Deceit. [COMPLETED.]

Chapter 38

I asked if she could get mummy and had to wait for what seemed an age before I heard my wife's voice. She was curt but polite, informing me that mum and dad were still there and asked when she would be seeing me. 

'Darling,' I started, 'I love you more than anything in the world. You know that. You are my life, but there is something very wrong going on here. Lies are being said that are hurting not just us but people in this company and I am really struggling to walk away from it all.'

I asked her to have faith in me but what I got back was something totally unexpected.

'I'm scared Kirk.'

'Of what?'

'Of what is happening. Christ. Of how this is effecting us. You and me. Can't you see that? You care more about your stupid job that us.'

I said that I didn't.

'Then give this pipe dream of yours up. Walk away from it darling. You don't owe them anything.'

'And the photographs?' I asked.

She asked me if they were something she needed to worry about.

I said that they weren't.

'Then come home,' she said. 'Sod em. We did ok on your junior officer's salary didn't we? We can do it again. Walk away. I don't care where you are. Just catch the next plane home and let's start again.'

But I couldn't. Not with so much at stake.

I hesitated. I needed more time.

'I'll walk away,' I promised, 'only if you give me two more days and if I haven't found out who was behind those photographs then I'm done, I'm on my way home.'

I know it hadn't been easy for Cheryl but I asked her to trust me one last time.

It wasn't easy. I heard her sigh. I heard her say that she would give me 48 hrs and no more and after that she wanted to see me walking through our front door.

I agreed.

'That Mr Wartley phoned again by the way,' she said. 'A very strange man if you ask me and most insistent that you call him - wanting to know if I had heard about some Egyptian god of all things.'

My shoulders dropped. Such an insignificant man, he was the last person I wanted to talk to. 'What god?' I asked irritated and with half a mind to ignore him.   

'I've no idea,' my wife said flatly. 'I think he called him a Numbskull or something like that.' 

She was clearly trying her best at being humorous under such trying circumstances and in my heart I wanted to reciprocate until with a chill another name suddenly filled my head.

'You mean 'Namuesis'?'

'Yes! How on earth did you know that?'

I made up a cock and bull story that he was a god from the sixth dynasty and I even quipped that he was the god of doom and gloom. She seemed to like that and I when asked, she gave me his number.

I told her that I loved her. I reaffirmed my commitment to her, offering yet more assurances that nothing underhand was happening or would happen for that matter and as I put the phone down I caught sight of Max coming through the hotel lobby, arms full of shopping bags.

She gave me a huge grin and tried to plant a kiss on my lips but I twisted my head slightly and pulled away. 'I've just been talking to my family.'

She put her arms down and sighed. 'Ohh.'

'What's in the bags?' I asked.

'New clothes, toiletries and something to carry them in.'