‘You have nothing to be fazed about.’ Something made her say, ‘I’ll let you in on a secret.’
He leant towards her, his expression unreadable.
‘Go on, then.’
‘When I worked with your dad, there was a bit of banter about the pair of us.’
‘Banter?’
‘Young woman, older man, you can fill in the blanks. The canteen culture thrives on gossip, preferably salacious. Of course, it was all made up. There was never anything personal between Ben and me. No relationship, I mean.’
‘He rated you as a detective. And he liked you.’
‘The feeling was mutual. But he never laid a finger on me.’
He checked his watch. Reluctantly, she hoped. But the conversation was straying into dangerous territory.
‘Marc will wonder what is keeping you.’
‘He won’t wait up.’
‘No?’ He frowned, but if he meant to say More fool him, he changed his mind. ‘I’d better let you go, all the same. Writing a book is a perfect excuse for not working office hours, but I suppose you’ll be up at the crack of dawn. Let me see you to your car.’
Outside, flecks of snow had begun to stick on the ground. The roads would be icy in the morning. When they reached the cars, he stopped in his tracks. The bright light of a security lamp illuminated his face, but she couldn’t see what was in his mind. She murmured goodnight and grasped the door handle. For a moment, he was motionless. Then a strange look came into his eyes and, in a smooth, swift movement, he bent forward and kissed her hard, full on the lips.
‘Goodnight, Hannah.’
He strode away and was starting up his car before she’d drawn breath. She sat in the driver’s seat, not switching on the engine, watching his tail lights disappear down the lane.
It took her five minutes to move off. How to deal with Marc? By the time she was back at Undercrag, it would be past eleven o’clock. The best guess was that he’d be up in bed in the spare room, like a teenager in a strop, punishing her for having the temerity to challenge him. One of these days, maybe he’d grow up.
As for Daniel, she’d made her first resolution of the New Year. She was determined not to feel guilty about him. Nor about the look in his eyes, something so rare and unexpected that it had taken a moment to recognise it as the gaze of a man who yearned for her, body and soul.
No lights shone from Undercrag as she pulled up outside. A fox scurried away as she jumped out of the Lexus. An owl hooted as she heaved open the garage door.
Marc’s car was nowhere to be seen.
She walked a hundred yards up and down the lane, to check that he had not, for some bizarre reason, parked outside the holiday cottages or under the trees. Of course, he hadn’t. The front door of the house was locked, a sure sign that he wasn’t inside. She checked the downstairs rooms to see if he’d left a message for her. He might have ventured out for a night drive, to clear his thoughts.
The house was as cold as a cemetery. Bare floorboards creaked, and the wind whistled through the windows yet to be replaced by double glazing. Only two of the bedrooms were habitable, and there wasn’t even a railing at the top of the stairs — the first floor was work in progress and the builders hadn’t started work again after their New Year break. Marc said there was an argument about an overdue payment. He said he didn’t owe a penny, and their accounts people had made a mistake.
Better check the first floor, just in case. But the instant she pressed the light switch by the staircase, the house plunged into darkness.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’
All of a sudden, this didn’t seem like home. Why had they come to Ambleside? Since moving in, they’d seen everything turn sour.
Picking her way down the steps to the cellar, she found the fuse box and the lights flicked back on. She ran back up and searched the bedrooms. Not a trace of him, but their best suitcase had vanished, along with some of his clothes. At least he’d left of his own accord, and wasn’t trussed up somewhere, the latest victim of whoever killed Stuart Wagg. But this wasn’t the comfort it should have been. She conducted a quick inventory and concluded that he’d taken enough to get by for several days. Maybe a week.
Bastard. He must be determined to make her sweat. They’d had rows before, plenty of them, but he’d never walked out on her. It was in his nature to fret about her friendships with other men — Ben Kind and Nick Lowther sprang to mind — but she hadn’t expected him to go overboard about Daniel. It wasn’t even as if anything had happened between them. Not counting the kiss.
Back in the kitchen, she filled a mug with coffee. Strong, black and scalding hot. Pinned up on the cork noticeboard by the filter machine was a photo of the two of them. He’d asked a fellow diner to snap them, in a restaurant outside Keswick where he’d taken her to celebrate her last birthday but one. They were laughing for the camera. His hand snaked around her waist. She had a bad habit of frowning when her picture was taken, but in this snap, neither of them looked as if they had a care in the world. She’d wondered if he kept it to remind himself that sometimes they could make believe they were a typical happy couple. Tonight they needed more than a photograph to bind them together.
Where could he be? Her best guess was that he’d run off to his mother’s in Grange-over-Sands. Mrs Amos would welcome him back with open arms. He was her pride and joy, and no woman was ever really good enough for him. The old lady had never been a member of Hannah’s fan club; as recently as their shopping expedition over Christmas, she’d mused aloud that there was something unfeminine about police work.
A phrase of Daniel’s sneaked back into her head. For once she shivered at the sound of his voice, as it echoed in her brain.
‘The man you’re looking for might be mad about books.’
Not Marc, surely.
It couldn’t be Marc.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Marc’s mother had suffered from insomnia ever since the day ten years ago when she woke up next to her husband to find that he’d died while she slept. She was up at five, and Marc lay in the room adjoining hers, listening as she shuffled about downstairs. All night, he’d tossed and turned, excited yet fearful that everything might go wrong.
Pale streaks of dawn crept through the curtains, furtive as trespassers. Birds chirruped on the branches outside. He levered himself from the warmth of the bed, shivering as he peered through the window. A haze hung over Morecambe Bay, but he saw none of the snow that had slanted down the previous evening as he drove from Ambleside to Grange. Perched on the slopes of the Cartmel Peninsula, the resort was sheltered by fells, and warmed by the Gulf Stream. It liked to think of itself as Cumbria’s Riviera. The climate was mild enough for a palm tree to have grown old in Mrs Amos’s small, steep front garden, although this morning, crystals of frost coated the leaves.
His mother had asked no questions when he phoned and asked for a room for the night. Give her half an hour, she’d said, and a bed would be made up and ready in his old room. She didn’t approve of Hannah’s job, and therefore of Hannah herself. He knew that, secretly, she would never think any woman good enough for him, but she contented herself with just an occasional snipe from the sidelines.
They breakfasted together, but he resisted her conversational gambits and, in silent reproach, she switched on the radio. He lingered over a second cup of milky tea, anxious to catch up with the local headlines. Police had confirmed that the body found in the grounds of Stuart Wagg’s house belonged to the well-known solicitor. Fern Larter explained that a witness had seen a small purple hatchback parked on the verge next to the house on the day of Wagg’s death, and asked the owner, or anyone who had seen the vehicle, to contact the police.