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“Yes!” Summer brightened. “Michael kept a file on all of them in the flat. I want you to take a look at it, when you get a chance.” After her second drink the room was spinning slightly. Summer realized she must have forgotten to eat lunch. “But you’re right, Tommy,” she went on excitedly. “Alexia could well be the key to this. Cutting her brake cables would be almost impossible. As home secretary, she’d have had a security detail, a driver, people watching her vehicles twenty-four/seven. Michael’s bike would have been a far easier target. And what better way to hurt a parent than to injure her child, right?”
She was so adorably earnest, Tommy could stand it no longer. Leaning over, he slipped a hand around the back of Summer’s neck and pressed his lips to hers.
For a second she was too surprised to do anything. But then she pulled away angrily. “What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”
A combination of embarrassment and sexual frustration, fueled by one too many drinks, made Tommy react angrily. “What’s your problem? It was a kiss. Why shouldn’t I kiss you?”
“Why shouldn’t you kiss me?” Summer repeated incredulously.
“I didn’t realize you’d taken a vow of celibacy.”
“I’m with Michael, you asshole. Your so-called friend.” Summer stood up shakily.
“Hey . . .” Tommy put a hand on her arm. “Michael was my friend, okay? My best friend. There was no ‘so-called’ about it. But Michael is dead, Summer.”
“He is not!”
“Yes, he is. Clinically and in every way that matters.” Every customer in the bar turned to stare at the drama playing out at the corner table. Tommy’s volume levels were rising. “Michael’s in a coma and he is never going to wake up. Never.”
“Fuck you!” Summer shouted.
“Is this what you think he would want?” Tommy shot back, tightening his grip on her arm. “For you to sacrifice your whole life for him, like some Hindu bride throwing her body onto her husband’s funeral pyre? Because if you think that, you didn’t know him at all.”
With a wrench, Summer pulled herself free from Tommy’s grip. Grabbing her purse, she ran out of the bar, tears of anger and humiliation clouding her vision as she stumbled toward the exit.
“He wasn’t a saint, you know,” Tommy called after her. “He wasn’t even faithful to you.”
Summer turned and glared at him. “Liar!”
“It’s true. The week before you came to Oxford, Michael told me about an older woman he’d been seeing. He called her his ‘sugar mummy.’ She was the one who bought him that damn bike, if you really want to know.”
Summer’s stomach lurched.
She turned and ran.
The London traffic was so bad, it took her an hour to reach the facility where Michael was being cared for, a redbrick Victorian building close to Battersea Park.
“You look terrible,” one of the nurses observed, not unkindly, when Summer walked in. Her hair was disheveled from having run her hands through it so many times and her cheeks were puffy and swollen from crying. “Are you okay?”
“Not really.” Summer took up her usual place in the chair next to Michael’s bed, but was too upset to take his hand. She knew that what Tommy Lyon had said was true. At first, when she left the Savoy, she tried to convince herself it was a lie, a cruel fabrication that Tommy had made up out of spite because she’d rejected his advances. But as her black cab crawled across the river, she accepted the truth. I knew it myself, all along. That was why I came to Oxford, to confront him. I knew there was someone else.
“How dare you lie there so peacefully, you son of a bitch!” she sobbed into the silence. “How could you do this to me?”
Scores of questions tormented her, like tiny needles pricking at her brain. Had this older woman been there that night, before Summer arrived? For all Summer knew, she could have shared Michael’s bed only hours earlier. She wanted to know, needed to know. But Michael had denied her even that small shred of comfort, the comfort of closure.
“You owe me an answer. You owe me!” she shouted at Michael as he slept, willing him to hear her. And she cried because there was no answer.
There would never be an answer.
Chapter Thirty-five
Police chief Harry Dublowski of the NYPD smiled at the attractive woman sitting opposite him.
Harry knew when the woman called that he’d heard her name somewhere before. It was an exotic name. Aristocratic. International politics wasn’t exactly a passion of Harry’s, but when he googled “Alexia De Vere,” it all came back to him. The new Iron Lady! England’s answer to Hillary Clinton, complete with an errant husband. Except that where Bill’s worst crime had been having some fat chick give him head in the Oval Office, Teddy De Vere was doing time for murder.
What Harry Dublowski hadn’t expected was to discover that Mrs. De Vere was actually a great-looking broad. Most women Harry’s age looked like hags. Either that or they had weird surgery faces that made them look embalmed. But Alexia De Vere was a genuine looker. Her Google pictures did not do her justice. According to her bio, she was in her sixties, but she could have passed for a decade younger. In a simple, flesh-colored shift dress and heels, with a caramel cashmere scarf draped across her shoulders, she could have used a bit more meat on her bones. But she was still elegant and, to Harry’s rheumy, old eyes, damned sexy. He’d always been a sucker for classy women. God knew he came into contact with precious few of them in this job.
Alexia sized up the overweight, middle-aged cop across the desk and reached a swift conclusion: The man wants to be flattered. In this case, she was going to catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
