Silent Truths (51 page)

‘I’m fine.’ Grief was swelling so hard inside her it was as though it might break through her skin. ‘Heather, I … I don’t know how much more I can take.’

‘Beth, you’ll be all right,’ Heather told her. ‘You’re stronger than you think.’

‘Yes. Yes,’ she choked, and pressed a hand to her mouth to stop herself howling. ‘Colin’s divorcing me, did he tell you?’

There was a pause before Heather said, ‘Yes.’

Beth sobbed and her voice relayed her torment as she said, ‘Did he have to do it this way?’

‘He hasn’t handled it well,’ Heather agreed. ‘He knows that. It’s often those we love that we end up hurting the most.’

‘If he loves me, then why’s he doing this?’

Heather didn’t answer.

‘Because he loves you and Jessica more.’ Beth’s heart was exploding, her mouth opened wide in a silent scream of pain.

‘Maybe he’ll change his mind,’ Heather said.

Please God, oh, please, please God
, she cried inside.

Several minutes ticked by, until finally Heather said, ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ Beth answered brokenly.

‘How are you enjoying LA?’

Beth sniffed and wiped her nose. ‘I love it, and I hate it,’ she answered. ‘It’s not home; it’s just a place to be until … until it’s all over. People from the press keep wanting to talk to me.’

‘I know. Me too.’

‘I wish they’d leave me alone.’

‘They will, eventually.’ Heather paused, then said, ‘The important thing for you to remember, Beth, is that you haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve got to stop blaming yourself. There was nothing you could have done to prevent what happened.’

Beth was suddenly sobbing so hard it was a while before she could speak. ‘Is that what Colin thinks too?’ she said. ‘That I’m blaming myself?’

‘Yes. He knows you. He says it’s what you would do, but we all know who’s behind it.’

Beth nodded and pressed a fist to her burning cheek. ‘I saw him, on the plane coming over here. He frightens me, Heather. I said things … things I shouldn’t have said. I’m afraid he’ll come after me now.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter now. I have to go.’ And abruptly she put down the phone.

Minutes later she was dressed and in the car, speeding along Mulholland Drive towards Beverly Glen. She knew where Fabio lived, in a smart little villa off Tulepo, so she’d go to his home, and if he wasn’t there she’d just keep driving till she found him.

Chapter 21

AS THE TALL
iron gates to Georgie Cottle’s home swung slowly open, Laurie peered out from under her umbrella, trying to spot the security camera. It had to be there somewhere, because she hadn’t even rung the bell. However, the rain was so dense it was hard to see anything, so she quickly ran back to the taxi, handed over two twenty-pound notes, then started up the drive, battling a belligerent wind for possession of her umbrella.

By the time she got to the front door it was already open and an anxious Georgie Cottle, with an enormous biscuit-coloured dog, was waiting to greet her.

‘You must be Laurie Forbes,’ she said, struggling to hang on to the overexcited beast. ‘Bruce told me you were coming. Dillon, will you be
have
!’

But Dillon didn’t want to, and as Laurie shook out her umbrella and stooped to prop it in a corner of the porch, he landed his huge front paws square on her back, almost knocking her over.

‘Dillon!’ Georgie gasped. ‘You bad boy.’

‘It’s OK,’ Laurie laughed, tousling his ears. ‘I’ll just make a note that this place is OK to burgle while this old dafty’s in charge.’

‘You don’t know how right you are,’ Georgie groaned and, grabbing his collar again, she hauled him inside. ‘He’ll calm down in a minute,’ she promised, as Laurie stepped over the threshold too. ‘He just loves meeting new people. He’s better once he knows you.’

‘Well, I have to confess,’ Laurie said, ‘it’s a much warmer welcome than I’d expected.’

Georgie immediately looked worried. ‘Oh dear, I hope you haven’t taken it personally, me not wanting to see you,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It was simply that I didn’t want to upset Beth.’

‘I understand,’ Laurie assured her. ‘So what changed your mind?’ she asked, following her along the hall. ‘Or is it Beth who’s had a change of heart?’ she added hopefully.

Seeming not to hear, Georgie said, ‘I hope the kitchen’s OK. My mother and Blake are in the sitting room, and the drawing room’s a bit chilly today.’ At which point both she and Dillon made a flying entry into the kitchen, which ended in a skidding halt at the table.

‘This is fine,’ Laurie said, trying not to laugh, though her stomach wasn’t making quite the same effort with its rumbling, for the smell of freshly brewed coffee had just reached her, and the plate of shortbread biscuits and huge macaroons at the centre of the table, which Dillon obviously already knew about, had just caught her eye. She really must learn to eat breakfast and / or lunch before she
came out, otherwise hunger was too distracting.

‘Dillon, go to your basket,’ Georgie commanded. Dillon stayed right where he was. ‘Please, sit down and help yourself to biscuits,’ she said to Laurie. ‘My mother makes the macaroons. They’re jolly good.’

‘Thank you,’ Laurie responded, shrugging off her backpack. ‘You have a beautiful home,’ she commented, sinking into a downy seat pad on one of the farmhouse chairs and sliding a macaroon on to a leaf-patterned china plate.

‘It’s been in Bruce’s family for five generations,’ Georgie responded, bringing two mugs of coffee to the table. ‘His parents live at their farm in Kenya now, so he’s acquired part of his inheritance early.’

‘Mm, mm, mm,’ Laurie muttered in response to the macaroon. ‘
This
is to die for.’

Georgie smiled. Then, tossing a biscuit into Dillon’s basket and telling him again to lie down, she said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you’re younger than I expected. I’d managed to create this image of you being much older and rather ferocious, though I can’t think why when I already knew what you looked like.’

Remembering their brief meeting at Beth Ashby’s house, the day Ashby was arrested, Laurie said, ‘You could be excused for thinking I’d grown horns since our first encounter, but I promise it was never my intention to upset or alienate Beth Ashby the way I seem to have. Quite the reverse, actually.’

Georgie looked down at her coffee. ‘I’m sure,’ she responded. ‘But Beth has never had much liking for reporters.’

‘Really? I’d have thought, with her husband
being who he is, that some of her best friends would be reporters.’

Since Laurie’s tone was ironic, Georgie smiled politely. ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this,’ she said, ‘but she’s always had a bit of an inferiority complex where his colleagues are concerned, and to be frank, they haven’t always treated her well. They can be extremely condescending; I’ve even been there sometimes when it happens.’

Laurie’s eyes rolled. ‘Believe me, I know how she feels,’ she replied. ‘There’s a group on the paper I work for who’ve done their level best to make my life a misery ever since I started. Any opportunity they get to treat me like an idiot, or shut me out, they take it.’

‘So how do you handle it?’

‘Not unlike the way Beth does, I try to pretend they’re not there.’

Georgie looked down at her coffee. ‘The problem is,’ she said, ‘as far as Beth’s concerned you’re one of them, which is why I feel so dreadful about doing this. She’d go berserk if she knew.’

‘So what’s happened to change your mind?’

Georgie’s expression showed her unease, as she blinked a few times and avoided meeting Laurie’s eyes. ‘I had a message, on the answerphone,’ she said finally. ‘It was waiting last night when I got back from the health farm. It’s terrible. So awful I can hardly bear to listen to it again.’

‘I presume it was from Beth.’

Georgie nodded. ‘I played it to Bruce over the phone, and he said I should let you listen to it, when you got here. So I’m trusting you because he does. I don’t know if he’s right, I just know I have
to do something.’ She got to her feet and went to the kitchen counter. ‘I won’t tell you anything before I play it,’ she said. ‘I just want you to listen, then tell me what you think.’

She pushed the button, there was a long beep followed by the sound of muffled laughing and music, then a loud, ecstatic female voice saying, ‘Georgieeeeee! My darling, how are you? I love you. I love you. I love you. Where are you? You have to get yourself over here. You’re missing all the fun. It’s so wonderful, Georgie. Everything happens here. You’d absolutely adore Mitzi. She’s so fantastic and she’s dying to meet you. Oh, by the way, Italy’s not happening yet. Theo wants us to stay in LA, do some more networking, so you’ve got to come over.’ She hiccupped, then laughed. ‘I want you to tell them all to fuck off about my book. Theo’s making the movie anyway, so they can just go screw themselves. They’re not getting to me that way. I know Marcus is going to come after me anyway, but do you know
what
? I couldn’t care
less
. I know he’s afraid of what I might know, and so he should be, because if he doesn’t leave me alone I’ll tell everyone. You can pass that on, Georgie. Tell him to leave me alone or he’ll be sorry. And you can tell Colin I said that too. He can have his divorce, because I have got so many men here, just begging for it …’ She shrieked and giggled, as though to confirm it. Then Georgie’s eyes went down as Beth said, ‘All the way, babe. Ooooh yes. I just love it. I love you too, Georgie. Honestly, you’ve got to come over. It’s all sex and drugs and rock and roll … Tell my mother she’s a bitch. Hah! Hah! I’m never coming back. I’m staying here for
ever and ever and ever … Amen. Bye, my darling, call as soon as you can. I love you. If I were a man I’d want to be Bruce.’

Georgie turned off the machine and kept her eyes averted. Laurie could see how upset she was, confused and even angry. In the end she threw out her question like a challenge: ‘She was more than just drunk, wasn’t she?’

Laurie nodded. ‘It certainly sounded like it,’ she said.

‘She’s never taken drugs in her life,’ Georgie snapped, coming back to the table. ‘This is all so unlike her. She’s changed so much since Colin’s arrest – not that I blame her, it’s a terrible thing to have to go through, but the way she is now …’ She stopped, took a quick, nervous sip of coffee, then said, ‘The name she wrote the book under, Ava Montgomery, that’s who you were just listening to. It’s as though she’s taken Beth over. At first it really seemed to do her good, being someone who wasn’t dependent on Colin. It was like an escape … But now it’s like she’s an impostor inside her own skin.’ She put a hand to her head, as though unable to believe she’d just uttered such words. ‘You know about the divorce, I take it?’ she suddenly said.

Laurie nodded.

‘Yes, well, she just mentioned it, didn’t she? Dear God, I don’t know why he’s doing this. It doesn’t make any sense when he’s always been so protective of her, as though he couldn’t bear anything to hurt her, even though there was no greater culprit than him. But he always used to try and hide it. He never rubbed her face in his affairs, or certainly not the way he did with Heather Dance.’
She drank some more coffee. ‘I don’t understand why he did that. Bruce said it was to protect Heather Dance. But what about Beth? Why didn’t he tell her himself, rather than let her find out like that? It was so cruel. If you saw what it did to her …’

‘Why do you think he didn’t tell her?’ Laurie asked gently.

Georgie sighed and shook her head. ‘Probably because like so many men he’s a coward,’ she answered. ‘He didn’t want to have to deal with her pain, so doing it this way he was off the hook. He knew, if he had to face her, he’d never be able to go through with it.’ She looked at Laurie. ‘It’s possible to love someone yet not want to be married to them any more,’ she said, ‘especially when you have a child by somebody else. It was that that hurt the most, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Laurie echoed, wishing she could take out her notebook, but Bruce had advised her not to turn her visit into an interview, so it had to stay where it was. ‘What about you and Bruce?’ she asked. ‘Did you know about Heather Dance before all this?’

‘No, thank God. I’d have hated knowing something like that without Beth knowing too. I’d have had to tell her. As a matter of fact it was me who told her in the end, because Bruce called to warn me that it was about to come out in the paper.’

Laurie watched the concern in Georgie’s face and thought how fortunate Beth Ashby was to have a friend who cared this much. Obviously it said something about Beth too, that she could inspire this kind of love and loyalty. ‘On the tape,’ she said,
picking up her coffee, ‘when Beth claimed to know something about Marcus Gatling … do you have any idea what that might be?’

Georgie shook her head. ‘When she first told me about it she said she was just winding him up. Now she’s saying she does know something. To be honest – well, I’ve been wondering for a while now if she was holding something back.’

Laurie’s heartbeat quickened. ‘Why do you say that?’ she prompted.

‘I’m not sure. It’s hard to put into words. It’s just a feeling really. The way she’s been behaving … There were times, even before she left, when the change in her was so noticeable it was like having a stranger in the house. Of course, I never said anything. I suppose I was encouraging the Ava thing, because it made her seem so much happier and on top of things. The blonde hair really suited her, and the male attention she was getting …’ She laughed without humour. ‘You’d have thought no one had ever looked at her before, but that’s not true. She’s always been attractive, she just never seemed to know it. Or use it. She was married to Colin and to my certain knowledge she never looked at another man. Until she became Ava.’

‘What about the book? Have you ever read it?’

Georgie shook her head. ‘She’s always said that it’s not based on her, or Colin, or their lives, but then there was that strange remark she made about Sophie Long being a sacrificial lamb, like someone in the book. Did Bruce tell you about that?’