the rise. Ned kept the ice pack on his eye with one hand and opened the cleverly disguised dishwasher door with the other. I stacked the dishes into it.
‘And then Karen gets sent to prison, Justin cuts her out of his life, divorces her in a flash, turns his life around completely, marries a stupendous Polish blonde, sires a replacement son and makes himself a cool fortune.’ He set the machine going. ‘Plus he got Sunny. Karen can’t have been happy that he got custody.’ He looked at me expectantly.
‘She’s my client, Ned. Even if I knew how she felt about it, I wouldn’t tell you. ‘
‘Oh sure, sure,’ he said, waving his hand in apology. His accent was back after a sustained absence. He dropped his ice pack in the sink with a loud clatter. His eye was the size of a purple golf ball. It was swollen shut so he probably didn’t see me flinch at the sight of it. ‘I was forgetting myself, us sitting here chatting and all.’
I didn’t intend to go back to sleep and I thought my sore bits would make it impossible but my brain had other ideas. When I woke at nine Ned was already gone. The dishwasher had been unpacked, the bench wiped down. There was a note on it, held down by a wind-up monk wearing headphones: ‘Prego. Tonight. 8 p.m. I’ll be the guy wearing the eyepatch.’
It wouldn’t hurt to have a meal with him. Okay, another meal with him. Call it research. But if the waiter gave me a funny look when I arrived I’d know the she-devil story had preceded me and I’d be out of there toot sweet.
I figured that since I was on the clock I should spend the extra time I had in Auckland finding out what I could about Justin. Apricot was a registered company, with both Justin and Salena nominated as shareholders and company directors. It was the same with the gym gear and health supplement importing business, which was registered under the company name of Orpheus. Both the websites for Apricot and Orpheus gave the impression of small-time businesses. Justin also had a specialty wine import business. From what I could make out it was so boutique as to be a company in name only, set up to provide tax-free expensive wines for Justin and Salena and their dinner guests. His own ‘private cellar’ I believe is the term used. I didn’t get very far by tracking the line of imports and sales for Justin’s gym gear and health products so I made a couple of phone calls complaining about missing deliveries and managed to glean much more information about the size of the import loads. On a roll, I followed this up by phoning the gym and posing as the personal assistant of a high-profile media celebrity who wished to remain anonymous. Eventually, after a lot of name-dropping on my part and a rather feeble struggle with confidentiality on hers, I convinced the receptionist to part with the gym’s membership list. By the time I had hung up I was confident my first impressions had been pretty close. Both businesses were doing okay but were hardly mega money-earners, which didn’t entirely gel with the house, the lifestyle and assets so ostentatiously on display. The Herne Bay multi-squillion-dollar villa with the barn-sized kitchen was owned by a trust, presumably for tax purposes — again — and presumably the trustees were Justin and Salena. I was about to check this when I realised it was five o’clock and I hadn’t eaten anything since Ned’s scrambled eggs in the early hours of the morning.
Over a coffee and muffin at Café Cézanne, a little place in Three Lamps, I thought over what I’d learned. It looked to me like Justin was spending more money than he earned from either the gym or the online store. This could mean the money was coming from somewhere other than from legitimate businesses. Possibly Justin had taken his alleged history of drug use to a new level and had switched from consumer to supplier. Possibly this was what Karen suspected, which would explain why she was concerned about Sunny — possibly. Justin’s assistant Anton with his gold-spangled chest ornaments and bulging water-winged biceps would pass as a classic drug-dealer accoutrement. I made one more call.
Oliver was affectionately known by those in the media as ‘accountant to the stars’. He had some luminary clients among the film and celebrity