The maid’s mouth opened and closed like a fish and she began backing Ruth towards the door.
‘No more questions; I know nothing,’ she said.
‘Cherry, please. Who is Mrs G with?’ But she could see that the housekeeper would say nothing else.
‘All right, okay. But couldn’t you at least give me Mrs Goddard-Price’s number so that if I have any more questions later, I can call her?’
She smoothly produced another crisp twenty, which immediately disappeared into Cherry’s pocket. Sucking her teeth, the housekeeper walked over to a closet in the hallway. It was full of brushes and cleaning products, and was where Cherry apparently stored her coat and her handbag.
She took a blue plastic pen out of a pen pot, scribbled down the number and handed it to Ruth.
‘You go now.’
Ruth was bundled out on to the steps and heard the front door being locked behind her. She looked down at the number in her hand.
‘What have you been up to, Mrs G?’ she wondered to herself.
Ruth sighed. There were so many missing parts of the puzzle, she didn’t know where to start. If only she had access to the information Detective Inspector Fox and his team had. They would be investigating Nick’s movements and business transactions, maybe getting access to his bank accounts. And if Nick had ‘form’, as they said in the force, then there was a good chance Fox knew about his potential enemies. If Sophie Ellis was still a suspect, they’d have built up a profile of her too by now.
‘All right, Ian Fox,’ said Ruth, pulling her mobile out of her pocket. ‘Let’s see what you know.’
She quickly tapped in a text message:
Fox, it’s Ruth. Can you call me? We need to meet. Important.
She looked down at it for a moment, then added an ‘x’ at the end. Not very professional, perhaps, but hey, she was a woman in a man’s world – she had to use whatever weapons were to hand.
Feeling a spot of rain, she pulled up the collar of her jacket and hurried to her next meeting.
34
It was hard to see anything out of the windows of Lana’s Gulfstream; they were tiny. Presumably the passengers on the sleek private jets weren’t that interested in sightseeing. All Sophie could see was a long expanse of tarmac and a stationary baggage cart with no driver. Welcome to America, she thought. Lana’s private jet had landed at Teterboro airport, an aviation facility in New Jersey popular with private and corporate aircraft. It was small, yes, but it was a ‘landing rights’ airport and, as such, an approved point of entry into the United States for people who weren’t American citizens. Sophie felt anxious as they waited for the plane to be inspected by the Customs and Border Protection agency.
At least Josh had his proper passport and had been able to hastily arrange his ESTA – the document required for US travel – at Nice airport. Sophie already had one from a previous trip to the States, but for all she knew, Inspector Fox could have American airports on red alert for a Sophie Ellis entering the country. If an alarm was going to go off, it would happen any minute.
‘Can you see anyone?’ whispered Josh. He sounded uncharacteristically nervous. Despite Lana’s reassurances, they had spent the entire seven-hour journey from Nice paranoid that they would be met by a SWAT team and two truckloads of FBI agents in black suits and wraparound shades.
‘Please relax,’ said Lana. ‘I assure you, the United States authorities have no interest in either of you. We simply have to wait for the landing officials to scan our fingerprints, then we can leave.’
Sophie looked back at the woman, sitting calmly in her armchair. How could she seriously expect them to relax? From the moment of meeting Lana by the pool at Villa Polieux, Sophie had been off-balance, feeling as if she was teetering on the edge of a cliff. The jaw-dropping revelation that she had been set up by Lana and Nick would have been enough, but now Sophie was being asked to accept that her father, the one man she had trusted and idolised in this world, was in fact a crook and had deliberately lost her family’s life savings. It was enough to mess with anyone’s head.
‘Let me see your book again,’ said Josh. ‘If we’re going to have to sit here, I might as well try and crack the code.’
Sophie opened her copy of I Capture the Castle, which had been safely retrieved from La Luna hotel.
In the centre of the page was Peter Ellis’s handwriting: To my dearest S, read this and think of our castle. Happy birthday. All my love always, Daddy. But in the top right-hand corner, above the title, the words ‘Benedict Grear’ had been written, in the small cursive writing of a teenager perhaps, alongside the date ‘22 12 56’. Sophie had seen it there before, of course, but the paperback had been old and a little worn and she had simply assumed it was the name of its previous owner. How many times had she inscribed her own name in her treasured novels as a way of claiming ownership of a story she had loved? It wasn’t uncommon to see something similar in any second-hand book.
But suddenly these few words had taken on huge significance. They had spent at least an hour in Sophie’s cramped Cannes hotel room thinking up ever more outlandish – and desperate – explanations for the words. When Google had thrown up nothing, Josh had tried breaking them down into anagrams, tried assigning letters to the numbers in the hope of forming words; Lana had even translated them into Spanish and back. Nothing made any sense. Finally Lana had suggested the Gulfstream.
‘If you don’t know what it means, then there’s really only one person who might: Michael Asner’s widow Miriam. And even if she doesn’t, perhaps she’ll tell you something she wouldn’t tell the investigators.’
It made sense, and as Lana had the means of flying them to the US, it seemed ridiculously simple. Simple, that was, until they were actually there, sitting on the tarmac, waiting for a siren to sound. Sophie felt her nerves might snap at any moment.
‘You do realise we don’t even know if it is a code?’ she said. ‘It could genuinely be just something the previous owner wrote in there.’
‘I have no idea of its relevance,’ said Lana, fixing her with her cool stare. ‘But I do know it is the only thing your father gave to you, and until we exhaust every possibility, we have to assume it does have some hidden message.’
‘We have exhausted every possibility!’ said Sophie. ‘I don’t know what you expect—’