Maeve Binchy - Quentins

"It's great news," he said, forcing a smile on his face. Quite a few of the people he had talked to today had expressed the view that Don Richardson might have faked his suicide. By the following morning, the newspapers had begun to express the same doubts. They reprinted stories of those who had folded their clothes, left farewell notes on beaches and had turned up in different countries with different passports years later. But then, the Richardson family was already in a different country at the time of the drowning. There were a lot of things that didn't quite fit together, causing a great deal of vague and uninformed speculation in the various feature articles of the newspapers.

What had happened to his family? The wife, sons and father-in law whom he was meant to adore? They had not come out of hiding to mourn his death. Why had Don Richardson left his wallet and documents to be readily found in a car that he had only rented that morning? What had happened to the missing money? He must have used an alias for the past four months. Were his family still living in this disguise? And if the family still had the embezzled funds, then what did Don Richardson's suicide actually achieve? It hadn't restored any livelihood to those who had lost it.

The press carried on for a few more days. The mystery of the months spent in Spain. The possible lifestyle the Richardsons might have lived on what was once called the Costa del Crime. The whereabouts of the grieving family. As always, Spanish authorities said they were co-operating closely with the Irish law forces to track them down. Efforts to find the family had been intensified among British and Irish expatriates in the area of the drowning tragedy. They had led to nothing. Nobody had ever heard of this family. There had been no trace of any of them since that morning four months ago when they had arrived in Spain using their own passports, and simply never been seen again.

And gradually, as other things happened, the story and speculation about Don Richardson disappeared from the papers. And public opinion began to revert to the thinking that he really had drowned. Brenda noticed from hearing people talk in the restaurant that the pendulum had swung back to where it was before. There had been no sightings of Don back in Dublin. And surely, if he had staged his own suicide, it would have been to get away from the mindless anonymity of being in a Spanish resort, back to where he had been king of everything. To Dublin, where he was a somebody. Don the great risk-taker would have known enough people who would have hidden him. And yet there had not been a whisper. Ella was in control again. She was alert and interested when Derry had introduced her to some of his financial people, the section where Firefly Films would direct their final budgets. She concentrated hard so that she would be able to put a face to each name.

Kimberly suggested she see some films already made on similar themes, and got her in touch with a viewing theatre. It was all very simple, if you had an introduction through the Kings. Ella realised more each day how important they must be and was glad she had not really understood this at the outset.

Most evenings she ate in a restaurant with Derry. He chose all kinds of different places for her, and seemed pleased with her company. He said he hated to eat alone in restaurants and usually wound up with take-out and ate at home, so she was saving him from indigestion. They talked easily. She never asked him why a man so wealthy, so single and obviously very eligible, managed to escape the New York prowling ladies. She told him tales about her childhood, and though she mentioned that they lived in what had been a garden shed next to their old house, she never said why.

Derry told her tales of holidays in Alberta when he was a child; the three children went to their Canadian grandparents for the whole summer. Five years they had done that, it had always been magical. He never said why his mother had not gone with them, and she never asked.

She told him about Deirdre who had been her friend since she was ten and how Nick and Sandy were going to get married. She said she missed teaching, but that she had needed to leave herself free to make money this summer.

He seemed to think that this was a perfectly normal thing to do. He himself had left school at fifteen and had worked in a variety of jobs. When he was twenty, he realised he'd need qualifications if he were to try to give his brothers any kind of start in life. So he got a job as a cleaner/janitor in a college and arranged his hours so that he could do business studies as well. It hadn't been easy, of course, mopping the floors and clearing the litter bins when other kids were going out to ball games or bowling alleys. But then nobody had it easy all the time, and he got a few good night-watchman stints too, which of course made it very easy for him to study. So he had done well in his examinations and won scholarships. And he had got his brothers into college as well.

So Ella didn't ask questions. She told how she would have loved brothers and sisters, but Deirdre had said that they were vastly overrated and that rabbits were a much better idea.

He had laughed. "She sounds like a character, this Deirdre."

"Oh, you'll meet her in Dublin."

Tm not going to Dublin, Ella," he said.

"Sorry, I forgot."

Ella had decided not to push it. And maybe it "would be much better if he didn't come. They would be freer to get on with things.

He very rarely talked about his work as the head of a hugely successful office supplies company, one of the biggest in the United States. He said it was a team effort, that he had been lucky to identify a need at the right time, something that "wouldn't change every few hours as computer software seemed to do. Kimberly had been brilliant on the marketing side, and almost everyone had been there from Day One, so in many ways it ran itself without his having to be there every day. That's what gave him so much time to deal with the Foundation, which was what he really enjoyed.

Yes, of course he had to be ruthless sometimes at work, make decisions that he hated in his heart. When he had to close down a division of his company he made sure the employees were retrained or given early retirement. He was indeed easy company. Kimberly must have met someone very special in Larry if she were able to walk out on Derry King. Every night when she came back from her dinner with Derry King, Ella sat down at the computer and looked up the Irish papers of the day. She read with horror how there had been a thought that Don was not really dead. If only this were true. If only it were possible. She would go to any part of the earth to tell him she loved him. That she understood why he had to do what he had done. But she knew that he was dead. He had written to her to say goodbye.

Then she would read about Margery and the children. And where they could be in hiding. Only Ella knew where they were. In Playa de los Angeles, using her name. Calling themselves Brady.

It was strange to think that she could lift a telephone and give their address to the authorities. But she would never do that. Don deserved better than a girlfriend who would blow everything. He had looked after those who needed to be looked after. His children and their mother and their grandfather.

And Ella. He had sent her those bank drafts, which she could cash and get her father out of trouble. Oh, if only he were alive, even for an afternoon, she would tell him how glad she was that he had loved her after all.

The emptiness of the last four months had been filled by something strange like a curious sense of peace. And eventually the formalities were all done. Ella had booked the Thursday night plane home. "I'm going to miss our suppers," Derry said.

The, too, but you won't come to Ireland and continue them, so what can we do?" she said.