© 2011

DR RILEY CHASE was bored. It was his third night in a row with no action, and Riley was a man who lived on little sleep. His medico-legal bookwork was up to date. He was on his third coffee. He’d even defeated the crossword.

He was checking his email for the tenth time when his radio crackled to life.

Two messages in twenty seconds. One was announcing the arrival of a daughter he’d never met, the other was a suicide.

It was enough to make a man spill his coffee.

Only the headlines of Britain’s gossip magazines were stopping her drowning.

‘Heiress Suicides!’

Pippa was surrounded by blackness, by cold and by terror. Any minute now something would attack her legs. Maybe it already had-she could hardly feel anything below her waist. The cold was bone-numbing. She was past exhaustion, and there was only one thing holding her up.

‘Phillippa Penelope Fotheringham, heiress to the Fotheringham Fast Food fortune, suicides after jilting.’

She would not give Roger the satisfaction of that headline.

‘Are we sure it’s suicide?’ Riley was staring intently down at the blackened sea, feeling more and more hopeless.

‘Jilted bride.’ Harry Toomey, pilot for New South Wales North Coast Flight-Aid, was guiding the helicopter through parallel runs from the cliff. Harry, Riley and Cordelia, the team’s Flight-Aid nurse, were searching north from Whale Cove’s swimming beach. Grim experience told them this would be where a body would be swept.

‘Do we have a name?’ Riley said through his headset.

‘Phillippa Penelope Fotheringham.’

‘That’s a mouthful.’ Their floodlight was sweeping the water’s surface, but the sea was choppy, making it hard to see detail. Detail like a body. ‘Do we know how long she’s been missing?’