He was sorry he’d lost his rag. He never normally lost it, ever. She knew that. All the sympathy he had shown her over these past lovely months. All those afternoons and early evenings when they had lain in bed, entwined, talking about that monster, Corin, and their future together.
Please, please don’t let her have made that call. Please. Please don’t. My career. God, my career.
He realized he needed to hurry back, to stop her.
They’d both been mad, totally out of character; she’d bloody started it. But surely they could work through this, sort it out? She had been angry, OK, he could understand. It wasn’t the way it looked, really it wasn’t. He’d explain to her, when they were both calmed down. Then everything would be how it always had been between them.
He loved her. He wanted a life with her. They were soulmates. So often he had told her that and she’d looked into his eyes and said the same back to him.
He reached the block of flats, let himself in the front door and climbed the stairs, not wanting to risk getting stuck in the lift. Lorna had once been stuck in it for three hours.
Back inside the flat, he closed the front door and called out, a tad apprehensively, ‘Lorna? Darling?’
Silence.
The room was dim, with no lights on and no music playing.
He didn’t like the silence.
Nor that he could not see her.
‘Lorna?’
He pressed the light switch on the wall but nothing happened.
‘Lorna!’ he called out again, walking towards the bathroom. ‘Lorna, darling?’
Had she left? Gone home?
Oh God, Lorna, please still be here.
Then, entering the dark bathroom, he smelled burnt plastic. Where on earth was she? Shit. He felt sick with fear. He went back into the living room and dialled her phone. Seconds later he jumped as he heard it vibrating right behind him.
His panic deepened.
She always had the phone with her, on silent. So they could talk whenever she could get away from Corin.
He switched on the torch app on his phone and went back into the bathroom, walking slowly. Slowly. Pointed the beam at the water.
Saw the cable.
And froze.
Lorna lay back in the tub, where he had left her. Beneath the surface of the water. Looking utterly, stunningly beautiful.
Utterly motionless.
The hairdryer in the bath with her.
No. Oh please, no.
His heart plunged down through his insides. He saw the cable, and the blackened plug socket.
Noticed again the acrid smell of burnt plastic.
He dived for the socket and yanked the plug out of it.
‘Lorna!’ he cried. ‘Lorna! Lorna!’
Christ. Had he done that? Had it fallen in, during his earlier fury?
He tried, desperately, to replay exactly what had happened. No, surely not, it wasn’t possible, was it? He hadn’t done that?
Please, God, no!
He lifted her out of the bath and laid her on the sitting-room floor, kneeling on the carpet beside her. There was still some daylight outside, just enough to see in this part of the flat. ‘Lorna? Lorna?’
He pressed his mouth to hers, frantically trying to recall everything he had learned about CPR in the last refresher course he had done, and began to alternate mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions, a rhythmic thirty pumps, two breaths, thirty pumps, two breaths, thirty pumps, two breaths, his panic growing deeper by the second.
13
Wednesday 20 April
Roy Grace’s anxiety was growing deeper by the second. Tomorrow afternoon he was due to fly to Munich to meet Bruno. He knew very little about the boy. He had some information from the German lawyer and from Anette Lippert, the mother of Bruno’s friend, Erik, with whom Bruno was currently staying. And he’d had a couple of stilted phone conversations with him, not really knowing what to say, after his attempts at Skyping with him had failed.
He didn’t even know Bruno’s birthday, at this moment, and he had only seen a few photographs, including one taken a couple of years ago in a park, with Sandy, that had been emailed to him by Anette. But fortunately Bruno spoke good English. In the photographs he was nice-looking, neatly dressed, but with a deep sadness in his expression that the smile he had put on for the camera could not hide.
All he really knew, from what Sandy had written in her suicide note to him, was that this child was the reason why she had disappeared all those years back, leaving Roy bewildered and distraught — and searching for her for the last decade.
He felt totally ill-equipped to take Bruno on. How was the small boy going to feel meeting his father for the first time? How would he feel about leaving Munich and coming to England? To live with an entirely new family?
Should he take him to attend the burial of his mother? He’d talked to a child psychologist friend of Cleo, who told him he should, that it would be important for him to have a sense of closure with his mother, and to have a place he could return to in future years to pay his respects.
There was another problem for him. Sandy had left no instructions on whether she wanted to be buried or cremated, as was often the practice in German wills. He remembered once, many years ago, they’d discussed it briefly out at dinner one night, when the subject of death had come up — the husband of an old friend of Sandy’s had drowned in a sailing accident on holiday. He was pretty sure Sandy had said she didn’t care, that when you were dead your spirit departed from your body, leaving it an empty shell. She didn’t care what happened to her shell. Roy and her parents had decided that burial would provide somewhere more tangible for Bruno to visit than a name on a crematorium memorial wall or a plant in a Garden of Remembrance.
He was in his office, with his workload of Crown Prosecution files in front of him. He was meant to be preparing for an important forum here in half an hour. Present would be DC Emma-Jane Boutwood and Emily Denyer — Emily Gaylor’s new married name — to discuss the financial aspects of the forthcoming trial of ‘black widow’ Jodie Bentley. But he was unable to concentrate on anything other than what would happen in Munich tomorrow.
Now that he and Cleo were married and had a son of their own, Noah, life was good. Or had been until the events of the past few weeks, when Sandy had surfaced in a hospital in Munich after being hit by a taxi, and had then committed suicide, leaving him the note informing him they had a son, Bruno.
And, suddenly, his life was turned upside down.
A son he had never known about, but now had no option but to care for. Permanently.
He picked up his phone and dialled a police friend and colleague, recently promoted Superintendent Jason Tingley, who had a son, Stan, of a similar age to Bruno. He asked him a load of questions about what a boy of ten might be interested in. Tingley was helpful and gave a large amount of information and advice, but Roy ended the call feeling even more worried. So much had changed; the world for a child today was so very different from how it had been for him.
Apart from football, Stan Tingley’s world was one Grace knew virtually nothing about, and it revolved around few of the things he was familiar with. Stan had a vocabulary of slang; Snapchat and Instagram were his social media platforms. He rarely watched conventional television, instead he used the screen to play FIFA and a shooting game on his PlayStation. And he had his own YouTube channel. Tingley offered for the two boys to meet, inviting Bruno to come over to their home. Maybe the boys would click and become friends, Grace hoped. Finding friends for Bruno and getting him into a school where he’d be happy were going to be priorities.