Chapter Twenty-Two
JILL IS AT the gallery, dealing with a customer who is considering a painting, when the sound of the door opening makes her turn her head.
She’s surprised to see Lara. She gives her a quick smile and turns back to the customer.
Once she’s finished and the woman has gone, she approaches her friend, who has been quietly surveying the canvases on the walls, having, Jill knows, no intention of buying art. Art isn’t really Lara’s thing.
‘What brings you here?’ Jill asks.
Lara faces her and glances around the gallery as if to be sure they are alone, an odd gesture. ‘We need to talk,’ she says.
‘About what?’ Jill asks. She doesn’t like Lara’s body language.
‘Last night a man from the US Coast Guard came to our house and asked us questions.’
‘Oh, right,’ Jill says nodding, trying to act naturally, despite her suddenly pounding heart. ‘That’s just a routine thing. They have to do an accident investigation, whenever someone dies at sea.’
‘It was a guy called Special Agent Ramirez,’ Lara says.
‘Yes, he spoke to us too,’ Jill tells her, in an offhand way, but her stomach flips.
‘He said some disturbing things,’ Lara says, looking at her intently.
‘Like what?’ Jill asks, her mask slipping a little. But she can guess. She remembers what he said to Nadya.
‘Ben sent him packing.’
‘What did he say, Lara?’
Her friend shifts her eyes evasively. ‘He said that you and Ted knew that Ted was Greg’s heir.’
Jill sucks in a breath. ‘For fuck’s sake.
We didn’t know. How dare he?’ she exclaims. She can’t admit they ever knew; she and Ted have discussed this.
Greg only mentioned the will to Ted once, when they were alone.
Neither Ted nor Jill has ever breathed a word of it to anyone.
Ted inheriting is something that people might assume, but no one can prove Ted knew.
‘He’s lying,’ Jill says firmly. Indignantly.
‘We didn’t know until we saw the attorneys.
I mean, it was always possible, even likely, that he was going to get some of it, because he was Greg’s younger brother, but you know they weren’t close.
They didn’t really get along. He might have left it all to his ex-wife, or to charity, or his friends. We didn’t know, I swear.’
Lara nods, as if reassured. Then she says hesitantly, ‘He said you and Ted were having financial problems.’
The bastard. Jill regards Lara and decides to tell the truth, or at least some of it. Lara is no fool, and Jill’s afraid of being trapped in a lie. ‘We’ve had some setbacks, but nothing serious,’ she says. ‘You know how it goes with investments, up and down.’
Lara says, in a voice so low it’s almost a whisper, ‘He said he thought it might have been murder.’
Jill feels her entire body go cold. ‘It was an accident, Lara. You know that.’
‘Of course it was!’ Lara agrees. ‘I just thought I should let you know what he’s thinking.’
Lara leaves the gallery and walks through Lower Manhattan.
She has a lot on her mind, and she needs to think.
Something about Jill hadn’t been entirely convincing.
Lara has known Jill a long time. And she’s been learning about micro expressions from a woman she follows on Instagram – the fleeting, unconscious facial expressions that can give you away – and she thinks that for just a fraction of a second, when Lara mentioned murder, Jill had looked absolutely terrified.
Is it possible they killed Greg? Ben thinks the very idea is absurd.
But she can see how it might have happened.
It’s not that she thinks they planned it, not deliberately.
But things might not have happened exactly the way Jill and Ted said they did.
A difficult day at sea. Greg without a life jacket, nobody around to see.
Two against one. What if they’d had an argument?
A shoving match, and Greg went over, perhaps by accident?
Or maybe he did just lose his balance and fall overboard.
But maybe they didn’t help him once he was in the water.
Is that what happened? Did they see him there in the ocean and not throw out the life preservers?
Did they not help him when they could have?
Was it a crime of opportunity, a sudden realization of what was to be gained if they didn’t save him? And no one there to see?
Now Lara finds she can picture it perfectly. And she thinks Ted and Jill would be capable of it, despite what Ben says. She thinks almost anyone could be capable of it, with $45 million on the line. Lara wonders what she might do for that kind of money.
If things didn’t happen on that boat the way they said, then it must be weighing on Jill.
Such a heavy secret. And then something else occurs to her.
Maybe Ted deliberately pushed his brother off the boat and there was nothing Jill could do to stop it.
Nothing she could do to save him. And now, there is nothing she can do but go along with it.
Maybe at some point she will need to unburden herself. Lara is her best friend. She will be there for her. She will never give her away. If Jill tells her the truth, she will keep her secret – for ever. Jill is her best friend, and she will protect her.
‘Do you think they did it?’ Nadya’s son asks her that evening at supper.
It’s not the first time he’s asked. Ever since it happened, four days earlier, he’s been very interested in the story about her employers and their brush with death at sea.
It’s such a juicy story. There’s a lot of speculation about it online – did they push Greg Westcott off the boat on purpose to get his money?
Nadya lifts her head sharply to look at him.
‘No, I don’t. Stop asking me that.’ She doesn’t want to talk about her employers.
As far as she’s concerned, it’s all rumours and gossip.
People will talk. She doesn’t like her son sticking his nose into her employers’ business.
She certainly hasn’t said anything to him about being questioned yesterday by the agent from the Coast Guard.
He persists. ‘Seriously though. Do you think they pushed him overboard on purpose?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she says curtly, ‘and you should mind your own business.’
‘But what if they did? To get the money. I’d push someone off a boat for that kind of dough.’
She looks back at her son with dismay. Surely he doesn’t mean it. How did he turn out this way? He’ll end up in prison at this rate, the way he thinks, the losers he hangs out with. She loves him, but she has no idea what to do with him. Her stomach begins to churn.
‘Konstantin says it’s the perfect crime,’ he continues.
This startles her. ‘Konstantin – who is he?’ she asks.
Her son smirks. ‘A friend of mine.’
She says, ‘It wasn’t a crime, it was an accident.’
Peter scoffs and says, ‘Either way, they’re probably going to get a shit ton of money.’
She gets up and throws her dishes into the sink with a clatter.
Ramirez speaks to his superior, Donovan Brady, at the end of the day.
‘I hate to see them get away with it,’ Ramirez tells him. ‘I saw their reaction to the idea of cameras on the boat. I know they’re hiding something.’
‘Look,’ Brady says. ‘I trust your instincts. But our hands are tied without any evidence.’
‘I know.’
‘I think it’s time to let it go. I need you to switch gears. We’ve got a complicated people-trafficking case I want you on, starting first thing tomorrow.’
‘Sure.’
But as he hangs up the phone, he’s still thinking about the Westcotts. He finds himself obsessing about them late at night, thinking about them going about their privileged lives. He thinks they probably got away with murder. He lets it bother him more than he probably should.