Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

My arms were still outstretched. Gravity allowed them to fall to my sides. I shuffled further back from him, found my feet and started to run, the tears falling freely now.

It had not been Carl sitting on the beach waiting for me to come to him, to find him, while he played our song over and over again. Just some sad druggie giving himself a fix. Oblivious, probably, to the music being played on his radio, to the song that had shaped so much of my life.

I slowed to a walk and wiped away the worst of my tears before rejoining Mariette on the pier. Nonetheless she gave me a curious glance and the muscle-bound young man in singlet and shorts who had no doubt been chatting her up took one look at me and retreated fast.

My distress had turned to anger, and I think it showed. ‘C’mon let’s pack and get out of here,’ I said. ‘I’m done with chasing shadows.’

We went to bed early and left right after breakfast, having decided to spend our last night at the Neptune Motel from which we could be at Miami airport in just over an hour and a half. I promised Mariette that the search for Carl in the Keys was over. I didn’t tell her about my experience with the druggie and his radio, but she knew something had happened.

We drove the first part of the journey in silence. I had insisted that I didn’t even want to talk about Carl any more and that I intended simply to enjoy our last twenty-four hours in Florida. The trouble was that when you cut Carl out of the conversation just like that, there suddenly didn’t seem to be anything else to talk about.

Mariette wasn’t fooled. As we crossed the bridge into Islamarada she glanced at me sideways. ‘Want to check with the painted lady?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

Mariette smiled. ‘Liar. It won’t take ten minutes. At least you may be able to satisfy yourself that Carl hasn’t been to see her while we’ve been chasing all round Key West.’

I smiled back. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

Maybe I remained a dreadful judge of men, or perhaps it was just how you looked at things, but as far as finding a friend went I’d struck gold with Mariette. I was certain enough of that.

We pulled into the Bay Point’s mile or so long drive just before 11 a.m. and this time were able to drive straight to reception. The plastic receptionist greeted us with the same artificial smile as before and, when we asked to see Mrs Barrymore, pushed a series of buttons on the telephone beside her with what was no doubt her customary efficiency.

Over the phone’s speaker system the voice I remembered so well said simply: ‘Yes.’

‘I have Miss Adams and Miss Powell from the UK for you again, Mrs Barry...’ began the girl.

She was interrupted by an angry-toned outburst: ‘Sandra, didn’t I say that if those two turned up again you were to tell them I was...’

We didn’t hear the rest because Sandra promptly switched the speaker mode off. Blushing slightly she apologised to us and said that unfortunately Mrs B. was not available. It was quite reassuring to see that Sandra did have some human qualities but we obviously were going to learn no more from Claire Mendleson Barrymore.

We told Sandra we’d got the message and left.

‘I wonder if she has heard from Carl,’ I mused aloud as we climbed back into the hire car.

‘She won’t be telling us, that’s for sure, not either way,’ muttered Mariette.

‘I can’t help wondering what she might do if he did turn up here. I think she might be capable of, well anything, don’t you...’

Mariette was ever practical and to the point. She was also beginning to lose patience, I suspected. ‘What, like your Carl you mean?’

‘No, of course not...’

She interrupted me. ‘I know, I know, he never meant to hurt anyone. If you ask me, he and the painted lady probably deserved each other.’

I decided to ignore her inferences. ‘She would like nothing better than to be rid of him for ever, though, wouldn’t she?’ I persisted.

Mariette sighed wearily. ‘Suzanne, you’ve been watching too many bad movies.’

I imagined she was right, as usual. But I decided to make just one last call. From the Neptune Motel I phoned Theodore Grant – I didn’t feel up to any more rebuffs in the flesh – and asked him the question I had wanted to put to Claire.

‘No,’ he responded easily enough. ‘Still no sign of him around here. But, in any case, I don’t figure he’d want to seek me out...’

I gave him Mariette’s number back home and asked if he would be good enough to call us there if he ever did see Carl or hear anything at all of him. He agreed he would, although I didn’t really believe him. I didn’t tell him that I had learned about the part he had played in the break-up of Carl’s marriage and all that happened after Claire told him she was leaving him. There didn’t seem any point.

We had dinner at the Sundowners that night, enjoying the moonlit balminess of the Keys for the last time. At least, I hoped Mariette enjoyed it. Try as I might, I remained totally preoccupied.

The next day we drove to Miami, deposited the hire car and caught our flight home, which, while torturous in every other way, as had been the outward flight, at least left and arrived on time.

I guess I had been harbouring the hope that we would return to some news of Carl. We didn’t. The Devon and Cornwall Constabulary continued to have an alert out for him but nobody had seen or heard anything of him. If it had been Carl who had thumbed a lift to Plymouth from a lorry driver, he had left no further trail. And while we were away a well-known local villain had been arrested and charged with the burglary at the Plymouth flat, and the stolen passport recovered.

Carl seemed to have disappeared into thin air, and I didn’t need Mariette to remind me that this wasn’t the first time.

Carl had fled to England after the death of his daughter, and built a new life and a new identity for himself. I had become part of that without even knowing it. Maybe he was just doing it again. Maybe that was how he would always live.

‘If you ask me he’s never stopped running,’ Frank Harvey had said.

Perhaps it was all Carl really knew how to do. He had certainly always been good at it. He had had a kind of sixth sense, it seemed now, for keeping us out of trouble during our time at St Ives, right until the very end.

‘Getting a new identity is no problem,’ Rob Partridge had told me. ‘It’s not being able to let go of the past which catches people out.’

That and chance, and carelessness. Driving too fast, getting burgled, getting ill. Carl had never been careless. But he couldn’t have bargained for Will Jones’s ridiculous jealousy, and both of us were in turn so obsessed with our own pasts that even the possibility of those threatening letters having referred to anything except the various secrets we were hiding had only fleetingly occurred to us and been swiftly dismissed.

But now, one way or another, Carl was gone.

‘You have a life to live,’ Mariette instructed. ‘You’re on your own now and you just have to accept it.’

Once again she was right, of course. And perhaps one of my problems was that I still harboured the notion that sooner or later Carl would come looking for me.

There were times when I suspected Mariette’s patience was running out for good, which was fair enough really.

Mariette’s mother’s patience was definitely running out. I was able to pay for my keep now, of course, but I knew that she would like her front room back. In any case there was barely space for me in it along with all those pieces of brass, and even if Mrs Powell’s cottage had been big enough to accommodate a lodger comfortably I would not have been a particularly attractive long-term proposition – I came with far too much mental baggage.