yone noticing. If you’re a high-profile billionaire like Julian, off to meet a lady friend, you just travel economy on a scheduled airline.’
Rachel whistled through her teeth, not wanting to speak ill of the dead.
‘So who is Kopek? Have you tracked her down?’
Ross glanced at her. ‘You can be bossy, you know that?’
Rachel smiled. It was funny how easily she and Ross had slipped back into their old working relationship. Blunt, to the point, dispensing with pleasantries, getting the job done. It felt good, she had to admit.
Ross clicked on a file, and an image of a young, beautiful, blue-eyed blonde filled the screen.
‘Diana’s basic nightmare,’ said Rachel, knowing in the pit of her stomach that this was the woman Greg Willets had seen his friend with outside the Four Seasons.
‘Not any more,’ said Ross. ‘She’s dead.’
He pulled up another window: a small online newspaper report.
‘Madison Kopek, twenty-one, a student from Maryland,’ he read, ‘was killed in a hit-and-run in College Park Thursday evening. Paramedics tried to revive her at the scene, but she was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.’
Rachel read the full report. Her head was reeling as she tried to process all the information.
‘So she died two days before Julian killed himself?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Shit,’ she whispered.
‘Indeed.’
Rachel stood up and walked over to the window, the penny dropping with a dreadful thud.
‘So let’s assume Madison was a girlfriend; if Julian was in love with her, he could have been grief-stricken – that’s enough of a reason for doing what he did.’
She pressed her fingertips against her temples. She had no idea how she was going to explain this to her sister, and knew instinctively that she had to protect her from it. She tried to make her mind twist the facts around to come to a more palatable conclusion.
‘According to Diana, Julian seemed cheerful that night. He was talking about the future, making plans. If you were cut up about your dead mistress, how do you hide something like that?’
Ross gave a cynical laugh. ‘He’d had enough practice, Rach. And anyway, if this Madison was his secret lover, who could he tell? For two days he would have had to carry all that grief, all that sorrow around on his own, keeping it locked inside.’
He bent to pull a file from his briefcase and handed it to Rachel. It contained all the information he had managed to gather on Madison Kopek. At the front were three different glossy photos, clearly professionally taken, perhaps for a modelling portfolio. She looked exactly as Rachel had imagined: wholesome, squeaky-clean beauty queen. Greg’s story of Julian picking up hookers in hotel bars hadn’t quite rung true for Rachel; he liked the nice things in life, shiny and new – there was nothing gritty or street-corner, even hotel-bar escort girl, about her brother-in-law. No, Madison was much more his style. And as she read, it confirmed her image of the girl. Madison Kopek was an honours student at the University of Maryland; smart and beautiful, easy to fall in love with. What a terrible loss, thought Rachel, terrible for everyone involved.
‘Still, we don’t know that Madison was Julian’s lover,’ she said, snapping the file shut.
‘No, we don’t,’ agreed Ross. ‘For all we know, Jamaica was some innocent business trip.’
‘So why do it on the sly?’ she said cynically. She could feel her frustration growing. Ross had always been uncanny in his ability to winkle out information; she had become accustomed to him knowing the answers to almost everything. ‘Where now? We can’t exactly quiz Madison Kopek about it.’
‘At least show her photo to Greg Willets. Get him to confirm she was the girl he saw with Julian outside the hotel.’
Rachel made a mental note to do that first thing in the morning.
‘And if it is her, then here’s the town where her mother lives. I hear Maryland is lovely this time of year.’
19
Diana watched from the window as the car pulled away down the drive from the direction of the Lake House. Folding her arms tightly across her chest, she wondered who had been visiting her sister – in an ancient-looking Fiesta at that – on a Saturday night. She mulled over the possibilities in her mind. It was the same car she had seen arriving at the Lake House when Adam had dropped her off a little while earlier. Most likely it was an old friend or a colleague, although Somerfold seemed an awfully long way to come for just an hour – to stay such a short time suggested that it had been somebody come to deliver something. A piece of information? she wondered, feeling suddenly keyed up that Rachel was making progress with the job at hand. Curious, she pulled on a pair of wellington boots from beside the door and crunched down the gravel drive towards the lake, passing the aviary and sending up a flurry of wings and cheeping.
Usually she felt nervous wandering around the grounds in the dark. Somerfold was a lonely place without Julian and Charlie around, so much so that she had almost instantly regretted putting Rachel in the Lake House. But tonight, as a squirrel darted across the lawn, and the boathouse appeared through a gap in the trees, she felt as if she had been dropped in the middle of a fairy tale. Like many things that day, Diana suddenly saw the house in a new light. It looked magical, like a Hansel and Gretel cottage hidden in the woods. She was surprised to find herself smiling as she walked on. She did not usually look forward to her meetings with Rachel, but this evening she felt more relaxed and mellow, which she thought momentarily might be Adam’s doing.