Page 166 of Perfect Strangers

She laughed, shaking her head.

‘He was only too happy to tell me about Asner’s fraud. According to Peter, we just had to sit tight for a couple of years until the scandal blew over, and we could go to Vanuatu and retrieve the money.’

‘So your family never lost money in the Ponzi scheme?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she laughed. Then her face clouded over. ‘But then that idiot Asner got himself killed and Peter fell apart. He couldn’t handle the stress. I visited him in hospital, gave him a little incentive to tell me how to get to the money, but the bloody-minded fool wouldn’t tell me.’

‘You killed him!’ roared Sophie, jerking towards Lana, almost slipping from Josh’s grasp. He pulled her back and pushed her on to the bed, standing between the two women.

‘Don’t, Sophie,’ he said. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’

‘Worse?’ she spat, her voice cracking. ‘How could it possibly be worse?’

Lana looked at her watch and put the envelope into her bag.

‘Come on, Josh, we can’t stand here all day.’

Together they turned towards the door, leaving Sophie crumpled on the bed in misery.

‘And you’re working for her, I suppose,’ she hissed at Josh.

Lana spoke for him. ‘Nick did such a shabby job of getting information from you; he always was too easily impressed by pretty things. But then I met Josh in Cap Ferrat and I knew that he could be more helpful than Nick had ever been. So I persuaded him to work for me.’

Hot tears were running down Sophie’s cheeks.

‘Sophie,’ said Josh, his eyes pleading. ‘If you’ll just let me explain . . .’

‘Get the hell out of here!’ screamed Sophie. ‘I don’t

want to even look at you, let alone listen to any more of your lies.’

‘Sophie, I’m sorry.’

‘Get out!’ she sobbed. ‘Get out!’

Josh bowed his head, then turned and walked out of her life.

46

Ruth felt like she was in the Cannonball Run. She’d been up all night, tearing along motorways, A roads and now narrow, winding country lanes, the endless white lines in the cone of the squad car headlights blurring into one. At first it had been exciting to put on the spinning blue lights and the ‘nee-naw’ siren and watch the traffic ahead part like the Red Sea, but they had now been on the road for five hours and the novelty of the high-speed pursuit had long since worn off. Ruth had always considered Great Britain to be a small country; after all, her home state of North Carolina was bigger than the whole of England alone. But as the past few hours had shown her, the road from London to the Scottish Highlands was a very long one indeed, even when you were exempt from the speed limit. It hadn’t helped that by the time Josh McCormack had called Fox at his flat, it had already been too late to fly north, and trains from London to Scotland reverted to the slower overnight sleeper variety after ten o’clock. Short of requisitioning a police helicopter – ‘You would not believe the paperwork involved,’ said Fox – the only solution had been to get a fast train to Manchester, then continue the rest of the way in a squad car, speeding up the motorway as far as Glasgow, then picking their way cross-country.

Ruth popped another can of Coke and leant against the car, staring across at a distant farmhouse, the only feature in an endless expanse of gorse and heather. They’d taken a pit stop in a lay-by so Fox could make some calls. He was tense, jittery; she could tell he knew his career was on the line if he got this wrong. She turned as he tapped on the windscreen, and slid gratefully back inside the warmth of the car.

‘Everyone’s in position,’ said Fox as he gunned the engine back to life. ‘Let’s hope it’s all worth it. I’m going to look such a bloody banana if this was a crank call.’

‘This Josh McCormack’s got no reason to lie,’ said Ruth, inspecting the road map one last time. She had been staring at it for so long, she felt she could ace a quiz on any of the towns and villages they had passed through that night.

‘Okay, take the next right,’ she instructed. ‘We should be coming to the head of a loch. My guess is that we’ll see it pretty soon.’

Fox slowed down as they reached a sharp turn at the bottom of the road and Ruth smiled to herself: he was still signalling, despite the fact that they hadn’t seen another vehicle in about an hour. Almost immediately the steep pass opened out in front of them and they could see the small castle high on their right, hanging over the loch beneath the glowering crag of Ben Grear.

‘Look, tyre tracks,’ said Fox, nodding towards a muddy strip where the loch road and the drive up to the castle met. ‘Looks like someone has been and gone.’

Ruth swore under her breath. ‘Don’t say we’ve come all this way and missed them.’

Fox gunned the engine all the way up the narrow roadway, skidding to a halt in front of the castle’s wide porch and running for the door.

It creaked open and he immediately raised a hand to stop Ruth. He put a finger to his lips. ‘Shh . . .’ he whispered as they went inside. ‘Did you hear that?’