Lovestruck

Vague memories of the night before slowly began to come back. Of course. The party. Johnny’s party. It must have been quite a night. Thank heavens Johnny only had a birthday once a year; too many parties like that could be life-destroying.

Pushing back the bedclothes, Sam swung his long legs out of bed and stood up, a hand over his dazzled eyes. Why was the sunlight so bright this morning? Why couldn’t it have been one of those dark and rainy days, when the sky was like old grey flannel and there was barely enough light to see by?

Naked, he walked across the room to the bathroom. Sam never wore pyjamas; he preferred to sleep naked, especially in summer. It saved on washing. He paid a cleaner to come in once a week to clean his flat but she did not do his washing; Sam had to do it himself.

He had a routine of stuffing his dirty clothes into the washing machine every Saturday and ironing them on Sunday afternoons while he listened to rival radio stations and got ideas from any programmes he enjoyed, or made derisive notes on what he considered their failures. He quite enjoyed the hours he spent that way; he had come to like ironing, it was a soothingly boring occupation, kept his hands busy and left his mind available for a free-flow of ideas. Some of his best projects had come out of an afternoon ironing.

After turning on the shower he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw uneasiness in his grey eyes, but couldn’t think why it should be there. What was preying on his subconscious? He knew something was—if only he could remember what!

He hadn’t crashed his car, had he? Hit someone? He stepped under the shower and gave a yelp of shock as his warm flesh came into contact with the cool jets of water.

At least this should wake him up! He showered rapidly, checking himself as he did—but there were no marks on his strong, angular face or the lean, muscular body below it. If there had been a fight he had not been injured in any way.

Maybe it was the other guy who had come off badly? he thought, grinning, not displeased with that idea. He hoped it hadn’t been Johnny—the last thing he needed was a feud with his top star. But Johnny wasn’t the fighting type. He was too afraid of damage to his face.

Something had happened, though. He just knew it. Ever since he woke up something had been hovering at the back of his mind just out of sight, never going away but never letting him see it clearly.

What on earth was it?

As he towelled himself, and dressed in a red-striped shirt and dark grey suit, he chased the memory. Something had definitely happened last night and Sam couldn’t shake off a growing uneasiness. Knotting his dark red silk tie, he stared into the dressing table mirror, not seeing himself at all, calling up memories of the party.

He had taken a taxi, which had stopped to pick up Helen who had been wearing pleated black satin which left a lot of her visible—bare white shoulders, half her high, creamy breasts, all her arms and even some of her thighs, glimpsed through slits in the long skirt.

She had looked sensational, and when Johnny had met them at his front door, he had gazed, open-mouthed. ‘Wow, you sexy thing!’ he’d breathed, arms flung wide. ‘Give me a kiss!’

Johnny had been lit up, the life and soul of the party, as always, loving being the centre of attention, and Helen hadn’t exactly struggled to escape his clutches.

She had been in one of her moods last night. All the way to the party she had been coaxing and badgering Sam on the usual subject. They had been arguing about it for weeks. Helen wanted to get married. Sam didn’t.

He had good reasons for not wanting to get married. He had explained them all over again, he had been patience itself—but Helen had refused to accept them. In fact, she’d refused to listen at all. By the time they’d got to the party she’d been in a sulky, glowering mood.

She had given him a defiant look as she’d put both arms round Johnny’s neck and dehberately leaned her sexy little body against him.

She hoped to make him jealous, he’d realised, watching her wryly. Well, she wasn’t going to win at that game, he remembered thinking. He wasn’t the jealous type. If she wanted to flirt with Johnny, let her. So he had wandered off to get a drink from the bar, leaving them together. Let them get on with it!

Bad move! he thought now, running a brush over his thick black hair. He shouldn’t have started drinking so early. He rarely drank much; it slowed the responses, made thinking difficult, and Sam needed his brain in good working order all the time. His job required it; you couldn’t run a radio station part-time—you had to be on the ball twenty-four hours a day because you never knew when a problem might come up. It was different for the broadcasters themselves; when they had finished their show they came off air and could go home and do as they pleased—they worked a fixed number of hours a day. Lucky old them.

If he hadn’t started drinking as soon as he’d arrived he wouldn’t have this headache now!

As he put his hairbrush down on the dressing table he stopped, staring at his hand fixedly. His signet ring was missing.

His heart thudded in shock. He almost never took it off. But maybe he had taken it off in the shower? He didn’t remember doing it—why should he have done? But he hurried back to the bathroom and looked everywhere. No sign of the ring there.

Returning to his bedroom, he searched that, growing increasingly worried, but he didn’t find the ring anywhere. He had worn it to the party, hadn’t he? He must have done. He never took it off. It was very old and immensely valuable. Of massive gold, it bore his family crest. Sam was very proud of it and had worn it day and night since he first inherited it.

The Erskines were an old family from the Strathclyde area of Scotland; their surname was believed to be the Celtic word for a green hill and their crest represented that.

The shield it bore was divided into four, with the symbol for a green hill in two opposing sections while the other two carried a broken sword, no doubt because they had been a war-like collection, his ancestors, always fighting, although why the sword in their shield was broken Sam had no idea.

The ring had been in Sam’s family for generations. It was always given to the eldest son on his twenty-first birthday, but in Sam’s case his father had been dead by then and the ring had been kept locked in a bank vault for some years. The ring had been handed over during Sam’s birthday party, by his mother. Sam could remember the weight of it as it first slid onto his finger; it had been far too big, and he had had to have it altered to fit, but he had felt far more than the weight of the ring that evening.

His mother had wept. ‘His finger was much bigger than yours.’ She still mourned his father, who had been a massive man, six feet six and broad of shoulders, deep of chest, with large, powerful hands. Sam had been scared of him but had loved him very much; he still missed his father, too.

Jack Erskine had died in the Himalayas during a British climbing expedition; the weather had turned against them overnight, arctic conditions had driven them back down the mountain and in a blizzard Jack had missed his footing and fallen to his death.

Sam had been sixteen, too old to cry; if he had cried he might not have taken the shock so hard. The bruise of it was still buried deep inside his mind. Putting on his father’s ring had been a terrifying experience.

He had felt the weight of his entire family as he’d put on the ring—aware of his mother, watching him with pride and sadness, aware of his two younger sisters, Jeanie, who was ten, and eight-year-old Marie, all of them now his responsibility, which he knew already wasn’t going to be an easy one. He had been aware, too, of the other Erskine eyes watching him. Dozens of relatives had been at his twenty-first party—and beyond them Sam had felt the centuries of family history stretching back to the fifteenth century, when their branch of the Erskines had first appeared.

He felt their shadowy presence now and shivered. If he had lost the ring, his mother, the family, would never forgive him—he would never forgive himself. It was priceless and irreplaceable. His finger felt bare without it.

He must have lost it at Johnny’s party—but how? Maybe Johnny had found it by now. Sam walked over to the phone, which was still switched onto the answering machine. He flicked the switch to play back any calls and Helen’s voice shrieked.

‘I hate you. Do you hear? I’ll never forgive you. Never.’

The machine clicked off. Sam put a hand to his head, flinching. There was a whirring noise and Helen’s voice shrieked again.

‘I suppose you thought that was really clever, didn’t you? You did it to make me look stupid. Well, you’re going to look pretty stupid when I’ve finished with you. I’m going to make you wish you were dead.’

Sam already wished he was dead. His head was hammering and his mouth was as dry as a desert.

Another whirr, then Helen’s voice began again. Sam couldn’t stand any more; he switched the recording off and hurriedly dialled Johnny’s number, but got no reply. Johnny was probably fast asleep and would be for most of the day. Heaven only knew what time he had got to sleep last night.

Sam decided to try again later. Without bothering to have any breakfast, he left his top-floor flat in an apartment block on the promenade, with its breathtaking view of the coast, took the lift down to the underground car park, climbed into his little red MG, which he loved passionately, and drove off to work.

He needed some black coffee before he could think clearly; he would get Natalie to make him some when he got to the office. A frown pulled his black brows together. Natalie. Now why had her name given him another stab of uneasiness?

What had happened last night?

Fishing dark glasses out of his glove compartment, he drove along the promenade and up the short hill on which the radio station sat. The drive only took a few minutes. Sam often walked it, but today he wasn’t up to the walk. Parking behind the building, he walked in through Reception, past the hovering mob of Johnny’s fans.

The girl behind the desk gave him a lopsided, excited grin as soon as he came through the doors. ‘Good morning, Mr Erskine! How are you this morning?’

Why was she smiling like that? Sam gave her a curt nod. ‘Fine, thanks.’ Stupid girl—what was so funny? That he was late for once? That he was wearing dark glasses? Okay, he had a hangover. So what?

‘Cong...’ she began, but he was already out of earshot, striding to the lift, passing a couple of secretaries who were chattering to each other on their way through the lobby. As they saw Sam they stopped talking quickly, only to begin giggling.

‘Good morning, Mr Erskine,’ they chanted as he strode past, and he got two more of those knowing, grinning looks.

He was glad to get into the lift and have the doors close on them all. When he got to his office he must ring Johnny first, and if there was no reply send someone over to wake him up, put him under a shower, sober him up and get him here in time for his show at noon. Dead or alive, Johnny had to do his show.

Sam walked into his office and found Natalie just placing a pile of opened letters on his desk.

She looked round, her sleek dark hair falling against her cheek, her blue eyes faintly amused, which irritated him. This morning Natalie was as cool and elegant and together as ever. No hangover for Natalie, who only drank orange juice or mineral water, or a single glass of white wine, or champagne on very special occasions.

‘No morning after the night before for you, I suppose?’ Sam muttered. ‘You’re too perfect to live.’ It annoyed him just to look at her; she wasn’t human—had she no ordinary weaknesses? He wished she had his head this morning. She should have agony stabbing away inside her temples.

She merely smiled. ‘Would you like some coffee?’