‘Sorry, I just can’t picture you sitting on top of a tractor, Carl. Wellies would ruin the line of your suit.’
‘Yes, that’s pretty much the attitude my father took when I had to go crawling back to him cap in hand. So I’ve been given an executive role.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re running the farm?’
‘God, no. My two brothers went to Cirencester. I leave all that to them.’
‘So what do you do – milk the cows?’
Carl pulled a sour face. ‘I see the warm climate of Thailand hasn’t taken the sharp edge off your humour, young lady.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a shiny business card.
‘“Carl Kennedy”,’ she read. ‘“Innovations Director”. What’s that mean?’
‘Expanding the business. I thought some glamour needed to be injected into potatoes.’
‘So what have you done?’
‘Crisps, darling, crisps,’ he said.
‘Crisps?’
‘You see, we had two thousand acres of potatoes sitting there, so I came up with the brilliant wheeze of using them for a higher purpose. We’re now turning them into a rather wonderful little brand of boutique crisps. We’ve sold zillions of them, TV ads, celebrity endorsements, sides of buses, the lot. Surely you’ve heard of Sausage Sizzler Tatties?’
‘They haven’t made it as far as Ko Tao, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, I’ll put South East Asia on my five-year plan. Speaking of which, darling, what brings you to this side of the globe?’
Rachel shrugged. ‘Julian, of course.’
Carl nodded. ‘I did hear. All very strange, too, I thought.’
‘Strange? What do you mean?’
‘Well I met him once, do you remember? That godawful awards thing. I have to say, he didn’t strike me as the sort of person to do what he did.’
Rachel nodded. That was pretty much her conclusion too, and suddenly she wanted to tell Carl everything. She had spent the last month wondering who she could trust, wishing she didn’t have so many secrets to hide, but right here was someone she could share it all with.
‘I don’t think it is as cut and dried as you read in the papers.’
‘Do tell,’ said Carl, steepling his hands together.
‘You sure you want to hear all this?’ she asked.
‘Are you kidding? The inside track on one of the hottest stories in the news?’
Rachel took a deep breath and did as she’d been told.
‘Ross McKiney is in a coma?’ said Carl finally, when she had brought him up to date. His serious expression took the wind out of her sails. ‘Talk about a run of shitty luck. I’m glad I’ve moved into potato farming. PI work seems far too hazardous.’
‘For the first time in my working life, I’m scared, Carl.’ She breathed a sigh of relief that she had finally said it. There was no one else to confess to. Liam would worry; Diana was neurotic enough as it was.
‘You know, crisps, scuba-diving, I think it’s a better life for us, Rach.’
‘I’m not giving up,’ she said with a flood of determination. ‘After everything that happened with Malcolm McIntyre, I can’t back off again, let someone off the hook.’
‘And who is the someone?’ he whispered dramatically.
That was the one thing Rachel hadn’t yet figured out, the one thing that made her head spin as she went to sleep at night.
Suddenly she realised that they were only ten minutes’ walk away from where it had all happened, and that the keys to the house were still in her handbag.
‘Come with me,’ she said, pushing the cocktail menu to one side and grabbing his hand.
It was clear that no one had been in the house since she had last left; in fact it looked as if no one had lived here for months, rather than weeks. It was surprising how quickly a home could drain of life. Dust was beginning to settle on the marble mantelpiece in the hallway, and there was the beginnings of a silvery cobweb in the door to the cloakroom.
‘Remind me why you have brought me here? Tell me you don’t want me to conduct a seance, because I only did that once and I’ve not stopped seeing red eyes staring at me from my bedroom wardrobe ever since.’
Rachel turned on the light – a vast crystal chandelier – to try and make the place look less intimidating.
‘I want you to look over the house. You always had that funny ability to see all the different angles, spot things that other people can’t see.’
‘I think you’re referring to my incredible powers of lateral thinking. Beautiful place,’ he said softly as he looked around. ‘You know, fifty, sixty years ago you could have picked this place up for a song. I bet this building was multiple flats, maybe even a squat.’
‘Times change. You wouldn’t get change out of forty million for it now.’
‘Look at this. Fingerprint-access locks, video surveillance. This is state-of-the-art,’ said Carl. ‘If there’re cameras in this place, does that mean you have security film?’
She had got hold of a copy of the video surveillance footage on her first day in England.
‘Yes, and most of it’s static shots of the stairs where nothing happens for three hours. In the dark. James Bond it ain’t.’
Rachel left Carl examining the doors in the study and wandered back into the kitchen. Forty million pounds. And that was just one of the assets that Julian had bequeathed his wife. What would she do with forty million? she thought idly. She’d have a pretty good go at trying to spend it, that was for sure. Yachts, jets, Caribbean islands, tanned muscular waiters bearing cool towels and cocktails – that would be a start.
In many ways, she could see that Julian had done Diana a huge favour. She had hated his narrow little dinner-party circle with his superior friends like Greg Willets, and now she was free of them. She never had to eat another canapé or make polite conversation about so-and-so’s divorce or face lift. She could go anywhere she chose. If Julian had lived, the money would still be there in the bank, the Denvers would still be as wealthy, but Diana would be obliged to live this uptight, predictable and frankly deathly dull life.
‘Tight as a gnat’s arse, this place,’ announced Carl, joining her in the kitchen. ‘I’m not surprised the police didn’t think anyone could get in. As far as I can see, there aren’t any blind spots on the CCTV camera. There wouldn’t be with a security system this sophisticated. My only thinking is that if it was foul play, then it must have been someone already in the house.’
‘You mean Diana?’ She thought about her sister’s diary. Which she had tried to put out of her mind since she had read it.
Carl shrugged. ‘It’s possible.’
‘Of course it’s not possible,’ she blustered. ‘Why on earth would she want to kill her husband?’
‘For the forty-million-pound mansion, the country retreat, the billion-dollar shareholding . . . Perhaps she was still just bloody pissed off with him for shagging that model.’
‘I don’t think she would have waited all this time to do it, do you?’
‘There’s the possibility that she did it in conjunction with someone else. Someone who manipulated her into helping them get rid of him. You used to say she was the soft, timid sort.’
‘Diana’s not a murderer,’ said Rachel defensively.
‘But Julian Denver had enemies. Enemies who wanted to bring him down and who didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire. Look at Susie McCormack. It’s not my proudest moment that we probably wrecked a teenager’s life for the sake of a story. But the person that shopped her didn’t worry about that. They just wanted to nail Denver.’
She stopped thinking of her sister for one moment and looked directly at Carl.
‘What do you mean, shopped her?’
Carl looked embarrassed, as if his mouth had run away with him.
‘You remember how Alistair told us he wanted sleaze stories, how fat cats misbehaving were suddenly hot again? So we needed to find industry figures, unfaithful bankers, so-called society family men who were, well, no disrespect to Julian, hypocritical sleazebags.’
Rachel didn’t react, just let him talk.
‘I mean, he wanted the whole news team working on it, but the pressure was on me because of the sorts of people I knew: society people, country people, exactly the sort Alistair was after, in fact. One day he called me into his office and told me he was counting on me.’ Carl did a note-perfect impression of their editor’s rich Scottish baritone. ‘So I did my best. Put the feelers out, mined the most well-connected and wealthy people I knew for gossip . . .’
‘And?’
‘I came up with nothing. Zero. I don’t know whether the wealthy socialites had got wind of the Post’s appetite for their blood, but it was almost as if they had shut down completely.’
Rachel frowned and leant forward. ‘But you did find something. You were the one who found out about Julian’s infidelity.’
She could remember his face that day, the day he had come to her, offered to buy her a drink, then told her that he’d found out about her brother-in-law and his affair with an eighteen-year-old girl. He’d shown her the pictures of them together, said he was warning her in advance, ‘as a friend’.
‘So what are you telling me, Carl, that you didn’t break the story on Julian?’
Carl pulled a face. ‘I did, yes. But not quite in the super-sleuth way I led everyone to believe,’ he said, shamefaced.
Rachel sank on to a chair. ‘Tell me,’ she said, the anger coming off her in waves.
Carl sighed, then nodded, as if he’d been dreading this moment for years but knew it was inevitable.
‘I told the news team that I’d heard rumours about Julian, that I’d followed him until I saw him with Susie, then took photos.’
Rachel remembered those photos. She could still picture them as if they were lying on the table in front of her. Julian and Susie, embracing, kissing. Wrapped around each other like two teenagers. The Denvers had threatened to sue, of course, claiming that the Post couldn’t prove that Julian was having an affair with Susie or anyone else. When the paper had produced a sworn affidavit from Susie attesting to their sexual relationship, they had tried to have her branded an evil opportunist or a naïve fantasist. Either of which could have been true, but by then it was academic – the photos and the story had run.
‘So that’s what you told the editor,’ said Rachel, her lips tight. ‘What was the real story?’
‘I never heard any rumours about Julian,’ said Carl quietly.
‘I don’t understand. So how did you know about Susie? And how did you get photos of them together?’
‘The photos were sent to me,’ said Carl, his eyes full of regret. ‘Brown envelope, anonymously delivered to the office and addressed to me. There was a note that came with them that simply said “Julian Denver and a blonde who is not his wife.” Just in case I hadn’t grasped the point.’
‘Those photo weren’t yours?’ she said incredulously.
‘I didn’t lie about the whole thing, Rach,’ said Carl quickly. ‘The only thing I lied about was how I got to hear about it in the first place. Once I was tipped off, I got a pap to trail Julian and we took our own set of photos of them together.’
‘But why lie at all?’ said Rachel, trying to grasp the significance of the tip-off. ‘Why claim the first photos were yours?’
Carl snorted. ‘You remember what it was like. The Post was struggling, there were strong rumours of redundancies and a recruitment freeze. I was worried about my job – we all were. It was no secret that Alistair was under pressure to downsize the staff and make more use of stringers.’
He stared down at the table.
‘I had to make myself look good, and finding out about Julian through my supposed network of contacts looks a lot better than the story landing on my desk signed, sealed and delivered, doesn’t it?’
Rachel wanted to scream at him, to tell him he was just trying to justify his lies, but she knew that what he was saying was true. That old cliché about being only as good as your last story was right on the money, or at least it had been back then. That was why so many of them had been sucked into phone-hacking, eavesdropping on email conversations and listening to message services. You had to keep coming up with the goods or you were out; that was the culture, and it was one the editors and management were happy to perpetuate, because they weren’t taking any risks themselves and were reaping all the rewards as exclusive after exclusive splashed across their front pages.
She looked at her friend, the wealthy potato crisps entrepreneur, and tried to remember him as he was back in that newsroom. The truth was, Carl had needed a scoop more than the others. He’d always been an outsider on the Post. Posh, sexually ambiguous, bouncy and eager to please rather than jaded and cynical. She understood, of course she did. Hadn’t she been there herself, desperate to succeed as the new girl, as the only young woman on the team? And she had pulled just as many stunts, played all the cards she could. Still, it didn’t stop her feeling angry, betrayed.
‘You should have told me,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Carl nodded. ‘It’s easier to lie to yourself, come up with excuses, isn’t it? Once I had my own set of photos, I convinced myself it didn’t matter how I’d found out. And it didn’t really matter where things came from, did it?’ he added, looking at her with a hint of accusation. ‘Not to us. But now he’s dead, and you think he had enemies – I just thought I had to tell you.’
Her head was a whirl of emotions: guilt, anger, disappointment and, above all, confusion. If they hadn’t come from Carl, then who had sent those photos, and why?
She voiced her question out loud.
‘You have to ask yourself, who had the most to gain from Julian’s infidelity, from his disgrace. If you ask me, the answer points straight back to the family, and whoever within it wanted the top job.’
46
Susie McCormack wasn’t pleased to see her, but then Rachel hadn’t really expected her to be. That was why she had sneaked in through the service entrance at the back of Susie’s office building and come up the stairs, walking past the receptionist with studied confidence. The bored-looking blonde girl at the desk barely gave her a glance. Clearly there were a lot of busy women in heels striding in and out of the headquarters of Leith and Brody Consultant Media Group.
Quite a mouthful for a PR company who put policy and mission statements into pithy little sound bites, Rachel had thought as she looked for Susie’s office.
She needn’t have bothered – she bumped into her target coming out of a meeting room, followed by a group of important-looking men in grey suits.
‘Rachel?’ said Susie, with a glance over at the man immediately to her left. ‘I, er, I didn’t know our meeting was so soon.’
‘Everything all right, Susan?’ said her companion, clearly having picked up on Susie’s distress, despite her laudable efforts to take Rachel’s intrusion in her stride.
‘Yes, yes, I must have forgotten to put it in the diary.’ She forced a smile and glanced at her watch. ‘Shall we go through to my office now?’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Why don’t we do that?’
Susie led her to a glass-fronted room and closed the door.
‘I hope you’ve got a bloody good excuse for barging into my workplace like this. Was an appointment not good enough for you?’ Her face had drained of colour but her cheeks were bright red with anger. Rachel thought she looked like a lollipop – a big red and white head on a tall, skinny body.
‘Can I get you some coffee?’ said Rachel, walking to the machine in the corner of the room. Susie was rattled, unusually ratt
led, and in Rachel’s experience that was usually a sign of guilt.
There was a pointed silence as the two women’s eyes locked. Rachel silently counted the seconds: Susie looked away on the count of six.
‘The story with you and Julian. You do know that he was set up, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, her eyes still blazing. ‘Set up by your newspaper.’
Rachel shook her head slowly. ‘No, it didn’t happen like that,’ she said evenly. She explained how Carl Kennedy had been sent the photos. ‘Remind me how you met Julian, Susie. Don’t miss out a detail.’
Rachel had a theory. A theory that had developed like a television picture on an old TV set coming into focus. She had no idea if it was correct or just a series of convoluted ideas born of her own desperation. But she had a feeling that she was about to find out.
‘We met in a nightclub in Chelsea,’ said Susie tartly. ‘Don’t you remember? It was all there for you to read in your newspaper. It went from there.’
‘What were you doing in a Chelsea nightclub? You were eighteen years old. I thought the Clapham Grand or the Fridge in Brixton would be more your style.’
‘Well I wanted to better myself, didn’t I?’
‘And you thought you’d do that by meeting a rich man.’
‘I grew up in Battersea in a crappy council flat and those Chelsea lights used to wink at me from the other side of the river. That was where I was going to get to, whatever it took. At first I thought I could do it by working hard at school. So I did; I was heading for A-levels and uni, all that. But then one day I was window-shopping in the King’s Road and some guy drove past me in a Porsche, tooted his horn at me. That was the moment I realised I was kidding myself. What was I going to do? Get some pointless degree, clock up a load of debts that I’d never be able to pay off and sit there and watch all the best jobs go to people with contacts and pedigree?’
‘So you decided to cheat.’
Susie curled her lip. ‘Call it that if you like; I prefer to see it as an alternative career path. I had my looks; that was my gift. I won’t apologise for using them. Look at your sister, she did exactly the same thing.’
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