Vicious Circle (2 page)

‘Hot as a dirty little bitch in heat,’ she whispered. That was what he had called her last night. Doctor would not need her for a while, he was busy with the Cross woman. She left the reception room and went down the passage to the toilet. She locked herself in one of the cubicles. Then she pulled her skirts up around her waist and dropped her panties around her ankles. She sat on the toilet seat and spread her knees. She put her hand down there. She wanted to make it last, but as soon as she touched her hot switch she could not hold back. It was so quick and so intense that it left her gasping and shaking.

*

Two hours later Hector returned and ensconced himself in a leather armchair in the waiting room facing Alan’s door. He picked up a copy of the
Financial Times
from the side table and turned to the FTSE reports. He did not even glance up as the intercom rang on the receptionist’s desk. She spoke softly into the receiver and then hung up.

‘Mr Cross,’ she called across to him. ‘Mr Donnovan would like to have a few words with you. Please would you go through to his room?’ Hector dropped the newspaper and jumped up from the armchair. Again he felt the quick stab of anxiety. He had learned over the years to trust his instincts. What dire news did Alan have for him? He hurried across the waiting room and knocked on the inner door. Alan’s muffled voice bid him enter. The consulting room was panelled in oak and the shelves were lined with sets of leather-bound medical volumes. Alan sat behind a vast antique desk and Hazel faced him. She stood up as Hector entered and came to meet him, pushing her big belly ahead of her. She was smiling radiantly and that allayed Hector’s premonitions of disaster. He embraced her.

‘Everything all right?’ he demanded, and looked at Alan over Hazel’s shining blonde head.

‘Tickety-boo! Calm seas and fair winds!’ Alan assured him. ‘Take a seat, both of you.’ They sat side by side and stared at him with full attention. He removed his spectacles and polished them with a piece of chamois leather.

‘Okay, shoot!’ Hector encouraged him.

‘The baby is doing just fine, but Hazel isn’t so young any more.’

‘None of us are,’ Hector agreed. ‘But ever so kind of you to mention it, Alan.’

‘The baby is just about ready to make its move, but perhaps Hazel might need a little bit of a hand.’

‘Caesarean?’ she asked with alarm.

‘Dear me, no!’ Alan assured her. ‘Nothing so extreme. What I have in mind is an induction of labour.’

‘Explain please, Alan,’ Hector insisted.

‘Hazel is in her fortieth week of gestation. She will be good and ready by the end of this coming week. The two of you are stuck out in the wilds of darkest Hampshire. How long does it take you to get up to London?’

‘Two and a half hours is good time,’ Hector replied. ‘Some drivers with heavy right feet do it in under two.’

Hazel pulled a face at him.

‘I want you to move up to your town house in Belgravia immediately.’ Alan had been a dinner guest there on more than one occasion. ‘I am going to book Hazel into a private ward in the Portland Maternity Hospital in Great Portland Street for Thursday this week. It’s one of the leading establishments in the country. If she goes into spontaneous labour before Thursday you will only be fifteen minutes away from it. If nothing happens by Friday I will give Hazel a little injection and pop goes the weasel, so to speak.’

Hector turned to her. ‘How do you feel about that, my darling?’

‘That suits me just fine. The sooner the quicker, as far as I am concerned. Everything is ready for us in the London house. I just need to pick up a few things, like the book I am reading, and we can move back into town tomorrow.’

‘That’s it, then,’ said Alan briskly and stood up behind his desk. ‘See you both on Friday at the latest.’

On their way through the waiting room Hazel stopped in front of the receptionist’s desk and rummaged around in her handbag. She brought out a gift-wrapped bottle of Chanel perfume and placed it in front of the receptionist.

‘Just a little thank you, Victoria. You have been so sweet.’

‘Oh, you are too kind, Mrs Cross. But you really shouldn’t have!’

As they rode down in the lift Hazel asked him, ‘Did you get your Range Rover from Stratstone?’

‘It’s parked just across the street; I will take you to lunch in her and bring you back afterwards to pick up your old can of rust.’ She punched his shoulder and led the way out of the building.

He took her arm crossing Harley Street and the taxi drivers coming from both directions, seeing how pretty and pregnant she was, braked sharply to a standstill. One of them leaned out of his window, grinning. He signalled at her to cross in front of his taxi and called out to her, ‘Best of luck, luv! Bet it’s a boy!’

Hazel waved back. ‘I’ll let you know.’

None of them noticed the motorcycle parked in a loading zone a hundred yards up the street behind them. Both the driver and his pillion passenger wore gloves and helmets with darkened perspex visors which hid their faces. As Hazel and Hector reached the parked Rover the motorcyclist jumped on the kick starter and the engine of the powerful Japanese machine under him burbled to life. The pillion passenger lifted his booted feet onto the footrests, ready to go. Hector opened the passenger door for Hazel and handed her up into the seat. Then he moved briskly around to the driver’s side. He jumped in, started the engine and pulled out into the traffic stream. The motorcyclist waited until there were five vehicles separating them and then he followed. He maintained the separation discreetly. They went around Marble Arch and down to Berkeley Square. When the Rover drew up in front of No. 2 Davies Street the motorcyclist rode on past and turned left at the next road junction. He circled the block and stopped when he had a view of the front of Alfred’s Club. He saw at once that the doorman had parked the Rover a little further up the street.

*

Mario, the restaurant manager, was waiting at the entrance to greet them, beaming with pleasure. ‘Welcome, Mr and Mrs Cross, but it’s been far too long.’

‘Nonsense, Mario,’ Hector contradicted him. ‘We were here ten days ago with Lord Renwick.’

‘That’s far too long ago, sir,’ Mario protested and led them to their favourite table.

The room went silent as they passed down it. All eyes followed them. Everybody knew who they were. Even in advanced pregnancy Hazel looked magnificent. The gossamer skirt billowed around her like a rose-coloured cloud, and the handbag she carried was one of those crocodile-skin creations which made every other woman in the room consider suicide.

Mario seated her and murmured, ‘May I presume that it will be the grapefruit salad for madame, followed by the grilled St Jacques? And for you, Mr Cross, the steak tartare, followed by the lobster with Chardonnay sauce?’

‘As usual, Mario,’ Hector agreed seriously. ‘To drink, Mrs Cross will have a small bottle of Perrier water with a bucket of ice. Please fetch a bottle of the Vosne-Romanée Aux Malconsorts 1993 from my personal wine keep for me.’

‘I have already taken the liberty of doing so, Mr Cross. Fifteen minutes ago I checked that the temperature of the bottle is sixteen degrees centigrade. Shall I have the sommelier open it?’

‘Thank you, Mario. I know I can always rely on you.’

‘We try our best to please, sir.’

As the manager left them Hazel leaned across and placed her hand on Hector’s forearm. ‘I do so love your little rituals, Mr Cross. Somehow I find them very comforting.’ She smiled. ‘Cayla also used to find them amusing. Do you remember how we laughed when she imitated you?’

‘Like mother, like daughter.’ Hector smiled at her.

There had been a period when Hazel had not been able to say the name ‘Cayla’ out loud. That had been from the time of her daughter’s brutal slaying and the mutilation of her corpse by her killers until she had discovered that she was pregnant with Hector’s child. That had been a catharsis and she had wept in his arms and blurted out the name. ‘Cayla! It’s going to be another little Cayla,’ she’d sobbed. After that the wounds had healed swiftly until she could talk about Cayla easily and often.

She wanted to talk now and when the sommelier had brought her Perrier water she sipped it and asked, ‘Do you suppose Catherine Cayla Cross will have blonde hair and blue eyes like her big sister did?’ She had already chosen the new infant’s name as a tribute to her dead first child.

‘He will probably have black stubble on his chin like his father,’ Hector teased her. He also had loved the murdered girl. Cayla had been the magnet that had first brought them together against all the odds. Hector had been head of security at Bannock Oil when Hazel had inherited control of the company from her late husband.

From the start Hazel had detested Hector, despite the fact that he had been appointed by her own beloved deceased husband. She knew Hector’s record and reputation intimately and was repelled by the hard and sometimes brutal tactics he used to defend the company assets and personnel from any threat. He was a soldier and he fought like one. He showed no mercy. He flew in the face of all Hazel’s gentler female instincts. At their very first meeting she warned him that she was looking for the slightest excuse to fire him.

Then Hazel’s cosseted and privileged existence was plunged into chaos. The daughter who was the cornerstone of her solitary existence was kidnapped by African pirates. Hazel exerted all her vast fortune and her influence in high places to try to rescue her. No one could help her, not even the President of the United States of America with all his power. They could not even discover where her Cayla was being held. At her wits’ end, she had cast aside her pride and gone back to the cruel, brutal and merciless soldier she so hated and despised: Hector Cross.

Hector had tracked down the kidnappers to their den in the fastness of the African deserts where Cayla was being held. She was being brutally tortured by her captors. Hector had gone in with his men and brought Cayla back to safety. In the process he had demonstrated to Hazel that he was a thoroughly decent person of high principles; somebody that she could trust without reserve. She had given in to the attraction she had so carefully suppressed at their first meeting and once she had got closer to him she discovered that under his armour-plated exterior he could be warm and gentle and loving.

She looked at him now and she reached across the table to take his hand. ‘With you beside me and baby Catherine Cayla inside me, everything is perfect again.’

‘It will be like this for ever,’ he assured her and another tiny frisson of dread ran up his spine as he realized he was tempting the fates. Though he smiled tenderly at her, he was brooding on how the rescue of Cayla had not been the end of the affair either. The fanatics who had seized her had not given up. Their hired thugs had come back and murdered Cayla and sent her decapitated head to Hazel. Hector and Hazel had been forced to re-enter the fray and finally eradicate the monster who had ruined their lives.

Perhaps this time it is really over,
he thought as he watched Hazel’s face. She went on talking about Cayla.

‘Do you remember how you taught her to fish?’

‘She was a natural. With just a little coaching she could cast a salmon fly at least a hundred and fifty feet in most wind conditions and she instinctively knew how to read the waters.’

‘What about the big salmon the two of you landed in Norway?’

‘It was a monster. I was hanging on to her belt, and it almost pulled us both into the river.’ He chuckled.

‘I’ll never forget the day she announced that she was not going to be an art dealer, the career I had planned for her, but that she had decided to become a veterinary surgeon. I nearly had a blue fit!’

‘That was very naughty of her.’ Hector pronounced judgement with a stern expression.

‘Naughty? You were the naughty one. You backed her up all the way. The two of you talked me right into it.’

‘Tut. Tut. She was such a bad influence on me,’ Hector admitted.

‘She loved you. You know that. She really loved you like her own father.’

‘That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.’

‘You are a good man, Hector Cross.’ Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Catherine Cayla is going to love you also. All three of your girls love you.’ She gasped suddenly and clutched her stomach. ‘Oh my God! She gave me a mule kick. She obviously agrees with what I just said.’ They both burst out laughing so that the guests at the other tables looked around at them, smiling in sympathy. However, they might just as well have been alone in the room. They were totally engrossed by each other.

They had so much to remember and discuss. Both of them had filled their lives with strivings and endeavour. They had both experienced soaring triumphs and shattering disasters, but Hazel’s career had been by far the more spectacular. She had started out with little more than guts and determination. At the age of nineteen she had won her first Grand Slam tournament on the professional tennis tour. At twenty-one she had married the oil tycoon Henry Bannock and borne him a daughter. Henry had died when Hazel was almost thirty years old and left control of the Bannock Oil conglomerate to her.

The world of big business is an exclusive domain. Intruders and upstarts are not welcome there. Nobody wanted to bet on a sometime tennis-player-cum-society-glamour-girl-turned-oil-baroness. However none of them had taken into account Hazel’s innate business acumen, nor the years of her tutelage under Henry Bannock, which were worth a hundred MBA degrees. Like the crowds at the Roman circus, her detractors and critics waited in grisly anticipation for her to be devoured by the lions. Then, to the chagrin of all, she brought in the Zara No. 8.

Hector remembered vividly how
Forbes
magazine had blazoned on its front cover the image of Hazel in her white tennis kit, holding a racquet in her right hand. The headline above the photograph read ‘Hazel Bannock aces the opposition. Richest oil strike in thirty years.’

The story described how in the bleak hinterland of the godforsaken and impoverished little emirate named Abu Zara lay an oil concession once owned by the Shell Oil Company. In the period directly after World War II, Shell had pumped the reservoir dry and abandoned the exhausted concession. Since then it had lain forgotten.