“Strictly between you and me?”
“Of course.”
“When Valerie dropped her little bombshell and all hell broke loose, I took her to the washroom.”
“I’ve always wondered what went on in there.”
“She told me she’d ruin me.”
“How?”
“When Val and I were students,” Jacqui said, “we were... well, to put it mildly, we were a bit wild. We got into coke and stuff in a fairly big way and it can skewer your judgment. There was a man. We thought it would be fun to make a video. He didn’t know. No copies. Only the original. Need I say more?”
“The three of you?”
“Yes.”
“And Valerie kept this?”
“I told you she liked control.”
“Why would she want to have control over you?”
“Not me, you fool. Him. He was a politician. Still is, and climbing the ranks.”
“So Valerie used it to blackmail him?”
“She never used it for anything, as far as I know.”
“But that gave him a motive for killing her. Who is he?”
“He didn’t even know about it. I’m sure of that.”
“But Valerie threatened to use it against you?”
“Yes. This Cherub contract is a really big deal, and I need to be squeaky-clean. It’s a family line, so if it got around that their cherub wasn’t quite as cherubic as they thought, I think you can see where that might lead.”
“The unemployment line?”
“Exactly.”
“You do realize, don’t you, that you’ve just given me another motive for your killing Valerie? If she made the video public, you’d have been ruined.”
“No. You don’t understand. There was no video.”
Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t think I wanted that thing lying around, do you? I can make myself look enough like Valerie to fool people, especially strangers behind the counter in a bank, and her signature is easy enough to forge. One day, while she was at the dentist’s, I borrowed her key and her ID.”
“So you’re saying—”
“Valerie didn’t know, because she never checked from one year to the next, but the video was gone. I destroyed it. That safety-deposit box was empty.”
“Then who...?”
Jacqui put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said, turning pale. “Oh, God, no!”
“You again,” said Scott when I called at their Scarborough home early that evening. I had spent the rest of the afternoon doing the sort of digging I usually do when I’m not investigating murders. Ginny walked through from the kitchen and nodded a curt greeting.
“What can I help you with this time?” Scott asked.
“When you were driving Jacqui home from the restaurant the night Valerie was murdered, you asked her about what went on in the washroom, didn’t you?”
“So what? I was curious.”
“And she told you that Valerie had threatened her with something that could ruin the whole Cherub deal.”
“She did? I don’t remember.”
“Oh, come off it, Scott! You mean to tell me you were so curious you can’t even remember what she told you?”
“What does it matter?”
I leaned forward. “It matters because it gave you a motive to kill Valerie.”
“That’s absurd.”
“No, it’s not. I’ve been doing a bit of research this afternoon, and I’ve discovered that your precious agency is in serious financial trouble. You’re in debt up to your eyeballs — second mortgages, the lot — and you can’t afford to lose the Cherub contract. When you thought that was in jeopardy, you knew you had to get rid of Valerie. Maybe you planned on killing them both, but when you saw Tony wasn’t there, you changed your plan.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” said Scott, “but that’s all it is.”
I knew he was right. What I’d discovered, and what Jacqui had told me, might point the police in Scott’s direction, but they’d need much more if Tony were to be set free.
“You know what the sad thing is?” I said. “You did it all for nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jacqui was upset. All she said was that Valerie had threatened to ruin her. What she didn’t mention was that she no longer had the means to do it. You killed Valerie Pascale for nothing, Scott.”
Ginny turned pale. “What did you say?” she asked.
“Don’t, Ginny!” Scott warned her.
But it was too late. Ginny glanced at her husband, turned back to me, and said, “Do you think for a moment I would let her destroy everything we’d worked for?” She looked over tenderly at Scott, who was gnawing on a fingernail. All his deepest fears had now come true. If he wasn’t an accomplice and had, indeed, passed out, he must at least have suspected and worried that the truth would come out. “She deserved to die,” Ginny went on. “She was going to ruin all of us just because of a stupid adolescent affair. And now you tell us it was all for nothing.” Her laugh sounded like a harsh bark.
“You still have no evidence,” Scott said. “Ginny will deny everything. Do you realize what you’re doing? You could ruin all of us, Jacqui, Tony, Ray included.”
I stood up to leave. “Jacqui will survive. And so will Ray. The one thing neither of you seem to have given a moment’s thought to,” I said as I headed for the door, “is that Tony Caldwell is awaiting trial on a murder charge. A murder he didn’t commit. Think about that when you lament your business losses.”
After I’d shut the door behind me, I slid my hand in my inside pocket and turned off the tiny digital recorder that had been on the whole time I’d been with Scott and Ginny. Maybe it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it would be enough to get Tony free and reopen the case. And, who knows, perhaps Susan Caldwell would be grateful enough to have dinner with me. We could talk about Darwin’s influence on Wordsworth.