Deep Blue Sea

by Tasmina Perry

  Rachel hadn’t paid much attention to Joyce and Chaucer; instead she had spent her time at the Coach and Horses in Soho, the middle of the epicentre. One evening she had got talking to a guy called Simon who worked for artist Darius Cooper, the controversial leader of the New British Art Movement. According to Simon, who was clearly trying to impress Rachel into bed, Darius never did any of his own work; instead he picked paintings and sculptures from a group of promising students who were then sworn to secrecy as he sold the works to galleries for hundreds of thousands, giving the students a minuscule cut of the proceeds. Drunk and giggling, Simon had let Rachel into Darius’s studio in then-unfashionable Shoreditch, where three of his artists were hard at work. Two bottles of vodka later and the students were all happy to tell her the details of the scam, even offering to pose for pictures.

  By ten the next morning, Rachel had written an exposé entitled ‘The Great Art Swindle: How Darius Cooper Lied To The Nation’. She took it straight to London’s Daily Post, where she talked her way into the news editor’s cramped office. The story ran the next day with the Post’s chief reporter’s byline attached, but Rachel was up and running, trawling the bars of Soho and Camden for scurrilous gossip.

  A few weeks later, she scored again with a story about the singer in a squeaky-clean girl band. Rachel had happened to see her entering a toilet cubicle in a nightclub with a notorious drug-user. Bribing the toilet attendant to close the ladies’ for an hour, she had called a friend doing a PhD in chemistry, who had rushed down with the necessary solutions and swabs to test the top of the cistern for cocaine. The positive result had been enough to create the headline ‘Pop Poppet in Drugs Quiz’ – and to get Rachel back into the news editor’s office, this time with a job offer. Her timing was perfect: the Post was low on female reporters. Besides, while there was no way the new breed of Britpop stars were going to talk to gnarled old-school hacks, they were happy to swap gossip with a pretty, street-smart girl who could match them drink for drink. Rachel quickly discovered that the newspaper was a true meritocracy: they didn’t care who you were as long as you kept the stories coming in. And the more stories you brought in, the higher and faster your promotion. She quit university and joined the Post. Within six months she had moved over to the Sunday edition as deputy features editor; within a year, she was running the showbiz desk. She had certainly been right about London being the place where things could happen.

  ‘This it, love?’

  The cab had pulled into Finsbury Square, right on the edge of the City. The railed garden in the centre of the square was dark and locked, but the lights were still on in most of the buildings towering over it. The city that never sleeps, thought Rachel with a smile.

  ‘Yes, just over there, the one with the steps.’

  The entrance to the Denver Group HQ was large and imposing, complete with marble pillars and three receptionists in headsets, even at this late hour. Rachel was given a security pass and shown to a lift, which opened and chose the floor without her having to touch a button. Impressive, she thought.

  A tall, austere-looking woman met her as she stepped out on to the eighth floor. She was much more the old-school secretary rather than the more glamorous and dynamic MBA-wielding personal assistant favoured by the rich and powerful these days.

  ‘Anne-Marie?’ said Rachel, offering her hand.

  ‘You’re late,’ said the woman, turning on her heel.

  Charming, thought Rachel as she followed her along a corridor past glass-fronted offices, some empty, others occupied by people peering intently at screens or jabbering into telephones.

  ‘In here, please,’ said Anne-Marie, holding open a door to a small office. Rachel sized her up as she took out her notebook. Late fifties, possibly single – no ring, anyway – certainly hostile if her expression was anything to go by. She wondered idly if Diana had demanded that Julian hire a secretary who was impossible to find attractive, even for a womaniser. She tried not to smile at the thought.

  ‘Well, thank you for speaking to me, Ms Carr,’ she said.

  ‘You can dispense with the niceties, Miss Miller,’ said the woman. ‘You are only here because Mr Denver’s wife specifically requested that I co-operate with you.’

  ‘I am only trying to find out the truth about Julian, Ms Carr,’ said Rachel as pleasantly as she could.

  ‘I imagine that’s what you said to yourself the last time too. You’ve got a nerve, you know that? Do you know how much damage you did to that family?’

  Rachel nodded slowly. ‘It’s why I’m here. To try and make amends.’

  The secretary’s expression clearly communicated that she was sceptical about whether that was possible.

  ‘Can we go into Julian’s office?’ asked Rachel. She wanted to see his personal space.

  ‘Very well,’ replied Anne-Marie disapprovingly.

  She led Rachel to a corner office that was as big as her entire flat in Ko Tao. It had floor-to-ceiling windows through which the City glittered with dots of light and shadow.

  ‘I’ve started packing,’ she said more softly. Rachel noticed the pile of boxes along one side of the room. The contents of the desk remained untouched. She could see a photo of Diana in a silver frame; one of Julian, Diana and Charlie in another. There was a copy of the Economist, a stack of Post-it notes, and a bottle of water by the phone. A desk waiting for its owner to return.

  Anne-Marie blinked hard, as if shutting out emotion.

  ‘So,’ she asked more briskly, ‘what do you want to know?’

  ‘You sat outside his office twelve hours of every day. How did he seem in the weeks leading up to his death?’

  ‘You mean did he seem suicidal?’

  Rachel nodded.

  ‘If he had done, I would have alerted somebody to that, of course. But he didn’t seem any different. A little stressed and short-tempered sometimes, but that goes with the territory with this job. Sadly I was not privy to his inner thoughts. Who knows what made him do such a thing.’

  ‘So he didn’t seem down or upset by anything?’

  ‘The day of the . . . incident, he came into the office as normal. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. He was a little distracted, perhaps. Then again, he had his wife on the phone a lot about the party. Julian never really enjoyed socialising in the way that his siblings do.’

  ‘So he wasn’t looking forward to the party?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  Rachel tried a different approach.

  ‘Julian and his team were doing a great job at Denver, weren’t they?’

  Anne-Marie couldn’t hide a small smile at that.

  ‘Julian was always too modest to blow his own trumpet, but he was doing a good job considering . . .’

  ‘Considering what?’

  She looked thoughtful. ‘Well, like many companies you see around the City, the group had been affected by the recession.’

  ‘I was under the impression it was doing well.’

  ‘It is, considering the climate. I’m not an accountant or an analyst, but the mood around here has been buoyant. I put that down to Julian. He was a good leader.’

  Another small smile.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a little bit in love with my brother-in-law, thought Rachel. Anne-Marie, you dark horse.

  ‘Why do you think he did it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve no interest in gossip,’ Anne-Marie said quickly, but Rachel could see that she was becoming emotional.

  ‘Anne-Marie, please. You must have known him as well as anyone.’

  ‘I don’t know what pushed him over the edge. What I do know is that he was doing an incredibly high-pressure job and perhaps all it took was the tiniest of things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You might think di
fferently, Miss Miller, but Julian was a very decent man. Let me show you something,’ she said, standing up and beckoning Rachel to follow her into a side room stacked with files and boxes. She pulled a cardboard storage container off a top shelf and placed it on the table. ‘This is only a small sample,’ she said, taking out a sheaf of papers.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Letters to Julian. Or rather, to the CEO of Denver Group. Complaints, gripes, suggestions, even proposals.’ She pulled one out and handed it to Rachel. It was written in red ink, a scrawled angry hand, and it began ‘Dear Blood-sucker’.

  ‘We used to get a lot of this on the newspaper,’ said Rachel. ‘People with too much time on their hands.’

  Anne-Marie pursed her lips at the mention of Rachel’s previous career. That was a misstep, thought Rachel, cursing herself.

  ‘Not all of these letters are from attention-seekers,’ Anne-Marie went on, her tone noticeably less warm. ‘In fact, many are genuine.’ She pulled out a thick file and opened it on the table.

  ‘All these are complaints about a helipad that serviced some of the more remote Scottish islands. Denver owned the heliport and were closing it down; someone in management believed it was no longer viable since North Sea oil has begun to run out. There are people here accusing Julian of destroying their lives, their communities, their relationships. Some are quite vitriolic; others are just downright heartbreaking. He’s even had death threats. You know, Miss Miller, if Julian had been murdered, there would be hundreds, if not thousands of suspects in these files. But he always tried to do his best for them.’

  Rachel frowned at her. ‘He knew about these letters?’

  ‘He got someone on the team to answer every single one of them.’

  ‘All of them?’ said Rachel incredulously.

  ‘You know, we get all these hotshot business school graduates in here: Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD. And they all want to be CEO. They see the prestige, the money, the power, and they think that’s all there is to it. Yes, Julian Denver was wealthy, but I wouldn’t have swapped my position with him in a month of Sundays.’

  She put the letters back in the box.

  ‘You see, Miss Miller, to be a really great CEO you have to be tough. Thick-skinned, ruthless, but not in the way you think – stabbing people in the back, insider dealing, all that. Yes, Julian could do that too if the situation required it, but it’s much harder to have to make unpopular decisions; you have to be able to lay off a thousand people before Christmas and then sleep easy at night.’

  ‘Do you think that bothered him?’

  The woman shook her head to indicate her disapproval.

  ‘Do you really believe any of these questions will bring him back?’ she asked, her face set in stone. ‘What good do you imagine it will do?’

  ‘It will set his wife’s mind at rest.’

  ‘Really? Is that what you think?’

  ‘Don’t you? Honestly, Ms Carr, if you know some—’

  ‘Honestly?’ spat the secretary. ‘What would you know about honesty? Mrs Denver is a decent woman and I agreed to speak to you for her sake, but if you care for your sister at all’ – the woman’s expression suggested she didn’t believe that for a moment – ‘then you will go back to wherever you came from and drop all this nonsense right now.’

  ‘Please, Anne-Marie,’ said Rachel, ‘I only wanted to—’

  ‘Good night, Miss Miller,’ said the woman, walking to the door of the office and holding it open. ‘I trust you can find your own way to the lift.’

  12

  Diana had never been to a shrink before. Sometimes, in the early days of her marriage to Julian, when she had felt so excluded and lonely, she had considered it, had even looked up a few numbers. But something had stopped her; the shame of it, probably. Not that there seemed to be much stigma about it in the circles she mixed in – women in Kensington and Notting Hill talked quite openly about sessions with their therapist. It was as if they were talking about popping down to the Cowshed Spa for a massage, and perhaps that was the way they looked at it: a soothing session for a tired or stressed mind, in exactly the same way you’d give physio to a knee injured during a spinning session. But Diana wasn’t like those women, she didn’t come from their world; she’d grown up in small-town Devon. If you had problems there, you went to friends and family; if you needed anything more, well, there was always the loony bin.

  This isn’t the loony bin, thought Diana. This was a discreet Edwardian house on a leafy street in Highgate, the sort of private clinic that had a brass plaque on the door, the sort of place where wealthy people came to get the very best care. There were leather sofas and big pot plants in the corner of the waiting room, which was decorated in subdued Farrow and Ball – Elephant’s Breath, she recognised – and Colefax and Fowler, designed to make rich women feel at home, she supposed. She looked up from the month-old copy of Country Life she had been pretending to read. The only other person – patient? – in the waiting room was a pretty woman in her early thirties. Well-dressed and groomed, she was using one of her perfectly manicured nails to pick at something on her Chanel skirt. Pick, pick, pick; she kept doing it until Diana had to look away. Am I like her? Am I just obsessively picking at something that isn’t there?

  ‘Diana Denver?’

  She looked up. ‘Olga Shapiro,’ said a woman standing by the door. ‘Would you like to come this way?’

  Dr Shapiro was younger than she had expected – prettier too, with long blond hair and a pencil skirt that showed off her figure – but she had come highly recommended. The consulting room was a surprise too: vaguely Swedish, with a modernist grey sofa and an oval mustard rug, a big splash of colour in the middle of the room.

  The therapist sat in a chair opposite Diana and tilted her head.

  ‘Not what you were expecting?’

  ‘I was imagining a life coach sort of thing,’ said Diana. ‘More New Age. Or maybe something Dickensian. You know, full of books and dust and photos of philosophers on the walls.’

  ‘Would you be more comfortable in those surroundings?’

  ‘No, not really,’ said Diana, feeling as if the analysis had already begun. ‘It’s just this seems a bit more formal, like a real doctor’s. A bit too . . . medical.’

  ‘And if it’s a real doctor’s, then whatever is troubling you must be really serious, is that it?’

  Diana gave a nervous laugh. ‘Yes, something like that.’

  ‘Well, let me put your mind at rest. I’m not here to judge you or assess you or trick you into saying anything, I’m just here to listen. So let’s have a chat, talk about what brought you here and take it from there. You should see if you like me first, see if we hit it off. No pressure, okay?’

  Diana nodded, relieved. She had thought that sitting in the therapist’s chair would be like awaiting Stasi interrogation under a hot and unyielding spotlight.

  ‘All right, do you want to tell me how you’re feeling?’

  She looked down at her hands. ‘Well, I lost my husband ten days ago. So I’m not feeling too great, as you might imagine.’

  ‘Grief is one of the hardest emotions to predict, actually. There are lots of different ways people experience it, but it does tend to go through stages. How are you feeling about it right now?’

  ‘I feel . . . mad.’

  ‘Mad?’

  ‘No, not insane or anything,’ said Diana quickly. ‘I mean in the American sense, you know? Angry, but not only that. I’m frustrated and irritated and I just can’t seem to get my head around it.’

  Olga Shapiro nodded. ‘It’s only logical that you’re going to be overwhelmed with emotions at a time like this. You can’t expect to be able to process it all in the space of a week. May I ask how your husband died?’

  ‘Suicide; at least that’s what they’re saying.
’

  ‘I see. And you don’t agree with that assessment?’

  ‘I don’t know. Really I don’t. There are too many questions and there shouldn’t be. Death is supposed to be a full stop, isn’t it, an end, but it doesn’t feel like that. I can’t get closure and it’s sending me mad. I can’t sleep, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a treadmill of mental torture.’

  ‘You don’t feel as if he’s really gone?’

  Diana hung her head, not wanting the woman to see the tears that were forming.

  ‘I can’t accept what has happened because I don’t understand it . . .’

  She choked off and the doctor handed her a box of tissues with a kind smile.

  ‘I’ve had two miscarriages and one stillborn child in the last two years. All that death – or absence of life, whatever – it’s very hard to take.’ She looked up, her eyes pleading. ‘Is it me? Have I done something to make it happen?’

  Olga Shapiro did not react.

  ‘Did you go and see someone about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought I could cope. My husband was very supportive.’

  She felt a surge of panic. The walls of the room were closing in on her, unwelcome pressure bearing in from every side.

  ‘I don’t really want to be here,’ she admitted in a faltering voice.

  ‘Then why are you?’

  She puffed out her cheeks, willing herself to stay in control.

  ‘My father-in-law insisted I see someone. I had an episode at Julian’s funeral. A panic attack. Then I went to Thailand. They think I ran away.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘I went to see my sister.’

  ‘So you don’t think you need professional help?’

  ‘I don’t want to be put on more pills. After my baby died, I was given medication by my doctor to help me sleep. I didn’t like how it made me feel.’

  ‘I’m a psychotherapist, not a psychiatrist. I’m not here to dispense pills. We just talk.’