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‘Are you sure you’re OK to come back to work?’
‘Just a bit of a headache,’ she said, adjusting her nervous grip on her briefcase and its explosive contents.
Frank gave her a hard look. His naturally suspicious nature had made him a good detective, and as David’s only surviving relative he had been very protective of his younger brother. He hadn’t much liked Rachel when she and David had started dating, and even after they’d got engaged the relationship had never been particularly relaxed. Frank was divorced himself, toughened by his profession and cynical about marriage.
‘If you’re not well enough, you shouldn’t be here.’
‘I’m fine,’ she insisted. Frank was so hard-bitten himself that he had little respect for the weakness of others. She hated it when he condescended to understand that she might not feel up to the job.
She decided in that instant that she wasn’t going to tell Frank about her humiliating problem—not while there was any chance she could quietly handle it herself.
‘OK, that’s good, because we have a major problem looming,’ said Frank, following her into her small sunny office.
‘What kind of problem?’
‘Matthew Riordan!’
‘W-what?’ Rachel’s briefcase slipped from her nerveless hand and crashed against the side of a filing cabinet. ‘Why? What’s he done now?’ she asked with brittle casualness.
‘It’s not what he’s done, it’s what he’s going to do,’ fumed Frank. ‘His father’s had a heart attack.’
‘Kevin Riordan?’ Rachel was genuinely upset. She had liked the brash and ebullient head of KR Industries, who had shown a flattering admiration for ‘feisty’ women. He had been a welcome surprise after his infuriating son. ‘When? Is he all right?’
‘Keeled over at his desk on Monday. All I know is that he’s in hospital and likely to be there for a while.’
‘Oh, no, how awful…’ she said, thinking of his boastful plans for an energetic retirement. ‘He isn’t even sixty-five yet…’
‘Yeah—awful for us.’ Frank dismissed her unselfish concern with a scowl. ‘Because Matthew Riordan’s stepped in to effectively run KR Industries, just when our fraud prevention package is on the table for a final decision, and so far he’s got a one hundred percent kill-rate on our deals!’
Rachel was confused. ‘But—I thought he had no official standing at KR—surely Neville—’
‘Neville is away in Japan—I got a fax from him last night,’ Frank said, drumming stubby fingers on top of the filing cabinet. ‘He’ll obviously take over when he gets back, but at the moment he’s out of the loop. With him pushing our case the old man was bound to have approved our bid, now with Junior minding the store we might not get it signed by the deadline. That would mean having to go through the bid process all over again.’
‘But Matt Riordan’s not going to make any major decisions if he knows he’s only keeping the chair warm.’
Frank’s paranoia was running rife. ‘Don’t you believe it. Neville told me that he doesn’t trust the bastard an inch. If Riordan has overall power of attorney for his father he can virtually do whatever the hell he likes. With his position and influence he could do a lot of damage in a few days. I wouldn’t put it past him to try to sabotage our bid…’
Rachel thought of the contents of her briefcase and felt her stomach lurch as Frank plunged on. ‘I think we need to face the fact we may not be able to make that balloon payment after all…’
‘I could mortgage the townhouse—’
‘No!’ Frank rejected the offer as forcefully as he always had before. ‘David gave that to you free and clear and it’s going to stay that way. Anyway, it would put your equity in the company at more than the whole is worth right now. If the worst comes to the worst we can maybe try downsizing, or even selling our client base…
‘We have to be realistic, Rachel,’ Frank told her. ‘We were banking on that KR contract coming through and without it our chances don’t look good. I’ll sort through our options and try and figure out something, and, in the meantime, why don’t you do some personal digging around on Riordan himself? See if you can come up with anything that might be useful.’
His tone doubted that she would. If he had seriously believed that an investigation was likely to be productive he would have put one of their senior men on the job, but unknowingly Frank had provided Rachel with the perfect excuse to devote the rest of the next few days to stalking her prey and plotting his downfall.
Wanting to make the most of her fast-dwindling time with Robyn and Bethany, she had used her illness as an excuse to cancel the rest of the week’s gym appointments and several massage bookings at the physiotherapy clinic, so she had no other demands on her time until the following Monday.
Now, Rachel softly depressed the accelerator, rolling her car slowly forwards past the row of parked cars as Matt Riordan began to ease his Porsche out of his parking space further down the road.
She pulled down her baseball cap and adjusted her sunglasses. She didn’t know exactly what she expected to achieve by tailing him around, but it was better than doing nothing. David had always believed that dry fact-gathering was no replacement for personal observation when trying to guess what a suspect’s next move might be.
After spending all of the previous day delving into the microfiche files of old newspapers at the central library, checking property and legal records and making numerous phone calls under a variety of names, Rachel had been chafing to take some real action.
After calling to check that he was still in the building, she had driven over to KR Industries head office and waited until dusk in order to find out which of the three Riordan-owned Auckland properties Matthew was currently calling home. If it did come down to forcing a confrontation, she’d rather it was well away from the public eye.
His destination had turned out to be not his own city apartment, but the family’s three-storeyed modern mansion on Auckland’s millionaires’ mile. Rachel had followed the black Porsche’s tail-lights through the city streets, careful to change lanes irregularly and hang one or two cars back, and had felt a little thrill of triumph when she’d seen Matt Riordan finally swing in through the electronically operated iron gates which guarded the estate, still unaware of her presence. Her hands had been sweaty on the steering wheel and her heart had fluttered with exhilaration as she’d continued on past and parked further up the street, in the inky shadows of an overhanging pohutukawa tree, and savoured the small victory—her first solo tailing job!
