Playing the Game

  There were moments of quietude between them, and as they lay side by side, Annette marveled at herself. She, who had never enjoyed sex, could not get enough of Jack, had become insatiable, was enraptured by him and transported by her desire, and her newly discovered sensuality.

  He had invaded her, taken possession of her completely—her body, her heart, her soul, and her mind. She belonged to him. And she knew she always would. There were moments when she stopped to think about him, and remembered what he had said once about the power of sex, and how it could transform people. He was right. She had been transformed. By him.

  Suddenly it was Sunday and he was gone. As he was flying to Nice to take care of the problems with Amaury and Hortense, she was reading the profile of her in The Sunday Times, and smiling to herself.

  He had mostly written about her life as it was now, had hardly mentioned her childhood or what little he knew of her past. It was all about the sale of the Rembrandt . . . and her intelligence, her cleverness, her prodigious memory, her skill, her extraordinary knowledge of art. But he had also made her sound human, caring and warm. And beautiful. It was, in its own way, a love letter to her. And she accepted this, and was pleased.

  Later that morning Malcolm and Laurie called her, as did Margaret Mellor, and Christopher and Jim. They each said the same thing . . . that Jack had written a wonderful piece and she should be happy, because it was great coverage.

  But she wasn’t happy, in that she was already missing him. Jack Chalmers. Her lover. The man she loved. She now understood that she must break up with him. If she didn’t leave Jack, but instead left Marius, she would ruin Jack’s life. She was convinced that Marius would undoubtedly wreak revenge on him. And on her. He most likely would turn her in to the police, making a cold case a closed case. She could easily spend the rest of her life in jail.

  Thirty-seven

  “I am all right, Monsieur Jacques. It was not necessary for you to come. I am managing,” Hortense exclaimed, once Jack had stopped hugging her. “And next week, my niece Albane is coming from Marseilles to help me in the house.”

  The two of them were standing in the middle of the entrance hall at the Villa Saint-Honoré, where he had just put down his two small bags. Jack said, “That’s good. I’m sure you’ve enough to do looking after Amaury, so you can’t be attending to the house as well.”

  “Amaury is better today, Monsieur Jacques. He was not good yesterday. It was the shock.”

  Hortense and Jack walked through the kitchen and the back hallway into the apartment facing the vegetable garden. It was here that Hortense and Amaury had lived for forty years.

  When they entered the living room, a wide smile flashed across Amaury’s weather-beaten face, and as Jack came forward, he exclaimed, “I’m sorry, Monsieur Jacques, I cannot get up.”

  “Don’t even try,” Jack replied warmly, bending over the older man, shaking his hand, patting his shoulder. “And I’m sorry this happened to you. I hope you’re not in a lot of pain.”

  “It is not bad. Difficult to move around.” Woefully, he looked at his arm and then down at his leg, both in plaster casts and bandages. He made a face. “A stupid thing, Monsieur Jacques. I was in a hurry. For no reason. I am very sorry.”

  “It was an accident, Amaury, these things happen. And the cellar steps are steep. You’ll be fine in a few weeks.”

  “The garden . . . who will tend it, Monsieur? I worry.”

  “Just take care of yourself and get better, Amaury. I will call my friend Madame Claudine Villiers. I’m sure she can be of help. She knows everyone in the area. Perhaps she can recommend someone.”

  “Oui, Monsieur Jacques. Merci.”

  Back in the front hall Jack picked up his laptop and small overnight bag and hurried upstairs. In his office he put the laptop and the bag down, glanced around. Everything was in place and exactly as it should be.

  The windows were open, and the scent of flowers wafted in on the light breeze. It was a beautiful day, sunny with a cloudless blue sky. He wished Annette were here with him. He had already spoken to her twice today. Once from Heathrow, later when he had landed in Nice. He was glad she was happy with the piece he had written about her, but he had known she would like it.

  Taking off his jacket, draping it around the chair back, he sat down at his desk and dialed Claudine. The machine came on at once, and he left a message, asking her to phone him as soon as she could, adding that it was fairly urgent.

  Within minutes the landline was ringing, and he picked it up at once. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Jack. It’s Claudine. You called me?”

  “Claudine, hello! Yes, I did. I’ve got a problem here, and I’m wondering if you can help me.”

  “If I can. What is it?” Claudine asked.

  He told her about Amaury’s fall down the cellar steps, his broken bones, and asked if she knew a gardener who could work at the villa for a couple of months. She promised to get back to him within an hour.

  Jack remained at his desk for a while, feeling lost and bereft without Annette. The long hours he had spent with her in the last few days had spoiled him. He wanted her beside him, now and always. He sighed. He was fully aware that it was going to be tough for both of them, especially when Marius returned to London.

  Marius Remmington. He knew Annette was afraid of him, but he did not understand why. Her husband was manipulative and controlling, that he knew from the gossip about Marius, yet something more than this seemed to scare her. She kept saying that Marius would never let her go, never divorce her. But she could just walk out, couldn’t she?

  He pondered for a long time. In a sense, the man was as mysterious as Annette was. And she was certainly wary, cautious about revealing her earlier years to him. What could she possibly have to hide? Nothing, surely.

  Within the hour Claudine called him. “I have found a gardener for you, Jack. His name is Antoine. Shall I tell him to come to see you around three tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely, that’s a good time for me.”

  “And will you come to dinner on Tuesday?”

  “That’ll be great, Claudine. By the way, how is Lucy?”

  “She’s away, Jack. In Italy on business. See you on Tuesday.”

  A moment later Hortense appeared and said, “Ah, there you are, Monsieur Jacques. Will you have lunch now?”

  “Merci, Hortense,” he murmured, and went downstairs to the terrace where the table had been set for one.

  Annette had not called him back all day and this troubled him, but he decided to wait until much later in the evening to call her again.

  She saved him the trouble. Much to his delight, she phoned around nine in London, ten o’clock his time.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you before, Jack,” she said, her voice subdued. “But I went to supper with Laurie and Malcolm, and just got home. They loved the piece.”

  “Thanks, darling. Listen, I’ll be back sooner than I thought.” He told her about Amaury’s injuries, the imminent arrival of Hortense’s niece, and Claudine’s success in finding a gardener, and added, “But I’ll stay longer if you’ll come and join me.”

  “If only I could, but you know I can’t. And Jack, we do have to . . . play it cool, you know,” Annette warned.

  “I understand,” he said, deciding to go along with her. “When is Marius coming back, actually?” he asked gently, not wanting to irritate her.

  “I don’t know. But toward the end of this coming week, I suppose. He never knows how long the research is going to take.”

  “I understand. Did he like the profile?”

  “I didn’t hear from him today.”

  Jack was startled. After all, it was Marius who had selected him to write about her. He said, “Maybe he hasn’t seen it yet, since he’s in Spain.”

  “That’s right.”

  They talked for a short while longer, and he refrained from pushing her about leaving Marius. It would only rile her. All he knew after he hung up
was that he was relieved she had finally returned his call. Now he could go to sleep a happy man.

  But he did not sleep well. He tossed and turned for several hours. When he finally did drop off he was assailed by terrible dreams . . . nightmares.

  He was on a battlefield piled high with the bodies of the dead, searching for his father, calling out his name, turning bodies to look at faces. There was blood and death everywhere, but where was he? What country was he in? And then he saw his father coming forward, carrying a body. Jack ran toward him, stumbling over the dead, rushing to help. And when he got to his father he saw blood all over his face, dripping down off his chin onto the girl he was carrying. She was crumpled and lifeless, wearing a wedding dress. The white had turned to crimson from her blood. Jack shuddered when he saw her empty eyes, her drooping head. She was dead.

  His father said through his tears that it was Hilda, his dear friend Hilda. He wanted to find a doctor to help her. Jack walked on with his father, afraid to say the girl was gone. And soon they found a Red Cross nurse kneeling in the mud and blood, her pristine uniform mud-splashed and stained red from the dead. It was Aunt Helen and she was holding a stethoscope. She reached for the girl, her arms wide.

  Jack left them. He began to move through the field of mud. But it was hard. His mother was waving, urging him forward, but he kept sinking into the mud. It was like treacle, pulling and sucking at his feet, hindering him. Suddenly he could not move. He heard his brother Kyle shouting, calling his name. He shouted back, and saw his stepfather, Peter, and Kyle, and they came and pulled his arms, dragged him out of the mud, saving him.

  In the distance he could see an ambulance. The driver was waving. The three of them struggled on, trudging through the mud. Everyone had inexplicably disappeared. The three of them were alone, except for the dead, the only ones left alive on the killing field. When they came to the ambulance it was his father Nigel who was waiting, his biological father. He said, “Find Hilda Crump. She’s out there somewhere, alive.”

  Jack went on down the road, leaving the three of them behind. In the distance he could see Annette. She was pushing the wheelchair. When he got to her he saw that tears were rolling down her face. She kept saying over and over again that she had lost Laurie, and didn’t know where she was.

  They walked together down the road. Gunfire started again. The sound of bombs exploding was shattering. Annette let go of the wheelchair and began to run away from him. He ran after her but he couldn’t catch up. “Annette, wait! Annette, wait for me,” he shouted, but his words were blown away by the wind, drowned out by the gunfire. . . .

  The light of dawn, trickling in through the slatted wooden shutters, awakened him and he sat up with a start. He was bathed in sweat.

  Jack struggled out of bed, taking off his damp pajamas as he crossed his bedroom. He had a severe headache, which was unusual for him. He went into the bathroom, stepped into the shower, turned on the taps, let the water sluice down over his sweaty body.

  After drying himself and combing his hair, he went back to his bedroom. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was only six. Putting on shorts and a pair of Moroccan flat mules, he went downstairs to the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of coffee and took it outside to the terrace.

  The fresh air was cool, soothing. He sipped the coffee, remembered his nightmare, and shuddered. He shook his head and swallowed more of the coffee, hoping his blinding headache would subside.

  Hilda Crump.

  He wondered what had really happened to her. Certainly the private investigator he’d hired hadn’t been able to find a trace of her. She had seemingly disappeared into oblivion. Maybe she was dead. So he had told the PI to drop the matter.

  He only knew her name from his mother, who had called her his father’s girlfriend. That was all he had to go on. And the fact that his mother had once told him Hilda Crump had worked at the Remmington Art Gallery.

  Seemingly she hadn’t, according to the PI. At the gallery no one had ever heard of her, and she wasn’t on their books or in their computerized records. The PI had drawn a blank.

  Oh, well, what does it matter now, Jack thought, and walked back into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. As he filled his mug, he reminded himself that he had been looking for Hilda Crump because he wanted to know more about his biological father. He had believed she would be able to enlighten him, tell him something important, more than he already knew.

  He had so wanted to know if his father had been a decent guy as well as a womanizer. But how would that really help him? Make him feel better, if his father had been one of the good guys? He didn’t know and suddenly he didn’t care. He, Jack Chalmers, was exactly who he was, and now that he thought about it, he liked himself. He had always been ambivalent about the women he had been involved with because he hadn’t been in love with them. He understood that now. Not the way he wanted to be in love, the way it was with Annette.

  It was that simple. He’d played around because he hadn’t found true love. He would accept who he was, and what he was as a man, because he knew he could live with himself. He was sincere, honorable, had ethics and integrity. That was enough for him. He had his father’s genes, and his mother’s, too, but a good man had brought him up, and Jack believed Peter Chalmers had done his job well.

  And that was all he needed to know.

  Part Four

  AN ACCIDENTAL

  INFORMANT

  Knowledge is power.

  Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597)

  How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be.

  Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 B.C.)

  Thirty-eight

  In many ways, Jack was a creature of habit, and whenever he came back to the Villa Saint-Honoré he made a point of going to La Réserve for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

  On this lovely Tuesday morning, bright with sunlight, the air filled with the many fragrances of spring flowers and foliage in bloom everywhere, he set out for the lovely old hotel he had been visiting since childhood.

  There was a jauntiness in his step as he left the villa at eight-thirty, the perfect time for him to have breakfast on the terrace of the hotel overlooking the Mediterranean.

  He felt more like himself today; he had slept well, and there were no memories of bad dreams to haunt him. The headache which had dogged him most of yesterday had gone, and he felt refreshed and ready to tackle anything.

  He had worked hard on the manuscript until late last night, pleased with the fine-tuning done by his editor, who had been insightful, precise, and careful, and the quality of her superior work showed. He’d already sent her an e-mail, telling her what a superlative job she had done and thanking her. He was relieved that there was nothing to cut or add, and no rewrites, only line editing. He would be able to finish reading it by this afternoon, add his own edits, and get back to his publisher well before the given date.

  This thought made him happy, because he was a true professional. He never missed deadlines and rarely objected to editing unless it was heavy-handed, which so far his editor had always avoided. He was also happy because he had received two phone calls from Annette yesterday, and of her own volition.

  The first was to tell him she had been inundated with phone calls about his profile, and that people were already clamoring for information about the next auction, wanting to be on the invitation list. The second call was to confide that she had had three huge offers for Degas’s The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer.

  “All from good clients, old clients with big bucks to spend. But I turned them all down,” she had explained late last night. “I simply don’t want to sell it in that way . . . accept a preemptive offer. My gut instinct tells me it must be in the auction. It’s a masterpiece, and something unique, and the publicity it will generate is of incalculable value, and I know I’ll get a huge price if it’s in the auction. And Sotheby’s also does a superb job.”

  He had agreed with her, told her how brilliant she was, and t
hey had gone on to chat for half an hour about a variety of things, barely touching on their relationship. Instinctively, Jack had known she did not want to go that route late at night, and so he had refrained from bringing up their future together. They had finished their phone call in a very loving way, and without a fight about breaking up.

  Jack walked steadily along Boulevard Maréchal Leclerc, and waited for the traffic to slow before crossing the busy main road to the hotel. He paused for a moment at the gates, thinking how beautiful it looked set against the blameless blue sky and the backdrop of the deep-blue sea.

  Strolling leisurely down the path, he spoke to the doorman and then to the concierge in the small lobby, who both welcomed him back.

  He ran down the few steps into the long bar, and walked along its terra-cotta-tiled floor, heading for the restaurant and the terrace beyond.

  The shrill sound of loud blaring music on a mobile phone caused him to pause and look around, but he was the only person in the bar. When the phone went on blaring relentlessly he glanced to his right, looking through the French doors to the garden where breakfast was also served.

  Instantly he caught his breath, and automatically stepped back into the shadowy part of the room, closer to the actual bar, resting his hand on the back of a tall bar stool.

  He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. Nor could he tear his eyes away. A tall, voluptuous young woman with flaming red hair had her arms wrapped around a tall, silver-haired man, and they were kissing passionately, ignoring the constant ringing of the mobile. And there was no mistaking who the man was. The Silver Fox himself. None other than Marius Remmington.

  Jack couldn’t believe his eyes. He was stunned. There was no other word for it, and he discovered he was rooted to the spot, watching them closely. Finally, they drew apart, and the woman reached into her large snakeskin bag on the chair, finally took out the phone, and spoke on it. Marius slipped out of his dark blazer, hung it on the back of a chair, and sat down. Once she was off the phone, the young woman seated herself next to Marius. They had their heads together at once, talking intimately, and kissing each other in between. Marius couldn’t keep his hands off her.