Chapter One

 

There was little indication at the start that things would turn out the way they did. That initial communication was innocuous enough - just an email out of the blue from a long-lost friend. Granted Charlotte made sure she didn’t get too many of those - after the trial and the divorce and all the surrounding unpleasantness, she’d taken some fairly extreme steps to ensure that long lost friends stayed that way - lost.

She’d left the country, she’d gone clean across the world, she'd changed her name. She was Anne Hartley no longer and had been going by the name Charlotte James for the past seven years or more.

So Ruth, the old friend behind the email, had demonstrated considerable ingenuity in tracking her down.

 

Dear Anne, or should I call you Charlotte?

I see from your website that you’re in Cardiff now. I hope you won’t be too jealous when I tell you I’ve ended up in Greece…I’m living in a village on the Peloponnese peninsula, researching the history of the area. Unfortunately I’ve landed myself in a spot of bother. I don’t want to go into details in an email, but I could  use your advice. Hell, I could use your moral support, even.

If you are up for a bit of a busman’s holiday, I’d love to see you. What do you say?

 

“What do I say…?  I say get me to the airport right now.” The scene through the narrow sash window was dispiriting - another filthy Cardiff afternoon in Wales. Nothing new there. The sky the colour of slate, and the rain, that Welsh rain, doing that horizontal thing it was so good at. It even had bits of ice in it. And it was only September. There were months and months of this ahead.

Of course she would go, no need to think twice about it. The timing was heaven-sent. That gallery catalogue just needed a few finishing touches. For once the bank balance was resting in the right-coloured slot of the roulette wheel. There was nothing in her diary that couldn’t be postponed for a few weeks. And since her personal life was a carefully constructed joke, it wasn’t as if anyone would miss her. There was Gareth, of course, but he didn’t count, not really, because he was just Gareth, part of the background of her life, like a shabby armchair.

 

Ruth’s unexpected reappearance was quickly represented by a series of pings on her computer as the email communications flew back and forth. The details were finalized with dizzying speed: she was to fly to Greece on Tuesday, just four days later.

I’ll drive to Athens to meet the plane. I can’t leave you to battle your way here, without ever having been to Greece before, and not speaking the language. I have some business in Athens, so you won’t be putting me out.

 

That had been the plan. They’d exchanged mobile numbers “in case something goes wrong” (what could possibly go wrong?) and all that remained was to pack a suitcase, tidy up a few loose ends at the office, and get herself to Heathrow.

And tell Gareth, of course. She couldn’t disappear for an unknown number of weeks without telling Gareth. So, late on the Monday afternoon, when she’d ticked off the last of the small tasks on her list. (I’m becoming like my mother. I make lists now…), she locked her office, thinking for the hundredth time she really needed to fix that seedy-looking, peeling-paint sign on the door that read Charlotte James, PhD, Fine Art Consultant. It made her whole business look seedy.

Well face it, Charlotte. It is seedy. You work in a seedy building in a seedy part of town. Your house is in a seedy village in a seedy valley. Thank the Lord  for websites, for casting a glossy and misleading façade over the seedy reality of your seedy life.

Life hadn’t always been that way. In the days before her fall from grace, the days when she’d worked for a gallery in Auckland, she had had one of those offices with plate glass windows and a splendid view over the turquoise blue of the Hauraki Gulf. A far cry from the paint-peeling cubbyhole in the semi-derelict building she now inhabited. Oh how the mighty hath fallen...

She sighed. Perhaps this trip to Greece would signal a turning point. It might even be a healing time. She might recapture something of  the lost Charlotte, the Charlotte who was once called Anne – successful, glamorous, and high-flying. A bit like Icarus, really, before he fell.

She walked down the gloomy corridor towards Gareth’s office and tapped on his door. They were the only two occupants on this the third floor of their decrepit Victorian building, situated midway down a little-used alley.

“Yep?” he called out in a lazy voice.

“Is that how a lawyer should answer a knock on the door?” she asked, slipping inside. “What if I’d been an important new client?”

“I knew it was you,” he said. “My Charlotte radar told me. Besides, my clients tend to be very unimportant. If I had important clients I’d have an important-looking secretary to answer the door for me, and I’d be too busy to waste time with the likes of you.”

She laughed. He was sitting in front of a desk piled high with files. Some of them, and she could see this even from the distance of the door, had managed to acquire a layer of dust. In front of him he had spread out a deck of playing cards, arranged untidily into a game of patience.

“I see I don’t have to apologize for disturbing you,” she said, nodding in the direction of the cards.

“What makes you think that?” he retorted. “I’m at a very critical stage of this very important game. Everything hinges on the next card I turn over. But I shall increase the suspense by waiting till you’ve gone before I do so. Would you like some coffee?”

“That would be nice,” she said.

He’d been in the building almost as long as she had – five years - and they’d gradually become friends, companions in struggle. They both eked out their living doing freelance work, unencumbered by the binds, but also unsupported by the security, of working for a firm. They shared that in common – a kind of go-it-alone quality, a free-spiritedness, a don’t-want-anyone-telling-me-what-to-do attitude to life and to the world. He was a lawyer, one of those no-win no-fee ambulance-chasing types of lawyers and she sometimes couldn’t help thinking the work he did was a tad on the shady side.

“I like taking on companies and corporations and great cumbersome bureaucracies,” he’d say. “I like standing up for the invisible people.”

“But those invisible people you like so much are often little more than thieves themselves,” she objected.

“So what?” he said. “Enough of them have a genuine grievance, and besides, who else will help them if I don’t?”  

So he was an interesting and complex character, was Gareth. He was tall, blonde and dishevelled, and looked a bit like Owen Wilson, the American actor, only with a Welsh accent.  He was habitually untidy, rarely remembering to comb his hair, which flopped in his eyes, and curled over his collar at the back. When he pushed it to one side, it was to reveal a pair of the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. They were like emeralds. And for this or for some other reason she couldn’t quite fathom, women seemed to find him irresistible. Perhaps they wanted to take him home and mother him or something – clean that egg off his tie, iron that rumpled shirt.

Charlotte had no desire to take him home and iron his shirt. And while it wasn’t something she analyzed often, for she’d only thought about it once or twice, she had come to the conclusion that the reason she did not feel even slightly inclined to join the queue of young women who traipsed up the stairs  for the pleasure of his company, in their tight leather mini skirts, with their pierced belly buttons showing beneath their skimpy tops, was because she was just too comfortable with him.

 He wasn’t boyfriend material. Besides, she didn’t do the boyfriend thing anymore. Not since Dennis, dreadful Dennis, her ex-husband, the root cause of all the unpleasantness. After the divorce she’d given up men the way some people give up coffee or cigarettes.

Now Gareth was pouring out two mugs of coffee – she’d not given that up – and she was moving a pile of dusty files from the only available chair in his office to the floor.

“So what’s new?” he asked, standing with his back to her, stirring sugar.

“I came to say goodbye,” she said.

He spun round. “Goodbye?” he said sharply. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t panic, I’m not leaving you. I’m just going away for a few days.”

“I wasn’t panicking,” he said with a grin. “Although I’d miss you if you left for good. Some days you’re the only person I see.”

“Are you talking about those rare days when you are between inappropriately young and inappropriately clad girlfriends?”

He grinned again. “Yes, those days. So where are you off to?”

“Greece,” she said.

“Greece! You’re full of surprises today. How long you going for?”

“Not sure,” she said. “At this point a week, but it depends how it goes.”

“So it’s a job, not a holiday?”

“It’s a bit of both. A working holiday, you could call it. An old friend of mine got in touch a couple of days ago and says she’s landed herself in a spot of bother. She thought I might be able to help.”

“What kind of bother?”

“Not the kind of bother she wants to divulge over the internet, apparently.”

“This is art-related bother?”

“I suppose so. She’s heavily into Greek sculpture. Can’t see what else it might be.”

“What kind of bother could you possibly get into with Greek sculpture?” He handed her her coffee and sat down on the other side of the desk, cupping his mug in both hands. The building was drafty, and on days such as this, bitingly chilly.

“I guess I’ll find out when I arrive,” she said.

“Do you know her well, this friend of yours?”

“Yes, I do,” she started, but then stopped, because it wasn’t true. How well did she really know Ruth? It was a long time since they’d had anything to do with one another. They’d hung out as students from time to time, sure, and she remembered how Ruth was always banging on about Greece, and how much she wanted to move there. But apart from that, she was hard pressed to come up with much concrete information about the other woman at all.

“I know her well enough, I think,” she amended. “We met at university, back in New Zealand.  We were both taking the same module in Greek sculpture. She was majoring in ancient history and I was in the art history stream. It feels a million years ago, to be honest. I can barely remember what she looks like even, except that she was blonde, petite, and quite pretty. She was also intelligent and fun to be around.”

Gareth looked faintly disapproving. “I hope this doesn’t turn out to be another of your disasters,” he said. “This time I won’t be around to come to the rescue if something goes wrong.”

“What could possibly go wrong?”

“That’s what you said last time.”

She laughed, but underneath she was suddenly besieged by a host of horrible doubts. Still, the die was cast. The doubts had come one booked airline ticket too late. She was off to Greece to spend an unspecified number of weeks, doing something entirely unspecified, with someone she didn’t even remember very well. She shivered suddenly, and not just because of the chill of the room.

But she brushed away the sudden doubt and fear: “You’re just jealous,” she said.

“You bet I’m jealous.” He waved a hand at the window, where the rain had turned to hail and was now clattering noisily against the glass. “Who wouldn’t be jealous of someone escaping all this to Greece?”

“I’ll send you a postcard,” she said. “You know, one of those sun-drenched beach scenes that will have you itching to throttle me.”

“I’m itching to throttle you already,” he said in that dead pan way of his and she laughed again. That was the best thing about Gareth – he knew exactly how to make her laugh.