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 beending. 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 onJessaminein 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 Martynnearly 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 ofall the new passwords mailed over the past few hoursand 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 fromStefan Sontag. The subject line was:Nothing’s foolproof.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach. His brain screamedvirus!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.
