Final Venture

'All right. Maybe you are having an affair with Diane. Maybe Dad found out. Maybe you wanted to keep him quiet. Maybe you wanted to keep him quiet and get your hands on his money.'

'That's absurd. I'm not having an affair with anybody. Can't you trust me?'

'I don't know,' she muttered.

'Anyway, why would I be so stupid as to leave a gun lying around the apartment where the police could find it?'

'I've been thinking about that, too,' said Lisa. 'It wasn't there when the police searched the apartment last week. Perhaps you were just keeping it overnight until you found a better place to hide it.'

'Don't be ridiculous. Someone must have planted it.'

'Like who? The police? The gun was in a Boots plastic bag. Do you think Sergeant Mahoney goes all the way to England to pick up his deodorant?'

I managed to get myself in control again. 'None of that proves anything.'

'It's a hypothesis. And a plausible one,' said Lisa. 'And I will go with it, until you can disprove it.'

'This isn't some scientific experiment, Lisa. It's me you're talking about. Us!'

'I know,' she said. 'But you said I should be rational. I'm trying to be rational about it. With all that's been going on in my head, the blackness I feel about everything, the way I just want to scream and scream and scream, it's all I can do. Be rational. So, let's test the hypothesis. Can you prove you didn't kill Dad?'

'No. But my point is, I shouldn't have to to you. You who know me better than anyone.'

Lisa looked at me, her eyes filling with tears. 'But I'm not sure I do know you, Simon – know who you really are.'

'But we're married, for God's sake!'

'Yes. But I've only known you, what, two years? I don't know anything about who you are, really, where you come from. I've only been once with you to your own country, and that was a disaster. I do know you come from a screwed-up family, but that's no comfort. I know you're clever, I know you can hold a lot inside without talking about it, but perhaps I don't know what really is there inside you.'

'That's ridiculous!'

'No, it's not,' Lisa said quietly. 'Of course the Simon I fell in love with wouldn't have an affair with another woman, or kill anyone. But did that Simon ever really exist?' She wiped her eyes, and then her nose with her sleeve.

I wanted to put my arm round her, but there was no point. I wanted to argue with her, but there seemed little point in that, either. How could I argue that I was just who I seemed to be?

'Come back,' I said simply. 'Please.'

Lisa took a deep breath, and shook her head. 'No, Simon.' She stood up. 'I've got to get back to work.'

And she left me standing there beside the makeshift soccer pitch, watching her slight hunched figure disappear into the Boston Peptides building.

I walked the couple of miles back to the office, through Cambridge, over the Salt and Pepper Bridge, and through the Common. It was a grey cold morning and the wind whipped off the water and threaded its way through the city buildings.

I played over our conversation again and again and again. Although I hadn't been able to understand the pressure Lisa had been under recently, the grief, the misery, the exhaustion, I had seen it in her face, heard it in her words, felt it with her. But to her, I had become part of that black world that seemed to surround and threaten her.

The bells of the Park Street Church chimed twelve o'clock as I plunged through the busy shopping streets of Downtown Crossing towards the office.

I didn't notice the people jostling around me. My anger ebbed, leaving a huge empty feeling of loneliness, of failure. My limbs felt heavy, my face taut. I still couldn't quite believe that Lisa had just walked away from me. But she had. I couldn't bear the thought of her believing that I had killed her father. Her love was the most precious thing in the world to me. The idea of it turning to hatred for me, hurt. It hurt a lot.

Somehow I had screwed up. Even my father had managed to keep hold of my mother for more than six months!

She had wanted to 'test her hypothesis'. Well, I would test her hypothesis for her. I'd prove to her that I was innocent.

Perhaps I should go to Mahoney? It was, after all, his job to find Frank's true killer. No, that was a very bad idea. I was clearly his favourite suspect at the moment, and it would be difficult to persuade him to look elsewhere. And I definitely shouldn't tell him, or anyone else for that matter, about the gun. If Lisa hadn't lost her head and ditched it, then I could have considered taking it to the police in the hope that if my honesty didn't clear my name, forensic tests might. But Lisa's actions just served to implicate me more. No, I couldn't rely on Mahoney to find out who killed Frank.

I would have to do it myself.

'You said you'd only be a quarter of an hour,' John said, as I walked in the door.

'Sorry,' I gave him a quick smile.

'Your voice-mail has been working overtime.'

'Thanks.'

But I ignored the winking light on my phone, and asked myself the vital question.

If I hadn't killed Frank, who had?

Could it have been a burglar as I had suggested to Lisa? Perhaps Frank had surprised him, and been shot? It was a tempting idea. But as I thought it through, I realized it was unlikely. The police hadn't mentioned any signs of a break-in, nor had I seen any. Frank had been shot in the back some way inside the house. It seemed most likely that he had known whoever had shot him, or at least that he had voluntarily let his murderer into the house.

I realized that I didn't know much about Frank's life away from Lisa and Revere. Presumably he had other friends, but I knew nothing about them. Lisa said there hadn't been any girlfriends since he and her mother had got divorced. She liked to believe that that was because her mother was the only woman Frank had truly loved, although he seemed to me to speak about his former wife with nothing more than indifference. Much of his time was spent at Marsh House. What else he did with it, I just didn't know.

I thought about the gun. It must have been planted. But how? I had checked the apartment for signs of a break-in. I wasn't an expert, but there was nothing I could see. The chipped paintwork round the living-room window seemed to my eye to have natural causes. And no one had been in the apartment since the police had searched it apart from Lisa and me.

In theory the police could have planted it. But would the American police really plant evidence on a suspect? Why? I didn't think Mahoney much liked me, but that wasn't much of a reason. Perhaps he wanted to improve his clear-up record? Perhaps a foreign national was an easy target? Anyway, if he had planted the gun, wouldn't he have 'discovered' it in his search of the apartment?

I now realized the Boots bag didn't mean anything. It was undoubtedly mine, in fact I thought it might have held some old school and university photographs, but whoever had been in the closet could have spotted the bag and taken the opportunity to stuff the gun inside it.

Ann and Eddie were on their way to San Francisco when the police had searched the apartment and found nothing. Not that I thought Ann could have killed her ex-husband. She seemed to me to have recovered from their separation quite successfully, and was now happily remarried. At the funeral, she spoke of Frank with a certain fondness rather than with passion.

But Eddie. Eddie was much more likely. He had never forgiven his father for leaving the rest of the family, and had barely spoken to him for years. Despite his professed indifference to money, the prospect of Frank's legacy seemed very important to him, as he had shown so clearly that morning at the lawyer's offices. And he was very eager to blame me for the crime. Eddie was definitely worth considering.

The other two 'family suspects' were Lisa and me. Lisa I just couldn't believe. Which left me.

There were rivalries at Revere. Frank and Art didn't much like each other, vying for position as Gil's right-hand