She was beginning to get a bit drunk. They both were.
‘Shall I open another bottle?’ Jennifer asked.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather call a cab and be bundled off to Barnes?’
‘Quite sure.’ Jennifer didn’t think that was a good idea at all.
‘Oh... Get another bloody bottle then.’ Anna gave in.
An hour or so later she called Dominic.
‘Don’t say anything on the phone,’ instructed Jennifer.
‘Do you think I’m effin’ daft?’ asked Anna in reply.
She had every intention of saying as little as possible to Dominic anyway. He would know she had drunk far too much as soon as she spoke, he always did.
When the two women had finished the second bottle, they prepared for bed.
‘Are you sure this blessed house is safe?’ asked Anna one last time.
‘Nobody could get in here, I promise you,’ said Jennifer.
‘And before I come up I shall put the alarm on down here. If a mouse coughs we will be wakened by the biggest racket you have ever heard — and it’s connected to the cop shop.’
‘Ah, to Marcus’s friends,’ murmured Anna.
She was slightly drunker than Jennifer, but then, she didn’t usually drink as much any more.
‘Go to bed,’ said Jennifer. ‘New toothbrushes, towels et cetera in the bathroom for you.’
Anna obediently hoisted herself up the stairs. Jennifer watched her with affection. At the top of the stairs, her friend turned. She stood above her holding the banister and swaying gently.
‘Have you got mice then?’ she asked.
‘Go to bed,’ said Jennifer once more, giggling in spite of everything.
Anna focused with difficulty, and all that whisky and red wine was starting to cause problems with her diction.
‘D’you remember when I told you Pelham Bay wasn’t Hollywood? Place ish more like bleedin’ Chicago! It’sh like a gangster movie, thish... The Pelham Connection...’
She threw her arms above her head in an extravagant theatrical gesture and nearly fell over.
‘Go to bed, Anna,’ said Jennifer yet again, this time as sternly as she could manage. But she was grinning broadly.
Dear Anna, what a good friend she was. Uncertainly Anna began to make her way along the landing to the bedroom she always used when she stayed with Jennifer. But she turned for one final time, and wagged a finger at Jennifer in what was supposed to be an imposing manner.
‘Jusht don’t unlock your bedroom windows,’ she ordered.
‘I won’t,’ promised Jennifer. ‘Good night.’
As she turned away, Anna called out: ‘Aren’t you coming up?’
‘I’ll be right behind you,’ said Jennifer. ‘Just something I want to do.’
She headed for the study where her laptop computer was still set up on the desk. She switched it on again and went to work. When she left the room fifteen minutes later, she was carrying a back-up floppy disc of all the material she had pumped into the machine over the last few days, as well as Marcus’s G7 disc. She entered the living room briefly to remove the micro tape from its recorder and then climbed the stairs. She could not resist peeping in at Pandora and then at Anna. Both were soundly asleep. Anna lying flat on her back. The booze had knocked her out. She was snoring. Jennifer smiled. It was reassuring to have them there with her, she had to admit. She went into her room and put the floppy discs and the tape on the bed, then she paused. It was no good — Anna had got her at it.
She left the room and toured the house, checking all the window locks, the bars downstairs, and that she had indeed part-set the burglar alarm. It would go off if anything moved downstairs, or if any of the locked or barred external doors and windows were tampered with. Everything was fine. The place really was totally secure. She had known that — but paranoia was obviously setting in. Back in her bedroom, she took the tape and the computer discs and put them both under her pillow.
‘Just in case,’ she said to herself, feeling faintly ridiculous.
Then she went into the connecting bathroom and brushed her teeth and cleaned her face. Old habits, she thought, even at a time like this. Finally she undressed and climbed gratefully beneath the goose-down filled duvet. Bliss. She was exhausted and she knew she could do no more that day, so she may as well give in to sleep. If Todd did call during the night, there was a bedside extension and she would wake up when the phone rang. If not she would deal with it all in the morning.
She could not even think about Marcus any more. She had to have sleep. Even as she was falling exhausted into her bed, she had wondered whether sleep would be possible. Amazingly it was. A combination of the relief of having shared her burden, of the close proximity of her best friend sleeping peacefully in the next room, and the soporific effect of two bottles of red wine preceded by rather a lot of whisky overwhelmed her.
She fell quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep. Her first proper sleep since the nightmare had begun.
Twenty One
Marcus removed the incriminating tape from the smashed recorder he had taken from Jennifer, extracted it from its plastic casing, cut it into several pieces with sharp scissors and fed the remains to the waste disposal unit in his kitchen sink. He stood by it until the grinding finished, only then satisfied that the tape had been effectively destroyed. He was still stunned by what had happened. What a crazy fool he had been, ruled by his cock yet again. If she had not told him about the tape, she could have broken him. Brought down by her own self-indulgence, he supposed.
Then a thought struck him — Jennifer should have remembered how streetwise he was. Even with ‘The Friends’ behind you, men did not achieve what Marcus had achieved without a quick and brilliant brain which continued to operate under extremes of pressure.
Christ, he thought suddenly, what do photographers and reporters do if they think someone might try to stop them getting a picture or a story? They have two cameras, two tape-recorders; the old double-bluff. He had done it himself often enough when he’d been on the road. So had Jennifer used that trick on him? He did not know; he must think this through.
There really was no other evidence, was there? The copy of Bill Turpin’s notebook was still on the kitchen table. The original was presumably already with the police, but it meant nothing without the appropriate software. Software. He decided to be methodical. He went into his study to check that nothing had been touched. It all looked in order, but suddenly, and with dazzling clarity, he became quite frighteningly sure that he had left the G7 floppy disc in the drive of the IBM computer the last time he’d used it. He remembered the phone ringing just as he finished editing a document, and when he returned to the computer to close it down he had been preoccupied. He checked the drive. Nothing. A little shakily he unlocked one of his big filing cabinets and began checking through his store of floppy discs. The G7 disc was missing.
He relocked the cabinet, sat down at his desk and went over and over what had happened and what it could mean. The computer disc alone would not be enough to incriminate him, would it? It would not necessarily lead back to him at all, but it would have his fingerprints on it. Still, that could probably be dealt with. It wouldn’t put him in the dock for murder, anyway. But if she still did have a tape? The more he considered it, the more he became convinced that the bitch really had outsmarted him. Two of a kind, he thought.
It was not the first time he had underestimated Jennifer. It would definitely be the last. He realised he was sweating, although it was quite cool in the flat. Jennifer would have been interested to see that he could sweat out of bed. He was also shaking quite badly now.