‘Is that why you’ve been keeping tabs on me, Adam? Come to Jersey, come dancing, come to Oxford, share your burden with me. You just wanted to know what I knew, what I had discovered in the investigation. I can’t believe I was so gullible.’ And I can’t believe I almost had sex with you, she added to herself. She just wanted to shower, to scrub him off her. She could still taste him in her mouth, feel his sweat on her hands, see a tiny spot of her lipstick on his ear lobe.
‘Rachel, don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, stepping forward. ‘What happened in Oxford happened because I like you, because I’m attracted to you.’
‘Save it,’ she snapped. ‘They are right about you. What they say in the papers, in the Denver boardroom. You are the playboy brother; it is all a game to you. And you’re everything a player should be: charming, handsome – and weak.’ She spat out the last word.
‘See it from my point of view, Rachel,’ he said, his voice pleading.
‘Oh, I do, Adam. I really do. And it isn’t pretty.’
She willed herself to think. Of course it looked bad that Adam had known all about Rheladrex. And whilst she could believe that his greed and his warped morals had made him want to stop Julian from pulling the drug off the market, he had neither the cold-heartedness nor the balls to do anything about it.
‘Just tell me: who else knows about the report?’
She knew the answer even before he had said it.
‘I gave a copy to Elizabeth,’ he said sheepishly. ‘She is in line to be CEO after all. She needs to know, she needs to be up to speed on all this if legal action starts against Rheladrex.’ He looked at Rachel curiously. ‘What’s wrong? Why shouldn’t I have told Elizabeth?’
She felt cold with fear. Images were flashing on to her retinas. Julian. Elizabeth. A coffin. Elizabeth sitting in the boss’s chair with a wintry, triumphant smile.
Adam grabbed her shoulders and shook her as if she were in a trance.
‘Rachel, tell me. What’s wrong?’
She shrugged him away violently. ‘Just go,’ she said, putting her hands up in front of her, wanting to block him out of sight.
‘All I did was read the report. All I did was tell Liz.’
‘That’s all,’ she said quietly, feeling so out of her depth, she thought she was about to drown.
58
Diana gripped her mother’s hand and looked anxiously at the blank screen to the side of her bed.
‘Just relax, my love,’ said the nurse as the sonographer busied herself with the equipment. ‘You won’t feel a thing and it will only take a few minutes.’
‘It’s going to be okay,’ said Sylvia, looking as nervous as her daughter felt.
As the technician inserted a wand-type instrument inside her, anxiety gripped Diana so severely she could hardly draw breath, but suddenly grainy black-and-white images began to appear on the little monitor.
‘Is that it?’ Diana whispered, although she couldn’t make anything out.
‘No, not yet,’ said the woman distractedly. ‘Just need to get our bearings.’
The door of the examining room opened, and Diana could see Rachel peering into the room. She locked eyes with her sister. There was so much at stake, so many questions, so many answers she didn’t want to hear.
‘There we go,’ said the sonographer. ‘I can see it. Just do a quick check of everything, take a few little measurements . . .’
She could feel Rachel by her side, stroking her shoulder. The sonographer looked up and smiled.
‘Would you like to see?’
Diana nodded. Her heart was thumping so hard, she wasn’t sure if the noise was coming from her own chest or the medical equipment. The woman turned the monitor towards her and then clicked a button, freezing the image in the centre of the screen.
‘See here?’ she said, pointing with her pen. ‘Can you see the curve of the spine? And here, the shape of the head?’
Diana gasped. She could – and were those tiny legs? The woman clicked the button and the picture started moving again. ‘Can you see baby moving?’ she said. ‘And right in the middle, there’s the heart beating.’
‘The heart?’ croaked Diana. Her baby? ‘So . . . so what does that mean? It’s an actual baby? It’s all right?’
The sonographer laughed. ‘Yes, an actual baby. And as far as we can tell, it wasn’t at all hurt by your fall; it looks completely healthy.’
Diana squeezed her eyes closed and willed herself to connect with Julian. His soul, his spirit. She just wanted to say sorry. Sorry that she couldn’t have given him his own child; sorry that she had conceived with his brother.
‘I’d say you were about eight weeks,’ said the sonographer more slowly.
‘Eight weeks?’ whispered Diana, snapping her eyes back open. ‘Are you sure?’
‘You can’t tell too much from early scans. But I would say around eight or nine weeks, yes.’
She was eight weeks pregnant.
She shook her head in disbelief. She counted back the weeks, working out the approximate time of conception. A moment flashed into her head, although it felt so long ago it was as if it belonged to another lifetime. It had been a matter of days before his death. Julian had come back from London, slipped into bed and had initiated sex. It had been painful, uncomfortable, and she had been certain that he hadn’t come inside her. But obviously it had been more successful than she’d thought. She started to tremble, fat tears clouding her vision.
She covered her face and began to bawl. ‘It’s his,’ she sobbed. ‘The baby’s his.’
It wasn’t Adam’s baby. It was Julian’s. He was alive. Julian was alive, and he was inside her.
59
Rachel looked around the Admiral Nelson pub in Victoria and decided it was quite appropriate that she should be here. It was an authentic copper’s pub that sold a decent pint of draught bitter and had scampi fries and pork scratchings behind the bar, an almost extinct type of watering hole; the Last Chance Saloon, she told herself ruefully as she waited for Inspector Mark Graham to arrive.
The past few days had gone by in a blur. Rachel had moved her stuff up from the Lake House to Somerfold and had tried to share Diana’s bittersweet joy about her pregnancy. Realising how difficult it must be for Diana anticipating the arrival of a child who would never know its father, her priority was to support her sister. But despite her fears that Diana might fall to pieces, Rachel had instead witnessed a surprising show of strength, a renewed sense of purpose that she herself was sadly lacking.
Rachel knew why she felt so helpless and defeated. There was no end in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel. She had discovered that Julian had been having an affair and had wanted to withdraw a controversial drug from the market. But she was still no clearer about whether those two things had anything to do with his death – or nothing at all.
The plane ticket to Thailand that Liam had given her felt as if it was glowing with temptation. The flight departed in less than forty-eight hours. If she wasn’t on it, would she ever go back to Ko Tao, she wondered, or would she be stuck in London chasing her tail, like a lost soul trapped in the underworld, as everyone else, even Diana, moved on?
‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Graham, sitting down on the banquette next to her and disturbing her thoughts. ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’
‘You don’t mess around, do you?’ said Rachel, watching him compose a text message.
Graham looked up and smiled at her. ‘Listen, I have a wife and four kids to get back to and I’ll catch earache off all of them if I’m home a minute later than I have to be.’
‘Then I’ll be quick. I need you to interview Elizabeth Denver.’ Rachel sipped her Diet Coke and observed the policeman.
Graham put down his phone and frowned. ‘I’ve already spoken to Elizabeth Denver
.’
‘And what did she say?’ she asked, searching his face for some sort of clue to how his investigation was going.
‘Wait for the inquest,’ he replied flatly.
‘Look, you were right about me. I’ve been looking into this myself . . .’
‘You surprise me,’ he said sarcastically as he unfastened a couple of buttons on his suit jacket.
She didn’t want to tell him about Julian’s affair with Madison Kopek, but she knew she had to give him something to keep him interested. There was no one thing that pointed directly to Elizabeth’s involvement in her brother’s death. If this was a story, if she was presenting it before the editor and the newspaper’s legal team, she would have nothing concrete to show them. But Elizabeth had been ruthless enough to destroy her brother once, and Rachel just knew that she was capable of doing it, more efficiently, more literally, again.
‘Julian was looking into a new drug produced by Denver’s pharmaceutical division when he died. He wanted to pull it off the market and it’s my belief that there were people in the company who didn’t want that to happen.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like his sister, Elizabeth Denver. She knew all about his plans. She is a big shareholder in Denver, with ambitions for the top job, and she won’t have been happy about it. Pulling the drug would have had serious repercussions for the potential sale price of the pharmaceutical division, which would then impact on the share price of the company.’
She stopped, reminding herself of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It was something that now struck a chord. However many times she voiced her fears about Rheladrex, there was no guarantee that it would bring her any nearer to finding out the truth about Julian’s death. As Liam had pointed out, she was beginning to sound like a fantasist.
‘Look,’ she said more reasonably. ‘I know that no one could have got into Julian’s house that night. I get that it was probably suicide. But I just don’t trust Elizabeth Denver and I can’t help thinking that she was involved in this. Have you been through her emails, her phone records?’
‘Looking for what?’
‘Elizabeth wanted Julian out of the picture. There are ways to have that done.’
‘You think she killed him? Or had him killed? Is that what you’re saying?’ said Graham incredulously.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more,’ she said, throwing her hands in the air.
‘Have you thought about seeing someone about this?’
‘Yes! You,’ she said, sitting more upright. ‘I mean, Elizabeth won’t speak to me. I’ve called her a dozen times, and each time it’s gone to voicemail.’
Understandable, she thought. The last time she had seen Elizabeth Denver was when she had blackmailed her to stop her contesting Julian’s will.
‘But you can do something. You can speak to her in an official capacity. You should also confirm cause of death with the pathologist who did Julian’s post-mortem. You said yourself a murder could be dressed up as suicide. It would just have to be a professional who did it and Elizabeth Denver has the power, the resources to order that. I mean, what if an assassin came down the chimney or something . . .’
‘I mean speak to a therapist,’ said Graham slowly.
She hesitated in disbelief. ‘Me? See a therapist?’
Graham nodded. ‘Just because Julian was not direct family doesn’t mean to say you are not grieving. I know you had quite a complicated relationship with your brother-in-law,’ he said diplomatically. ‘Because of it you are probably trying to work through a lot of emotions, a lot of guilt. I understand how this is a difficult time for you. I understand that letting go is hard.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.
Inspector Graham looked at her sympathetically. She knew she looked a mess. She hadn’t washed her hair since the lake swim with Adam Denver, she had an angry red spot on her chin and her jeans hadn’t been cleaned in a week. She had never been one for high levels of personal grooming – the last time she had had a professional blow-dry had been for Diana’s wedding – but she knew there was no excuse for her tramp-like appearance. No wonder Graham thought she was crazy.
‘Forget it,’ she said, holding up her hand. ‘You’ve got a wife and four kids to get back to, I know. Just go.’
‘Rachel, please. I know you’re trying to help.’
‘I have to leave,’ she said, getting up.
She left the pub, regretting her impulsiveness almost immediately. She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets and started walking down the street. It was getting dark and there was a chill in the air. The roads were jammed, the bus lanes clogged with traffic, but despite the noise, London seemed cavernous and lonely. She quickened her pace, glad that she had checked herself into a hotel in Victoria, glad that she didn’t have to trek all the way back to Somerfold.
She was running out of options, she thought miserably. Rachel Miller had never been somebody who liked to fail at anything. Looking back at her childhood, she knew it was the real reason she had given up competitive swimming. Boys and a social life had just been a convenient excuse. She had given up because she was never going to be the best and she had known when and how to bow out gracefully.
She was in the hotel lobby when her mobile rang.
Liam’s name flashed up on caller ID and her heart galloped. She hadn’t wanted to admit to herself how much she was missing him. Hadn’t wanted to admit that his departure, his rejection of her had in some way contributed to her sexual misadventures with Adam. At least that was what she had been telling herself.
‘Liam,’ she said with surprise. It was a moment before she worked out that it was almost 3 a.m. in Thailand, and the thought unsettled her immediately. ‘Is everything okay? It’s late.’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
Her pulse beat with hope. Had he been lying in bed thinking about her?
There was a lag on the line.
‘So I looked through the security tape you asked me to.’
‘Oh.’ She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or flattered.
‘Something struck me as odd.’
She reverted instantly to business mode. Suddenly she wasn’t thinking about Liam in bed, but sitting in front of a computer screen, wearing his intelligent black-framed glasses, his sharp brain in full throttle.
‘Did you find anything? On the footage, I mean?’
‘There was a lot of it.’
‘You’ve been through it all?’ she said with surprise.
‘I’ve had bad jet lag.’
‘I’d say it was a fairly good cure for insomnia.’
‘So you’ve been through it too?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed.
‘And you were looking for someone coming into the house.’
‘To see if it was foul play, yeah.’
‘I just wondered if we were looking at this from the wrong angle.’ He paused before he spoke again. ‘What if no one came in?’
‘I don’t understand.’ Rachel frowned.
‘What if someone was already in the house?’
‘You mean the catering team?’ replied Rachel. ‘I’ve already asked Diana about them. She was horrified at the thought that they could have had anything to do with it. The owner is a good friend of hers. She’d used them many times before.’
‘I don’t mean the caterers, Rach,’ said Liam. ‘I mean the guests.’
‘The guests?’
‘I know it sounds crazy, but just hear me out. Are you near a computer?’
‘I’m at a hotel. I’ll just go to my room.’
She ran up the stairs, pushed her key card into the room lock and went inside. She flipped open her laptop and logged into
her mail.
‘I’m sending something through now.’
A few seconds later there was a ping.
‘Okay,’ said Rachel into the phone, clicking on his message. ‘I’m opening the file.’
Immediately she could see a grainy screen-grab from the footage. It was time-stamped 19:48 and was a reasonably clear picture of an attractive blonde woman.
‘Do you know who that was?’ asked Liam.
‘I’ve never met her, but I identified all the guests with Diana. The blonde came with Greg Willets.’
‘Well, she never left the party.’
‘Never left?’
‘I’ve looked at everyone coming in and cross-referenced them with everyone leaving. Everyone who came in also left. With the exception of Greg’s girlfriend.’
Rachel cursed herself for not having looked at the footage that way.
‘Are you sure?’ she said, scrabbling through her bag to see if she had her own copy.
‘Pretty sure. I’ve been through the relevant bits a couple of times now. I’ve ticked all the guests in and out – and I can’t see this woman leaving the house. Her partner, Greg, left at about a quarter to twelve, when most guests seem to go.’
The disc was in her bag. She pushed it into the laptop and it whirred to life.
‘I’m going to go and look at it now. Thanks, Liam. Thank you, so much.’
There was a long silence. It was as if he was about to say something and then stopped himself.
‘What?’ she asked quietly.
‘Just show it to the police and come home.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘Rachel, I’m not messing about here. Will you please fucking come home.’
She rarely heard him swear and it shocked her.
‘I can’t. Not yet,’ she said, feeling tears well up in her eyes.
‘I didn’t think so,’ he said, his voice softening again.
Another long lag.
Deep Blue Sea Page 42
