Helene had to force herself to face the fact that she had no idea who the man was – and would probably never know. He had disappeared from her life as completely as if he had never existed. Only the fact that she was still alive proved that she hadn’t imagined him.
As the weeks passed, Helene’s world began to return to something like normal.
But one day in early Autumn, on a mild October evening, she was wandering restlessly through her garden when she saw Mr Jenkin standing at her gate.
“Evenin’, Miss La Borde,” he said.
She smiled.
“I really wish you’d call me ‘Helene’, especially after everything that’s happened… after everything that you’ve done for me.”
The old man blushed and stammered. He could no sooner call her by her Christian name than fly to the moon. It didn’t matter: first name terms weren’t a prerequisite of intimacy and understanding. Not for a man like Mr Jenkin.
“Be the last day of our Indian Summer,” he said thoughtfully.
“Mmm, it has been unseasonably mild,” she agreed.
“Aagh, the south westerlies will be picking up,” he said. “I’ll come and dead-head those roses for you. Garden could do with a little bit of nurturing.” He looked up at her kindly. “And I think maybe for you, too. Maybe have a bit of a holiday? Have a rest?”
Helene shook her head.
“No time for that,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve been away for long enough. It’s much better to, you know, get on with things.”
As she said the words she realised that she meant them. There was nowhere else she wanted to be except in that small, pretty cottage in the furthest corner of Cornwall. Of course, it would be wonderful to share it… with the right person… the right man…
The old man nodded his head thoughtfully. He looked the picture of wisdom, possibly Methuselah himself.
“This came for you,” he said, interrupting her whimsy. “What with all the helter and skelter, the postie put it in the wrong box.”
He held out a postcard.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Mr Jenkin touched his cap and disappeared back into his own kitchen, where he stood watching her from the window.
When Helene looked at the frail piece of cardboard she held in her hands, she almost dropped it from shock. The picture showed a photograph of the shrine at Kompira-san. She would have recognised it anywhere.
With trembling hands she turned over the postcard. Apart from her address, there were just four words written on it:
‘Wish you were here.’
Nothing else. Unreasonable joy pulsed through her.
She turned on her heel and by the time she ducked through her kitchen door, her heart rate had trebled and she thought she was going to faint. It was a sign! At last! A message. A message only she would understand. It meant he was safe and that he was back in Japan.
No, she was wrong. Helene looked at the postcard and read the words again – more carefully this time.
‘Wish you were her.’
The sudden joy was swiftly dissolved by a disconcerting chill as if someone had just walked over her grave. A cold feeling seeped through her.
Oh God. Japan. Did that mean he was back with Mayumi? Back with the Yakuza?
‘Wish you were her.’
Helene had a bad, bad feeling.
She turned the card over and over in her hands, looking for some other clue. ‘Wish you were her’. Not ‘wish you were here’. But could she be certain it wasn’t a typo?
Helene turned on her computer, impatient with the twenty seconds it took to fire up. First she checked her email. Nothing. Then she checked the Helene of Troy website: still nothing. Seething with frustration, she paced up and down the kitchen pointlessly.
Then a thought occurred to her. An appalling, distressing, unshakeable thought. She put up the website for her bank account and logged in.
The shock hit her in a wave of nausea. One hundred thousand pounds had been removed from her account.
And she knew who had done it.
The bastard! After everything they’d been through together! He’d been playing her. Waiting for the moment when her money would be paid in.
Fury raged through her and then another thought occurred to her. One hundred thousand pounds had gone, but the per diem money and her meagre savings had been left untouched. He could have taken everything and left her penniless. Maybe there was a reason for his behaviour – and an explanation?
Hadn’t they escaped the clutches of the Yakuza rather too easily? After all, they had knowledge of Bill’s murder and they had simply been allowed to walk away. Maybe he had promised the money to save them – to save her: after all, the turnaround of events in Kotohira had been rapid and unexpected. Had he given the Yakuza that money to pay off a debt? Was he still paying it off by working for them?
Helene longed to know the truth: what had it all meant? To her? To him?
Over the next two days she had numerous and interminable conversations with the bank manager, the police and the Serious Fraud Squad, which seemed cruelly ironic. But the money had undoubtedly vanished and the bank staff were adamant that Helene herself had removed it. How else could anyone have got through all their substantial security?
The police were suspicious: they suggested that Helene was using the event to drum up further publicity for herself. She was furious, but knowing what she knew – or suspected she knew – ill equipped to fight back and prove her innocence. If indeed she was innocent.
Helene lurched from fury to lethargy and back. Sometimes she felt like screaming and sometimes she accepted that it was a fee payable to Charlie for a job well done. And, in the end, had it truly been her money? She had extracted the promise of it from Frank with a lie. Who, in fact, had committed the fraud in the first place? In her darker hours, she wondered how deep had become the man’s relationship with the Matsumotos.
She was grateful that her per diems and money earned from interviews had remained untouched. It was a gesture that seemed thoughtful. But it still wasn’t quite the nest-egg that she had anticipated. Early retirement was now an impossibility. And there had been no further communication from Charlie – the man she wasn’t sure she could think of as ‘Charlie’ any more.
Nor could she tell the world the full story of the Gene Genies or of Smiling Clive Jackson or of the secrets that lurked within the Federal Reserve banks. Neither could she write about Kazuma, Hassan, the Matsumotos, or even Bill Bailey with impunity. The list of events and people that she could never mention grew unfeasibly longer.
But Helene did have one weapon: she was a writer after all. And if she couldn’t write the facts, there was no-one stopping her from writing fiction – at least, she didn’t think so.
So one day, when the first frost of a hard winter had sprinkled icing onto her rose bushes, Helene sat down at her computer. Her hands hovered over the keyboard, and then she began to write.
Have you ever listened to a stranger’s conversation at an airport, or on the bus, or on a train? I did. And it changed my life...
THE END
Jane Harvey-Berrick, Exposure
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