Page 166 of King’s Ransom

‘Yeah . . .’ I said slowly. This was indeed formal confirmation of what I’d deduced in the cab.

‘Dude, did I catch you in time? You’re not there yet, are you?’

I looked up the drive ahead of me.

Winnie Tan’s butler stood on the steps of her huge white mansion, watching me.

‘It’s too late, Monty. I just got here. And I’m locked inside the grounds.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘What I came here to do. Talk to Winnie Tan.’

I continued up the drive.

‘I saw you at Ari’s penthouse on the 21st, didn’t I?’ Winnie Tan said conversationally as I sat down opposite her on her enormous glassed-in rear deck.

It looked out over Bullhead Bay. The waters of the cove glistened. It was a truly eye-popping view.

Ms Tan had her own private jetty at the bottom of a wide sloping lawn. A seaplane and a huge motor yacht were docked on either side of it.

Hidden away from the main road, her mansion was colossal, the way the homes of billionaires are.

For unlike the other ex–Mrs Kings, Winnie Tan was a billionaire in her own right. She’d helped Aristo start his first successful computer chip company and now, thirty years later, still had a major stock holding in it and was on the board.

Her butler/bodyguard lurked a short distance away, ever ready to tackle me if I tried anything.

‘You were one of the five detectives who were brought in that day,’ she added.

‘I was. I hope you’ve recovered from all that. It was quite ­traumatic for a few people, you included.’

I recalled that when I’d seen Winnie Tan at 59West on the 21st—at first on the 95th floor and later in the helicopter dangling precariously off the roof—she’d been dressed in a beige suit that had concealed her physique somewhat.

Now, in the warmth of her glasshouse-like deck, she wore gym clothes: sleek blue-and-white Alo leggings plus a matching sports bra that revealed her toned arms and stomach.

(I’d already seen her naked on the sex videos, so I knew how cut her abs were.)

She must have caught me looking at her clothes.

She glanced down at them. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I was about to do some yoga before I went shopping for a dress to wear to the event tomorrow night, the one I’m hosting with Ari in the Steinway Tower in Ajax’s honour and for the new foundation. But thank you, yes, I’m fine now. Nothing that a few sessions with a therapist can’t fix.’

She laughed lightly at her own joke, before sipping from a bottle of detoxifying iced tea.

(It looked expensive. When she’d offered me something to drink, I’d accepted a bottle of water, which also looked expensive.)

She added, ‘I thought all of that stuff at the tower had been concluded. The FBI told me that new Russian wife of Ari’s did it; that she hired some Russian trickster-killer to carry out all those ghastly riddles.’

‘That’s what the FBI thinks,’ I said. ‘But not me. When did you start sleeping with Aristo King again?’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘I know all about it, ma’am. King secretly filmed it.’

‘But how—?’

‘Detective,’ I said.

She sighed. Shifted in her chair. Took on a new tone.