Martin came with me to the hospital but I didn’t want him to be there. Donna was alive but my relationship with her husband felt dead.
He waited with me in A&E. I was a priority case, apparently, speeded through on a nod from the police, but still it took two hours to be seen and treated. I was given a chest X-ray and some paracetamol for my headache.
‘Let’s get back to London,’ said Martin, settling an arm across my shoulder. ‘Finally we can go back to the loft.’
‘I think I should go home,’ I said carefully.
‘We’ve had some resolution tonight, Fran. But it doesn’t change the fact that Pete Carroll is dangerous. For a minute I thought he might have had something to do with Donna’s disappearance. I thought he might be so in love with you, he was willing to kill Donna and frame me to get me out of the picture.’
‘If you ever get bored of finance, you should consider a career in writing fiction,’ I smiled, wanting to shake him off.
He looked at me and put both hands on my shoulders. ‘Move into the loft. Maybe not now, this week, this month. Perhaps we should wait until all this is over and we can get on with our lives and start afresh. But I can’t wait to live with you.’
I couldn’t deny that he was beautiful. That his green eyes were the most extraordinary colour, that he had the most muscular and tanned forearms that were the very definition of manliness. Living in a multimillion-pound warehouse conversion with Martin Joy, having incredible sex on tap, and a lifestyle that was straight out of a movie would be a dream for thousands of women. But not me, not any more.
His eyes narrowed, as if he’d felt my rejection.
‘You don’t believe any of those rumours, do you? That I hit Donna.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Fran, it’s bullshit. Donna set me up. The whole thing was lies.’
‘I believe that,’ I said quietly, although I still couldn’t shake the thought of his bullying in the workplace. He had never denied that.
I pulled away and put my hand on his shirt.
‘I need the bathroom. Then I want to find a coffee. Do you want one?’
‘Sure,’ he said distractedly. ‘I’ll wait here.’
I walked down the corridor until I came to the coloured, annotated map on one of the walls, directing people towards cardiology, outpatients and the eye clinic; every department, every ward was listed as I looked to see where I was going.
I’d heard Inspector Doyle on the phone, heard where he had to go to see Sophie Cole, and I followed the map to get there.
At some point, I affected a limp – I always said I had potential as an undercover spy – and no one stopped me as I made my way towards the private room where Sophie was recovering.
I didn’t need to see two plain-clothes policemen talking at the door to know which room Sophie Cole was in. I hung back and watched as one cop glanced at his watch and disappeared down the corridor to speak to a nurse. When the second cop took a call, walking towards the window to get a better signal, I knew it was my chance.
She looked like a ghost lying on the thin bed.
Her back and both legs had been broken. She was attached to a drip. One arm was in a cast, both legs were cased in pins and rods, but Martin had already told me that the doctors were not sure if she would ever walk again.
Her bed was slightly raised so that she could look around the room. She moved her neck slowly. I wondered if it hurt her.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘I wanted to see you.’
She looked as if she was about to point out that I shouldn’t be here, but as if it was too exhausting to bring it up, she looked away.
‘Why did you do it, Sophie?’
I waited for a reply but she remained silent.
‘You have to tell me. You owe me that. You and Alex have everything. Was it not enough?’
‘Alex had nothing to do with this.’ It was said with an almost undetectable note of regret.
‘Then why?’ I whispered, taking a step closer to the bed.
The silence almost swallowed the room.
‘The value of the Gassler Partnership is its algorithmic model,’ she said finally, a dribble of saliva sliding down her chin. ‘All their technology was built around a system I created. It was my idea.’
‘You weren’t a computer scientist.’
‘No. But I pulled all the strings. I found them the best quants, the best computer and data scientists, I set it up. But my name wasn’t above the door or on the letterhead. There were no shares in my name, no credit from the industry. No credit from Martin or Alex. They’d pushed me out.’
I watched her eyes trail out of the smoked-glass window as if she were collecting her thoughts, no doubt wondering how she would do things differently if she had her time all over again.
‘Have you any idea what it’s like being married to men like Martin and Alex?’ she said, looking me in the eye now. ‘Men obsessed with money and status, men consumed with ego and their own sense of self-importance. Right now, you’re only seeing the good stuff,’ she said, trying to smile like a benevolent old sage. Instead her expression looked pained and cracked.
‘You’re impressed with their confidence, their easy charm, the baubles they bring you, the clothes and the handbags. They use those things to reel you in. Then they trap you and control you.’
I knew she was struggling to breathe but I was desperate to hear it all.
‘You make excuses for them for a long time, and then you can’t stand it any more, but they bring in the clever lawyers – people like yourself – to screw you.’
‘So this was about money,’ I said slowly. ‘Donna would have got an eight-figure settlement. Was it not enough? It would have been more money than she could have spent in a lifetime.’
‘It was easy to persuade Donna it wasn’t enough,’ she said, with a whisper of triumph.
Her voice was getting weaker. I moved as close to the bed as I could. Close enough to see her bloodshot eyes and hear her shallow breaths.
‘Alex was having an affair. Not with Donna. With some bimbo at work. He’s so stupid, he had no idea that I knew,’ she said, not looking me in the eye.
‘I could see how it was all going to pan out,’ she continued. ‘The algorithm was being constantly upgraded by the team I had put in place. It was getting better all the time. But I knew that the more profitable and valuable the business became, the more I would get slowly squeezed out of my marriage, replaced by some tart who contributed nothing but flattery and sex. So I decided to do something about it.’
She gazed out of the window as if she were remembering how it all happened.
‘Donna had wanted to leave Martin for years. She never really loved him but she loved the lifestyle, which was why she stayed with him for so long. I never thought Martin would have the balls to file for divorce but when he said their marriage was over after Donna’s New York trip, I knew it was time to put the wheels in motion. I told Donna to file for divorce first. Found her a great divorce lawyer. ‘The Piranha’. But I knew Martin would find a great lawyer too. I knew he wouldn’t give up half of everything he’d worked for without a fight. And when it started to look like Donna might not get 50 per cent, I reminded her how unjust that was. I told her there was another way.’
She was fading fast, too weak to talk. I helped her fill in the gaps, speaking out loud as I tried to work out her plan.
‘So you staged her disappearance. You knew that Martin would be the only suspect, you knew how to take advantage of the morality clause in the partnership agreement.’
‘Donna did her bit, composed some diary entries about Martin’s nasty temper and started buttering her sister up. Told her a few stories about domestic violence – that wasn’t difficult to believe. She went to her sister’s house – took her passport. Poor cow never went anywhere, obviously never noticed it had gone.’
Sophie paused to catch another breath. ‘The week of the FDR she invited Martin to her house. He still couldn’t resist her. They had sex. She asked him to leave.’
‘And you picked her up.’
‘I’d arranged to go out with Alex that night. I had to sort his alibi out, just in case. We got home. I put a Zopiclone in his drink, and picked a fight with the intention of sleeping in the guest room. When Alex was out cold, I collected Donna and drove out of London. I’d arranged for someone to get her on a ferry to France, under the radar. Jemma’s passport was too risky to use at this point. By the next morning she was in France. She was to stay just outside Paris until I could get her somewhere further out. She wanted to go to Bali. She liked it there. It wasn’t hard to sell her the idea of a couple of years in the sun.’
‘And then what?’ I said, not believing the audaciousness of the two women.
‘Once Alex got full control of the company, the plan was to help him build it. Gassler delivers such a great return, people would soon forget about Martin Joy and his involvement in the company. And I’ve got investors lining up. Befriending rich wives is a powerful strategy,’ she said.
‘Then I was going to divorce him. Unlike Donna, my claim to a 50 per cent split was much stronger.’
‘What was in this for Donna?’
‘Do the maths. Thirty per cent of Martin’s assets or split a much bigger pie with me. Donna was greedy. She was easy to persuade.’
‘Was it all worth it?’ I said, so quietly I wasn’t sure that she heard me.
‘It wasn’t about the money. It was about the principle,’ she hissed as if she had found energy from some deep well of fury.
‘You cared so much about that principle, you were prepared to kill me?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to pan out like that.’
She met my gaze and at that moment, I believed her.
‘I just wanted Martin out of the company,’ she said slowly, deliberately. ‘I wanted him disgraced, and gone. We just needed enough suspicion to force him out. That’s all. That’s why Donna left the house as she did. She didn’t ransack it, or broadcast violent struggle. We were subtle, suggestive.’
‘What about the blood in the bed?’
‘Simple. A finger-prick blood test. Surprising what you can get from fleshy fingertips. As I said, we didn’t want The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just a hint of trouble.’
Sophie gave a weak sniff of irritation.
‘But then Alex told me you’d followed Martin that night. Followed him back to Donna’s like some lovesick puppy. You were Martin’s alibi and so you spoiled everything, by being as pathetic as the other women who hanker after men like Martin Joy.’
All I could do was shake my head. She was pale, broken in her bed. It took a few seconds before she continued her story.
‘But I’d started something, Francine. So I had to finish it. I suggested that Martin come and stay with us after his arrest. I wanted to keep an eye on him. I had a heart-to-heart with him one evening and asked about his relationship with you. He told me he loved you but was worried you were mentally fragile. He didn’t need to tell me that, though. I’d already seen the razor scars.’
‘You thought I’d be easy to get rid of. The unstable lover who’d already tried to kill herself.’
‘Alex said you rang him last night. Said you were paranoid. Delusional. But he also said you’d found Donna’s necklace that I’d planted at Dorsea. That was meant for the police. I couldn’t believe they didn’t find it. Sloppy.’
‘So I was too troublesome to have around.’
‘Donna was the same,’ she muttered.
I noticed that she’d said it again. Donna was.
‘Why do you keep referring to Donna in the past tense, Sophie?’
‘Past tense?’
‘I noticed it when we met at the Gassler office.’
‘Does it matter?’
I felt the cold prickle of goosepimples as I began to understand.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she? You’ve told the police that she’s in France. But she’s not, is she?’
Sophie didn’t reply.
‘Donna is dead, isn’t she, Sophie?’ I said, taking another step towards the bed. ‘She could have just come home at any time when you were worried that Martin had an alibi. But she didn’t. Because she couldn’t.’
‘She was as stupid as you are,’ Sophie whispered. ‘A reckless coward. I didn’t trust her to stick to the plan. I knew she would have slipped up, bought a phone, left footprints on social media. Or had a wobble and decided she just couldn’t go through with it.’
‘You didn’t want to split the money with her, did you?’
I heard the door open behind me. I turned and saw Doyle holding a coffee cup, looking at me with disappointment but not complete surprise.
‘You should leave,’ he said firmly. I knew better than to argue.
‘I didn’t want to hurt you, but you got in the way,’ said Sophie and I walked out of the room and didn’t look back.