See No Evil

13

Sandy Waterhouse stood in the ‘All Other Passports’ queue at Heathrow’s Terminal Three. Her flight from New York had arrived at the same time as one from Pakistan and another from Jamaica, and the line was moving slowly. She was tired — she hadn’t done more than doze on the plane — but her brain was buzzing.

She knew that this was an important trip, but now, standing on British soil, she was beginning to feel it. She was scared and excited and impatient. The dice were thrown and she wanted to see how they would land.

Officially she was in London for three days working with a client, a large American insurance company, on the acquisition of a British investment-management firm. But she had an appointment to see the senior partner of her own firm’s London office that morning at eleven o’clock. She checked her watch. It was barely seven. She had plenty of time to go to her hotel and have a shower before seeing him at Trelawney Stewart’s office in the City.

The firm, medium sized by New York standards but with a strong reputation, was doing well in London and was expanding. They were recruiting locally, and planning to send over two more partners from New York. They also needed experienced, capable associates who understood both the American and the British way of doing things. That, Sandy hoped, was a good description of herself.

She had spent two years in London and had hated most of it. She had no friends there and because of the ridiculous hours she had been forced to work she had found it virtually impossible to make any. There had only been Jen, whose death had deeply shocked her. And Alex. Alex Calder.

Jen’s death had brought them together as she had supported him in his single-minded attempts to find out what had really happened to his assistant. She liked Alex, she liked him very much. It wasn’t just that she found him physically attractive, with his strong, well-toned body and those thoughtful blue-grey eyes that seemed to assess and understand her, his kind smile and his gentle voice with that soft Scottish intonation. She admired him too. He had been willing to take on great risks to do what he, and she, thought was right. Many of the men she met every day on Wall Street took few risks in doing what they knew was wrong.

She hadn’t encouraged the relationship, if it could be called that; she knew that her eighty-hour weeks weren’t really conducive to it. But they had had a great time together in Italy. Since then their encounters had been characterized by frustration and the occasional snatched jet-lagged day. Then there had been the awful weekend when he had come to New York to see her and she had been whisked off to Dallas. All right, he had blamed her for that, but he didn’t seem to understand that there was nothing that she could do about it, that a deal was closing and there was no other lawyer who knew the documents, and that she couldn’t have refused to go and still keep her job at Trelawney Stewart. She had been looking forward to the weekend too! It hadn’t been exactly fun to spend Friday and Saturday night awake until four a.m. arguing over warranties in legal agreements. He hadn’t understood that.

The conclusion was obvious to both of them: there was no future in this relationship. Sandy was angry about this. Angry with herself, and angry with Alex. But as the weeks went by she was sad about it too. It wasn’t often that someone like Alex came along. Couldn’t she do something to make things easier? It would be difficult. She knew what Trelawney Stewart’s partners would think. That she was a soft-headed woman who was willing to put her career second to her love life. Before long she’d be married and having babies. They’d never say it, probably not even to each other, but they’d think it.

Why should it be she who made the compromise? Why couldn’t Alex move to New York? She understood very well his reasons for stepping away from the financial world, but perhaps he could do something with airfields or flying. He could at least try; he could at least discuss it with her. The anger and frustration that had been simmering since that disastrous weekend flared up again.

Then she had flown up to Martha’s Vineyard to spend the long Memorial Day weekend at the end of May at her folks’ place. Over dinner her father asked her about Alex. She explained the problem, why the relationship wasn’t really going to work. She expected him to leave it at that, her father never usually seemed to take more than a polite interest in her boyfriends, whether because he wasn’t interested or he respected her privacy, she wasn’t quite sure. But this time it was different.

‘Do you like this man?’ he had asked.

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘A lot?’

She had reddened at this untypical question from her father. ‘Yeah, I guess. A lot.’

‘Then why don’t you talk to Trelawney Stewart? See what they can do.’

‘You know how these firms work, Dad,’ she said. ‘They’ll just view it as a sign of weakness. I’m doing really well at the moment and I don’t want to screw it all up.’

Her father exchanged glances with her mother. Sandy detected a conspiracy. They ate in silence. Sandy was wary.

‘Stanhope Moore asked me to go to Sydney once,’ her father said at last. ‘They wanted to make a big push in Australasia. They wanted me to head it up. It was a great opportunity. I guess I was about thirty-five. You were three.’

‘I don’t remember going to Sydney,’ Sandy said.

‘No. Grandmother Peabody was very sick. She had cancer and Mom was spending a lot of time with her. I told them we couldn’t go. They suggested I leave the family in the States and spend one month there and two weeks here. They were very persuasive. But your mother needed me here with her.’

‘OK, but that didn’t hurt your career, did it?’

‘Sure it did. I got passed over for promotion that year and the next. It took me three or four years to get back on to the fast track.’

‘That was different,’ Sandy protested. ‘You’re a man, they understand that kind of thing. I’m a woman. I’m not supposed to put my personal feelings ahead of the job.’

Sandy’s father shrugged. ‘I don’t know where you get that idea from. I nearly went to Sydney. I guess all I’m telling you is that I’m glad I didn’t.’

Sandy looked at her father, countless arguments running through her head. Her father’s point was, of course, that his career had recovered. Until the bank had been swallowed up in a merger a few years earlier, he had been chairman of Stanhope Moore, one of the most prestigious and conservative commercial banks in the country.

But Sandy couldn’t agree with her father. It just wasn’t allowed. She loved him of course, and he loved her, but ever since she was eighteen he had been the enemy. At college she had stumbled into a student debate on whether the United States’ big banks should forgive the billions of dollars of debt owed to them by the world’s poorest nations. The argument that they should seemed to Sandy incontrovertible. She also realized that her father was one of the few men in the country who could really make it happen. And so, unlike the other fifty or so students in the room, Sandy could actually influence the fate of the Third World.

That running war with her father was still being waged, if on a much lower level than it had been in her early twenties. Cornered by him on her attitude to Alex and to her work, Sandy’s instinct was to summon the plight of the starving in Africa and Latin America to her aid, but she didn’t. She did, however, exercise her right to behave grumpily for the remainder of the weekend.

But her father’s point had sunk in. And now, now she was willing to give it a go.

Her passport stamped, she strode through baggage reclaim and customs, her carry-on sized suitcase trundling along behind her. She decided to take the train to Paddington rather than a taxi. She didn’t know what it was about her, but whenever she took a cab in London, invariably the driver began a conversation. Usually she didn’t mind, but this time she wanted some peace and privacy. She bought an International Herald Tribune to hide behind and sought out the platform.

She had been wary of discussing her plan with Alex. This was partly because there was always a chance it might not work, but also to give herself the opportunity to back out if she changed her mind. Although, as she found herself drawing nearer and nearer to Trelawney Stewart’s London office, she realized she was becoming surer of what she was doing. She’d call him after the meeting, perhaps arrange to see him that night or the next.

She had no idea how the relationship would develop. But she smiled to herself. She was looking forward to finding out.

Calder spent the day at the airfield. It was a perfect morning for flying, and he had taken the opportunity to put his little red Pitts biplane through its paces, performing a series of barrel rolls, outside loops, Cuban eights and Immelmann turns over the Norfolk sky. But a stiff crosswind picked up in the afternoon, making take-off and landing impossible. He decided to meet Kim at the hospital. After his stray thoughts of the previous evening, he wanted to see Todd again, remind himself as forcefully as possible that Kim had a husband and he was in a coma.

As he pulled the Maserati into a parking space, he saw Kim unlocking her rented car on the other side of the car park. He got out of his own car and waved to her. She saw him, and came over to him, smiling.

‘Are you here to see Todd?’

‘Yes,’ said Calder.

Kim looked at him strangely. She couldn’t really ask why, but she could think it. ‘I’ll come back in with you.’

‘Any change?’

‘None. I spent the whole day with him, though. I got some reading done.’ She lifted the thick paperback she was carrying.

‘Any sign of the other van Zyls?’

‘Cornelius took a helicopter down to London first thing. Caroline was here this morning, but she’s on her way back to California now. We talked a lot. I like her.’

They walked through the familiar corridors to the private room where Todd had been transferred. By the head of his bed was the figure of a woman crouching on a chair, bent over towards his face. Calder saw her straight away, but Kim didn’t notice her at first. As they moved closer, the woman turned. She was young and strikingly pretty, with yellow hair in a bob, white teeth and an upturned nose. Her big blue eyes were red and brimming with tears. When she saw Kim her jaw dropped and her face, red from crying, lost its colour.

‘Donna?’ Kim said.

‘Oh, my God,’ the girl said in an American accent, and put her hand to her mouth. She stumbled to her feet, pushed past Kim, and headed for the exit.

‘Donna!’ Kim shouted after her. ‘Donna!’

Kim’s face was pale. Her lips were trembling. A nurse appeared to see what the fuss was about. ‘Has that woman been in here before?’ Kim asked the nurse. ‘Have you seen her before?’

‘Here, have a seat, Kim,’ the nurse said. She was a solid woman with a strong Norfolk accent.

‘She has been here before,’ Kim said. ‘Hasn’t she?’ She glared at the nurse, demanding an answer.

The nurse nodded.

Kim’s cheeks, so pale a moment before, reddened. She switched her glare to her unconscious husband, entangled in tubes, oblivious to the drama around him. Then she stared at Calder, her face a mixture of anger and bewilderment.

‘Let’s go,’ Calder said, putting an arm round Kim and leading her from the room. A tear ran down her cheek and then another. They walked in silence down to the hospital café, and Calder got them both a cup of tea.

‘Who is she?’ he asked.

‘Donna Snyder. Art teacher at the school.’

Calder nodded. There was no need to ask what she was doing in England, or why Kim was so upset. For a moment he considered suggesting that there was a misunderstanding, but one look at Kim convinced him that that was pointless.

‘She must have waited until she saw me leave,’ she said. ‘I wonder how long she’s been here, skulking in the car park, watching.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Calder said. ‘I’m so sorry. What a terrible way to find out.’

‘I should have realized,’ Kim said. ‘I knew they liked each other. They would always talk to each other at school functions, joke together and so forth. I suppose I was mildly jealous, Donna does have those big baby-blue eyes after all, but you can’t go through life being jealous of every attractive woman your husband is friends with.’ She sighed. ‘Or maybe you can. Maybe that was my mistake. Anyway, I noticed about a month ago at a dinner party given by the principal that they were avoiding each other. Stupidly I was relieved. I thought they’d fallen out, had one of those staff-room squabbles, something like that. But that’s what happens when flirtation turns into an affair, isn’t it? Ignore each other in public, but in private...’ She broke down in sobs. Calder leaned over the table to touch her arm. There were a few other visitors in the café, and they looked on in sympathy. Grief is what you expect to see in hospitals.

Calder drove her home, promising to bring her back the next day to pick up her own car. He cooked some supper. Kim went out for a long walk through the marshes alone. When she returned, there was a little colour in her cheeks but her dark hair was a mess. Calder had a bottle of white wine open. She took a glass thankfully.

‘I don’t know, Alex, I don’t know what to think. I mean, I love him, I love him so much. And I see him lying there every day, so helpless, not knowing when he’s going to recover, if he’s going to recover. And all the time she’s outside, tearing herself up with her own grief. I feel like such a bloody idiot. I want him to get better but I also want to strangle him. And the terrible thing is, if he doesn’t get better, then I’ll know that at the end he was in love with her, not me. I couldn’t face that, I just couldn’t face that.’ She buried her face in her hands.

Her agony was painful to watch. Calder would not wish Todd’s condition on anyone, but his anger was building too. It had turned out that Todd was like all those other good-looking charmers after all. He had used Kim and he had hurt her. Except that this time Kim looked as if she had been hurt so badly it would be difficult to recover.

They ate supper and moved outside to the bench in the garden. Calder opened another bottle of wine. It was a warm evening, despite the clouds overhead, but to the west there was a band of clear sky into which the sun was dipping, throwing its long shadows across the garden. The rooks kicked up their evening fuss. Kim talked and drank. Calder listened and drank.

They talked about university, the other schmucks. Calder spoke about an old girlfriend who had dumped him. They opened a third bottle of wine. He put his arm round her and she buried her head in his shoulder. The sun sank beneath the horizon and the windmill on the ridge retreated into the darkness. The rooks settled down. He kissed her, or did she kiss him? They broke away. She rested her head on his shoulder again. Then she turned her head up to his and they kissed again.

They made angry, passionate, drunken love, there, on the grass, under the apple tree.

Calder heard the car draw up outside the front of the house. Then he heard the engine splutter and stop. Then he heard the door knocker. It took him several moments to react. He looked frantically around for his clothes. Kim was lying semi-naked on the grass, her mouth open, asleep. Calder grabbed a shirt and some trousers and pulled them on. Who the hell was that?

‘Hello?’

Christ! He recognized the voice. It was coming closer, around the side of the house, checking the garden.

‘Hello?’

‘Sandy!’ he shouted, frantically zipping up his trousers. ‘Sandy. Wait there! I’m in the garden. I’ll be right round.’

Kim stirred, and raised herself on one arm. ‘Huh?’

‘Alex?’ The voice was nearer. The little side gate to the back garden squeaked open. ‘Alex? What the hell...?’

Calder stood barefoot, shirt hanging out of his trousers. Sandy stopped by the side of the house, speechless. Kim was sitting on the grass, blinking, her top half still clothed, but her jeans and panties in a ball at her feet.

‘Oh, my God!’ Sandy put her hand to her mouth and turned and ran. Calder ran after her. ‘Sandy, stop! Wait!’

‘Didn’t you get my message?’ Sandy said as she opened her car door.

‘What message?’

‘I left you a message. That I was coming up to see you. Oh, God.’ She jumped into the car.

‘Sandy, stop!’

But Sandy slammed the car into gear, spun it round and drove off back to the village and the road to London.

Calder stood there, watching the tail lights disappear round the first bend.

‘Alex?’

It was Kim, still blinking, but now wearing her jeans. ‘Who was that?’

‘Sandy,’ Calder replied.

‘Jesus,’ Kim said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Calder looked at her, his alcohol-sodden brain torn between confusion and a rising surge of panic.

Kim pulled her arms around herself. ‘Alex? What have we done?’