Eviction, and all that would mean, was now confronting Harry Stone. Lady Ruth would stand behind her children like a mother hen when trouble came, and that alone would keep Marine House another mile from Stone’s grasp. But Claire had no regrets as she drove fast the next day to Brighton.
It was empty, dark in the kitchen as she closed the back door. She called out “Harry” twice. She stood still, but there was no reply. In the Regency lounge, it was eerie in its formality. This was no place for Harry Stone to spend his last days in.
She wandered to Stone’s study, a room at the back of the house; it was small, dismal, dark, with no sunlight ever on it. She flicked the light switch, and in that instant, the reality of the whole situation of Harry Stone’s deadly illness confronted her. Claire shuddered for an instant at the depressing piles of papers that left little space on the top of his large oak desk and the two chairs. Stone did not have a filing system, important things were kept in his head, and this place echoed his sometimes-chaotic life. He rarely wrote letters, but emails, usually lacking grammar and spelling, were his easy way of communicating. There was a closed laptop and half-empty whisky bottle on a side cabinet.
Claire found a plastic folder with the Panama bank accounts just as she had set up for Stone six years ago in Arrow Hall. Nevis, his mate Sol in Hatton Garden, diamond dealer, were all there, a very neat web weaved by an arch manipulator. But Josh, missing with a large diamond, was a thread leading right back to the Jackson family. Claire would see they paid a big price for it.
She picked out a single sheet of paper – it was a letter from the Plaistow Children’s Hospice. She read the thank you for the donation twice and she grinned. She had known Harry Stone to do that before. What was money really to him?
A desk diary rested on the top of a pile of dog-eared papers on the floor, and Claire flicked through it. There was a creased sheet of paper folded into a page of three days ago. It fell onto the desk, Claire flattened it, it was a printout of an email. Claire scanned the two-line message quickly. She reread it before she began to understand it.
‘You’ve had nearly £125,000, and that’s all you’re getting. I’m being watched; you owe me five grand for what I’ve done. So this is the end. Keep your man right away from me.’
Claire immediately recognised James’s details as the sender, and she recoiled from it. She flipped the paper over and read the second sheet. It was an email back to James.
‘My runner who’s calling on you for the cash said you were being cocky and teasing him with the last parcel of money. He tells me he gave you a gentle reminder not to do that. Hope he didn’t bust you too much.’
This scam of creaming off cash in overpayments to suppliers and odd money sloshing into fake bank accounts now fitted into place. She folded the sheet of A4 and placed it in the diary just where she had found it. The back of her scalp tingled with unbelief and horror where this might lead. James and Harry Stone were in this scam together. Both of them right in front of her eyes. Closing the diary, Claire walked quickly from the dark, untidy study.
But why had he left these emails not even hidden in his diary? And the letter from the children’s hospice? Was she meant to see them? Perhaps when he had gone? Claire walked into the brightly lit sitting room and felt the sun warming the place. Stone’s diary was like reading ghost letters to her, and even in the warmth of the room, she again shuddered.
She wanted to get away from this soulless, empty place. She should have known better than to get involved with the dubious life of Harry Stone again.