The Eden Inheritance (57 page)

‘Oh Lilli, Lilli, you are so young and beautiful. What a terrible waste it would be if anything should happen to you!'

Then he was gone, calling a goodbye to Ingrid in a sick parody of a friendly social visit.

As the door closed after him Lilli looked at her father. He had slumped in his chair again and the beaten look of him, which had been inflicted not only by the disease that was ravaging him but also by the humiliation of his fierce pride, tore at her heart. She could kill Jorge for doing this to him! But however painful, there were questions that had to be answered.

‘What did Jorge mean, Daddy?' she asked.

Otto raised a now-frail hand, plucking at his lips with fingers grown skeletal and nails neatly manicured but a fraction too long.

‘He was warning you to be careful in what you say to this pilot fellow – and probably asking you, in a roundabout way, to report back to him with any suspicions of your own.'

‘No,' Lilli said, ‘I'm not talking about that. What did he mean about Mama? You told me that she killed herself because of Jorge. That was bad enough, for goodness' sake, but since I've been back there have been several mentions of Mama's death and the implication that I don't know the whole truth about it. Don't you think it's time I did?'

Otto sighed deeply.

‘I hoped you would never need to know the whole truth. I didn't know it myself until quite recently – since I became ill, in fact, and Jorge came back from Miami to take over again. It's a terrible thing, Lilli, and I wanted to keep it from you if I could, but I think you are right. The time for secrecy is over. Your mother didn't kill herself. She was murdered.'

Lilli froze. A band of steel seemed to be tightening around her chest, making breathing difficult.

‘But you said she shot herself!'

‘She was shot, yes, but it wasn't suicide as we thought. She died because she had become a threat to Jorge.'

‘You mean – Jorge killed her?'

‘Not personally. That isn't Jorge's way. But he put a contract on her – lured someone to do the job for him. As you know, he and your mother were having an affair, but he was beginning to tire of her. She was no longer as young and beautiful as she had been and Jorge only likes women who are young and beautiful. Then she became pregnant and tried to press him into going away with her. He refused – told her to get rid of the baby. He wanted no more to do with her. She became desperate and tried to blackmail him into doing what she wanted, threatened to expose the cartel to the authorities. In doing so she signed her own death warrant.'

‘Oh my God!' Lilli whispered.

‘He couldn't risk her doing what she was threatening, you see. He made sure he was safely out of the way in Miami and the man he had paid to do the job came to the island, shot your mother and arranged things so that it looked like suicide. Then he slipped away again, back to whatever cesspool he had come from.' He paused, his eyes brilliant in his wasted face. ‘Now do you understand, my darling, why I am so afraid for you? You have the same fire, the same disregard for danger, that she had. I don't want you to die as she died.'

Lilli shook her head fromside to side. ‘ No-no! I can't believe it! It isn't true!'

‘You must believe it. Please,
liebling
, you must. You heard what Jorge said – he was threatening you too. He's a dangerous man, Lilli – I've always known that but until a few months ago I didn't realise just how dangerous. Perhaps he is a little crazy too. I don't know. But I do know that he will stop at nothing to protect his empire here. Stand in his way and he will crush you are surely as he crushed my lovely Magdalene.'

Lilli wrapped her arms around herself, rocking in an agony of revulsion. The realisation that she had made love with her own mother's murderer was so horrendous she did not know how to bear it.

‘Lilli … please …' Otto murmured in distress. ‘Don't take it like this,
liebchen
. It all happened a long, time ago.'

‘No, no … it didn't,' Lilli sobbed. ‘I loved him, Daddy. I loved him and all the time he …' She broke off, burying her face in her hands for long minutes. When she raised it again her cheeks were wet with tears. ‘Why did you have to get mixed up with him, Daddy? Didn't you realise how evil he was?'

‘I told you, Lilli, I didn't know he had had your mother killed'.

‘But you knew she had died because of him. And you knew about the drugs. Why did you stay here? Why didn't you go home?'

‘I couldn't do that.'

‘Why not? The war was long over.'

‘I couldn't. Let's just leave it at that. And in any case, I had you to think of. I wanted you to have everything, my darling – a comfortable home, a good education, money to buy pretty clothes … you were – you are! – the most important thing in the world to me.'

‘Oh Daddy! Can't you see that if I'd known what was paying for all those things I wouldn't have wanted them? And if I'd known about Jorge …'

The sickness rose again in her throat. Otto stretched out a hand to her but she could not take it. In that moment it seemed to her that he, too, was tainted. She saw the pain in his eyes yet still drew away, into herself, not wanting to hurt him, yet unable, for the moment, to understand or forgive.

‘I have to be alone for a little while, Daddy.'

‘Lilli, please …'

‘You should be somewhere more comfortable. I'll get Basil.' Her voice, curiously controlled, sounded to her own ears to be coming from a long way off.

Ignoring the plea in his haunted blue eyes she left the room.

For what seemed like hours Lilli stood at her window, looking out over the sun-soaked gardens which seemed to her to be edged with the blackness which filled her.

If only she could get away, leave the island now, this minute, and fly back to New York! She might have felt in exile there, but at least life had some sort of normality and reason, at least she could bury herself in her work and begin to rebuild her life. In New York everything that surrounded her had been gained through her own efforts and she was a person in her own right, not the daughter and granddaughter of drug-traffickers, whose mother had been murdered by her lover. But even as the thought crossed her mind she knew she could not leave just yet. In spite of everything Otto was still her father and she still loved him. Whilst she could not even begin to condone what he had done, nothing could alter that fact. And she believed him when he said he had cared for nothing but her. The bond between them was too strong to be denied. She couldn't leave him now, when the end was so close.

Lilli shivered. Somehow she must find the strength to go back downstairs and tell him that she understood. It wasn't true – she did not understand, and she knew it would be a long while, if ever, before she did. But time was a luxury that was not on her side. If she delayed it might be too late. Her father might the thinking she despised him and if that happened Lilli knew she would never forgive herself.

A light aircraft droned overhead. Lilli saw it, a silver speck in the blue, catching the sunlight, and suddenly she was thinking not of her father but of Guy and remembering the things Jorge had said about him.

In all that had followed, Jorge's denouncement of Guy as an agent of the Drugs Enforcement Agency had been driven from her mind. Now, suddenly, it was there once more and with a sick heart Lilli realised that she believed what Jorge had said. The evidence was all too damning – and not only that evidence which Jorge had outlined. Lilli found herself remembering all too clearly Guy's questions to her – about her father and her mother, about the island itself – and the tiny sharp edge that had been there in his eyes when he had asked them.

Yes, dammit, she believed Jorge – she didn't want to, but she did – and the realisation was yet another betrayal. She had liked Guy so much and she had trusted him. He had seemed to her to be a rock to which she could cling in the shifting sands of her world. But it had been an illusion. What she had seen as strength had been steely determination to do a job, his seeming concern for her and the pretence that he found her attractive had been nothing but a means to an end. Guy had used her and she, fool that she was, had fallen for it.

How dare he! she thought, anger flashing through the haze of wretchedness. Yet somehow it was no surprise that he should. In the last days she had learned that nothing was as it seemed, no one was quite the person she thought them. Why should Guy be any different?

When he left the villa Jorge Sanchez went straight to his office and telephoned his brother Fabio in Venezuela.

‘I'm not sure, but I think we may have trouble here. You know the new pilot you took on? I think he may work for the DEA.'

‘Holy shit!'

‘Exactly. How the hell could you have been so careless, Fabio? I warned you the authorities had been sniffing around the office in Miami.'

‘I thought you said you'd bought them off!' Fabio blustered.

‘Yeah, sure, I thought I had. It's not difficult, God knows, the greedy pigs will close their eyes to anything if you make it worth their while. But once in a while you come up against one who can't be bought – or who takes your money and double-crosses you. You've got to be ready for it, Fabio. I should have thought you'd been in this game long enough to know that. But you're still a stupid jerk, aren't you? You still foul up every damn thing you touch.'

There was a slight pause, then Fabio said sourly: ‘Can't you buy him off too?'

‘Why the hell should I? It's time someone was taught a lesson here. I shall have him dealt with. I just wanted you to know.'

‘Dealt with? A hit man?'

‘I haven't decided yet. But in his line of business it shouldn't present too many difficulties.'

Fabio laughed, a high-pitched whinny.

‘True. Well, I'll start watching the obituaries.'

‘Do that.'

Jorge replaced the receiver, running his hand over the beginnings of stubble on his chin and thinking about the new pilot.

Bastard! Coming here to undermine the operation, and thinking he could get away with it! And seducing Lilli into the bargain. If he hadn't done that Jorge might well have offered him money to buy his silence. As it was …

Jorge smiled unpleasantly.

As it was, the bastard was going to get more than he bargained for. And Jorge was going to enjoy every minute of it.

Guy put the Twin Otter down on the runway at Hewanorra International safely but with something less than his usual perfect touch, and realised that his mind was far from being completely on what he was doing. He taxied to the apron, locked up the aircraft and went into the airport building to complete the formalities, resentful of the fact that simply doing his job was preventing him from giving proper thought to the problems that were worrying away at the back of his mind. Only when he had dealt with the necessary documentation and got himself a cup of coffee could he allow them back to the surface, and when he did he felt much as he had felt as a novice pilot caught in thick and unexpected low cloud.

What the hell was he going to do?

His plan, when he had come to Madrepora, had been straight-forward and clear-cut. Find out for certain if Otto Brandt was in reality Otto von Rheinhardt, recover the family heirlooms and bring the war criminal to justice. But somewhere along the line his priorities had changed. And the reason for that was Lilli.

He had known instinctively from the moment he had met her that she was going to cause him problems, but he'd thought he could handle it. She might be beautiful, she might appear sweet-natured and pleasant company, but she was Otto's daughter, and as such she couldn't escape the legacy of what he had done any more than she could avoid carrying his genes in her body. It was unfortunate for her, but there it was. He couldn't let sympathy for an apparent innocent stand in the way of the justice he intended to secure for his family.

But last night he had held her in his arms and everything had changed. The cold desire for revenge had been replaced by feelings so powerful that no amount of determination could conquer them. He had wanted her physically, more than he could ever remember wanting any woman, but it was more than that. When he'd seen Jorge Sanchez standing beside her with his hand on her shoulder he had wanted to hit him, hard, right in the middle of his handsome debauched face. When he had realised how upset Lilli was he had wanted to kill him. And it had come to him in a flash that what he intended to do would hurt Lilli far more than anything that arrogant South American bastard had done.

I can't put her through all that, he had thought, sitting late into the night with a glass of his favourite whisky at his elbow and one eye on the clock – ‘ Eight hours between bottle and throttle' was the rule pilots lived by. I can't destroy all her illusions that way. What good would it do? Otto would be unlikely to live to face trial and the heirlooms were just inanimate objects. Whatever their intrinsic value, whatever their sentimental worth, they counted for nothing compared with the feelings of another human being, especially one who meant as much to him as Lilli. But it wasn't easy, all the same, to give up on something which had become an obsession. And if he did give up, what then? Should he stay in Madrepora, continue to do the job he had taken for such ulterior motives and see how things developed with Lilli? It was what his heart was urging him to do but he couldn't see that that could have a satisfactory outcome either. How could they ever have a close and loving relationship when so many secrets lay between them, secrets that would destroy her if she learned about them? He couldn't bring himself to tell her, but he couldn't see how he could ever be truly close to her if he did not. The dilemma was real and insoluble. Guy could not see any way out and it was tearing him apart.

And of course in all probability Lilli would return to New York when her father died. If she did the affair would end before it had properly begun and Guy would be able to put it all behind him and get on with his life.