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Using her company cellphone, she’d checked her voice messages, then rung Robyn to let her know that she was on her way home. As she’d been saying goodbye she was startled to see the gates reopen and the black Porsche sweep out again and purr off into the night. He must have only called in to drop something off or say hello to his mother, she’d thought in dismay.
By the time she had got her engine restarted and fumbled her gears it had disappeared around the corner, and at the next intersection it had been only a wink of a brake-light at a distant curve, heading back towards the city. Rachel had pursued the streak of black metallic paint pulsing under the orange street lights on the straight stretch ahead as fast as she’d dared, and had actually believed she was catching up when she’d been flagged down by a uniformed police officer standing by her unmarked car, and handed the indignity of a speeding ticket and an on-the-spot breath test.
‘What about that Porsche ahead of me? He was going just as fast—why didn’t you stop him?’ she’d complained.
‘Because he had the sense to slow down as soon as he spotted me and not register over the speed limit on my radar,’ the female officer had said drily.
Flushed with annoyance, Rachel had tucked the ticket in her notebook and set off again at a sedate pace, resigned to the fact that she had no chance of catching up with her quarry. She had driven past Matthew’s apartment building, noting the darkened windows of his top floor corner eyrie, and vowed not to
be taken off guard so easily the next day.
Now, pulling into the heavy lunchtime traffic behind the gleaming Porsche, Rachel thought that at least there would be no chance of breaking the speed limit today!
Expecting him to head to another business meeting, or go back to the office, she was intrigued when he turned off towards a leafy suburb—until she remembered that it was where the city’s newest private hospital was located. She had looked it up in the telephone book the previous day when she had wanted to find out Kevin Riordan’s medical condition.
Rachel drove into the open car park and surfed into an empty spot on the waves of heat which shimmered off the surface of the new black seal. She nibbled on her lower lip as she watched Matthew lock his leather briefcase into the boot of his car and shoulder back into his jacket as he made for the double glass doors of the hospital. What she wouldn’t give to be able to rifle through the contents of that briefcase!
A thick-set uniformed security guard—unfortunately not one of Westons’—was strolling between the cars, and Rachel thought he might think it suspicious if she remained lurking in her car rather than seeking the air-conditioned coolness of the hospital. Besides, a comfort stop was a growing imperative. Rachel was already suffering from sitting for too long in a small metal box under the blazing sun. Her short-sleeved silk tunic top was sticking to her back, and while the car was stationary the fan blowing air around her sweeping skirts was merely recycling the oppressive heat.
The hospital looked big enough and busy enough to provide plenty of cover, she reasoned. Perhaps she might even manage a quick snoop to find out how Kevin Riordan was really doing behind the smokescreen of official information. Taking a charitable view, maybe it was the stress and worry over his father that had caused Matthew to flip out. Maybe he had stooped to a sordid act of blackmail while the balance of his mind was disturbed?
She shivered in spite of the oppressive heat. Those had been very the words quoted in a news clipping about twenty-four-year-old Leigh Riordan’s tragic death. Most of the details had been suppressed, but not the coroner’s final decision—that she had taken her own life ‘while the balance of her mind was disturbed’.
But, no, she told herself, the charitable view was difficult to take when the fact was that Matthew had had those sleazy photos taken over a week prior to his father’s heart attack.
The coronary care wards were on the third floor, and, unwilling to risk being caught in a lift, Rachel ran lightly up the stairs, two at a time, blessing her rapid return to fitness. She wasn’t even breathing hard as she peeped around the heavy smoke-stop door on the third floor, reassured by the evidence that lunchtime was a popular visiting hour. Opposite her was a spacious dayroom peopled with a mix of elegantly dressed visitors and bathrobe-attired patients.
Halfway down the polished corridor she could see a T-intersection, where the nurses’ station was situated, and more people moving about—the staff distinguishable only by the open white coats they wore over their smart clothes. In her thigh-length sand-coloured tunic worn over her filmy, patterned brown skirt Rachel was confident of blending in.
A logo on a door across the way caught her eye and she darted for the women’s restroom with a sigh of relief. While she was in there she took her plastic pump bottle out of her capacious shoulder-bag and refilled it from a filtered water dispenser, and spritzed a dash of refreshing cologne across her throat and wrists.
Replacing her sunglasses, she cautiously exited and walked towards the nurses’ station, her eyes flicking over the patients’ names posted outside the individual private rooms.
She had almost reached the intersection when she glimpsed a grey suit around the corner of the right-angled reception desk and shied backwards. At the same time that she realised the suit-wearer was a woman, her reversing heel ground down on something soft and uneven.
Her cry of dismay mingled with a similar one of pain as she lurched around, her sunglasses tumbling off her nose to join the cascade of envelopes and the bunch of flowers which her swinging shoulder-bag had knocked out of the clutches of the tiny grey-haired woman woefully flexing one crushed foot.
‘I’m most dreadfully sorry. That was entirely my fault. Are you all right?’ Rachel burst out, thanking the Lord that she was wearing flat sandals. From her pain-creased features, Rachel judged the woman to be somewhere in her mid-sixties and, knowing how brittle older bones could be, she crouched to inspect the damage, relieved to see only a faint impression of her sole on the reddened top of her victim’s foot.
‘It looks like you’ll just have some bruising. I’m so sorry; I know how painful something like that can feel!’
She hastily gathered up her sunglasses, scrabbling together the scattered mail and injured flowers before rising back to her full height. The other woman couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall, and Rachel immediately felt like a clumsy giant as she loomed over the tiny figure in the fashionable powder-blue summer suit.
‘It’s really not that bad,’ said the lady bravely. ‘And it couldn’t have happened in a more convenient place, could it?’ She tested her foot gingerly back on the ground and smiled kindly at her sheepish assailant. ‘Are you on the staff?’
‘Oh, no—I don’t work here,’ Rachel responded with a weak smile. ‘I don’t think the hospital would be too keen to employ someone who goes around trampling people down!’
‘I don’t know—you could generate them some very brisk business.’ The woman laughed. Although she was expensively dressed, and the triple strand of pearls around her neck undoubtedly genuine, the vibrant Kiwi twang in her accent bespoke down-to-earth origins.
‘Or get them sued out of business. I’m afraid your flowers may be a little bit bruised, too.’ Rachel smiled apologetically as she handed them back.
‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose my husband will notice. He’ll be too busy complaining I haven’t brought him whisky and chocolates.’
Rachel was amused by her expression of loving exasperation. ‘In a coronary care unit?’
‘He’s a very bad patient,’ the little lady admitted ruefully. ‘He’s always been so proud of being as tough as old boots—never had a sick day in his life until this…’
‘Is he very ill?’ Rachel asked warily.
