Money Never Sleeps by Whitelaw Stella

Author:Whitelaw, Stella [Stella Whitelaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719811197
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2013-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Wednesday Afternoon

The police were still searching the garden and the lake, an inch at a time, everything bagged and labelled. The crime scene had been sealed off and freeze-frozen. Now and again there was a glimpse of white overalls. They were looking for strands of hair, flakes of skin, fibres. The lake had even been dredged. It gave up a quantity of empty bottles, plastic bags and rotting debris, even a dead bird. It also gave up Melody’s handbag. The sodden contents were being examined by forensic.

Fancy nodded to the white spacemen at they combed the gardens. She didn’t ask them if they had found anything. They would think she was going to put them in a book. People were always suspicious of writers, their eyes narrowing. They inevitably asked: ‘Are you going to put me in a book?’

No, thank you, she wasn’t. She had an unruly crowd of characters romping about in her head, waiting to be given life, stampeding for attention every time she started on a new book. ‘Me next!’ they shouted, pushing each other out of the way.

She let herself into her room, checking for intruders and anything weird. The flowers had gone. She examined the coffee sachets and milk cartons for pin-pricked holes and decided that the Nescafé was uncontaminated. She refused to make a nest of her own fears. Both fruits got a hot water wash before she ate them. She munched the chunk of cheese with relish.

As she sat at the desk, eating and drinking, she drew a sheet of A4 paper forward and started to write down all the possible connections with the Marchant twins. As she worked out the dates, she realized that it was almost impossible to find a connection. It happened before she was even born. The trial, the disappearance, the subsequent investigations. The case had rarely been written about in the last twenty years. Only her magazine had dredged up the mystery.

She opened the lid of her laptop and went onto Google. The Missing Cover Girl case was on Wikipedia and had several other empty sites. One site covered the trial of Rupert Harlow. She made a note of all the names mentioned in court, the judge, the barristers. The dry mechanical details. None of them rang a bell, not even the merest tinkle.

Then something caught her eye. The Marchant money was mentioned. ‘Money never sleeps,’ Jed had said. Wasn’t there a film, with that title? She hadn’t been to see it. Wall Street was of no interest to her. She clicked on the link.

The twins’ father, Eddie Marchant, had owned a family brewery in the Midlands, which he sold to a big northern conglomerate for a tidy fortune. The money was left equally to both girls in Eddie’s will, on condition that when one daughter died, her share of the brewery money should go, without question or qualification, even if she had married, to the remaining daughter.

This clause caused a great deal of trouble. Thelma could not be declared dead for seven years because her body was never found.

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