Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 92668 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92668 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
I couldn’t find an actual figure for the business, but there was no doubt the two of them were very wealthy men. Declan Tierney had offered me a million pounds without batting an eyelid, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was cash.
Which meant he would have owed Alan a very, very large amount of money.
That begged the question—did ownership of the business now go to his wife, Stephanie?
If so, she might have had the biggest motivation of them all.
That said, the chances of me finding anything out about their marriage on the internet was quite slim, so that was going to have to be something we sniffed out in real life.
If Gwen was right that they were in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, Mrs Tierney was about to be the talk of the town.
And I wanted to be a part of that conversation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I hadn’t been in a beer garden in a very, very long time.
Not because I didn’t like beer gardens. As far as they went, they were absolutely the best place to get sozzled—as long as you had suncream, of course.
I was blonde, I was pale, and UV rays had an inexplicable attraction to me.
Suncream was a must, even if it was a bit cloudy.
Yes, the sun could burn you through the clouds.
Ask me how I knew.
Sigh.
I’d just never had time to go out like this before. I was always working, and when I wasn’t working, I was sleeping. I’d done little more than merely survive over the past few years, and that was a sorry state of affairs for someone who wasn’t even thirty yet.
Now, as I opened the gate to the beer garden that was attached to the back of The King’s Head pub, I couldn’t help but smile.
Sure, my life might have been kind of falling apart, but I was about to have dinner and drinks in a beer garden with an old friend and her kooky grandma, so it wasn’t all that bad.
Ash and Gwen were sitting at a table in the corner, and Ash waved me over with a beaming smile as soon as she saw me. “You’re here!”
I grinned and hugged them both. “Of course I am. I have to tell you everything I discovered today, don’t I?”
“I’m very annoyed you didn’t tell me about this,” Gwen said, pushing me to sit down. “I am an expert in all things sleuthing, and I could have been a great help.”
“Oh, you were,” I said, eyeing the cat on the table. “Let me guess—Tofu’s walkies coincided with dinner?”
“No,” Gwen replied brightly. “I just don’t like to leave him at home. He gets awfully sad without me, and he has his suncream on, so he can have a little snooze in the sunshine.”
“Of course,” I said, watching the walking chicken wing with a bit of confusion rattling around in my brain.
On the bright side, he wouldn’t get fur in my food. As far as cats went, he was the perfect dinner companion.
“What did you find out?” Ash asked, pushing a wine glass towards me.
I gladly took it and sipped, then relayed everything I’d discovered about Guy Quinn and Declan Tierney. I dove straight into the issues between Tierney and Michael Swann, then what little I knew about Alan’s connection to it all.
“I think there’s a lot there that I don’t know about yet,” I finished. “And I think finding out about their marriage is probably something better done on the grapevine. I doubt there’s much online.”
Gwen shook her head. “You’re right. I can’t say I know much about their relationship, but I know enough to give you both a starting point. Stephanie is quite a bit younger than Declan was—at least twenty years, I believe, maybe more.”
“I can’t imagine why they’re together,” Ash said dryly. “Her looks and his money, right?”
“Given how his first wife died, he probably wanted a trophy wife rather than one who’d get involved in his business,” I pointed out.
“Hmm. Do we really believe that was an accident?” Ash turned to me. “That’s a bit suspicious, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, but two people very close to him with a financial interest in his business getting hurt on one of his building sites? It’s definitely suspicious.” I paused. “As far as Alan’s concerned, it makes me wonder who’d get the company when he dies. Is he married?”
“Yes,” Gwen answered. “Been married for thirty years, but I knew Declan’s father. The man was a shark. He wanted Alan for his brains.”
“But he didn’t leave school with any qualifications,” Ash pointed out.
“Because he was working a full-time job to help support his parents,” her grandmother replied. “Alan is an extremely smart man. He’s been running that company practically single-handedly in terms of the books for years, even before his accident. Declan was the face of the business, but Alan was certainly the brains.”