Читать книгу Element Of Risk - Robyn Donald - Страница 7

PERDITA GLADSTONE smoothed moisturiser on to her famous translucent skin, then glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes until the taxi came. In five more months this high-pressure life would be over, and oh, how glad she’d be! Modelling had been good to her, but only ever as a means to an end.

She stared with dispassionate interest at the face that had looked out from a million magazines, been admired on the world’s most noted catwalks, a face almost universally heralded as her generation’s most mesmerising.

Not that Perdita had ever succumbed to the extravagant ravings of the hype machine. During the last ten years she’d developed a healthy cynicism. When she began she’d been the trendsetter; her dramatic bone-structure, height of six feet and translucent Celtic skin were touted as the look of the decade, the eight or nine pale golden freckles across her nose providing a piquant contrast to the starkly sculptured, sensuous spareness of her face.

It was the right look at the right time and she owed it to the photographer in Auckland who had taken the first shots for her portfolio.

He’d insisted she pose for a full-face profile wearing the high headdress of Nefertiti, wife of the Pharaoh of Egypt. The contrast between her heavy-lidded, oriental air of serene mystery and her warm northern European colouring had created an enormous stir. That photograph had taken her all the way from New Zealand to the heights of international fame. And she’d achieved ‘the Perdita look’ as a very nervous seventeen-year-old wearing jeans, a towel around her breasts, and a headdress co-opted from a fancy-dress hire business!

However, her decade was over. Elfin waifs were set to conquer the fashionable world during the next twelve months, and Perdita was going to take her hefty investment portfolio and substantial bank balance and retire thankfully to the obscurity from which she’d come.

Brushing back the flood of barely waving, silky amber hair that was her trademark, she pulled a face at her reflection. Obscurity couldn’t come soon enough.

Outside, the New York traffic thundered past in a hail of tooting, jostling, urgent taxi cabs. And the telephone rang.

‘Damn,’ she muttered in a voice that still held faint traces of a New Zealand accent. It had to be someone she trusted; her number was unlisted. And that meant it was reasonably important. Picking up the receiver, she said crisply, ‘Hello?’

‘Perdita Gladstone?’ There was more than a trace of New Zealand in this masculine voice. It was pure NewZild, broad and unashamed.

The breath died in Perdita’s throat. Staring blindly out over Fifth Avenue to the green, interloper’s glory of Central Park, she swallowed as one hand curved protectively around the antique “Victorian locket—another trademark—which she wore on a thin gold chain around her neck.

‘Yes, it is I,’ she said hoarsely, giving the simple code she had worked out with him.

For ten years she had been waiting for this, for half that time searching actively. The last occasion Frank had rung he’d said the name she wanted was very close.

‘I’ve got them.’ He always tried to sound deadpan as a good private detective should, but there was no hiding the jubilant note in his voice. ‘Natalie and Luke Dennison. They live at a little place called Manley up in Northland.’

Shock dimmed the green trees in the park, banished the ever-present throb and hum of the city to a faint, gasping echo. Perdita looked back, down ten years to a place so far removed from this that they might well be on different planets.

She’d known there was an element of risk in what she was doing; she’d had no idea that it would jeopardise everything she had made of her life.

‘Are you there? Miss Gladstone? Perdita?’ Frank’s voice registered a sudden alarm.

‘Dennison?’ The voice wasn’t hers. It croaked rather than breathed, and the cool control was lost to a shaky tremor. ‘I’m all right. Dennison,’ she repeated on a long, ragged sigh. ‘Luke Dennison.’

‘Yup. He’s a big man in the north—owns a huge cattle and sheep station called Pigeon Hill. He’s fairly well known—old money, family came over on the first ships, mixes with the elite, that sort of thing. Prime ministers consult him, and he belongs to a lot of very powerful organisations.’

‘I know,’ she said, outrage beginning to surface through the numbness.

‘You know him?’ Frank was curious but she couldn’t have answered him then, not if her sanity had depended on it. ‘He married Natalie Bennet—another family with old money. She died about eighteen months ago. Cancer.’

Perdita groped desperately for a chair. Shivering, she collapsed into it, clutching the receiver with white-knuckled fingers.

‘Died?’ she managed to repeat.

‘Yup, tough, poor woman. She was only thirty-seven. Luke Dennison was a couple of years younger. They were married when he was twenty-one. His parents were both dead and I suppose he needed a wife.’

‘Probably,’ Perdita agreed tonelessly. ‘I have to go, Frank. Can you send me the details?’

‘Yeah. It’ll be a big bill, I hope you realise. Usually I don’t have much difficulty with these cases even when there’s a veto, but this was a humdinger. I had a hell of a time tracking down the information. Files were missing or lost, people didn’t know or wouldn’t talk, and it turned out to be a real challenge. I’d say that someone did their best to make sure no one was able to trace anything. Still, we got there.’ He sounded professionally pleased with himself. ‘OK, I’ll courier everything off straight away, if you’re still sure you trust couriers.’

She would have trusted the mail, or copies of the documents on the fax, but Frank had his idiosyncrasies, and one of them was a passion for security and a vast mistrust of agencies that moved information.

Perhaps he was right; when she had first contacted him he had told her that he didn’t do anything illegal and she believed him, but she had a feeling that her ideas of illegal and Frank’s possibly didn’t coincide. She didn’t know how he had got this information, and she wasn’t going to ask.

‘Thank you,’ she said levelly.

‘That’s OK. Glad to get it done. It was starting to take over my life.’ He hung up.

Take over his life? Perdita had been waiting for those names for ten years. And now that she had them, the beginning she had anticipated was turning into something else, a nightmare she didn’t know how to deal with.

Eventually, when the dialling tone impinged, she set the receiver down and looked at her watch.

‘Oh, panic!’ she muttered, leaping to her feet. She had no time to think, none to dwell on this news, or even to sort out her emotions. But mingled with the grief and the anger and the bewilderment there was another, one she had never expected to feel: a keen, almost brutal sense of betrayal.

For ten years she had been alone and lost, and for those years Natalie and Luke had been happy. Her hand lingered for a moment on the thin gold locket. Whether they’d known it or not, their happiness had been built on her misery.

Setting her mouth, she forced herself to pick up her bag, weighed down by the usual assortment of necessities and the ever-present book on landscape gardening. Perdita had always prided herself on her professional outlook, and she wasn’t going to let the complete upheaval of her life make her late.

Five more months! They stretched out like an eternity.

‘What have I done?’ she muttered as she opened the door. ‘Oh, what have I done?’