The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [117]
“It wouldn’t have done you any good to lift me when you lifted Morgan, because I’d have been just as stubborn and just as inventive in stalling you, and I guess there must have been quite an argument about whether it was safe to leave me on the outside to help with the investigation. My guess is that it was my old acquaintance Arachne who persuaded the team to go for the bug option—which might have been a valuable information feed if Mr. Leland hadn’t stuck his paranoid oar in—but that doesn’t matter. The point is that it was the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons. I’m ready to help you, Helen. I’m ready to do what you can’t, and demand the truth from Morgan because I want to know, before my life goes down the toilet with all of yours, exactly what it is that’s flushed me away.
“I need to know, Helen. It’s the one thing left that I really do need. And the beauty of it is that from your point of view, it’s cost-free. You have nothing left to lose, and any chance to win is worth taking.”
It had been an exhaustingly long speech, and she was shivering in the night-born cold that the sullen morning light hadn’t yet contrived to banish, but Lisa felt more alive than she had for many a year, and it certainly wasn’t Ginny’s pep pills that were responsible. She was prepared to go on if she had to; Helen might still need time to think about it, and in a situation of this kind, it was best to keep piling the pressure on until something gave.
Fortunately, something had already given. “I can’t trust you,” the other woman said pathetically.
“You don’t have to,” Lisa said. “Your worst-case scenario is that you might be arrested two hours early. I can’t guarantee that even I can get anything out of Morgan—after all, whether you believe it or not, he’s been keeping me in the dark for the best part of forty years—but at the very least, you’d have an extra hostage to bargain with. I have my car. You name the time and the place—but make it soon. If there aren’t enough sisters where you are to constitute a quorum, somebody had better make an executive decision.”
“Bitch,” was Helen Grundy’s reply—but she said it offhandedly, with no real feeling. Lisa was confident that it hadn’t been Helen who’d shot the phone out of her hand or sprayed “Traitor” on her door, but she now figured that Helen, not Stella, must have been the principal shaper of the burglars’ script.
“We don’t have time for insults,” Lisa said. “Where? When?”
Whether Helen was alone or not, the executive decision was made. “The mall straddling North Parade Road, where the old recreation ground and cricket field used to be,” she said defeatedly. “There’s a shop called Salomey on the ground floor, just to the right of the Johnstone Street entrance. Come to the dressing rooms. Come on foot, alone. You have ten minutes.”
“I’m too far away. Make it fifteen.”
“Break the speed limit and leave the car on a double yellow. You have ten.” Helen rang off.
TWENTY
Lisa had no watch to tell her the time, but it was obviously too late now to do the run into what had once been the Bath city center in ten minutes. The morning rush hour was already well underway. The onboard computer, roused from quietude by the parking offense she’d committed on North Road, logged six more manifest offenses and four instances of contributory negligence. Its muted voice was still beeping plaintively about parking regulations when she abandoned it, but she figured she made it to the Recreation Ground Mall within a couple of minutes of the deadline she’d been given.
Lisa didn’t expect that her tardiness would make any difference; Helen’s imposition of a time limit was a meaningless gesture, born of