‘Because of the risk you’d talk to Jenny Hurst at some stage. Because of the risk you’d somehow work it out later, which of course, you did… Anyway, Frye decided to kill Jase instead and keep the diamonds for himself.’
‘Did he deliberately save my life?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe it was fortuitous, or maybe it was to spite Tim, because he knew Tim wanted you dead. One thing I can say is that it wasn’t out of love for you…’
‘I didn’t think it was.’ I went on bleakly, ‘No wonder Tim became so morose afterwards – me still alive and the diamonds gone. All that trouble for nothing.’
They’d thought that Tim had intended to use the money first to buy himself a new identity, and then to set up some kind of clinic or similar in Africa. As it was, he’d sold his house and was planning to disappear abroad. It had been just his bad luck that Rachel had spotted the Potassium Cyanide before he’d used it, and then spoken when she had.
‘Which is why he wanted to get away so badly,’ Rebecca said. ‘He knew that something could give him away at any moment.’
He’d somehow managed to erase his records on Workers Abroad, but must have known that someone might have remembered at any moment…
‘I wonder what he’d have done if he’d got away,’ I said.
‘I don’t suppose we’ll never know that.’
‘D’you think he was mad?’ I asked her.
She shrugged again. ‘Depends on your definition of mad.’ She went on, ‘For what it’s worth, I think he was using the Africa thing to punish someone, anyone, in revenge for his father.’
‘In other words, he was mad.’
‘And spiteful,’ she said bitterly. ‘Making me think I had AIDS…’ Tim had falsified the result on Craig’s blood.
*
I’d been seeing a lot of Rebecca one way and another. I wasn’t going to ‘get over’ Sarah for a very long time, if ever… but I’d found as the months went by that I liked Rebecca’s company, and she seemed to like mine.
Something else I’d been thinking about a lot was what Tim had said to me just before he’d chloroformed me. Mad or not, there was more than a germ of truth in it… I was complacent, self-centred and self-pitying, despite being better off in most ways than most of the rest of the world.
‘But by that measurement, so am I, so are we all in this country,’ Rebecca said when I told her about it.
‘Yes, we are, most of us,’ I agreed.
‘If you feel that badly, why not make a regular donation to Oxfam?’
‘I already do,’ I said – Tim had been right about that.
‘You could always give more,’ she said. ‘Ten percent, say – that would make a painful dent in your income, if it’s pain you want. Or –’ she grinned mischievously – ‘You could always do VSO yourself. I daresay someone with your experience could make themselves quite useful…’
‘I have thought about that,’ I said, quite seriously, ‘But Grace comes first.’
She nodded gently.
Bad Medicine- A Life for a Life; Bed of Nails; Going Viral Page 64