Dig Two Graves by James Harper (important books to read .txt) 📗

of them waiting for him when they let him out. It was splashed over the front of all the papers. It was a huge embarrassment for him. And he couldn’t say anything about it. What would he say? My future daughter-in-law’s sister beat me up? She’s a big bad Marine. That would’ve made it even worse.’

‘It still doesn’t sound like something you’d try to kill somebody over.’

‘You don’t know Gerald Bloodwell. Besides, it wasn’t only his pride. His company lost a huge contract that he’d been on the verge of signing because of it. And that had a knock-on effect. Suddenly he was persona non grata. The company almost went under. It cost him millions, anyway. It’s been festering away ever since.’

‘It can’t have helped your relationship with him.’

For a moment she looked as if she might be sick when he said your relationship. Then she recovered.

‘It didn’t. But it wasn’t great to start with. My father was his biggest business rival. The fact that I was marrying his son didn’t go down well.’

He remembered Bella or Leon telling him about it. But he was getting the feeling that the perfectly reasonable and understandable explanation she was giving for the animosity was just a convenient cover story for more personal reasons underneath.

Then he had a moment of all but divine inspiration as if he’d popped into the chapel after all.

‘Did all this happen immediately before your wedding?’

She stared at him as if he had indeed floated down from heaven.

‘How on earth did you know that?’

‘Bloodwell isn’t in any of the wedding photographs. Either he wasn’t there at all or he didn’t want his busted-up face in all the pictures to remind him and the whole family for the rest of his life. Your son found the wedding albums when he was going through your father’s possessions. You need to tell him everything you’ve told me to stop his mind from inventing all kinds of crazy stuff. He thinks there’s a big conspiracy to keep him in the dark.’

She was nodding before he finished speaking.

‘I’d already made up my mind to.’ She checked her watch. ‘In fact, I’m meeting him in half an hour.’

Then she did something that surprised him. She got out her phone. At first, he thought she was simply about to confirm the arrangement. But she didn’t make a call or send a text. Instead she checked incoming text messages. It might have been to see if Merritt had sent a text to confirm or cancel their meeting, him being so busy working for his grandfather Bloodwell. Except he hadn’t heard her phone ping, not since he’d sent her the picture of the fake detective slumped in the toilet stall. She was double-checking to see if his text had arrived.

Seemed Merritt was about to be told more than she’d just told him.

In the meantime, he wasn’t going to let her go without asking what was on his mind.

‘What did Bloodwell do to make Bella attack him?’

She’d been expecting the question. Who wouldn’t, even though she’d said earlier that he didn’t need to know? She saw a very obvious truth in his face. If she didn’t tell him, he’d ask Bella. Best it came from her.

She kicked it off with a caveat.

‘I know it won’t sound like much, but he made some vile remarks. He accused her of being a lesbian, said that’s why she’d gone into the Marine Corps, into a man’s world. He said he’d bet she had bigger balls than my husband had. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. He managed to insult both of them with one nasty remark. He was always so horrible to Vance. Then he changed tack, started saying how she wouldn’t be able to hack it, they’d never let a woman into a combat role, even though he’d just said she was more of a man than his son.’ She paused, her mouth pinched, remembered anger and frustration rising easily to the surface after thirty years. ‘Bella wouldn’t have cared. But he threatened to tell them, said he’d pay some woman to prove it. I don’t know what it’s like now but back then homosexuality wasn’t tolerated in the Marine Corps.’

He saw where the story was going, picked it up.

‘So she showed him how wrong he was about her not being able to make the grade, kicked his ass in a way he wouldn’t forget.’

‘Exactly. And because he’d threatened to ruin her career, get her thrown out, she tried to ruin his. That’s why she arranged for the press to be there when he was let out of the drunk tank.’

He sipped the remains of his stone-cold coffee without noticing, his mind full of the problems that families like to bring down on themselves.

‘What made him accuse her of being a lesbian in the first place?’

She shook her head wearily, not meeting his eyes. He waited. Then made another educated guess. It wasn’t a difficult one.

‘Bloodwell made advances towards her. And she rejected him.’

‘Close enough. And after that it spiraled out of control, almost to the point where nobody could remember how it all started.’

It made sense. It also fit with Bella breaking his fingers. A harsh but effective warning—don’t touch—or a fitting punishment for having already done so.

12

Evan stayed at the hospital while Blair went off for her meeting with Merritt. He went back up to Bella’s room, nodded to the cop, stuck his head in the door. She was asleep. Or pretending to be. They had quite a conversation coming in the near future. He didn’t blame her for wanting to put it off until she was feeling better. He pulled up a chair, sat on the other side of the door from the cop. He soon gave up trying to make conversation. The guy had a real cop’s dismissive attitude towards all things private—private security and private investigators in particular. From the way his nose turned up, Evan was tempted to ask him if he