Free Fifth Victim by Zoe Sharp

side, although the yacht had been designed with the privacy of its guests in mind. Every deck had its own personal sun deck, none of which were visible from the others. I was only too aware that things could very quickly get out of hand.
    As standard operating procedure, I’d already identified myself to the ship’s captain, pointed out my principal and asked for notification if anyone tried to take her off the yacht without me in attendance. By his reaction, this kind of request was not unusual.
    Still, she was my responsibility, and she didn’t need to be taken ashore in order to be taken advantage of, so I ended up doing a constant roving sweep, no mean feat on a boat that size. Dina, apparently oblivious, danced with various people on the pool deck, sat and chatted to others in the thickly carpeted main salon area below. If her earlier experience with Torquil and the glass of champagne had unsettled her, she gave no sign of it. I saw nothing to alert me that she was in danger.
    I suppose it was inevitable, sooner or later, that I’d run into Manda Dempsey again as I prowled round the decks. I was up near the slim pointed bow, far enough forward to have a glimpse onto all the balconies and where the volume of the music was less combative. She stepped out of one of the open sliding doorways and made a beeline for me. At first I thought it was purely coincidence, but I quickly realised she’d sought me out. I put my back to the guard rail and waited. She stopped a couple of metres away, took a sip from her champagne glass and said at last in a cool voice, ‘I always wondered if I’d end up meeting with you again, Charlie.’
    Smiling to take the sting out of it, I said, ‘And I always wondered if you’d end up in gaol.’
    She continued to regard me for a moment, her body swaying to the pulse of alcohol or music, I wasn’t sure which. Then she smiled.
    ‘That’s what I always liked about you. You were so damned unimpressed by this kind of thing,’ she said, nodding towards the magnificent yacht laid out behind us. ‘I may have despised my father and the sycophants with which he surrounded himself, but at least you were never in awe of him.’ She laughed. ‘You once told me, if I hated him so much, to stop taking his money and go make my own way, do my own thing.’
    Her own thing , I recalled grimly in the face of this charm offensive, had included seducing a gullible boyfriend into an attempted hit on the old man. It hadn’t worked, and the Dempseys’ flat refusal to do anything constructive about their only child had been one of the reasons I’d asked to be taken off the job. A decision I’d never regretted.
    ‘Nice to see you took my advice to heart,’ I said dryly. ‘Trust fund, didn’t you say?’
    She smiled again. ‘From my grandparents. So, technically, I did listen to you.’ She took another sip of her drink. ‘I wanted to let you know that you were a big influence, though I guess it didn’t seem like it at the time.’
    I waited for the flash of guile, but saw enough apparent sincerity to deliver a cautious, ‘Thank you.’
    ‘You’re welcome,’ she responded. A girl with looks that were striking rather than pretty, with dark hair which – now she’d discarded the hat – I could see she’d had cut sleek and stylish, feathered in around her neck. The dress probably cost more than my entire annual clothing budget, and she wore it with the careless elegance of someone entirely used to such expense. ‘I’ve done some growing up over the last couple of years,’ she said, almost rueful. ‘About time, huh?’
    ‘You were kidnapped,’ I said, recalling the fortress-like parental estate, made even more secure by the installation of the electronic surveillance equipment and sensors that I myself had overseen. They should not have been able to get within a mile of her.
    I cursed the sketchy reports, the lack of official investigation, and asked, ‘How did they get to