Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

‘I’m not sure I can,’ I said. ‘I feel I have to do something. In any case, if Carl were planning to come back to St Ives to find me I reckon he would already have done so. I imagine that he feels rejected by me. I made it quite clear that I wanted nothing more to do with him when I saw him in jail and then I didn’t answer his letter...’

My voice caught in my throat.

‘You really are sure you want to find him, aren’t you,’ muttered Mariette resignedly.

I assured her I was.

She sighed. ‘Men,’ she said. ‘Nothing but trouble.’

‘Is that why you have nothing to do with them?’ I asked sweetly.

‘Maybe that’s what it will come to.’

‘And pigs might fly,’ I replied.

‘As a matter of fact there are days when I just can’t wait to get old and past it.’

I could only grin. There she was, radiating vitality as usual, perfect skin, shiny black hair, a woman born to drive men mad if they weren’t already.

But my mind was still on more serious matters. ‘Mariette,’ I said hesitantly, after a short pause. ‘If I did decide to go to America... would you come with me?... I mean, I’m not sure I could manage on my own and I have the money to pay for both of us... and we could try to make a holiday of it...’

I wasn’t sure there was actually much chance of that in my frame of mind, but if Mariette suspected as much she did not let on. ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said.

Over the next couple of weeks we prepared for our trip. I took myself off to Penzance to buy some much needed new clothes. This time I travelled alone and I bought garments that suited me, not Mariette, fond as I had become of her. Carl had probably been right about the tarty orange suit episode. I had attempted to turn myself into somebody I wasn’t. That was another thing that was never going to happen again.

We also had to sort out passports and tickets, and car hire. Yet another of Mariette’s many friends, who lived in London, obtained a copy of my birth certificate. I decided that my passport would be in my maiden name. It was simplest and in any case I no longer desired to be either Mrs Foster or Mrs Peters.

I became Jane Adams again, the name I was christened with. At least, according to my brand new passport I did.

Mariette was pensive as she fingered the pristine document. ‘You know, you’re still Suzanne to me. I can’t imagine calling you anything else...’

I smiled. ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m still Suzanne to myself too.’

Official documents were one thing, but I could never really be Jane again, not inside my head. Too much had happened. And, in fact, the memory of the night when Carl had given me my new name, although tainted by the lies we had lived, remained too vivid. I could not easily discard my name, even though I had thrown away Carl’s records and CDs of the Cohen song from which it had been taken. And, to be honest, I was already beginning to regret that.

Before we left for America I made a final call to DS Perry to make sure that there was no further news of Carl. She had earlier supplied me with all the information she had from the Florida police about Carl and the death of his daughter, including the name of the man who had been the investigating officer at Key Largo when he had been charged with manslaughter.

‘I don’t know exactly what you’re expecting to find over there, but don’t build your hopes up, will you?’ Julie Perry cautioned.

‘I’m expecting nothing but you know what I’m hoping for, I’m hoping I might find Carl, or at least discover more about him,’ I said.

‘As long as you don’t end up wishing you hadn’t...’

She didn’t seem quite to finish the sentence, but I thought I knew what she meant.

Mariette and I flew out of Heathrow en route to Miami just fifteen days after my journey to Hounslow. I had a suitcase full of new clothes, a chequebook, a Barclays Premier gold card and, of course, a passport. I thought that was pretty good going. And I must confess that even in my distress my new-found independence gave me considerable satisfaction. In spite of my extraordinarily sheltered past I found that I took to it with surprising ease – although I realised I would not have managed such a big trip so effortlessly without Mariette. Her only previous trip to the States had been a package tour to Disneyworld at Orlando, but she seemed totally confident that this prepared her for almost anything America could throw at her. Nothing much fazed Mariette.

Any notions I had about transatlantic travel being glamorous were well and truly scotched by nine hours in Virgin economy class. I am not particularly tall, about five foot six, but I felt as if I had been wedged in to my seat with a shoehorn. By the time we reached our destination the circulation in my legs seemed to have disappeared and I couldn’t help thinking about the newspaper articles I had read claiming that being cramped on aircraft can cause blood clots and kill.

‘If we were animals,’ remarked Mariette crustily, ‘there would be animal rights protesters, waving bloody great banners, waiting for us on the tarmac.’ I managed half a smile.

As we battled our way through Immigration I became increasingly glad that we’d decided not to go further than the airport Hilton that night. I had heard about jet lag but nothing had prepared me for it. I had never been so tired in my life.

We had a huge room in the Hilton overlooking a runway – almost on top of one, it seemed – and yet we could hear very little aircraft noise through the triple glazing. We both crashed out instantly and woke very early with the morning light. Then we sorted out our prebooked hire car – something the Americans called a compact. It seemed like a limousine to me, but then about the sum total of my previous motoring experience had consisted of travelling around in Carl’s elderly van, which we had never quite afforded to change and every year had nursed painstakingly through its MOT.

Mariette had to do all the driving but the distances we expected to travel were not great – Key West, our furthest destination at the southernmost tip of the Keys, being less than 200 miles from the airport – and she said she was quite looking forward to it. We were on our way before 8 a.m.

Refreshed by sleep and in bright sunshine we navigated ourselves out of Miami without too much difficulty and headed down Highway 1 to Key Largo where Mariette, using an already much thumbed tourist guide, had booked us into a little bayside motel called Neptune’s Hideaway.

For forty-five dollars we rented a spotlessly clean room, which I gathered was small by American standards, but boasted a seven-foot-wide, king-sized bed around which we had to walk sideways while also negotiating the obligatory fridge and TV. I sat on the bed with my feet on my suitcase while I phoned the police station and asked for Detective Theodore Grant. I was told he had retired but the officer I spoke to was helpful and informed me that Theo Grant ran a boat charter company a couple of miles down the coast. I was all for taking off there right away, but Mariette said she wasn’t going anywhere until she had had something to eat.

I allowed her to tempt me into the Sundowners bar and restaurant next door, where we sat on a wooden terrace overlooking the bay while I discovered for the first time what a sandwich means in America.

By the time we had ploughed our way through a mountain of food, which would probably have been presented in the UK as a three-course dinner, I realised I had managed to get myself mildly sunburned. The weather in Florida at the end of June and beginning of July can be stiflingly hot, I had been warned, and the sun very dangerous, but in the Keys a deceptively refreshing breeze blows almost all the time. After we had eaten Mariette consented to drive to Theodore Grant’s boatyard.