The sonographer laughed. ‘Yes, an actual baby. And as far as we can tell, it wasn’t at all hurt by your fall; it looks completely healthy.’
Diana squeezed her eyes closed and willed herself to connect with Julian. His soul, his spirit. She just wanted to say sorry. Sorry that she couldn’t have given him his own child; sorry that she had conceived with his brother.
‘I’d say you were about eight weeks,’ said the sonographer more slowly.
‘Eight weeks?’ whispered Diana, snapping her eyes back open. ‘Are you sure?’
‘You can’t tell too much from early scans. But I would say around eight or nine weeks, yes.’
She was eight weeks pregnant.
She shook her head in disbelief. She counted back the weeks, working out the approximate time of conception. A moment flashed into her head, although it felt so long ago it was as if it belonged to another lifetime. It had been a matter of days before his death. Julian had come back from London, slipped into bed and had initiated sex. It had been painful, uncomfortable, and she had been certain that he hadn’t come inside her. But obviously it had been more successful than she’d thought. She started to tremble, fat tears clouding her vision.
She covered her face and began to bawl. ‘It’s his,’ she sobbed. ‘The baby’s his.’
It wasn’t Adam’s baby. It was Julian’s. He was alive. Julian was alive, and he was inside her.
59
Rachel looked around the Admiral Nelson pub in Victoria and decided it was quite appropriate that she should be here. It was an authentic copper’s pub that sold a decent pint of draught bitter and had scampi fries and pork scratchings behind the bar, an almost extinct type of watering hole; the Last Chance Saloon, she told herself ruefully as she waited for Inspector Mark Graham to arrive.
The past few days had gone by in a blur. Rachel had moved her stuff up from the Lake House to Somerfold and had tried to share Diana’s bittersweet joy about her pregnancy. Realising how difficult it must be for Diana anticipating the arrival of a child who would never know its father, her priority was to support her sister. But despite her fears that Diana might fall to pieces, Rachel had instead witnessed a surprising show of strength, a renewed sense of purpose that she herself was sadly lacking.
Rachel knew why she felt so helpless and defeated. There was no end in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel. She had discovered that Julian had been having an affair and had wanted to withdraw a controversial drug from the market. But she was still no clearer about whether those two things had anything to do with his death – or nothing at all.
The plane ticket to Thailand that Liam had given her felt as if it was glowing with temptation. The flight departed in less than forty-eight hours. If she wasn’t on it, would she ever go back to Ko Tao, she wondered, or would she be stuck in London chasing her tail, like a lost soul trapped in the underworld, as everyone else, even Diana, moved on?
‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Graham, sitting down on the banquette next to her and disturbing her thoughts. ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’
‘You don’t mess around, do you?’ said Rachel, watching him compose a text message.
Graham looked up and smiled at her. ‘Listen, I have a wife and four kids to get back to and I’ll catch earache off all of them if I’m home a minute later than I have to be.’
‘Then I’ll be quick. I need you to interview Elizabeth Denver.’ Rachel sipped her Diet Coke and observed the policeman.
Graham put down his phone and frowned. ‘I’ve already spoken to Elizabeth Denver
.’
‘And what did she say?’ she asked, searching his face for some sort of clue to how his investigation was going.
‘Wait for the inquest,’ he replied flatly.
‘Look, you were right about me. I’ve been looking into this myself . . .’
‘You surprise me,’ he said sarcastically as he unfastened a couple of buttons on his suit jacket.
She didn’t want to tell him about Julian’s affair with Madison Kopek, but she knew she had to give him something to keep him interested. There was no one thing that pointed directly to Elizabeth’s involvement in her brother’s death. If this was a story, if she was presenting it before the editor and the newspaper’s legal team, she would have nothing concrete to show them. But Elizabeth had been ruthless enough to destroy her brother once, and Rachel just knew that she was capable of doing it, more efficiently, more literally, again.
‘Julian was looking into a new drug produced by Denver’s pharmaceutical division when he died. He wanted to pull it off the market and it’s my belief that there were people in the company who didn’t want that to happen.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like his sister, Elizabeth Denver. She knew all about his plans. She is a big shareholder in Denver, with ambitions for the top job, and she won’t have been happy about it. Pulling the drug would have had serious repercussions for the potential sale price of the pharmaceutical division, which would then impact on the share price of the company.’
She stopped, reminding herself of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It was something that now struck a chord. However many times she voiced her fears about Rheladrex, there was no guarantee that it would bring her any nearer to finding out the truth about Julian’s death. As Liam had pointed out, she was beginning to sound like a fantasist.
‘Look,’ she said more reasonably. ‘I know that no one could have got into Julian’s house that night. I get that it was probably suicide. But I just don’t trust Elizabeth Denver and I can’t help thinking that she was involved in this. Have you been through her emails, her phone records?’