She had got hold of a copy of the video surveillance footage on her first day in England.
‘Yes, and most of it’s static shots of the stairs where nothing happens for three hours. In the dark. James Bond it ain’t.’
Rachel left Carl examining the doors in the study and wandered back into the kitchen. Forty million pounds. And that was just one of the assets that Julian had bequeathed his wife. What would she do with forty million? she thought idly. She’d have a pretty good go at trying to spend it, that was for sure. Yachts, jets, Caribbean islands, tanned muscular waiters bearing cool towels and cocktails – that would be a start.
In many ways, she could see that Julian had done Diana a huge favour. She had hated his narrow little dinner-party circle with his superior friends like Greg Willets, and now she was free of them. She never had to eat another canapé or make polite conversation about so-and-so’s divorce or face lift. She could go anywhere she chose. If Julian had lived, the money would still be there in the bank, the Denvers would still be as wealthy, but Diana would be obliged to live this uptight, predictable and frankly deathly dull life.
‘Tight as a gnat’s arse, this place,’ announced Carl, joining her in the kitchen. ‘I’m not surprised the police didn’t think anyone could get in. As far as I can see, there aren’t any blind spots on the CCTV camera. There wouldn’t be with a security system this sophisticated. My only thinking is that if it was foul play, then it must have been someone already in the house.’
‘You mean Diana?’ She thought about her sister’s diary. Which she had tried to put out of her mind since she had read it.
Carl shrugged. ‘It’s possible.’
‘Of course it’s not possible,’ she blustered. ‘Why on earth would she want to kill her husband?’
‘For the forty-million-pound mansion, the country retreat, the billion-dollar shareholding . . . Perhaps she was still just bloody pissed off with him for shagging that model.’
‘I don’t think she would have waited all this time to do it, do you?’
‘There’s the possibility that she did it in conjunction with someone else. Someone who manipulated her into helping them get rid of him. You used to say she was the soft, timid sort.’
‘Diana’s not a murderer,’ said Rachel defensively.
‘But Julian Denver had enemies. Enemies who wanted to bring him down and who didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire. Look at Susie McCormack. It’s not my proudest moment that we probably wrecked a teenager’s life for the sake of a story. But the person that shopped her didn’t worry about that. They just wanted to nail Denver.’
She stopped thinking of her sister for one moment and looked directly at Carl.
‘What do you mean, shopped her?’
Carl looked embarrassed, as if his mouth had run away with him.
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‘You remember how Alistair told us he wanted sleaze stories, how fat cats misbehaving were suddenly hot again? So we needed to find industry figures, unfaithful bankers, so-called society family men who were, well, no disrespect to Julian, hypocritical sleazebags.’
Rachel didn’t react, just let him talk.
‘I mean, he wanted the whole news team working on it, but the pressure was on me because of the sorts of people I knew: society people, country people, exactly the sort Alistair was after, in fact. One day he called me into his office and told me he was counting on me.’ Carl did a note-perfect impression of their editor’s rich Scottish baritone. ‘So I did my best. Put the feelers out, mined the most well-connected and wealthy people I knew for gossip . . .’
‘And?’
‘I came up with nothing. Zero. I don’t know whether the wealthy socialites had got wind of the Post’s appetite for their blood, but it was almost as if they had shut down completely.’
Rachel frowned and leant forward. ‘But you did find something. You were the one who found out about Julian’s infidelity.’
She could remember his face that day, the day he had come to her, offered to buy her a drink, then told her that he’d found out about her brother-in-law and his affair with an eighteen-year-old girl. He’d shown her the pictures of them together, said he was warning her in advance, ‘as a friend’.
‘So what are you telling me, Carl, that you didn’t break the story on Julian?’
Carl pulled a face. ‘I did, yes. But not quite in the super-sleuth way I led everyone to believe,’ he said, shamefaced.
Rachel sank on to a chair. ‘Tell me,’ she said, the anger coming off her in waves.
Carl sighed, then nodded, as if he’d been dreading this moment for years but knew it was inevitable.
‘I told the news team that I’d heard rumours about Julian, that I’d followed him until I saw him with Susie, then took photos.’
Rachel remembered those photos. She could still picture them as if they were lying on the table in front of her. Julian and Susie, embracing, kissing. Wrapped around each other like two teenagers. The Denvers had threatened to sue, of course, claiming that the Post couldn’t prove that Julian was having an affair with Susie or anyone else. When the paper had produced a sworn affidavit from Susie attesting to their sexual relationship, they had tried to have her branded an evil opportunist or a naïve fantasist. Either of which could have been true, but by then it was academic – the photos and the story had run.