Perfect Strangers (51 page)

Our own little magical castle
, he had promised. And he had kept his word. But at what cost? She closed her eyes and thought of her father: the kind, generous man who had been her hero and protector, the clever, smiling youth so full of promise that she had seen on Miriam Asner’s Super 8 footage. How could such a decent man, with so many wonderful qualities, have got mixed up in Asner’s plan? How could he have been involved in a theft of that magnitude? A theft that had stripped so many innocent people of their money. Was money such a destructive, corrupting force? Of course, she knew that it was. What she would never know were her father’s reasons, his justifications for getting involved.

‘Look for a key,’ said Lana, getting out and slamming the Range Rover’s door. ‘Whatever’s here, it’s going to be inside.’

Sophie tried the obvious first: she looked under the mat in front of the wide oak door, then along the top of the door frame and under flowerpots. Nothing.

Lana emerged from the back of the property, her hands empty.

‘Do
you
have the key?’ she said.

‘Of course I don’t have the bloody key,’ snapped Sophie. ‘Do you think I’d come all this way, then somehow forget—’

She stopped as they heard a grunt, then a crash. Running to the side of the house, they saw Josh’s legs disappearing through a window. Sophie swore under her breath. What if he was about to wake up a couple of honeymooners, or worse – an angry Scottish laird with a shotgun? It would be just typical to chase thousands of miles only to be arrested at the last moment for breaking a window.

‘No one’s home,’ said Josh two minutes later as he opened the creaky door from inside.

Sophie pursed her lips, but thought better of telling him off; things were tense enough without adding petty squabbles to their problems. She followed Lana inside. It was basic, almost spartan, with a thin layer of dust on most surfaces and a cold, damp smell coming from the bones of the house. There were a few personal effects – books, old maps and dark oil paintings on the walls – but it didn’t look as if anyone had been there for a while.

‘Now where?’ said Lana. She looked wound up, on edge. Had her jibe about Nick betraying Lana to the Russians got to the woman? wondered Sophie.

‘There’s not much here, so check everything,’ said Josh, coming back from a quick look around. ‘Lana, you take the kitchen and living room. Sophie, you take the bedrooms upstairs. I’ll do everywhere else.’

There were three bedrooms on the first floor. Sophie took the largest one first, which at least looked as if someone had been in it within the last thirty years. There was a fishing rod in one corner, some leather-bound Dickens novels on the shelves, but not much else.
So what exactly am I looking for?
she wondered. If there was money hidden here, it would take up a lot of room, and even if Asner’s loot had been converted into diamonds or something else valuable, she was pretty certain it would be something of size.
A suitcase, perhaps?
she thought, looking under the bed. No. Not even a shoebox. In the corner of the room was a small built-in wardrobe, but there was nothing inside apart from a rather mildewed overcoat and a pile of equally mouldy linen.
In the movies, the safe is always hidden behind a painting
, she thought to herself, walking over to a picture above the washstand – and found herself looking at a photograph of a boat.

‘
Iona
,’ she gasped, recognising her father’s beloved boat. ‘So you
were
here.’

She stood there in shock for a moment. She had guessed that this had been her father’s place, had
expected
to find something of his here, in fact. But even so, she found her heart beating hard in her chest, knowing he had stood where she was, that he had slept in this bed and, after all the running and dead ends, that this was exactly where he had wanted her to come.

‘Where would you hide something, Daddy?’ she asked.

And then it came to her. At Wade House, her father had installed a wall safe in the back of a wardrobe; she could remember him on his knees with the drill. She stepped back over to the closet and pushed the overcoat and the mottled sheets out of the way. There it was, the same colour and shape as the safe they had at home, with a four-digit electronic PIN lock.

‘Josh! Lana!’ she shouted.

She heard Josh’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs two at a time.

‘Good girl,’ he said when he saw the safe. ‘Have you tried to open it?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. She bent to tap in the combination of the safe they had at home. It beeped twice: wrong number.

Lana burst through the door.

‘Have you found it?’ she gasped.

Josh nodded to the safe. ‘Yes and no. We don’t have the code.’

‘Try the number from the book,’ said Lana.

Warily, Sophie pulled the paperback from the pocket of the waxed hunting jacket she had borrowed from the lodge that morning. She wanted to get inside, of course, but she didn’t like the feeling of having Lana hovering behind her.

She tried various combinations of the map co-ordinates, but still the safe door refused to budge.

‘This is ridiculous!’ said Lana. ‘Josh, do something.’

‘What do you expect me to do?’ he said. ‘Blow a hole in it? All I know about safe-cracking I got from
The Italian Job
.’

Tuning out their bickering, Sophie turned back to the first page of
I Capture the Castle
. Was there anything else on it except the name and co-ordinates?

Of
course
there was.

To my dearest S, read this and think of our castle. Happy birthday. All my love always, Daddy
.

Her birthday
. The fourth of September – it had to be. She bent over the panel and tapped in ‘0409’. There was a second’s pause, then the safe whined open. She could hear Lana gasp behind her. Sophie looked inside: it was empty. No, not quite: there was a plain Manila envelope sitting on the bottom. She opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper.

‘A certificate?’ she said, looking up at Josh.

She had been expecting bricks of bank notes or gold bars; at the very least a black velvet bag full of diamonds. This looked like a fancy version of the guarantee which came with a washing machine.

‘It’s a bearer share certificate,’ said Josh, taking it from her.

‘What’s that in English?’ said Sophie, standing up to get a better look.

‘Have you ever heard of bearer bonds?’

She nodded. ‘They’re what Hans Gruber was after in
Die Hard
, right?’

Josh didn’t smile. ‘Exactly, but you don’t just get them in Hollywood. They used to be used by banks to transport large amounts of money, but they became popular with criminals as a way of concealing funds. If you have a bearer bond, it’s like owning cash, except it’s pretty much untraceable. Whoever physically holds the bond can redeem it for cash.’

‘So what’s this?’ asked Sophie.

‘This,’ said Josh, waving the paper, ‘means you own a whole company, rather than just cash. You turn up at the issuer’s bank holding this, it means you – and you alone – have full access to the company’s accounts. Your dad was clever, Soph. Putting Asner’s money into this offshore company meant it was almost impossible to track down because it leaves so little paper trail.’

‘So where is the bank account?’

Josh examined the certificate.

‘Vanuatu, by the looks of it. It’s an offshore banking centre in the South Pacific.’

Lana stepped forward.

‘Very good, Josh,’ she said coolly. ‘You’re smarter than I thought. Now how about you give it to me and then I suggest we hurry along.’

Josh handed Lana the certificate.

‘I’m sorry, Sophie. I think it’s better if you stay here,’ said Lana slowly. ‘And if you think of squealing to the SEC about where Mr Asner’s hidden money has gone, you’ll have more than some angry Russians on your tail.’

Sophie looked at Lana and then at Josh. She felt time slow down as she realised what was going on.

‘Josh, what’s happening?’ she croaked, a sense of dread filling her chest.

Lana gave a gentle little snort.

‘He’s doing his job, aren’t you, Josh? Now are you coming or do you want to stand around admiring the view?’

‘W-where are you going?’ said Sophie, still looking at Josh.

Lana shrugged, putting the certificate back into its envelope.

‘Oh, I believe the first stop will be Vanuatu. It’s an island in the South Pacific, one of the most privacy-conscious offshore banking centres in the world. That’s where Peter told me he’d hidden the money. All I have been trying to do is work out where the bearer share certificate was. It’s useless trying to claim the money without it.’

Sophie felt the floorboards beneath her feet shift. Her brain couldn’t take it all in.

‘You spoke to my father?’

‘Frequently,’ said Lana with a spiteful smile. ‘Usually in bed, actually.’

‘You liar!’ screamed Sophie, lunging at her. Josh stepped forward and grabbed her, pinning her clawing arms to her sides. ‘My father wouldn’t go near someone like you!’ she spat.

Lana pouted.

‘I was your father’s mistress for almost two years,’ she said mildly. ‘Before my husband, of course – well, mostly before.’

Sophie struggled against Josh again, but he held her tight.

‘You bitch!’

‘Funny, that’s what your father said when I told him I was marrying Simon. He said it was only because Simon was richer than he was, which was probably true, actually.’

She gave a small laugh.

‘But then poor Peter began to beg; he told me he was going to come into a lot of money too, but I didn’t believe him. Why would I? He was just some accountant from nowhere.’

‘Screw you, Lana,’ said Sophie. ‘You never knew him.’

‘Actually, you do have a point,’ said Lana. ‘It turned out that Peter had hidden depths after all. When Simon found out I couldn’t give him children, he told me he wanted a divorce. So I went back to Peter and asked him straight – “What money?”’

She laughed, shaking her head.

‘He was only too happy to tell me about Asner’s fraud. According to Peter, we just had to sit tight for a couple of years until the scandal blew over, and we could go to Vanuatu and retrieve the money.’

‘So your family never lost money in the Ponzi scheme?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she laughed. Then her face clouded over. ‘But then that idiot Asner got himself killed and Peter fell apart. He couldn’t handle the stress. I visited him in hospital, gave him a little incentive to tell me how to get to the money, but the bloody-minded fool wouldn’t tell me.’

‘You killed him!’ roared Sophie, jerking towards Lana, almost slipping from Josh’s grasp. He pulled her back and pushed her on to the bed, standing between the two women.

‘Don’t, Sophie,’ he said. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’

‘Worse?’ she spat, her voice cracking. ‘How could it possibly be worse?’

Lana looked at her watch and put the envelope into her bag.

‘Come on, Josh, we can’t stand here all day.’

Together they turned towards the door, leaving Sophie crumpled on the bed in misery.

‘And you’re working for her, I suppose,’ she hissed at Josh.

Lana spoke for him. ‘Nick did such a shabby job of getting information from you; he always was too easily impressed by pretty things. But then I met Josh in Cap Ferrat and I knew that he could be more helpful than Nick had ever been. So I persuaded him to work for me.’

Hot tears were running down Sophie’s cheeks.

‘Sophie,’ said Josh, his eyes pleading. ‘If you’ll just let me explain . . .’

‘Get the hell out of here!’ screamed Sophie. ‘I don’t want to even look at you, let alone listen to any more of your lies.’

‘Sophie, I’m sorry.’

‘Get out!’ she sobbed. ‘Get
out
!’

Josh bowed his head, then turned and walked out of her life.

46

Ruth felt like she was in the Cannonball Run. She’d been up all night, tearing along motorways, A roads and now narrow, winding country lanes, the endless white lines in the cone of the squad car headlights blurring into one. At first it had been exciting to put on the spinning blue lights and the ‘nee-naw’ siren and watch the traffic ahead part like the Red Sea, but they had now been on the road for five hours and the novelty of the high-speed pursuit had long since worn off. Ruth had always considered Great Britain to be a small country; after all, her home state of North Carolina was bigger than the whole of England alone. But as the past few hours had shown her, the road from London to the Scottish Highlands was a very long one indeed, even when you were exempt from the speed limit. It hadn’t helped that by the time Josh McCormack had called Fox at his flat, it had already been too late to fly north, and trains from London to Scotland reverted to the slower overnight sleeper variety after ten o’clock. Short of requisitioning a police helicopter – ‘You would not believe the paperwork involved,’ said Fox – the only solution had been to get a fast train to Manchester, then continue the rest of the way in a squad car, speeding up the motorway as far as Glasgow, then picking their way cross-country.

Ruth popped another can of Coke and leant against the car, staring across at a distant farmhouse, the only feature in an endless expanse of gorse and heather. They’d taken a pit stop in a lay-by so Fox could make some calls. He was tense, jittery; she could tell he knew his career was on the line if he got this wrong. She turned as he tapped on the windscreen, and slid gratefully back inside the warmth of the car.

‘Everyone’s in position,’ said Fox as he gunned the engine back to life. ‘Let’s hope it’s all worth it. I’m going to look such a bloody banana if this was a crank call.’

‘This Josh McCormack’s got no reason to lie,’ said Ruth, inspecting the road map one last time. She had been staring at it for so long, she felt she could ace a quiz on any of the towns and villages they had passed through that night.

‘Okay, take the next right,’ she instructed. ‘We should be coming to the head of a loch. My guess is that we’ll see it pretty soon.’

Fox slowed down as they reached a sharp turn at the bottom of the road and Ruth smiled to herself: he was still signalling, despite the fact that they hadn’t seen another vehicle in about an hour. Almost immediately the steep pass opened out in front of them and they could see the small castle high on their right, hanging over the loch beneath the glowering crag of Ben Grear.