Page 209 of Private Lives

Helen swallowed, then looked at Peter.

‘Amy didn’t just fall down the stairs, did she?’

He didn’t speak for several seconds.

‘A few weeks before it happened, we’d gone out dancing. Ridiculous for an old fart like me, but like I say, she made me feel young. I’d had too much brandy and got sentimental. I told her about Doug Faulks’s suicide – well, not everything, but I was drunk, unhappy. I told her I blamed myself.’ He snorted. ‘In vino veritas, eh? I blamed myself because it was my fault.’

‘But how did that lead to her death?’

Peter shook his head, remembering.

‘I was stupid. Amy used to stay in the Bloomsbury flat I use during the week and I left my computer on. She’d been putting pressure on me to leave my wife and she obviously thought she might find something about Doug on the laptop, something she could use to force my hand. She did. She found the Atlanticana report and copied it.’

Peter looked at Helen, his eyes red.

‘She was a clever girl, Amy. People thought she was an airhead, but she had enough intelligence to connect the engineering faults in the rig with Doug’s death. So she threatened me, told me she’d blow the whistle on us; she had that do-or-die mentality.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Helen, already knowing the answer, but needing to hear it.

‘What could I do? I told James Swann about her. Everyone goes to James with their problems. I thought he was just going to pay her off, maybe threaten her. But two days later she was dead.’

‘You think James had her killed?’

Peter rubbed at his eye with the heel of his hand.

‘He said he’d dealt with her. I guess he did.’

Helen looked away from him, watching the man with the dog, wishing she was back at Seaways the afternoon before Anna Kennedy had called. In Simon’s arms, their bodies entwined, no worries or fears.

‘So are you glad you know now, Miss Pierce?’ asked Peter. ‘I’m assuming that’s why you never asked before. Because your conscience couldn’t deal with it.’

Helen didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

The first time she had met Peter, he was a steely and vital man, but now he looked pale, weak, as if the life force had been drained out of him.

‘I should confess,’ he said quietly. ‘Give the newspapers a little bite to their story, eh?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Helen, a little too loud.

Peter’s expression was one of pure resignation.

‘It’s what I want,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t want to live like this.’

‘But why?’ said Helen passionately. ‘Amy’s dead – and yes, I know you loved her, but throwing yourself to the wolves won’t bring her back.’

‘I killed Amy and I killed Doug. Not with my own bare hands, but I might as well have.’

‘Doug committed suicide,’ said Helen plainly.

Peter sat back on the bench, his head tilted towards the milky sky. ‘We knew the rig was unsafe,’ he said softly. ‘Half the board of Dallincourt knew. We’d completed a repair job but the materials used were compromised.’

‘Cost-cutting?’

He nodded.

‘We didn’t know at the time that they wouldn’t be up to the job, but when the senior engineer gave us some projections and said we’d need to go back down and strengthen the work we’d done, well, we took a chance to leave it. It was all about profit, Helen. We wanted to spin off the engineering arm of the company, and a multi-million-

pound repair job would have affected the bottom line and our projected sale price.’