love her.
She had replied:
It’s beauty that captures your attention -
personality which captures your heart.
She saw nothing untoward in the street all Sunday. No strangers watching her. No Ricky. Just the rain. Just people. Life going on.
Normal life.
Something she was – for just a short while longer, she promised herself – no longer a part of. But all that would be changing soon.
37
Rain rattled down on the roof and the van rocked in strong gusts of wind. Although he was well wrapped up, he was still cold in here, only daring to run the engine occasionally, not wanting to attract attention to himself. At least he had a comfortable mattress, books, a Starbucks nearby and music on his iPod. There was a public toilet close by on the promenade with an adequate washing facility and it was conveniently out of sight of any of the city’s CCTV cameras. Very definitely a public convenience.
He had once read a line in a book someone had given him which said, Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.
The book was wrong, he thought. Sometimes revenge could be fun too. Just as much fun as sex.
The van still had the FOR SALE note written in red ink on a strip of brown cardboard stuck in its passenger-door window, although he had actually bought it, for three hundred and fifty pounds cash, over two weeks ago. He knew Abby was sharp, and had observed her checking the vehicles daily. No point in removing the sign and alerting her to any change. So if the previous owner got pissed off with people phoning, wanting to buy it, tough. He hadn’t bought it because he needed transport. He had bought it for the view. He could see every window of her flat from here.
It was the perfect parking spot. The van had a valid tax disc and MOT and residents’ parking sticker. All of them ran out in three months’ time.
By then he would be long gone.
38
It was the same every damn time. Whatever confidence Roy Grace felt when he set off to come to this impressive place deserted him when he actually arrived.
Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was just a fifteen-minute drive from his office. But in atmosphere, it was on a different planet. Strike that, he thought as drove past the raised barrier of the security gate, it was in a whole different universe.
It sat within a ragbag complex of buildings on the outskirts of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, housing the administration and key management for the five thousand officers and employees of the Sussex Police Force.
Two buildings stood out prominently. One, a three-storey, futuristic glass and brick structure, contained the Control Centre, the Crime Recording and Investigation Bureau, the Call Handling Centre and the Force Command Centre, as well as most of the computing hardware for the force. The other, an imposing redbrick Queen Anne mansion, once a private stately home and now a Grade 1 listed building, was what had given its name to the HQ.
Although conjoined to the ramshackle sprawl of car parks, single-storey pre-fabs, modern low-rise structures and one dark, windowless building, complete with a tall smokestack, which always reminded Grace of a Yorkshire textile mill, the mansion stood proudly aloof. Inside were housed the offices of the Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable and the Assistant Chief Constables, of whom Alison Vosper was one, together with their support staff, as well as a number of other senior officers working either temporarily or permanently out of these headquarters.
Grace found a bay for his Alfa Romeo, then he made his way to Alison Vosper’s office, which was on the ground floor at the front of the mansion. It had a view through a large sash window out on to a gravel driveway and a circular lawn beyond. It must be nice to work in a room like this, he thought, in this calm oasis, away from the cramped, characterless spaces of Sussex House. Sometimes he thought he might enjoy the responsibility – and the power trip that came with it – but then he would always wonder whether he could cope with the politics. Especially the damned, insidious, political correctness that the brass had to kowtow to a lot more than the ranks.
The ACC could be your new best friend one day and your worst enemy the next. It had seemed a long time since she had been anything but the latter to Grace, as he stood now in front of her desk, used to the fact that she rarely invited visitors to sit down, in order to keep meetings short and to the point.
Today he was actually rather hoping he wouldn’t get invited to sit down. He wanted to deliver his angry message standing up, with the advantage of height.
She didn’t disappoint him. Giving him a cold, hard stare, she said, ‘Yes, Roy?’
And he felt himself trembling. As if he had been summoned to his headmaster’s study at school.
In her early forties, with wispy blonde hair cut conservatively short, and framing a hard but attractive face, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was very definitely not happy this morning. Power-dressed in a navy suit and a crisp white blouse, she was sitting behind her expansive, immaculately tidy rosewood desk with an angry expression on her face.
Grace always wondered how his superiors kept their offices – and their desks – so tidy. All his working life, his own work spaces had been tips. Repositories of sprawling files, unanswered correspondence, lost pens, travel receipts and out-trays that had long given up on the struggle to keep pace with the in-trays. To get to the very top, he had once decided, required some kind of a paperwork management skill for which he was lacking the gene.
Rumour was that Alison Vosper had had a breast cancer operation three years ago. But Grace knew that’s all it would ever be, just rumour, because she kept a wall around herself. Nonetheless, behind her hard-cop carapace, there was a certain vulnerability that he connected to. In truth, she wasn’t at all bad-looking, and there were occasions when those waspish brown eyes of hers twinkled with humour and he sensed she might almost be flirting with him. This morning was not one of them.
‘Thanks for your time, Ma’am.’
‘I’ve literally got five minutes.’
‘OK.’
Shit. Already his confidence was crumbling.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Cassian Pewe.’
‘Detective Superintendent Pewe?’ she said, as if delivering a subtle reminder of the man’s position.
He nodded.
She opened her arms expansively. ‘Yes?’
She had slender wrists and finely manicured hands, which seemed, somehow, slightly older and more mature than the rest of her. As if making a statement to show that although the police force was no longer a man-only world, there was still considerable male dominance, she wore a big, loud, man’s wristwatch.
‘The thing is…’ He hesitated, the words he had planned to deliver tripping over themselves inside his head.
‘Yes?’ She sounded impatient.
‘Well – he’s a smart guy.’
‘He’s a very smart guy.’
‘Absolutely.’ Roy was struggling under her glare. ‘The thing is – he rang me on Saturday. On Operation Dingo. He said you’d suggested that he call me – that I might need a hand.’
‘Correct.’ She took a dainty sip of water from a crystal tumbler on her desk.
Struggling under her laser stare, he said, ‘I’m just not sure that’s the best use of resources.’
‘I think I should be the judge of that,’ she retorted.
‘Well, of course – but-’
‘But?’
‘This is a slow-time case. That skeleton has been there ten to fifteen years.’
‘And have you identified it yet?’
‘No, but I have good leads. I’m hoping for progress today from dental records.’
She screwed the top back on the bottle and set it down on to the floor. Then she placed her elbows on the shiny rosewood and interlocked her fingers. He smelled her scent. It was different from the last time he had been here, just a few weeks ago. Muskier. Sexier. In his wildest fantasies he had wondered what it might be like to make love to this woman. He imagined she would be in total control, all of the time. And that as easily as she could arouse a man, she could rapidly make his dick shrivel in terror.