MRS. JOYCE CHAN. INTERVIEW COMMENCING, NINE A.M.”
The plump Chinese woman blinked at Inspector Liu nervously. She was afraid of policemen generally, but of this one in particular. He carried himself with importance and kept frowning, tapping his left foot against the leg of his chair in an irritated manner. Joyce knew she hadn’t done anything wrong, but that didn’t necessarily matter when it came to the Hong Kong police. If they wanted a scapegoat and chose her, there was nothing she could do about it.
Inspector Liu was in a bad mood. But it had nothing to do with Joyce Chan. In fact, he was very much hoping that the housemaid from the Barings’ mansion might finally provide him with the breakthrough he so desperately needed in this case. With Lisa Baring being so stubbornly uncooperative, Inspector Liu had made precious little headway in catching Miles Baring’s killer, a failure that was starting to embarrass not just Liu himself, but his superiors. Indeed, it would not be stretching the point to say that Inspector Liu had come to hate Miles Baring’s widow, with her arrogant, Western beauty and her refusal to submit to his authority. Any sane woman would have been grateful for police protection, under the circumstances. And any genuinely grieving woman would have wanted to stay and help the police catch the man responsible for her husband’s death, not to mention her own violation. The fact that Lisa Baring hadn’t done these things, but had fled to a compound in Bali, outside of Inspector Liu’s jurisdiction, further hardened the detective’s heart against her. Lisa Baring was listed as the sole beneficiary in her husband’s will. That gave her motive. By her own admission, she was present when the murder took place. That gave her opportunity. Of course, she hadn’t raped herself. But did she know more about her “attacker” than she was letting on? And if so, was she afraid of him, or protecting him?
Inspector Liu would have dearly loved to force Lisa Baring to return to Hong Kong and answer these questions herself. But short of arresting her, for which he had no grounds, his hands were tied.
That was where Joyce Chan came in.
“How long have you worked at 117 Prospect Road, Mrs. Chan?”
Sweat trickled down the maid’s fat cheeks. “Long time. Mr. Baring buy house, 1989. I working there two year later. Long time.”
“And what were your duties?”
Mrs. Chan looked at Inspector Liu blankly.
“Your job. What was your job?”
“Oh. I in charge all the maids on bedroom floors. Level two and three. They change sheet, keep it clean. I organize.”
“I see. So you were a supervisor. You did not clean yourself.”
She nodded eagerly, pleased to have provided a correct answer. “Supervisor. Yes. Only sometime I clean for Mrs. Baring. Special thing.”
Inspector Liu’s ears pricked up, like a deer scenting danger on the wind.
“What sort of ‘special thing’?”
Mrs. Chan’s hands shook. She mumbled, “Private thing.”
Belatedly, Liu realized that the poor woman was terrified. He tried to reassure her. “You’re not in any trouble, Mrs. Chan. This is all very helpful information, I assure you. It may help us to catch the man who killed Mr. Baring. Do you understand?”
She nodded dumbly.
“What private cleaning did you do for Mrs. Baring?”
The maid squirmed. “Mrs. Baring have a friend. Sometime visit in the day.”
“A friend? You mean a man?”
Joyce Chan nodded. “After, she like me make everything clean. Only me.”
Inspector Liu could barely contain his excitement. This was more than the kind of conjecture the tabloids were running wild with. This was hard fact. The lovely Lisa Baring was having an affair!
“And did you ever meet this man? Mrs. Baring’s ‘friend’?”
Mrs. Chan shook her head no.
“But you saw him, presumably. Can you describe him to me?”
“Never see him.”
Inspector Liu frowned. “You must have seen him. You said he visited during the day. Who let him into the house? Did he drive there? What kind of car did he have?”
But the maid only repeated more firmly, “Never see him. Never. Only missus tell me afterward, come and cleaning everything.”
Inspector Liu grilled Mrs. Chan for a further thirty minutes, but the well of revelations appeared to have run dry. Yes, Mrs. Baring had a lover, but she had not asked for any “special” cleaning on the day of the murder, or in the week leading up to it. She had dismissed the domestic staff early that day and asked not to be disturbed, but apparently this was not uncommon. According to Joyce Chan, Mr. and Mrs. Baring often requested to be left alone together.
After Joyce Chan left the interview room, Inspector Liu sat thinking for a long time.
It was time for another chat with the helpful American from Interpol.
MANY PEOPLE DESCRIBED BALI AS A paradise. But for Matt Daley it was more than that. Bali was a place of magic, of healing, of transformation. It brought him back to life.
When Lisa Baring first asked him to stay, Matt assumed he’d be at Villa Mirage for a few days until his head fully healed. He’d find out everything he could about the night of the murder, and about Miles and Lisa themselves: Was there something about them that had led them to be targeted? Some link with the other victims that he hadn’t seen before, that might help them trace the killer? Then he’d report back to Danny McGuire at Interpol and head to Los Angeles to deal with his mounting problems back home.
But as he and Lisa spent more and more time together, something strange started to happen. Matt found himself caring less and less about the case, and more and more about Lisa. Though he didn’t dare ask her, he was pretty sure she felt the same way. Here in the idyllic surroundings of the villa, days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and the pair of them barely left the property at all. Domestics were dispatched to the local farms and villages for food. Books and other luxuries were ordered online. It was the longest period Matt had spent confined to one property in his entire life, but he didn’t feel trapped. Quite the opposite in fact. It was liberating.
Danny McGuire had been attempting to contact him frantically, bombarding him with e-mails and calls, but Matt couldn’t bring himself to read or respond to the messages. He’d even stopped responding to calls from his sister, Claire, or the other occasional calls he received from home. Once he opened the door to reality, to life outside the bubble, the idyll would be shattered. And Matt wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
Villa Mirage was a world unto itself, an infinitely dazzling miniature ecosystem. Matt and Lisa would work in the morning, Matt (officially at least) on his documentary and Lisa on the mountains of paperwork already being generated by Miles’s estate. Bali might have granted her a respite from the police and the media, but there were still trustees and tax attorneys and mortgage companies to be dealt with, not to mention the shareholders of Miles’s various companies. Luckily, Lisa had excellent secretarial skills. One of the few nuggets of information Matt had managed to glean about her pre-Miles life was that she’d once worked as a paralegal in a lawyers’ office in L.A.
But both Matt and Lisa soon began living for the afternoons, when they would take off and explore Mirage’s limitless delights together. Sometimes Lisa hired local guides to lead them into the thick jungle that bordered the villa’s grounds, a world bursting with exotic and sometimes dangerous life. As the guides pointed out potential dangers—a coral snake here, a green pit viper, or a two-striped telamonia spider there—and educated them about the breathtaking flora, Matt and Lisa listened entranced, like children released into a strange, tropical Narnia. Other times they went fishing in the lagoon, or swimming in one of the deep, volcanic rock pools hidden at the foot of the cliffs. Matt loved to watch Lisa swimming. She was a slight woman, but her slender body was strong and athletic and she fairly glided through the water with all the deft grace of a young otter. There was something else there too, when she swam. Joy. Delight. A lack of inhibition that he rarely saw in her at other times. One afternoon he asked her about it.
“I’ve always loved the water.” Standing on a rock, rubbing her damp hair with a towel, Lisa looked luminous. Her dewy skin glowed like a teenager’s and her eyes sparkled with light and life. “There’s a freedom to it. The silence. The weightlessness. No one can touch you there. No one can hurt you. It’s what I imagine death to be like.”
“Death? That’s a morbid thought, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” She laughed, wrapping the towel around her hips Turkish style. “Not to me. I’ve always seen death as an escape. It doesn’t frighten me.”
Matt had heard people say this before, and had always taken it with a grain of salt. How could anyone not be scared of dying? Surely it was humanity’s most basic instinct to want to survive. Clinging to life was like breathing, a fundamental fact of human nature, a flaw or a strength depending on how you looked at it, that all of us shared. But when Lisa expressed the thought, somehow it was different. He could see in her face that she meant it. There was a strange, fatalistic aura of peace right where the fear should be. He envied her.
“Lucky you,” he said, stuffing his own clothes into a rucksack to take back to the villa. “That must help a lot, I imagine. Coming to terms with Miles’s death.”
Since their first days together, when he’d bombarded her with questions about her marriage and her past and gotten precisely nowhere, Matt had stopped asking Lisa about the murder and her husband. By unspoken mutual consent, Miles Baring’s name was no longer mentioned between them. Hearing it now, Lisa looked stricken.
“Not really,” she said bleakly. “Come on, let’s get inside. I’m cold.”
Matt could have bitten his tongue off. He hated when this pall of sadness came over Lisa, and hated even more when he was the one who cast it. Back in the villa, they dried and dressed and took some hot, sweet tea out onto the veranda. Lisa had changed into cutoff jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Barefoot, with her still-damp hair slick against her face and her knees drawn up to her chest, she looked more like a teenager than a grown woman, never mind a woman who had lived through such tribulations. Matt realized with a jolt that at some point during his long, happy days at Mirage, he had begun to view his life in a new way, as before Lisa Baring and after Lisa Baring. It had happened almost without him realizing it, but he was in love with her.
Before Lisa, Matt had been lost. It wasn’t just Raquel’s decision to leave him, although that blow had certainly hit him hard. It was many things, things he hadn’t had time to process until now, here in the deep peace of the Balinese jungle. His failed career. His adopted dad’s death. Not being able to have children with Raquel. Never knowing Andrew Jakes, the man who had given him life but then abandoned him, apparently without a moment’s regret or remorse. Researching Jakes’s murder and becoming so obsessed with this documentary, Matt now realized, had been his way of detaching from the pain. But Lisa Baring had shown him a better way.
After Lisa, it was as if a weight he hadn’t even known he’d been carrying had been lifted off his shoulders. Matt felt hopeful, happy, alive. Whatever the future held, whatever the outcome of his work with Danny McGuire to track down this elusive killer, being with Lisa made Matt realize that there was a future for him, a future as bursting with possibility as the jungle all around them was throbbing with life. Increasingly, Matt found himself hoping that his future included the presence of Lisa.
There were problems, however. Nothing physical had yet happened between them. Sometimes Matt thought he could sense her staring at him as he sat at his computer or reading a book on the sofa. But whenever he looked up, her attention was elsewhere. Even so, an unspoken hum of mutual attraction seemed to linger in the air between them.
Last week, out fishing on Mirage’s private lake, Lisa had lost her footing on the bank and Matt instinctively slipped an arm around her waist. Lisa froze. But after a moment’s hesitation she did not object, gradually allowing herself to relax against Matt’s body. It felt wonderful. Matt longed to go further, but he knew better than to rush her.
I have to be patient. Let her come to me. She’s just lost her husband. She’s just been raped.
That was the other problem. Lisa never spoke about the night of Miles’s murder or her rape. As if by refusing to talk about it, she could make it go away. And much to his shame, Matt saw himself colluding in that silence. He wanted to forget the past as well. But this killer was not just a part of the past. He was out there, somewhere, watching and waiting, planning his next kill.
Matt had come to Bali looking for clues, clues that might help him unearth a serial killer, but he’d allowed his love for Lisa and his happiness in her company to distract him. Watching Lisa sip her tea now, he forced himself to remember:
The man I’m looking for raped and terrorized Lisa. If his past crimes are anything to go by, his next step will be to kidnap her. To have her “disappear” like Angela Jakes, Tracey Henley and Irina Anjou.
Lisa was in danger. And Matt still had no idea how, or where or when that danger might strike. The thought crossed his mind that his own prospects looked none too rosy either. This man, whoever he was, had a pretty gruesome track record of dispatching the men involved with his female victims. But it was Lisa’s safety that tortured him inside.
I can’t lose her. I can’t lose another person I love. If I do, I’ll lose my mind.
INSPECTOR LIU TURNED ON HIS TAPE recorder as Jim Harman began to speak.
An Englishman who had grown up in Hong Kong, the son of well-to-do expat parents, Jim ran his own security and electronics business on the island. He had personally overseen the installation of the alarm system at the Baring estate on Prospect Road.
“I’ll tell you this, mate,” he told Inspector Liu firmly. “There was nothing wrong with that alarm system.”
Tall and skinny, with a face like a weasel and small, widely spaced eyes, Jim Harman was prepared to defend his reputation vociferously.
“I installed it myself, with more fail-safes than the fucking White House, pardon my French.”
Liu asked calmly, “Then how do you explain the fact that Mr. Baring’s killer was able to get around it?”
“He didn’t ‘get around it,’” Jim Harman said matter-of-factly. “Someone let him in.”
“And why would they do that?”
Harman shrugged. “I’m a systems guy, not a detective, Inspector. You tell me. But the only explanation is that someone deliberately disabled the system and let the guy in.”
“And who knew how to do that?”
For the first time, the weasel-faced Englishman looked perplexed. “That’s the thing. No one. Mr. Baring and myself were the only ones who knew how to work that security system. It makes no sense.”
The interview over, Inspector Liu hopped on the DLR to Wan Chai, in the northern part of the island, in search of some lunch. The underground trains were clean and ran on time, a rarity in Hong Kong. Taking them calmed Liu and helped him to think.
“It makes no sense,” Harman had said. But it did make sense. Indeed, the possibilities were clear and satisfyingly finite: either Miles Baring had given his wife instructions on how to disable the security system, or Miles had disabled it himself, unwittingly opening the door to his killer.
Was it someone he knew?
Was it Lisa’s lover?
Was Lisa’s lover a friend of her husband’s?
Stranger things had happened.
Inspector Liu emerged from the subway blinking into the Wan Chai sunshine like a reluctant mole. His phone rang the very same instant.
“Liu speaking.”
“Sir.” It was one of his surveillance team, a small, elite group who’d been dispatched to Bali to keep an eye on the beautiful, headstrong Mrs. Baring. “We got some better shots of the villa today from the long-range cameras.”
“She still hasn’t left the property, then?”
“No, sir.”
Villa Mirage, the Barings’ Balinese retreat, was so secluded as to be almost completely inaccessible and extraordinarily difficult to photograph. Liu had tried to have the place bugged, but Mrs. Baring’s private security detail was excellent. None of his men had been able to get near her. He’d hoped he might have more success if, by a piece of luck, she should venture out of the place by car, but so far she had lived as a virtual recluse. It was as if her every action, or inaction, had been specifically designed to frustrate him.
“We do have some good news, though, sir. It appears there’s a man staying at the house with Mrs. Baring.”
Liu almost choked. “A man?”
“Yes, sir. A Westerner. They had breakfast together on the terrace this morning. They looked…”—the detective searched for the appropriate word—“intimate.”
Had Inspector Liu been a different kind of man, he would have punched the air with excitement. Lisa Baring’s lover! She’s smuggled him in! It was hard to believe that anyone could be so reckless. Surely she must know that the police would still be watching her? Inspector Liu had never been in love and he hoped he never would be. What fools passion made of people.
All they needed now was some physical evidence. If this man’s fingerprints or any trace of his DNA were found at the Baring house, they’d have enough evidence to arrest the two of them. Danny McGuire from Interpol had warned him that the killer was likely to stay close to Mrs. Baring. That as long as Liu held Lisa Baring, he held the bait.
The problem was that Inspector Liu no longer “held” Lisa Baring.
He had to get inside that villa.