Final Venture

13

I hardly slept at all that night. I needed to get out of the apartment, so I went in to work at Revere as soon as was decently possible, and stared at Tetracom papers without really taking in their contents. I more or less ignored Daniel and John. I waited for a quarter past nine, by which time Lisa would be sure to have arrived at the lab. Daniel was out of the room and John was on the phone.

'I'm just nipping out,' I called over to John. 'I'll be back in quarter of an hour.'

John waved as he continued talking.

I put on my jacket, took the lift down to the ground floor, and strolled out on to Federal Street. It was quiet, although the sounds of the 'Big Dig', Boston's heroic attempt to bury the highway that bisected the city, seeped round the giant buildings. I flipped open my cell phone, dialled Boston Peptides' switchboard, and was soon put through.

'Lisa Cook's phone.'

It wasn't her voice.

'Can I speak to her, please?'

'I'll see if she's available. Who's speaking?'

'Simon.'

Normally the response would have been: 'Yeah, sure, here she is.' I wasn't at all surprised when the voice told me Lisa was unavailable.

I waited five minutes, hands in pockets, shifting from foot to foot with impatience. Then I tried again.

'Lisa Cook's telephone.'

A different voice. Good. I put on my attempt at an American accent. 'Oh, hi, can I speak with Lisa please? It's her brother, Eddie.'

'One moment.'

There was a pause, and then Lisa's voice came on the line. 'Eddie! You're up early.'

'It's not Eddie,' I said. 'It's me.'

'Listen, Simon, don't you ever try to pretend-'

'No, Lisa. Listen to me. We were both upset last night when you walked out. We need to talk it through again when we're both calmer.'

There was a moment's silence. I prayed that she wouldn't hang up. Then I heard her sigh. 'Let me transfer you to a different phone.' A click and more silence, until I heard her voice again. 'OK, I can talk now'

'I think we should meet somewhere so we can talk properly'

'There's no need, Simon. I've been thinking about it all night. I've made up my mind.'

'But you can't leave me, Lisa.'

'No, Simon. I can't stay with you. Not when I think you might have killed my father.'

'You said "might". You're not sure then, are you?'

There was a pause at the other end. 'Look, I'm confused, OK? I feel lousy. Really bad. I just want to be away from you for a while.'

'I understand that's how you feel. But I don't understand why. Just think about it from my point of view for a second. I have a right to know why you're doing this. Why don't we meet for a cup of coffee, and you can explain it?'

'I'm not sure I can explain it.'

'You can try. I deserve at least that.'

There was silence on the phone. 'OK. I guess you're right. Can you get here now?'

'Yes,' I said immediately. 'I'll be there right away'

I took a cab.

Despite its name, Boston Peptides was housed in a scruffy looking one-storey building in Cambridge, in the wasteland between MIT and Harvard. On one side was a small engineering company making castings, and on the other was an open patch of land that was temporarily being used as a soccer pitch. Backhoes churned up the plot in front.

Lisa was waiting on the steps. The tired look of misery I had grown accustomed to in the last few days was set firmly on her face..

'Let's walk,' she said, and we made our way towards the soccer pitch. Two teams of kids were playing, one in green and one in red. They weren't bad for eight-year-olds. One day, I thought, the United States is going to field a decent team in the World Cup.

We sat on a wall and watched them for a few moments, both of us nervous of starting a conversation that could, and probably would, end in disaster. The backhoes ground and clanked behind us.

'Well?' said Lisa.

'Why did you leave last night?'

She said nothing for a few moments. 'I need to get away for a bit. Sort myself out.'

'I see.' I forced myself to speak slowly and calmly. 'But why do you have to leave me to do that? Surely you'd be better staying with me? Then I can help you with your problems.'

'Simon, I think you might be the problem.'

'No, Lisa. It's not me. Your father died. You're worried about work. You're tired. You need me to help you.'

Lisa glanced up at me, and then back to the soccer players.

I waited for her to say something. She didn't.

'You shouldn't listen to Eddie. He hates me. He hates himself.'

'Maybe Eddie can see things more clearly than I can.'

I lost the calm I had been trying so hard to maintain. 'Lisa. You know me. I'm your husband. I love you. You know I'm not capable of killing your father.'

Lisa turned to me, her eyes moist. 'Then what was the gun doing there?'

'I don't know,' I said in exasperation.

Lisa looked ahead.

'Be rational about it, Lisa. I know you've been under a lot of pressure recently, but you must get a sense of perspective.'

'Oh, I am being rational,' she said through gritted teeth. 'Very rational. You're right, it's difficult with all that's been going on. But let's look at the evidence here, Simon.' She was talking fast now.

'One, you were the last person to see Dad alive. You were with him at about the time he died. Two, you and he have been getting along badly recently. You had a fight. Three, he was shot. You know how to use a gun. And four,' she looked at me defiantly, 'I found that gun hidden in our apartment.'

'That doesn't mean anything. Why would I kill him anyway?'

'I don't know. You need fifty thousand pounds to fight your sister's lawsuit. We'll have that now.'

'Oh, come on.'

'All right. Maybe you are having an affair with Diane. Maybe Dad found out. Maybe you wanted to keep him quiet. Maybe you wanted to keep him quiet and get your hands on his money.'

'That's absurd. I'm not having an affair with anybody. Can't you trust me?'

'I don't know,' she muttered.

'Anyway, why would I be so stupid as to leave a gun lying around the apartment where the police could find it?'

'I've been thinking about that, too,' said Lisa. 'It wasn't there when the police searched the apartment last week. Perhaps you were just keeping it overnight until you found a better place to hide it.'

'Don't be ridiculous. Someone must have planted it.'

'Like who? The police? The gun was in a Boots plastic bag. Do you think Sergeant Mahoney goes all the way to England to pick up his deodorant?'

I managed to get myself in control again. 'None of that proves anything.'

'It's a hypothesis. And a plausible one,' said Lisa. 'And I will go with it, until you can disprove it.'

'This isn't some scientific experiment, Lisa. It's me you're talking about. Us!'

'I know,' she said. 'But you said I should be rational. I'm trying to be rational about it. With all that's been going on in my head, the blackness I feel about everything, the way I just want to scream and scream and scream, it's all I can do. Be rational. So, let's test the hypothesis. Can you prove you didn't kill Dad?'

'No. But my point is, I shouldn't have to to you. You who know me better than anyone.'

Lisa looked at me, her eyes filling with tears. 'But I'm not sure I do know you, Simon – know who you really are.'

'But we're married, for God's sake!'

'Yes. But I've only known you, what, two years? I don't know anything about who you are, really, where you come from. I've only been once with you to your own country, and that was a disaster. I do know you come from a screwed-up family, but that's no comfort. I know you're clever, I know you can hold a lot inside without talking about it, but perhaps I don't know what really is there inside you.'

'That's ridiculous!'

'No, it's not,' Lisa said quietly. 'Of course the Simon I fell in love with wouldn't have an affair with another woman, or kill anyone. But did that Simon ever really exist?' She wiped her eyes, and then her nose with her sleeve.

I wanted to put my arm round her, but there was no point. I wanted to argue with her, but there seemed little point in that, either. How could I argue that I was just who I seemed to be?

'Come back,' I said simply. 'Please.'

Lisa took a deep breath, and shook her head. 'No, Simon.' She stood up. 'I've got to get back to work.'

And she left me standing there beside the makeshift soccer pitch, watching her slight hunched figure disappear into the Boston Peptides building.

I walked the couple of miles back to the office, through Cambridge, over the Salt and Pepper Bridge, and through the Common. It was a grey cold morning and the wind whipped off the water and threaded its way through the city buildings.

I played over our conversation again and again and again. Although I hadn't been able to understand the pressure Lisa had been under recently, the grief, the misery, the exhaustion, I had seen it in her face, heard it in her words, felt it with her. But to her, I had become part of that black world that seemed to surround and threaten her.

The bells of the Park Street Church chimed twelve o'clock as I plunged through the busy shopping streets of Downtown Crossing towards the office.

I didn't notice the people jostling around me. My anger ebbed, leaving a huge empty feeling of loneliness, of failure. My limbs felt heavy, my face taut. I still couldn't quite believe that Lisa had just walked away from me. But she had. I couldn't bear the thought of her believing that I had killed her father. Her love was the most precious thing in the world to me. The idea of it turning to hatred for me, hurt. It hurt a lot.

Somehow I had screwed up. Even my father had managed to keep hold of my mother for more than six months!

She had wanted to 'test her hypothesis'. Well, I would test her hypothesis for her. I'd prove to her that I was innocent.

Perhaps I should go to Mahoney? It was, after all, his job to find Frank's true killer. No, that was a very bad idea. I was clearly his favourite suspect at the moment, and it would be difficult to persuade him to look elsewhere. And I definitely shouldn't tell him, or anyone else for that matter, about the gun. If Lisa hadn't lost her head and ditched it, then I could have considered taking it to the police in the hope that if my honesty didn't clear my name, forensic tests might. But Lisa's actions just served to implicate me more. No, I couldn't rely on Mahoney to find out who killed Frank.

I would have to do it myself.

'You said you'd only be a quarter of an hour,' John said, as I walked in the door.

'Sorry,' I gave him a quick smile.

'Your voice-mail has been working overtime.'

'Thanks.'

But I ignored the winking light on my phone, and asked myself the vital question.

If I hadn't killed Frank, who had?

Could it have been a burglar as I had suggested to Lisa? Perhaps Frank had surprised him, and been shot? It was a tempting idea. But as I thought it through, I realized it was unlikely. The police hadn't mentioned any signs of a break-in, nor had I seen any. Frank had been shot in the back some way inside the house. It seemed most likely that he had known whoever had shot him, or at least that he had voluntarily let his murderer into the house.

I realized that I didn't know much about Frank's life away from Lisa and Revere. Presumably he had other friends, but I knew nothing about them. Lisa said there hadn't been any girlfriends since he and her mother had got divorced. She liked to believe that that was because her mother was the only woman Frank had truly loved, although he seemed to me to speak about his former wife with nothing more than indifference. Much of his time was spent at Marsh House. What else he did with it, I just didn't know.

I thought about the gun. It must have been planted. But how? I had checked the apartment for signs of a break-in. I wasn't an expert, but there was nothing I could see. The chipped paintwork round the living-room window seemed to my eye to have natural causes. And no one had been in the apartment since the police had searched it apart from Lisa and me.

In theory the police could have planted it. But would the American police really plant evidence on a suspect? Why? I didn't think Mahoney much liked me, but that wasn't much of a reason. Perhaps he wanted to improve his clear-up record? Perhaps a foreign national was an easy target? Anyway, if he had planted the gun, wouldn't he have 'discovered' it in his search of the apartment?

I now realized the Boots bag didn't mean anything. It was undoubtedly mine, in fact I thought it might have held some old school and university photographs, but whoever had been in the closet could have spotted the bag and taken the opportunity to stuff the gun inside it.

Ann and Eddie were on their way to San Francisco when the police had searched the apartment and found nothing. Not that I thought Ann could have killed her ex-husband. She seemed to me to have recovered from their separation quite successfully, and was now happily remarried. At the funeral, she spoke of Frank with a certain fondness rather than with passion.

But Eddie. Eddie was much more likely. He had never forgiven his father for leaving the rest of the family, and had barely spoken to him for years. Despite his professed indifference to money, the prospect of Frank's legacy seemed very important to him, as he had shown so clearly that morning at the lawyer's offices. And he was very eager to blame me for the crime. Eddie was definitely worth considering.

The other two 'family suspects' were Lisa and me. Lisa I just couldn't believe. Which left me.

There were rivalries at Revere. Frank and Art didn't much like each other, vying for position as Gil's right-hand man. The only other conflict that I was aware of at work was once again with me. But Revere was generally a civilized, pleasant place to work. It wasn't the kind of place where people stabbed each other in the back. Or shot each other for that matter.

With a sigh, I drew the same conclusion as Mahoney. I was the most obvious suspect.

I needed to find out more.

The first place to look was Frank's office. I walked down the corridor towards it. The door was locked. Hm.

I sauntered further along the corridor.

'Connie, I'd like to get into Frank's office. I need to see if he has some papers on Net Cop. Do you know who has the key?'

Connie occupied a large desk just outside Gil's office. She was a well-groomed woman in her forties who had been Gil's assistant since before he had set up Revere. She seemed to like me, which was at times very useful.

'I think Gil has it, Simon. Go right in, there's no one with him at the moment.'

I went in. Gil was on the phone. I sat and waited. After five minutes or so he finished.

'What can I do for you, Simon?' Gil smiled at me, his thoughts obviously still on the telephone call.

'I need the key for Frank's office. There are some files on Net Cop in there I need.'

For a moment, Gil looked at me half-suspiciously. Then, as if remembering his decision to trust me, he reached into his desk for a key.

'Here you are. Please return it as soon as you're done with it.'

I took it and unlocked Frank's office. It looked much the same as it had the last time I was there. My eyes were immediately drawn to a photograph of a seventeen-year-old Lisa, looking slightly gawky, but already with the smile that I loved so much. There was a smaller photo of Eddie graduating. Nothing of Lisa's mother. The office was reasonably tidy, but there were papers in his in-box, and on top of the wooden filing cabinets. Yellow Post-Its reminded him of things he would never now do. The office looked as if it were expecting him back at any minute.

I had worked with him closely enough to know my way round his filing system. The first thing I did was to look for his Net Cop file and pull it out. The only papers in it were ones prepared by me. I ignored the bulging files on his other deals and concentrated on his more personal stuff.

He didn't have any secrets. No locked drawers. No coded files. A very full diary, but none of the appointments seemed out of the ordinary. There was an interesting file labelled 'Recruitment'. In it was a sheaf of resumes, mine included. Curious though I was, I just skimmed it. And then there was a file labelled 'Fund IV.

I flipped through analyses of Revere's existing funds' performance, completely dominated by BioOne of course. This was no doubt supposed to impress investors into taking part in the new fund. Then I came across a single sheet of paper.

It was a letter from Gil to Lynette Mauer, dated September 9. The second paragraph grabbed my attention:

As you know, I am planning to reduce my involvement with the day-to-day management of Revere Partners and its investments. While I will continue to provide advice related to investments made by our first three funds, I will take no role in the new fund which Revere intends to raise next year. You know the strong team of partners that I have been fortunate enough to assemble over the last few years, and I am confident that the performance of our fourth fund will be as strong or stronger as those preceding it.

I look forward to seeing you at our Monday morning meeting on October 19, when we can perhaps discuss this further.

The letter was signed Gilbert S. Appleby III.

So Gil was going to retire! With the twenty or thirty million that was his share of the BioOne loot, no doubt. Very interesting. And now that Frank was out of the way, his successor was obvious. Art Altschule.

No wonder Lynette Mauer was worried. She didn't trust Art. She saw BioOne for what it was, a fluke.

Art Altschule running Revere! I shuddered.

I stuffed the letter back in the file and continued my search. I had just turned on Frank's computer and was beginning to figure out how I might be able to get into his files when his office door opened. I looked up guiltily, half-expecting it to be Frank himself. It wasn't. It was Gil.

'What are you doing, Simon?' he asked, his forehead wrinkled. 'You've been in here a long time.'

'I'm looking for a memo Frank wrote when we originally invested in Net Cop,' I said, guiltily. 'I was just checking to see if I could get it off his computer.'

The small brown eyes bored into me through those thick lenses. He said nothing. I sat still, trying to keep a keen-associate look on my face. Inside I squirmed. I'm sure he saw the inside.

'I don't think you should be rooting around in Frank's computer. You've been in here long enough. If you haven't found it yet, you're not going to find it.' He nodded at the Net Cop file lying on Frank's desk. 'Why don't you take what you've got and go?'

I switched off Frank's machine, grabbed the file, and left, feeling very small. I should be much more careful in future. Gil had promised me his trust. It might be very useful in the coming weeks. I would be foolish to throw it away.