by Jill McGown
Judy looked at Lloyd, his teeth chattering, listened to him mumbling, watched him toss and turn and tried very, very hard to be unselfish, but it didn’t work. ‘Am I going to get it?’ she asked.
‘Probably not. It isn’t particularly virulent, but there have been a few cases up and down the country. Enough for me to recognize the symptoms. Thirsty, headachy, then a fever, then they’re better, providing they’re under seventy-five. If the sufferer is going to pass it on, it’s during the first twenty-four hours, and you would probably be coming down with it yourself by now. It has a very short incubation period.’
Did she feel headachy? No. Thirsty? No. She hadn’t had anything to drink since she’d got here, and Lloyd had gone through two bottles and three cans of fruit juice, with her pointing out that it was costing him as much as a six-pack would cost every time. But there was another problem. She looked at the doctor, and uttered the actual words for the very first time. ‘ I might be pregnant,’ she said.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. There’s no danger there.’ He smiled. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you,’ said Judy, weakly. Lloyd was tossing and turning and muttering, and she wished she could make him feel better, more comfortable. It was hard to believe that he would be as right as rain tomorrow. ‘Are you sure he’s all right like that?’
‘I’m sure you have no need to worry about him,’ the doctor said. ‘But he should take it easy for a day or two when he recovers, however well he feels. Post-viral fatigue will get to him if he tries to do too much, but he’ll be fine. If he’s still like this in two hours, then call me again, but he won’t be.’
Judy tucked him in every time his uncomfortable writhings threw off the bedclothes. Eventually, he stopped shivering and muttering. And then he slept. She watched television with half an eye, creeping into the bedroom to check on him every ten minutes until she felt that she could get in beside him without waking him. She would have slept on the sofa, but she wanted to be with him, in case anything happened.
She lay stiff and awake, frightened to move in case she disturbed him, and then after what seemed like a month, she finally got some sleep herself.
Chapter Ten
The light shining through the crack between the heavy curtains landed on Judy’s face, and she opened her eyes. What time was it? Where was she? She glanced over, glad to see that it was Lloyd she was with, because she didn’t recognize that window, and she did hope she hadn’t taken to letting strangers pick her up.
Then her brain began to function, and she remembered where she was. She checked Lloyd, who was still sleeping peacefully and normally. Good. Now. What time was it? Why did they never have clocks in hotel bedrooms? She reached gingerly over Lloyd to pick up his watch, and smiled as he stirred, then settled down again.
She would never have arranged all this when she was coming down with a flu-type virus. She was selfish, she knew that. She just didn’t know how to go about not being, really. But then, she would never have arranged it in any circumstances; it simply wouldn’t have occurred to her, because she was also irredeemably unromantic. Romance always seemed slightly comic to her; and what had happened last night proved that it was just as difficult to plan as murder. Romance happened when you least expected it.
Half past four. She had loads of morning, and she didn’t feel sick. Good. If she didn’t feel sick when she woke up, then she was all right. She inched out of the bed, and went out into the little corridor, into the bathroom. She was going to enjoy this. An hour in the bath with lots of toppings-up and an entire facial with the goodies at her disposal later, she emerged, wrapped in a wonderfully heavy bathrobe, wearing the towelling slippers she was invited to keep with the hotel’s compliments, and padded into the sitting room. She had hung her clothes up last night, and she didn’t want to go back into the bedroom in case she wakened Lloyd. Besides, it was still only twenty to six, and she wasn’t going to get dressed yet.
She pushed up the window, and smiled at another bright, sunny, warm day. Early-morning London rumbled gently past, and she stood there for a moment, watching as delivery trucks arrived and turned into various courtyards and side streets, as the newsagent and the breakfast house across the road opened for business, as the road gang arrived, with a bright yellow, tiny little excavator, and an equally bright yellow, remotely operated road drill, and two compressors. They began setting up barriers and stop and go signs, and she closed the window. The noise of a road being dug up was another one that mattered not a jot to her, but it might disturb Lloyd.
She jumped when the door opened, and turned to see Lloyd, fully dressed, and entirely well.
‘What are you doing up?’ she said.
‘Good morning to you, too.’ He came over, put his arms round her. ‘ You smell gorgeous,’ he said.
‘Well, I don’t know how much that stuff costs, but I made the most of it,’ she said. ‘What are you doing up?’ she repeated.
‘I’m not only up,’ he said. ‘I have had the executive breakfast?’
‘You never have breakfast. What’s the executive breakfast?’
‘Cornflakes, orange juice, and really good black coffee.’
Judy’s face fell. ‘ Do I have to have the executive breakfast?’
He grinned. ‘No. Full English breakfast, German breakfast, American breakfast, Japanese breakfast – you name it. We execs have ours in a little room along the corridor.’ He kissed her, then kissed her again. ‘You know the sexual harassment part? Is it still on?’
‘That’s something else you don’t do in the morning.’
‘I’ve not usually gone to bed at half past seven in the evening,’ he said. ‘I woke up at quarter to five, couldn’t get into the bathroom because some woman was in there who locks the door, so I just got dressed and went in search of a loo. What I found was the executive shower room. Complete with shaving facilities. I don’t think it’s for policemen who find women locked in the bathroom – I think it’s for executives falling off overnight planes and going to meetings first thing when their rooms aren’t available, but they let me use it anyway. Then I had some sustenance, because I was hungry.’
‘Cornflakes?’ she said. ‘You call that sustenance?’
‘They’re very good for you. And I asked about the car park. They said I can talk to the security manager at half past seven when he comes on. So, I thought, what can I do to while away the time? Sexual harassment, that’s what. So – is it still on? Then I promise you can have the full English breakfast, and the full German breakfast, and the full—’
‘You’re supposed to be taking it easy – the doctor said.’
‘It is easy. Come on.’ He took her by the hand and led her towards the bedroom. ‘I’ll show you.’
She couldn’t remember ever having had a nicer start to the day, and she told Lloyd that as they lay, still entwined, on the bed. It was too hot like that really, but she didn’t want to let him go. There had been a dreadful thirty minutes last night when she had thought he might be dying, before the wonderfully reassuring doctor of the sort she had thought was extinct had come along. It was Lloyd, eventually, who moved, who went off, and returned with the champagne and glasses, and the only can of orange juice that he hadn’t got round to last night.
‘They’re setting up a sort of information network as a result of Curtis Law’s programme,’ he said, pouring the orange juice, then expertly addressing the champagne cork.
Judy frowned. Work? Lloyd never did this. She did. It usually annoyed him. ‘Are they?’ she said.
‘And there’s to be a working party, and all that – you know the sort of thing. It’ll have twelve months to do something that should probably be given twelve years, if it’s to be done properly.’ The cork left the bottle with a satisfying pop. ‘It’s supposed to come up with a computer system that will plug all the gaps,’ he said, topping up the glasses with champagne.
‘Yes?’ she said. Sometimes conversations that started like this ended up being jo
kes, but she couldn’t see this one’s potential.
‘They intend seconding you to head it,’ he stated. ‘Sit up,’ he said, handing her her glass. ‘ Or you’ll spill it.’
It had better be a joke. She sat up. ‘ Me?’ she squeaked.
He nodded.
‘I hope you said no!’
He shook his head, sitting down beside her.
‘Well, I will! I’d hate it. I hate committees. I hate computers. I hate paperwork.’
He drew in his breath. ‘I really don’t think you should turn it down,’ he said, and touched her glass with his. ‘Your health, Detective Chief Inspector Hill.’
She stared at him as he drank. He wouldn’t joke about that. Would he? No. He wouldn’t. ‘Honestly?’ she said.
‘Honestly.’
‘Wow.’ She sipped her Buck’s Fizz, then set it down. ‘That’s the fastest promotion sexual harassment’s ever got me.’
He kissed her, held her close. ‘Am I allowed to mention you-know-what?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course you are.’
‘Well, for a start, I want to tell you that you mustn’t think for one moment that I meant any of that nonsense the other night.’
‘You must have meant some of it.’
‘Judy!’ He smacked her gently. ‘You know me far too well to think I had to mean any of it at all. When I saw the pregnancy-test thing, all right, I felt … well, left out. Which is something you do to me that I don’t like, and that made me angry. The only bit I meant was that you should have told me. All the rest was rubbish.’
‘What about the bit about having your baby?’’
‘That’s the bit I meant least of all! You don’t have to have my baby to prove anything to me.’
‘But I am having your baby.’ She disengaged herself from him, and sat back so she could see his face. ‘I want to know how you feel about that,’ she said, looking into the blue eyes which she had never been able to read, so this was probably a waste of time. He’d say whatever he wanted her to believe, whether he believed it or not. ‘About abortion,’ she added sternly. ‘Let’s stop refusing to use the word.’
‘You know how I feel about abortion. I think it’s up to the individual.’
‘Oh, Lloyd! You are an individual. So what are your individual feelings about this individual baby?’
‘Exactly the same. I want you to do whatever you feel is best for you.’
Maybe. She wished she really knew how he felt, but she never would, and it was just typical. He made all that fuss about her not telling him, and now he was just loading it all back on to her anyway. It was her decision.
‘What I’d really like to know is how it happened,’ he said.
Judy smiled. ‘ Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that, and I think it’s got something to do with what we were just doing.’
‘Very funny. I thought you were supposed to be on the pill.’
She sighed. ‘ I forgot to take it, didn’t I? It was your fault. I’ve got a routine when I go to bed, so I don’t forget. But you turned up to watch me make my television debut, and …’ She shrugged. ‘I forgot,’ she said.
‘You’ve forgotten before. You always just took two the next day.’
‘I wasn’t forty before. He wanted me to come off the pill altogether, but I said no, so he put me on some other kind. It’s more critical. So will he be, if I go saying I want …’ She tailed off, and didn’t use the word.
She was just finishing her full English breakfast when Lloyd joined her with the intelligence that the security key for the Executive Wing allowed access to the car park at any time, since they were simply inserted at the barrier.
‘So she could have taken the car, driven home, bumped off hubby, and driven back with no one any the wiser,’ he said. ‘The latest sighting we’ve got of them is when dinner was delivered to their suite at eight. But Law could have been here on his own from then on. She could have driven home, given her husband a fatal injection of morphine before half past ten, which is why the tapes weren’t changed, and been driving away from the farm at ten to eleven when Nicola saw her. Nicola really did think the house was empty. She didn’t know her father was unconscious somewhere. And Law could have gone home on the train, and done what he did in order to confuse us.’
Judy shook her head. ‘I’m no doctor,’ she said, ‘ as I proved yesterday, when any fool could have seen that you were coming down with something, but if Bailey had been drinking heavily, and then was given barbiturates and enough morphine to kill a horse at half past ten, I don’t think he would still have been conscious four hours later. So how did Law get in?’
‘Nicola says the alarms were off. Rachel could have put them off, and Law could have got in the back way, put them on again before he stabbed Bailey. He’ll know where all the cameras are, as Tom pointed out, so he could avoid them with no trouble.’
‘Mm.’ She put down her cup. ‘ Why would they kill him twice? Do I get to mention you-know-what?’ she asked.
‘I’m not being paranoid! It’s possible.’
Judy conceded that it was possible, though hardly likely. For one thing, Rachel’s hysterics had been too convincing. Her doctor had said that she had been given a real fright.
‘Law didn’t tell her what he was going to do,’ said Lloyd.
‘Then she didn’t put the alarms off for him,’ said Judy.
Lloyd smiled. ‘How can you think that quickly?’ he said.
She didn’t always think quickly. Judy’s thoughts went back to last night. Why hadn’t she called a doctor sooner? What sort of mother would she be if her child had to be delirious before she worked out that he needed medical attention? But Lloyd wasn’t a child, she argued back. He must have known there was something wrong. He should have been going to the doctor himself, not organizing romantic nights in five-star hotels. She frowned as she thought about that. Bailey must have known there was something wrong too. Something a great deal worse than a flu-type virus.
‘Why do you suppose Bailey didn’t call a doctor?’ she asked.
Lloyd shrugged. ‘Maybe he was too ill to get to the phone,’ he said.
‘But according to Freddie, it would have been fairly gradual. He might not have been able to carry on much of a conversation, but there must have been a time when he knew he was desperately ill. He could at least have dialled nine-nine-nine, surely? If he could let Curtis Law in when he was barely conscious, he could have called for help at some point before that.’
‘See? Maybe he didn’t let Law in, as I have just suggested.’
Maybe he didn’t, thought Judy, as they left, the hotel. Maybe Lloyd’s weird scenario was right. Maybe Rachel Bailey was a brilliant actress into the bargain. They were pulling out of the courtyard, very nearly on their way back to Stansfield, with her at the wheel, having told Lloyd that he was supposed to be taking it easy, when he told her to stop.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing at a security camera.
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘ What about it?’
‘Do you think they’ve got them in the car park?’
‘Possibly,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘More videos. I don’t think I can take it.’ But she reversed smartly back in, and invited the young man who whisked the cars away and brought them back to show her the way to the car park.
And there were more videos. Judy would pay a lot of money never to have to look at a jerky security video again in her life. And this one, run through at top speed, showed that Rachel Bailey’s BMW had sat in its space in the car park, untouched by human hand, from two twenty-one on Friday afternoon until seven o’clock on Monday morning, when it was driven out by a member of staff.
‘Does this mean we can forget Rachel Bailey and Curtis Law?’ Judy asked, as they went back into the breakfast room for a cup of tea in order to recover from a surfeit of security videos.
But even as she asked the question, Judy knew she didn’t want to forget about Curtis Law. He had been on the
ten o’clock news last night, being magnanimous, saying that he didn’t think for one moment that the Law on the Law special had in any way affected Chief Inspector Lloyd’s judgement; he had simply moved too fast, and jumped to a wrong conclusion. The item was by way of being a sort of trailer for the network showing of Mr Big? What Mr Big? which would now get a much bigger audience than it would have done. Then he had oh-so-casually mentioned the death threats about which nothing seemed to be being done. She was beginning to feel paranoid about Law, never mind Lloyd.
‘You can’t clone people,’ said Lloyd. ‘ But you can clone cars.’
‘Oh, Lloyd!’ said Judy, as a middle-aged man approached them.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘are you the police officers from Bartonshire?’
‘We are,’ said Lloyd.
‘It’s just that I was told you were asking if anyone had seen Mrs Bailey on Sunday night, and I did. I wasn’t actually on duty, which is why no one told you to talk to me. I’d been to the pub, which is just round the corner from the Executive Wing, so I nipped in the private entrance as she was coming out. You’re not supposed to do that, but it takes a good five minutes longer to walk round to the front, so I always do, if I get the chance.’
‘You’re certain it was Mrs Bailey?’
He smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was looking for a cab. She said her husband had ordered one for eleven o’clock to go to St Pancras, but there weren’t any there. But his train wasn’t until half past, apparently, so I told her not to worry, because it was only a ten-minute run at that time of night, and one would be there any moment.’
‘Thank you,’ said Lloyd, and the man left. Lloyd looked at Judy and shrugged. ‘Nicola Hutchins,’ he said. ‘We have to have another word with her’
‘My problem is that I still can’t see Nicola doing all that.’