Perfect Strangers (36 page)

Of course, that was the old days, back when spending the night in a bombed-out house or watching mortars fly over your head still felt romantic. Here in London, buzzing and energetic though the city was, there were precious few stories that made Ruth feel as engaged, as excited as this one. Which was why she
had
to crack it – she couldn’t let Nick Beddingfield get away from her.

Ruth looked up, realising she was at her destination.
Nice place
, she thought at she studied the glorious white stucco-fronted house in front of her. Francesca had been right when she had described it, rather enviously, as one of the most beautiful houses in London. Ruth took a second to imagine herself as its owner, and quickly decided she had no desire to ever live in something this grand.
A girl could get lost just going to the bathroom
, she smiled to herself.

She went up the front steps and pressed the bell, knocking on the door for good measure. Finally, the door opened a crack and a housekeeper in a black and white uniform peered out, her expression one of faint irritation.

‘I’m looking for Lana Goddard-Price,’ said Ruth, trying to see past the woman into the house.

‘No here. South of France,’ the woman said, beginning to shut the door.

Ruth made a guess that the housekeeper was Filipino. She had no command of the Tagalog language, but she knew of one currency that was understood the world over. She rooted around in her purse, drew out three twenty-pound notes and held them through the gap like a fan.

‘Could I ask you a couple of questions?’ she said with a winning smile. ‘Five minutes of your time. Please?’

The housekeeper hesitated for a moment, then opened the door just enough for Ruth to slip through.

‘Thank you,’ said Ruth as the woman folded the money into her pocket. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Cherry,’ she said warily.

‘Okay, Cherry, nothing to worry about,’ she said soothingly. ‘No one’s in trouble. I just wanted to asked about the girl who stayed here. Sophie Ellis? She house-sat for Mrs Goddard-Price.’

‘I see her only one time. Thursday. I let her in, then leave for holiday.’

‘So she arrived last Thursday?’ said Ruth, glancing around the entrance hall, craning her head into the living room, trying to take in as much as she could.

‘Girl gone. She bad girl. She go in Mrs G’s wardrobe.’

Ruth nodded sympathetically. Francesca had told her, without any apparent remorse, how she and Sophie had borrowed ‘a few nice things’ for the Chariot party.

‘Did she leave any of her own things?’

Cherry shook her head.

‘Can I just look at Sophie’s room, where she slept, where she kept her belongings?’

‘Police take everything,’ said Cherry. She clearly hadn’t enjoyed their visit. Ruth wondered if the woman had a proper work permit.

‘Well could I at least speak to Mrs Goddard-Price?’

‘I say, she in France.’

‘And who is she in France with? Mr Goddard-Price?’

There was a glint in Cherry’s eye.

‘Husband in Switzerland,’ she said with a hint of smile. ‘Maybe she with other man.’

‘Other man?’ frowned Ruth. ‘What other man?’

The maid’s mouth opened and closed like a fish and she began backing Ruth towards the door.

‘No more questions; I know nothing,’ she said.

‘Cherry, please. Who is Mrs G with?’ But she could see that the housekeeper would say nothing else.

‘All right, okay. But couldn’t you at least give me Mrs Goddard-Price’s number so that if I have any more questions later, I can call her?’

She smoothly produced another crisp twenty, which immediately disappeared into Cherry’s pocket. Sucking her teeth, the housekeeper walked over to a closet in the hallway. It was full of brushes and cleaning products, and was where Cherry apparently stored her coat and her handbag.

She took a blue plastic pen out of a pen pot, scribbled down the number and handed it to Ruth.

‘You go now.’

Ruth was bundled out on to the steps and heard the front door being locked behind her. She looked down at the number in her hand.

‘What
have
you been up to, Mrs G?’ she wondered to herself.

Ruth sighed. There were so many missing parts of the puzzle, she didn’t know where to start. If only she had access to the information Detective Inspector Fox and his team had. They would be investigating Nick’s movements and business transactions, maybe getting access to his bank accounts. And if Nick had ‘form’, as they said in the force, then there was a good chance Fox knew about his potential enemies. If Sophie Ellis was still a suspect, they’d have built up a profile of her too by now.

‘All right, Ian Fox,’ said Ruth, pulling her mobile out of her pocket. ‘Let’s see what you know.’

She quickly tapped in a text message:

Fox, it’s Ruth. Can you call me? We need to meet. Important
.

She looked down at it for a moment, then added an ‘
x
’ at the end. Not very professional, perhaps, but hey, she was a woman in a man’s world – she had to use whatever weapons were to hand.

Feeling a spot of rain, she pulled up the collar of her jacket and hurried to her next meeting.

34

It was hard to see anything out of the windows of Lana’s Gulfstream; they were tiny. Presumably the passengers on the sleek private jets weren’t that interested in sightseeing. All Sophie could see was a long expanse of tarmac and a stationary baggage cart with no driver.
Welcome to America
, she thought. Lana’s private jet had landed at Teterboro airport, an aviation facility in New Jersey popular with private and corporate aircraft. It was small, yes, but it was a ‘landing rights’ airport and, as such, an approved point of entry into the United States for people who weren’t American citizens. Sophie felt anxious as they waited for the plane to be inspected by the Customs and Border Protection agency.

At least Josh had his proper passport and had been able to hastily arrange his ESTA – the document required for US travel – at Nice airport. Sophie already had one from a previous trip to the States, but for all she knew, Inspector Fox could have American airports on red alert for a Sophie Ellis entering the country. If an alarm was going to go off, it would happen any minute.

‘Can you see anyone?’ whispered Josh. He sounded uncharacteristically nervous. Despite Lana’s reassurances, they had spent the entire seven-hour journey from Nice paranoid that they would be met by a SWAT team and two truckloads of FBI agents in black suits and wraparound shades.

‘Please relax,’ said Lana. ‘I assure you, the United States authorities have no interest in either of you. We simply have to wait for the landing officials to scan our fingerprints, then we can leave.’

Sophie looked back at the woman, sitting calmly in her armchair. How could she seriously expect them to relax? From the moment of meeting Lana by the pool at Villa Polieux, Sophie had been off-balance, feeling as if she was teetering on the edge of a cliff. The jaw-dropping revelation that she had been set up by Lana and Nick would have been enough, but now Sophie was being asked to accept that her father, the one man she had trusted and idolised in this world, was in fact a crook and had deliberately lost her family’s life savings. It was enough to mess with anyone’s head.

‘Let me see your book again,’ said Josh. ‘If we’re going to have to sit here, I might as well try and crack the code.’

Sophie opened her copy of
I Capture the Castle
, which had been safely retrieved from La Luna hotel.

In the centre of the page was Peter Ellis’s handwriting:
To my dearest S, read this and think of our castle. Happy birthday. All my love always, Daddy
. But in the top right-hand corner, above the title, the words ‘Benedict Grear’ had been written, in the small cursive writing of a teenager perhaps, alongside the date ‘22 12 56’. Sophie had seen it there before, of course, but the paperback had been old and a little worn and she had simply assumed it was the name of its previous owner. How many times had she inscribed her own name in her treasured novels as a way of claiming ownership of a story she had loved? It wasn’t uncommon to see something similar in any second-hand book.

But suddenly these few words had taken on huge significance. They had spent at least an hour in Sophie’s cramped Cannes hotel room thinking up ever more outlandish – and desperate – explanations for the words. When Google had thrown up nothing, Josh had tried breaking them down into anagrams, tried assigning letters to the numbers in the hope of forming words; Lana had even translated them into Spanish and back. Nothing made any sense. Finally Lana had suggested the Gulfstream.

‘If you don’t know what it means, then there’s really only one person who might: Michael Asner’s widow Miriam. And even if she doesn’t, perhaps she’ll tell you something she wouldn’t tell the investigators.’

It made sense, and as Lana had the means of flying them to the US, it seemed ridiculously simple. Simple, that was, until they were actually there, sitting on the tarmac, waiting for a siren to sound. Sophie felt her nerves might snap at any moment.

‘You do realise we don’t even know if it is a code?’ she said. ‘It could genuinely be just something the previous owner wrote in there.’

‘I have no idea of its relevance,’ said Lana, fixing her with her cool stare. ‘But I do know it is the only thing your father gave to you, and until we exhaust every possibility, we have to assume it does have some hidden message.’

‘We have exhausted every possibility!’ said Sophie. ‘I don’t know what you expect—’

There was a cough, and they looked up to see the pilot at the door.

‘Sorry to interrupt, but the immigration team are here.’

Their immigration ordeal took just a few minutes; a few questions and some fingerprinting and they were through.

‘Is that it?’ breathed Sophie.

‘I told you,’ said Lana. ‘You have no convictions, you’ve committed no crime on American soil and the British police are hardly going to bother their American cousins about a missing witness who for all they know is probably still somewhere in Chelsea.’

Sophie let out a long breath.

‘So where next? A diner for burgers and shakes?’

‘Not quite,’ said Lana officiously. ‘I have a car waiting which will take you to Pleasantville. The driver knows Miriam’s address.’

‘You’re not coming with us?’ said Josh, surprised.

‘No, I’m going to the city,’ said Lana, handing Sophie a card. ‘This is my address in New York. Find out what you can and I’ll meet you there. We’ll have dinner this evening.’

‘So what’s to stop us finding the money and running off with it?’ said Sophie, only half joking.

Lana didn’t smile. When she spoke, her tone was light but her dark eyes were deadly serious.

‘I found you once, Sophie,’ she said. ‘I can find you again.’

Sophie sat in the back seat of the town car and craned her neck to watch the buildings of the airport terminal disappear behind them. She could barely believe it. They were in America.

‘Do you trust her?’ she said, turning to Josh.

‘Sophie, she tricked you into her house, set you up with Nick, lied about who she was. No – I don’t trust her an inch.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Sophie, still feeling duped and angry and humiliated.

He paused, looking towards the driver. The sliding glass panel between him and the passenger area was closed, but Sophie could tell Josh didn’t trust that either.

‘But what choice do we have?’ he said finally. ‘She’s given us use of a private jet, a car, all the resources we need to find out who killed Nick and to set the record straight. The brutal truth is we can’t fix this on our own, Soph. Much as I’d like us to.’

‘I always got the feeling you could do anything,’ she said softly. She looked down at his hand on the seat beside her, and was suddenly desperate to reach out and touch it, desperate to tell him how she felt when she was with him: safe, stronger, complete. But instead she turned away, watching the New Jersey streets as they turned on to the freeway, feeling deathly tired.

She’d had a short nap on the plane, but when was the last time she had slept properly? she asked herself, wondering if she would ever sleep like that again. Careless, innocent, untroubled. Was her innocence really gone for ever? Her eyelids were heavy, but when they closed, all she could see was Josh. She had wondered whether the swell of feeling she’d had for him at the Villa Polieux had just been the balmy summer air and the fact that he’d looked so handsome in a suit. But she was self-aware enough to know that her feelings for him were getting stronger rather than fading. On the one hand, it made her feel fickle and ridiculous. Only a week ago she had been strolling along the Thames with Nick Beddingfield, although she knew now that all those emotions had been based on a lie. Her relationship with Josh was something else. They had shared so much together, been through so much. During those long nights in the garage, in the tiny sleeper carriage of the train, even at the motel, he had made no move on her, hadn’t tried to touch her. But still, she was sure he had felt that electricity between them at the villa. She was
sure
of it. Finally Sophie dozed, vaguely aware of the sway of the car, the feel of Josh’s leg against hers, nothing else.

Not long after – or had it been hours? She really couldn’t tell – Josh nudged her awake.

‘Almost there, sleepy,’ he said gently. She rubbed her eyes and looked out at the changed landscape of Westchester County: the single-storey clapboard houses with well-tended and shady lawns surrounded by that great American staple, the picket fence, the golden sunshine slanting through oaks and pines. Miriam Asner’s house was on the outskirts of town, its mower-striped grass edged by a silver pond.

‘Not bad,’ said Sophie sarcastically, as they stepped out of the town car and stretched. It wasn’t quite the Fifth Avenue luxury of Miriam’s old life, but it was close. Looking at the widow’s lovely property, you’d say that crime definitely did pay.

‘I googled her,’ said Josh, holding up his mobile. ‘As part of an agreement with the US prosecutors, Miriam Asner was allowed to keep a million dollars.’