by Peter James
But there was another thing really worrying him. It was the cryptic warning Sandy had written in her suicide note to him, about Bruno. He’d been fretting about this for days.
So please, when I am gone, take care of our son, Bruno.
He worries me; you’ll see what I mean.
Just what exactly had she meant by that?
14
Wednesday 20 April
‘Lorna! Lorna! Don’t do this to me! Baby. Baby. Lorna.’ He shook her, frantically. Then he looked at his watch. He was sweating heavily. Thirty minutes had passed. Lorna’s eyes were open, her pretty but often sad blue eyes, staring sightlessly up, clouded. A startled expression in them.
He was shaking. No. Jesus, no. This could not be happening. It just could not. It had to be a dream, a bad dream, a nightmare.
He was trying desperately to think clearly. Must not panic.
‘Baby,’ he whispered. ‘Come on, baby.’
He thought he saw a tiny flicker of movement. ‘Baby?’
Had he imagined it?
‘Lorna?’ He shook her again, pressed his lips to hers and gave her more breaths, then chest compressions.
The doorbell rang.
He froze.
There was a rap on the door.
He held his breath.
He glanced at his watch. 7.35 p.m. Who the fuck was calling at this hour? No one came here, no one but them.
Another rap.
Whoever was out there would know someone was in. Who was it?
He heard the rustle of paper. Shit, was someone coming in?
Shaking, he turned and saw a note had been pushed under the door. Tiptoeing across, he knelt and picked it up. It was a standard, printed form letter from a firm of electricians.
Dear Occupier,
We are currently working in this building. At the request of the landlord, we called today to make an appointment to upgrade the wiring in your flat. Please call us on the number below to arrange a convenient time for this work to be carried out.
Yours sincerely,
Gordon Oliver
Now it had his fingerprints on it, he realized. Idiot. Shaking almost uncontrollably, he folded it and pushed it into his trouser pocket, then went back to Lorna and stared down at her naked body. Her beautiful figure; her full breasts.
Fear gripped him, clawing at his skin, tightening his scalp. He gave one final try, his lips against her cold lips, then more compressions.
Nothing.
He peered into her eyes. Nothing. Then he felt again, hoping against hope for her pulse. There was none.
Behind him, somewhere below the falling darkness beyond the window, was a sharp squeal of brakes and angry hooting. He heard the cry of a gull. His brain raced, uselessly, showering fragments of thoughts.
Think.
CSI!
He went over to the kitchenette and tugged on the yellow rubber gloves Lorna used for washing up. Then, returning to her, he placed one arm below her knees, the other behind her back, and lifted her up. She was heavy, shite. She seemed much heavier dead than when she was alive. He staggered forward into the bathroom, where the acrid stench of burnt plastic seemed even stronger now, and laid her, clumsily, back in the bathtub. Water spilled over the edge, onto his suit trousers and his shiny black boots. Her head flopped forward, and in a way he was glad about that, glad that her eyes were no longer looking up at him.
But it didn’t look like an accident any more.
He repositioned her so that the back of her head was against the bloodstain on the tiles.
Could fingerprints be taken from a wet body? DNA?
With shaking hands he grabbed the sponge, soaped it, then washed her face, neck and every part of her body, trying to remove all his fingerprints, all traces of him.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry, my darling Lorna.’
All the time thinking.
Thinking.
Where else in here might his fingerprints be? His DNA?
When he had finished with her body, he took a bottle of bleach from the kitchen and wiped all around the surfaces of the bath. He was about to wipe away the smear of blood on the cracked tile, then hesitated. Better to leave it. He didn’t want to make it obvious someone had cleaned up.
He lifted the hairdryer out of the bath by its cord. Its air vents were blackened. Using a towel, he carefully and thoroughly wiped the casing to remove any fingerprints, curled the fingers of her right hand around the grip, then laid it back in the water, between her thighs.
To make it look like suicide or an accident. She electrocuted herself and in the shock her head flew backwards, striking the tiles. Yes.
He was in such turmoil, he was finding it hard to think clearly in any way. What had he touched since coming here? The front door to the flat, which he had pushed open. Her computer keypad, to wake it up to look at the photograph. Anything else?
Could his prints be found on her body?
Once more, with the sponge, he soaped the back of her knees and then her back, then wiped it all away. He wiped all around the washbasin, the loo handle, the seat.
What else?
Think. THINK.
He carefully rinsed out the sponge in the basin, looking around the tiny bathroom, then took a few paces back and stared at everything in the little flat. The place that had become the centre of his life. Where he had always looked forward so much to coming. To seeing the woman he truly loved.
He opened the fridge, where earlier he had put the bottle of Champagne, wiped it clean and replaced it. What else? What else?
There was a framed photograph of the two of them on the table, by the fruit bowl. One of them high up on Wolstonbury Hill, with miles of open Sussex countryside below them. He debated whether to simply remove the photograph, or take the whole thing. A frame with no photograph would look odd, wouldn’t it – to a trained eye? Evidence of someone trying to hide something.
His raincoat lay folded on the armchair. He put the photo frame, with the photograph still in it, on top, intending to conceal it with the coat as he left. Back in his car he’d rip up the photo and dispose of it in a bin, then the frame in another. He was starting to think more clearly, suddenly. THINK. THINK. THINK.
It was still not completely dark outside. Bloody British summer-time. Probably another half an hour before it would be fully dark. It was OK, his wife knew he was at work, he’d told her he would be home late.
He walked back into the bathroom. ‘Darling, you just got it so wrong,’ he said, quietly. ‘You did. I really was planning to leave her. I told you white lies, but I really, truly did believe we would have a life together.’
Oh God. What have I done? he thought.
Suicide?
Could the police believe she had committed suicide with the hairdryer?
His eyelids crushed his tears as he looked around the bathroom, checking it once more. What had he touched? To his horror, he saw the hairdryer plug lying in the sink. Shit! He pushed the pins back into the blackened wall socket and carefully wiped it.
What had he forgotten? Stepping back out of the bathroom he looked around again. The little dining table and the two chairs, where they’d eaten so many meals together, half naked, in the afterglow of having made love. Deliveries mostly. Pizzas; Chinese; Thai. He looked at the armchair. The fridge and kitchenette. The bed. Any other pictures? He checked. Just the two faded old Brighton prints, in their cheap frames, that had always been there as part of the flat’s meagre furnishings. However, her phone was a problem, her laptop another.
Her phone was a cheap pay-as-you-go job. The phone that she had told him her husband didn’t know about. Corin, she’d said, was insanely jealous and she was convinced he’d installed tracking software on her phone, somewhere. So when she came here to meet him, she left her iPhone at home, so it wouldn’t show any movement from the house, and only ever brought this one.
He picked it off the table, and studied it for a moment. His heart was still hammering and his hands shaki
ng. He looked through the list of dialled calls. They were all to his own private iPhone number. Then he looked at her received calls. They were all from withheld numbers. Glancing down at the times of them, all except two tallied with calls he had made to her. One of the exceptions was three days ago, on a day he had not seen her. Another was earlier today, just after 11 a.m. this morning. He wondered who that was, and knew he would never find out now. Probably her best friend, Roxy, who was the only person, so far as he believed, Lorna had ever told about their affair.
How much did Roxy know?
Next he went to her text messages, but there was nothing there. All of them were deleted, as he’d expected. She was terrified of her husband finding this phone. At least if he ever did, there would be nothing incriminating on it.
He pocketed the phone. It was unlikely anyone other than her best friend and himself would know about it. When he got to his car he’d remove the SIM card, drop it down a drain, and dump the phone in a bin.
Then he went back into the bathroom and stared at Lorna for some moments. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I’m just so sorry.’
Craving a cigarette, he stepped back into the living room, pulled a Silk Cut out and lit it. But it did nothing to calm him down. He smoked it down to the butt and crushed it out carefully in the one ashtray they had, a souvenir from Madeira that Lorna had brought along soon after they’d got this place. Putting spittle on it to ensure it was completely out, he dropped the butt into his pocket and looked at his watch again.
He had time, all the time he needed. Had to use it. Had to clear this place of any evidence he had ever been here. THINK. THINK. One good thing was they’d not had sex for nearly a month, because he’d been away on a course straight after getting back from holiday.
He’d read somewhere recently, in a newspaper, that forensics had discovered DNA could be found in bed bugs for up to forty days. It had been close to that amount of time since he had last been here, so he decided to take a chance and leave the bedding as it was, again not wanting it to look obvious the place had been forensically cleaned.
He continued to work through the flat, wiping the door handles, light switches, the CD player. Every glass in the kitchenette cabinet. The kettle, the Nespresso machine he’d bought Lorna as a present. The cups, mugs, spoons, knives, forks.
Thinking.
Thinking how to cover his tracks absolutely and completely. Thinking about what he needed to do. Slowly an idea was forming. He sat in the chair and lit another cigarette, thinking it through. Again, when he had smoked it down to the filter he stubbed it out and pocketed the butt.
He stood up and paced around. His idea could work. Would work.
It had to work.
But he needed total darkness for it.
Shit. A bit longer yet.
He looked at the news on his phone. Another terrorist atrocity in the Middle East. A harassed and distressed-looking surgeon in scrubs was talking to the camera. He switched it off. Sat back down. Stood up. Went back into the bathroom and stared at Lorna.
What had he done?
Calm down. Had to calm down. Had to think it all through. Then suddenly he flipped up the toilet lid and the seat, knelt and vomited violently. He stayed, staring into the spattered mess around the bowl. Remembered the words of some comedian, he couldn’t remember who it was, who said it didn’t matter what you had eaten, when you vomited you always threw up tomato skins and diced carrots. It had been funny then; it wasn’t funny now.
Nothing was funny now.
Nothing would ever be funny again.
The stench of vomit made him gag and he threw up once more. Then again. Retching just bile now.
Several minutes passed before he felt steady enough to stand. He flushed the toilet, wiped away the remnants still stuck to the bowl and flushed again, then used the toilet cleaner to squirt around the rim.
When he had finished he rinsed his mouth out with cold water and, glancing once more at Lorna’s motionless figure, backed out of the bathroom.
He remembered the chilled Champagne bottle, which he had bought from an off-licence on the way here, tempted to drink some to try to settle his nerves. But he daren’t open it, daren’t have alcohol on his breath in case he got stopped, driving. Then in his panic he couldn’t remember if he’d wiped it – his prints would be all over it.
He peeled off the off-licence’s price tag, which had a serial number on it, and put that in his pocket, wiped the bottle carefully and laid it back on a rack in the fridge. Then he sat down on the edge of one of the chairs at the little table and tried to think clearly. To think through the idea he’d had. Suicide might work. But he couldn’t rely on that, could he?
He’d done his best to remove any trace of his ever having been in the flat, without making it look too obvious. But he needed to cover his tracks better – perhaps by throwing a red herring into the mix. Point the police to her husband? She’d blown out their planned Monday reunion because that piece of shit had attacked her again. Make the police think it was domestic violence?
Yes, that might work.
And he knew one thing from Lorna about Corin which gave him a chance of doing just that.
15
Wednesday 20 April
As he continued to work his way around the little flat, wiping, wiping, the one thing he knew he had to do was to keep calm, keep thinking. Not miss anything. But, shit, that was hard. His brain felt like a library in an earthquake. All the shelves were vibrating, everything on them shaken loose. Cascading down.
THINK!
She wasn’t dead when he had left, was she? How long had he been gone, outside, pacing around? An hour at least? More? Long enough for someone to have entered after he’d left and –
Kill her?
Her bastard husband?
He stared down, as if the words of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ were lying at his feet.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . . .
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn . . .
And lose, and start again . . .
And never breathe a word about your loss . . .
That was all he needed to do. Keep his head. Just stand. Wait. Oh yes. He knew all about that. Shit happened. If you weren’t living on the edge you were taking up too much space. And if you did live on the edge you got the highs, but it was where the shit hit the hardest. So hard it stung.
You could wash the stuff off, wash the smell away. And if you were of a strong enough mindset, you could wash away the memory. Life breaks all of us, but afterwards some are strong in the broken places. He was trying to remember who had written that, or something like it. That’s what he needed to be right now. Strong in the broken place. He would be. Oh yes.
His mind was jumping all over the place. Focus. Had to focus. Calculate.
Panic made people screw up. Had to get rid of panic. And then just carry on as normal.
There was no other option. Well, not strictly true. Of course there was one.
But.
The other option was unthinkable.
16
Wednesday 20 April
Roy Grace looked guiltily at his watch and thought, grimly, how true that expression was about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It was 8.30 p.m. Yet here he was once again, in his office long past when he should have gone home. Sipping cold coffee, fretting about a crucial piece of evidence and waiting for a call from a Crown Prosecution lawyer to discuss it.
He took a moment out to schedule a timed Tweet, a ‘Happy Birthday’ greeting to DC Jack Alexander, who would be twenty-six tomorrow, then focused back on his work.
In a couple of weeks he had to go to the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court in London, for a plea hearing regarding his most recent case, a female sociopath – in his view – called Jodie Bentley,
who was currently on remand in London’s Bronzefield Prison. He had strong evidence that she had murdered a lover and then her husband, but he was pretty certain her death toll went beyond that. He still had hours of paperwork to read through. The barrister she’d hired, Richard Charwell, was a man he’d come up against before. Charwell had once ridiculed him in court for taking a piece of evidence in a murder trial – a shoe – to a medium. Although Grace had got the better of him under cross-examination in the witness box, the mud had stuck – and the killer had very nearly walked.
A canny, smart and manipulative lawyer, Charwell knew how to play a jury better than anyone Grace had encountered in his entire career. He had to make absolutely sure their prosecution case was belt and braces. This barrister was a man who could limbo dance a client below the smallest gap in a cell door.
Although the evidence against Jodie Bentley was strong, and the sometimes tricky Crown Prosecution Service had agreed, quickly, to bring a murder charge against her, it wasn’t watertight. There were plenty of holes for a smart barrister like Charwell to drive a coach and horses through. Grace knew this woman was guilty as hell. He was confident that taking the witness stand in front of a sensible jury, he could say enough to convince them beyond reasonable doubt. And yet he was painfully aware that a defence barrister’s job was to sow that doubt. For them it was a game. For the police it was the difference between a killer being put behind bars, or being free to roam the streets and kill again.
But juries were unpredictable, and never more so than now, when there was a lot of anti-police and anti-establishment sentiment. Some of it had been fostered by politicians, and some by the police themselves, after a series of bungled high-profile prosecutions of celebrities. He had no way of knowing how Charwell would play things in a future trial. His one certainty was that his immediate boss, Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe, would be watching like a hawk, ready to pounce on him for the way he had handled the case if it went badly, but of course taking the credit if it went well.