"Pardon?"
"Were you able to have the same lifestyle or, with two small children, was it less free?"
"We still traveled a lot."
"He traveled with you and the children?"
"No, I would bring the children to see him."
"Where?"
"Well, wherever he was. "Julia listed Florida, Germany, France, India, Switzerland, and Scotland among the places she had taken her children to visit him. She was obviously becoming bored; she tilted her head
back and closed her eyes. "You can check all this out with passport control. Both children have separate passports. A few times they went with a nanny he hired, but mostly I traveled with them."
"Can you give me a list of the hotels you stayed at during this period?"
"What, all of them? I can't remember all of them."
"I'd like you to try. Why don't you start off with Scotland? Where did you stay there?"
"Skibo Castle; we often went there, but we never stayed in the castle, always in one of the cottages. You can send over to the restaurant and they deliver food, whatever you want. You could play golf—well, not me, I don't play, but we would ride ..." She continued discussing the other activities she had enjoyed as Cunningham jotted down a note to Anna for the photograph of Alexander Fitzpatrick to be sent for identification to the hotel.
When Anna returned to the interview room, Julia was still trying to recall the various hotels where she had taken her children to stay. By now, she was leaning her chin on her hands, elbows propped on the table. The extraordinary thing was that Simon Fagan had not said one word since Julia had recoiled from him; he had remained sitting stiffly, almost as if determined to keep his distance. He had a leather-bound notebook in which he wrote odd notes with a Cartier fountain pen, unscrewing and rescrewing the top. Then he would stare down at the page, or back to the wall, as Julia talked on, and on, and on.
Cunningham spoke into the tape recorder that DI Travis had returned to the interview room. Anna slipped her a note to say they were checking into the Scotland connection; she then inched her legs under the table and picked up her pencil, straightened her notebook, and waited, but Cunningham remained silent. It was a little unnerving. Julia looked to Fagan, but he didn't pay any attention to her. Instead, he coughed and straightened his immaculate tie.
"When did it all go wrong?" Cunningham asked suddenly.
Julia sat back as if she didn't understand the question.
"You moved into a property in Wimbledon and you married Frank Brandon. Then, it appears from our previous interviews, you were
coerced into handing over a considerable amount of money: four million. Your financial adviser apparently persuaded you not to release any further monies. He then ends up dead, as does your new husband. So I am asking you, Mrs. Brandon, when did it all go wrong?"
"I never had anything to do with their deaths. I can prove where I was at all times. I wasn't involved in any way at all." Her voice had become shrill.
"I never said that you were involved, but it is rather a coincidence, isn't it? So, what I am asking you to explain to me is, when did this wonderful relationship—with a man you knew only as Anthony Collingwood—
when did it go wrong?
Was he aware of your marriage? Perhaps he even arranged it? He seems to have arranged everything else about your life."
"I haven't seen him for a long time, I swear I haven't."
"But why not? If, as you have taken pains to describe to me, you had a very special and very luxurious life together, what happened for you to marry someone else?"
Anna tapped Cunningham's arm and she leaned close; they whispered together, and then Anna took out her report of when Julia had broken down at her home when Anna had interviewed her very early in the investigation. Julia began to twist her ankle around again, then tapped her foot as Cunningham read Anna's report.
"I am waiting for you to answer, Mrs. Brandon. I need to know exactly when you last saw Mr. Collingwood."
"He had another woman."
"I'm sorry?"
"I said, he had another woman. She'd moved into the house in St. John's Wood."
Cunningham sighed and glanced to Anna. "When was this, Julia?"
"Years ago, whilst I was living in the Mews. He told me he was abroad, but I think he had been living at the house all the time. I couldn't tell you how long, but he had this woman, and I knew she had been living there."
"Did you find out who it was?"
Julia was now leaning forward, wrapping her arms around herself. "I couldn't believe it, but when I confronted him about it, he admitted it. We had this terrible argument."
"Was this before you conceived your children?"
"Yes! I threatened to leave him and, to make up for betraying me, he said he had put a lot of money into my account. He said that he had been very stressed because of some business transactions, that he needed me even more to divert funds. He said the house in St. John's Wood was mine, but I was very upset and angry. Then he said he wanted me to have children. I said before, that it was probably to keep me bound to him. I went along with it, but things were never the same between us. I was so hurt."
"Did he continue seeing this other woman?"
Julia wouldn't look up. "He disappeared again—said he had suffered huge losses. Some bank had collapsed."
"Would that be BCCI?"
"I can't remember. I had my hands full with the first baby. I suffered from terrible postnatal depression. And I was obviously suspicious of him."
"Because of this other woman?"
"Yes!"
"And you never discovered who she was?"
Julia's lips tightened, and she began rocking again. "I knew, I knew, but I wouldn't face it."
"So you did know who she was?"
"Yes! I'm not dumb, I put two and two together; it was a painting."
Cunningham leaned back in her chair as if this was going nowhere, but now Anna spoke up. "Was it a painting of a yacht?"
Julia looked in surprise at Anna, but made no reply. There was a long pause and, at last, Fagan seemed to feel he should inteiject.
"What painting are you referring to,Julia?"
"I was feeling so wretched, you know, with a new baby, and I had never asked her for anything, ever. She'd got married and had moved with her husband to this farmhouse, so I packed a case and drove to Oxfordshire. The place was hideous, falling down, damp, and the spare bedroom was so small I couldn't breathe. I hated it, and I was very
obviously not welcome. I was no sooner there than I wanted to leave, and then I saw the painting."
"At the farmhouse," Anna said quietly.
"Yes. As soon as I saw it, I put two and two together, and I knew."
Anna continued. "So you discovered that the other woman, the woman who had been living at your house in St. John's Wood, and in fact driven you away, was your sister?"
Cunningham glanced at Anna; she hadn't put it together.
"Yes,"Julia hissed.
"Did you confront her?"
"No. I fucked her husband and left. I lied to you about the IVF. I only had it the once; my second baby is her husband's. I didn't even think I was pregnant. If I'd known about it earlier, I wouldn't have had it, but it was too late for an abortion. I told Anthony that it was IVF again, and he accepted it."
"Did you ever tell your sister?"
"No, I don't speak to her. It was after I had the baby I decided that I had taken enough, all his lies, and that's when I sold the house." Julia sighed, really tired now. She had been interviewed for a long time, but it wasn't over. She asked for some water, and was handed a beaker and a plastic water bottle; she unscrewed the cap and drank from the bottle.
"I contacted David Rushton; it was luck, really. I had no idea who to turn to and it was my hairdresser who told me she'd had problems with tax, or something, and had this wonderful accountant. So I went to see him. He handled the sale of the house."
"For how much?"
"Eight million. He arranged a deposit account, and then organized the Wimbledon property."
"And the other accounts?"
"Well, when he knew I had access to so much, he started to say I had to really protect it—you know, start to make it earn more money for me. So he opened all these offshore accounts, and arranged various investments, making sure that I lived off an allowance. I needed a lot of money to refurbish the Wimbledon property and furnish it."
"Did Mr. Rushton have any indication that the money was not actually yours but Anthony Collingwood's?"
"No. I told him I had inherited some, and the rest had been given to me by my partner. I wanted him to make sure that no one could get their hands on it."
"Wasn't he suspicious?"
"No—well, if he was, he didn't mention it. He was very, very clever, and always tried to explain everything to me, but to be honest, I was never really sure exactly what he was doing—-just that he had invested the bulk sums."
"Which were what?"
"Around twelve or thirteen million, to begin with."
They were reaching the point where Julia moved into the house in Wimbledon with her children, and employed the Chinese au pair, and Frank Brandon. It was now that Fagan insisted that his client have a bathroom break. Anna needed one herself. Just as she was washing her hands, Julia walked out from one of the cubicles.
"All right?" Anna asked pleasantly.
"Yes, thank you, but I want to have a few words with my lawyer before I continue."
"I'll arrange that," Anna said, but knowing that Cunningham wouldn't like it.
Julia remained by the washbasins, until the remaining engaged cubicle was vacated by a uniformed female officer. As soon as the door closed, she went back into a cubicle and opened her powder compact. She lifted a gauze from the compact; pressed flat was the cocaine.
She took out a small silver spoon and used two scoops, snorting the fine-cut coke. She then rubbed her gums, sniffed and, unlocking the door, went back to the washbasins. She checked her nostrils for any residue, reapplied her lipstick, and took a damp tissue to rub beneath her eyes, where her mascara had left black smudges from crying. She ran a comb through her hair and then shook her head so her hair fell in loose, silky strands onto her shoulders. She gave herself a look of approval, biting at her lip, as the cocaine had numbed her gums slightly; by the time she walked out, the coke had kicked in.
Langton had already been into the incident room with his update on his interviews with Delroy and Silas, and the team were able to see how the jigsaw was slowly building, piece by piece. Phil turned to Anna, asking how it was going with Julia, and Anna pulled a face.
Phil gave her a rueful look. "Well, we're not getting much from her financial adviser's murder. We have the CCTV footage and we have every indication that Alexander Fitzpatrick was the last man to see David Rushton alive. What we don't have, obviously, is where in God's name he is! We've also got more bloody paperwork; it's been a real argy-bargy getting the Julia Brandon files from Rushton's partners but, from what we've ascertained so far, there are about four files missing."
"But you have some idea of what he was doing for her?"
"Yeah, but it's a maze of companies and investment banks and fucking hedge funds; we've got three guys on it. We might find out Rushton was feathering his own pockets big-time."
Phil sighed, and they both looked back at the board. They now knew that Delroy and Silas were blaming each other for the shooting of Frank, but Langton was certain it was Delroy who also shot, with the same gun, the garage owner Stanley Leymore.
Phil called over to Gordon, who joined them. His desk was stacked with papers from the garage. They were still trying to unearth the date that Leymore received the Mitsubishi. They had the date and time it had been stolen in Brighton, but by whom they didn't know. What they were trying to piece together was when the jeep was taken over by Frank Brandon, driven to the farm in Oxfordshire, and how Donny Petrozzo's body came to be in the back of it. They still had no time frame for when it came into Julius D'Anton's possession.
Phil moved along the incident board. "The start date would be when whoever bought it from Leymore. Gordon here's been checking over the garage's farcical receipts and invoices.The turnover wasn't bad, considering it was such a shithole."
Gordon pointed to the area on the board that he was writing up. "I'm going back two years, because I've found a Mercedes listed by Leymore: its reg plates were found in a stack at the back of the garage.
They match a vehicle stolen from Kingston in Surrey. This Merc, a silver four-door saloon, was the one driven by Donny Petrozzo; we've got a match on the engine number. The car Petrozzo used for his wife and her niece to drive around was on Leymore's legit books. I've also traced the BMW driven by our drug dealer from the squat back to Leymore's garage; this was stolen almost a year ago. This could be the reason Leymore's prints were found in the squat; they could have been left there before the murder went down: prints minus fingertip, right? I've got another vehicle Leymore also sold to—"