‘Yes, all the time.’
‘I understand he was a confident sailor,’ the man says.
‘Oh yes. Overconfident, if anything.’
‘He didn’t wear a life jacket, I understand.’
‘No, he never did. The fool. It would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes. Probably.’
If Greg had been wearing a life jacket, Min thinks, he wouldn’t have drowned; he would have stayed above the waves, highly visible, for a long time. And it would have been almost impossible for Ted and Jill not to rescue him, if that’s what they’d wanted. But they knew he never wore a life jacket; they’d sailed with him often enough before. She keeps this to herself.
‘Can you tell me about the relationship between Greg and his brother, Ted?’
She looks up at him, alert. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’m investigating what happened. I need to make sure that there was no… foul play.’ He looks back at her and the two of them lock eyes for a long moment.
‘Do you suspect foul play?’ she asks, with a tremor in her voice.
‘I want to know what happened,’ he replies. ‘Ted Westcott and his wife, Jill, were on the boat. They survived. And Ted will inherit, I understand.’ He pauses, waits for her to speak.
She takes a breath and looks at him, considering what to say. She wants to know what happened on that boat too. She wishes she’d been there, to see it with her own eyes, because she has doubts. She remembers the last time she saw Ted. It was in his office, when he’d lost her all that money. His eyes were wild. She’s pretty sure it wasn’t her losses he was concerned about– it was his. ‘I’m pretty sure Ted hated Greg,’ she says at last. ‘They hated each other, if you must know.’
‘Did Ted know that he was his brother’s heir?’
‘Probably. Greg made a point of tellingme, anyway. After the divorce, when he was very angry about how much I got in the divorce settlement, he told me that he’d changed his will in favour of Ted.’
‘Isn’t it a bit strange,’ the agent asks, ‘if Greg hated his brother, that he’d leave his fortune to him?’
‘Not really. There was no one else to leave it to. He was family.’ She continues, ‘That’s how rich families are. Now that Greg is dead, Ted probably gets it all. And from what I understand, he needs the money.’
‘Oh?’
She hesitates, but only briefly. ‘Ted used to handle some of my investments. He recommended I invest in a stock that he was investing in as well. We both lost heavily. I was angry, so I told Greg about it and he was furious. He tore a strip off Ted, I think. And then Greg told me that Ted had come crawling to him after that asking for a loan to help him out, but Greg said no.’
‘I thought Ted had lots of money?’
She snorts. ‘Maybe he used to. And he will when the estate goes through. But he doesn’t now, even though he inherited a bundle.’ She adds dismissively, ‘Ted never had Greg’s knack for making money.’
Chapter Seventeen
AT NINE O’CLOCKon Wednesday morning, Nadya Sokolov uses her key to open the front door of the Westcotts’ brownstone and quickly disables the alarm. She comes here every Wednesday. It is hard work, cleaning such a large house, so many floors, but she is strong. She cleans beautiful homes for rich people. It’s better than cleaning offices or hospitals, or the homes of not-so-rich families with grubby houses and messy children. In Nadya’s experience, the wealthy are polite and pay well. But even rich people have problems. She has read all about the awful sailing accident over the weekend. She had called Mrs Westcott’s number and left a clumsy message of condolence, but she had not received a reply. She showed up today to clean as usual.
They stay out of her business, and she stays out of theirs. The cleaning lady should be invisible, and Nadya is very good at being invisible. She comes and goes when they are at work. She does her work like a magical fairy, so that when her employers get home at night the bathrooms sparkle, the kitchen gleams,the floors shine. The bed is made up with fresh sheets, the furniture is polished, everything is dusted, the pillows plumped, the costly rugs vacuumed. It makes her think of the tale about the shoemaker and the elves. Except he was poor, that’s why the elves snuck in at night and did his work for him. These people aren’t poor, they just don’t want to clean up after themselves.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod, then part of the USSR, in 1980, Nadya knows what it is to struggle. She immigrated to New York City with her husband, Ilya, in her early twenties, with their son, Peter, in tow, only a toddler at the time. They were in search of a better life. Did they find it? Sometimes she is not so sure. She gathers her cleaning materials from the cupboard and goes upstairs and begins in the Westcotts’ en suite bathroom, scrubbing and polishing.
Peter is such a worry. Sometimes she wonders if he might have turned out better if they had remained in Russia, but it is impossible to know. Occasionally, when she is cleaning, she imagines an alternative life, back in Nizhny Novgorod. But she invariably imagines it differently than how it would actually be, through a haze of nostalgia. They left for a reason, after all. There was so much poverty, so little opportunity. But sometimes she reimagines herself as a girl, back in her homeland, meeting a different man, a better man than Ilya. Someone who would take good care of them and give them a better life.
Peter’s father left them when the boy was four, and she has had to make a go of it on her own. She knows it’s a good thing that she had no more children, although it is a sadness, too. She would have loved to have a daughter, someone she could be closeto, someone to take care of her in her old age. A girl would be hardworking, devoted, or so she imagines. Her son has turned out to be a disappointment. She thinks he isbespomoshchnyy,the Russian word for feckless. Perhaps it is because he had no father figure growing up, and a boy needs a father. However, Ilya had liked his vodka too much and hadn’t been much of a role model, so perhaps it’s just as well he left. She has tried to be a good mother, strong and loving, but Peter has always been a handful.
Finished with the toilet and shower, she moves on to the vanity, still thinking of her son. There were problems at school; he was not a good student. He wasn’t bad, not then, he just didn’t work very hard. If it didn’t come easy to him, he wasn’t interested. She found him challenging, but she loved him, the way a mother does, no matter what. But as the years went on, he became more difficult. It was impossible to make him do anything he didn’t want to do. He was a slacker at school, a slob at home. The school tried to help but they had enough to do already, and they weren’t very effective. She tried to teach him at home, but there was something wrong with him, he couldn’t seem to learn, or he didn’t care. And then as a teenager, he became sly, and sometimes not very nice.
He began to insult her. She tried to forgive him for it, because she knew it came from his own deep unhappiness with himself. But she refused to put up with it. When he was still a child, she made him apologize and clean his room. But he became taller and stronger than her, and there was always a feeling of walking on eggshells in her own home. Sometimes she felt that she had left one authoritarian regime for another.
Now Peter is in his early twenties, and she suspects he has fallen in with a bad crowd, a bunch of Russian petty criminals. He has tattoos all over his arms. When she tried to talk to him one night recently about his choices, he argued with her. His unaccented English is perfect, unlike hers, and he also speaks fluent Russian.
