CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Simon Crozier picked up the phone, punched in the number and held the receiver to his ear.
For a moment there was static, and then a mechanical female voice said, ‘The number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable.’
‘Dammit!’ he said and slammed the phone down. He looked at his watch. He’d been trying to reach Jane Talbot for the last hour without success. The landline was dead and her cell was either switched off or receiving no signal. He’d tried a few of the others on the island with the same result.
The door to his office opened and Martin Impey entered holding a thin blue file. ‘I have the information you wanted,’ he said.
‘Information?’ Crozier was distracted. He was trying to decide whether to give Jane more time or to send a helicopter over to Kulsay to take them off.
‘The Sorority,’ Martin said, holding the file out in front of him. ‘Took some digging up.’
Crozier gathered himself and went back to his desk. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘And show me what you have.’
Martin slid the file across the desk and waited while Crozier flicked it open and scanned through the pages.
‘Basically it’s a group of high-profile women who’ve banded together to perform charitable acts; hosting celebrity-studded luncheons, sponsoring music recitals, that kind of thing. I can’t really see why you’re interested in them. There’s nothing there to suggest there’s anything more to them than just a group of wealthy do-gooders with too much time on their hands.’
Crozier closed the file, then opened it again and pulled out the list of the Sorority’s members. ‘Miranda Fry,’ he said. ‘How do I know that name?’
‘Sister-in-law of the last U.S. president. She was a bit of a wild child, then she married Sebastian Fry, head of Nexus Communications, and transformed herself, virtually overnight, into a born-again sophisticate.’
‘And Felicity Coleman?’
‘Widow of Mark Coleman, the astronaut who died in a plane crash back in the eighties.’
‘The other names mean nothing to me, except for Celeste Toland.’
Martin sat forward in his seat. ‘Ah, now she’s interesting. If only for the fact that she has no history.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She came to prominence in the early 1980s when she bought out the Haver Corporation. Bought it lock, stock and barrel. But I can’t get a line on her in the runup to that. I found an entry for her in the 1963 yearbook at Priestley High School in Connecticut but after that nothing until twenty years later when she arrived fully formed on Wall Street and started making huge waves in the financial circles of the day.’
‘But there must be something to show what she was doing with herself for those twenty years. College? University?’
‘I agree, there should be something, but there’s nothing documented. Maybe she left high school and went abroad to further her education. If that’s the case, then it could take days to pick up her trail.’
‘At high school she was listed as Celeste Toland?’
Martin nodded.
‘So that means she never married.’
‘If what you say about her relationship with Jessica Anderson is correct, then that’s hardly surprising, is it?’ Martin smiled the way men do when talking about women seemingly beyond them.
Crozier grumbled something under his breath that Martin didn’t catch. Then he said, ‘Surely there was some press when she bought out Haver? There must have been a curious journalist out there anxious to know who this woman was, where she came from.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I can find nothing, and I’ve trawled through every database I can think of. Why are you so interested in her anyway?’
‘I’m not…not her specifically. But the Sorority interests me greatly, and Jessica Anderson’s connection to it. This whole Kulsay Island thing has me rattled. I get the feeling the Department is being used and I don’t like that, I don’t like that at all.’
‘Have you heard from Jane? How are things going over there?’
‘I heard from her last night. Nothing today. I’m sure things are fine.’ He drummed his fingertips on the desktop. ‘Do another sweep and see if you can turn up anything at all on this Toland woman. Anything at all.’
‘But.…’ Martin started to protest.
Crozier cut him off. ‘Just try; there may be something you’ve missed.’
Martin got ready to leave the room. ‘It’s your call,’ he said. He was annoyed that his habitual thoroughness was being questioned.
Crozier watched the office door close, then picked up the phone again. ‘Just answer the bloody thing, Jane,’ he said.
‘The number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable.’
Crozier sighed and cradled the receiver. It could be nothing more than atmospherics blocking the telephone signals. It might be something altogether more sinister. Either way it was too early to send in a helicopter to airlift them off the island. Jane Talbot needed time to get to the root of what was happening on Kulsay, and she’d be furious if he overreacted and pulled the plug before she had some answers. He just had to be patient.
But patience had never come easily to him. As a young man he’d been very much like Robert Carter; headstrong, impetuous. He’d been invited to join the Department by the incumbent director, Sir George Logan, but he and Logan had clashed many times over Crozier’s methodology. When the time came for Logan to retire the old man had tried to stop Crozier from succeeding him, but by that time Crozier had made some very influential friends in government and his appointment as Director of the Department was little more than a formality.
The directorship tempered his more impulsive tendencies, and over the years he’d watched himself turn into a clone of Sir George Logan. It was a fact that irritated him intensely, but the behavioral traits were too embedded now for him to do much about it.
He picked up the phone again and looked at it for a long moment, his fingers itching, anxious to punch in Jane Talbot’s number. With an effort of will he stopped himself, placed the receiver back on its cradle and swore savagely.