“Yes, well. Your personal problems are none of my business. But in answer to your question, your wife instructed me by telephone. We haven’t met.”
“Did she say where she was calling from?” asked Jeff.
“No.”
“Well, did she leave a number, at least?”
“She did not. I have an e-mail address. She said that would be the best way to contact her.” On the back of another card, the agent scribbled something down. “Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Stevens, I really must get on.”
Jeff looked at the card. His heart plunged for a second time. It was a Hotmail address, generic and untraceable.
“If she contacts you again, Miss Flint, please ask her to get in touch with me. It’s really very important.”
The real estate agent gave Jeff a look that clearly translated as Not to me it isn’t.
Jeff went back to Gunther’s.
“At least you know she’s alive and well.” Gunther tried to get Jeff to look on the bright side at dinner.
“Alive and well and selling our house,” said Jeff. “She’s dismantling our life together, Gunther. Without even talking to me. That’s not fair. That’s not the Tracy I know.”
“I suspect she’s still very hurt.”
“So am I!”
It pained Gunther to see Jeff fighting back tears.
“I have to find her,” he said eventually. “I have to. There must be something I’ve missed.”
REBECCA MORTIMER WAS GETTING ready for bed when the doorbell to her apartment rang.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.” Jeff Stevens’s gruff, gravelly voice on the other side of the door made her heart skip a beat. “Sorry to come by so late. It’s important.”
Rebecca opened the door.
“Jeff! What a lovely surprise.”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course.”
He followed her into a living room littered with half-drunk cups of coffee and books on Celtic manuscripts. Rebecca’s hair was wet from the shower and the nightshirt she was wearing clung in places to her still-damp skin. Jeff tried not to notice the way it rode up when she sat down on the sofa, exposing the smooth, supple skin of her upper thighs.
“The disk you gave me,” said Jeff. “The footage of Tracy with McBride. Where did you get it?”
For a moment Rebecca looked nonplussed. Then she said, “Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
She hesitated. “I can’t tell you, I’m afraid.”
“Why not?”
“I’d be betraying a friend. It’s complicated but . . . you’ll just have to trust me.”
Now it was Jeff’s turn to hesitate. “Do you have another copy?”
Rebecca looked surprised. “Yes. Why?”
“I destroyed the original you gave me. I was angry and I wasn’t thinking straight. But I’d like to look at it again. I’m hoping there might be some clue in there, something I missed the first time that might help me find Tracy. Can I have it?”
Rebecca pouted. “All right.” She’d hoped, assumed, that Jeff had come here tonight to see her. Doing her best to mask her disappointment, she walked over to her desk drawer. Pulling out a disk, she handed it to him.
“She doesn’t love you, you know.”
Jeff winced.
“Not like I do.”
He looked at Rebecca, genuinely surprised.
“You don’t love me. You barely even know me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes it is. Believe me. Besides, I’m far too old for you.”
“Says who?” Rebecca coiled herself around him like a cobra, kissing him with a passion that caught Jeff completely off guard. She was a gorgeous girl, but he wasn’t ready for this. Gently but firmly, he pushed her away.
“I’m married,” he said. “What happened between us the other day—”
“Almost happened,” Rebecca corrected him.
“Almost happened,” Jeff agreed. “Well, it shouldn’t have. I was hurt and angry, and you’re a beautiful girl. But I love my wife.”
“Your wife’s a whore!” Rebecca’s sweet, innocent features twisted suddenly into an ugly mask of jealousy and rage. Jeff stepped away from her, shocked. He had never seen this side of her before.
A horrible thought struck him. As if someone had cut the cable of an elevator he was taking, he felt his stomach lurch and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
“How did you get the footage?” he asked again. “Tell me!”
“I won’t!” snapped Rebecca. “Can’t you see you’re missing the point here? Tracy’s been screwing around behind your back. That’s the headline. Who cares how I caught her. The point is I did. I did it because I care about you, Jeff. I love you!”
But Jeff was already gone, the disk clutched tightly in his hand.
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK THE next morning, Jeff sat in Victor Litchenko’s basement office in Pimlico, staring at a screen.
Victor was an old friend and one of the top audiovisual experts in the London underworld. A master at doctoring footage, both images and sound, Victor Litchenko described himself as a “digital artist.” Few who’d worked with him disagreed.
“It’s actually not a bad piece of work,” the Russian said at last, sipping at the double espresso Jeff had brought him. “The most common mistake amateurs make is to go for something too complex. But here she simply doctored the time line and changed the lighting. Very easy. Very effective.”
“So it is Tracy?”
“It is Tracy. The footage itself is genuine, nothing’s been superimposed or patched together. All she did was to change the time clock in the bottom right-hand corner. You think this was shot at two A.M. because there’s a set of numbers there telling you so. If you strip those out, like so”—he tapped a few keys—“and remove the superimposed shadowing she used like . . . so . . .” Some more tapping. “Voilà! Now, what do you see?”
Jeff frowned. “I see the same exact thing but in the daytime. There’s Tracy, coming out of the hotel. And there’s her lover.”
“Ah, ah, ah.” Victor interrupted him. “Look again. What makes you think that’s her lover?”
“Well, they’re . . . She kisses him. Right there,” said Jeff.
“On the cheek,” said Victor. “How many women do you kiss on the cheek every day? And then what happens?” He fast-forwarded the footage in slow motion. “They embrace. A friendly hug. They part ways. Shall I tell you what that looks like to me?”
“What?” Jeff’s mouth felt dry.
“It looks like two friends having lunch.”
Jeff watched the footage again, slowly.
“It’s the oldest trick in the book, and one of the best,” said Victor. “I’ve used it in countless divorce cases. A man and a woman coming out of a hotel at two A.M. and embracing, after the woman’s told her husband she’s spending the night three hundred miles away? That’s an affair. But edit the circumstances just a little, and what have you got?”
Jeff’s voice was a whisper. “Nothing.”
Victor Litchenko nodded. “Exactly. Nothing at all.”
THE DESK CLERK AT the British Museum smiled warmly.
“Mr. Stevens! Welcome back.”
Jeff hurried past her up to his office and pulled open the door.
His desk had been dusted but otherwise was exactly as he’d left it the day he stormed out. The day he last saw Tracy.
Rebecca’s desk was empty.
All her things were gone.
IT TOOK HIM TWENTY minutes to reach Rebecca’s building. Ignoring the bell to her flat—no warnings, not this time—Jeff pulled a hairpin out of his jacket pocket and expertly picked the lock.
Once inside, he slipped upstairs, ready to break into the apartment itself and confront Rebecca. The bitch had deliberately deceived him, sabotaging his marriage and playing him for a fool. When he thought about how close he’d come to sleeping with her, he felt physically sick. But that was all in the past now. Now Jeff knew the truth. Now he was going to make her pay. He was going to find Tracy, and force Rebecca to tell her the whole truth. Tracy would still be angry, of course. She had every right to be. But when she saw how desperately sad and sorry he was for ever doubting her, when she realized what a Machiavellian, twisted young woman Rebecca Mortimer really was . . .
Jeff stopped outside Rebecca’s flat. The door was wide open.
He stepped inside. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, clothes and books and trash strewn everywhere.
An elderly Indian man looked surprised to see him.
“If you’re looking for the young lady, she’s gone, sir. Took off last night and told the security guard she won’t be back.” He shook his head bitterly. “No scruples, these young people. She still owed me three months’ rent.”
CHAPTER 5
SHE OPENED THE BRIEFCASE and looked at the money.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand?”
“Of course. As agreed. Feel free to count it.”
“Oh, I will. Later. Not that I think you’d cheat me.”
“I should hope not.”
“But people do make mistakes.”