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‘I’ve got plenty of time to study.’ Dee fibbed. ‘I want to stay here with you, Dad. I’ll come with you to this meeting...I—’
‘No.’
The sharpness of his denial shocked her. She had rarely seen him angry before, never mind so frighteningly close to losing control.
‘Dad...’
‘Go back to Lexminster, Dee,’ he reiterated.
And so, stupidly, she did. And that was a mistake; an error of judgement; a failure to understand that she would never, ever forgive herself for.
If Julian Cox was responsible for her father’s death, then she was certainly a party to that responsibility. If she had refused to go back to Lexminster, if she had stayed with him...
But she didn’t... She drove back to Lexminster, desperate to see Hugo and tell him what had happened, running in fear to him, like a child denied the comfort of one strong man’s protection and so running to another.
But when she reached the house Hugo wasn’t there.
He had left her a note, saying that he had been called to London unexpectedly to attend another interview and that he didn’t know when he would be back.
Dee wept in a mixture of anger and misery. She wanted him there with her, not pursuing some selfish, idealistic dream. She needed him there with her, and surely for once her needs came first. Was this how it was going to be for the rest of their lives? Was Hugo always going to be missing when she needed him? Were other people always going to be more important to him than her? She was too wrought up to think or reason logically; it didn’t make any difference that Hugo had no idea what was happening—it was enough that he just wasn’t there.
Anxiously Dee rang her father at home. There was no reply. She tried his office, and gritted her teeth as she listened to the vague voice of the middle-aged spinster he employed as his secretary more out of pity for her than because he actually needed her help. She lived with her widowed mother and three cats, and
was bullied unmercifully—both by her mother and the moggies.
‘Your father—oh, dear, Andrea, I’m sorry; I have no idea... He isn’t here—’
‘He said he had an appointment with someone,’ Dee told her, cutting across her. ‘Is there anything in his diary?’
‘Oh, let me look... There’s a dental appointment—but, no, that’s the fifteenth of next month. Just let me find the right page. Oh, yes...here we are. And it isn’t the fifteenth today at all, is it? It’s the sixteenth... No...he was to have seen that nice Mr Cox for lunch today...’
She paused as Dee made a fierce sound of disgust deep in her throat. What was loyal Miss Prudehow going to say when she learned just how un-nice ‘nice Mr Cox’ actually was? When she learned just what he had done to Dee’s father—her employer?
Five minutes later, having extracted from her the information that she had no idea where Dee’s father was, Dee replaced the receiver and redialled the number of her father’s home. Still no reply. Where was he...?
* * *
It was later in the day when she knew. Early in the evening, to be exact.
The young policeman who came to give her the news looked white-faced and nervous when Dee opened the door to him. After he had asked to come in, and followed her inside the house, Dee noticed how he was unable to meet her eyes, and somehow, even before he said her father’s name, she knew.
‘My father?’ she demanded tautly. ‘Something’s happened to my father...’
There had been an accident, the young policeman told her. Her father had been fishing. Quite what had happened, no one was sure. But somehow or other he had ended up in the river and got into difficulties. Somehow or other he had drowned.
Dee wanted badly to be sick. She also wanted badly to scream and cry, to deny what she was being told, but she was her father’s daughter, and she could see that to give in to her own emotions would upset the poor young policeman, who looked very badly as though he wanted to be sick as well.
Dee had to go back with him to Rye. There were formalities to be attended to but not, thankfully, by her. She wanted to see her father, but Ralph Livesey, his friend and doctor, refused to allow her to do so.
‘It isn’t necessary, Dee,’ he told her firmly. ‘And it isn’t what he would have wanted.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she whispered, over and over again and throughout it all. ‘How could he have drowned? He was such a good swimmer and...’
As she looked at Ralph she saw the look in his eyes, and instantly a sickening possibility hit her like a blow in the solar plexus.
‘It wasn’t an accident, was it?’ she whispered sickly to him. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’
Her voice started to rise as shock and hysteria gripped her. ‘It wasn’t an accident. It was Julian Cox...he did it. He killed him...’
