She allowed herself to consider it for a while, imagining herself as a glamorous newshound striding through a buzzing newspaper office, getting important phone calls from shadowy contacts and writing wild exposés that would make the front pages of papers the world over.
‘So what are you working on at the moment?’ she asked tentatively.
‘See? I can tell you like the idea,’ said Elliot, putting down his fork.
Abby laughed.
‘Well,’ he said more cautiously. ‘This week I’ve been looking into the mysterious world of Dominic Blake.’
She felt her bubble of good mood pop, but Elliot didn’t seem to notice.
‘You know how much my editor loved the Last Goodbye story. Well, he asked me to have a poke around.’
‘Elliot, you know how unhappy Rosamund Bailey was about it.’
‘Rosamund is a dignified, probably too cynical old lady who doesn’t want her private life splashed over the newspapers, and I can understand that. But it’s Blake I’m interested in. His story is fascinating. I’ve only had a quick dig around, but there’s a possibility he may not have died of natural causes.’
‘What do you mean? Murdered?’ she asked, aghast.
‘It’s pure speculation at this point, but I’ve been looking into his background. We know he was an explorer, of course, but that’s not all he was known for back in 1961. I pulled some files down in the paper’s cuttings library, and his name pops up again and again in the society gossip columns.’
‘A man after your own heart,’ she smiled.
‘Cheeky. Anyway, reading between the lines, it appears he was squiring a lot of socialites and heiresses around town, possibly some of whom were already married.’
Abby couldn’t believe he had found all this out in such a short space of time.
‘And what? You think a jealous husband got to him?’
Elliot lifted his glass and smiled.
‘Doubtful. Blake disappeared in the Amazon jungle, remember? That’s a long way from Mayfair. I imagine the cuckolded Earl of Whatnot would have preferred to run him over crossing Piccadilly or something.’
Abby grimaced. ‘So why do you think his affairs are relevant to his disappearance?’
‘Well, ladies like that, married or not, they’re not going to be a cheap date, are they? Expensive restaurants, hotel rooms, little gifts, it’s all going to mount up. Our hero wasn’t from money – he went to Cambridge on a scholarship, his father was a middle-ranking career soldier turned grocer after the war – but for his lifestyle, he seemed to need an awful lot of it. For a start, he’s listed as the co-founder of Capital magazine. Setting up a magazine isn’t cheap. My family knows that better than anyone. His expeditions, his playboy lifestyle. It doesn’t add up.’
‘And you have a theory . . .’
‘Drugs,’ he said bluntly.
‘Drugs?’
‘Blake spent a lot of time in South America – Bolivia, Colombia, Peru – just at the time when drug trafficking was exploding in the area. They were clearing huge swathes of the rainforest for cash crops – it was just that some had a higher cash value than others.’
She looked at him wide-eyed.
‘You think Dominic Blake was involved with drug-running?’
‘It would explain why he kept going back to that part of the world, and remember, it would have been much more straightforward to walk through an airport with drugs in those days. It was easy money really.’
Abby frowned, then shook her head.
‘It just seems . . . wrong. It doesn’t seem to fit.’
Elliot shrugged. ‘Maybe. All I’m saying is we can’t get carried away by the romance of that photo. The facts are that Dominic Blake was living the high life with no visible means of support. That money had to be coming from somewhere. And he was spending a lot of time going back and forth between Peru and Colombia and London.’
‘And this is the story you want to write?’ said Abby, feeling herself bristle. ‘That Dominic Blake was a drug dealer?’