Deep Blue Sea (15 page)

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 driven 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 anyone 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?’

Ross gave a cynical laugh. ‘He’d had enough practice, Rach. And anyway, if this Madison was his secret lover, who could he tell? For two days he would have had to carry all that grief, all that sorrow around on his own, keeping it locked inside.’

He bent to pull a file from his briefcase and handed it to Rachel. It contained all the information he had managed to gather on Madison Kopek. At the front were three different glossy photos, clearly professionally taken, perhaps for a modelling portfolio. She looked exactly as Rachel had imagined: wholesome, squeaky-clean beauty queen. Greg’s story of Julian picking up hookers in hotel bars hadn’t quite rung true for Rachel; he liked the nice things in life, shiny and new – there was nothing gritty or street-corner, even hotel-bar escort girl, about her brother-in-law. No, Madison was much more his style. And as she read, it confirmed her image of the girl. Madison Kopek was an honours student at the University of Maryland; smart and beautiful, easy to fall in love with.
What a terrible loss
, thought Rachel,
terrible for everyone involved
.

‘Still, we don’t know that Madison
was
Julian’s lover,’ she said, snapping the file shut.

‘No, we don’t,’ agreed Ross. ‘For all we know, Jamaica was some innocent business trip.’

‘So why do it on the sly?’ she said cynically. She could feel her frustration growing. Ross had always been uncanny in his ability to winkle out information; she had become accustomed to him knowing the answers to almost everything. ‘Where now? We can’t exactly quiz Madison Kopek about it.’

‘At least show her photo to Greg Willets. Get him to confirm she was the girl he saw with Julian outside the hotel.’

Rachel made a mental note to do that first thing in the morning.

‘And if it is her, then here’s the town where her mother lives. I hear Maryland is lovely this time of year.’

19

Diana watched from the window as the car pulled away down the drive from the direction of the Lake House. Folding her arms tightly across her chest, she wondered who had been visiting her sister – in an ancient-looking Fiesta at that – on a Saturday night. She mulled over the possibilities in her mind. It was the same car she had seen arriving at the Lake House when Adam had dropped her off a little while earlier. Most likely it was an old friend or a colleague, although Somerfold seemed an awfully long way to come for just an hour – to stay such a short time suggested that it had been somebody come to deliver something. A piece of information? she wondered, feeling suddenly keyed up that Rachel was making progress with the job at hand. Curious, she pulled on a pair of wellington boots from beside the door and crunched down the gravel drive towards the lake, passing the aviary and sending up a flurry of wings and cheeping.

Usually she felt nervous wandering around the grounds in the dark. Somerfold was a lonely place without Julian and Charlie around, so much so that she had almost instantly regretted putting Rachel in the Lake House. But tonight, as a squirrel darted across the lawn, and the boathouse appeared through a gap in the trees, she felt as if she had been dropped in the middle of a fairy tale. Like many things that day, Diana suddenly saw the house in a new light. It looked magical, like a Hansel and Gretel cottage hidden in the woods. She was surprised to find herself smiling as she walked on. She did not usually look forward to her meetings with Rachel, but this evening she felt more relaxed and mellow, which she thought momentarily might be Adam’s doing.

As she approached the house, she could see Rachel’s silhouette on the window seat in the bedroom. Her head was bent over a book, her long legs stretched out in front of her, and Diana was struck by how serene and clever her sister looked.

She knocked gently. The door creaked open, just an inch at first, and she was met by Rachel’s anxious smile.

‘Hello, can I come in?’

‘Of course. It’s your house.’ Rachel beckoned her in.

Diana frowned at the gloom inside the house. Her first thought was for her sister’s eyesight, but standing here in the dark, she was also reminded of how spooky this part of the estate was at night. She wondered guiltily if Rachel was scared, if she should invite her up to stay in the main house, but then she remembered that Rachel Miller never got scared. Growing up, her courage and pluckiness was legendary among their little group of friends – Rachel was always the one to be pushed forward to do a dare, to retrieve a ball from an irate neighbour’s garden. She had always been the first kid to jump off the top diving board, the first one to explore a derelict garage, pretending that she was Nancy Drew or George from the Famous Five in the midst of some intrepid adventure.

‘It’s dark in here,’ said Diana finally. ‘Can’t we switch some lights on?’

‘Habit.’ Rachel grinned sheepishly. ‘In Ko Tao, our office just has a little diesel generator. We’re always trying to save electricity.’

‘Do you remember at home, you’d leave every light on?’ laughed Diana. ‘Mum used to go mad.’

Rachel smiled. ‘It’s good to see you laugh, Di.’

Diana turned away. She nearly blurted out that it had been Adam who had put that smile on her face, but . . . well, she wasn’t ready to think about that right now. Wasn’t sure what sort of message it sent.

‘Why don’t you sit down and I’ll go and make some tea.’

‘Just hot water and lemon if you have it,’ called Diana as Rachel moved out of sight. She looked around at the chaos of the cottage. Rachel had only been here a week, and already the Lake House looked like it had been sucked up by the tornado in
The Wizard of Oz
. There were socks on the floor, papers piled high on the desk and stuff hanging out of drawers. How was it possible to make such a small place so messy in such a short space of time? She resisted the urge to start tidying, instead resolving to send Mrs Bills down first thing in the morning for a swift clean.

‘Builder’s tea,’ said Rachel, thrusting a mug into her hand. ‘Sorry, I’m all out of lemons. But it’s just how you used to like it.’

Diana narrowed her eyes, detecting a dig.
Chill out, Diana
, she reminded herself.
Don’t ruin a lovely day over something silly
.

‘I see Mum’s back,’ said Rachel, sipping her own tea. ‘Saw her doing something strange on the lawn this morning.’ She waved her free hand around in the air as if she were a wizard about to cast a spell.

Diana giggled, spraying a spot of tea on to her green cashmere top.

‘That will be her t’ai chi.’

‘Mum does t’ai chi?’ said Rachel in amazement.

‘She does a lot of things you might not recognise.’ Diana smiled complicitly, for a moment enjoying the banter between them.

‘Tell all.’

‘There are a lot of charity committees. She’s on the board of an inner-city youth ballet group, she’s planning a fund-raising ball for the Tories,
and
she’s taking a course in portraiture at an art college in Chelsea.’

‘Bloody hell,’ whistled Rachel. ‘You couldn’t even get her to join the PTA back in the day.’

‘You should talk to her.’

‘I’ve tried that.’

‘Look, I know she can be a bit . . . inflexible at times, but don’t you think we should all try and get along while we’re living together?’

She was surprised to hear the conciliatory words coming out of her mouth. The last thing she’d expected was to find herself as the mediator between Rachel and her mother.

‘Listen, there’s a few bits of housekeeping things we need to discuss.’

Diana’s eyes floated around the mess once more.

‘Yes, I was thinking that.’

‘Not that.’ Rachel smiled. ‘We need to talk about how expenses are going to work. I need to pay for a couple of flights. I’d do it myself, but booking at such late notice, we’re talking over two thousand pounds, and that might be a bit of a stretch . . . well, a lot of a stretch actually.’

Diana felt disappointed that Rachel seemed so eager to revert to business matters.

‘Don’t worry about the money, I’ll book the flights. What are they for?’

Rachel handed over a piece of paper with some hastily scribbled details written on it.

‘Washington? Why do you need to go to Washington? And who’s Ross McKiney? The man who just left?’

Rachel nodded. ‘He’s an old friend of mine. A private investigator. I thought I’d get him to help with some things. He’s good, Di. Really good.’

‘But why Washington?’ she repeated, suddenly needing to know everything. ‘Has he found anything out? Got a lead?’

Rachel waved a hand. ‘We just need to go to the States to speak to some people about Julian.’ She was being blasé. Overly blasé, and vague, as if she was hiding something. Diana could feel her fretfulness returning, the good mood of the day evaporating immediately.

‘Who? Who do you need to speak to?’ she pressed.

‘I don’t exactly know yet,’ Rachel said haltingly. ‘Ross is finding the contacts.’

Diana could feel her pulse throbbing. Why was her sister lying? She was doing her damnedest to try and hide it, but there was definitely something she didn’t want to tell her.

‘But if you don’t know who you need to speak to, how do you know you need to go to Washington?’

Rachel gave a laugh. A nervous laugh she tried to disguise by sipping her tea.

‘Diana, this is the way it works. Don’t ask too many questions and I will tell you when I know stuff. I promise.’

‘You don’t have to shield me from anything, Rachel. The deal was I wanted to find out what had happened to Julian – that hasn’t changed.’

But Rachel was equally firm. ‘Just trust me, Di. Now, do you mind if I swim in the pool?’ she said, standing up and looking out of the back window towards Somerfold.

‘What? Now?’ replied Diana, feeling confused – had she missed a part of the conversation? Why was Rachel talking about swimming all of a sudden? She got the distinct feeling that her sister wanted to get rid of her, and she certainly didn’t want to talk about Washington.

‘You’ve got a beautiful pool. I saw it when I was taking a walk this morning. I was desperate for a dip, but I thought Mum might see me and have a go, so I thought I had better ask your permission . . .’

Diana knew it was an opportunity to take a different tack.

‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘Do you have a costume, or do you want to borrow one?’

‘I brought one on the off-chance.’

‘Well, go and get it. We can walk back up to the house together.’

As Rachel disappeared into the bedroom, Diana’s eyes darted around the room. The desk by the window was a mess, a leaning tower of books and papers that looked as if it might topple at any moment.

‘Do you have goggles?’ shouted Rachel.

‘Yes,’ replied Diana, walking towards the desk and rifling quickly through the papers. There was a blue file by the laptop, held shut by elastic ribbons. She opened it and read the first piece of paper that presented itself. It was a printout of a news report about a car crash.

‘What are you doing?’ asked a voice behind her. Rachel stood in the doorway holding a swimsuit and a carrier bag.

‘Who’s this Madison Kopek?’ asked Diana, wishing she’d had time to go through the whole file. She was sure that her sister had paled.

‘It’s just a news story, Di,’ Rachel said, stuffing the costume into the bag. ‘Come on, we should go before it gets totally dark.’

‘Why is it here?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘Ross left it.’

‘So this girl is part of the investigation. Is it someone Julian knew?’

Rachel hesitated, as if she was taking a moment to construct a lie.

‘Possibly. Like I say, we aren’t entirely sure whether she’s involved yet . . .’

‘This accident happened in Maryland. Is that why you want to go to Washington?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel finally.

‘Then you must think she’s significant,’ Diana pressed. She felt warm. The paper was trembling in her hand. She didn’t want her sister to say anything further, wanted to rewind the last two minutes and erase everything she had just learnt, and yet as she looked down at the picture on the printout, taking in the girl’s blonde prettiness, she knew that Rachel had made a breakthrough, and she wanted to know exactly what it was.

The words
someone Julian knew
echoed over and over in her head. Yes, Madison Kopek looked exactly like the sort of girl Julian might have known, she thought, forcing herself to read the story once more.

‘Diana, put it down,’ said Rachel, walking over and snatching the page from her hand.

Diana’s stomach clenched as she absorbed the date of the accident and acknowledged its relevance.

‘But this girl’s dead. She died two days before Julian.’

Rachel just nodded, her mouth pursed, as if she didn’t want to say any more.

‘Who
is
she, Rachel? What does she have to do with my husband?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Rachel, her voice wobbling. ‘There’s a chance she might have been working with Julian.’

Diana had smelled blood and was not going to let this go.

‘Working?’ she repeated. ‘And how closely do you think they were “working” together?’

‘Diana . . .’

‘Tell me what you think!’ she yelled. She was surprised by the level of her own anger. No, it wasn’t just anger, it was fury. Right at that moment she hated this Madison person, she hated her dead husband and she hated her sister and her horrible, sticky web of secrets and lies.

‘Diana, please,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve only been working on this for three days, you can’t expect me to know everything. These things take time.’

‘Don’t give me that crap,’ said Diana, crumpling the paper in her hand. ‘You think he was having an affair with this girl, don’t you?’

‘Di . . .’

‘DON’T YOU?’

Rachel let out a long breath. ‘It’s a possibility, yes.’

‘That’s rubbish,’ said Diana, stepping towards her sister, holding up the crumpled sheet. ‘Julian was faithful. Ever since that time, he promised me. He said he’d never do it ever again, and I believed him.’

Rachel dropped the carrier bag to the floor with a thud.

‘Di, please. Why did you bring me here if it’s what you hadn’t already suspected? You knew that something was going on in Julian’s life that you didn’t know about, that he didn’t want you to know about.’

‘I didn’t think it would be another woman,’ Diana lied. She began to pace around the Lake House. She felt dizzy, as if her world was turning on its axis and she had nothing to hold on to. ‘Mum’s right. This
is
a witch-hunt,’ she said almost to herself.

‘Di, come on. I’m doing a job.’

She felt powerless, out of control, and the only thing that made any sense was to turn all the anger, frustration and blame on her sister, because it was wrong to speak ill of the dead, wrong to think such a thing about her husband who was barely cold in the ground.

‘Why did you hate him so much?’ she said, feeling white-hot rage explode in her belly. ‘Hmm? You never liked him, did you? Were you jealous, was that it?’

‘Diana, this isn’t helping . . .’ said Rachel, but Diana could see the concern in her sister’s eyes – the fear. And weirdly, it felt good, it felt powerful. She took another step forward, and even though she was almost four inches shorter than her sister and a much slighter physical presence, she forced Rachel to press back against the window.

‘You hated him, why?’

‘I didn’t hate him.’

‘Even now that he’s dead in the ground, you have to think the worst of him, don’t you?’

‘No, Di, honestly, I was happy for you. I cried at your wedding and they were real tears of joy; you were going to have the life we never had. Why wouldn’t I be happy?’

‘Exactly!’ cried Diana, pushing at her chest. ‘Why weren’t you happy? Why couldn’t you leave us alone?’

Rachel barged past her, her expression changing.

‘Because he wasn’t good enough for you, Di!’ she cried finally, her voice loud and clear as if it had been liberated from some place deep inside her.

‘Why?’ Diana’s own tone was more anxious. She felt as if she was walking over cracked ice, as if at any moment it would break and she would plunge into the unforgiving icy depths beneath.