Deep Blue Sea

by Tasmina Perry

  ‘I thought you went to Harrow.’

  ‘They expelled me,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The first of many.’

  Diana only knew the broad strokes of Adam’s tearaway youth. It was not something the family liked to dwell on, not something that fitted in with their usual success and order, and as she sat with him at their rickety table overlooking the coast, ready to hear his story, she realised that the two of them had had very few heart-to-hearts, spent very little time alone, even though the brothers had been quite close.

  ‘How many schools did you leave?’ she asked, pouring Pimm’s into a glass.

  ‘Three.’ He grimaced.

  The waitress came and put two club sandwiches on the table, and Adam waited until she had gone before he spoke again.

  ‘You know I always wanted to be like Julian. Strong, capable, accomplished. He was a few years older than me. Too old to be my friend, so he became my hero. I wanted to be like him so much, but when I realised I never could, I must have subconsciously decided to be everything he wasn’t. It was a philosophy that kind of got me into trouble.’

  ‘You’re very alike. I always thought that.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone else has ever shared that opinion.’

  ‘You’re more alike than you realise. Kind of different sides of the same coin.’

  ‘My parents don’t agree with you.’

  She knew what it was like for a parent to have a favoured child. In their family it had been her, a state of affairs she had struggled to understand, struggled to accept; until the scandal, she had always felt a deep sense of guilt about it.

  Not wanting to think about that, she tipped her head back and let the sun shine on her face.

  ‘This place is amazing. I can’t believe I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘Never?’ he said disbelievingly.

  ‘I’ve been missing out.’

  He gave a soft snort. ‘You know, since Jules died, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the things I haven’t done, all the things I want to do. Is that selfish?’

  ‘No. It’s only natural to think about your own mortality.’

  He looked deep in thought.

  ‘So what’s on your bucket list?’ she asked, picking at some lettuce. ‘What are the things you’ve always wanted to do? Compared to most men, you’ve probably done a lot. Driven a Bond car. Slept with a Sports Illustrated cover girl . . .’

  He didn’t deny it.

  ‘There’s loads of stuff I’ve not done. I know I’ve got money, and that’s great, but I just haven’t got my arse into gear to do things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Take a motorbike across Asia.’

  ‘Then do it.’

  ‘Fly to the edge of space. Maybe in one of those F-14s or Russian MiG jets. Pretend I’m Maverick in Top Gun.’

  ‘Surely you know Tom Cruise. He might be able to sort you out.’

  ‘I want to see a volcano erupt, camp in the Arctic – you know, man versus nature. I want to free-dive.’

  She opened her mouth to tell him that this was one of Rachel’s great loves, but stopped short of revealing it. It had often occurred to her that Adam and her sister would be a good match, and she had thought about subtly setting them up. But every time, she had found some excuse not to. True enough, in those early days she wasn’t even sure that she liked Adam. He was self-confident in a way that made her feel inadequate, with a reputation as a commitment-phobe, and her sister did not deserve a man like that. Or secretly, deep down, did she not want her sister to have a man like that? A man even more handsome and charismatic than her own husband. Was that an unspoken truth between sisters? That you wanted them to have the best of everything so long as it wasn’t better than yours.

  ‘And I want to get married. Have a family,’ added Adam, polishing off his sandwich in just a handful of bites.

  That one nearly knocked her off her seat.

  ‘You’re broody?’

  ‘It’s pure ego,’ he teased. ‘It’s just what the world needs – Adam Denver mini-mes running around brightening the place up. What about you?’ he added more softly.

  She shrugged and smiled, wondering why she had never played this game before. After all, she and Julian had had the money to do whatever they fancied.

  ‘See Ayres Rock at sunrise. Get a degree. Go to a lap-dancing club.’

  He almost spluttered on his Pepsi. ‘You’re a dark horse . . .’

  ‘Rachel lived in Soho for a while. She always used to make it sound so exciting. She knew all these crazy people. Sometimes I think I need a walk on the wild side.’

  ‘You might find it’s overrated.’

  She felt exhilarated by the conversation. For just a few moments life was full of possibilities once again, and there seemed an urgency about it.

  ‘Is that it?’ he asked after a few moments.

  There was one thing she wondered if she would ever do, but she didn’t dare voice it aloud.

  She wondered if she would ever recover from the death of her husband, if she would ever meet anyone new.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, wiping the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

  They talked for another twenty minutes about Adam’s latest hotel purchase from the Qataris – a string of grand dame hotels in some of the world’s top cities – and as he spoke, Diana wondered why the Denvers had been so quick to dismiss him as the family clown.

  ‘We should go,’ said Adam when they had both finished their food. They got back into the car and drove along the coast through the village of Charmouth, taking a turn up a steep hill shaded on both sides by oak and poplar trees. It was a glorious day to be out in the country and a perfect day to forget your troubles and just be, thought Diana. Not worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, no inquest or investigation, just driving through beautiful scenery with someone she liked.

  As she glanced across at him, watching him concentrating, observing his hands on the wheel, the same strong hands and lightly tanned forearms as Julian, she realised that the day was beginning to feel more like a date. The thought was unwelcome. It felt traitorous and wrong. And yet if she squinted, if she allowed herself to get swept away by the moment, it was like going back in time.

  Back to her first date with Julian, an occasion that still brought a smile to her face. She had insisted on meeting him in Highgate Village. At the time she had been living with Charlie in a small flat in nearby Tufnell Park and had been too embarrassed for him to pick her up from where she lived. More particularly, she didn’t want him to come inside and see the books and toys belonging to her six-year-old son. She had never denied Charlie’s existence at work, but had felt it better to keep the fact that she had a child low-key. She loved her temporary admin job at the Denver Group and she didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise it. Besides, she was realistic enough to know that being a single mum did not help your dating prospects, no matter how attractive men found you.

  It had been a warm Saturday, much like this one. Julian had been wearing chinos and a white shirt, and she had been pleased to see that he looked nervous. She knew she was playing with fire dating Julian Denver. Not only was he the boss, but she had also heard through the secretarial rumour mill of his reputation with the ladies. He had led her to his car and she had half expected him to take her into town – to one of the flashy restaurants or hotels she knew his sort frequented. But instead they had driven the short distance to Hampstead Heath. They had sat outside Kenwood House with ice creams and gone to the Spaniards Inn for lunch, when Julian had told her all the folk tales and legends associated with the pub. How Keats had written his most famous poem here. How Dick Turpin had stopped here for a tankard of beer. How the owners – two brothers – had ended up duelling over a lover.

  She and Julian had just clicked. And when he’d d
riven her back to Tufnell Park, without even asking her address, finally admitting that he’d looked it up on the human resources database, she knew that their fledgling romance had a future.

  Much as she hadn’t wanted the evening to end, she hadn’t invited him into her flat. She’d played it right all day and didn’t want to ruin everything by having him step on a plastic fire engine. Years later, when she knew him better, she saw that it had been a clever move. Julian wasn’t used to being turned down, and he loved a challenge. Diana’s apparent reticence made him all the more intrigued, the one woman in London who seemed to be able to resist him. Inadvertently, she had played it perfectly.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Adam, stopping the Aston Martin in a small dusty car park on top of the hill.

  Diana stood and waited for him to unload a navy nylon bag from out of the boot.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said, putting it under his arm and striding ahead.

  He led her up a shady path. On either side was a sun-dappled wood, bursting with summer flowers. Butterflies and insects flitted through the dusty beams of light breaking through the leaves. Ever since Julian’s death, Diana had found it hard to see the beauty in things. But this was perfect.

  At the top of the hill they came out of the wood and the ground fell away; they were standing on the edge of a steep drop, with a view out over the Dorset hills, and off in the distance the hazy blue of the coast.

  ‘Look at it,’ said Diana, feeling the wind on her face.

  ‘I thought you’d like it,’ grinned Adam. ‘We used to run around here when I was at school. I hated cross-country. You’d come up here rain and shine, but no matter how much your legs were hurting and your lungs were crying out for mercy, this view would kind of pull you out of it.’

  She watched him unzip the carrying case.

  ‘A kite,’ she said, feeling lightened.

  ‘No idea how to use the bloody thing.’

  She couldn’t imagine where he had got a kite from since last night, but she was glad that he had.

  He took hold of the frame and walked backwards with it, instructing Diana to keep hold of the string. When he was far enough away, he launched it into the air and Diana paid out the line, shrieking with glee as the kite soared higher and higher into the sky, dancing around the gulls, stretching to touch the clouds.

  ‘Go on! Run with it!’ he shouted, his voice muffled on the breeze. ‘But stay away from the edge.’

  The kite was flapping wildly, and as she ran as fast as she could, she could feel a little of her dark mood lift out of her into the air.

  Finally the kite tumbled back to earth. Diana was too emotional to speak.

  ‘We should probably be getting back,’ said Adam, squinting at the sun as though he was gauging the time like an ancient mariner. She felt a stab of disappointment, and wondered where he had to run off to this time.

  ‘The traffic will be murder.’

  It was almost seven o’clock by the time they arrived back at Somerfold. As they drove past the lake, they saw the lights on at the boathouse and an unfamiliar car pulling up outside.

  ‘Rachel must have a visitor,’ mused Diana out loud.

  Adam stopped the Aston outside the main entrance. He hopped out of the vehicle and opened the door for Diana.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘I have to get back to London.’

  She smiled, hoping to mask her disappointment.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ she said finally.

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for showing me that days don’t have to be so dark.’

  He stepped forward and planted a light fraternal kiss on her forehead.

  ‘You’re shivering.’

  ‘It’s cold when the sun goes down,’ she said, not wanting to meet his gaze.

  He said his goodbyes and she stood at the door of Somerfold until his tail lights had disappeared from sight.

  18

  ‘Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve come on a mini-break,’ said Ross McKiney, standing in the doorway of the boathouse, casting his eyes from side to side to take it all in. ‘Look at this place. It’s like something from one of those posh interiors magazines.’

  ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it?’ smiled Rachel, beckoning him inside. ‘Although I think I’m only here because Diana doesn’t want me in the big house. This is supposed to be my punishment.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind some punishment like this,’ said Ross, his eyes still wide.

  Rachel shook her head. ‘Anyone would think you’ve never seen a tree before,’ she teased.

  ‘We don’t have trees where I live,’ said Ross. ‘Council cuts.’

  ‘Let me open the doors,’ she said, pulling back the floor-to-ceiling plate glass so that balmy evening air tumbled into the house. She was willing to bet that Ross hadn’t been on a holiday in the last five years – the least she could do was make this evening as convivial as possible.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve driven all the way out here,’ she said, noticing that he’d had a haircut in the twenty-four hours since they had last met. He looked smart, professional, not the neglected, semi-employed hermit she had seen yesterday.

  ‘You said daily updates.’

  ‘A phone call would have done,’ she grinned.

  ‘You know me. I give you more bang for your buck.’

  ‘That’s what all the ladies say,’ she teased, clearing the mess off the sofa so that he could sit down. ‘So. I see you’re driving. I have some zero-alcohol beer if you fancy one.’

  ‘Go on. We can pretend.’

  She went to the kitchen, returning with drinks and bowls of crisps and nuts. She hadn’t found the local shop yet and had been subsisting on the snacks that Mrs Bills had originally left for her.

  ‘Seen your mum yet?’ asked Ross as he opened his laptop.

  ‘Saw her the day I came to Clapton to see you.’

  ‘So you survived the encounter?’

  ‘Barely,’ she replied. ‘She’s been avoiding me since I got back from Thailand. Diana engineered a meeting where she practically accused me of being Satan. She came back to Somerfold this morning. Curiosity couldn’t keep her away, I bet.’

  She watched Ross click open some files on the desktop.

  ‘You’ve been busy.’

  ‘I don’t mess around,’ he said.

  Rachel gulped down her Becks Zero, anxious to see what he had come up with. She had been trying to do things the proper way – interviewing Julian’s friends and colleagues, searching through his possessions – but she had yet to make a breakthrough. By any means necessary, she thought, looking at Ross and remembering an old maxim from the newsroom.

  ‘So I managed to get into Julian’s Flypedia account,’ he said, sticking a pencil behind his ear.

  ‘I won’t ask how.’

  ‘Here’s what those payments you circled were for.’ He started to read from the screen. ‘One economy flight from Washington Dulles airport to London Heathrow in the name of Madison Kopek. Flight from Washington to Montego Bay also in the name of Madison Kopek. One flight London to Montego economy class in the name of Julian Denver. One return flight economy to Bucharest, Julian Denver.’

  Rachel looked at him with puzzlement.

  ‘Julian was flying economy? He was worth a few billion quid and he had a Gulfstream V. What the hell was he doing flying economy to Jamaica and Romania?’

  ‘No idea what he was doing in Romania, but you can guess what he was up to in Jamaica.’

  ‘A nice little assignation in the sun,’ she said as her brain caught up with her mouth.

  ‘And imagine you’re well known, you’ve been in the papers, but you want to travel abroad without an
yone noticing. If you’re a high-profile billionaire like Julian, off to meet a lady friend, you just travel economy on a scheduled airline.’

  Rachel whistled through her teeth, not wanting to speak ill of the dead.

  ‘So who is Kopek? Have you tracked her down?’

  Ross glanced at her. ‘You can be bossy, you know that?’

  Rachel smiled. It was funny how easily she and Ross had slipped back into their old working relationship. Blunt, to the point, dispensing with pleasantries, getting the job done. It felt good, she had to admit.

  Ross clicked on a file, and an image of a young, beautiful, blue-eyed blonde filled the screen.

  ‘Diana’s basic nightmare,’ said Rachel, knowing in the pit of her stomach that this was the woman Greg Willets had seen his friend with outside the Four Seasons.

  ‘Not any more,’ said Ross. ‘She’s dead.’

  He pulled up another window: a small online newspaper report.

  ‘Madison Kopek, twenty-one, a student from Maryland,’ he read, ‘was killed in a hit-and-run in College Park Thursday evening. Paramedics tried to revive her at the scene, but she was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.’

  Rachel read the full report. Her head was reeling as she tried to process all the information.

  ‘So she died two days before Julian killed himself?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Shit,’ she whispered.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Rachel stood up and walked over to the window, the penny dropping with a dreadful thud.

  ‘So let’s assume Madison was a girlfriend; if Julian was in love with her, he could have been grief-stricken – that’s enough of a reason for doing what he did.’

  She pressed her fingertips against her temples. She had no idea how she was going to explain this to her sister, and knew instinctively that she had to protect her from it. She tried to make her mind twist the facts around to come to a more palatable conclusion.

  ‘According to Diana, Julian seemed cheerful that night. He was talking about the future, making plans. If you were cut up about your dead mistress, how do you hide something like that?’