Wearing Purple

Chapter 48

When I sat down and thought about the situation rationally, Susie Gantry made no sense at all as a suspect. She had hired Jan in the first place and had asked her to research the profitability of the business.

Unless of course my wife had been a far better accountant than she expected. What if, I asked myself, Susie had simply expected Jan to give the business a clean bill of health then pick up the reins from old Joseph Donn? What if Jan had stumbled on something that was buried really deep, something that she was never meant to find?

What if she had signed her own death warrant by dropping that hint to Susie across our dinner table?

‘No way, Oz!’ I said aloud, as Jan would have. ‘Trust your judgement on this. Susie Gantry is not the sort of person who sends people to break into houses and rig deadly devices. No fucking way!’

‘But someone did,’ I shot back at myself. ‘Even if the accident was just that, a fatal one in a million fault, someone took those papers and put them back in the Gantry files. Somewhere in the Gantry office there’s someone who didn’t want Jan to find whatever was hidden in those records.’

It was as if she was there with me; the other half of my brain, as she had become, slipping in points to the argument. ‘So why did that someone take the chance of putting those papers back into the files, having taken them, and the notes, from our place?’

‘Because if they knew that you were dead, Jan,’ I whispered, ‘there would be no threat. The Gantry Group is a private company, but the records of the business have to be kept for Inland Revenue purposes. There would have been an element of danger in simply throwing those files away. So whatever this deadly secret is, it must be there still, buried deep in the books, where only a clever girl like you could work it out.

‘But now that Mr Joseph Donn and his nephew are back in control of the company accounts, there won’t be any more clever girls looking them over, will there.’

I felt my eyes narrow as the cold anger which had overwhelmed me in Barcelona took hold of me once more.

‘Time to talk to the police, Osbert Blackstone,’ I said, in that voice of someone else’s. ‘Even though you’ll be putting the policeman in question right on the spot.’