‘I’ve no interest in gossip,’ Anne-Marie said quickly, but Rachel could see that she was becoming emotional.
‘Anne-Marie, please. You must have known him as well as anyone.’
‘I don’t know what pushed him over the edge. What I do know is that he was doing an incredibly high-pressure job and perhaps all it took was the tiniest of things.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You might think di
fferently, Miss Miller, but Julian was a very decent man. Let me show you something,’ she said, standing up and beckoning Rachel to follow her into a side room stacked with files and boxes. She pulled a cardboard storage container off a top shelf and placed it on the table. ‘This is only a small sample,’ she said, taking out a sheaf of papers.
‘What are they?’
‘Letters to Julian. Or rather, to the CEO of Denver Group. Complaints, gripes, suggestions, even proposals.’ She pulled one out and handed it to Rachel. It was written in red ink, a scrawled angry hand, and it began ‘Dear Blood-sucker’.
‘We used to get a lot of this on the newspaper,’ said Rachel. ‘People with too much time on their hands.’
Anne-Marie pursed her lips at the mention of Rachel’s previous career. That was a misstep, thought Rachel, cursing herself.
‘Not all of these letters are from attention-seekers,’ Anne-Marie went on, her tone noticeably less warm. ‘In fact, many are genuine.’ She pulled out a thick file and opened it on the table.
‘All these are complaints about a helipad that serviced some of the more remote Scottish islands. Denver owned the heliport and were closing it down; someone in management believed it was no longer viable since North Sea oil has begun to run out. There are people here accusing Julian of destroying their lives, their communities, their relationships. Some are quite vitriolic; others are just downright heartbreaking. He’s even had death threats. You know, Miss Miller, if Julian had been murdered, there would be hundreds, if not thousands of suspects in these files. But he always tried to do his best for them.’
Rachel frowned at her. ‘He knew about these letters?’
‘He got someone on the team to answer every single one of them.’
‘All of them?’ said Rachel incredulously.
‘You know, we get all these hotshot business school graduates in here: Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD. And they all want to be CEO. They see the prestige, the money, the power, and they think that’s all there is to it. Yes, Julian Denver was wealthy, but I wouldn’t have swapped my position with him in a month of Sundays.’
She put the letters back in the box.
‘You see, Miss Miller, to be a really great CEO you have to be tough. Thick-skinned, ruthless, but not in the way you think – stabbing people in the back, insider dealing, all that. Yes, Julian could do that too if the situation required it, but it’s much harder to have to make unpopular decisions; you have to be able to lay off a thousand people before Christmas and then sleep easy at night.’
‘Do you think that bothered him?’
The woman shook her head to indicate her disapproval.
‘Do you really believe any of these questions will bring him back?’ she asked, her face set in stone. ‘What good do you imagine it will do?’
‘It will set his wife’s mind at rest.’
‘Really? Is that what you think?’
‘Don’t you? Honestly, Ms Carr, if you know some—’
‘Honestly?’ spat the secretary. ‘What would you know about honesty? Mrs Denver is a decent woman and I agreed to speak to you for her sake, but if you care for your sister at all’ – the woman’s expression suggested she didn’t believe that for a moment – ‘then you will go back to wherever you came from and drop all this nonsense right now.’
‘Please, Anne-Marie,’ said Rachel, ‘I only wanted to—’
‘Good night, Miss Miller,’ said the woman, walking to the door of the office and holding it open. ‘I trust you can find your own way to the lift.’
12
Diana had never been to a shrink before. Sometimes, in the early days of her marriage to Julian, when she had felt so excluded and lonely, she had considered it, had even looked up a few numbers. But something had stopped her; the shame of it, probably. Not that there seemed to be much stigma about it in the circles she mixed in – women in Kensington and Notting Hill talked quite openly about sessions with their therapist. It was as if they were talking about popping down to the Cowshed Spa for a massage, and perhaps that was the way they looked at it: a soothing session for a tired or stressed mind, in exactly the same way you’d give physio to a knee injured during a spinning session. But Diana wasn’t like those women, she didn’t come from their world; she’d grown up in small-town Devon. If you had problems there, you went to friends and family; if you needed anything more, well, there was always the loony bin.
This isn’t the loony bin, thought Diana. This was a discreet Edwardian house on a leafy street in Highgate, the sort of private clinic that had a brass plaque on the door, the sort of place where wealthy people came to get the very best care. There were leather sofas and big pot plants in the corner of the waiting room, which was decorated in subdued Farrow and Ball – Elephant’s Breath, she recognised – and Colefax and Fowler, designed to make rich women feel at home, she supposed. She looked up from the month-old copy of Country Life she had been pretending to read. The only other person – patient? – in the waiting room was a pretty woman in her early thirties. Well-dressed and groomed, she was using one of her perfectly manicured nails to pick at something on her Chanel skirt. Pick, pick, pick; she kept doing it until Diana had to look away. Am I like her? Am I just obsessively picking at something that isn’t there?