Lost - Michael Robotham [111]
“I need to speak to Rachel.”
“Miss Rachel isn’t here, Sir.”
He’s lying.
“You don’t have to protect her. I don’t want to cause any trouble. If she doesn’t want to speak to me I’ll leave.”
He looks past me into the garden. “I don’t think Sir Douglas would approve.”
“Just ask her.”
He contemplates this and agrees, leaving me waiting on the steps. A fire is smoldering somewhere, turning the air the color of dirty water.
Thomas appears again. “Miss Carlyle will see you in the kitchen.”
He leads the way. We pass along hallways lined with paintings of foxhounds, horses and pheasants. The frames are so dark they blend into the walls and the animals appear to be suspended, set in aspic. Above the stairs there are English landscapes of lakes and rivers.
At first I don’t realize that Rachel is already in the kitchen. She stands with the stillness of a photograph, tall and dark, with her hair drawn back.
“Your father said I couldn’t see you,” I say.
“He didn’t ask me.”
She is wearing jeans and a raw-silk shirt. Her wedge-shaped face is softened by the cut of her hair, which is shorter than I remember, loosely brushing her shoulders.
“I hear you couldn’t remember what happened that night.”
“Yes, for a while.”
She bites her bottom lip and weighs whether to believe me. “You didn’t forget about me.”
“No. I didn’t know what happened to you. I only discovered a few days ago.”
Urgency fills her eyes. “Did you see Mickey? Was she there?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
She purses her lips and turns her face away. “Losing your memory, forgetting everything, must be nice. All the terrible things in your life, the guilt, the regret, gone, washed away. Sometimes I wish …” She doesn’t finish. Leaning over the sink, she fills a glass of water from the tap and empties it into a row of African violets on the windowsill. “You never asked me why I married Aleksei.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“I met my ex-husband at a fund-raising dinner for Bosnian orphans. He wrote a very large check. He wrote a lot of very large checks in those days. Whenever I took him to lectures and documentaries about deforestation or animal cruelty or the plight of the homeless—he pulled out his checkbook.”
“He was buying your affection.”
“I thought he believed in the same things.”
“Your parents didn’t like him?”
“They were horrified. Aleksei had no equal—anybody would have been better than a Russian émigré with a murdering father.”
“Did you love him?”
She ponders this. “Yes. I think so.”
“What happened?”
She shrugs. “We got married. For the first three years we lived in Holland. Mickey was born in Amsterdam: Aleksei was building up the business.”
Rachel’s voice is low and introspective. “In spite of what my father says, I’m not a foolish person. I knew something was going on. Mostly it was just rumors and nervous glances in restaurants. I used to ask Aleksei but he told me people were jealous of him. I knew he was involved in something illegal. I kept asking questions and he grew irritated. He told me that a wife should not question her husband. She must obey.
“Then one day the wife of a Dutch flower grower visited me at home. I don’t know how she found my address. She showed me a photograph of her husband. His face was so scarred by acid that his skin looked like melted wax.
“‘Tell me why a woman would stay with a man who looks like this?’ she asked me. I shook my head. Then she said, ‘Because it cannot be as bad as staying with the man who would do such a thing.’
“From then on I began to discover things. I eavesdropped on conversations, read e-mails and kept copies of letters. I learned things—”
“Enough to get you killed.”
“Enough to keep me safe,” she corrects. “I learned how Aleksei does business. It is simple and brutal. First he offers to buy a business. If a price cannot be agreed he burns it down. If they set up again he burns their houses down. And if the message still fails to be heard, he burns down the