Michael Robotham - The Wreckage

Rising slowly from the table, unsteady at first, Elizabeth moves to the door. “Thank you for your advice, Mr. Weil, I won’t be needing your services anymore.”

What she wants to say is thank you for the lesson in sophistry and doublespeak. Thank you for riding roughshod over my marriage and my husband’s reputation. Thank you for showing me what I’m up against.

Mr. Weil tries to argue, but Elizabeth stops him.

“Leave now or I’ll tell the police exactly what you’ve asked me to do.”

The overweight lawyer is no longer smiling. He packs his briefcase and departs, moving along the corridor without swinging his arms.

Moments later Campbell Smith takes his place in the interview room and begins asking Elizabeth questions. There is a pattern to them. Politely put, but aimed at picking apart her marriage like a cheap sweater. Her phone calls, her emails, her friendships… They have copies of her bank statements. They want to know about North’s parents in Spain, his friends, properties he might own or places he liked to visit. Did he gamble? Did he have any secret accounts? Where did they holiday?

“Does your husband have a share portfolio?”

“A small one.”

“What about offshore bank accounts?”

“No.”

“Have you ever visited the Middle East?”

She mentions the holiday in Lebanon and Jordan. This triggers another line of questioning.

“What do you think has happened to your husband, Mrs. North?”

“I have no idea.”

“You must have a theory.”

“No.”

A figure is mentioned: fifty-four million pounds. Elizabeth has no idea where it comes from. The TV report had referred to a black hole. Missing money. More numbers. North had been worried about something. He told Bridget Lindop that he’d done something terrible.

Campbell continues to question Elizabeth about the family finances.

“Do you really think my husband would steal?54 million and then bother taking my jewelry? He didn’t pack a suitcase. He didn’t take any clothes.”

“He took his passport,” says Campbell.

“All our passports were taken.”

“Maybe you were all going to run away.”

Elizabeth wants to laugh, but can’t clear the ball of anger that is lodged in her throat.

“You seem to be missing the obvious. I’m pregnant. I can’t fly anywhere.”

Campbell isn’t going to back off.

“You made a statement to police in which you described your husband as acting strangely. You hired a private detective. Perhaps you overheard him on the phone or read his emails…”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Mrs. North. You thought he was scratching some other woman’s itch, yet you never once spied on him or asked him what he was up to or looked in his diary or checked his receipts.”

Elizabeth feels her face flush. Tears close. “I hired a private detective-I thought that would be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“My husband did not steal that money,” she says, wiping her eyes, but she doesn’t know if she says it aloud because the words are being drowned out by a thousand other voices in her head that are asking, What if you’re wrong?

Ruiz can’t find his shoes. A man can’t go to his daughter’s wedding without a decent pair of shoes. He should have looked earlier. He should have polished them. The polish is somewhere under the stairs with dozens of other things he won’t be able to put his hands on when he needs them.

“When did you last wear them?” asks Joe O’Loughlin.

“I can’t remember.”

“Try.”

“A funeral maybe…”

“When?”

“In March.”

Ruiz looks at his full-length profile in the mirror, sucking in his stomach, his chin up, not too shabby, he thinks. He’s been working out for the past few days, curling sixty-pound barbells and doing push-ups. His trousers are too loose and he needs a haircut.

Claire has been on the phone twice already and it’s only ten o’clock. She and the bridesmaids are getting ready at Phillip’s house. The groom has been banished to a hotel in Hampstead so he doesn’t see the bride in her dress.

“It’s supposed to be the biggest day of her life,” the professor reminds him.

Ruiz grunts. “One day she’ll get pregnant, she’ll have a child, then she’ll know a big day.”

“A wedding is still in the top three.”

“None of mine were top three.”

“What about the first?”

“Yeah, well, maybe the first.”

“You’re such a romantic.”

Ruiz hooks a finger inside his collar, trying to make it stretch, feeling as comfortable as a penguin in a microwave.

“Let me tell you about romance in this day and age, Professor. You might appreciate the lesson since your Charlie is going to be dating some time soon. My daughter’s fiance has been putting his Ukrainian Kovbasa into my Claire’s vagina for the past two years-which is a sentence I wish I had never uttered out loud or in my head. Where is the romance in that? Whatever she had to give away, she’s given away… pretty frequently.”

“Kovbasa?”

“It’s a sausage.”

“Oh. You didn’t sleep with Laura before you married?”

“Nope.”

Joe stares at him in disbelief.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason.”

Ruiz gets annoyed. “I mean, I wasn’t a virgin, but Laura had this thing about waiting.”

Joe has found Ruiz’s shoes beneath the laundry sink. He wets a dishcloth and wipes the dust from the leather. Ruiz breaks a lace and curses. He steals one from another pair of shoes and checks the street before they leave. In a house on the far side of the road he sees a figure silhouetted in a window. He wants to believe it is an ordinary person, a good one: a mother putting a baby down for a nap or a shift worker going to bed after a long night.

That’s the thing about trying to protect someone-or failing to-you start to think that danger lurks around every corner and that shadows hold secrets. Holly Knight needed his protection but he let her down. Now he has no way of finding her unless she contacts him.

The wedding is at a church in Primrose Hill, opposite Regent’s Park. Ruiz has to pick up his mother from the retirement home in Streatham and then go to Claire’s house.

Daj could be a problem. Some days her dementia is so profound that she refuses to believe Ruiz is her son. Either that or she mistakes him for Luke, the brother he lost as a child. At other times she remembers every single detail of her past, which is almost as tragic.

Somewhere in her rambling mind is the riddle of Ruiz’s existence. Daj fell pregnant in a concentration camp. She was a teenage gypsy girl used as “recreation” by the SS officers and guards. One of the officers took her out of the camp brothel and had her cleaning his house and warming his bed. Ruiz had never discovered the officer’s name. Daj claimed to have forgotten. Instead she talked about an attempted abortion and how the “bastard child” had “clung to my insides, not wanting to leave, wanting so much to live.”

She was three months pregnant when the war ended and the camps were liberated. She spent another two months looking for her family but they were all gone-her twin brother, her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins… No countries were accepting gypsies as refugees. Daj lied on her application form at the displaced persons’ camp. She took the identity of a young Jewish seamstress who was nineteen, instead of sixteen.

Ruiz was born in a county hospital in Hertfordshire that still had blackout curtains and tape across the windows. They bulldozed it in the seventies-did what the Luftwaffe couldn’t do. Progress marches in jackboots.