,' he said briskly. ‘Do you have somewhere you can go?'

‘Yes, I … I can stay with friends. Can I take some of my stuff?'

‘An officer will write down what you take.'

Holly suffered the humiliation of a junior officer painstakingly listing her bras, pants and toiletries as she packed them. Then she went to pick up her watch and engagement ring from the bedside table where she had left them the night before. She glanced up and saw Detective Tshabalala
watching her with dark, suspicious eyes, and she left them where they were.

The shocks were far from over. She went downstairs to her work area, and found the officers had taken the details of her seamstresses and sent them home. They were busy pawing through her stock and materials and listing everything, making a dreadful mess. She went through into the office. An officer was pulling files and books off the shelves in a disorderly and destructive way, and Jonathan was sitting at his desk like a statue, his eyes red and swollen. She wanted to hug him.

‘I'm so sorry, Jon,' she said. ‘I don't know what's going on. But when this is all over, we'll put everything back and things can get back to normal.'

‘It's all gone,' he said in a whisper.

‘What do you mean? Nothing is gone. They're just making lists. It's a mess, but everything is still here.'

‘No, the money. It's gone. The business accounts have been stripped. There isn't a cent left.'

‘Our business accounts?' Holly said, her voice surprisingly calm, even to her own ears. ‘But no one has access to them except you and me.'

‘He …' Jonathan couldn't bring himself to say Damon's name. ‘He watched me doing the online banking. He must have remembered all the passwords. It's all gone.'

There followed several weeks of intensive and painful questioning by the police. They gave her very little information, but bit by bit she pieced together the story. The multimillion-rand deal Damon had been working on had turned sour. He'd tried to shore it up by borrowing even
more money, and then he'd mortgaged the house and taken out further loans against his car and other assets. It seemed that when he had run out of options, he had decided to take all the cash out of Doradolla, the only liquid and profitable business he had access to. The police knew he had left the country, crossing the border by road into Botswana, but from there he had disappeared. Detective Tshabalala was relentless. He was convinced Holly knew where Damon was and was in on it, but she kept telling the same story and what she said was always consistent. Once the detective understood the arrangement she had made with Damon over Doradolla and had grasped that she too had been robbed, he began to be a little gentler with her. Finally, reluctantly, when it was clear that Damon was not going to be found and could not be put on trial, he gave her leave to go.

She didn't want to stay in Johannesburg. The house now belonged to the bank. She had moved back in with Pierre, and she could have stayed there and started again, but she just didn't have the strength. She had no capital to get the company back on its feet, so she spent almost the last money she had paying off Jonathan and the seamstresses as fairly as she could. Then she packed up her few personal belongings, booked a flight to London and went home to her mother.

A mother-and-child relationship is a funny thing, Holly thought. Although she wasn't one herself, she knew a lot of mothers and had observed them. Mothers grow their children inside their bodies, make every cell of them, nurture them, give birth to them and feed them. Many mothers will always feel that bond, no matter how old the child becomes. The phrase ‘You'll always be my baby' has an element of truth to it. But for the child, the bond is not the same. They don't remember the gestation, the birth, the unceasing and intimate care. Once children are conscious beings, they believe they invented themselves, and they don't feel that constant physical bond with the mother. In fact, they might look at their mother and wish they could deny being of her body at all. She is so strange, so other, so foreign to them, they cannot possibly be related.

Or maybe it's only me who feels that way, thought Holly, as she sat at the kitchen table and watched her mother iron dish towels. Judith Evans was a small woman, slight of build, and she had been a petite size eight all her adult life. Holly had grown taller than her mother when she was
twelve. If Holly was to choose three words to define her relationship with her mother, they would have to be, ‘Oh, Holly, don't …' Sometimes it seemed that everything she had ever done, her mother had found too bold, too colourful, too adventurous. Whatever the situation, Judith would always counsel caution. She was forever saying, ‘Well, maybe we should wait and see,' whether Holly was talking about travelling through Africa or buying a new kettle. She made these pronouncements in a wavering, tentative and almost girlish voice, and every time, it set Holly's teeth on edge.

Judith had grown up in west London, and the house she lived in now was less than a mile from the house where she had been born, and round the corner from the school she had attended. She had held the same job as the secretary for a small local medical practice for thirty-five years, until her retirement two years before. She had a small circle of friends, people she had met at school or church and had known for forty years or more. Now she was retired, her life revolved around the church: she did the flowers, helped to clean it once a fortnight, sang in the choir and attended coffee mornings and the bridge club.

She was only sixty-two, no age at all, Holly thought, but she had embraced life as a pensioner, and seemed happy to sink into old-lady activities without a fight. It was ridiculous. Her health was sound and she had a reasonable income. She could do anything she chose, but instead she inhabited a tiny world bounded by the North Circular and the Uxbridge Road, and it was very difficult to get her to go beyond those boundaries. When Holly had first returned home, she had
tried to get Judith out and about. She'd suggested a trip into town to see an art exhibition or to watch a show. She'd even proposed they go away for a weekend to the Cotswolds or the Lake District. She'd been away so long that the prospect of being a tourist in her own country had seemed quite appealing, and she thought Judith would welcome the chance to do something new. ‘Oh no, dear,' Judith responded to each offer of an outing. She always had an excuse: either there was a church event on the same date, or she didn't like to drive at night (or be driven), or the Tube into town got so crowded. After a while, Holly gave up. At a push, Judith could be convinced to get into her little Nissan Micra and creep around the North Circular to visit Miranda and her family, but that would only be on a Sunday, after church. David lived in Oxfordshire, and he knew perfectly well his mother would never come to visit him, so he and his wife and children made a duty visit once a month.

Holly tried hard not to get annoyed at her mother. It seemed unfair to be angry with someone so determinedly inoffensive, like being infuriated by mashed potato. In the end, she decided to accept that they were just completely different people, who could coexist peacefully, like different species in the same enclosure at the zoo. She stood up from the kitchen table, and her mum looked up from her ironing.

‘Cup of tea, dear?'

What Holly really fancied was a gin and tonic. She was sick to her back teeth of tea.

‘No, thanks, Mum. I thought I might …' Might what? Go for a walk? It was raining. Go out for a drink? With whom? She was low, but not low enough to go and nurse a drink
alone in a bar. ‘… go to my room,' she finished, aware she sounded like a sulky teenager.

‘All right, dear,' said her mum, sounding disappointed and, as usual, faintly martyred. ‘Can I do any ironing for you, dear?'

Holly tried not to bristle. From anyone else, that might sound like an innocent offer, even a generous one, but from her mum, there was an implied criticism, as if Holly, who did take great care over her appearance, was somehow rumpled. ‘I can do my own ironing, Mother,' she said, aware that she sounded petulant.

‘I know you can, dear … and I suppose you wouldn't want me ironing some of your … special things.'

‘What do you mean, “special”?' said Holly, unable to keep the tension out of her voice.

‘Those outfits you've made – the fancy ones,' said Judith, aligning the edges of a dish towel perfectly and ironing the folded square. ‘I've never ironed things like that.' She sighed, and with a touch of wistfulness said, ‘So glamorous … like a bird of paradise.'

Holly raised her eyebrows. The idea of pale, wispy Judith coveting one of Holly's jewel-coloured silk-and-taffeta creations was too bizarre for words. She had to squeeze past her mum to get out of the kitchen, and as she went, touched her briefly on the shoulder. Judith quickly put her own small, soft hand over Holly's, just for an instant, and then let her go. Funny old fish, thought Holly, as she bounded up the stairs.