He gripped her head tightly, pulling her mouth hard against his. Feeling her silky skin entwined around his. Feeling her insanely beautiful, lithe body. Sometimes she felt like a stunning, pedigree racehorse. Sometimes – now – as she suddenly broke her mouth away and stared at him in tense concentration, he saw a vulnerable little girl.
‘You won’t ever hurt me, will you, Roy?’ she asked plaintively.
‘Never.’
‘You’re incredible, you know that?’
‘You’re more incredible.’ He kissed her again.
She gripped the back of his head, pressing her fingers in so hard they hurt. ‘I want you to come staring into my eyes,’ she whispered intently.
Some time later he woke up, his right arm hurting like hell, and blinked, disoriented, unable to figure out for a moment where he was. Music was playing. A Dido song he recognized. He was staring up at a square glass tank. A solitary goldfish was swimming through what looked like the remains of a submerged miniature Greek temple.
Marlon?
But it wasn’t his fish tank. He tried to move his arm, but it was dead, like a big lump of jelly. He shook it. It wobbled. Then a tangled fuzz of blonde pubic hairs filled his eye-line. The view was replaced by a glass of whisky.
‘Sustenance?’ Cleo said, standing naked over him.
He took the glass in his good hand and sipped. God, it tasted good. He put it down and kissed her bare ankle. Then she lay down and snuggled up beside him. ‘OK, sleepyhead?’
Some life was returning to his arm. Enough to put it around her. They kissed. ‘Wassertime?’ he asked.
‘Two fifteen.’
‘I’m sorry. I – I didn’t – didn’t mean to fall asleep on you.’
She kissed each of his eyes in turn, very slowly. ‘You didn’t.’
He saw her beautiful face, and her blonde hair, in soft focus. Breathed in sweet scents of sweat and sex. Saw the goldfish again, swimming around, oblivious of them, having whatever kind of a good time a goldfish had. He saw candles burning. Plants. Funky abstract paintings on the walls. A wall-to-ceiling row of crammed bookshelves.
‘Want to go up to bed?’
‘Good plan,’ he said.
He tried to stand up, and it was then that he realized he was still half-dressed.
Shedding everything, holding Cleo’s hand in one hand and his tumbler in the other, he climbed, leadenly, up two flights of steep, narrow wooden stairs, then flopped on to a massive bed, with the softest sheets he had ever felt in his life, and Dido music still pumping out.
Cleo wrapped herself around him. Her hand slid down his stomach and wrapped around his genitals. ‘Is Big Boy sleepy?’
‘A little.’
She held the whisky to his lips. He sipped like a baby.
‘So, how was your day? Or would you like to sleep?’
He was trying to put his thoughts together. It was a good question. How the hell was his day?
What day?
It was coming back. Bit by bit. The eleven o’clock emergency briefing. No one had anything significant to report, except for himself. Brian Bishop’s move from the Hotel du Vin to the Lansdowne Place – and the strange explanation he had given.
‘Complicated,’ he said, nuzzling up against her right breast, taking her nipple in his mouth and then kissing it. ‘You are the most beautiful woman in the world. Did anyone ever tell you?’
‘You.’ She grinned. ‘Only you.’
‘Goes to show. No other man on this planet has any taste.’
She kissed his forehead. ‘Actually, this may come as a surprise from a slapper like me, but I haven’t tried them all.’
He grinned back. ‘Now you don’t need to.’
She looked at him quizzically, shifted herself around and propped her chin up on one hand. ‘No?’
‘I missed you all week.’
‘I missed you too,’ she said.
‘How much?’
‘Not going to tell you – I don’t want it going to your head!’
‘Bitch!’
She raised her free left hand in the air and curled the index finger, provocatively mimicking a limp dick.
‘Not for long,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘You are totally wicked.’
‘You make me feel wicked.’ She kissed him, then moved back a few inches, studying his face carefully. ‘I like your hair.’
‘You do?’
‘Uh huh. Suits you. I do, I really like it!
He blushed slightly at the compliment. ‘I’m glad. Thank you.’
Glenn Branson had been going on about his hair for as long as he could remember, telling him it needed a makeover, and had finally booked him an appointment with a very hip guy called Ian Habbin, at a salon in Brighton’s most fashionable quarter. For years Grace had just had his hair clipped to a short fuzz by a mournful, elderly Italian in an old-fashioned barber’s shop. It had been a new experience to have his hair shampooed by a chatty young girl in a room hung with art and pounding with rock music.
Then Cleo asked, ‘So, Sunday lunch with your sister – Jodie, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me about her? Is she protective of you? Am I going to get the third-degree interrogation? Like, Is this old slapper good enough for my brother?’ She grinned at him quizzically.
Grace took a large gulp of whisky, trying to buy time to compose his thoughts and his response. Then he took another gulp. Finally he said, ‘I’ve got a problem.’
‘Go on.’
‘I have to go to Munich on Sunday.’
‘Munich? I’ve always wanted to go there. My friend Anna-Lisa, who’s an air hostess, says it’s the best place in the world to buy clothes. Hey, I could come with you! Check out some cheap tickets on easyJet or something?’
He cradled the glass. Took another sip, wondering whether to tell her a white lie or the truth. He didn’t want to lie to her, but at this moment it seemed to be less hurtful than telling her the truth. ‘It’s an official police visit – I’m going with a colleague.’
‘Oh – who?’ she was staring at him hard.
‘It’s a DI from another division. We’re meeting to discuss a six-month exchange of officers. It’s an EU initiative thing,’ he said.
Cleo shook her head. ‘I thought we’d made a pact never to lie to each other, Roy.’
He stared back at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes, feeling his face flushing.
‘I can read you, Roy. I know how to read you. I can read your eyes. You taught me – remember? About that right and left stuff. Memory and construct.’
Grace felt something drop deep inside his heart. After some moments’ hesitation, he told her about Dick Pope’s possible sighting of Sandy.
Cleo’s response was to pull away sharply from him. And suddenly he felt a chasm between them as large as the one separating Earth from the moon.
‘Fine,’ she said. She sounded like she had just bitten into a lemon.
‘Cleo, I have to go there.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘I don’t mean it like that.’
‘No?’
‘Cleo, please. I—’
‘What happens if you find her?’
He raised his hands hopelessly. ‘I doubt that I will.’
‘And if you do?’ she insisted.
‘I don’t know. At least I’ll have found out what happened to her.’
‘And if she wants you back? Is that why you lied to me?’
‘After nine years?’
She rolled away from him and lay facing the far wall.
‘Even if it is her, which I doubt.’
Cleo was silent.
He stroked her back and she shrank further from him.
‘Cleo, please!’
‘What am I – something to tide you over until you find your missing wife?’
‘No way.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Totally and utterly.’
‘I don’t believe you.’