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‘Actually you’re a bit like my brother Richard,’ she said hastily. ‘He got picked on for being a gawky kid-all elbows and knees and a chest like a chicken—but he wasn’t feeble by any means and the older he got, the more he appreciated his natural leanness. Women positively drooled over him when he got into the movies—’
‘How very reassuring, but your concern for me is quite misplaced,’ Luke said, with a cutting precision that rejected her backhanded compliment. ‘I was never a particular target for bullying, nor, I’m glad to say, indiscriminate drooling, which sounds equally unpleasant.’
His words had more impact than he could know. Rosalind let her bright head drop back against her seat with a sigh.
‘Oh, it is, it is,’ she said moodily, thinking of all those salacious tales about her which had floated to the surface over the past week. She had once thought such rumours funny, hadn’t minded people entertaining themselves with silly exaggerations about her sex life. But the joke had somewhat lost its savour when it had become coupled with the knowledge that somewhere out there beyond the spotlight was a faceless man who regarded her as his own personal possession, who was obsessively collecting every scrap of knowledge about her, watching, waiting, gradually shaping and fashioning her to fit his private fantasies, turning her from a person into a...a thing that he might one day come to claim, perhaps violently...
And because of that life would never be the same for Rosalind. She would never again feel quite as safe, never be quite as carefree and trusting as she once had been. Olivia had been frustrated by her twin’s refusal to take Peter seriously, but Rosalind had always handled her fears and doubts by laughing at them, by holding them up to ridicule and contempt, because to do otherwise would be to admit that they had unreasonable power over her.
But this time her tried-and-true remedy had failed her. She had received a harsh lesson in helplessness that she had longed to repudiate. That was why she had gone streaking down to Wellington after that tantalising telephone call.
‘We’ve never met,’ the woman had faltered, after introducing herself only as Peggy, ‘but I believe we have a mutual...friend—someone who’s been writing a lot of letters to you lately—someone I’m worried about.’
Rosalind’s heart had accelerated and she’d gripped the receiver hard. ‘You’re talking about Peter?’
A deep, unsteady breath along the line had signalled her caller’s mingled nervousness and relief. ‘Yes. You obviously know who I mean. But I... I don’t want to get him into trouble...’
‘Nor do I,’ said Rosalind honestly. ‘I haven’t made any sort of official complaint yet, if that’s what you’re asking. I was hoping the situation would resolve itself...’
‘Maybe it will. It’s just—I saw some of Peter’s letters to you, at his flat... I found photos, and things of yours—he has a whole room wallpapered with pictures of you; it’s almost like a shrine the way it’s set out. I think he’s more likely to harm himself than anyone else but I—You see... Oh, it’s so complicated...you can’t possibly imagine! I—I thought that you and I might be able to help each other, to help Peter, without there being a fuss or any ghastly publicity—’
She broke off with what Rosalind thought sounded like a sob but then continued, her voice choppy with mistress. ‘It’s all so very awkward talking like this over the phone. This is terribly personal, you see, Miss Marlow. Not even my family knows—they mustn’t know—’
Rosalind could hear the incipient panic building. Her informant sounded almost at the end of her tether. She might lose her courage any moment and hang up, leaving Rosalind none the wiser as to her, or Peter’s, true identity.
‘I agree; nobody else has to know. Would it make you more comfortable if we could meet, Peggy, and talk about it face to face?’ she interrupted gently, clamping down on the impulse to hammer urgent questions down the line. ‘Just the two of us, alone? Trust me, I don’t want any unnecessary publi
city about this either.’
‘Oh, yes, could we do that?’ There was a gushing sigh of immense gratitude. ‘But it needs to be right away and I live in Wellington .. : Her voice swept high again in tense frustration. ’My husband is in the Government, you see, and our comings and goings are sometimes monitored. I don’t have any excuse to come to Auckland at short notice and the family is bound to be curious and suspicious if I suddenly take it into my head to insist...’
The woman’s ragged dignity and desperation triggered Rosalind’s compassion as well as her avid curiosity, especially after hearing that she was the wife of Donald Staines, a conservative pillar of the political establishment and self-appointed watchdog of New Zealand morality.
Reading between the lines, Rosalind guessed that Mr Staines was an authoritarian husband who lived by a set of rigid, old-fashioned standards and expected his wife to be equally upright and unblemished in character. He had no truck with modern, namby-pamby psychology that forgave people their sins because they had been victims themselves, and, whatever Peggy’s involvement with Peter, it was obvious she feared she would receive contempt and condemnation rather than help and understanding on the home front.
Rosalind had just got back from location. She had hardly even unpacked, but she didn’t hesitate. She threw a few things back into her bag and flew to Wellington that very evening, booking into the agreed meeting place as the ubiquitous ‘Miss Smith’. She was eager to shrug off her growing sense of powerlessness by seizing the initiative and taking assertive action instead of passively waiting for events to run their own course.
The hasty trip turned out to be a massive error in judgement. Perhaps if she had been more sensible and less arrogant, and had sought professional advice before rushing off to slay her phantoms, then Peggy Staines would not have had her heart attack, or the accompanying stroke which had complicated her recovery.
Hell!
The burden of guilt now resettled crushingly on Rosalind’s shoulders. It all came down to choices and Rosalind knew that in the last few weeks she had made too many of the wrong kind: wrong personal choices, wrong career choices. Just about everything she did these days was turning out wrong, she thought, heaving a luxurious, self-pitying sigh.
‘Rosalind? Are you feeling ill?’
She blinked and discovered that she had been frowning blankly out of the window of the plane at the vast blue nothingness. The sky was utterly clear, not a wisp of cloud in sight, and as her eyes dropped Rosalind could see the flattened contours of the Malaysian countryside below.
A broad brown river snaked lazily across the blue-green landscape, looping back on itself to almost enclose fat teardrops of lush jungle. Where the jungle gave way to serried ranks of palm trees she could see narrower brown bands—dirt roads running in straight lines for kilometres through the vast palm-oil plantations. From above, the palms looked like clusters of multiarmed starfish, spreading their green limbs across the earth-bed beneath a crystal-clear sea of air.
‘Rosalind? Is something wrong? Why are you looking like that?’
The harsh demand shattered her abstraction. She looked around. Luke James had removed his glasses and his naked eyes weren’t the least myopic as they drilled into hers. They were razor-sharp with curiosity, and with a jolt of alarm Rosalind recognised a shrewd intelligence at work. She hoped he wasn’t as perceptive as he was evidently observant.
‘Sorry...what was it we were talking about?’ she said, instinctively brandishing the shield of charming vagueness that had served her so well in the past. ‘I’m afraid my thoughts wandered off on a tangent. I tend to do that sometimes—my imagination is pretty wild...’
He refused to be diverted. ‘Not very pleasant thoughts, whatever they were. From your expression, I thought the wing must be on file at least!’
That explained his uncomfortably dissecting look. She must have given him a scare! Her mouth relaxed into a leasing curve.
