His voice answered after a few moments. ‘Nan,’ he said, gathering his wits, ‘what is it, is something wrong?’
She forced a glacial calm into her voice. ‘No,’ she said coolly, ‘nothing wrong. Just something I had to call you about right away. If Max Benning calls you, please on no account give him my address here. Give him no information. Nothing.’
‘Will you tell me why?’
‘Sometime soon. Not now.’
There was a long silence. ‘OK, Nan. No address, nothing. I’ve got it.’
When she had put down the phone she stood pouring herself a glass of wine, thinking of Edward, thinking of Max, thinking of her father. Wine spilled over the rim of the glass as the telephone rang.
She walked back into the living room. Edward. Who else at this time of the night. Not Max. He could not possibly know the number. She lifted the phone. Kim Hoang’s voice said: ‘Nan, I just got it on the wire service. Something dreadful’s happened. Something really dreadful.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
She was sick with guilt. Sick with the image of Louise lying murdered in the motel room. Sick with the idea that she might somehow have prevented her death. On the phone Kim Hoang had urged Nan Luc to go to the police. But that would mean revealing everything Louise had been desperate to hide. Now she owed Louise silence, if nothing else.
Through the night, half sleeping and dreaming in a chair, Nan Luc tried to tear the veil aside, to break through into the Saigon world of only twenty years ago. A wild world, Louise had said, a world of sex and drugs and ugliness and tens of thousands of abandoned children. Was it possible that Louise was telling the truth about the money? To Nan it seemed more likely that the story of the five thousand dollars and the forging of the birth certificate was something Stevenson had forced Louise to tell her.
Where, Nan asked herself, would her mother, Pham, a South Vietnamese Army nurse get five thousand dollars? To any Vietnamese who wasn’t involved in drugs or war profiteering or prostitution it would have been a gigantic sum.
She got up and walked back and forth through the length of the small apartment. Facing him, confronting him, was the only way. She was too Vietnamese to believe that a father could face his child without somehow revealing the truth. And then no police. No courts. No clever lawyers. He must never walk free.
As dawn etched the jagged outline of the rooftops opposite, she peeled off her clothes and fell naked across the bed. She lay there chasing an idea, a nagging thought through the corridors of memory. Stevenson had eluded her at the motel but something still drummed in her head. A connection which came from last night.
Something, through the curtain of drizzling rain, that had flashed through her mind at the moment the Mercedes pulled away on the ramp.
Mary Page Butler, dressed in a plaid skirt, a black Pringle cash-mere and a Bettina Hopman gold necklet, came down the stairs and turned left towards the drawing room. Through the hall windows she could see the low grey cloud which presaged snow. But beside the door she could also see her husband’s three leather suitcases ready for loading into his car for his weekend in the city.
Two days, two nights by herself. Two days more she could put off telling Fin she wasn’t going to resign from the fund. Worse, that she was voting for Cy at the Christmas Eve election. Would he guess? Fin, maybe no. But Sunny. And the other trustees.
Reaching for the door she heard voices in the drawing room. As if to match her thoughts, Fin’s voice, Sunny’s.
She pushed open the heavy panelled door. ‘Hi, Sunny,’ she said. ‘I thought it was you.’ She reached up and gave Sunny a careful kiss on the cheek. ‘Drinks already?’ she said, turning to Fin.
‘I’m leaving in a few minutes,’ Fin said. ‘If I’m to mix them, and who else, you’ll have to have them straightaway.’
‘This is a surprise,’ Mary dropped down on to the sofa, her eyes on Sunny.
‘Yes,’ Sunny said flatly.
‘I thought maybe you had come round to hitch a lift with Fin into New York.’
‘Looking like this?’ Sunny said, without a smile.
Mary shrugged. It was true, Sunny looked worn and stale, as if she had passed a bad night. And of course she would never go into the city dressed in jeans.
‘An early start to the day, but I always insist Saturdays don’t count,’ Fin Butler said, as he carried the two heavy tumblers, tinkling with ice, across to his wife and sister-in-law. ‘There,’ he handed a glass to Sunny, ‘I’m justly renowned for the gin and tonics I make. Just a touch of bitters added. The Prince adores them.’
‘Sunny knows,’ Mary said, taking her own glass. ‘In fact, Fin,’ she added, not unkindly, ‘everybody knows.’
‘Ah,’ Butler threw his hands in the air. ‘Repeating himself again. Old age, Mary.’
‘You’re not old,’ she said, more sharply. ‘If you’re old, what does that make me?’
‘Five years younger,’ he said. ‘Just as you’ve always been. Now,’ he signalled he was changing the subject, ‘I’m going into the city today for lunch at my club. Probably stay overnight. We’ve got the Argentinians over on a non-playing visit.’
‘Best polo players in the world,’ Sunny said.
Fin Butler smiled easily. ‘Thank you, Sunny. Nearly repeated myself again, did I?’ Giving each woman a peck on the cheek, Fin Butler left them alone in the room.
‘He’s a good man,’ Sunny said after a moment’s silence. They could hear Fin humming to himself as he picked up the bags the houseboy had brought down into the hall.
‘I don’t think you’ve a right to say that until you’ve lived with a man,’ Mary said as the door slammed shut behind Fin. ‘He’s good enough, but only I can say whether he’s really good.’
‘A very raunchy remark from my rather prim elder sister.’
‘I’m not prim,’ Mary said irritably. ‘And it wasn’t intended as a raunchy remark. I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about life.’
They listened to Fin’s car start and the gravel of the drive crackle beneath the wheels.
Mary took a long drink of her gin and tonic. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he makes a good gin and tonic. An excellent Martini. He can decant a bottle of vintage port better than any English butler. He can play polo with the best who, as he constantly reminds us, are Argentinians. He is an acquaintance of Prince Charles. But that’s Finlay Butler. That’s all of him.’
Sunny got up and carried her glass towards the drawing room door. ‘My big sis is feeling scratchy today,’ she said.
Mary shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Where’s Cy?’
With one finger Sunny pushed the door closed. For a moment she stood there, looking down, as if admiring the smooth swing of the door and the satisfying click of the lock. ‘Cy?’ she echoed. Her face turned back towards Mary. ‘He’s sleeping it off.’
‘Sleeping what off?’
‘Sleeping off whatever drink and debauchery he treated himself to last night, I suppose.’
‘You don’t know where he was?’ Mary said tentatively. Debauchery. The picture of the naked Vietnamese masseuse bending over her swept through her mind. She drank some more gin. Spilt a drop or two on to the peach silk sofa.
‘No,’ Sunny said. ‘He was too drunk to tell me. He passed out just after he got back. I found him this morning sprawled in an armchair, his suit covered with mud. Mud on his face, his hands… Not a pretty sight.’
‘Did you wake him up?’ Sunny, watching her sister carefully, shook her head. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well,’ Mary said.