Shimmers of Pearl (The Pearl Trilogy, Part 3) (26 page)

“Nice excuse, Alex. Tell that to Scotland bloody Yard.” James took out his cell and dialed 999. Alexandre watched him steadily. His heart was pounding like an out of beat drum but trying to stop James would be suicide. Fuck. This was it now. He saw his life flash before him. He’d heard that happened to people when they drowned; and now both the beautiful and hideous, like snapshots, flew through his mind. His father jabbing him in the butt with a broken bottle. His sister’s screams. Riding on the back of a bicycle with his dad, he was smiling and happy – they were going on a picnic in the sun. An IED exploding and blowing off his best friend’s head, only missing Alexandre because he’d gone to take a leak around the corner. Pearl’s face when he last kissed her when they were dancing. Pearl having an orgasm, her body juddering in ecstasy…

James’s voice sounded distant, even though he was right next to him. James was giving them his address. “Yes, that’s right, some type of accident but she’s definitely dead. I’m here with her ex-boyfriend. Yes, I’m her husband.”

Oh God, that sounded just peachy – the ex. The ex who just happened to be the object of Laura’s crazy desires. James disconnected the call. Alexandre knelt down beside Laura. Why did he feel so little compassion? She was dead, after all. Flesh and blood. He’d loved her once. Tears prickled his eyes but they weren’t for Laura, they were for Pearl. And him. What the fuck was going to happen now? He wanted to get out of there and run, but that would make him look as guilty as sin.

He got up from his haunches and leaned against the wall to steady himself. “Where have you been, James? I’ve been calling and leaving messages.”

“I know.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t you get back to me?”

James sat down on the bottom step which was still smeared with Laura’s blood. He didn’t seem to notice. The image was surreal. James sitting by his dead wife, looking vaguely sad, yet with an almost imperceptible gleam of relief flickering in his eyes. Alexandre couldn’t read him. Had James killed Laura?

“I was in The Priory,” James answered solemnly.

The Priory – the British equivalent to the Betty Ford Clinic.
Rehab for celebrities who take too many drugs, stuff their faces with too many cakes. Deals were made there – it was a pretty ‘hip’ place to end up. Some people exaggerated their problems just so they could say they’d been to The Priory. Sounded cool to some.

“I didn’t know you had a problem.”

James looked down at the corpse and buried his face in his hands. “Nor did I. Well, I did, but I was in total denial.”

“What was your drug of choice?”

James swallowed nervously. “How d’you know it was drugs?”

“I figured. You’ve never been an excessive drinker.”

“Smack.”

“Heroin? Really? You could have fooled me. How did you get to work every day? How did you make all that money?”

James didn’t flinch when he answered, “Well, most of my money went up my arm.”

That made sense. He’d only ever seen James wear long sleeved shirts, hand-made in Jermyn Street. He wasn’t a T- shirt kind of guy.

James went on, eager to share. Alexandre noticed that people fresh out of treatment were always keen to tell their story. “I was a very controlled junkie. I had the budget for the high grade shit, you know. But things started spiraling out of control – I lost some money on the stock exchange; the tax men were after me. I needed to clean up my act so I went AWOL. My suitcase is still in the hall. I, literally, just got back five minutes ago. And I found
you
here. And Laura dead.”

“So, had you spoken to Laura?” A loaded question. What Alexandre really wanted to know was,
how much do you know?

“Of course. She told me she wanted to get back with you and that you were still in love with her.”

Oh fuck!
“And you believed her?”

“Well, yes. Why would she lie about that? It’s one of the things that drove me into treatment. She was disgusted by me, and rightly so. I was a fuck-up, a disaster. A junkie. How could I have expected her to live with a man like me? There you were, all sorted out. Making a mint. Good looking. Together. And there was I like a fucking loser, jacking up every day.”

Alexandre laid a hand gently on James’s shoulder. After all, they’d been friends before. Sort of. “What she said wasn’t true. I’m in love with Pearl, my fiancée. I have never wanted Laura back. Ever. You have to believe me, James.”

James flinched his shoulder and Alexandre took his hand away. “I don’t know what to fucking believe. Here we are, the pair of us, sitting next to a dead woman. My wife. The woman I was in love with. The woman I got clean for. I have a feeling you killed her but, obviously I can’t prove it.”

“James, you don’t seem to be that distraught about Laura lying there dead. I could just as easily suppose
you
killed her.”

He looked up at Alexandre, his brows furrowed. “And why the hell would I do that?”

“Jealousy. Rage. Revenge. Or simply to stop her taking you to the cleaners. I don’t know – you could have a million reasons.” Alexandre thought of the evidence. Was it possible that it was right here, in the house? He was desperate to check it out before the police arrived. He knew how most women’s minds worked; they always kept things of value hidden in their bedrooms. “I’m going upstairs to the bathroom.”

“There’s a bathroom down here, use that.”

“I’d prefer to use the one upstairs.”

“Why? So you can do a quick robbery while you’re at it? Steal Laura’s jewelry?”

“Don’t be absurd, James.”

“Do what you like, the police will be here any second and you can tell them your bullshit excuses about why you broke into our house.” He sat like a stone, not budging from the bottom step.

Alexandre skirted around him and mounted the stairs. At the top, he made a right and followed the corridor all the way to the end. The master bedroom door was open. He entered, and scanned his eyes about the room. He’d been to this house on several occasions over the years, and knew his way around. He could hear sirens from two or three vehicles, outside. He looked out of the window, down onto the street. Two police cars and an ambulance had arrived. There was a frantic knock at the front door and he heard James opening it and talking in muffled tones to the police. The living room was filling up rapidly with more voices and commotion. Alexandre didn’t have much time. He looked under the bed – nothing. Laura used to like keeping important things in her closet – letters and personal stuff. He opened the closet door, rummaged through hanging dresses, pants and shirts and he glimpsed something shiny at the back – was it the titanium hip? No, just was a silver sequin jacket.

“What the fuck are you
doing
?” It was James standing behind him. Alexandre spun around. James edged closer, a scowl set on his sharp face as if he was about to lash out.

“Nothing. Sorry,” Alexandre replied. But James leapt at him, launching his slim body at Alexandre like a missile, his right fist flailing in the air aiming for his face. Alexandre ducked and clamped James’s wrists tightly behind his back. Fighting was the last thing he wanted to do.

A policewoman quickly entered the bedroom, and a policeman rushed from behind, barging her out of the way and diving at the two men locked together; Alexandre was still immobilizing James who was thrashing about like a fish on a hook.

The policeman and another colleague, also pushing his way through the room, shouted out, “I want you two to come with us down to the police station.”

James shouted out, “This bastard killed my wife! He broke into my house, uninvited. He must have shoved her down the stairs. They were lovers.”

Alexandre shook his head and mumbled, “It’s not true.” What a fuck-up. He knew, though, that the best course of action was to remain calm and wait for his attorney. He’d call Sophie and get their legal team onto it. He had never needed a criminal lawyer before, but they had a good one on HookedUp’s payroll, just in case.

Alexandre was silent. He released James’s wrists and put his hands up peacefully. Oh shit. He needed his attorney, and fast.

“He basically broke into my house,” offered James, nursing the burns on his wrists and glowering at Alexandre.

The policeman, a pale-faced man in his fifties, eyed both men up and down and said, “Look, there is a dead woman below and I don’t have time to play Sherlock Holmes. I want you both down at the station, now, to make a statement and give interviews. I’ll want to take DNA swabs – meanwhile, the forensic team will tell us if there’s been any foul play.”

“I know my rights!” James yelled. “Either arrest me now, or leave me be. You have no right to force me to come down to the station, let alone take any bloody DNA samples! I’ll give my statement, right here, in my own house, thank you very much.”

Alexandre noticed the policeman’s thin lips quiver with rage. James answering back in his pompous Etonian accent, had really got his goat.

The officer, a small and ‘important’ man, told him, “Alright, so be it. I’m arresting you
both
on suspicion of manslaughter.” He puffed up his chest and said in a monotone, “You have the right to remain silent, if you give up this right, anything you say can, and will be used as evidence against you in the court of law. You have the right to…”

The man’s voice was a swirl of words spinning about in Alexandre’s dazed head. He felt as if someone was smothering him with cotton wool. He tented his fingers in front of his face and mumbled, “This is crazy.” But he noticed a sneer on the policeman’s lily-white face. Damn. He shouldn’t have spoken.

The other officer said, in a broad Cockney accent, “What
are
you? Bloody
foreign
or something?”

Alexandre was aware that he shouldn’t have opened his mouth. His French accent would not go down well. At all. The English hated the French, it was common knowledge.
Frogs,
they called them. The French, in return, nicknamed the Brits ‘Roast Beef’, not because of their national dish, but because of the color their bodies turned in summer as they slumped about Mediterranean beaches sporting agonizing sunburns.

James piped up, “It’s him you should be questioning, not me! He broke into my house, I tell you.”

Alexandre wanted to defend himself, explain he’d been invited, that the back door was open and he had a key to the garage but he bit his lip. He needed to stay calm, wait for his attorney to be present. He simply shook his head.

“So you don’t know this man?” asked the policewoman looking at James.

“Yes, I
do
know him, I told you that, downstairs. He’s my wife’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Is this true, sir?” the Napoleon complex officer asked Alexandre.

“I’d rather wait to give my statement down at the station with my lawyer present, if you don’t mind,” Alexandre answered quietly. He knew his rights. He couldn’t be kept at a police station for more than twenty-four hours without being charged, although this could be extended to thirty-six hours with the authority of a police superintendent, and for up to ninety-six hours with the authority of a magistrate, which is exactly what could happen if they got wind of the whole IVF nonsense. He could hear them downstairs now, probably the forensics team – shit, now he thought about it, traipsing upstairs wasn’t such a great idea. His footprints would be all over the staircase, proof that he could have pushed Laura. After all, it wasn’t his house. James could have his footprints or fingerprints anywhere, and so what? But Alexandre was another story, altogether. That, plus coming in from the back when nobody was home, did not look good at all.

James cried out, pointing his skinny finger like a weapon at Alexandre, “It’s him you should be worried about. He was having a bloody affair with my wife!”

The policeman smirked as if he’s made a great discovery, and said to James, “So, sir, that would give you a good motive, wouldn’t it?”

“Should I handcuff them, sir?” the female officer asked.

“Look, that really won’t be necessary,” James blurted out. “This is absurd. This is my bloody house! You think I’m going to kill my own wife? I’m the one who called
you,
for Christ’s sake? You think I would have made that phone call if I’d been guilty of murder?”

“Actually, a neighbor called 999 before your call came in,” the woman said. “She heard a woman scream.”

The officer in charge shot her a poisonous look. She’d obviously said too much. She covered her mouth with her hand in embarrassment.

Laura screamed, did she? Alexandre mused. He didn’t think that James was capable of murder, but who knew? His mother had killed - and he hadn’t imagined Laura would be capable of blackmail. People did strange things under pressure. Maybe Laura was threatening James in some way, and he needed her out of the picture. It seemed strange that she would fall down the stairs in her own house, even with heeled slippers. It wasn’t even dark.

“Look sir, we can either do this peacefully and you come with us nice and quietly down to the station for questioning, or we’ll have to cuff you.”

It was still very civilized in Britain, Alexandre thought. In the USA, he and James would be on the floor by now, wrists cuffed behind their backs and a gun held to their heads. Yet here, they were politely asking them to come along to the station for questioning. He knew a little about the law in Britain and the way the system worked. His new partner, the one he was starting the video game company with, had once been arrested for dealing marijuana. The police in the UK were able to arrest people much more easily than in the States. American police needed probable cause to make an arrest, but in the United Kingdom, officers could arrest just on suspicion.

Alexandre pushed out his wrists in front of him to show good will.

The police officer said, “That won’t be necessary, sir. If you men can both come along with us quietly and do not resist, we won’t be needing restraints.”

“Sure,” Alexandre told him, offering a limp smile. His mind raced back to the possibility of the evidence being in the closet. Damn, he’d like to have one more look but it would cause mayhem. James was already suspicious; Alexandre couldn’t draw attention to the closet – not even look at it. He’d have no choice but to be led like a lamb to slaughter to the police station, and call Sophie to get his lawyer there ASAP. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t incriminate himself, wouldn’t give evidence – he had ‘the right to remain silent’ and he’d damn well use that right.