Oh.
“How do you know that?” I asked Marina. She was staring at the ground. I could see Simon’s hand on the armrest of his chair; he was gripping it so hard his knuckles were white. As subtly as I could, I rested my hand on his. Lest he do something stupid.
I could feel his weight shift as I did so, his arm losing some of its tension.
“After Riz’s death” – Marina was looking in our direction as she spoke, but not at us exactly, more somewhere off in the distance, over the fields – “Suzycame to me a few days later, she said Riz had told her everything, that the pictures had fallen into his lap, that he … he felt he had no choice to do it. She accused me of getting them. I had no idea where she thought I got them from! I didn’t know Guy Frobisher from Adam before the campaign. And I’ve only heard about this Tarquin Scott chap from the news.”
“So why did Suzy think that you had provided them?”
“Your husband,” Simon said.
Marina looked away. Eventually, she mumbled, “Ex-husband.”
“Currently serving eighteen months for blackmail and extortion,” Simon said to no one in particular. “All very hush-hush, what with who it was that he’d been blackmailing. Using his position in the party to gain access to senior figures and then threatening to spill their secrets.”
“I had nothing to do with it!” Marina snapped. Her eyes were wet. “I was disgusted when I found out what Peter had done. He said he did it for us, for the children, but it was all for him. I should never have married him. And now …” Her voice broke as she stifled a sob. “Now, I’m stuck in this house that I can’t afford to sell and I can’t afford to make liveable, drowning in his lawyer’s bills, and this was my last shot.”
She shook her head. “The moment I met Riz, I could see it in his eyes, the same hunger that Peter had. The desire to win no matter what the cost, no matter what it did to you or anyone else. I could see it like a freight train coming towards us all, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
“Instead, you let him carry on.”
“No, I tried, again and again, to warn him off. I tried everything.”
“Where did he get the pictures?” Simon asked tersely.
“I don’t know. He didn’t give me any warning. I only found out afterwards, and he wouldn’t tell me.”
“You could have stopped him!” Simon snarled. “You could have told me that he’d leaked the photos, you could have done anything apart from the route you took!”
“I know!” she cried. “Don’t you think I know that? But Riz, he had, I don’t know, there was someone he was working with. I don’t know where he was getting all this information from, but someone was helping him. Someone who had intel, money, I don’t know. I thought it was someone from within the party, or a Tory who wanted to sabotage Guy. That’s why I reached out to Suzy; in case she knows someone from Macauley Sheridan’s inner cabal who might be against him.”
“Inner cabal?” I scoffed.
“Sheridan had a lot of enemies,” Marina said, her eyes flashing. “That man had been in Parliament a long time; he knew a lot of secrets. Isn’t that right, Simon?”
Simon’s face remained impassive.
There was a long silence. “You let Riz dig his own grave,” Simon said through gritted teeth.
“I didn’t want him to die!” Marina shouted. “God, Simon. Yes, Riz was no innocent, but no one deserves that. To be tricked, to be left dead in a bloody car park with a bullet hole—” She broke off and squeezed her eyes shut.
No, Riz wasn’t innocent. He was far from it. But the image of him in that car, slumped over, his eyes open, his hair spilling over his face. I couldn’t not see it. The smell of the blood. The … the bits of his brain and skull over the passenger seat. I felt bile in my throat. Riz may have been a shit, but no one deserved to die that way. Not alone, not by someone else’s hand.
Riz, like everyone, was complicated. He was flawed and ambitious. He lied, and he was petty. But he was also a doctor who helped people, who deep down probablyloved Simon, and was loved by him. Who, once upon a time, had been a boy with a mum and dad who loved him very much and had clapped at his graduation, so proud of their son, the doctor.
Now he was ashes in the wind, his body cremated, and his killer free.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, pinching the gap between my eyebrows. “Riz got the photos from someone, you have no idea who?”
Marina nodded.
“He was in contact with this person after the photos came out?”
She nodded again. “I think so. But after the photos, well, he was shaken. I don’t think he knew what it would kick off.”
“You mean everyone and their mum leaking photos of MPs and every dirty little secret habit they had, which cost us three cabinet members?” I asked.
“Not to mention that Welsh MP who tried to hang himself when his internet history got leaked,” Simon muttered.
