The Wreckage: A Thriller (30 page)

“You’l have to move your car.”

“Of course, whatever you say. I’m here with Mrs. North’s lawyer. Nobody is to speak to her unless he’s present.” A large man struggles with his seat belt as he emerges from the Lexus. He has a fringe of brown hair combed over his head. He reaches up to pat his scalp, checking that everything is stil in place.

“You don’t have to say anything,” says Marcus Weil. “You don’t have to comment at al .”

“I don’t need a lawyer. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Of course not, but Mitchel wants to be reassured,” says Miss Stone.

“Where is he?”

“Busy. But he’s on your side.”

Elizabeth looks at her and wonders why there are “sides.”

Hustled through a side door and up a set of internal stairs, Elizabeth fol ows a new police officer, a florid, beefy man, who carries his weight like a weapon. Uniformed. More senior. A commander. How different this is from her last visit to the police station. Now everybody wants to talk to her.

“Sorry about the stairs,” says Campbel Smith. “We thought it best to bring you in the back… away from the cameras.” The lawyer is puffing behind them, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, which he tucks into his breast pocket. When they reach the interview suites he demands a private consultation with Elizabeth. Campbel Smith grudgingly agrees and clears the room.

“The police make this sort of thing seem so dramatic,” says Mr. Weil. “The sirens and flashing lights—they do it to intimidate people.”

“I’m not intimidated.”

“Good.”

He takes a legal pad from his briefcase. “You cannot be compel ed to give evidence against your husband, Mrs. North. You do not have to say anything, but you may get in trouble if you fail to mention something that comes up later in a court case.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

A pen clicks beneath his thumb. “You haven’t seen or spoken to your husband?”

“No.”

“Did he show you anything?”

“Like what?”

“Documents. Papers.”

“No.”

“Did you share or otherwise have access to your husband’s laptop?”

“No.”

“Are there any documents or computer disks in your possession either at your home or in some other location that are the property of Mersey Fidelity? This relates also to copies of documents or disks as wel as your husband’s notes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did he take notes?”

“Pardon?”

“Some people use notebooks. Seems very old-fashioned, I know.”

“Why is this important?”

“I’m just saying that if you become aware of anything or if you discover any sensitive materials they would be better off in the bank’s hands than any third party.”

“By ‘third party’ you mean the police?”

Mr. Weil puts down his pen and leans back, lacing his fingers together on his stomach like a man about to pontificate on the state of the world.

“People don’t like banks, Mrs. North. They’l happily rake up muck or blow things out of proportion. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you have confidential information—either written or passed on oral y—it remains the intel ectual and commercial property of the bank. If your husband whispered any secrets in the bedroom, or made any remarks about Mersey Fidelity, you should be wary of repeating them.”

Elizabeth hesitates. The lawyer wets his lips with the tip of his tongue. It’s a nervous, almost reptilian mannerism.

“Who do you work for, Mr. Weil?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who is paying you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you here to represent Mersey Fidelity or me?”

The lawyer pauses with the pen resting on the page. “I have been retained by Mersey Fidelity.”

“I see.”

Rising slowly from the table, unsteady at first, Elizabeth moves to the door. “Thank you for your advice, Mr. Weil, I won’t be needing your services anymore.” What she wants to say is thank you for the lesson in sophistry and doublespeak. Thank you for riding roughshod over my marriage and my husband’s reputation. Thank you for showing me what I’m up against.

Mr. Weil tries to argue, but Elizabeth stops him.

“Leave now or I’l tel the police exactly what you’ve asked me to do.”

The overweight lawyer is no longer smiling. He packs his briefcase and departs, moving along the corridor without swinging his arms.

Moments later Campbel Smith takes his place in the interview room and begins asking Elizabeth questions. There is a pattern to them. Politely put, but aimed at picking apart her marriage like a cheap sweater. Her phone cal s, her emails, her friendships… They have copies of her bank statements. They want to know about North’s parents in Spain, his friends, properties he might own or places he liked to visit. Did he gamble? Did he have any secret accounts? Where did they holiday?

“Does your husband have a share portfolio?”

“A smal one.”

“What about offshore bank accounts?”

“No.”

“Have you ever visited the Middle East?”

She mentions the holiday in Lebanon and Jordan. This triggers another line of questioning.

“What do you think has happened to your husband, Mrs. North?”

“I have no idea.”

“You must have a theory.”

“No.”

A figure is mentioned: fifty-four mil ion pounds. Elizabeth has no idea where it comes from. The TV report had referred to a black hole. Missing money. More numbers. North had been worried about something. He told Bridget Lindop that he’d done something terrible.

Campbel continues to question Elizabeth about the family finances.

“Do you real y think my husband would steal £54 mil ion and then bother taking my jewelry? He didn’t pack a suitcase. He didn’t take any clothes.”

“He took his passport,” says Campbel .

“Al our passports were taken.”

“Maybe you were
all
going to run away.”

Elizabeth wants to laugh, but can’t clear the bal of anger that is lodged in her throat.

“You seem to be missing the obvious. I’m pregnant. I can’t fly anywhere.”

Campbel isn’t going to back off.

“You made a statement to police in which you described your husband as acting strangely. You hired a private detective. Perhaps you overheard him on the phone or read his emails…”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Mrs. North. You thought he was scratching some other woman’s itch, yet you never once spied on him or asked him what he was up to or looked in his diary or checked his receipts.”

Elizabeth feels her face flush. Tears close. “I hired a private detective—I thought that would be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“My husband did not steal that money,” she says, wiping her eyes, but she doesn’t know if she says it aloud because the words are being drowned out by a thousand other voices in her head that are asking,
What if you’re wrong?

19

LONDON

Ruiz can’t find his shoes. A man can’t go to his daughter’s wedding without a decent pair of shoes. He should have looked earlier. He should have polished them. The polish is somewhere under the stairs with dozens of other things he won’t be able to put his hands on when he needs them.

“When did you last wear them?” asks Joe O’Loughlin.

“I can’t remember.”

“Try.”

“A funeral maybe…”

“When?”

“In March.”

Ruiz looks at his ful -length profile in the mirror, sucking in his stomach, his chin up, not too shabby, he thinks. He’s been working out for the past few days, curling sixty-pound barbel s and doing push-ups. His trousers are too loose and he needs a haircut.

Claire has been on the phone twice already and it’s only ten o’clock. She and the bridesmaids are getting ready at Phil ip’s house. The groom has been banished to a hotel in Hampstead so he doesn’t see the bride in her dress.

“It’s supposed to be the biggest day of her life,” the professor reminds him.

Ruiz grunts. “One day she’l get pregnant, she’l have a child,
then
she’l know a big day.”

“A wedding is stil in the top three.”

“None of mine were top three.”

“What about the first?”

“Yeah, wel , maybe the first.”

“You’re such a romantic.”

Ruiz hooks a finger inside his col ar, trying to make it stretch, feeling as comfortable as a penguin in a microwave.

“Let me tel you about romance in this day and age, Professor. You might appreciate the lesson since your Charlie is going to be dating some time soon. My daughter’s fiancé has been putting his Ukrainian Kovbasa into my Claire’s vagina for the past two years—which is a sentence I wish I had never uttered out loud or in my head. Where is the romance in that?

Whatever she had to give away, she’s given away… pretty frequently.”

“Kovbasa?”

“It’s a sausage.”

“Oh. You didn’t sleep with Laura before you married?”

“Nope.”

Joe stares at him in disbelief.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason.”

Ruiz gets annoyed. “I mean, I wasn’t a virgin, but Laura had this thing about waiting.”

Joe has found Ruiz’s shoes beneath the laundry sink. He wets a dishcloth and wipes the dust from the leather. Ruiz breaks a lace and curses. He steals one from another pair of shoes and checks the street before they leave. In a house on the far side of the road he sees a figure silhouetted in a window. He wants to believe it is an ordinary person, a good one: a mother putting a baby down for a nap or a shift worker going to bed after a long night.

That’s the thing about trying to protect someone—or failing to—you start to think that danger lurks around every corner and that shadows hold secrets. Hol y Knight needed his protection but he let her down. Now he has no way of finding her unless she contacts him.

The wedding is at a church in Primrose Hil , opposite Regent’s Park. Ruiz has to pick up his mother from the retirement home in Streatham and then go to Claire’s house.

Daj could be a problem. Some days her dementia is so profound that she refuses to believe Ruiz is her son. Either that or she mistakes him for Luke, the brother he lost as a child.

At other times she remembers every single detail of her past, which is almost as tragic.

Somewhere in her rambling mind is the riddle of Ruiz’s existence. Daj fel pregnant in a concentration camp. She was a teenage gypsy girl used as “recreation” by the SS officers and guards. One of the officers took her out of the camp brothel and had her cleaning his house and warming his bed. Ruiz had never discovered the officer’s name. Daj claimed to have forgotten. Instead she talked about an attempted abortion and how the “bastard child” had “clung to my insides, not wanting to leave, wanting so much to live.” She was three months pregnant when the war ended and the camps were liberated. She spent another two months looking for her family but they were al gone—her twin brother, her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins… No countries were accepting gypsies as refugees. Daj lied on her application form at the displaced persons’ camp. She took the identity of a young Jewish seamstress who was nineteen, instead of sixteen.

Ruiz was born in a county hospital in Hertfordshire that stil had blackout curtains and tape across the windows. They bul dozed it in the seventies—did what the Luftwaffe couldn’t do.

Progress marches in jackboots.

Parking the Mercedes outside the retirement home, Ruiz and the professor go through the reception and find Daj in her room. She is watching a daytime chat show where people seem to be shouting at each other and throwing chairs.

“Hel o, Daj, do you remember Joe?”

“Are you a doctor?” she asks suspiciously.

“No, I’m a friend of Vincent’s.”

“I have a son cal ed Vincent.”

“That’s me, Daj,” says Ruiz.

She looks at him suspiciously. The skin of her face seems to be covered in finely lined tissue paper and her hands are bony branches. She’s wearing a floral dress and a short jacket. The nurses have helped her put on lipstick.

“Are you ready, Daj?”

“Where are we going?”

“To the church.”

“I don’t like churches.”

“It’s the Catholics you don’t like,” says Ruiz, and then to Joe, “A priest comes round once a week and Daj tries to convert him to atheism.” He looks back at his mother. “Claire is getting married.”

“Claire?”

“Your granddaughter.”

“She’s too young.”

“She’s thirty-two.”

“Nonsense. I want to talk to Michael.”

“Michael’s not here.”

“Is he coming to the wedding?”

“We’re not sure.”

Ruiz feels a pang of guilt. He hasn’t seen his son in nearly four years. They talk every three or four months, snatched conversations from whatever port Michael has washed up into after a month at sea. Duty phone cal s, he cal s them, but every time Ruiz feels aggrieved, he remembers his own youth, working as a young police officer in London, rarely phoning home, visiting even less often.

“Bring a cardigan—it gets cool of an evening.”

“Where are we going?”

“The church.”

“I hate churches.”

“I know that, Daj, but Claire is getting married.”