Love & Freedom (37 page)

And he looked at Ru.

‘No!’ Honor, exhaled her outrage, jerking upright.

Ru looked startled and then affronted. ‘I didn’t give them to him! Fuck off.’

Shaking with rage, Martyn turned the laptop towards Ru, showing him the naked figures cavorting across the screen under crude headings. ‘You’re the only other person who’s had access to the passwords. Did you give my notebook to him? Did he pay you? Or is this some sick way of getting back at Honor, and you timed it to happen whilst you were here, so you could watch the fun?’

‘The book’s right there.’ Ru pointed to the slim black book, lying in its normal place on the footstool.

‘Martyn, I’m sure it wasn’t Ru,’ Honor began, hotly. ‘How could you think it was? Stef must have got in here and–’

‘Don’t talk such bollocks, my front door is next thing to Fort Knox. It’s too convenient that your new-found baby brother knew where to find my passwords and your ex-husband has used them to try and destroy both my careers in one swipe.’

Ru jumped up, looking much more child than adolescent. In a few quick strides he was at the front door and gone.

Honor stared at Martyn. ‘I’m so sorry. This is all because of me.’

All his attention was fixed on his computer. ‘No, it’s my fault. I know that married women always fuck everything up.’

‘I’ll go see him and make him change it all back.’

‘He won’t just be waiting there to be discovered–’ he began. But Honor snatched up her bag and followed Ru out of the door, clanging down the metal stairs, swinging around at the bottom and setting off at a dead run for the bungalow.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

She was too late. Of course. She hadn’t held out much hope; Stef was too neat in the execution of his pranks not to have left himself time to jump ship.

In the silent bungalow, Honor strode past the sitting room, strewn with magazines and empty beer cans, and the kitchen with its sink full of dirty dishes and a bulging bin of cartons. In the bedroom, the bed was unmade. On the pillow was a note.
See you in Hamilton Drives, babe.

It blurred before her eyes. Her instinct was to phone a cab and set off in pursuit.

But she knew she would be too late.

The damage was done. Damage to Martyn and his careers. Because of her. He had been right about her all along.

Stolidly, she rang American Airlines and was able to switch the round trip part of her ticket to a flight at eight thirty in the morning. The internet got her a room overnight close to London Heathrow and a further phone call got her a taxi to get her there, leaving in one hour.

Eyes boiling, she switched off the UK cell phone.

Then she straightened up the little bungalow, washing the dishes, throwing out the cans and cartons, packing the things she’d left when she had run to Martyn’s, and was standing in the drive when the taxi arrived.

In the cab, she closed her eyes, unable to bear to see the last of Marine Drive, the ocean or her route down to the Undercliff Walk. She’d hate to glimpse somebody she knew – Frog scowling, one of the Mayfair sisters looking curious, Peggy wistful at the departure of a lucrative customer.

Taking out her US phone, she checked with the driver that it was OK to plug it into the car cigarette lighter, then switched on. She checked her watch. At home, the working day would be ending. All at once, she longed to be back in the thickly wooded hills around Hamilton Drives, Connecticut, where families would be taking picnics out to the lake to cool down after the hot August day; clapboard houses, the white wooden church where she and Stef had had a pretty June wedding, field stone walls, familiar traffic systems where everybody drove on the right side of the road. She clicked on
Jessamine
in her phone book, waiting out the silences and clicks until the ring tone sounded in her ear.

‘Honor?’ Jessamine answered with that peculiar mix of delight, irritation and worry that family members reserve for other family members who don’t call often enough.

Honor coaxed her voice to emerge on the light side of neutral. ‘Hi, Jessie! Guess what? My flight gets into JFK at eleven-twenty tomorrow morning, local. I’ll get the airport shuttle to New Milton. It would be great if you could meet me.’

Jessamine didn’t hesitate. ‘What’s wrong?’

Honor forced a laugh, swaying with the car as it breasted a rise and swung hard left at the same time. ‘Why should anything be wrong?’ She felt slightly sick. Maybe it was the fish and chips that she’d eaten too enthusiastically. Or motion sickness.

Or she was just sick with sorrow. She forced her eyes wide open so she wouldn’t see visions on the insides of her lids, of Martyn, beyond angry as his careers disintegrated, Ru haunted and sad. And suddenly her in-breath turned to rags and the out-breath was a sob and once she started she couldn’t stop and she could hear her sister’s voice, across the miles, crooning in her ear, ‘Don’t cry, Honor! I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for whatever has made you so unhappy. Come home. You come home right away.’

And she cried harder than ever, because that’s exactly what she was going to do.

Martyn worked grimly through the tedious processes of hacking out the hacker.

If it had been just his own web presences compromised he would have gone straight after Honor. But with the agency and other agency clients involved
 
…

It took him about ten seconds to realise that both Twitter and Facebook were all-too-wearily-familiar with compromised accounts and that one only had to reset passwords and delete the crap to right the whole thing.

The endless posts were sexually imaginative, defamatory and eye-watering in turn – or sometimes all at once – but in an amazingly short time he had returned normality and sanity to the social networking pages, the agency’s and his own, and plastered apologies and explanations all over the place.

Ace rang again. ‘Martyn, DownJo are going out of the stratosphere! Twitter and Facebook are alive with stories about child labour being used in the manufacture of their products.’

‘Yes, I get it, Ace!’ Martyn almost shouted. ‘I’ve put up explanations – for God’s sake, get Tweeting those links. Tell DownJo to do the same. And leave me alone to fix the mess.’ As he worked, he was savagely aware that he had – again – hurt Honor, her white, shocked face swimming in front of his eyes. Drumming his fingers as he waited for emails full of security questions and long involved password replacements, he promised himself that the moment he’d gone through the excruciating ‘compromised security process’ with his web host and returned all of the sites to normal, he would abase himself with grovelling apologies.

His host company advertised on their site that they would respond to security problems within an hour and that certainly was when they began their co-operation.

But he couldn’t believe how long it all took. Ace rang every twenty minutes demanding progress reports, driving Martyn nearly demented. Then the host’s helpdesk rang him and that kept him tied to the machine, glancing at his watch, but at least reduced Ace to a ‘call waiting’ beep that he could ignore.

He tried to ring Honor but got only her voicemail.

He stabbed at keys and clicked on links, fielded phone calls, personally reassuring an irate executive officer from le Dur, dragged away from an evening out, agreeing to record an explanation to go on the le Dur website and on YouTube, swearing continuously under his breath, feeling as if his head was going to explode with information frustration overload, fingers fumbling. Waited for new emails with fresh instructions. Rang Honor again, heart thundering. Where the hell was she?

Finally, finally, his hosts used their back-up files to restore all sites to the previously unsullied glory and he sagged in relief. He already had the laptop half-thrown down, ready to race off to the bungalow to begin his search for her when realisation hit him that if Stef had all his passwords for websites and social networking, it followed that he would have the password for Martyn’s email account, too, and would be able to gain possession of
all the new passwords mailed over the past few hours
and repeat the whole appalling process. He snatched the machine out of mid-air and raced through the re-resetting of all his passwords – beginning with his email – and then clicked furiously through each site.

He groaned with relief. No further meltdown.

Then, to his fury, he saw an email drop into his inbox from
Stefan Sontag
. The subject line was:
Nothing’s foolproof
.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. His brain screamed
virus!
at him. But he couldn’t make himself delete the email unread. Slowly, he clicked on it.

In case you’re wondering, pretty boy, I climbed up to your French doors in the roof. You ought to keep them locked. Your security’s hardly foolproof – not for this talented fool.
Then followed images of the relevant pages of his password book, including one of Stef holding the book and beaming to demonstrate how the pages had simply been held up in front of the laptop’s own webcam. Easy enough, then, for Stef to email them to himself.

Tomorrow – he looked at his watch:
today
– he would take his machine into his computer whizz in Brighton and get it checked out for viruses. But he was at the limits of his patience, endurance and talent and until then the machine could stay off.

He texted Ace to tell him all the dials should now be set to zero, texted Ru:
Really sorry, I know it wasn’t you, I just lost my temper.
Then rang Honor and, again, got her voicemail.

Ru replied:
Yeh OK cd c u were freaked.
Martyn squinted at his watch. Past four in the morning? He checked with the clocks in the kitchen, incredulous when they said the same. And felt worse than ever that his text had probably woken Ru up.

But the time didn’t stop him pulling on his shoes and setting off for the bungalow, knowing that he’d hardly be welcome when he got there. But he
must get to Honor.
He knew Stef wouldn’t still be at the bungalow. If Honor had found him, she would have phoned Martyn. So she was hiding out from him. And he couldn’t blame her. And he hated himself for making her feel like that.

Breathing much faster than the exertion demanded, he made the distance in two minutes, scarcely noticing the palest blue-and-apricot dawn and the steely sea. His feet slowed as he reached the drive. There were no lights on in the bungalow and, unlike the houses either side, no closed curtains. Taking the stairs in three giant strides, he pressed on the bell and pounded on the door.

Nothing stirred.

He tried Honor’s phone again.
It has not been possible to connect your call
 
…

Cursing, he cut the connection, pressing so hard that the screen bowed. He rang Clarissa. She sounded alarmed. ‘Martyn? What’s the matter?’

‘I need the key to the bungalow.’

‘Now? It’s the middle of the night, Martyn, has Honor locked herself out? What about
 
…?’ She trailed away.

‘Exactly,’ he agreed. ‘What about her husband, who got into the bungalow without her permission? What about if Honor’s locked in there with him and he won’t let her answer the door?’

‘I’ll come right down.’

‘Good. Because in ten minutes, I start smashing windows.’ Martyn paced the patio and glared at the hawthorn bushes that filled the space between the bungalow and its neighbours, almost impossible to penetrate, squeeze past or climb over. As a key was about to arrive, he decided against trying to scale fences in and out of neighbouring gardens or doing anything else to wake the neighbours. The last thing he needed right now was a patrol car wailing up with its lights flashing.

Bad enough that the key arrived clutched in the hand of Clarissa, who had woken up enough to want to cling on to it whilst she hissed an interrogation into the early morning hush. Martyn listened for five seconds, decided that that was about four too long, and snitched the key out of her fingers. ‘You stay here,’ he instructed, jamming the key into the lock. But, of course, she followed him in.

It didn’t take him long to race through the few rooms, seeing them neat, clean
 
… and empty. In the bedroom, he threw open the wardrobe and the drawers. Empty. Empty. Empty.

Fighting the urge to roar with rage, he picked up a note from the floor.
See you in Hamilton Drives, babe.

Bastard.

Underneath Stef’s words, Honor had written,
It’s time for me to go home. xxx

She’d known that he’d come looking – the message was undoubtedly for him.

It seemed as if the world had hit the pause button.

Clarissa came up quietly and, without a word, he showed her the note, hot with shame.

She made a small, inarticulate noise of pain. ‘Martyn, what I did was wrong–’

He shook his head. He’d done enough blame shifting. He did something he should do more often and put his arm around Clarissa. ‘It’s my fault that she’s gone.’

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Honor felt as if she hadn’t slept for days. In fact, she calculated fuzzily, battling a luggage cart that wanted to travel in circles, it was only about a day-and-a-half. It just felt like more. After lying awake all night at the hotel, she hadn’t been able to sleep on the flight, staring at movies without taking them in and picking at the airline food, tension banging inside her head.