It took a moment for Maggie to twig that he was talking to her, but as soon as she did she accepted the suggestion gratefully. It was still one of the hardest things she’d ever done—to achieve a dignified exit wearing only her socks, jeans and her bra. She did resist the temptation to run, however, until she was out of the shed, then she spurted to her car, climbed in with a sigh of sheer relief, and reached over into the back seat for the denim jacket she’d tossed there the day before.
It was fifteen minutes before Jack came out to her and he stopped on his way to retrieve his mobile phone and bag from his Range Rover and then to lock it.
He got into the passenger seat, glinted her a daredevil little smile and said, ‘Home, James, I think.’
‘What about your—?’
‘Maggie, just go,’ he commanded. ‘I’ve done my level best to protect your fair name, let’s not hang around.’
She switched the motor on and nosed the car forward. Two minutes later, she turned out of the concealed driveway onto the road and turned to him. ‘I’m dying of curiosity! Who were they? What did you tell them? Do they still think we were… we were…?’ She stopped and coloured painfully.
He was fishing around in his bag and he dragged a T-shirt out and shrugged into it with difficulty. ‘Hang on,’ he said as he began to punch numbers into his phone. ‘What’s your address?’
She told him.
It was someone called Maisie he rang—a Maisie who didn’t object to being woken at four-thirty in the morning and given all sorts of instructions.
To wit, someone was to retrieve his Range Rover at the farm address, using his spare keys; someone was to pick him up at Maggie’s address in about half an hour; a new flight to Melbourne was to be booked for him later in the day, no, he wouldn’t be stopping in Sydney this time—what had happened to him?
‘I was kidnapped by a girl, locked in a shed and— maybe I’ll tell you the rest of it one day, Maisie, just be a love and sort all that out for me, pronto.’
He ended the call.
Maggie looked over at him. ‘That’s not funny!’
‘No? I have to tell you it has been one of the funnier days of my life, Maggie Trent,’ he said with his eyes glinting. His hair was standing up from his struggles with his T-shirt, and he ran his fingers through it.
She bit her lip and concentrated on her driving for a bit until he dropped his hand on her knee. ‘All right. I apologize. Who were they? A private investigator and a journalist.’
Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, no!’
‘As you say,’ he agreed dryly, and told her the whole story.
The owners of the property had had a farm machinery hire business, now defunct. All the equipment had been stored in the shed, which explained why it was built like Fort Knox. They also had a wayward son, apparently, who’d stolen the vintage car and the bike on a whim and as a bit of a lark, and decided there was no better place to keep them under wraps than his parents’ shed—he’d contrived to get copies of the keys made.
But he was also a garrulous young man when under the influence of liquor and drugs and the journalist, who wrote a motoring column and was a vintage-car freak himself, had got wind of the heist. He was also aware that the owner of the car and bike had hired a private investigator to look for them when the police had failed to trace them, so they’d decided to pool their resources.
‘I see!’ Maggie said at this point in the story.
‘Yes,’ Jack agreed. ‘It all falls into place. How much more interesting to find Jack McKinnon and Margaret Leila Trent engaged in what could have looked like weird practices, though?’
She flinched. ‘Do you think they believed our story? What did you tell them?’ She pulled up at a traffic light on the Oxenford overpass.
‘The truth, mostly. That the property was about to come onto the market and we were interested in it.’
‘Perfectly true!’
‘Yep.’ He shot her an amused look. ‘But I had to tamper with the truth a bit then. I told them the wind banged the shed door shut on us, locking us in.’
Maggie flinched again. ‘That’s a very small white lie,’ she said, although uncertainly. ‘Isn’t it?’