Blue Steal Page 10

  If all went well tonight, she hadn’t planned on being here tomorrow. And even if she were … Did she want to get to know Lewis better? Wasn’t it a little too late to start playing happy families?

  As if he could read her thoughts, he said, ‘As you are no doubt aware, I never married. I have no children of my own. You are my only family.’

  ‘And Anna,’ she added automatically.

  Lewis ran one of his soft, well-manicured fingers down the side of his cup. ‘Your sister with the unfortunate condition.’

  Yes, that was her.

  Selina hated when people assumed Anna was somehow less because of her dystonia. She wasn’t less because she had dystonia—she was more. Selina didn’t know a single other person with her spirit. Her determination to live life on her own terms.

  He took another sip of tea. ‘Yes, you are quite right, my dear. She is a Holloway too of course.’

  The simple acknowledgement was more than she was expecting, and her protective hackles settled.

  Lewis must be lonely, she thought. He was such a successful, power figure in the business community, and yet so lonely. And she was, as he said, his only family. Besides, she had all but promised to show him the necklace—if she found it tonight, perhaps they could do business tomorrow.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said. That was as much as she could promise at the moment. She needed time to process. Family was tricky at the best of times, but this really had to take the cake.

  She rose and he rose with her. Unsure of how to end the meeting, she opted for a semi-professional approach and extended her hand. He clasped it in a surprisingly firm, papery-dry grasp. ‘I’m glad we met,’ she said, and she was almost sure it was true.

  She walked past the beefcakes still sitting on their bar stools. Security, she supposed. Perhaps someone in Lewis’s position needed them. Once out of the room, she stopped for a moment. She’d returned to the real world, and she breathed it in gratefully.

  Then expelled it in a determined blast. She didn’t have time to be exhausted and she didn’t have time to ponder her strange family reunion.

  She had too much to do before tonight.

  ***

  To his credit, Charles kept the meeting brief, and Jack soon found himself free to get back to the case.

  He’d started by lining up interviews. The first cop on the scene, Ross King, was retired now but still living in Melbourne. Most ex-cops didn’t mind talking about old cases, and if Jack was in luck, Ross would remember something useful. Jack had made an appointment to see him the following morning, giving as little information as possible. He didn’t want anything he said interfering with Ross’s memory of that night.

  Next, he’d spent a little time on the phone to the alumni officer of Wentworth and managed to find someone who’d been in the same class as the Holloway twins amongst the fathers of his school friends. At one stage, he’d known the Turnbull family reasonably well, and it hadn’t been hard to line up a meeting with Keith for tomorrow afternoon. He hoped Keith would be able to tell him a little more about the Holloway twins in their school years. It was unlikely to prove fruitful, but at this point, Jack needed as much help as he could get.

  He’d also done the de rigueur internet stalking of Selina, not that it had amounted to much. She had no Facebook page that he could find, or any other social media presence. There was a Selina Migliore working as an executive assistant at a boutique financial services company in the CBD—no photo, but Jack was confident it was her. Problem was, knowing where she worked didn’t tell him a great deal. He called in a favour and confirmed Selina didn’t have a police record. With longer to dig he could find more, but he was already on borrowed time.

  He needed to do what he came to do, and get back to the Empire.

  Leaning against his desk, he reviewed what he knew for sure. The full Petrovsky set had been sighted earlier the evening it went missing. It had been stored in a safe deposit box in one of the offices and the box had been found prised open later that night. There was no cause to believe the jewellery had been compromised before then.

  One thing that had struck Jack as he re-read the police report, was how heavily the official version of the events rested on Lewis Holloway’s testimony. One man—boy, really—with very little to corroborate his story. No other witnesses, or at least, none alive, and in the intervening years, no one had ever come forward claiming to have seen the jewellery or to have knowledge of the thieves who escaped with it.

  Which happened sometimes, Jack had to concede; some items simply disappeared without a trace. The problem was that Lewis’s statement was nigh on impossible to reconcile with the ring turning up at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft. And as to Selina’s apparent belief that the linen room was somehow pertinent … None of it made sense.

  He’d come to the conclusion that the only way forward was to throw out almost everything he’d been told and reconstruct events from scratch. If he had any hope of finding that necklace, and he was more sure than ever that it was still in the hotel, he needed to know what really happened on that night fifty years ago.

  And for that, he needed a little help. His unorthodox but to date failsafe secret weapon.

  He reached into the top drawer and picked up three totally unremarkable darts. He held them a moment, cold in his warm hand, then he looked up, across his office to the bullseye dart board attached to the back of his door.

  Time to get some answers.

  Standing in position, he threw dart after dart at the target. Collected them, and threw again. And again. Aiming to empty the mind he’d just filled with the case—with reports and data, with questions, with theories of his own. He focused on nothing but throwing and retrieving until his mind was calm and clear. Then he stopped.

  Selina. He had to start with Selina.

  There must be some connection, some link. Someone must have told her where the necklace was. Who would know where it was? The obvious answer was the thieves.

  Had she known one of them?

  The darts flew through the air in rapid succession, landing scattered around the board.

  That was a no then.

  Thank God for Tess, a hippie kinesiologist ex he was still friends with. She’d told him about her job, about how it worked. According to her, her clients already knew the answers they were seeking. The knowledge was embedded in their bodies, in their muscles. Her job was to tell them what they already knew. Fascinated, he’d developed his own version to help him out in tight investigative spots. When he knew he had the answers but he couldn’t get to them, he threw darts. If he hit the bullseye, he was on to something.

  If he didn’t, the direction of his thoughts was a bust. As it was here, with the burglars.

  Gathering the darts, he thought through the next possibility. Perhaps Selina didn’t know the robbers herself, but had heard something. A rumour, passed from person to person, until it had found someone willing to act on it.

  Was that it?

  Closer but still far from the bullseye. There was something wrong in his reasoning.

  What else did he know about Selina?

  She lived with her grandmother. Her nonna.

  He knew the second the dart left his hand that he’d executed a perfect trajectory. Bullseye.

  Nonna. She was important. And he could almost, but not quite, grasp the how and the why.

  What else?

  Lewis Holloway had recognised her, and she had recognised him, yet she’d said she’d never seen him before.

  That was interesting, no?

  A whizzing through the air, and the second dart joined the first.

  Yes, that was interesting, and again he felt he was on the verge of understanding something profound. He didn’t believe Selina was after Lewis Holloway’s millions, and not just because he didn’t want it to be true. She’d said she was a gold digger, become angry and defensive when he’d questioned it, but it didn’t fit. Smart, resourceful and determined, Selina wasn’t waiting
around for a rich husband to provide for her.

  But there was a connection …

  It was there, hovering close, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Rather than scare it away completely, he turned his attention to his next question. One more dart, one more question.

  What else did he have?

  The ring that had started this whole adventure. A ring, separated from the necklace. Rings were symbols of love, of devotion.

  Without thinking further, he threw.

  Another bullseye.

  An elderly woman. An elderly man. A ring that had been lost for fifty years.

  Threads he could pull together into a story. A love story.

  Vibrating with excitement, because he was close, he moved back around his desk, thumbed his way once more through the police report and scanned interviews until he found the one he was looking for.

  Maria Ferranti, hotel maid, live-in. Date of birth 23 January 1949. Making her sixteen at the time of the theft. Recent arrival from Sicily, not much English. Young. Italian. Beautiful? Probably, if the way he was thinking was on the money.

  Maria had said nothing of interest in her statement, claiming to have slept through the whole thing. She hadn’t heard anything, hadn’t seen anything. Hear no evil, see no evil?

  She’d be sixty-five now. Old enough to be Selina’s grandmother, if she’d been pregnant in 1965. Lewis had lived in the hotel at the time of the theft, and so had Maria. Just off the boat, not much English …

  If Jack was right, if Maria was Selina’s grandmother, was it a stretch to imagine that Lewis was her grandfather? Maria was young and alone. Hadn’t girls like that been considered ripe for the picking by the landed gentry—or the twentieth century update, the boss or his son—since the dawn of time?

  A love affair, a ring and a baby.

  If he had to guess, if he had to make a crazy-wild conjecture, he would say Lewis had got Maria pregnant, and the result, one generation removed, was Selina.

  That went some way to explaining the connection he’d witnessed between Selina and Lewis, but what did it mean for the Petrovsky sapphires? If Lewis had stolen the ring to make his promises with, what was with the thieves running out the door? What was with the dead twin and the dead security guard?

  Throw out everything you think you know and start from scratch.

  A bad feeling clenched at his gut.

  He’d known from the first that this case was going to cause him headaches, but he was starting to think it was much, much worse than he’d first imagined.

  He was starting to wonder if he was even trying to solve the right crime.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Jack. We need to talk. Meet me in the bar next door?’

  There was a pause while he considered her request, and Selina gripped the handset tight. She’d been lucky so far—Jack had been in his room and answered the call she’d put through from reception—now she just needed him to agree to meet her.

  Say yes, Jack. You know you want to.

  He couldn’t resist, right?

  ‘Give me five,’ he said.

  She handed the phone back to a receptionist she hadn’t met before with a smile, and walked through the chilly night air to the bar two doors up. The city street was all but deserted, and so was the bar. Which wasn’t surprising—it was quarter to eleven on a Tuesday evening in a quieter section of town.

  It was a funky little wine bar—the type Melbourne did so well, with interesting but muted lighting, a gorgeous wooden counter, exposed brick, and a whole wall displaying bottles of wine she didn’t know much about. She went straight to the counter and ordered two glasses of the best red they had.

  ‘We close in fifteen minutes,’ the man behind the bar, a handsome scruffy hipster, warned.

  Selina knew that. In fact, she’d pretty much timed it down to the minute. ‘That’s fine. We’ll be done by then.’

  She carried the glasses to one of the small tables at the far side of the long, narrow room, and set them down, careful to keep her back to the bar, though it was probably unnecessary since the barman was absorbed in his nightly clean-up. Five seconds later, she slid into her seat to wait for Jack. Here’s hoping he liked Shiraz.

  Anticipation was burning through her, and not just because she had a job she needed to pull off. She liked seeing Jack, liked being near him. Even though she usually had reason to want him far, far away, she thrilled to his presence.

  When he strode into the room, her heart flipped and she found herself unable to tear her eyes off him. Sheesh. She had it bad. Racing heart, dry mouth, hot everything. The whole kit and caboodle.

  Fact was, she wanted him like she’d never wanted anything in her life.

  Except Anna’s happiness.

  Another jolt as he neared, quirk to his mouth, the piercing blue of his eyes fixed on her.

  She wondered how many people he fooled, with his clean-cut but slightly unkempt good looks, his ready smile and his easy charm. Did anyone else see what a threat he posed? He missed nothing and understood everything.

  Fact was, he was too smart for his own good. He was too smart and he’d forced her hand.

  She didn’t want to do this.

  It wasn’t too late to back out, a frantic part of her insisted. But as she dropped her gaze to the dark red wine in front of her, she knew she wouldn’t. This was a one-shot deal and tonight was her last chance. She had to get Jack out of the picture.

  He took the seat opposite her, long athletic body almost too big for the undersized furniture of the edgy café/bar hybrid, and looked at her, waiting.

  ‘I hope you like Shiraz. Last call went out, so I took the liberty of ordering for you,’ she said, indicating the glasses standing like little pawns in front of them. What was this week if not a game of chess?

  ‘Why how considerate of you, Ms Migliore.’ His eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘As it so happens, I do.’

  She picked up her glass, lowered it to his in a quick cheers, and sipped. ‘It’s good,’ she said, savouring the rich, red mouthful, then returned her glass to the table. ‘Bar closes in fifteen. We don’t have much time.’

  ‘Something you want to discuss?’

  The quieter he spoke, the more the rasp in his voice came out. And that rasp did all sorts of weird things to her. Maybe she should be grateful for it—after all, mutual attraction would only further her cause. ‘I have a proposal.’

  Head tilted slightly, he regarded her through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Last night, you said you thought we were after the same thing,’ she said.

  ‘You going to try to convince me that isn’t so?’

  ‘I think we’re a little past that,’ she said, smiling coyly. Neither of them had admitted it, but he must know what she was here for, and she was certain he was here for the same thing. ‘But you won’t find what you’re looking for without me, and I can’t make further progress without your cooperation. The solution seems obvious.’

  He looked at her expectantly.

  ‘We work together,’ she went on. ‘Pool information and resources. Split the proceeds.’

  His mouth quirked up. ‘I didn’t have you pegged as the sharing kind.’

  She wasn’t. She couldn’t afford to be. Shrugging with fake nonchalance, she traced a finger around the rim of her glass. ‘Half is better than none.’

  She flicked her eyes to him. He was watching the tip of the finger. Collecting a drop of wine from the rim, she brought her finger to her mouth and sucked it softly. His eyes met hers then, and the erotic heat in them hit her right in her core.

  He shook himself a little and his long, tanned fingers reached out and wound round the stem of his glass. ‘So you’re admitting you’re here for the necklace?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Full disclosure, Jack. I’m looking to cooperate.’

  Head cocked, keen eyes assessing her, for a moment it looked like he might actually be considering it. And for a moment she indulged in a fantasy that this was for real. That he
was about to say yes to her proposal and mean it. That they were somehow going to be in this together instead of working strategies from opposite sides of the board.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said, and lifted his glass slowly. Eyes on her the whole time, like he was waiting for her to stop him.

  Like he knew. But he couldn’t know.

  She had half a second before it was too late. She wanted to snatch the glass from his hand, dash it against the slick polished concrete beneath them.

  She didn’t.

  Her fantasy of cooperating was just that—a fantasy. The sad truth was, she couldn’t trust him. She might be lying about wanting to cooperate, but so was he. There was one necklace and two of them, and she had to emerge the winner.

  The glass touched his lips. She watched as the liquid swirled into his mouth, watched as his throat worked to swallow.

  Done. It was done.

  ‘Start talking,’ he said.

  She tore her gaze away from where it was lingering on well-cut lips she ached to press against. ‘Full disclosure goes both ways. I tell you something, you tell me something.’

  ‘Fair’s fair,’ he agreed sardonically.

  She’d anticipated the need to give him something, worked through the ramifications and decided in advance what she could live with. ‘That man, the one we saw yesterday?’

  ‘Lewis Holloway.’

  She started, just a little. So he already knew that had been Lewis Holloway.

  She nodded, then paused as if considering what to say. It worked to her advantage when he took another mouthful of wine.

  ‘You didn’t believe we’d never seen each other before, but that was the truth. The thing is, he’s my—’

  ‘Grandfather,’ Jack inserted smoothly.

  Her heart surged. There were three people in the world who knew about her relationship with the Holloways: nonna, herself, and Lewis. How on earth had Jack worked that out? Not that he’d totally nailed it, but he wasn’t far off the mark.

  ‘He’s not my grandfather,’ she said.

  One second. Two.

  ‘Andrew.’

  He was that quick. That’s how he’d worked it out. She nodded.