‘That’s right, yeah, Dad’s sister’s boy. Poor little sod. You know what happened? The avalanche, et cetera?’
‘Yeah, Decima told me.’
‘Bloody awful thing. I was only twelve when it happened. I can still remember bawling my eyes out. My first experience of real grief.’
Strike having declined, by his silence, the tacit invitation to commiserate with the actor, Sacha continued,
‘Yeah, so, Rupe was brought up in Switzerland by his paternal aunt. She kept a pretty tight grip on him while he was growing up. It was all Dad could do to get him over to Heberley every few years, and Rupe’s a lot younger than me, so we never really, you know, hung out much when we were kids. Lovely guy, though,’ said Sacha.
‘He seems to have got himself into a lot of trouble, one way or another,’ said Strike.
‘Well, as I say, you probably know more about that than I do,’ said Sacha, with a rueful expression.
‘Did you know about the drug debt?’
‘The – what, sorry?’ said Sacha, and Strike recognised his reaction as one of obfuscation, rather than genuine confusion.
‘Rupert was being threatened. His housemate stiffed a drug dealer who then turned his attention to Rupert.’
‘Ah,’ said Sacha.
‘And Rupert ended up paying the guy a couple of grand to get him to back off.’
‘Oh,’ said Sacha. ‘Right.’
‘You didn’t know he had a vengeful coke dealer after him?’
‘I… no, I had no idea.’
‘Did he ask to borrow money from you?’
A faint pink flush had now suffused Sacha’s handsome face.
‘I don’t know that that’s any of your business.’
‘My whole business is asking questions that wouldn’t usually be any of my business.’
‘“Dirty work, but someone’s got to do it”?’
‘Wouldn’t claim I’ve got to,’ said Strike. ‘Just the line of work that best suits my abilities.’
‘Look, the person you really need to talk to is Rupe’s aunt, Anjelica. She’ll know the whole story.’
‘I’ve already talked to her. She wasn’t very complimentary about Rupert, nor very sympathetic to his predicament.’
‘Ah,’ said Sacha, with another rueful smile. ‘Well, I think she worries Rupe’s genetically predisposed to being a wastrel.’
‘Rupert’s parents were wastrels, were they?’
‘Not my aunt, but Peter Fleetwood wasn’t what you’d call one of the world’s hardest workers. Charming guy, but he mostly gambled and drank.’
‘Did you know about Rupert nicking this silver ship thing from Dino’s?’
A less experienced interviewer might have missed the tiny twitch at the corner of Sacha Legard’s mouth.
‘No. Again, you see, I was—’
‘Mexico, yeah. But you found out subsequently?’
‘Yes,’ said Sacha, and Strike detected a slight reluctance at having to admit to this concrete knowledge, minimal though it was.
‘When did you find that out?’
‘Er… it was on my birthday, as a matter of fact.’
‘Which is when?’ said Strike.
‘May the twenty-first.’
‘Did Rupert tell you what he’d done?’
‘No, I – well, to tell you the truth, I saw Rupe and Valentine having some kind of confrontation in a corner, at my party. We were at Claridge’s and, yeah, there was a slight scene. I hadn’t actually invited Rupe – it wasn’t a big party, he wouldn’t have known many people there – anyway, I looked round and there he was. Kind of crazy to gatecrash, all things considered; you’d think he’d have avoided any place where the Longcasters were.’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, who was making rapid notes, ‘you would. Was Dino at your party?’
‘God, no,’ said Sacha, with a little laugh. ‘Dino never attends parties unless they’re held at his club. D’you know him?’
‘No,’ said Strike.
‘Quite a character,’ said Sacha.
‘Tara doesn’t mind you hanging out with her ex-husband?’
‘Oh, that’s all water under the bridge,’ said Sacha easily. ‘Ma doesn’t dictate who I see. No, with my party – I only invited Val and Cosima. She was in tears, actually.’
‘Who’s Cosima?’ asked Strike, though he already knew.
‘Decima and Valentine’s half-sister. Lovely girl.’
Strike seemed to remember that in Robin’s notes of her interview with Albie Simpson-White, Cosima Longcaster had been described as ‘a spoiled brat’.
‘Why was she in tears?’
‘I assume because Rupe was being aggressive, or offensive. I… to tell you the truth,’ said Sacha for the second time, lowering his voice, ‘I had to ask security to ask Rupe to leave. He seemed to have come looking for a fight. After he’d gone, I asked Val what it was all about, and he told me about this silver ship thing that had gone missing.’
‘Did he say why Rupert had turned up?’
‘I assume he was trying to get Val to call off the police, or something. Val was pretty pissed off about it all, as you can imagine.’
‘How was Valentine supposed to call off the police? The stolen property was his father’s, wasn’t it?’
‘I honestly don’t know details,’ said Sacha, with a slightly helpless gesture. ‘It was all news to me, I didn’t know what was going on – and as you can imagine, I had a lot of people to speak to and so on, that night, so I let it drop.’
‘Did you hear from Rupert after the party?’
‘No, the next thing I heard, he’d left for New York.’
‘How did you find that out?’