‘You’re just feeling vulnerable. It can make people a little paranoid.’
She pushed herself upright and looked at him. ‘Well how’s this for paranoid? Basically there are two possibilities: somebody wanted to kill me, or somebody knew Cassandra was staying at the Stables and wanted to kill her.’
Rob thought about it for a while and decided to run with it.
‘Well, I know Cassandra is pretty unpopular in some areas, but who would want to kill her? Surely she was suffering enough already at that point?’
‘Yes, I know. It’s unlikely, isn’t it, but I’m still convinced the accident in Gstaad was a deliberate act.’
She saw Rob frown, chewing it over.
‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘Let’s go with this one for a moment. Who wants you dead and why?’
Emma had spent the last forty-eight hours thinking about it fanatically, her forensic brain sifting through the many scenarios. Her mother would inherit Emma’s shares on her death; and she felt sure that in that instance Virginia would want to get rid of them rather than keep hold of the shareholding. The other shareholders could get them at a preferential rate which meant that Roger, Julia, Ruan or Stella could, in theory, benefit from Emma’s death. (She refused to believe that her own mother would try and kill her.) But in Emma’s mind there was only one obvious person with both motive and opportunity: her uncle.
‘Roger has hated me from day one,’ she told Rob slowly. ‘He thinks I’ve sidelined him from the company, which of course I have. He seems to have lost interest in Milford in the last few months and over Christmas was pressurizing me to have a meeting with a luxury goods conglomerate and he seemed desperate to sell. It’s logical: because of terms in the shareholders agreement, he’ll get more for his shareholding if we sell the entire company to an outsider than if he sells his shares to me.’
‘So what’s his motive?’
‘Money,’ said Emma frankly. ‘Roger owns 20 per cent of the company. With me dead, the shares pass to my mother. She’d definitely sanction a sale if he asked her. Twenty per cent of fifty, a hundred, million pounds is a lot of money. Even for Rebecca.’
She looked out of the library door and, as she did so, images of Saturday night’s party came back to her with clarity.
‘Roger thought I was going back to the Stables. He offered me a lift back in the taxi right there,’ she said, pointing to the curve of the stairs they could just see through the doorway. ‘I told him I was getting the next taxi. His house is five minutes drive from the Stables through the East Gate. He could have waited half an hour, then gone to my house, saw the lights were on, and well …’ her voice tailed off and suddenly she felt uneasy looking at the fire in front of them.
Rob put his hand over hers. ‘How about we have an early night?’
‘It’s only seven.’
‘I can think of ways we can while away the time,’ he said, taking her hand.
She felt her body freeze. She’d barely let him touch her since the fire; she couldn’t bring herself to be close to anyone; it was as if she had physically and emotionally shut down. She couldn’t explain it, didn’t want it, but it was as if some instinct of self-preservation was trying to protect her by making her stay isolated and distant.
‘Em, please,’ he said quietly. ‘I know what’s happened has been awful but you don’t need to put yourself in deep freeze.’
He reached over and she let him kiss her softly on the lips.
‘Let’s take it slowly? Please?’
‘At least sleep in the bedroom tonight.’
She hesitated and was about to speak when there was a knock on the door.
‘Were you expecting anyone?’ she asked Rob, suddenly on edge.
Rob got up and walked to the front door. Emma listened to the male voices that floated into the house.
‘Em. It’s Inspector Sheldon,’ said Rob, returning to the door of the library with a frown on his brow.
Sheldon extended a hand. ‘I hope I haven’t disturbed anything,’ he said looking around the hallway. ‘I heard you were staying here, Ms Bailey. I’m afraid we need you down at the station to answer a few more questions.’
‘I feel as overdressed as Joan Collins at a Hell’s Angels convention,’ whispered Stella, still wearing the aqua chiffon dress in the small dark basement of the Helter Skelter record shop on Denmark Street.
Tom laughed. ‘I said don’t dress up. Don’t worry. No one comes here to people-watch,’ he said, aware of the irony that every man in the room had been clocking Stella, luminous in some wisp of a shimmering blue dress, since the moment she had walked in.
‘Shit. They’re coming on,’ he nudged her as four guys in black T-shirts and jeans walked onto a makeshift stage so small it was more like a podium.
‘Who are they again?’