to a faint, gasping echo. Perdita looked back, down ten years to a place so far removed from this that they might well be on different planets.
She’d known there was an element of risk in what she was doing; she’d had no idea that it would jeopardise everything she had made of her life.
‘Are you there? Miss Gladstone? Perdita?’ Frank’s voice registered a sudden alarm.
‘Dennison?’ The voice wasn’t hers. It croaked rather than breathed, and the cool control was lost to a shaky tremor. ‘I’m all right. Dennison,’ she repeated on a long, ragged sigh. ‘Luke Dennison.’
‘Yup. He’s a big man in the north—owns a huge cattle and sheep station called Pigeon Hill. He’s fairly well known—old money, family came over on the first ships, mixes with the elite, that sort of thing. Prime ministers consult him, and he belongs to a lot of very powerful organisations.’
‘I know,’ she said, outrage beginning to surface through the numbness.
‘You know him?’ Frank was curious but she couldn’t have answered him then, not if her sanity had depended on it. ‘He married Natalie Bennet—another family with old money. She died about eighteen months ago. Cancer.’
Perdita groped desperately for a chair. Shivering, she collapsed into it, clutching the receiver with white-knuckled fingers.
‘Died?’ she managed to repeat.
‘Yup, tough, poor woman. She was only thirty-seven. Luke Dennison was a couple of years younger. They were married when he was twenty-one. His parents were both dead and I suppose he needed a wife.’
‘Probably,’ Perdita agreed tonelessly. ‘I have to go, Frank. Can you send me the details?’
‘Yeah. It’ll be a big bill, I hope you realise. Usually I don’t have much difficulty with these cases even when there’s a veto, but this was a humdinger. I had a hell of a time tracking down the information. Files were missing or lost, people didn’t know or wouldn’t talk, and it turned out to be a real challenge. I’d say that someone did their best to make sure no one was able to trace anything. Still, we got there.’ He sounded professionally pleased with himself. ‘OK, I’ll courier everything off straight away, if you’re still sure you trust couriers.’
She would have trusted the mail, or copies of the documents on the fax, but Frank had his idiosyncrasies, and one of them was a passion for security and a vast mistrust of agencies that moved information.
Perhaps he was right; when she had first contacted him he had told her that he didn’t do anything illegal and she believed him, but she had a feeling that her ideas of illegal and Frank’s possibly didn’t coincide. She didn’t know how he had got this information, and she wasn’t going to ask.
‘Thank you,’ she said levelly.
‘That’s OK. Glad to get it done. It was starting to take over my life.’ He hung up.
Take over his life? Perdita had been waiting for those names for ten years. And now that she had them, the beginning she had anticipated was turning into something else, a nightmare she didn’t know how to deal with.
Eventually, when the dialling tone impinged, she set the receiver down and looked at her watch.
‘Oh, panic!’ she muttered, leaping to her feet. She had no time to think, none to dwell on this news, or even to sort out her emotions. But mingled with the grief and the anger and the bewilderment there was another, one she had never expected to feel: a keen, almost brutal sense of betrayal.
For ten years she had been alone and lost, and for those years Natalie and Luke had been happy. Her hand lingered for a moment on the thin gold locket. Whether they’d known it or not, their happiness had been built on her misery.
Setting her mouth, she forced herself to pick up her bag, weighed down by the usual assortment of necessities and the ever-present book on landscape gardening. Perdita had always prided herself on her professional outlook, and she wasn’t going to let the complete upheaval of her life make her late.
Five more months! They stretched out like an eternity.
‘What have I done?’ she muttered as she opened the door. ‘Oh, what have I done?’
ELEVEN years—a lifetime ago, the last time she had been to Pigeon Hill—she had walked this road beneath a boiling Antipodean sun, tattered shorts and a T-shirt clinging to coltish limbs, her hair shaded by a Huck Finn hat, jandals on her narrow feet. Then the road had been metalled, and her legs had been white with dust by the time she got to Pigeon Hill, the station named after the looming, bush-clad hill where the large, slow-flying native pigeon flourished.
She certainly had never imagined returning to Pigeon Hill in a car that cost more money than she could have visualised at seventeen; then her sights had been set on a job in a shop, and eventually marriage and children.
If a hotel in Wellington hadn’t failed to give Luke Dennison a message, that was probably exactly what would have happened.
Because the hotel staff had failed she was a mature, worldly woman with a famous face and body, and a secure future. She should, Perdita supposed, her full lips compressing with the irony of it, thank that unknown person who hadn’t done his or her job properly.
Suddenly realising that she was veering towards the wrong side of the road, she twisted the steering-wheel a little too impatiently. She hadn’t driven on the left for some years; it would pay to concentrate on her driving, not what had happened so long ago.
Five letterboxes loomed ahead like a cluster of ragged beehives. Suspended from the top bar of the gate was a neat sign that said Pigeon Hill. Beneath it in smaller letters was painted L.D.E. Dennison. Perdita’s stomach clenched.
Breathing deeply, she braked. The car rattled over the cattle stop and along the road winding across a wide green paddock towards a cluster of roofs. The three farm cottages belied their name; sheltered from the southerly winds by the blue, forested hill that was Pukekukupa, they were substantial houses, built for families.
A couple of hundred metres before the first one, the well-kept track divided. Perdita took the fork that led to the homestead. Nestled behind its plantations of trees, all that could be seen of it was the pale orange bulk of the roof.
Her mouth dried with anticipatory dread; she had to fight the temptation to turn around and drive down the road, the three and a half hours back to Auckland, then get on to a jet to take her as far from New Zealand as possible. The seatbelt tightened across her chest as her foot hit the brake.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ she muttered fiercely, easing it off.
A tunnel of greenery led into a wide, gravelled forecourt in front of a gracious, two-storeyed wooden house built in the colonial Georgian style that had been fashionable seventy years before. As she pulled up and stopped the engine, moisture trickled disgustingly down Perdita’s spine and dampened her palms. Surreptitiously wiping her hands on a handkerchief before she got out, she forced air into her deflated lungs.
She knew who waited for her inside the homestead. Over Frank’s
