Perfect Strangers (47 page)

She got up and walked over, wrapping a towel around herself.

‘Josh, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because I knew you wouldn’t have reacted in the same way. Sergei had to believe he was getting the real thing. I’m sorry.’

He handed it to her. ‘And I thought you’d probably want to hang on to the original.’

She looked down at the desk. Josh’s smartphone was sitting there, and he had been writing something on a pad.

‘So what’s all this about?’

‘You were right, Sophie,’ he said, excitement in his voice. ‘The book is the key to it.’

‘You know who Benedict Grear is?’ she said incredulously.

‘Not who, where,’ said Josh. Sophie sat on the arm of his chair as he turned to the front page. ‘We always wondered who Benedict Grear was, rather than
what
it was. You know why I thought of it? Walking into the restaurant yesterday, seeing all those tourists, thinking they probably thought the Steppes was named after the stairs at the front of the restaurant. Stupid, I know, but it triggered something in my mind: what if Benedict Grear isn’t a name?’

Sophie frowned.

‘But it
is
a name . . .’

‘Yes, a name of a place, not a person,’ replied Josh, running his finger under the text. ‘Benedict Grear is Ben Grear,’ he said. ‘Ben is Gaelic for mountain. I did a search; there’s a Ben Grear in Scotland. And this number here?’ he said, pointing at the faint pencil numerals in the corner of the page. ‘Again, we were making wrong assumptions. We thought it was a date of birth or a sort code or account number. But it’s Ordnance Survey coordinates.’

Josh picked up his phone.

‘There’s an OS Explorer map of the Ben Grear area and you can download digital copies.’

He played around with the phone until he showed her a map page.

‘Look, here’s the mountain, and if you read off the numbers from the book, it gets you here.’ He tapped his finger on the screen, just below the mountain. ‘It’s a building, on an outcrop of land in this small loch. You said your dad always told you he’d get you your own castle one day, didn’t he? I bet that’s it. And I bet Asner’s money is hidden somewhere there.’

He looked up at her, a wide grin on his face.

‘All we have to do is go and get it.’

Sophie knew she should feel excited, she knew she should whoop for joy; after all, that was what they had been looking for all this time – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But she didn’t, she just felt flat. The one thing this journey had taught her was that money only brought heartache.

‘It’s stolen money, Josh,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want stolen money. My dad would know that.’

‘Would he?’ said Josh.

‘What do you mean?’ said Sophie, pulling the towel higher.

‘Listen, your dad loved you, right?’

‘Of course!’

‘And he knew you liked the good life. He would have wanted you to be comfortable, to give you everything you’d always wanted. Nice house, nice car, all that.’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve met a lot of rich people in my time. Gangsters. Corrupt businessmen. You look at their wives, their grown-up kids, do you think any of them stop to question how Daddy is paying for it?’

‘I’m not like that!’

‘I know that, Sophie. But did he?’

She suddenly felt terribly sad, because she knew there was a grain of truth in what Josh was saying – more than a grain, in fact. She
had
been fixated on material things: the shoes, the postcode, the boyfriend with a big engagement ring. And now she realised how little all that meant, but her dad had never met –
would
never meet – his new daughter and that was a tragedy. Maybe there was some way of making amends, maybe she could still fix it – but to do that, they had to get to the money before the Russians or anyone else.

‘We have to go to Scotland,’ she said quickly.

‘I’ll call Lana. Maybe we can get out of Miami this morning. We have to get there before Sergei works out what we have.’

‘Why didn’t you give him the false co-ordinates in the book?’

‘He’s not the sort of man you want to lie to. You just have to out-smart him.’

She looked at him, doubt creeping in.

‘Are we going to call Hal Stanton?’

‘No.’

She frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘Because we’re almost there, Soph.’

She felt a cold shiver somewhere deep inside her. It was a moment before she recognised what it was. Doubt.

She looked at Josh playing with a route map on his iPhone. There was a definite reluctance to get the authorities involved. Was that because he had an inherent distrust for the establishment? This was a man who skirted around the law, not worked with it. Or was it something else?

An unwelcome thought began to present itself in her brain. A thought that made her pull her towel a little tighter round her body. Josh couldn’t have an ulterior motive for wanting to keep the authorities out of this, could he?

As she tried to rid herself of the notion, Josh curled one strong arm around her waist. Pressed up against him, she could feel him harden beneath his boxer shorts.

‘This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a first date,’ he said, stroking her hair. She felt herself relax in his arms. She was wrong to question Josh. She trusted him implicitly. He’d had so many opportunities to abandon her, and yet he’d stuck by her side from the moment she’d left his houseboat and been chased by the Russians.

‘When this is over, we’ll go somewhere hot and sunny and wonderful. Brazil, Bali, the Maldives. We can stay there six months, a year, longer. You can write books or poems or paint pictures, or we can just sell coconuts and spend the rest of our time doing what we did last night. Doing what I wanted to do to you since the moment I saw you. But first we have to find the money.’

She pulled away from him. ‘You wanted to have sex with me at the Chariot party?’ she grinned.

‘I was as jealous as hell that Nick had got his paws on you first.’

‘Maybe you should have tried a bit harder,’ she replied, circling his T-shirt with her fingertip and feeling the coarse scrub of chest hair underneath. As she looked up at him, she wondered how things might have panned out had she met Josh before rather than after Nick. Or if Josh had tried harder, hung around a little longer to talk to her. Would he have charmed her away from Nick? If he had succeeded, where would they be now? On his houseboat, enjoying the English summer, or in her tiny Battersea studio, which seemed so remote it was as if it belonged in another lifetime? Or would she not even have given him a chance? Josh was the antithesis of her usual type, but it had taken this week, this journey to realise that he was exactly what she wanted.

He smiled, and the corners of his soft grey eyes creased into fine lines. It was a hell of a sexy smile.

‘Much as I would like to make up for lost time, we should get moving.’

Sophie unfolded herself from his embrace and began to dress. She splashed some water on her face, brushed her teeth and threw all their belongings in their two small nylon bags. She was ready to finish this.

It was almost four a.m. and the sky was still black.

They shut their room door quietly and dropped the key off in a drop box, leaving two fifty-dollar bills behind the reception desk.

‘Stop,’ said Josh, putting his hand in front of Sophie.

He peeped through the front window shutters.

‘See there?’ he whispered. ‘Blue saloon car across the street. There’s someone in it.’

‘Not Sergei’s men again?’ said Sophie, her heart starting to hammer.

‘I’m guessing the SEC or the FBI. Come on. There must be a back exit somewhere around here.’

They went through the small courtyard behind the motel and scrambled over the back wall. A dustbin clattered over as Sophie fell on top of it, which set off a dog barking.

Josh phoned Lana, who told them to get to her hotel as soon as they could. They wandered the streets for ten minutes for a taxi, and only when they had reached Lana’s hotel – South Beach’s art deco jewel, the Raleigh – did Sophie even start to feel safe.

42

The insistent ring of her mobile phone woke her. Peeling open one eye, Ruth squinted at her alarm clock and groaned; it was three thirty in the afternoon. It had been a long time since she had slept this late. True, she had always been a night owl – working through till the early hours, when her brain seemed to function better. Perhaps it was sensory deprivation like a blinkered horse; having the world cloaked in darkness and quiet allowed her to concentrate. But the truth was this time she had just overslept, exhausted from long hours and too much stress.

‘Dammit,’ she hissed, stretching to grab her phone.

‘Hello,’ she croaked, swinging one leg out of bed, then the other, feeling for her slippers with her toes.

‘Ruth, it’s Isaac. We need to talk.’

His voice made her stand up, wide awake.

‘Isaac. It’s Sunday.’ She sounded foggy, but her mind was already up and running, trying to second-guess why her editor-in-chief might be calling on a Sunday afternoon. Was he about to tell her that the bureau was closing down, effective immediately: don’t bother to come in tomorrow because the doors will be bolted and your pink slips will be in the post?

‘So what if it’s Sunday?’ snapped Isaac. ‘I’m working seven days a week trying to keep this paper from sinking to the bottom of the goddamn Potomac, and I expect my employees to do the same.’

‘I
am
working, Isaac,’ said Ruth calmly. ‘You know me, I never switch off. I’m famous for it.’

She went over to the kitchen sink and poured herself a big tumbler of cold water.

‘I’m assuming you’ve seen the
Chronicle
this morning?’

‘Sure, not read it yet,’ she said. ‘Been too busy, had an interview to transcribe. Saw the front page, though, obviously.’

She tiptoed to the front door and snatched up the bundle of papers which had been delivered many hours earlier.

‘What I want to know,’ Isaac was saying, ‘is why we’re not getting scoops like these guys are. Was I not clear last week when I said we needed grade A exclusives? The
Chronicle
’s lead is exactly the sort of item I’m talking about. You should congratulate your boyfriend; maybe we should think about getting him over to the
Trib
, whatdaya think?’

Boyfriend?
She felt a cold, creeping sense of horror. Cradling the phone between her ear and her shoulder, she laid the newspaper flat on her dining table – and immediately felt sick.

Banker stung in honeytrap vice ring
, screamed the headline.
US political hopeful and German minister also ensnared by escort girl conspiracy
.

She skim-read the text, hoping against hope that it was not her story, but it was. The story she had given David about the three escort girls who had brought down powerful men. He’d stolen it, taken it on and, from her quick scan of the feature, managed to find the link between the girls and a ‘Mr Big’ who was taking money from the men’s rivals to set up the stings. Ruth’s palms were damp as she grasped the newspaper, smearing the ink.

‘If only you were bringing in things like this,’ said Isaac, ‘I could definitely justify keeping the London bureau.’

She dug her fingernails into her palm and tried to control her temper. There was no point explaining to Isaac what had happened, how the story had been her idea. How she had seen the link and come up with the theory that it turned out had been true. There was no point because it wasn’t her story any more. It was David’s.

‘I agree,’ she said, struggling to stay composed. ‘It’s exactly the sort of story we need to be generating. In fact, I’ve got something even better brewing for you, Isaac. It’s a good one, a big one. It’s going to make David’s honeytrap story look like a local rag story about a park bench.’

‘Now you’re talking, kiddo,’ said Isaac, a little of the warmth and humour returning to his voice. ‘So when can I expect you to file it?’

‘I’m still working on it,’ she said. ‘But soon, very soon.’

She hung up her phone, double-checked it wasn’t still connected, then took a deep breath and screamed, crumpling up the paper and throwing it across the room.

‘Bastard!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll cut his balls off!’

In her fury, she swept the rest of the papers off the table, sending a coffee mug smashing to the ground. She couldn’t remember when she had felt more angry. She was furious with David, furious with Isaac for being taken in by him, furious with that slut Susie for giving David the excuse to back-stab her. But most of all, she was furious with herself. It was her idea,
hers
– no one else had seen the link between those escort girls, no one else
could
have seen it – but instead of pursuing it and taking the glory for herself, she had got bogged down with this stupid Riverton murder story. And right now, that was looking like a bad decision. A very,
very
bad decision.

She stalked into the bathroom and turned the cold water tap on full, splashing it over her face.

‘Think,’ she said to herself. What was her next move? She couldn’t let David win, not now, not when he’d already humiliated her with another woman –
a younger, prettier woman
, her mind mocked.

Consumed by rage, she went back into the living room and snatched up the phone, determined to ring David, confront him. She forced herself to calm down. What would it achieve? She’d been right first time: it was David’s scoop now. No amount of yelling about feeding him his entrails would change that fact. In fact, Ruth was pretty sure hearing his voice would only make her feel lousier than she did already. And what if Susie answered? That would really cap her week. She was just about to chuck the phone down when she noticed there was a text message from Chuck. She clicked it open. ‘Urgent,’ it read. ‘Call me.’

She dialled Chuck’s home number.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘I got hold of the CCTV footage.’

‘Fantastic!’ she said, her mood lifting, marginally.

‘Not exactly high-definition, is it?’

‘It’s security film, Chuck, not a Spielberg movie.’

‘Look, I know it’s Sunday and everything, but do you want to come round? I’ve got something I think you should see . . .’