The Real Katie Lavender (17 page)

They drove to The Meadows in silence. What could either of them say after what they’d just gone through? Could either of them ever forget seeing Neil in that dimly lit, eerily silent room? Save for the bloating, save for the discoloration, he had at least looked at peace. Or was that wishful thinking on Stirling’s part? At peace or not, Stirling regretted agreeing to Cecily coming with him. No mother should be subjected to such an ordeal. Although he was kidding himself if he thought he could have prevented it. Cecily was a force of nature when she set her mind to do something.

‘And you’re sure you can’t think of anything that might have been troubling your brother?’ Rawlings had tried one last time when they were leaving. ‘There’s always something,’ the man had added. Of course there bloody well is! Stirling had wanted to shout back at him. People don’t kill themselves without good reason. The way Rawlings kept asking the question, it was as if he knew that Stirling was hiding something.

But sooner rather than later, Stirling would have to be honest with Rawlings. If he wasn’t, and if at a later date anyone suspected a cover-up, or even an attempt at a cover-up, the shit would really hit the fan. But before he spoke to Rawlings again, he had to be one hundred per cent sure that Rosco was right, that Neil was guilty of the unthinkable. He had to check the client files personally. Only then would he be utterly convinced.

But how could Rosco have got it wrong? There were often occasions when his son could act like the proverbial bull in a china shop, but there wasn’t a chance in hell of him getting something as important as this wrong. As Rosco had said, he’d checked and he’d double-checked, because he didn’t want to believe what he’d overheard and then discovered.

Putting aside all the emotions involved, it was of paramount importance that Nightingale Ridgeway could not be accused of trying to cover up anything as serious as client money being embezzled. In their industry, this was as bad as it got. For the good of the company, Stirling would have to report Rosco’s findings to the police. And the Financial Services Authority. He wished wholeheartedly that it wasn’t necessary.

‘Stirling, I know what you’re thinking,’ Cecily said, breaking into his thoughts.

He took his eyes off the road momentarily and looked at her. ‘You do?’

‘What Neil did was wrong. You mustn’t fall into the trap of also doing the wrong thing. You must put things right, no matter how difficult or potentially hurtful.’

‘I know. I’m going to go to the office later, and when I’ve seen for myself what he did, then . . . then I’ll . . .’ His voice broke and he gripped the steering wheel hard. ‘It feels such a betrayal. How can I do this to him? How can I tell the world what he’s done?’

‘He would have known this would have been the outcome,’ she said gravely. ‘He may have acted stupidly, but he wasn’t stupid.’

‘What are we going to tell Pen?’

‘The truth. All of it. He killed himself because he knew the full extent of what he’d been doing was about to be exposed and he couldn’t see a way out.’

‘Do we tell her about Simone Montrose?’

‘Yes. She’s not as fragile as you think. It’s all going to come out anyway, and it would be an insult to keep her in the dark; she’s not a child. We have to brace ourselves for the worst, Stirling. Once the inquest takes place, the local press will get hold of the story. If they haven’t already. Suicide is always newsworthy, especially when it’s someone who was as well known locally as Neil was.’

Stirling groaned. ‘Which means the nationals might also pick up the story.’

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

He turned into the driveway for The Meadows. Parked alongside Pen’s car was the now familiar sight of a yellow Mini. He came to a stop and switched off the engine. He suddenly felt very tired. ‘You must be disappointed with us,’ he said morosely.

‘With whom?’

‘Neil and me. We’ve let you down. First I betrayed my marriage vows all those years ago, and now it looks as if Neil has been doing the same thing. You must have hoped for better from us.’

She turned and faced him, the strength of her gaze belying her age. ‘My love for you and Neil has always been unconditional; I’ve never judged either of you, and I’m certainly not about to start doing so now. When are you going to tell Gina about Katie?’

He shook his head wearily. ‘God only knows.’

‘I suggest you do it soon. Get it over and done with. Get everything out in the open.’ She paused. ‘Katie’s a lovely girl, you know. You should consider yourself extremely lucky that she found you.’

Right now, Stirling felt far from lucky. He felt like a condemned man.

They found Pen and Katie outside; they were sitting in the coolness of the courtyard, it was one of Stirling’s favourite parts of Pen’s amazing garden. It was very peaceful, very calming. Almost as if Pen had planned it, it was the perfect place for him to deliver the news she would be dreading.

When Pen saw them, she rose unsteadily to her feet and with puffy, bloodshot eyes looked anxiously at Stirling.

He went to her and held her close, if only so that he didn’t have to look at the suffering in her face when he said the words. ‘I’m so sorry, Pen,’ he said gruffly, her head resting against his shoulder. ‘So very sorry. I’m afraid it was Neil.’

She clung to him. ‘I hoped . . . I hoped so much it wouldn’t be . . . that it would be . . .’ Her words trailed off and she gulped back a sob.

With tears in his own eyes, he led her to the chair she’d been sitting in; Katie stood up so that he could take the chair next to it. He heard her quietly offer to make everyone a drink. When it was just him and Pen and his mother in the courtyard, he said, ‘Pen, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but we think we know why Neil killed himself.’

‘It was because of me, wasn’t it?’

He frowned. ‘How could you think that?’

‘Did he leave a note? I mean another note, other than the one the police found in his car. The one that just said he was sorry. Did he leave something that makes sense of what he did?’

Her words came at Stirling in a breathless rush. A rush of hope. ‘No, Pen, there’s no other note. Not yet, at any rate. But . . . the thing is, it’s possible that he was taking money from some of his clients.’

‘Taking money? What do you mean,
taking
?’

‘Stealing.’ He swallowed. ‘Defrauding clients.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s not possible. Why would he do that? We had enough money. More than enough. Why would he want more?’

‘I don’t know, Pen. None of this makes sense to me either.’

But the trouble was, slugging it out inside his brain was the realization that it was all beginning to make perfect sense. The woman called Simone Montrose was very likely the reason Neil had been siphoning money off from his clients. She had somehow ensnared him into not only a secret double life, but an extravagant lifestyle that required funding. Whoever the woman was, Stirling hated her. He hated her for what she had made his brother do, and for the pain they were all now going through. Almost certainly she was one of those scheming women who could wrap a man around her little finger and make him do whatever she wanted.

Looking at the distress in Pen’s face, Stirling wasn’t brave enough to tell her about Simone Montrose. Not now. Perhaps when Lloyd was here, when she had him to comfort and support her.

His mobile rang. He stood up and moved away to take the call: it was Rosco. ‘It’s started, Dad. As I warned you. I’m at the house with Mum and we’ve just had a local reporter on the phone.’

‘Oh hell!’

‘You’re going to have to make sure Pen doesn’t answer the phone at The Meadows. Where are you now?’

‘With Pen.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Your grandmother and I have just got back from identifying Neil’s body.’

‘And?’

‘It was him.’

Katie appeared in the courtyard with a tray of drinks. Stirling watched her go over to Cecily and Pen. He saw the compassion in her face as she offered Pen the tea she’d made. Twenty-four hours ago, all this girl had wanted to do was snatch a glimpse of the man she’d learnt was her father, and now here she was taking care of two bereaved strangers.

‘Dad? Are you still there?’

‘Sorry, the line went a bit crackly for a moment,’ he lied. ‘Look, I’m going to go to the office now. I need to see with my own eyes what you found out yesterday.’

‘You still don’t believe me?’

‘Like I say, I need to see it for myself.’

‘I’ll meet you there.’

‘No. I want to do this alone.’

‘Then what will you do?’

‘If it’s as you say it is, then we have to report it to the police and the FSA. We can’t cover this up, Rosco. You understand that, don’t you? If we do, we’ll be complicit and we’ll be crucified by the FSA and anyone else who wants to take a shot at us.’

‘I get it, Dad. No need to spell it out for me.’

‘Tell your mother I’ll be home later. I’ve no idea what time.’

Stirling let himself in at the office. The building was empty, as it should be on a Sunday. He remembered the day he and Neil signed the lease on the place, how excited they’d been. And how proud. ‘Here’s to the big time,’ they’d said over a celebratory glass of champagne.

He took the lift up to the third floor and opened the door to Neil’s office. He hesitated on the threshold. What would happen to this office after today? Would it become a crime scene? Would Neil’s computer and all his files be taken away as evidence? He felt sick. If only he could go through the client files and find that the irregularities Rosco had discovered were nothing more sinister than sloppy typos – a misplaced zero here, a misplaced decimal point there.

He sat in his brother’s chair behind his desk. He placed the palms of his hands flat on the desk and took a deep breath. Then he switched on the computer, and whilst it came to life, he distracted himself by thinking of Katie. He’d been tempted to ask her to come with him, just so that he could spend some time alone with her in the car. But her presence here would have been inappropriate. Before leaving The Meadows, he’d thanked her for spending the day with Pen and apologized for not being able to talk to her properly. He tried to explain that there was so much he wanted to say but couldn’t right now. She said she understood, that he wasn’t to worry about her, she just wanted to know if there was anything more she could do to help. She said that she’d been worried about Pen, that she had been in a terrible state earlier. For a moment he had been overwhelmed by her thoughtfulness and had wanted to hug her. It seemed impossible, given the magnitude of his grief and shock, but her presence was a consolation to him.

An hour later, he sat back in Neil’s chair and rubbed his eyes.

It was true, exactly as Rosco had said. Over a period of fourteen months, Neil had siphoned off the best part of a million pounds. He’d been clever with it, bloody clever, but the evidence was there once you knew what you were looking for. The portfolios that he’d targeted were all new additions to the company and of a kind that were bulky and well spread over a wide spectrum of investments. He had been paying client cheques and transfer payments into a bank account that wasn’t actually a Nightingale Ridgeway account, but one called Nightingale Ridgeway Finance Inc. From there he had been siphoning off a percentage from each sizeable payment made, which was then presumably transferred into another account – an account that would have to be traced. The bulk of the money, that he hadn’t touched, was then paid into the official Nightingale Ridgeway account, and – Stirling was surmising here – if any of the clients had queried why they weren’t getting as good a return on their investment as they might have hoped for, Neil would have blamed it on the recession, the fact that the market was performing badly. Experience told Stirling – and this never failed to surprise him – that a lot of clients didn’t even bother to check how their investments were going in the short term. Their trust in the fund manager was implicit.

Admittedly none of the clients who Neil had targeted would go hungry as a result of his dishonesty, but this absolutely wasn’t the point. These clients had trusted Nightingale Ridgeway, and Neil had abused their trust for his own ends.

Stirling knew what people would say – what and where were the safety procedures to prevent something like this? How could it have been allowed to happen? The simple answer was: who the hell would have thought a founding director of a prestigious investment management company like Nightingale Ridgeway would need watching?

Having printed page after page of damning evidence, he stared at it bleakly. How could you do it, Neil? How could you look yourself in the face of a morning?

But that was exactly what had gone wrong, hadn’t it? In the end, Neil hadn’t been able to face himself or anyone else.

Stirling nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of his mobile ringing on the desk. He hoped it wasn’t Rosco again.

His heart sank.

It was Lloyd.

From the landing window, Gina watched her husband’s car pass through the open gate at the end of the drive. Countless times before she had stood here and watched Stirling leave for work. Usually – so long as there hadn’t been some silly disagreement between them over, say, Scarlet or Rosco – they waved goodbye to each other. But not today. Today Stirling hadn’t looked back up at the house.

Never before had she seen her husband so worried or so introverted. Or so unreachable. Never before had she felt so locked out. He’d come home late last night, having gone to identify Neil’s body in the morning and then spent the rest of the day at the office. His face drawn and grey, he’d looked awful when he’d been getting ready for bed. It had frightened her just how much he’d changed in so short a time.

She still couldn’t believe how disgracefully Neil had behaved. How could he have put the family in this invidious position? Such wanton and deplorable selfishness. As Rosco had said, killing himself was perhaps the only decent thing he could have done; it did at least spare them the impossible task of forgiving him. Or feigning forgiveness. Because one thing Gina knew with great certainty: she would never be able to bring herself to absolve Neil for his appalling conduct.