Michelle xx
Alex breathed a sigh of relief. At least it was safe. She checked the time. If she called now, Michelle or Dante would probably offer to return it right then and Alex didn’t want to inconvenience them. She decided just to go and get it. It was her phone she needed most. It had all kinds of notes she’d take for preparing school lessons, and really it was her major means of communication with people.
First she showered and changed into a fresh set of clothes, then she checked the clock again. If she left now she would arrive at T just before opening. She could probably get in and out without causing Dante too much bother, and hopefully see Michelle and thank her too.
*
More than an hour later Ryan still had not returned. Lauren wondered if she should bother waiting around. Deciding to just get her stuff together and head home to see if Alex wanted to get dinner, she looked around for pen and paper to leave Ryan a note. She spotted a pen when her mobile rang with the same blank screen. “What did you find out?” she asked when she picked up.
“Where did you say this guy was from?” There was no longer any lightness in Greg’s voice. He wasn’t playing around anymore.
“Spain, I guess? Why?”
“I found something.”
Chapter Six
Trust Is A Nasty Word
“Ok, explain,” Lauren said.
“So listen. I have run every check I could, and even called in a few favours of my own, but nothing about this guy’s history makes sense. All I have is his birthdate, driver’s licence and tax file number. Everything someone would need to apply for a business, and that’s it. No registered address, no school history, no police records, nothing. I even checked internationally; same thing.”
“So tell me what you do have,” Lauren prompted.
“Okay. He was born in 1982 in San Vicente de Leon, but the next thing that crops up is him taking over his father’s business under his name in 2000. Not one mention of the guy until then. No schooling, no University. And get this: there is no mention of his mother on his birth certificate. Sometimes a birth certificate won’t contain a father’s name, but the mother’s? That never happens.”
“That does sounds strange,” Lauren agreed.
“So then I went back through as many papers as I could find and the name Delavega is all over Spain, just different spellings. Same with Esteban, but Dante is more Italian, and I can’t find any links to Italy in his family. The weirder thing? His family tree—what I can find of it—is all single male names, no females. Esteban, Diego, Lorenzo, Gabriel and back and back. No aunts, sisters, nieces, nothing. Just father-son, father-son.”
“How’s that even possible? There have to be women involved, or else there can be no children. Maybe they just left their names out for some cultural reason? Wouldn’t you think someone would have picked up on it if it were suspicious or illegal?”
“Well, if it’s cultural, it’s definitely atypical. As for any illegalities, no one would even pick up on it unless they looked for this specific thing. If he had no police records, if no one knew who he was, why would they bother digging? Like I said, his record is not just clean, but more like a blank slate. No one had heard of him until he started building that club of his, so it’s like he appeared out of nowhere.”
“Anything else?”
“Do you want to know where the name Dante Delavega first appeared?”
“Um, I guess… Where?”
“Seventeen ninety. A Dante Delavega was convicted of murder and sent to Australia with the Second Fleet. What a Spaniard had been doing in England at the time is anyone’s guess. I could speculate, but it could be any number of reasons for him being there. But the thing is, after the murder conviction, he was supposed to have journeyed on the HMS Guardian. You know, the ship that struck ice?”
“Wasn’t that the Titanic?”
“Are you shitting me, Loz? You don’t even know your own history? The Guardian originally sailed with the First Fleet but struck ice and limped back to Africa. Eight people were rescued and brought the rest of the way to Australia. The convicts on those ships were infested with scurvy and heaps of other diseases. Many of them didn’t survive.”
“Yeah, ok. So what?”
“Babe, trust me, I’m getting there. Picture this: what if that’s not the whole story? What if what killed all those people wasn’t any disease?”
“If it wasn’t a disease, then what was it?”
*
Servants crossed the vast and open grounds of the Kent Estate. All were anxious; the time of day becoming apparent. The last rays of the setting sun could just barely be seen over the horizon surrounding Darling Point, one of the richest housing areas of Sydney. One of the modern day palaces that the sun always set over first was the crown jewel of the area, the estate of the late Sir Vincent Kent.
One of the servants, Nadia Kraus, carrying a bucket of freshly picked roses, broke off from her fellows and headed inside.
“Nadia! What are you doing?” Solomon whispered.
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute. Look at the sky… You know the rules,” he replied harshly.
“But she likes roses…”
“We are not allowed in the house after sunrise!”
Nadia ignored him, walking into the lavish open living area. She ventured towards the back of the room to the elevator and pressed the down button.
Taking four years to construct and occupying 1800 square metres of land with facilities
