Illusions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 2)

  Illusions

  Jean Saunders

  Copyright © Jean Saunders 2000

  The right of Jean Saunders to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Robert Hale Limited.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Extract from Thicker than Water by Jean Saunders

  Chapter 1

  Alex only noticed the woman properly when she was shown to a place at her breakfast table during the second week of the cruise. She had been aware of her before, but only as one of the faceless others on the luxury ship.

  She was the kind of person you registered as a background accessory, like fading wallpaper or uninteresting paintings. She always wore beige or brown, and her hair was the sort referred to as a pepper-and-salt mixture. Whichever of the ship’s lounges she visited, she usually sat in a corner like a silent observer, until people with apparently more social graces than Alex joined her out of sympathy.

  Even now, sharing a breakfast table, the woman gave Alex no more than the merest hint of a half-smile as if to apologize for being alive at all.

  Such subservience was irritating, whatever the reason for it. Alex found herself wondering what the devil had happened to girl-power — or in this instance, middle-aged woman power? God knew Alex herself hadn’t particularly courted company on the cruise, but you had to be sociable. In any case, most of the other passengers were in couples, and definitely the wrong side of sixty and she certainly wasn’t looking for a fling with any of the crew.

  She was here to relax... and to reward herself for successfully concluding a tricky case... but she felt glamour personified compared with the little mouse of a woman seated opposite her now. And at nine o’clock on a sunny May morning her own bright red hair and designer black gear made her feel more uncomfortable than worldly-wise.

  ‘Are you enjoying the cruise?’ she felt obliged to ask, when the woman said nothing for several minutes.

  ‘Oh yes. Thank you. It’s very nice.’

  ‘Good,’ Alex said, desperately wishing someone else would join them, but the early onshore day trippers were preparing to leave as the ship eased into the port of Playa Blanca, and most of the others were obviously having a lie-in. She decided not to be uncharitable, although she prayed that because they were two women cruising alone, the dun one wouldn’t feel the need to latch on to her at this late stage of the cruise.

  ‘I’m Alexandra Best,’ she said helpfully.

  ‘Oh — Leanora Wolstenholme — Mrs,’ she added, as if it was an afterthought.

  Alex tried not to look surprised at the elegant-sounding name, knowing she had made an instant assessment and got it wrong. She’d have said the dun one was a spinster who had been saving up for years for this cruise — which certainly wasn’t cheap — and was tagged with a far more lacklustre name.

  She should have known better. In her job, things were rarely what they seemed, which had gone a long way towards making the whole concept of being a private investigator so attractive. She liked intrigue and puzzles and it gave her a heck of a buzz to succeed in solving them.

  Oh vanity, thy name is woman, the idiotic misquote flashed through her mind... And if it was, to hell with it.

  Surreptitiously, she studied her companion with a more practised eye, but nothing about her as she ordered her breakfast so diffidently, made her any more appealing than before. She was almost — well, creepy — in her nonentity. It had the strange effect of making Alex feel stifled.

  ‘Please excuse me,’ she said suddenly, leaving half of her toast and marmalade, which would be all to the good of her thighs, she thought nobly. After the mountains of food she had devoured on this holiday, she would need to fast for a month to recover anything like the shape she had before — and that was nothing to write home about, she thought dismally, though it had never seemed to bother any of the opposite sex.

  Child-bearing hips was the enthusiastic — and glutinous — term that came to mind... yuk.

  She left the dining-room and went up on deck, absorbing the scenery of Lanzarote. She could almost recite the guidebook’s words. The north of the island had a dark, forbidding coastline, due to hundreds of volcanic eruptions in its history, where boiling lava had spewed out. It had not only smothered thirteen villages, but created an extra half mile of land in the ocean before the volcanic masses cooled, leaving part of the island with a strange, moonscape appearance.

  Alex felt a delicious shiver at the legend, however true or embellished it was by the locals — or the tourist industry, more like. Loving the thought of the dark side of the island as much as the traditional villages and the man-made resorts. Everything had a darker side, even people. It was what made them interesting, unpredictable, and often frightening.

  She brought her thoughts back to the island, wishing they were going to be here longer than one day. There was an organized all-day shore trip, but free time for those who wanted a more leisurely look around. That was for her. She intended hiring a car and going into the interior, where the mountains reared upwards in varying shades of colour.

  ‘Dreary, isn’t it?’ she heard a cigar-thickened male voice say, as she leaned on the ship’s rail.

  She took a fraction of a moment before she turned around, knowing who the owner of the voice would be.

  This morning he wore a navy blazer with an important-looking badge on the breast pocket, and an immaculate white roll-neck sweater. His trousers were creased so sharply you could cut yourself on them, and his hair was dyed an even more improbable shade of black than usual. Alex wondered if he had it touched up daily in the ship’s hairdressing salon. Unless it was a toupée, and Alex found herself mischievously hoping for a gust of wind to test it out.

  ‘Do you think it’s dreary, Major?’ she said coolly now. ‘I find it fascinating.’

  She’d be willing to lay bets that he wasn’t a genuine major, either... she squirmed as his calculating eyes looked her over, clearly admiring her fringed, pike-straight red hair and the black sweater and tight-fitting trousers.

  In her opinion the outfit was unprovocative, but it was her colouring that made all the difference, and as a fair-weather friend had once said, ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it, girl, and you’ve certainly got it, in or out of the clobber!’

  ‘Once you’ve travelled the world and seen the rain-forests of Brazil, you tend to find these little ports very ordinary,’ the major went on grandly.

  ‘Really. I wonder why you bother to come here, then,’ Alex said, her best sloaney accent sharpening, and hoping it would put him off. To her annoyance it always seemed to have the opposite effect, and he gave a deep chuckle, displaying discoloured teeth from too much tobacco over too many years.

  ‘To meet interesting little ladies like you, my dear.’

  She gave him a freezing glance. Talk about delusions of grandeur and self-importance! She was head and shoulders above him in height, and she looked down at him deliberately now.

  ‘I’m sure there are far more suitable ladies on board for a gentleman of your years, Major. Now, if you’ll excuse me—’

  ‘Saw you got stuck with the weir
d one at breakfast this morning,’ he said casually.

  It wasn’t the way he said it, but the words he used... and since it was normally the other way around, Alex paused. ‘Mrs Wolstenholme? Isn’t that a little churlish of you?’

  And oh boy, who was calling the kettle black now, when she had had similar thoughts herself!

  But she’d hardly thought this old guy would have given the woman a second glance, or even a first one. A rich widow would have been more to his taste. Alex had seen his predatory glance around the dining-room before he pounced on the most likely ones to bore with his tales of faraway places.

  ‘Wolstenholme?’ he almost honked now. ‘Is that what she calls herself?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she, if it’s her name?’ And she had no intention of supplying him with the woman’s first name either.

  She felt momentarily defensive of Leanora, as if this gigolo was going to target her next — but that was the most unlikely thing of all. He always hovered around the ladies wearing the glitziest jewellery, especially in the small casino where the money flowed most freely. Leanora was obviously not one of those.

  Alex hadn’t realized just how observant she had been of this pompous oaf — but that went with the job, of course.

  ‘Anyway, why did you call her the weird one?’ she went on, unable to resist the question, while despising herself for letting herself be caught like this.

  The sun was rising higher in the sky now, and it was going to be a beautiful day. Even from here, the mountains near this side of the island were becoming bathed in all kinds of fantastic hues. She longed to be among them, isolated in her own hire car, and breathing in the atmosphere of new and unfamiliar surroundings.

  ‘Calls herself a clairvoyant. Didn’t you know?’

  Alex felt her heart jump. No, she didn’t know. And if she had been offered a million pounds to guess the dun woman’s background, she would have failed miserably.

  ‘A clairvoyant? Like a medium, do you mean, getting in touch with spirits and suchlike?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ the major sniggered. ‘Though, the only spirits I’d care to be in touch with are the ones I put down me throat each night, wouldn’t you say so, m’ dear?’

  Alex ignored this. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong about Mrs Wolstenholme. She’s such a quiet little thing—’

  ‘You ask the two old trouts on C Deck then. Pair of old whoozers if you ask me,’ he said derisively. ‘They consulted her, so-say, on a matter of some missing cash. I daresay her Red Indian guide from the other side supplied the answer. Load of old codswallop, if you ask me.’

  As someone else caught his attention, he went off chuckling, while Alex stared after him, mesmerized. How on earth did he get all this information? He was such an unlikely confidant, although she guessed there were always gullible women, flattered to hear of his adventures.

  If the stuff about Mrs W was true, of course, and he wasn’t just stringing her a line. She had no truck with anything in the least spooky, though her old sparring partner, DI Nick Frobisher, said that even the police sometimes consulted a medium in difficult cases — strictly unbeknown to the public, of course.

  She gave up thinking about any of it as the ship was tied up at the port. Once the landing formalities and the bustle of disembarking were over, she walked briskly along to the nearest car hire place. There were plenty of them, and within half an hour she was in possession of an old Ford Fiesta, and a map that would take her from Playa Blanca into the hinterland of the island.

  This was what she had concluded her last big case for, she thought blissfully. Although the intended winter cruise had been put on hold as a small clutch of minor investigations had come in, that she couldn’t afford to pass. The fee from the big case had been a good one, but her growing reputation meant that she had to be available whenever new clients called for her services.

  It was one of the things the self-help Manual of Detection had impressed on would-be private investigators, in the days when she had considered it her bible. Now that she was more streetwise in the ways of villains — and even the deviousness of some of her clients — she was tempted to write a small self-help manual of her own, to put the original author right on a few things.

  But he was definitely right about one thing. Treat each case separately, and each client as an individual, for no two were ever the same. Every cheating husband or wife had their own reasons for doing what they did, and their partners had their own expectations for hiring her to find them out. Nothing was ever what it seemed. It was a phrase that Alex never forgot.

  As she drove away from the pretty little town of Playa Blanca with a mental reminder to buy some souvenirs later, she found herself thinking about Leanora Wolstenholme, and all she had learned about her that morning. But not the obvious things. She knew them already.

  It was that last bit that the major had confided that was so odd. And yet she didn’t know why it should be, and she was probably confusing genuine clairvoyants with the fortune tellers at fairgrounds, all gypsy ear-rings and crystal balls.

  She smiled faintly as a vision of an erstwhile companion flashed into her mind.

  ‘You don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of oddball, Alex. It’s all balls, anyway.’

  Everything was, as far as Gary was concerned... For a moment she felt a tingle in her veins, and in various other places, remembering just how good they had been together for a while. It had been great while it lasted. But not for ever.

  Thank God both of them had understood that, and once they had parted he had vanished like one of Leanora’s forays into the ether. She shivered, but try as she might during her tour on that long, gloriously hot spring day exploring the darker side of the island, she couldn’t get the nondescript woman with the autocratic name out of her mind.

  Leanora Wolstenholme, Mrs. It was a strange way to say it, as if the husband was no more than an appendage, when anyone would expect her to be the hanger-on. The tagged-on little wifey to macho-man…

  She was doing it again, Alex thought irritably. She was stereotyping the poor woman and being thoroughly sexist into the bargain. Unfortunately, with some people, you couldn’t help it. She resolved to be charitable, while cheerfully reminding herself that since there were only two more days left of the cruise, it was unlikely they would meet again.

  ***

  During the entertainment in the show lounge after dinner that evening, when the ship was once more at sea and heading majestically on its last lap towards Dover, she realized that someone had joined her at the table where several other couples were saying goodnight and moving away.

  Alex glanced around, and met the eyes of her breakfast companion. But she wasn’t quite so dull now, she thought faintly. Although still basically brown-hued, Mrs W was done up to the nines in a dated cocktail dress and feathery boa that might have done justice to a Bonnie and Clyde movie set.

  ‘May I join you?’ she said.

  ‘Please do,’ Alex said, hoping desperately that people wouldn’t think they were travelling together, and ashamed of herself for doing so. Even so... should she offer to buy her a drink... or simply concentrate on the showgirls strutting their stuff…?

  ‘I was hoping to have another word with you before the cruise was over,’ Mrs Wolstenholme said.

  ‘Were you?’ Alex said in surprise, since the conversation at breakfast that morning had been practically nil.

  She almost recoiled then as the woman put a skinny hand over hers. Christ, she wasn’t a lesbian, was she? It wasn’t unheard of on these cruises (or anywhere else), as Nick Frobisher had pointed out lecherously, while offering to accompany her as her minder.

  ‘I wanted to warn you.’

  ‘Warn me?’ Alex said, starting to feel like a parrot.

  ‘You’re a good person,’ Mrs Wolstenholme observed, her voice even more monotone than Alex remembered. ‘I see a golden aura around you, but it can’t work miracles, so be on your guard. I see a death—’

 
‘I think you’d better stop right there,’ Alex almost snapped. ‘I don’t like that kind of talk—’

  ‘Oh, please don’t be offended. I don’t mean to frighten you, and I’m quite sure it’s not your death, my dear. But it will touch you in some way, so I felt that I had to alert you. But such visions, however obscure, do leave me very tired, and I’ll say goodnight.’

  She virtually glided away, leaving Alex speechless. But not with fear. She was enraged that even for a moment she had allowed herself to be caught up in the weirdness of the woman’s prophesies. And coming right back down to earth in an instant. The old cow, she thought savagely, wondering how many other people she had scared with her creepy stories. And how many of them had consulted her further, and paid for the privilege? Even as she thought it, her breathing slowed. That was it, of course. You could never trust appearances, and Leanora was probably a con woman.

  As such she probably had to be admired for her ingenuity, however grudgingly. Not that Nick would have said so. Nick would have run her in as soon as look at her.

  For the first time in ages, she wished he was here. She could do with Latino rough good looks and his no-nonsense police jargon now, telling her she was a nut-case and she was in the wrong business. But she knew that. She had been told it before, but she still did it, because the idea of helping people and solving their mysteries and problems made her a kind of social worker of the best kind, she thought nobly. Or a bleedin’ saint, as Gary Hollis might have said.

  ‘Got rid of her then, have you?’ she heard someone say, and she gave a heavy sigh.

  ‘If you mean has Mrs Wolstenholme gone to bed, then yes,’ she told the major pointedly. ‘And I’m following her lead.’

  ‘What? Had enough already? A young thing like you?’ he leered. ‘I thought we might have had a dance.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Alex said. ‘I really am too tired.’

  ‘Pity. I used to be quite a mover in my day.’

  I’ll bet you were, Alex thought, as she went back to her cabin — and not only on the dance floor, you old lech. But she hadn’t realized just how tired she was. She couldn’t even be bothered to take a shower before falling into bed, and Leanora’s flat voice was still disturbingly in her head, warning her to be careful, and that she saw a death.