Page 54 of The Soulmate

‘That was a late one,’ I said when Max joined me later. I was sitting up under the covers with a novel in my lap. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m not sure you want to know,’ he said, as he got undressed.

I raised my eyebrows to indicate that I did.

‘All right.’ He finished unbuttoning his shirt and sat on the bed. ‘You know the streaming service we acquired a few months back?’

‘Of course.’

‘It was very expensive. Getting the finance was tricky. For a while we thought it wasn’t going to fly.’

‘I remember.’

‘Gabe Gerard managed to pull it off, though. At the eleventh hour he found an investor who came forward with fifty million dollars.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, remembering how relieved Max had been. ‘It was a huge coup.’

Max sighed. ‘Yes, well . . . It turns out the investor wasn’t exactly the saviour we were looking for.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a group called A.S. Holdings.’

‘And?’ I prompted, but Max didn’t continue. ‘So, what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is’ – Max hung his head – ‘A.S. stands for Arthur Spriggs.’

51

AMANDA

AFTER

Max has a leather satchel over his shoulder and is walking with purpose. To the Gerards’ house, I assume, but then he takes the steps down to the beach and heads to the rock groyne that sticks straight out to sea, like a pier.

He removes his shoes. It’s a romantic sight, Max walking barefoot on the rocks. In another life, I would have photographed it. The beach is quiet, apart from a few dog walkers several hundred metres away. When he reaches the end of the groyne, he opens his satchel and removes the secret laptop.

Suddenly I understand what he’s doing. All his secrets are on that computer: falsified paperwork, documents linking him to Arthur Spriggs. It needs to be destroyed.

He lifts the laptop and brings it down hard against the rocks. It’s shocking how quickly it falls to pieces. No one on the beach pays him the slightest attention as he bashes it again and again, his face contorting with the effort. I imagine it feels cathartic.

Max had another call from the cops this morning, this time to ask if Gabriel Gerard was a former employee of his. Max replied that he had thousands of employees; he couldn’t possibly be expected to remember every single one. That was interesting. It made me wonder what kind of game he was playing.

Still, the cops are smarter than either Max or I gave them credit for. They didn’t simply accept that my death was a suicide, as I presumed they would – they were doing their due diligence. They’d already been keeping an eye on Max and his business dealings, but my death gave them a reason to poke into his affairs. Now, while supposedly investigating my death, they’d stumbled across another crime.

When he’s finished, Max tosses the remnants of the laptop into the water and watches them sink to the bottom. Now the computer is gone, Max is already looking more relaxed. He doesn’t know that the evidence still exists – at least, he doesn’t know for sure. But I suspect he has an inkling, so that final hiding place will be the next thing he looks for.

My USB.

52

PIPPA

NOW

It’s mid-afternoon when Gabe arrives home with the girls in tow, and I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop, catching up on some emails.

Mum left half an hour earlier, having made enough soup to feed us for a week. After my phone call with Gabe, our conversation had moved on to regular topics – the girls’ birthdays, Kat and Mei’s baby, Dad’s high cholesterol – but something about it felt forced. I was glad when she finally went home.