Platinum by Jo Rees

Author:Jo Rees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

In Lechley Hall the rain hammered on the lead-pane kitchen windows. Emma slugged back the whisky shot and slammed the glass down on the table. Above the Aga, on a hinge on the wall, the small television was tuned into the news and Emma watched as the perfunctory report of Julian’s death was replaced by showbiz news and a sunny report about Todd Lands kissing a pretty girl at the Cannes Film Festival. Emma couldn’t bear it. She pointed the zapper at the small TV and put her head in her hands.

How could the newsreader do that? Move from something so serious to something so flippant and inconsequential?

Didn’t they realize that Julian’s death meant everything?

‘I don’t know how they got hold of the story,’ Susie said to Emma apologetically.

Emma rubbed her face. Of course the news channels were going to pick the story up. The table was strewn with the day’s papers, all detailing Julian’s suicide and the financial disaster he’d left in his wake. She couldn’t help resent the gloating tone that some of the papers had taken, delighting in the downfall of many of Julian’s investors.

‘Those bastards,’ Emma said, wiping her eyes, which seemed to leak continual tears. ‘Can’t they leave anyone alone?’

‘There’s a Lady Whiteley for you,’ Pim said, coming into the kitchen. ‘I left the phone on the bureau in the hall.’

Since they’d heard the news of Julian’s death, five days ago, Pim and Susie had been amazing, but Emma could tell from the strain on her brother’s face that he too was reeling from the financial consequences of the platinum mine being a hoax.

Because that’s what it had been: a hoax.

The worst part was that deep down, on a very subconscious level, Emma realized that she’d known. She’d known from the moment she’d first seen Dimitry Sergeyokov’s evil face. Yet she’d allowed Julian to go ahead with it. She’d ignored her intuition and looked the other way. And now he was dead.

Poor Julian had arrived in Russia to find panicked engineers at the mine site telling him that the mine he’d purchased was full of sand. The geologist’s report that Sergeyokov had given him was totally fraudulent.

The next discovery was even worse. Sergeyokov had been offloading his own shareholding secretly and steadily at the top of the market. When Julian tried to contact him, he discovered that Sergeyokov had vanished into thin air.

The shambles that had followed had been inevitable. When word got out about the mine, the shares went into freefall. Within twenty-four hours of Julian’s arrival at the site, the shares were as worthless as the mine itself.

In addition came the catastrophic news that most of the money that was supposed to have been transferred from Platinum Reach in the BVIs to the bank in Norilsk had never arrived.

Julian hadn’t been able to bear it – or so Emma assumed because of what he’d done next.

He’d jumped. After midnight. From the twentieth floor of his hotel. A kitchen porter had found his bloodied body frozen in the gutter the next day.

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