“Yes, well . . .” Teddy nodded sadly. “I suppose so.”
“You don’t look well, Teddy. You’re terribly thin.”
“I’m fine, darling. I had some sort of god-awful tummy bug, but I’m fit as a fiddle now.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“A doctor? Heavens no. No need for all that fuss and nonsense. Believe me, I’m fine.”
Alexia tried to believe him. “Will you cope, Teddy?” she asked anxiously. “I feel so helpless.”
“Of course I’ll cope.” Teddy laughed. “What a question. I survived prep school. Prison’ll be a doddle after that.”
Alexia thought, He means it. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Teddy said, “Let’s not talk about that now. We probably only have a few minutes. How are you, my darling? How was the Vineyard?”
“The Vineyard was the same as it always is. Lovely. Peaceful.”
“And New York?”
Alexia looked up sharply. “How did you know I was in New York?”
“I think Angus mentioned something,” Teddy said nonchalantly. “I was surprised. You never mentioned it in your letters. I always thought you loathed the city.”
“I needed a change of scene,” lied Alexia. The last thing she wanted to discuss with Teddy was her research into Jennifer Hamlin’s murder. Since his confession about Billy, they hadn’t touched on the subject again. They couldn’t, not if the marriage was going to survive. But there was one question she needed to ask. Now, while she had the chance.
“Have you ever heard of a company called HM Capital?”
Teddy looked bemused. “What on earth makes you ask that?”
“It’s a long story,” bluffed Alexia. “Nothing important. I just wondered if the name rang any bells.”
“All right. Well, yes, it does, as a matter of fact. It’s one of Arnie Meyer’s shell companies. An investment vehicle. Based out of Cayman, if memory serves.”
Alexia felt a tingle of something—excitement, or maybe apprehension—hearing Teddy confirm what her own research suggested. When she first saw Arnie Meyer’s name on the list of company directors, she thought she must have made a mistake. But it soon emerged that Arnie was not only a director, but the founder and primary investor in HM Capital. The other names on the directors’ list were all professional trustees, lawyers, and accountants who provided the business with tax advice. HM Capital was Arnie Meyer. And it had systematically set out to destroy Billy Hamlin’s business.
“What does it invest in?”
“Emerging markets,” Teddy said confidently. “Former Soviet republics primarily. Oil and gas.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not that I know of.”
“They don’t invest in automotives, for example? In the U.S.”
“No.” Teddy frowned. “What’s all this about, darling?”
“Honestly, it’s nothing.” Alexia smiled reassuringly. “I was thinking of making an investment, that’s all. I wanted to get your thoughts.”
“I’ll give you my thoughts.” Teddy suddenly sounded furious. “Tell Arnie if he wants to try and get money out of this family, he can damn well come to me. How dare he prey on you like that, at such a vulnerable time? I knew he was having some liquidity problems, but I never realized things had got that bad.”
“Please calm down, darling. No one’s been pressuring me, least of all Arnie. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
To Alexia’s relief, two prison guards came in at that moment and, very politely, asked her to leave. Taking her in his arms, Teddy forgot about Arnie Meyer.
“Thank you for coming to see me.”
“I’ll come as often as I can. Just as soon as they tell me where you are.” Alexia kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
“Look after Roxie,” Teddy called over his shoulder as he was led away.
“I’ll do my best.”
Alexia watched as the man who’d shared her life for forty years was led along the corridor, out of sight. A wave of emotion surged up within her, but she pushed it back down. There was nothing she could do for Teddy now. But she could still help bring Jennifer Hamlin’s killer to justice.
Arnie Meyer had a connection to Billy Hamlin. As bizarre as that sounded, it was true. Teddy had confirmed it. Arnie Meyer, Alexia’s neighbor and friend, had used his shell company, HM Capital, to deliberately wreck Billy’s business. According to Billy’s ex-wife, that more than anything was what had driven poor Billy over the edge.
Teddy clearly knew nothing about it. His bafflement earlier had been genuine and he’d bought Alexia’s investment excuse hook, line, and sinker.
But somebody must know.
I have to talk to Lucy.
Summer Meyer stared at Karen Davies’s computer monitor. She was so disappointed she could have wept.
“This is it? This is all you have?”
“That’s it,” said Karen. “She was in and out very quickly. No one you know, then?”
Summer might have known the woman on the screen. But it was utterly impossible to tell from this footage. Grainy, low resolution, and in black and white, it showed her only from behind and above. As she approached the front desk there was a split second when the camera captured a partial profile. But other than that, her face was hidden the entire time. For a moment Summer had thought there was something familiar about her—the way she walked, perhaps, or her body language as she leaned forward over the desk. But she quickly realized she was clutching at straws.
I want to see something so badly I’m making it up.
“Would it be all right if I took a copy of the footage home with me?”
She didn’t expect to glean much more from the images, but at least if she had them on her home PC, she could study them more closely.
The secretary glanced warily around her before ejecting the disc and pressing it into Summer’s hand.
“I don’t have a copy, only the original. Take it and bring it back to me when you’re finished with it. But for God’s sake, don’t lose it. David would have my guts for garters if he knew. He didn’t even want me to call you, you know. He was well ruffled after you came in the first time.”
“Was he?” said Summer, pocketing the disc. She wondered what Drake Motors’ manager felt he had to hide. “Well, thank you, Karen. And I promise to take care of it.”
“My pleasure.” The older woman winked. Summer Meyer’s little “investigation” was the most interesting thing that had happened to Karen Davies in a long time. “We girls have got to stick together, ’aven’t we?”
Later that night, Summer lay sprawled out on the couch in her rented flat in Bayswater, watching Karen Davies’s CCTV footage for the umpteenth time. The more she watched the slender gray figure move across Drake Motors’ shop floor, the more her feeling of familiarity grew. But there was nothing to connect it to. The woman’s clothes, a knee-length skirt and sweater, were dull and unremarkable. She wore a head scarf—no one Summer knew wore head scarves—but perhaps she’d been conscious of the cameras, and done this to help conceal her face? Certainly she could hardly have done a better job of making herself anonymous, short of a balaclava.
Putting the computer aside, Summer turned on the television, flipping the channels to BBC news. Teddy De Vere had been sentenced today. His fifteen-year-term was the evening’s top story. Even now, after so many months, Summer found it hard to believe that soft, kindly, cuddly Uncle Teddy could have killed a man, shot him in cold blood. She was amazed to see that Roxie had turned up at court—two weeks ago she’d been adamant about wanting nothing to do with either of her parents. The news footage showed her looking pretty and relaxed in a fitted black dress, leaving the High Court in her wheelchair at her mother’s side.
Summer smiled. If Alexia and Roxie reconciled, at least some good would come out of this sorry mess. She noticed that Alexia was wearing the cream Chanel jacket that Lucy had given her last year on her birthday. Summer remembered the day well. H
ow resentful and furious she’d felt back then, watching her mom walk across the room with the Chanel shopping bag in her hand, yet another expensive present for a woman Summer had perceived then as coldhearted and self-centered in the extreme. That was before she knew the truth, of course. She remembered Alexia stretching out her arms to receive the bag, and how greedy and graceless Summer had thought her: a spoiled queen accepting a tribute from one of her groveling courtiers.
And then it hit her. So hard, she gasped out loud.
Oh my God, I know.
I know who it is.
Heart hammering, she picked up her laptop again, cursing the seconds it took the disc to reload. At last the grainy figure reappeared. There could be no mistaking it now. There she was.
Michael’s lover.
The woman who had bought him the bike.
The woman who had destroyed his life, and Summer’s.
For a split second Summer felt a rush of satisfaction. She’d solved the puzzle. She’d won. She knew. But the truth was so unspeakable, so unnatural, so wrong, her feeling of achievement soon turned to revulsion. Dropping her head into her hands, Summer Meyer started to sob.
Once she started, she couldn’t stop.
Alexia flew back to America two days after Teddy’s hearing. The flight was in the early morning, and there were no photographers at Heathrow to see her go, only her daughter, Roxie.
“I’ll be back soon, darling,” Alexia promised. “There are a couple of things I need to talk through with Lucy. But it won’t take long. Then you and I can work out a plan for the future.”
On the plane, in the comfort of her first-class seat, Alexia finally allowed herself to relax.
Tomorrow she would see Lucy. Lucy would know the truth about Arnie. Lucy would tell Alexia. Lucy trusted Alexia.
They trusted each other.
Alexia De Vere smiled as she soared up into the blue.
Chapter Thirty-nine
“The toast is burning.”
Arnie Meyer looked up briefly from the Wall Street Journal. He was in the kitchen of his home on Martha’s Vineyard, sipping the finest Colombian coffee and enjoying the view across his gardens to the harbor, when the unexpected, acrid smell of smoke disturbed him. Unexpected because Lucy never burned anything. Ever. Her meals were always things of beauty, delivered perfect and piping hot on pretty bone-china plates, timed to perfection like miniature military campaigns. It was a precision and attention to detail that Arnie Meyer both appreciated and expected. He was a man used to getting his own way.
“Hmm?” Lucy looked at Arnie, then at the toaster. “Oh my God! Why didn’t you say something?”
“I did.”
Lucy wasn’t listening. Pressing cancel, she ejected the two charred squares, opened the kitchen door, and carried them outside, still smoking.
“Careful, honey,” Arnie called after her. “You’ll burn your fingers. Do you want me to put on some more?”
Outside in the cool morning air, Lucy Meyer took a deep, calming breath. “No, no,” she said cheerfully, the competent housewife once more. “I’ll do it.”
From behind the shield of his newspaper, Arnie watched his wife as she bustled around the room, slicing bread from the fresh baker’s loaf and whisking up the eggs for his smoked-salmon scramble. She’s still beautiful to me, he thought affectionately. He loved Lucy’s slender waist—slim, but not too thin, like her friend Alexia. Mrs. De Vere was looking gaunt these days, in Arnie Meyer’s humble opinion. A woman should have a little meat on her bones. In a cornflower-blue shirtwaist dress, with a floral apron tied over the top, Lucy had an old-fashioned, 1950s look about her this morning that conjured up the wholesome happiness of earlier, simpler times. She reminded Arnie of his mother as a young woman: feminine, nurturing, a soft, welcoming respite from the slings and arrows of the world.
“I love you.”
Lucy turned around, a curious smile on her face. Arnie wasn’t usually big on verbal displays of affection. “Well, that’s good.” She laughed. “Because at this point you’re pretty much stuck with me.”
Arnie finally put down his paper. “Is something the matter, Luce? You seem kind of jumpy this morning.”
“Why, because I burned the toast?” Lucy laughed again, but he sensed there was an edge to it.
“I don’t know. Maybe. You never burn the toast. You never burn anything.”
“Nothing’s the matter, Arnie.” Putting the pan of eggs on a low heat, she came over to the table and kissed him. “If anything, I’m a little excited. I haven’t seen Summer in so long. It’ll be a treat having her here.”
“Oh, shit.” Arnie Meyer put his head in his hands. “It’s today, isn’t it? I totally forgot she was flying in.”
“Arnie!”
“I know. I’m sorry. I arranged to go fishing with Jake McIntyre.”
“Well, you’d better un-arrange it,” said Lucy, returning to the stove, wooden spoon in hand. “You agreed to pick Summer up at the airport. She’s expecting you.”
“Can’t you do it? I promised Jake—”
“No, I cannot do it,” Lucy said, annoyed. “I’m hiking with Alexia, remember? She called from England especially to ask if we could have some time alone today.”
“But you can see Alexia anytime.”
“For God’s sake, Arnie, Teddy’s just been sent to jail! You can see Jake McIntyre anytime. Alexia needs me right now.”
Arnie Meyer held his hands up like a soccer player admitting a foul. After three decades of marriage, he knew when he was fighting a losing battle.
“Okay, okay, I’ll go get Summer. What time’s her flight land anyway?”
Summer pressed her face to the window of the little, single-engine plane, watching the contours of Martha’s Vineyard take shape below. An almost perfect triangle, with the Atlantic Ocean at its base and the Nantucket and Vineyard sounds along the other two sides, it looked so peaceful and unchanging. As the plane began its descent, she could make out the familiar white clapboard homes, dotted like dollhouses around the island. Swimming pools glinted blue, like tiny square-cut sapphires in the emerald-green yards. Everything was ordered and manicured and unthreatening, mocking the turmoil that Summer felt inside.
As a child, she used to relish these short plane rides from Boston. The first glimpse of the island was always magical and exciting, marking the beginning of a summer of adventures. Summer had been cripplingly shy in those days: overweight, tongue-tied, socially awkward. But her mom had made sure that her childhood was idyllic, despite those disadvantages. Always there to defend her, to hold her hand, comfort her, boost her confidence, Lucy Meyer was the mother that every other kid wanted.
For the hundredth time on her long journey from London, Summer’s eyes welled with tears.
How could she? How could she?
When Summer first realized that the woman on Drake Motors’ CCTV footage was her own mother, her natural response was disbelief. Yes, the walk was Lucy’s, and the body language and the way she moved her arms. (It was that, more than anything, that had triggered Summer’s memory. Picturing her mother handing that birthday present to Alexia, the Chanel jacket.) But the idea that her own mother had had an affair with Michael? That simply didn’t compute. It was like being told the world was square, or the sky green. However many pictures someone showed you, you wouldn’t believe it. Lucy being Michael De Vere’s “sugar mommy” defied all laws of nature, of probability, of reality as Summer knew it.
Unable to trust her own judgment, or even believe her own eyes, Summer had done what every good journalist would do. She’d looked for corroborating evidence. Karen Davies at Drake Motors had given her the details of the anonymous offshore bank account used to pay for Michael’s Ducati. At the time they’d meant nothing to Summer. They were just a string of random numbers: IBAN and SWIFT and routing codes. But when she checked them against the spreadsheet Arnie had made for her years ago, detailing all the Meyer family’s bank holdings, they were a perfect mat
ch.
Lucy bought the bike.
Lucy was Michael’s mistress.
Had Lucy tried to kill him too? Had she tampered with the Panigale deliberately?
A sharp bump dragged Summer back to the present.
We’ve landed.
Unfastening her seat belt, she wiped away her tears and tried to focus on her anger, wrapping it around her like a protective cloak. How had her mother dared do this to her? How had Michael! What had they been thinking? Michael’s betrayal hurt Summer deeply, but her mother’s was worse. Didn’t Lucy realize that Summer had now lost everything? Not just Michael, and her hopes for a new family, but her old family as well. All her memories, her childhood happiness, all of it had been tainted, poisoned, destroyed. It would have been less painful if Lucy had cut off her arms or thrown acid in her face. And all the while she’d made herself out to be this perfect mother! That was the worst of it.
Summer thought back to what Roxie had said to her at Fairmont House.
“You have no idea how lucky you are to have Lucy for a mother.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like, realizing that everything you thought you knew about yourself and your family was just smoke and mirrors!”
Summer could imagine it now.
She’d already decided what she was going to do. First, she would tell her father. She would show Arnie the footage, show him the bank transfer, let him know that his wife, the saintly Lucy Meyer, was a liar and an adulteress and a fraud and . . . a killer?
It was at this point that everything started to unravel. Even now, knowing what she knew, Summer couldn’t bring herself to believe that Lucy would have tried to kill Michael by deliberately sabotaging his bike. For one thing, she had no reason to want to hurt him. Apart from everything else, he was her best friend’s son. Lucy had known Michael since boyhood. Besides, the mechanics at the St. Martin’s garage weren’t certain that anyone had tampered with the Ducati’s brakes. It could have been an accident. Summer didn’t know what to believe anymore. The only person who knew the truth was her mother, but did Summer have the strength to confront her? What did one say in these circumstances? She’d had the last twelve hours to think about it, but still had no idea how to begin.