Carrying her purchases, she stepped out and turned right, walking along London Road, stopping at a chemist to buy a cold gel-pack, then at a hardware store where she purchased a short length of heavy-duty insulated wire, a roll of insulating tape and a pair of pliers. She hailed another taxi and instructed the driver to take her to a kitchenware shop in Western Road, where she made her final purchases of a small set of digital kitchen scales and a coffee grinder.
She then asked the driver to take her to the Jurys Inn Hotel, opposite Brighton Station.
As she made her way across the hotel foyer towards the lifts, leaning on her stick with grim determination, she was looking forward to getting down to work. Her shopping trip was complete and one hundred per cent satisfactory, no problems at all.
She didn’t do problems.
96
Thursday 12 March
At 12.30 p.m. Roy Grace did the Asda run to get his lunch and something to drink. He’d eaten nothing since a few mouthfuls of porridge at 6 a.m., and a muffin in the café, and he was hungry again.
His eyes ran along the superstore’s sandwich shelves, and he was tempted to get an all-day breakfast bacon and egg feast. But guilt held him back. Cleo had repeatedly warned him of the dangers of the rubbish diet that so many police officers survived on. He looked at several cakes and doughnuts, too. Often in the past he had ignored her — and Sandy’s — entreaties for him to eat healthily. But Noah and Cleo had added a new dimension and purpose to his life. He felt an extra strong need to take care of himself, for his family. So in the end he bought a tuna and sweetcorn on brown bread and an apple, and allowed himself just two naughty treats, a Diet Coke and a KitKat.
As he walked across to the ‘10 Items or Less’ till he saw a rack of Argus newspapers. The headline read:
Good! The seed had been sown. He bought a copy.
Back in his office, Grace laid the paper in front of him. The front-page splash was accompanied by a photograph of the stocky, tanned billionaire barely recognizable, even to himself, as Norman Potting. The accompanying story, written by a reporter he didn’t know, told of one of the city’s favourite sons, born on the Whitehawk Estate, who had truly gone west to make his fortune in California’s Silicon Valley. He was now terminally ill with prostate cancer, and had decided to return home to his roots for the last months of his life.
Instead of buying a home in the city, because the doctors had told him he had so little time left, J. Paul Cornel had moved into a suite at an undisclosed hotel for a few days, before returning to California to tie up his business affairs there. With no dependants, he was intending to look at worthy local charities to leave the bulk of his estate to, and something by which the city would remember him. He said he hoped, if his health permitted, to return to Brighton to spend his remaining days here.
When I asked Mr Cornel if it was true he had been thwarted in his attempts to buy a US baseball team, he replied that it had once been a dream but now his love affair with the US was over. Did he have his sights set on anything closer to home? Perhaps Brighton and Hove Albion?
‘Well, you know,’ he replied in his American drawl, ‘I’ve got this damned cancer but I’m not done yet. Watch this space, eh?’
As he peeled open the wrapping round his sandwich, Roy Grace read on. J. Paul Cornel’s journey from Dorothy Stringer School — winning a scholarship to Boston’s MIT, the leading technology university in the USA — was documented in detail as were the visionaries he’d met and helped finance on the way, including acolytes of Danny Hillis, the founder of Thinking Machines Corporation and pioneer of the parallel processor, and of Nicholas Negroponte, head of the MIT Media Lab, plus half a dozen former employees of Apple and Microsoft.
Due to smart tax planning, the article continued, just as the Sunday Times Rich List team had found, Cornel’s true wealth was impossible to estimate. But many financial analysts put it as not far short of the $17.4 billion of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.
Since arriving back in our city earlier this week, Cornel has, understandably, gone to ground in a suite at a rather grand Brighton hotel which he has asked me not to disclose.
One thing I spoke to this delightful gentleman about, before our time was up, was romance. I asked him if he felt he still had the time and the energy for love in his life. He replied with a smile, ‘What else matters in life, at the end of the day? And you know what, this is going to sound strange. I know I don’t have much time left, but I would like to find love again — and I’m gonna keep looking!’
Yes, Grace thought. Brilliant stuff! Yes, yes, yes!
97
Thursday 12 March
Jodie Carmichael walked through the busy concourse of Victoria Station to the Brighton line platforms. She was in a foul mood after a distinctly unsatisfactory meeting with her lawyers. She used a top London firm of solicitors as she felt more anonymous there than with a local Brighton firm.
She reflected, as she walked, on the costly hour and a half of advice she had received from one of the firm’s senior matrimonial law partners, Drendia Ann Edwards. Jodie had been correct, Edwards had told her, the captain of the ship was a certified registrant and the marriage was indeed legal and binding. But, with almost unprecedented speed, a marker had already been put down by the law firm acting for Rowley Carmichael’s children. Alarmed at the haste of their late father’s marriage — and subsequent death — she confirmed they were not accepting the Goan Coroner’s report and, despite the fact that their father’s body was embalmed, were demanding a second post-mortem. They were prepared to take their fight to any level — and they had pockets deep enough to do so, Edwards had warned.
Which meant she would almost certainly be in for a massive fight over Rowley’s estate, too. Something that could easily drag on for a couple of years, maybe longer, with costs that could run into tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, which she would have to fund. At the end of the day she should certainly inherit some of his fortune — but that could easily be some while into the future.
Most of her inheritance from her first husband, Christopher Bentley, had gone on buying the house in Roedean, and on living and travel costs. She had the $200,000 windfall from the Romanian in New York, which would see her through for a bit, and she had a small emergency fund stashed away, but bloody Walt Klein had caused her to eat into that. She’d had to pay for everything out in Courchevel on her own card, because both Walt’s card and the one he had given her had been declined at checkout; on top of that, she was out of pocket for that ridiculously expensive coffin she’d bought him.
If she didn’t find another source of funding quickly, she might need to sell one of her properties. The Roedean house had soared in value in the years since she had bought it, but having to sell and downsize would be a worst-case scenario. An admission of defeat, and an end — even if only temporarily — to her plan, to the goals she had set herself.
Perching on her Standard Class seat — the first time in years she’d not travelled First — she was feeling a slight sense of panic that she was going to have to start making economies. She decided the first thing she would do when she got back home was sift through all the replies from the internet dating agencies that would be in her inbox, and contact a few of the most promising ones.