Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“Lucy?”

“Lucy Brighton, Adam’s—”

“I know who she is. What’d she want?”

“She said she knows you have it. That she wants it back.”

“It?”

“She says she doesn’t want any trouble if you return it.”

“That private detective,” Duncomb said. “He must have told her he suspects I’ve got the discs. What did you tell her?”

“I told her you weren’t here. What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. I’ll try to sort her out later. Set up a private meeting, show her the discs, destroy them in front of her, maybe. I don’t know. I can’t deal with this now.”

He ended the call.

The doorbell rang.

“Turn that off,” Duncomb said to Blackmore. “Put those discs away.” Once there were no longer naked bodies on the television, the Thackeray security chief opened the door.

“Well, whaddya know, it’s Detective Duckworth. Won’t you come on in?”

As Duckworth stepped into the living room, Blackmore was gathering together the discs and putting them into a cabinet under the television. He approached and extended a hand. “Hello. I–I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Peter Blackmore.”

Blackmore looked nervously at Duncomb, as though seeking permission to say anything more. Duncomb stepped in. “The detective here’s been out to the campus a couple of times.” He grinned. “Thinks we don’t know how to do our job.”

Blackmore said, “I don’t work with Clive. I’m a professor.” A pause, then, “English literature.”

“So it’s Professor Blackmore?” Duckworth asked.

“Yes.” He looked at the security chief. “We should tell him.”

“Peter, please.”

“About Georgina’s phone. About that man who answered. He—”

“Peter,” Clive Duncomb said, struggling to remain patient, “let’s see why the detective has decided to drop by.”

Duckworth said, “Professor, I understand you were talking to someone else from the Promise Falls police today.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Detective Carlson had interviewed Mr. Duncomb here, and you followed him out afterwards. About your wife. That she was missing.”

“I didn’t file an official report,” the professor said, glancing at Duncomb. “I just had some basic questions for him.”

“Did your wife finally turn up?”

Blackmore swallowed. “No, not yet. But... the last time I tried to call her—”

Duckworth reached into the plastic shopping bag and took out the purse. “Do you recognize this, Professor?”

“That... that looks like Georgina’s.”

“It has her wallet and ID in it as well,” Duckworth said. “And her cell phone.”

“Dear God, where did you find that?”

“It was in Adam Chalmers’s Jaguar. The one that was crushed at the drive-in last night.”

“Why would my wife leave her purse in Adam’s car?” he asked.

Duncomb said, “Oh shit.”

“I don’t understand,” Blackmore persisted.

“It wasn’t Miriam in the car,” Duncomb said to his friend. “It was Georgina.”

Blackmore started to go weak in the knees. The detective put his hand on the professor’s elbow and led him over to one side of the room. “I’m very sorry, Professor, but I think Mr. Duncomb is right.”

Duckworth guided him to the couch, where the man collapsed. “Oh, Jesus, no. Oh dear God. I thought — I thought she was just mad at me. That she’d gone off for a few days. Georgina was very high-strung. Clive thought she was angry with me.”

“Angry why?” Duckworth said.

“Just some disagreements, that’s all.”

“Professor, I’ll need you to make an official identification of the body. We already know it’s not Miriam. She contacted her brother a short while ago. She was out of town. She’s alive.”

“Jesus,” Duncomb said.

“I have a picture,” Duckworth said gently. “On my phone. It shows three tiny moles on the lower abdomen, making a kind of triangle.”

Blackmore began to moan.

“May I show it to you?”

Blackmore nodded. Duckworth got out his phone, opened the photos app, held it in front of the professor.

“Oh, God, yes, that’s her.”

Duncomb’s phone rang. As he looked to see who it was, both men turned their heads.

Duncomb was staring at the word Miriam on the screen. “It’s my wife,” he told them. “I’ll be right back.”

He slipped out the front door, put the phone to his ear, and said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Adam is dead,” Miriam said.

“I just found out you weren’t with him. You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have let anyone know it wasn’t you?”

“I didn’t know! I get home. I find some man in my house poking around. He tells me my husband got fucking crushed to death!”

“Who told you? The police?”

“Weaver. A private detective.”

“Him,” Duncomb said.

“Lucy hired him! Why does she have some private eye searching my house?”

“Miriam, listen to me. Everyone thought you were dead. I thought you were dead. You and Adam.”

“The son of a bitch. I think he was with Georgina. They thought Georgina was me.”

“It just got confirmed. I’m at Peter’s. The police are here. He just found out. He’s devastated.” He paused. “A little more so than you are.”

“I’ll grieve in my own way, on my own time, Clive. I’ve got too much else to think about right now, like who was in my house this morning when Lucy came over here.”

“Weaver told you.”

“Yeah. Was it you? Was it you who broke into the house? And got into the room downstairs? Someone took the discs. Please, God, tell me it was you.”

“It was me,” Duncomb said.

“Oh, thank God!”

“Soon as I realized Adam — and you, I thought — had been killed at the drive-in, I knew I had to get in there and get those discs. Adam had given me a key long ago, and the code, when you guys took that trip to Switzerland and wanted me to check in on the place. I knew that sooner or later, Lucy, or someone else going through the house, would discover that room and find the discs. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I guess, given the circumstances, it was a smart thing to do.”

“I called Peter right away, told him we had a problem. He’d been sitting by the phone, waiting for Georgina to call. God, what a turn of events. I didn’t even know she and Adam were seeing each other outside of... you know.”

“The sex?” Miriam said.

“Yeah, outside of the sex. I’d been worried about Georgina. She’s been acting funny lately, having second thoughts. I even thought at one point that she’d gotten in and taken the discs.”

“I think what was going on,” Miriam said, “was that she wanted Adam to herself and didn’t want the rest of us to know.”

“Maybe. Maybe that was it.”

“What have you done with the discs?” Miriam asked. “Tell me you’ve destroyed them.”

“Not yet. Peter and I have been watching them.”

“I don’t believe you two. You think Adam and I are dead and you’re sitting around getting off on what we did together?”

“No!” Duncomb said. “Listen to me. I needed to go through them, make sure we had them all.”

Miriam went quiet.

“You there?”

“I’m here,” she said.

“There’s at least one missing.”

“What are you saying?”

“One of the sessions where we brought in those other girls, put the roofies in their wine. Lorraine, and—”

“I remember. Just get to it.”

“I can’t find the one where we had the Fisher girl. The one who was killed in the park and—”

“Mr. Duncomb!”

Clive Duncomb spun around. Barry Duckworth was standing on the front step of Blackmore’s house.