Perfect Strangers

‘That’s why he was perfect, Sophie,’ said Lana, sipping her brandy. ‘I don’t know whether he was involved from the start, or whether Asner approached him when things started to get hot and he had to make a contingency plan, but it was a stroke of genius to choose your father. Asner knew that the SEC, the FBI would investigate his close Wall Street colleagues, but a small-time British accountant who had lost all this money in the scheme? He’d be completely off their radar.’

‘How do you know all this?’ asked Josh.

Lana stood up and pulled a thick manila file from a drawer in the desk.

‘I have spent nine months and hundreds of thousands of dollars looking into Asner’s affairs. Private investigators, forensic accountants, they’ve collected every last scrap of information on him and sifted through it. I think I know more about him than the FBI.’

‘But why?’ asked Sophie, shaking her head. ‘Why go to all that trouble?’

‘Because my family lost everything too,’ said Lana. Her eyes were bright and fierce.

‘Your family?’ said Sophie.

‘My family are based in Madrid. They were wealthy, but not super-rich. Like yours, they invested everything they had in Asner’s scheme, hoping for a glorious return for their pension. Like your parents, like hundreds of others, they lost everything. I support them financially now, but that’s not the point. No one should be allowed to get away with what Asner did.’

She walked over to pour herself another brandy, and Sophie noticed that her hands were shaking.

‘I knew from the start we were unlikely to get anything back. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been trying to trace the money, of course, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and besides, it has limited resources like any governmental department. So I recruited my own team to look into it. They did a very good job, if I do say so myself.’

‘So where is the money?’ said Josh.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? Why not?’

‘Because the trail ends here.’ Lana looked at Sophie.

‘With me? That’s crazy!’

‘Is it?’ said Lana. ‘Everyone involved with the Asner investigation believes he must have stashed the money somewhere, but I’m convinced your father was the one who hid it.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sophie. ‘If he had all that money, why would he have made us suffer like that?’

‘Suffer?’ laughed Lana. ‘You hardly suffered, Sophie. You had to come down a few pegs in life, that’s all. And your father would have thought the discomfort was worth it for the rewards he knew were to follow. My guess is that he would have waited two or three years for the scandal to die down, then quietly distributed the money back to Asner’s wife and inner circle, and of course kept a big chunk for himself – he would have set you up for life.’

A sickening thought suddenly occurred to Sophie.

‘Was my father killed?’

Lana shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know. But either way, the trail ends with you. With such a large fortune at stake, your father would have made his own contingency plan; he would have told someone else where the money was hidden in the event that anything happened to him or Asner.’

‘And you think that person was me?’

‘Of course. He loved you, he trusted you. Who else would he turn to?’

Sophie looked at Josh, her eyes pleading.

‘But he didn’t tell me anything.’

‘So let’s get this straight,’ Josh said to Lana, narrowing his eyes. ‘You engineered it so that Sophie would come and house-sit for you, presumably so she would bring all her personal possessions with her? Then you hired Nick to seduce her, to work his way into her life and find out everything he could about it?’

Lana nodded.

‘You’re a cold bitch, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘I thought it was the best way,’ said Lana uncertainly, her composure slipping.

‘The best way?’ snarled Josh, banging his fist down on the desktop. ‘You got Sophie wrapped up in all this, you got Nick killed, all for nothing.’