Anna marshalled every bit of self-control to stop herself from screaming at him, screaming that he was hers, that no one else was having any piece of him and if any stupid tart tried sticking her tongue down his throat then she, Anna, would put a very definite stop to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small voice, getting out of the car, taking his hand and pulling him towards her.
He shook her off in annoyance. ‘That’s not fucking good enough, Anna. Your mad bitch from hell act has lost me that job and probably quite a few others.’
She took hold of his hand again. ‘I really am sorry. Forgive me?’
He looked into the sharp green eyes. There was something a little weird in them, he thought.
‘How about we go to Room 21 and forget all about it,’ she whispered.
He wanted to ask if she was crazy but he was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that question. He turned on his heel and went back to work.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Harry struggled to understand what it was he had just witnessed. It had been an astonishing drama and he knew it was crucial in helping him discover what was going on.
He was sitting in his silver Volvo estate in the Greene House Hotel car park. The taxi had been parked close by and he had slid low in the driver’s seat while the man who had been fighting with Anna came over to it with the two passengers. Harry had opened his window a fraction but hadn’t managed to catch any of the conversation. He didn’t think there’d been much. The woman had looked icy, like she couldn’t wait to get away.
He could see Anna sitting in her car, slumped across the steering wheel with her head lying dejectedly on her arms. He had spent the day following her. No doubt Laura Maxwell would call it ‘stalking’. It was risky, very risky, but he couldn’t fuss about that. Things were bad enough already and he’d have to take risks if he was going to save himself.
Martha had been collected early that morning by the family who were taking her to London. Anna stayed put at home and he assumed that, with her daughter away, she had nowhere particular to go. He remembered she didn’t have a lot of girlfriends, but he kept hoping she might visit the boyfriend or he would visit her. It had been looking like a cold and dull waste of time and he was thinking of getting something to eat, when she came out, got in her car and drove to the hotel.
He had been to Greene’s a couple of times for business lunches but had always come by taxi and had no idea of the size of the car park. He took a gamble following his wife’s car into the enclosed space, fingers crossed that she wouldn’t spot him. Until then, he’d been careful to keep his distance and he was relieved to find the car park was large and he could slot into an empty place well away from where his wife parked.
She sat in her car for almost an hour. It was too far away for him to see her clearly, and although he had binoculars with him, he didn’t dare use them. He saw her get out of the car, walk to the door of the hotel as if she was going in, then hesitate and go round the side of the building, stopping to peer in windows as she went. It was bizarre. Who was the stalker now? he wondered grimly. He thought she was heading for the front entrance, but not long after, he saw her coming back through the grounds still looking in windows on the way.
Suddenly, she stopped dead in her tracks, staring hard. Moments later all hell kicked off and she was running towards the car park door, beating on it and screaming. He had no idea why, but he heard her yelling, though he couldn’t make out the words.
He didn’t recognize the man who came out and tried to calm her down, nor the couple with him, but he could see the man was very angry with Anna. It was obvious, too, that they knew each other pretty well.
It was a puzzle, but now he would have to stop thinking about it because Anna’s car was on the move and he had to decide whether to follow her or go into the hotel and track down the man.
He chose the hotel, waited until his wife had left, then walked round to the main entrance and into the lobby. The receptionist was busy with some guests so he sauntered casually past and into the hotel proper. He turned left down the corridor sign-posted to the dining room, found it empty, the last of the lunchtime stragglers had gone. He carried on and stood by the door to the car park, returned and investigated another corridor with an office and a conference suite.
He was about to knock on the office door when he heard someone coming along the corridor behind him.
‘Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?’ It was the receptionist. He read the name ‘Ellie’ on the badge she was wearing.
‘I’m interested in what conference facilities you have,’ Harry gestured towards the suite.
‘I can give you our brochure and maybe you’d like to talk to one of our organizers about exactly what you’re looking for?’ she said, heading back towards reception.
He followed her and waited at the desk while she got him the brochure, telling her he was the managing director of a local housebuilding company.
‘Pelvale Homes. You might know it, Ellie?’ Harry said.
‘Yes, of course, I’ve seen it all over the place,’ she smiled at him. Joe had told her to always flatter a potential customer.
She picked up the phone, dialled Joe’s extension, explained there was a client who might want to hire the conference suite. He sounded delighted. She knew his earlier meeting had ended badly though she didn’t know why. Strange, because it had seemed to be going well. She liked Joe a lot. He had brought some fun and a little bit of glamour to life at Greene’s hotel and she wanted him to succeed. She kept smiling at the pushy man in front of her.
‘Can I just take your name, sir?’
Joe, still on the other end of the phone, heard the reply and the smile left his face. Anna’s husband, here in the hotel only a short time after she had left.
‘Sorry, Ellie, I can’t see him just now. Can you ask Simon,’ he put down the receiver fast.
Joe didn’t believe in coincidence. This was not good news, he felt sure.
Ellie dialled again. The man was leaning towards her, a little too much in her face. Simon, the hotel manager, answered her call, said, yes, he’d be round at once to talk to Harry.
Harry waited, flicking through the brochure.
‘Business good?’ he asked, conversationally.
Ellie said it was.
‘I used to know a guy who worked here,’ Harry smacked his hand on his forehead. ‘Can’t get his name. Tall guy, black hair. Maybe you know him?’
‘I can’t really say, sir, there’s a few fit that description,’ she said.
The manager arrived and he certainly wasn’t the man in the car park. Harry strung it all out as long as possible, asked to see round the conference area, asked to see round the hotel. He sat in the bar for an hour or so, slowly sipping at a beer, positioned where he could see passers-by, but there was no sign of the man he was looking for. At 6 o’clock he reluctantly decided to give it up.
Ellie was at reception when he was leaving and he waved to her.
‘Have you found what you want?’ she asked.
‘I’ve certainly come pretty close,’ he gave a rather twisted smile.
‘Great. Just give me a call if you decide to book or, if I’m not here, talk to Joe Greene. He runs the conferences.’
If there was business in this, Ellie wanted Joe to have it. It was a shame he’d been too busy to see the man; she was sure he was a lot more charming than Simon.
Harry turned round on his way to the door and stared at her.
‘Joe Greene, you say.’ He emphasized the ‘Joe’
‘Yes, he’s one of the owners.’
‘Is he here now?’
‘You’ve just missed him. He left about ten minutes ago.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The vet had left a message to call, and when Laura rang back, she found him increasingly agitated by Valentine’s condition. Two of Valentine’s ‘four more days’ were gone; after that, in all conscience, she could not let the horse suffer an
y more. Laura sat with her head in her hands asking herself the dreadful question, should she even wait that long?
The shrill ring of the phone on her desk startled her and she picked it up cautiously as if it might explode in her face. Her fear-ridden mind felt slow and clumsy. It trailed round and round on the same track, like a hamster on a wheel, unable to come up with any new thought about what was happening to her or what she could do about it. She would have to get a grip, she knew; pull out of this passive state of terror.
She heard a foreign voice with a heavy accent and her mind was so preoccupied with her own problems that she couldn’t immediately place it.
‘Laura, you cannot have forgotten me so soon.’ he said, laughing.
She remembered then. It was Karim Chehoudi, the lawyer from Tunis.
‘I’m sorry, Karim, there’s been a lot happening here’ she got herself together, ‘But it’s always lovely to hear from you.’
‘You are flattering me, I think. But you will be pleased to hear my news, I’m sure of that.’
He’d had a tip off. The boy, Ahmed, and his father were booked on a flight to Istanbul in three days’ time. They were spending a week with relatives before returning to Tunis. He waited for the information to sink in, waited for her to understand, was disappointed when she didn’t pick up on it at once. She was usually such a smart lady. ‘Laura, this is Turkey we are talking about. Turkey has signed the Convention.’
She came to life then, concentrating on what he was saying. Fear retreated a step from her immediate thoughts. Of course, he was right. It was that small chance she had been hoping for, that the boy would set foot in a country that had signed the child abduction treaty. If she could get a court order issued urgently, get it served by immigration officials when the pair arrived in Istanbul, the boy could soon be back in England. For the first time in a long time she sniffed success, felt the rush she always felt when she won a case against the odds.
‘Thank you, Karim, I’ll get onto it at once. I owe you.’
‘Dinner will be good,’ he said. ‘I am in London in two weeks’ time.’
Two weeks. It seemed like another century. Would she be alive then? She told him how much she hoped to see him then and meant every word.
Morrison was in her office almost before she realized it. He’d given his usual perfunctory knock and marched in just as she was putting down the phone to Karim Chehoudi. Her brief diversion into another life, a life she used to have where she worked as a solicitor and no one tried to kill her, even though they might have wanted to, was over. It seemed that Monica had spread the word and Morrison had been listening.
‘I’m hearing things, Laura, worrying things. What’s going on?’
‘Not sure I’m with you, Marcus?’ Make him spit it out.
‘The police,’ he hissed. ‘Monica has been telling me.’
She knew his tricks and she wasn’t falling for that one. He wanted her to tell him the story, so he could check her version against the one he’d got from Monica.
Laura felt stronger, buoyed up by the call from Tunis and the chance of getting Mary Hakimi her son back. She would follow Morrison’s own golden rule – never apologize, never explain.
‘Monica?’ she said, puzzled. ‘Has something happened? Afraid I’ve been so busy today with developments on the Hakimi case, I haven’t had time for much else.’
That got his attention as she’d known it would.
‘Developments? Progress, I hope.’
She hadn’t intended to tell him, not yet, not until the boy was back home and safely reunited with his mother, because there were still an awful lot of things that could go wrong. She would have much rather waited for that happy ending, then dropped in to his office and mentioned, casually, that the whole business was resolved, as if there had never been any doubt that it would be. But she wanted to divert him from Monica’s tittle-tattle and so she told him.
Morrison tried hard not to show how pleased he was that her unpromising scheme might actually deliver a result.
‘We need that court order asap. Get the barrister onto it now,’ he ordered, as if it was all his own idea and she hadn’t just said she would be doing exactly that. He was already preparing to take the credit, but, given the nightmare her life had become, she wasn’t in any mood to fight over it.
‘As I said,’ she dredged up a smile, ‘I was about to ring him when you came in.’
There was silence for a moment. She guessed he was considering whether to raise the police visit again. In the end, he contented himself with reminding her about that night’s Law Society dinner, then got up to go.
‘Well, let’s hope there’s an end to this appalling mess.’
‘Yes, with luck we may be close to sorting it out.’
He paused in the doorway, couldn’t resist a parting shot.
‘Don’t celebrate too soon, Laura. Close doesn’t get the cigar, eh?’
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Anna sat on the bed and swallowed hard but the lump in her throat wouldn’t go away. Joe had been angry with her, walked away from her, dismissed her as if she disgusted him. She felt she would go mad, the terror of being abandoned by him growing in her brain like a huge, ugly tumour.
She took his photo from under her pillow and kissed it, examined every inch of his handsome face, gazed into the laughing blue eyes, softly stroked the cleft in his chin and ached to put her arms around him.
She loved him. Always had and always would. Nobody could ever love him the way she did. He was her saviour and he belonged to her. But other women would take him from her if they could. Laura Maxwell had taken him, the blonde at the hotel had wanted him. Men were led by their dicks. It was not his fault.
Her breath came in uneven gasps; there was a screeching in her ears from the mayhem in her head. There had been too much love and not enough hate. Too much time already wasted. Joe still lived with Laura Maxwell, slept in her bed. Who’s laughing now? Not you Anna, she thought, certainly not you.
She looked at her watch. 4.30 p.m. Tenderly, she replaced the photograph and went downstairs, brought back a kitchen knife from the rack and sat down again on the bed, running her fingers up and down the blade, testing it. This time she would make sure; the car chase had been a chance grabbed in the heat of the moment, a chance to frighten Laura and hurt her though she hadn’t cared if she killed her. It had shown her the way and as the idea of badly hurting Laura, maybe killing her, grew large in her mind she had planned a second attack: she had strung the wire between the trees to bring down Laura’s horse.
But the bitch was still alive and Joe was no closer to being hers, in fact he seemed farther away than ever. Anna shook her head in murderous fury. There would be no more half measures; she wasn’t stopping now until Laura was dead.
She gripped the knife’s handle, held it high above her head, thrust it down with all her strength into the mattress. Laura Maxwell before her eyes. Stab, stab, stab and stab again. Slash and stab. Face, heart, neck, chest. This is how it would be. She could hear the screams; smell the blood.
Anna had read somewhere the story of a survivor who’d been stabbed nineteen times: ‘You don’t feel the stabs when they’re happening,’ he said. ‘You think you would but you don’t. And you don’t feel pain either, because pain is a distraction while you’re fighting for your life. I felt nothing at all, except the fear and the adrenaline that it gave me.’
But Laura Maxwell would know pain because Anna would make certain of it. It would be the pain of a knife twisted in her heart, the pain Anna had endured for so many years.
‘This is how it feels,’ she shrieked, stabbed again, then again. ‘See how it feels.’
Anna Pelham’s face in the bedroom mirror was smiling and triumphant. Her breathing grew more regular and the noise in her head died away. She felt calm again. She would do it tonight.
With Laura dead, she would get her happy ending. Joe would live with her, wake up next to her every morning and go to s
leep next to her every night; she would be happy at last, free from the crippling fear of losing him, of seeing his love grow cold. She would watch over him and never again would any other woman take him from her.
Laura would be alone tonight. Anna knew this because it was the beginning of the ‘special’ time that she had planned to enjoy with Joe. The first evening of Martha’s absence and she’d hoped Joe would spend it with her, had fantasized that he would spend the night with her. She had been badly disappointed – again. He couldn’t make it; he was taking his mother to see a musical at the Theatre Royal in Brighton. He had no choice, he told her.
Laura alone in the house. Would she be just a little bit scared?
You’ll be dead by the end of the week.
It was only Wednesday. There were a few days left.
Want to know how you’re going to die?
No thank you. Please, will you leave me alone.
Painfully. Very painfully.
Anna laughed. Had the police found it yet, she wondered.
It had been so very easy because Laura Maxwell had been out when she’d arrived at Morrison Kemp. Her plan had been to see Laura on the excuse of giving her more of Harry’s financial correspondence. She had ready, in her bag, a letter stolen from his house. It was nothing much and Laura might think her over-anxious for wanting to hand deliver it. But so what? It would get her into Laura’s office, which was where she needed to be.
The mobile was also ready in her bag, the one she’d used to send the texts. She intended to drop it somewhere in the office, somewhere out of sight where it could later be traced by the police, and the lawyer discredited and humiliated. It would be tricky, she knew, dropping it in the right place; a place where it wouldn’t be spotted too soon, before the police arrived.
She needn’t have worried. It had worked out a treat. That nosy cow of a receptionist had been there, of course, had tried to get her to come back later when the bitch was in, but Anna knew exactly how to deal with people like her. They were leeches, thriving on other people’s problems; hadn’t she met enough of them in her life? So she told Monica all about Harry, the pervert, watched her suck in the salacious details and digest them. Hinted at things too gross to relate.
Someone Out There Page 23