The Stone Wife (19 page)

Unsure how to deal with this soul-baring, she watched him top up his cup. An insight into Nathan’s private life might be of use, but it wouldn’t be smart to put herself into a position where he felt he’d said too much and was getting nothing in return. She said, “I haven’t the faintest idea what’s on Lee’s mind.”

“Don’t give me that crap,” he said, dropping the civility straight away. “You’re close, you two. You must be.”

“I only met her yesterday.”

He brushed that aside. “Who supplied the rope ladder?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“She didn’t bring it with her. I drove her to the ship for the shoot. I know a woman can stuff a lot in her bag, but I’m bloody sure there wasn’t a ladder in there.”

“I can’t help you with this,” Ingeborg said, doing her best to sound cool.

“What’s your name?”

“Ingeborg Smith.”

His lip curled.

She had a response she’d used a hundred times before. “I can’t help being called Smith, if that’s what bothers you.
There are seven hundred thousand Smiths in Britain and I happen to be one of them.”

“You’re a writer. Get a pen-name.”

She took this as humour and smiled. “It’s what I’m known as. Why change it now?” On an inspiration, she added, “Wilbur Smith is one of the most famous writers in the world and he doesn’t find it a handicap.”

Nathan was unimpressed. He didn’t look like a book-lover. “If you didn’t know about the rope-ladder,” he doggedly returned to his main line of enquiry, “how come you used it to get off the ship?”

“It was hanging over the side when I ran along the deck. I was being chased. Your men were shining flashlights at me. What would you have done?”

Nathan wasn’t interested in replying.

“They could have been armed,” she added, becoming more confident. “Someone comes after me in the dark, I don’t hang about.”

Another temporary halt was called for the arrival of Nathan’s lunch, a plate piled high that made her think fleetingly of Peter Diamond. In this situation Diamond, like Nathan, wouldn’t have ordered the crêpes. But he might have approved of the way she was coping with the interrogation.

“What was that about my men being armed?” Nathan asked when the waitress was gone.

“You’re a major player,” she said. “I expect you need to defend yourself.”

He didn’t deny it. “Tell me what you know. Is Lily playing silly games or has she really jumped ship?”

“I can’t answer that. I keep telling you we aren’t friends. My dealings with her are professional. She’s someone I arranged to interview, that’s all.”

He used his knife on the fried liver, served so rare that blood oozed from it. “I don’t like being pissed about. I invested a fortune in that girl. I treated her well.” He looked up from his plate. “Did she say something was bugging her?”

“Not to me. We hardly talked at all.”

“After the shoot finished, did you speak?”

Ingeborg shook her head. “I went to the dressing room and they told me she’d already left.”

“How soon was that?”

“Not long after the wrap.”

“Was she with anyone?”

“They didn’t say so.”

Nathan used his blood-stained knife to stress what he said next. “She wasn’t acting alone. Some toe-rag supplied the ladder and fixed it to the side of the ship. She knew where to go, and she had wheels to get away. It was all arranged.”

Ingeborg had worked this out for herself. It didn’t require great deductive powers. She sipped her coffee and said nothing.

“Am I reading it right?” Nathan asked.

Difficult. Neutrality was her preferred stance. “I’m not in a position to say.”

“Come on, I’ve checked your phone. You took pictures of her. You were with her.”

“On and off.”

“Was she nervous? Excitable? Angry?”

“How would I know? We’d only just met.”

He pointed the knife at her. “You’re not helping.”

“I’m being honest.” And she added something which was not honest at all. “If you want to know who’s angry, I am. I’m angry with Lee. She played me for a sucker, letting me think I could get a magazine piece out of this.”

The mean eyes widened a fraction. Maybe she’d made a telling point. “Where was this going to appear?”

“In one of the Sundays, probably.”

“A national?”

She nodded.

Nathan was clearly interested. He pressed his fingers to his lips and tapped them thoughtfully. “It’s not like Lily to turn down the chance of publicity.”

She was content to let him think the matter through in his own time. If he came to the right conclusion this could be helpful.

“The silly little bitch is bound to come to her senses soon,” Nathan spoke his thoughts aloud. “She’ll find she can’t hack it as a pop star without me backing her every inch of the way. She’d never have got this far without me. She’s not answering my calls. All I get is some recorded message.” He put down the knife and fork and leaned back in the chair. “But I know what to do.”

Ingeborg waited.

“You can talk some sense into her.”

She shook her head, acting dim. “I don’t know how.”

“Like I just said, she needs to be in the papers all the time, or she’ll find herself at the bottom of the heap. Tell her you still want to write about her, even though she let you down.”

“But we don’t know where she is.”

“She’ll have her phone with her. Call her on your mobile.”

“You took it off me.”

“Play along and you can have it back. I don’t know why you’re bothered about the phone. There’s fuck all on it.”

“It’s brand new,” she said, which was true. “I got it especially for this project. It’s supposed to take better pictures than my old one.” In reality she would have been idiotic to have brought her own phone with all its data. “Can I have it back now?”

“All in good time. You and I are going to strike a deal. She’s not answering my calls, but you can bet your little cotton socks she’ll talk to you. What did Mrs. Thatcher call it? The oxygen of publicity?”

“Something like that.” In her wildest dreams she hadn’t expected to hear Margaret Thatcher being quoted by Nathan Hazael.

“It’s neat,” he said, leaning back and rubbing his hands. “I’ll tell you what to say. We’ll soon find out who she’s shacking up with.”

“And what do I get out of the deal?”

“Your ticket of leave. You’ll be free to go after I get her back.”

“I can’t guarantee she’ll come back.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Nathan said. “When I know where she is, I’ll fetch her.” A simple statement of intent with a grim subtext. He dipped his hand into a pocket of the robe and produced Ingeborg’s phone and held it out. “Call her now.”

She took the phone and let it rest in her palm as if she’d never seen it before.

Put on the spot like this, she felt her veins ice up. She hated the idea that Lee would be tricked into revealing where she was and brought back by force. But if Nathan didn’t get his way, the ferocity would swing in another direction. He was in charge here.

Crunch time.

The bigger picture was that she couldn’t allow herself to fall out with Nathan. Her reason for being here was to get the truth about the hold-up at the auction and the fatal shooting. She needed to stay on speaking terms with the man. She felt a strong empathy with Lee, but it wasn’t a case of Lee being totally ignorant about Nathan’s intentions. The singer would be expecting him to come after her. She’d lived with him and she knew he wouldn’t be dumped without a fight.

Lee had the intelligence to work out what was going on.

The bigger picture had to win.

“If I get through, do you want to speak to her?”

He shook his head. “She’d cut me off. Besides, we don’t want her knowing you’re with me. You’re calling for yourself, got it?”

Lee’s number was one of the few she had stored. She called it.

There was still a chance of getting a recorded message.

But Lee’s voice came through. “Hi. Is this Ingeborg?” As chipper and friendly as if nothing had gone wrong.

“How are you? We seem to have lost contact.”

Across the table, Nathan made a fist and held it up in triumph.

Into the minefield.

“I’m good,” Lee said. “Hey, I don’t know what to say about last night, leaving so suddenly. But at least we met.”

“Where are you?” Ingeborg asked, and saw Nathan’s nod of satisfaction at the question.

“Right now? With a friend.”

“In Bristol?”

“I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind. Change in my personal arrangements. I’m not at Nathan’s place any more.”

“The thing is … are you still up for the photo shoot?”

After a pause, Lee said, “Sure. We can do it, only it won’t be exactly as we planned, and we may have to wait a few days.”

“Sorry, but I can’t wait that long,” Ingeborg said and improvised: “I pitched the idea to the
Sunday Times
and the magazine editor is keen to use it. I promised to deliver by the end of the week.”

“The
Sunday Times
? Diggety dog, that’s cool.” The excitement was so clear in Lee’s voice that Ingeborg felt a stab of conscience. It was one thing telling lies to Nathan, but this young woman wasn’t remotely evil.

“I can’t mess them about,” Ingeborg felt compelled to say. “I was counting on doing most of it today.”

“Aw, shoot. That’s so difficult. I can’t tell anyone where I am, not even you. Ask no questions and hear no lies. Well, I’d better say this much: I’ve split with Nathan. My life was getting impossible for all sorts of reasons I won’t go into. So, you see, we can’t do the photo shoot at his house like we said we would.”

“That
is
a problem,” Ingeborg said, her brain in overdrive, conscious that Nathan was hanging on every word she spoke. “It’s supposed to be a typical day in your life.”

“Can’t you change the format?”

“Not at this late stage. Really it doesn’t matter where we do it, as long as it’s about you from morning till night. I took those shots on the ship last night. They’ll go in nicely and show you at work. Great publicity for the video, too.”

“You’re right. Oh, God, this is difficult. I’m really up for it, only I don’t see how it’s possible.”

The conflict in Lee’s voice was painful to hear and Ingeborg felt desperately mean, but she couldn’t allow this call to end yet. “There must be a way round this. Can we meet somewhere and talk it through?”

Nathan raised both thumbs.

The pull of publicity was too much for Lee to resist. “Righty. I’ll meet you. Only it has to be somewhere I can feel safe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve. Let me think.”

Ingeborg was tempted to tell her she’d think better if she stopped trotting out these stupid proverbs.

“Do you know Queen Square?” Lee asked.

“I do, but where in Queen Square? It’s huge.”

“The middle, where I can see in every direction.”

“Where the statue is? Okay, what time?”

“What is it now? Half-twelve? I can be there by two, just to meet, right, and work out what we do?”

“Two it is.”

Nathan had a smile like sunrise over the Bristol Channel when the call ended. He didn’t ask for the phone back. “I heard your side of it. Queen Square. Did she say where she is now?”

“No. She was being careful.”

“She can’t be far off if she’s meeting you at two.”

“True.”

“Not long until I get her back.”

“That isn’t what she’s expecting.”

He chuckled. “Women like surprises.”

“Do you need me there, or can I go now?” Ingeborg asked, already guessing what he would say.

“You’ve got to be there.”

“I feel like Judas.”

“Relax. She’ll come to her senses when she knows how much I care about her.” And his eager voice suggested he really did care. “Have you seen the sound studio I built for her? Come on, I’ll show you.”

Recording studios held no particular interest for Ingeborg, but the chance to see more of the house was unmissable. She
followed Nathan from the room and through a spacious sitting room equipped with a plasma TV, on the lookout all the time for anything resembling an armoury. But this was a place to relax, more modern in style than the other living rooms she’d seen, with deep armchairs, sofas and subdued lighting.

“We’re entering her private quarters now,” Nathan said, pushing open another door. “I don’t often come in here. Had it built for her only three months ago. You can still smell the paint. There’s also a small gym. She’s quite an athlete, as you saw on the ship.”

“Do you have your own gym?” Ingeborg asked.

He laughed. “Christ, no. What do you think I am?”

“What’s in your section, then—a cocktail bar?”

“You don’t want to know what I get up to.”

“But I do. Let me try. Men’s stuff. Snooker and darts?”

“I’ll own up to that.” He was leading her along a white-walled corridor into the extension.

“A gun-room?”

He turned to stare at her. “What makes you say that?”

“You’re a powerful guy,” she answered as smoothly as she could. “I can see you target shooting and hitting the bull, no problem. Wouldn’t surprise me if you have some kind of shooting gallery as well.”

“You’d be wrong,” Nathan said.

“About the gallery? Then I reckon you have a range somewhere outside. Or do you just shoot squirrels and pigeons?” She was pressing him harder than she intended because she could see he was practically purring over the macho image she was suggesting for him. “As for foxes, I bet they know better than to come visiting your estate.”

“Did Lily speak to you about me and guns?” he asked after an uncomfortable pause.

“No.”

“What put this in your head, then?”

Stay cool, she thought. He’s not suspicious. He’s trying to be friendly, making conversation.

“If you remember, I was squeezed between you and one of
your employees in the car last night—close enough to feel what was clipped to his belt. And if your men are armed, I’d expect you to know how to handle a weapon.”

Satisfied, apparently, he gave a shrug and moved on. He hadn’t denied a strong connection with guns. He hadn’t denied anything except owning a shooting gallery.