Sally swallowed. Her mouth was dry. But she didn’t let it show. She went to the car boot and began to get out her cleaning equipment.
‘I’m only pulling your leg, girl.’
She took out the black attaché case she kept her notepads and pencils in and, without waiting, set off up the path, followed by David, who huffed and puffed and muttered darkly about people with no sense of humour. Inside the house was filled with the smell of bread. He must have been cooking, using the three hundred pounds’ worth of automatic bread-maker that sat next to the coffee machine in the kitchen. Sally sucked at the air, pulling it down into her lungs, willing it to calm her. The smell of food always made her nerves go away.
‘Know what, Sally?’ David said, when they got to the office. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have the feeling Sally Benedict doesn’t hold David Goldrab in very high esteem. Because that’s the way the world works, ain’t it? Now, you probably grew up in some place with turrets and stables. Me? Well, there were towers and drawbridges in my past too – a tower block with a fucking great iron security door to stop the junkies off the Isle of Dogs breaking in and shitting in the lift. Which never worked anyway, whether it got used as a toilet or not. Seventeenth floor and no hot water, no heating.’
He sat on his swivel chair, unstrapped the heart monitor, plugged it into the back of a white Sony laptop and began downloading his day’s workout readings. Then he used his heels to kick himself across the room to a larger desktop computer and switched it on.
‘1957 – that was when I was really born, not 1983, in case I had you fooled there. Youngest of three boys – it was two to a bed in those days, a mattress on the floor, and count yourself lucky if you got one scabby little square inch of peeling wallpaper to stick your posters on. Always getting your dick groped – had to sleep like this.’ He put his hands over his crotch and bent at the waist as if he’d just taken a cricket ball in the groin. ‘Oldest brother turned into a drunk at thirteen. Mum never even noticed, she was that taken up with herself and her own bloody misery. He’d come home shit-faced and crash on top of us. Can still smell him, the miserable cunt. One morning I wake up and the bed’s wet. He’s wet the fucking bed, and the moment I sit up in bed, see him lying there all covered in puke and blood and his own piss but still breathing, still snoring, I know for sure that if it takes every inch of my energy, every drop of my sweat, if I have to eat shit, kill for it, I’m going to get out of there – find my own space. My Lebensraum.’
He opened his hands to indicate the grounds outside the window. From there the hills rolled away. There was hardly anything, just a few telegraph poles in the far distance, to indicate that there were any other human beings on the planet. The gate Millie had gone through was surrounded by trees throwing giant shadows on to the grass below. She was nowhere to be seen.
‘Lebensraum,’ he repeated. ‘What Hitler wanted. Sometimes, you know, you have to wonder if Hitler didn’t have a point. And there’s me, Jewish name, and plenty of Jew blood in me, though not as pure as my arse of a father would’ve liked it – and I’m thinking Hitler had a point! My ancestors, God rest your souls, put your fingers in your ears, but Hitler was a vegetarian. And he did like animals. And most of all he liked space. Space to breathe, space to live, space to sleep. Space not to be groped and pissed on by your slag of a brother. And that’s what you’re here for, Sally, to run my Lebensraum. And to keep it like that. Peaceful. Lacking in human clutter.’
The heart monitor had finished downloading its data. David spent some time studying it. Then, seeming satisfied, he switched off the computer.
‘Course,’ he said, with a half-glance up at her, ‘if I had my druthers I’d have a woman in my life, little golden-haired thing with big knockers, a good head for figures, and a problem in the nymphomaniac department. But I know women – most of you’ve only got one thing on your mind, and it doesn’t begin with S. So, Sally, come and sit here.’ He drew another chair up next to him in front of the computer. ‘Come here and let me show you what I want you to do.’
Sally sat next to him. He smelt vaguely of sweat and aftershave. She couldn’t stop thinking about the women in the Balkans, about whether he’d told them his life story.
‘Now …’ he waved a hand around the office ‘… this is Tracy Island – the nerve centre of Goldrab Enterprises. We’re sitting in the personal section. That, over there, that’s the money-making part.’
He was pointing to where a desk sat piled high with files and another computer. There was a filing cabinet next to the desk and, mounted above that, a huge monitor showing the view of the driveway from the security camera in the front. Once she’d been cleaning here and had noticed a pile of paperwork on top of that cabinet. She hadn’t looked too closely but she recalled invoices in a foreign language. The name Priština had jumped out. At the time she’d thought it was the name of a city in Russia. Now, thinking about what Steve had said, she guessed it must be Kosovo.
‘Sally, I don’t want you going home with the idea I don’t trust you, because of course I do. But you won’t mind me pointing out that my work is confidential. I prefer to keep it that way. In other words, if I catch you snooping around there I’ll shoot you in the fucking eye.’ He gave a fat, pleased smile when he saw her reaction. ‘A joke. Another joke. Jesus, the sense-of-humour fairy is definitely AWOL this morning, ain’t she? Now, on this computer I keep the database for the house. See? So this is where you work. You enter the invoices here, and the receipts here. It’s not rocket science. You make the calls, get the estimates, organize the workers. Just try to make it so everyone comes on the same day so I’m not running around every morning thinking, I’ve got to get my drawers on pronto cos the bleeding plumber’s on his way.’
‘OK,’ she said quietly.
‘And smile, for fuck’s sake. Crack a bleeding smile. It’s like looking at a shagging slapped arse, looking at you—’
He broke off and jerked to his feet, staring at the CCTV monitor on the wall. ‘Holy Jesus,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘The scabby little bumsucker.’
On the lane outside was parked a small Japanese jeep in a metallic purple, with shiny chrome bull-bars. Sally stared at it. The dealer from Kingsmead? It couldn’t be. Here at David Goldrab’s? As if he’d followed them? The window opened and an arm came out, jabbing at the keypad on the gate. It was him. She recognized the hair and the suntan. She spun round and stared out of the window. Millie had appeared on the lawn. Maybe she’d already seen the pheasants, maybe she wasn’t interested anyway, but for some reason she had settled on the grass, lying on her stomach, her phone in both hands, busily texting or browsing, or updating her Facebook page. Sally got up, dithering, not sure what to do, whether to run through the kitchen and yell, or to get her phone and call her.
On screen the man was still jabbing in numbers, though evidently he didn’t know the code, because the gates stayed resolutely closed. David didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head, a nasty smile on his face. ‘Oh, Jake,’ he said, to the monitor. ‘Jake the Peg. You didn’t ought to be coming back here, mate. No. You really didn’t ought to be doing that.’
Chapter 24
Taking casts of footprints and comparing them to shoes was generally one of the quicker jobs forensics teams did. No waiting around for lengthy lab tests. By eleven o’clock that morning the results from the canal path had come back. The prints Zoë had found last night had been made by Lorne Wood. And when the police looked at the path that led away from the gap in the trees they saw there was only one route she could have taken to get there. From the canal the track led through a small wooded area, then along a path that ran between two horse paddocks, under a railway bridge and out to a bus stop. Nowhere near the shops. Lorne had lied to her mother about where she had been that Saturday and, in Zoë’s book, if a person could lie about something like that, there was no knowing what else they could lie about – the fibs could roll on and on, as far as the horizon.