BY THE time Harry woke, it was midafternoon, and Bob Quayle wasn’t at home or answering his mobile. Restless and ill at ease because what he wanted to do was visit Steph—something he also didn’t want to do until he’d spoken to Bob—he walked down to the beach, then back through the tourist shops to the apartment block.
As he reached the doors of the clinic, he realised that another answer to his dilemma would be to get Bob’s job done as quickly as possible then get out of the place. Once he was no longer connected with the clinic he’d lose the feeling that he was spying on Steph and could start again with her.
At least as a friend, though the nagging ache in his body whenever he thought of her kept reminding him he wanted more.
He walked in to the clinic, introducing himself to staff he hadn’t seen before, then made for the administration office, where he pulled out the files he needed—staff rosters, staff wages, patient and procedure numbers, and the figures submitted to the government for Medicare payments. He wasn’t an accountant, but he’d looked into the finances and staffing of a lot of practices, both general and specialist, in order to learn about setting up his own. The basic accounting tactic was to look at incomings and outgoings and see how they balanced.
And the books were all here.
There was a second desk in the room, which he knew belonged to a part-time practice manager, but twenty-four-hour clinics he’d known in the past had had full-time managers. Maybe that was part of the problem. The manager—whom he had yet to meet—was overworked.
Looking at the staff-patient ratio, the place certainly wasn’t overstaffed so that didn’t explain any shortfall in the income. And if the problem wasn’t in the income, it had to be in outgoings.
He tracked through the ledgers available to him, and finally found the answer. About twelve months earlier there’d been a big hike in the rent. The books didn’t tell him why, just that the rent had almost doubled. Going back, it appeared it had been some years since there’d been a rent rise, so maybe the previous owners had negotiated a long-term contract which had finally expired, allowing the building owner—Bob Quayle under a company name—to charge more for the space.
It was more per square metre than specialists like himself would be paying for their suites at the hospital, but he had no idea of the cost of space in the tourist centre of Summerland, so Harry couldn’t tell if the rise was fair or not. But it had happened and had certainly contributed to the decreased profitability of the clinic.
Though if the place stopped bulk-billing the government for patients on Medicare and instead charged patients a normal fee, it would not only make more money but it would pay less interest on its overdraft facility which was currently needed to meet the rent when government funds from bulk-billing hadn’t come through. By charging normal fees, it would soon find itself back in the black, and from all Harry had seen, this clinic—or a clinic—was needed in the area.
He stretched his cramped, tired limbs, then, mainly because he felt so uncomfortable, checked his watch. It was after midnight and, as far as he could remember, he’d had nothing to eat since the breakfast special.
But far more disturbing than missing a couple of meals was the fact that any number of Bob Quayle’s minions, by going through the books as he had, could have seen the problem with the clinic’s cash flow. Was he so tight-fisted he wouldn’t pay someone to do that? So mean he’d asked Harry to do it as a favour?
Harry wouldn’t have minded accepting this explanation, but a feeling of unease told him that was too easy an answer. He said goodbye to the night staff now on duty and went up to the apartment, determined to phone Bob Quayle first thing in the morning.
Bob, sounding excessively pleased to hear from him, invited him to lunch, thus spoiling Harry’s plan to visit Steph and Fanny. But the sooner he got his business with Bob over and done with, the sooner he could approach Steph with a clear conscience and no secrets.
Oh, yeah!
The first thing Bob told him, after welcoming him back to the house where he’d holidayed so often, was that Steph and Fanny were expected that afternoon.
‘It’s our access visit,’ the older man said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice. ‘Ordered by the courts and supervised by Stephanie herself, would you believe?’
Harry felt his intestines crunch together, as if reacting to a blow they’d been expecting, but though some of his suspicions were being confirmed, he still didn’t know why this apparent animosity existed.
‘I’ve already seen Steph. She’s working at the clinic. You must have known that.’
If Harry had expected Bob to look embarrassed, he was disappointed, though, considering it, Bob had probably lost the ability to be embarrassed very early on—one didn’t build an empire the size of his without treading on toes along the way.
‘Yes, I’d heard she was,’ Bob said, as if the matter was one of supreme indifference to him. ‘With some teenager left to mind Fanny. The girl could be on drugs, or having unsuitable young men over at the house. It’s a most unsatisfactory arrangement.’
Harry said nothing, though the urge to defend Tracy—who’d seemed on brief acquaintance to be an exceptional young woman—was strong. Instead, he asked after Doreen and was eventually led out to the poolside patio, where Doreen lay on a lounger, tanning her fashionably thin body.
Harry greeted her fondly, remembering how kind she’d been to him when he’d been a student and far from his own family. They talked easily, about the old days, and Martin, and the fun they’d had, but as they ate a delicious lunch, served out near the pool by a middle-aged woman who was obviously a housekeeper, Harry’s unease began to escalate.
His mind listed his problems quite succinctly.
First on the list—Steph and Fanny were coming.
Second—there was obviously some ill feeling between Steph and the Quayles.
And whose side would he appear to be on, when Steph arrived to find him drinking fine wine and eating a sumptuous dessert with people she might well regard as the enemy?
‘I really should go,’ he said, pushing the rest of the dessert away and setting down his glass of wine. ‘Didn’t get much sleep last night.’
‘No, please, stay.’
Doreen rested her beringed hand on his arm, while Bob, murmuring something about phone calls, excused himself and vanished into the house.
‘Please, Harry. It’s been so difficult for us, so very hard, to lose our beloved Martin first, then to be separated from our only grandchild. I don’t know what Bob has told you, but we did hope, he and I, that you might be able to talk to Stephanie for us.’
Did that explain Bob asking him to look into the clinic?
Maybe.
But talk to Steph on their behalf?
Yeah, right! Any minute now she’s going to get here, fire killer looks in my direction the very moment she sets eyes on me, and never speak to me again.
How the hell did he get into this situation?
More to the point, how the hell could he get out of it?
Doreen was still speaking, and he tried to follow the conversation, but he suspected either his brain had stopped working or she’d overdone the wine, because not much was making sense.
‘Natural she’d be upset over Martin’s death, but she could hardly blame us for that. But bitter! And unjust. Unnecessarily so. We’d suffered just as great a loss as she had, worse, in fact, for the loss of a child must surely be the worst pain in the world.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Harry said, wondering if this conversation was leading anywhere, and how he could terminate it.
‘She blames him, as if it was his fault he was killed,’ Doreen continued. ‘Now she won’t even speak his name if she can avoid it, but it wasn’t his fault he was killed. If anything, it was hers, having the baby a fortnight early.’
Harry stared at the older woman, wondering if she could really believe what she was saying. And had she told Steph it was her fault? Or made this opinion clear to her?
No wonder there was animosity between the two parties!
‘Here’s our little doll—our darling.’
Bob’s voice, presumably announcing Fanny’s arrival, cut off any hope of escape for Harry and, just as he’d expected, the fury in Steph’s eyes as she took in the conviviality of the lunch table cut through him like a sabre thrust.
Fanny, however, was delighted to see him, though she had enough sense to greet her grandmother with a polite kiss, before flinging herself with great delight at Harry.
‘Are you going to have a swim with me and Grandad?’ she asked. ‘Mum thought it would be too cold, but I knew Grandad would want a swim, so I brought my bathers.’
Fanny ran back to her mother, who stood like a pillar of stone on the edge of the patio.
‘I really must be going,’ Harry said, though he knew the damage had already been done as far as Steph was concerned.
Bob looked from him to his daughter-in-law, then back to Harry, but his face revealed nothing.
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ Bob said. ‘And now the rain seems to be finished, you might want to pop in at the hospital and talk to the decorators about the soft furnishings—curtains and such—you want in your suite of rooms.’
Harry felt, rather than saw, Steph’s reaction—the air between them solid with distrust—and when he turned to say goodbye, the look she sent him, through slitted eyes, could only be described as venomous.
Steph nodded politely in response to Harry’s goodbye, but regret ached within her when she saw Fanny’s reaction to his departure. Harry was promising he’d see her again soon, but Steph knew it was impossible, and her little daughter was going to lose her Uncle Harry before she’d properly had a chance to get to know him.
But once again she’d been lured into trusting Harry—or almost trusting Harry—only to find him ensconced in the enemy camp.
She moved across the patio, settling into a chair not far from Doreen, a chair, she now realised, which was still warm from Harry’s body. Fanny delved into the big bag, producing her bathers, and, knowing the routine, dashed into the little shower pavilion on the far side of the pool to get changed.
Bob was also ready for his swim by the time he returned from seeing Harry out, and Steph watched as the big man and the little girl swam and frolicked in the pool.
‘She could swim every day if you lived here,’ Doreen pointed out, repeating the words she said every Sunday afternoon.
‘Yes,’ Steph said, because agreeing usually stopped the conversation.
‘Now your mother’s remarried she doesn’t need you,’ Doreen added. As this was a new tack, Steph hesitated before replying, but she could see no hidden traps beneath the statement. ‘She’s travelling overseas for two years, isn’t she?’
‘She didn’t ever need me as much as I needed her,’ Steph said, ignoring the remark about her mother’s travel. ‘Especially when Fanny was a baby.’
‘You could have lived here. You should have lived here! This should be Fanny’s home.’
Doreen’s voice became shrill and Steph sighed.
‘Let’s not get into this conversation again,’ she pleaded, wondering for the umpteenth time why she hadn’t ever come right out and told the Quayles exactly why she’d refused to live with them.
But it would have destroyed their image of Martin and tarnished his memory in their eyes, and they’d done nothing to deserve that.
Nothing more than loving him too much—and giving him too much.
‘She could be such a wonderful swimmer,’ Doreen said, and Steph closed her eyes and prayed for patience as the same conversation began all over again.
By Monday evening when Steph left for work, she was tired, uptight and very apprehensive.
‘If Harry Pritchard turns up,’ she told Rebecca, ‘I do not, under any circumstances, want to see him.’
Rebecca looked so startled Steph replayed the words in her head, then realised it must have been her tone as much as the content which had taken Rebecca aback.
‘OK,’ Rebecca agreed, but the warning proved unnecessary as Harry didn’t appear.
Steph didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. She told herself she didn’t want to see him—ever again—but she would have liked the opportunity to vent a little spleen by telling him exactly what she thought of him.
Within the clinic, rumours abounded. The clinic had been sold again—it was closing—no more bulk-billing. So many stories, but nothing changed until the following Friday when, along with a slip detailing what pay had been transferred to her bank account, was a dismissal notice. Alerted by the disgruntled day staff, the night shift had gathered in the tearoom, where they’d all fingered the little envelopes before opening them.
According to the notice, the clinic was no longer a viable concern and the owners had been forced to cease operations.
As from this Sunday! She was to work out the night, and weekend staff would operate, but the Sunday night shift would be the last. The clinic would not be open Monday.
Steph stared at the words, sure there must be some mistake, but loud wailing from Rebecca suggested she’d received the same information.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ Colin, the second doctor on night shift that night, said, staring at his own piece of paper. ‘You can’t just shut the doors of a place like this. Look at the patients we see, the people who need attention immediately. Where are they supposed to go? Another ten kilometres to the public hospital where they might wait six hours before being treated?’
‘You’re a far nicer person than I am,’ Steph told him. ‘I’ve been wondering where I’ll get another job, not where the patients will have to go.’
‘I guess I’ll go back to the agency,’ Colin said. ‘They can usually get me night work in A and E at the General.’
He smiled encouragingly at Steph.
‘They’d probably take you on as well,’ he said, but she shook her head.
‘The shifts are all wrong,’ she told him. ‘I’d either be starting late afternoon, when I’d prefer to be with Fanny, or finishing late in the morning, so I couldn’t be home for her when she wakes up. That’s why this job was ideal.’
‘It’s that bloke that did it!’ Rebecca muttered, turning to Steph. ‘Your friend Harry.’
‘No!’
The protest was automatic, but a swirling nausea in her stomach belied her denial. Harry had been here to look at how the clinic was working—but why was it any of his business? Who had asked him to do this?
Who were the new owners?
With her stomach churning even harder, she remembered walking into the Quayles’ mansion on Sunday and seeing Harry sitting there.
Had the Quayles’ vendetta against her reached the stage where Bob would buy the clinic and close it down in order to put her out of a job?
And so force her to take up their offer to house and keep both her and Fanny?
She worked through the night, and by morning knew exactly where to lay the blame for her current unemployment situation. Bob had said something about Harry taking up a suite of rooms in his new hospital. Maybe the hospital would have a phone number for him.
But as she said a tearful farewell to Rebecca, promising to keep in touch, a chance remark saved her the phone call.
‘We should go straight upstairs and tell that Harry Pritchard what we think of him,’ Rebecca said.
‘Upstairs?’ Steph echoed. ‘Upstairs in this building? Harry’s staying in this building?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ Rebecca said. ‘No, I guess you wouldn’t, but that first night he came in, when he was jet-lagged, he said he’d come down and I asked him where he was staying. Unit seventy-four on the twelfth floor—heaven knows why I remember it!’
It all began to make sense. Bob had built Dolphin Towers and, according to Martin, his father had always kept a couple of apartments in the buildings he built. Bob had bribed Harry to spy on her workplace with the offer of free accommodation.
‘You go on home,’ she said to Rebecca. ‘Leave me to deal with Harry Pritchard!’
Shaking with fury, she made her way into the foyer where lifts served the residential tower. She jabbed her finger on the ‘up’ button, and wasn’t the least bit mollified when the doors swept open immediately. She stabbed at the button marked twelve, and as the metal cube slid silently upward she told herself to calm down—to think through this confrontation.
But a red mist of anger prevented any sensible thinking, and she strode out of the lift on the twelfth floor, looked around and spied number seventy-four. It would be the one with the views to the beach and out across the wide Pacific Ocean! Bob would keep the best for himself.
Another button to press but, rather than jab at this one, she put her forefinger on it and held it there.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ She could hear Harry’s exasperation through the door, but didn’t move her finger so the chiming bell sound continued to jangle within the apartment.
Finally, he wrenched open the door, and Steph’s fury froze momentarily, her heart kicking up a notch or two of pace as she came face to face with Harry’s broad, bare chest. Her gaze slid lower. Fortunately, from the waist down, he was clad in an ultra-conservative, blue striped pair of pyjama bottoms.
His surprise—or mock surprise—reminded her of her mission, and she jabbed her finger out again, this time into the middle of the bare chest. She’d teach it to give her palpitations.
‘You slime-ball, Harry Pritchard! You cheat! You traitor! I can’t believe you’ve done this to me again. To think I let you see my daughter—that I told her only nice things about you so she thinks you’re wonderful, and then you come back to Australia and muck up my life once more.’
Harry had stepped back, possibly because of the jabbing, but he wasn’t getting away that easily. Steph followed him and continued to emphasise her points with forefinger on the slight indentation of his sternum.
‘Well, let me tell you, it won’t happen. The Quayles won’t win, and do you know why? Because you’re going to make up for this. You’re going to find me another job—right now—and if it means I have to come to work for you in your swanky new suite of rooms in Bob Quayle’s hospital, then so be it. But even if I’m only vacuuming the carpet, I work the hours I want and you pay me as a doctor. OK?’
She was surprised to hear this declaration, as she certainly hadn’t thought it through to that extent, but if she was surprised, Harry was far beyond that emotion. Beyond stunned as well, she guessed.
Which made it a good time to press the advantage.
‘Agreed?’ she demanded, then, worried she might be late home for Fanny, she glanced at her watch.
Could it only have been five minutes since she’d left the clinic?
‘Let’s have a cup of coffee and talk like real people, not actors in a daytime soap,’ Harry suggested. ‘The kitchen’s this way.’
He walked away and she had the choice of following—which was the only way she could push through to his agreement to her demands—or not following, which would get her precisely nowhere.
But she didn’t like the fact he was now the one giving orders any more than she liked having to obey.
She went as far as the bench dividing the dining room from the kitchen and stopped there, looking out through uncurtained windows to the still dark expanse of ocean and the brightness of the eastern sky where the sun would soon rise.
Harry ignored her, keeping his back—broad but tapering down to where the pyjamas hung on his hips—to her as he delved into cupboards, producing mugs and instant coffee, filling the electric kettle and turning it on. Then the coffee was made, and he pushed a mug towards her.
‘Still black with sugar?’ he said, placing a teaspoon and sugar bowl beside the mug.
She didn’t bother answering, merely waiting until he brought his own cup across to the bench and settled on a stool opposite her.
‘Now, start at the beginning,’ he suggested, looking sternly at her. ‘Not the slime-ball part but before that. What’s happened that you need a job?’
‘The clinic’s closed as from Sunday.’ She shot the words at him, adding, ‘As if you didn’t know,’ with reheated rage.
He didn’t take advantage of her short pause, so she leapt back into the attack.
‘Just what did you tell Bob Quayle? I presume it was Bob who’d bought the place. Bob, the new owner, identity kept secret, who wanted you to do his dirty work. Only he—’
‘Steph.’ Harry’s quiet voice interrupted her tirade, but he reached out to take her hand at the same time, and it was more the touch of his fingers on hers that made her pause.
She snatched her hand away, but not soon enough apparently, because the sense of warmth his fingers generated lingered on her skin.
‘Tell me what’s happened. Why you’re so paranoid about the Quayles. Why you feel only Bob would shut down the clinic. Why you think he’d deliberately put you out of work.’
Harry’s voice was gentle but, as ever with Harry, there was steel beneath the velvet.
She met his steel with a sword thrust of her own.
‘Are you saying Bob isn’t the new owner? That you weren’t working for him?’
‘No, I’m not saying that at all,’ Harry told her. ‘Bob did buy the clinic, and he did ask me to look at it—’
‘And you told him it should be shut down.’
‘I didn’t tell him it should be shut down. In fact, I told him the opposite—that the clinic could be a lucrative investment if it stopped bulk-billing.’
‘Well, according to the dismissal slips we all received in our pay packets, an independent advisor had pointed out the clinic was no longer viable and monetary considerations were, regretfully, forcing the owners to cease operations. You’re saying you’re not that independent advisor?’
‘I’m saying I didn’t tell him to close down,’ Harry repeated, hoping he sounded more in control than he felt.
For a start, Steph had never been irrational, yet there had been something definitely irrational—close to paranoid—about her vilification of Bob Quayle’s behaviour.
But he couldn’t let Steph’s paranoia get to him. True, there were strange currents flowing here, and apparently the clinic had been shut down against his recommendations, but for Steph to be imagining a vendetta against her…
‘What’s happened between you and the Quayles?’ he asked again, and saw her reaction in a sudden stiffening of her body, followed by tremors obvious from his side of the bench.
‘Steph!’
He had to go to her, to hold her, but she twisted out of his grasp and walked away, ignoring the coffee, making for the wall of glass on the far side of the living room, where she stood, head bowed and shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped protectively against her body—silhouetted against the magic colours of the rising sun yet oblivious to its beauty.
She stood so still she could have been a statue, long limbs and classic profile carved from the finest marble. The artist would have called it ‘Pain’ or perhaps ‘Despair’.
Harry followed, but didn’t venture too near and though his arms longed to draw her close, and his heart wanted desperately to comfort her, he knew she’d retreated so far from him he might never get close again.
A matching despair settled like a yoke around his shoulders, but he had to ignore it for the moment.
‘Tell me what’s happened?’
That won a huff of mocking laughter.
‘Where do I start?’ she said. ‘And why should I, when you obviously won’t believe a word I say, even though you’ve now seen Bob in action? The basic facts are that Bob Quayle doesn’t like to lose. What he wants, what he’s always wanted, is for Fanny and me to live with him and Doreen, and he’ll go to any lengths, including rendering me unemployed, to do it.’
She turned now, straightening her shoulders and looking directly into his eyes, although, with the strengthening sunlight behind her, her face was shadowed.
‘He’d actually prefer Fanny without me—they both would—and that’s always the second string to his bow. The moment he gets even a whiff of something that might prove I’m an unfit mother, he’ll have a custody case in court so quickly we’ll all skid along the pavement.’
She paused but only to take in air for the next attack.
‘Do you know, he had the hide to have Tracy investigated? My little cousin, just down from the country, followed about by a couple of thugs Bob had hired to check her out? They were too stupid to keep out of sight, and she was terrified, thinking she was being stalked, but when we called the police and Bob explained, it was all laughed off as a big joke.’
‘Steph, I hear what you’re saying, but is it all so bad? If you look at it from Bob’s point of view, would living with them in luxury be so awful? And was it wrong of him to want to know who’s caring for his grandchild when you’re not there?’
‘He could have asked me about Tracy,’ Steph snapped, answering the last question first. ‘As for living with them, can you really ask me that, Harry? Can you consider, coolly and rationally, the kind of person Martin was at his core, and deny it was his upbringing that made him that way?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘We both loved Martin, Harry. He was clever, and fun to be with, and kind and generous, but underneath that Martin was the other Martin, the one who’d grown up with every wish granted, with the money to buy whatever he needed, and the notion that just wanting something was enough to justify having it. Or taking it! The psychologists even have a name for it—entitlement. A person truly believes he or she is entitled to have whatever they want.’
She half turned, so her face was now in profile against the colours of the morning sky, and Harry felt an inner wince again when he read the sadness in her stance.
‘Did it never occur to you,’ she said softly, ‘that it wasn’t until you started showing an interest in me—seeing me as a woman instead of a friend—that Martin made his move? He swept me off my feet with all the considerable charm and wealth, and, now I see it, expertise at his disposal. And I went along—fell in love with love, the way he offered it—and believed every lie he told me.’
Her shoulders squirmed, as if shedding the skin of the past, and she looked directly at Harry.
‘I will not have my daughter grow up like Martin!’ she said, challenge in every syllable of every word.
Then she walked towards the door, turning as she opened it.
‘I’ll be in touch about the job,’ she told him, then disappeared from sight.
He was too stunned to follow—too blown away by all she’d said, particularly her reading of Martin’s sudden pursuit of her.
But even if she was right, he decided much later, it didn’t mean she was also right about the Quayles. He could see they’d want the best for their granddaughter, so, to a certain extent, he could even understand them wanting people who minded Fanny checked out. But to deliberately take away Steph’s job?
She was getting into the realms of fantasy.
Wasn’t she?
The questions spun around and around in his head until, by late afternoon, he knew he had to see her—to find out if her fears had any basis in fact.
Apart from Bob closing the clinic, of course.
But he’d have had his reasons for that…
Fanny was playing in the front yard when he pulled up outside, and she greeted him with such delight he swung the little girl into his arms and tossed her into the air.
‘That could send her brain bumping against her skull.’
Steph stood at the top of the steps that led up to the veranda, her arms folded, not defensively in the way that said she was defending herself, more defending her home—her family.
‘I won’t do it again,’ Harry promised, settling Fanny on his shoulders. ‘Ouch, not too tight!’ he added, as the small hands gripped his hair.
‘Oh, poor Uncle Harry!’
The child was instantly contrite, smoothing her fingers down his face.
‘Can we talk?’ Harry asked, as Fanny called to Tracy to come and see how high she was.
‘Only if it’s about a job.’ Steph was obdurate.
Harry felt the frown gathering on his forehead. He was frowning inside as well.
‘That’s another thing,’ he growled. ‘The job situation. Not about getting you a job—I’ll do what I can to help—but it’s ridiculous for you to even consider doing a job you’re overtrained for.’
‘People do it all the time,’ Steph told him, leaning one shoulder against the wall but not uncrossing her arms.
‘I know, I know.’ He waved aside the objection—and that subject. ‘It’s the other job I’m talking about. Your GP work. You were always going to specialise—do surgery. You’d even been offered a place on the surgical programme. What happened?’
He could feel her disbelief radiating in waves towards him.
‘What happened to being a surgical registrar and working twelve or fourteen hours a day with a new baby? Can’t you guess?’
He could, of course, but Fanny was nearly five now.
‘But later—you’d already deferred. The Prof would have let you defer again.’
He wanted to add, ‘And if you’d been living with the Quayles, it would have been easy,’ but discretion was definitely the better part of valour at the moment.
Tracy had appeared, and he lifted Fanny off his shoulders, kissed her cheek, then watched her chase her friend across the yard.
When Steph didn’t reply, he turned towards her and saw she, too, was watching Fanny. But the look on her face held little joy—in fact, it was heart-wrenchingly sad.