Perfect Strangers (40 page)

Satisfied, she went back into the kitchen and poured some nachos into a bowl – ah, the domestic goddess – and took them through with the beer and her wine.

Fox was standing at the window looking down at the street.

‘Nice place, this, must have cost a packet.’

‘I wish,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s rented, but I still love it.’

The Victorian conversion was on the very fringes of gentrified Islington, where the pretty Georgian squares were just beginning to melt into council estates and all-night minimarts. Still, it had that desirable N1 postcode and Ruth rarely felt intimidated walking home from the tube at night. Or maybe that was something to do with having spent time in Sarajevo and Belfast.

‘So this is the famous flow chart?’ said Fox, walking up to the whiteboard.

She stuffed some nachos into her mouth.

‘It came with the flat,’ she said. ‘It’s owned by an investigative journalist friend at the
Observer
. He went to live in New York and when I became his tenant I got custody of the whiteboard. It’s fabulous for games of dinner-party Pictionary. You should come to the next one.’

Fox was only half listening, being absorbed in the hasty notes that Ruth had scribbled on the board that morning.

‘I was a bit hung-over, so I didn’t get very far. My problem is too little real information about any of the players.’

Fox pointed to the word ‘Nick’.

‘You didn’t know there was a wine fraud, did you?’

Ruth pulled a face.

‘Not a wine fraud as such,’ she said, ‘but I knew he’d been charged with fraud. It was reasonable to assume that was how he made a living; he certainly wasn’t the wealthy businessman he’d pretended he was with Sophie.’

She sat down in an armchair, tucking her feet under her. ‘That’s the thing with all of them – I’m not sure anyone on that chart is exactly what they seem on the surface.’

Fox pushed his hand through his short brown hair.

‘That’s the way I’ve been thinking too. Everyone’s got something to hide.’

He turned and smiled. Ruth looked at him. He really was quite good-looking, she thought. Shame he spent most of his life scowling. Not that she was one to criticise; she’d been pretty gloomy these past few days, but then who could blame her? She glanced around the half-empty apartment and made a vague note to contact David that weekend. She had no desire to speak to him, but every intention of getting her belongings back as quickly as possible; if he thought he could use her good linens, her nice candles to feather his pleasure den for PR Susie, then he was very much mistaken.

‘So let’s fill in the blanks,’ said Fox. He picked up the marker and scrawled the words ‘wine fraud’ next to Nick’s name. He looked at Ruth. ‘To answer your question, it was certainly motive enough for murder,’ he said. ‘A single bottle of vintage wine can go for twenty grand.’

Ruth looked down at her glass. ‘Really? I’d better start paying more attention when I’m in Waitrose.’

Fox shook his head.

‘It’s not always the wine itself – at least that’s what the fraud squad guys were telling me. Wine fraud can have links to wider organised crime. It’s as if these bottles are made of solid gold, like little recession-proof trading units. And obviously that makes them very attractive for people who might want to hide where their money’s come from.’

‘Money laundering?’

‘Yes, drugs, prostitution, anything really. And a bottle of fake wine’s much easier to get through customs than a suitcase of money or a few kilos of heroin. The crooks sell it on legitimately and turn that cash back into smack, whores or whatever on the other side of the border.’

Fox drew a line from ‘wine scam’ to the word ‘money’, then back to Nick.

‘So if Nick had been pushing his phoney claret on the Russian Mafia or the Triads or whoever, and they discovered it wasn’t the real deal, they could well have got pretty upset.’

Fox pulled a face. ‘It’s a nice theory, of course,’ he said, putting the lid back on the pen. ‘But we have zero evidence to prove that’s what’s going on.’

‘What about those guys shooting at Sophie down by the river?’

‘One, we don’t know they were gangsters,’ he said, ticking the points off on his fingers. ‘Two, we don’t know for sure who the other guy was – yes, we checked the owner of the boat, Joshua McCormack. But that’s not necessarily the man that Sophie ran off into the night with.’

‘I checked out McCormack. Does he have a criminal record?’

Fox shook his head. ‘No. Apparently he’s a watch salesman. He’s no relation to Sophie. Her friends have never heard of him.’

‘Maybe he’s part of the wine fraud.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Fox. ‘Although there’s no hard evidence that Nick was involved in a wine fraud.’

He held up the almost empty bowl of nachos.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got anything else to eat, have you? I came straight from my shift and I’m starving.’

Ruth didn’t need to look to know that the fridge was empty except for a green-haired garlic bulb and a withered lemon.

‘Give me two minutes and I’ll order Chinese,’ she said, heading for the phone in the hall. Coming back through, she saw that Fox had been busy at the whiteboard, adding a spider’s web of links to Nick’s central hub: ‘Chariot party’, ‘Wine fraud?’, ‘Womaniser – con man?’, ‘Russian connection?’ and so on.

‘What’s this one?’ he asked, tapping a word Ruth had written that morning: ‘Asner’.

For a moment she hesitated. Did she really want to reveal everything to him? But then what exactly was she hiding? She felt certain Fox knew that the Ellis family had lost money recently. Besides, she wasn’t getting anywhere on her own: that was the uncomfortable truth. She needed Fox’s input, even if it was just as a sympathetic sounding board.

‘Michael Asner,’ she said, picking up her glass.

‘The Ponzi scheme guy?’ asked Fox.

Ruth nodded. ‘Peter Ellis was an investor and basically lost everything the family had.’

‘That gives Sophie a motive,’ said Fox slowly. ‘If she thought Nick was going to be the answer to her financial troubles and found out he had nothing, she’d be pissed off.’

‘But you don’t believe that, do you?’

‘If she was some hardcore gold-digger who’d invested years in their relationship, maybe. But they’d been dating what? A week? And Sophie Ellis is a ditzy posh girl, not a social player.’

‘So you think she’s innocent?’

‘I don’t think she killed him, but I still think she’s the key to it all. Look at your whiteboard – everything leads back to her.’

They talked a while longer until the doorbell rang and Ruth ran down to collect the food, laying it out on her coffee table: ribs, dumplings, noodles and beef in satay sauce. She and Fox picked them from their cartons as they talked.

‘Have you spoken to Jeanne Parsons?’

Fox nodded. ‘Nick’s girlfriend in Texas.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘Not much.’

‘When I spoke to her, she said that Nick had said that if he was seen in London with a beautiful woman it was just work.’

‘Really?’

Ruth felt a flush of pride at having tracked down information the police had missed.

‘Nick and Sophie were apparently inseparable from the minute they met. If we assume that Sophie was that beautiful woman, then she was the work,’ said Fox thoughtfully.

‘And if Nick was a con man then it makes Sophie a victim. She was a
mark
. All day I’ve been asking myself what Sophie Ellis had that Nick – and possibly other men with guns – wanted.’

‘Money and sex,’ said Fox, picking up a dumpling and dunking it in chilli sauce. ‘Money and sex are always the motive.’

‘Have you checked the CCTV cameras around Nick’s suite?’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘Hotels aren’t like banks with cameras everywhere. The biggest crime they can expect is someone walking off with a monogrammed robe.’

‘So you couldn’t tell who’d been to his room?’

Fox suppressed a burp and shook his head.

‘No, we had a look at some security footage of the lobby which confirmed Sophie’s story of running for the taxi and returning at the time she did. That was about it.’

‘What about other forensic evidence from the hotel suite?’

‘We found prints on some shards of glass on the bathroom floor. They must have come from the smashed champagne bottle used to whack him over the head. There were also hair samples. Six different types, but they could be from the maid, other guests, Nick and Sophie. Unless we have something specific to match it with, then I’m not sure how useful that is. We could go down the DNA testing route only to find it’s the housekeeper’s.’

Ruth began to pace the room.

‘How did Nick think he was going to make money from Sophie? A couple of phone calls and he’d find out her family had lost everything.’

They lapsed into silence as they ate, Ruth running the options over in her mind.

‘Did you get any leads from Nick’s phone or laptop?’

‘That’s part of the problem. There was nothing like that in his suite. I doubt a man like Nick wouldn’t have those things. So they must have been taken by his killer.’

‘Again, it gets Sophie off the hook. A crime of passion is one thing. A meticulous clean-up operation is another.’

It didn’t bring her any closer to answers, but her brainstorm with Fox had certainly had the desired effect: she had more questions.

‘Thanks, Ian,’ she said as she collected up the now empty plates and cartons.

‘What for?’ he said. ‘I should be thanking you for all this.’

‘For coming here and letting me talk it through. I know you didn’t have to – in fact, probably shouldn’t have.’

She met his gaze and felt . . . what? A connection, something she really hadn’t felt with a man for a long time. It was there for one shimmering moment, then he looked away and it was gone.

‘Well, I’d better go,’ he said, getting up.

He lingered, and for second Ruth thought about asking him to stay, but that was madness, wasn’t it? Besides, they’d both got what they wanted – just another of those little transactions between the press and the police.

She saw him to the door.

‘Thanks again,’ she said. ‘And sorry for dragging you so far north.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Really.’

And then he was gone and Ruth was left standing in her hallway, wondering if she was ever going to be able to get to sleep.

36

The bus approached Manhattan from the north, passing down through the Bronx and across the Triborough Bridge. Manhattan was magnificent whichever way you came at it, and the sight of the Chrysler Building glinting in the lazy early evening sun made everything, even Sophie’s problems, pale into insignificance just for one glorious moment.

Jim had dropped them at a bus stop outside a Duane Reade where Josh and Sophie could just blend in among the shoppers. ‘Who pays any attention to some working stiff at a bus stop?’ he had said as he held open the pick-up’s door and Sophie had kissed him goodbye.

They made the final part of the journey to Andrea Sayer’s office by bus, calling her en route to tell her to expect them.

Sophie wasn’t sure if they should telegraph their presence, not when they had been so close to getting caught. What if this lawyer had called the authorities? So now with each jerking stop, each hiss of the bus doors, she felt herself tense, expecting to be swarmed by men in Kevlar or burly assassins. But each time, it was just more tired, sullen New Yorkers slowly going downtown.

Still, it was impossible not to feel a shiver of excitement. She was in New York. Everything about the streets was familiar from a million cop shows: the fire hydrants, the yellow cabs, even the shape of the delivery trucks. It was as if someone had created a huge film set just for her.

‘Next stop,’ said Josh, craning his neck to look up at the skyscraper to their left.

They stepped out of the air-conditioned bus on to the sidewalk right in front of the famous Miller Building, a soaring white-fronted 1920s facade dominated by a Frank Gehry sculpture of a bird in flight. The notoriously dense New York summer heat hit Sophie immediately; it was almost palpable, like being squeezed in a giant hand. It was only twenty paces from the sidewalk to the lobby, but she could already feel the cotton dress she’d picked up in Cannes sticking to her.

Josh announced them to the receptionist, then moved purposefully towards the lifts, but Sophie grabbed his arm and pulled him to one side.

‘What exactly are we going to tell this lawyer?’

Josh glanced around to make sure they weren’t overheard.

‘Not everything. Just enough.’

‘How much is enough, Josh? Shouldn’t we tell her everything? She could help us.’

‘If Asner siphoned off some of the fund into a secret stash, then
we
need to find this money. Us. Not Andrea Sayer. Not any of the US government agencies.’

Sophie felt a flutter of panic.

‘Us? Why?’ she hissed. ‘We’re not going to keep the money . . . are we?’

‘Sophie, don’t be so bloody naïve. If Asner’s secret stash exists and the Feds get the money before we do, then we’re screwed. We’ll have zero leverage and that could be very bad for us.’

‘Leverage? What do we need leverage for?’

Josh looked impatient.

‘I hate to remind you, Sophie, but you’re a possible suspect in a murder inquiry. For all we know, you are the only suspect. We need to use whatever we’ve got to take the heat off you. The second the Feds have Asner’s booty, I guarantee they won’t give a shit about helping you or me, even if Nick’s death is linked to the Asner money. And once the press find out that your dad hid Asner’s siphoned cash, you and your family are going to be hung out to dry. Now come on, we’ve got to catch her before she leaves.’

Sophie followed Josh into the lift and watched as he pressed the button for the twenty-fifth floor. She could see the sense in what he said, but she still felt anxious and out of control.

Josh saw her biting her lip and gently touched her mouth with his thumb.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll ruin those lovely lips of yours.’

‘I wish I had your gift of the gab, Josh, but I don’t,’ she snapped, pushing his hand away. ‘And I don’t know what to say in there.’