False Money (27 page)

SIXTEEN

B
ea was amused. Instead of answering questions, Gregor was asking them. So he wanted to know all about Chris, did he? ‘Well, what have you heard?'

He rolled his eyes. ‘Which version would you like? Harry said he was an insolent yob, wet behind the ears. Tomi said he was sexy in a Bohemian sort of way, although not exactly her type, and that he had a father who was something of an
éminence
grise
. She believed he was a budding genius, who'd dropped out of university to make films. Hermia said he was single minded, a good friend, had integrity and a lot of charm. I understand he's appointed himself acting minder to Hermia.'

‘Does that surprise you?'

A quick frown. He hooked one knee over the other and spread his hands.

Bea concluded, ‘You care about Hermia.'

A shrug. ‘Of course. We are very old friends. All of us. That is the problem, isn't it? Those of us who are left, we must look out for one another.'

‘Did you like Nick?'

‘Hah. An idiot. When he was young, he was taken in by a girl older than himself, who said he'd made her pregnant. He married her, was loyal to her. She lost the baby at four months and the doctors said she couldn't have any more. She left him to pursue a much older, richer man, and he took to chasing love wherever he could find it. I felt rather sorry for him, actually, having had much the same thing happen to me.'

‘We heard you'd been divorced.'

A twist of the mouth. ‘She was beautiful, young and said she loved me to distraction.' He kissed his fingertips. ‘She also loved racing cars and racing car drivers. I believe she's happily living with one now. We had no children, fortunately.'

‘You play the field, as Nick did?'

‘Not as Nick did. Certainly not. I am far more discriminating, and I don't pay for it, except occasionally with the sparkle of diamonds.'

Oliver stirred. ‘You say you went out with Tomi once, and that Nick tried it on with her, too. She wasn't promiscuous.' He made it a statement, but Bea heard the note of doubt.

Gregor hastened to reassure him. ‘No, of course not. She was a beautiful girl, intelligent and gracious. She had the glamour of having starred in a small art film that had won a prestigious prize. It was no wonder that the men she met wished to improve their acquaintance with her. My reading of the situation was that she was flattered to be singled out by older man with money to spend, that she liked being taken to good restaurants and being introduced to a different lifestyle. From my own observation, she was fond of Harry, but didn't take him seriously. She would have drifted on to a better prospect in time, no doubt.'

Bea did some swift mental arithmetic. ‘Jamie.'

‘A busy lad, our Jamie; what with Hermia on one side, Tomi for special occasions, and his pretty little chick for everything else.'

‘What do you know of his girlfriends?'

‘His fiancée?' A shrug. ‘A particularly nasty small child. Hermia?' He waved his hands around. ‘Delightful girl. Intelligent, hard-working; what's not to like?'

‘Were you never inclined to push your luck with her?'

‘Hermia loves me dearly as a friend and companion, but she's formed the opinion – I'm sure I don't know why – that I have a frivolous side to my nature. Perhaps she is right. I find it hard to live up to her high standards. Besides which, she's taller than I am when she wears heels. No, no. We are good friends, that is all.' He looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece and checked its accuracy with his watch. ‘Now, if you will permit me, I really must take my leave. I have some important calls to make. Do, please, feel free to contact me at any time.'

He got to his feet, as did Bea and Oliver. Bea said, ‘I suspect that you personally will be hard hit if you don't get that money on Monday?'

‘True, dear lady. As will some of the others. We're all greedy little tykes at heart, don't you think? I've asked Duncan to arrange for the money to be transferred electronically to our individual accounts on Monday afternoon, which he assures me he will do. Oh, and by the way, we shall be holding a little party at Duncan's on Monday at eight to celebrate. Hermia suggests her young cockerel makes a DVD to record the moment when we all turn from pumpkins into fairy-tale princes and princesses. Would you both care to join us? Hermia's little boy can bring his camera, young Oliver here can manage the lighting equipment – as I gather he has done in the past – and perhaps you, dear lady, will take charge of the recording machine?'

He swung his superb coat on to his shoulders and made his way to the door. ‘Don't bother to see me out, and oh – before I forget – I've advised everyone concerned to drink nothing but bottled water till Monday night when we break out the champagne. Perhaps you might wish to do the same? I should hate anything to happen to either of you – or to the young cock – before then. He's been sent back home for the weekend, by the way. Hermia is going with a party of friends to the theatre tonight. Very wise of her. She'll be safer there than in the company of a randy young college dropout.'

Bea felt herself smile, because Gregor was smiling, too.

‘I'll see you out,' said Oliver, also smiling.

‘No need,' said Gregor, but Oliver insisted. When Oliver came back into the room, he'd lost his smile.

So had Bea. ‘Did he have a chauffeur-driven car outside?'

‘A minicab was parked on the other side of the road, waiting for him.' Oliver rubbed his chin. ‘Now, what was all that about, apart from the obvious?'

‘He wanted to make sure we weren't going to the police before Tuesday. He seemed to speak freely and to give us a great deal of information, but most of it we knew already. He didn't want to talk about Jamie and his new fiancée, and he didn't mention Duncan's girlfriend. Quite deliberately, I think. I'm not sure why. He's a very clever young man. What did you make of him?'

‘I liked him. I don't trust him, though. I can see why everyone else wants him to be the murderer, although they know very well that he isn't. It's just not his style.'

That chimed with Bea's view, too. ‘An interesting remark about Claire Stourton. He called her “a particularly nasty small child”.'

Oliver was fretting. ‘He made out that Tomi was promiscuous. She wasn't.'

Bea shook her head, which he could take any way he wished. The girl had gone out with Harry and Gregor and had rebuffed Nick. Had she gone out with Jamie, too? It sounded like it. She hadn't gone out with Duncan, because he'd got his own girl on tap. Or had he?

It was a grim and dismal afternoon. The rain hadn't let up. Bea turned up the central heating and switched on the big side lamps. Drifting past the mantelpiece, she picked up and dusted the silver photograph frame showing her smiling family: Pippin in Nicole's arms, with Max standing behind them.

She was not going to cry. No.

‘I'll tell you one thing he got right,' said Oliver, ‘and that's you. I didn't feel able to tell you this before, but I was terribly homesick when I first went to uni. I understood how it was that Chris dropped out. I'd sit and imagine you here in this room with the lights on as it got dark. Sometimes you were playing patience at the table by the window and looking up at the portrait of Mr Abbot. I'd make believe that you were thinking of me at that moment and wondering how I was getting on. I'd get my mobile phone out a dozen times a night and wonder if I dared ring you. Then I'd say to myself that it was time to grow up, that you didn't want me bothering you all the time. Now you can have a good laugh.'

Sentimental, or what? He'd seen her grieving over Max and Pippin, and had made his confession to make her feel better. It had worked. She did feel better.

In the normal way of things, he was going to grow away from her very soon and start thinking more about a new girlfriend than about Bea. He might even try to find his birth mother and father, and transfer his love to them. But, for now, she was his lodestar. So be it.

At this very moment, it was up to her to reassure him. ‘My dear boy, you've no idea how many evenings Maggie and I have sat on after supper, wondering what you were doing and what friends you were making. We'd try to work out what nights you saw certain friends or went to jazz or whatever. Maggie even ticked off the days before you were due to return on the calendar in her room.'

He grinned. ‘I made that bad an impression, did I?'

‘Oh, you.' She pretended to chase him from the room with a cushion. He went, laughing.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the agency office was closed for the weekend. It was raining so she couldn't go out for a walk. Where was Maggie? Out with Zander? Well, that was a good thing, wasn't it?

She was restless. She'd done what she could to bring Tomi's murderer to justice. On Tuesday morning the police would be told the motive behind the killings – if that was what they were. From then on, the matter would be in the hands of the professionals. She had done her bit.

What more could she do, apart from mope around the house worrying about Pippin and Max? If she hadn't an efficient cleaning team, she could have done some housework. If she knew how many people would be in for supper, she'd have baked a cake. Well, she could still prepare a nice supper.

But before that, she'd order a bouquet of flowers and a hamper of delicacies to be sent to Max and Nicole. She went down into her office and booted up her computer. Rain – or was it sleet – pounded against the window. Ugh. Nasty.

She sent the order through, and then decided that, weekend or no, this was a nice quiet time in which to catch up on work. No phone calls to interrupt. No callers.

By order. Now, she really could do with a good session on the account books . . .

Her concentration was usually good. After a while she lost track of time.

Someone knocked on her door and came in. Oliver, with a frown on his face. ‘Can you spare a minute? I've been going back over Tomi's emails. I went over them earlier and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary; nothing to make me think she was other than I'd thought her. Knowing a bit more about what men she'd been seeing, I went back to read through everything again.'

‘And you found – what?' What did she remember about this? Not much, and that was the truth.

‘It's a something and a nothing. To start with, there's hardly anything personal in Harry's emails. I've double checked to make sure. When Tomi first got the computer, she used it to email her parents and a good friend back in Nigeria, and they replied, usually once a week. It's trivial stuff mostly: a tiff she'd had with someone in the supermarket who jumped the queue – which she said was most un-British – and she complained about how cold the flat was. She wrote that she was getting on nicely at work and was tempted to buy a rather expensive pair of shoes. All safe subjects.'

‘Did she mention Harry?'

‘She explained that Harry had given her the computer, that he was very nice and was taking her to all sorts of places she wouldn't have known about by herself. She added that she wasn't taking him seriously. From her emails and their replies, you can see that her parents were concerned that she might get involved with someone unsuitable, so her replies were fairly guarded.'

‘She didn't mention anything about meeting Zander at a church event?'

‘No, she didn't mention that. Her parents were worried about the film Chris had made with her, believing that “exposing” herself to the riff-raff like that would harm her reputation and make her unfit for a suitable marriage. She tried to reassure them by saying that Chris was like a brother and took the greatest care of her. She didn't mention that anyone else had asked her out. I double and treble checked. I put in the names of everyone else in that group and not one came out, except Hermia, and that was only because she'd given Tomi a lift one night – which again, we knew about already. She told her parents about Hermia, and said she was very nice. Tomi used the word “nice” a lot.'

Bea sighed. ‘Hermia crops up everywhere. There was a link there; they both read their bibles. Apart from that, did Tomi say that they socialized much? I wouldn't have thought they did.'

‘There was only that one mention. Tomi reported going to parties, to a concert, a gallery, but she hardly ever mentioned who she had gone with. We know she went to an art gallery with Gregor, but she doesn't mention his name. To read her emails, you'd think she never went anywhere except with Harry.'

‘Which we know is not true. A pity she didn't mention more names. What about the friend she sent emails to? Was she more open there? I seem to remember something . . . No, it's gone.'

‘No names, no pack drill. But there was one entry which I thought might be significant. Tomi wrote that she'd been taken to a rather posh “do” at a big hotel. It was a first for her, and she'd been worried that she wouldn't know how to behave and that her dress wouldn't be good enough. Afterwards she wrote that her escort had been a perfect gentleman and hadn't tried anything on. She added that she didn't want her friend to get any ideas about this man, because it had just been a one off, and anything more would have been impossible. She didn't say why she thought the relationship wouldn't work.'