The Deadline Series Boxset

by Wendy Soliman

  Alexi was no longer frightened, but mad as hell that Seaton had turned up, presumably to look for whatever it was that Natalie had on him. She had to admire his nerve, doing so in broad daylight. Nerve or desperation? She ought to call the police, and she ought to do it now, but she’d never been big on doing the right thing. Besides, Seaton was right about one thing. With Cosmo on her side she had the upper hand. Having a pissed-off feline on the prowl was a good way to persuade Seaton to explain himself. Not that she had the slightest idea of how to make Cosmo attack on command, or if he even would, but Seaton didn’t know that.

  ‘Hey, Cosmo,’ she said, snapping her fingers.

  The cat gave one final warning hiss and, to her astonishment, retreated. He walked over to Alexi and bumped and twined around her legs, purring as he rubbed his head against her calves, all sweetness and light again. Aren’t I a good pussycat?

  ‘I’ll be damned.’ Seaton’s mouth fell open as he observed the change in Cosmo.

  ‘Most likely,’ Alexi agreed.

  ‘A most unusual feline,’ he said, nodding towards Cosmo.

  ‘And your worst nightmare if you give me any trouble.’ In spite of the tense situation, Alexi had to prevent herself from laughing aloud at her use of such a clichéd line. ‘I’ll ask you again, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Where’s your partner?’

  ‘On his way.’

  But she could tell he didn’t believe her. She should ring Tyler now. He was only twenty-odd miles away and never paid much attention to speed cameras. If he thought it was an emergency he’d probably get to her in ten minutes or less. But if she rang him, Seaton would know for sure that he wasn’t actually on his way. He probably wouldn’t be caught unawares by Cosmo for a second time. Besides, if he had a weapon—a knife, or even a gun—she couldn’t see him hesitating to use it on Cosmo. What was a cat’s life compared to covering up filicide? Was it filicide if the child was adopted?

  ‘Can we talk inside?’ he asked for a second time.

  Alexi folded her arms, still clutching the spanner firmly in one hand. ‘How did you know where Natalie lived?’

  ‘The last time I met her to hand over money, it was in a pub in Clapham. Presumably it was familiar territory for her, what with the agency she worked for being based there. Anyway, I left first, then doubled back, followed her to her car and took the registration number.’

  That was careless of Natalie. In her shoes, Alexi would have made sure she didn’t park anywhere near their meeting place. Presumably she thought she had Seaton where she wanted him, too scared of the hold she had over him to fight back. Cosmo, if he could talk, would have told her that cornered animals are the most dangerous type.

  ‘And you had a friend somewhere, probably a policeman at your swanky golf club, run the number for you?’

  ‘I just wanted it to stop, and make it up to Natalie in some way if I possibly could. Make her understand that what happened between us was a mistake, and that I was genuinely sorry for it.’ He paused. ‘I wanted to tell her she’s the sole beneficiary of our will and that nothing would give my wife greater pleasure than to see her again, if we could just find a way to put the past behind us.’ He dropped his head and kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. ‘I know what you think of me, and I don’t expect you to believe me, but it’s true.’

  The media’s darling putting on a convincing show, a brutal rapist trying to cover his tracks, or genuine contrition? Probably a combination of all three, Alexi decided.

  ‘You imagined Natalie would return home and not tell your wife the truth about why she ran?’ Alexi opened her eyes wide in disbelief, unsure if the man was naïve, too used to getting his own way to see the bigger picture, or just plain doolally. ‘And how do you imagine Fay would have felt when she learned how Natalie had been making her living? Surely she’s better off in ignorance.’

  ‘Perhaps Natalie would have spared her that knowledge. And all the other stuff, too. She could have made something up about why she ran, for Fay’s sake. After all, it was me she wanted to punish, and she sure as hell achieved that ambition.’

  Alexi didn’t think anything the self-centred bastard said could have surprised her, but he still managed it. All that twaddle about his wife’s feelings. The only person he gave a toss about was numero uno. ‘So, why are you here today? Come to revisit the scene of the crime?’

  ‘I wanted to see where she lives, and if there was any sign of her.’

  Alexi rolled her eyes. ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘She never lost her love of flowers.’ He glanced at the lovely garden. ‘She got that passion from Fay.’

  Alexi didn’t respond. Had he really thought she’d be won over by a little nostalgia and a sad smile? And yet, part of her still wanted to believe he regretted what he’d done—the damage he’d caused to two lives—Natalie’s and his wife’s. Damn, he was good! She reminded herself he would only tell her what he wanted her to hear, and that certainly wouldn’t be the truth. She neither liked nor trusted him, but if they’d met under different circumstances she would most likely have been charmed by him. But she knew him for what he was and being anywhere near him clouded her judgement, making it difficult for her to think coherently. Perhaps that was why she couldn’t decide if he was a murderer, a paedophile, a conniving liar, or all of the above.

  ‘I suppose you were hoping to get into her cottage and find all the incriminating stuff she has on you,’ Alexi said, finding her voice.

  ‘In broad daylight?’

  His reasonable tone only made him seemed more dangerous. She felt vulnerable and exposed but knew better than to show it. Not a single car had passed the cottage during the time they’d been having their confrontation. No one had passed it on foot or horseback, either. Natalie had chosen her secluded hideaway a little too well.

  ‘Unless you can tell me anything useful about what happened to Natalie, then I think you’d better go. My partner and I haven’t told the police about Natalie blackmailing you. Yet. So they don’t know you paid her to keep silent, but I figure they will take an active interest in her disappearance if they ever learn of it.’

  It was a hollow threat and they both knew it. ‘How would that make Natalie look?’

  ‘More to the point, what would they say at the golf club?’ Alexi shot back. ‘I doubt your police contacts will stand by you if there’s a whiff of that sort of scandal attaching to your name. Natalie might be a blackmailer, but she had damned good reason to become one. Murder trumps blackmail in the high-stakes crime game.’

  ‘Please let me know if you discover what’s happened to Natalie,’ he said politely as he opened his car door. ‘And if I can help you in any way…well, I don’t suppose you would want my help, I quite understand that.’ He offered her one of his charming smiles, probably without realising he’d done it, and slid into the driving seat. ‘I hope to hear from you soon with good news.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Alexi muttered as she and Cosmo watched him reverse into the lane and drive away.

  Whatever he might have said to the contrary, no matter how genuine his contrition might be, it didn’t alter the fact that Natalie had something that would incriminate him if it ever came to light. A man like Seaton would never rest easy until he got it back. She watched his car disappear around the corner. Only when it was out of sight did she release the breath she’d been holding and uncross her arms, releasing her hands from beneath her armpits. She’d tucked them there to disguise the fact that they were shaking.

  ‘That went well, baby,’ she said aloud, bending to stroke Cosmo’s head, calmed just a little by the sound of her own voice. ‘Come on. We’re not scared of that big bully, are we? And we’re not going to let him upset us. Let’s get this search on the road.’

  Alexi returned to her car to grab her bag. She then approached the cottage’s front door and fiddled with the strange locks, hampered by her shaking fingers. She dropped the keys and some colourful language but finally m
anaged to get the door open. She went straight to the kitchen, poured a glass of water from the tap and downed it in two gulps. Gradually her heartbeat returned to a more normal rate and she was able to think about her confrontation with Seaton without trembling. All things considered, she felt rather proud of the way she and Cosmo had faced him down.

  ‘Bullies hate being confronted,’ she told Cosmo, who was stalking along the work surfaces, either looking for a sunny place to have a snooze or, more likely, for something to eat. The cottage smelt musty so Alexi opened the back door wide to let in some fresh air.

  ‘Now, Cosmo,’ she said, staring speculatively around the pristine kitchen. ‘Where do you think she hid her papers? In the cottage, or in her workroom out the back?’ Cosmo rubbed his head beneath her hand. ‘Hmm, that’s what I think, too. She had customers in and out of the workroom, but this was her private space, so we should concentrate on the cottage.’

  Alexi shoved the spanner into the back pocket of her jeans before putting the kettle on and making herself a mug of instant coffee, needing the caffeine hit. She found a tin of pilchards in a cupboard. Figuring that Cosmo would need to recharge his batteries following his busy morning, she peeled back the lid and decanted the contents into a bowl which she placed on the floor. Cosmo stalked across to it, sniffed to see if it passed muster, then settled down to consume his snack.

  While Cosmo cleared the bowl and then set about fastidiously washing his face, Alexi investigated every nook and cranny in the kitchen. She reasoned that if Natalie was hiding a lot of papers, they couldn’t be jammed into…well, into a jam jar. If, on the other hand, everything had been put onto a memory stick, it could be hidden just about anywhere and she might never find it.

  Nil desperandum. ‘We know she didn’t trust computers, don’t we, Cosmo. So my money’s on us still looking for a fairly large, albeit well-concealed, hiding place.’

  A half-hour later, Alexi stood back with her hands on her hips, convinced the kitchen hid nothing more incriminating that a few cans of food past their sell-by date. She moved on to the lounge, which took considerably longer to search, mainly because there were so many books lining the walls. Not only did she remove each of them in turn and flip through the pages to see if anything had been slipped between them, but she also felt along the shelving for any hidden nooks or crannies, feeling as though she was featuring in an old fashioned spy film.

  No dice.

  The floor and the rest of the walls were solid and there was nothing hidden beneath the seat cushions or stuck to the bottom of the sideboard. She even checked inside the chimney breast, disturbed an old bird’s nest when she poked upwards with a stick and received a face full of soot for her trouble.

  ‘Oh, fuck!’

  She made her way to the cloakroom and washed her sooty hands and face.

  ‘This is disheartening,’ she told Cosmo. ‘Perhaps I should have let Cheryl come along and help me, like she wanted to. Two pairs of hands would be better than one. Besides, I could use the company. No offence, babe, but our conversations sometimes get a bit one-sided.’

  Cosmo blinked his hazel eyes twice and preceded her towards the staircase, knowing without needing to be told that their next port of call would be Natalie’s bedroom. By then it was mid-afternoon and Alexi’s stomach growled, reminding her she’d forgotten to bring anything with her for lunch.

  ‘It won’t kill me to skip a meal,’ she muttered, standing on the threshold to the bedroom and looking around her, wondering where to start, or if she even had the energy to attempt it.

  This sleuthing business wasn’t as easy, or as glamorous, as they made it out to be on the telly. The investigating she did for a story was very different to the real thing. For a feature she collected the facts, laid them out in chronological order and offered opinions and conjecture, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. But opinions and conjecture didn’t cut it in the real world, and no one would take Natalie’s disappearance seriously—especially when the powers that be discovered how she made a living and that she was a blackmailer—unless Alexi could come up with irrefutable proof that something bad had happened to her.

  Alexi had been able to remain detached while searching the other rooms, but pawing through another woman’s personal apparel somehow seemed like an invasion of privacy. Reminding herself that if Natalie was still alive, the results of Alexi’s search might well be the only means of keeping her that way, enabled her to thrust aside her misgivings and set to.

  ‘Okay, big guy, where to start? Any suggestions?’

  Cosmo responded with a slow, trace-like blink. He then stalked into Natalie’s dressing room, leapt onto a shelf full of sweaters and curled up on one.

  ‘Cosmo! You’ll leave hairs everywhere. Come on now, I need your help. I know this is the shelf where we found Natalie’s bank statements and it’s very clever of you to remember that, but…’ Alexi clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh my God! Cosmo, you’re a genius!’ She grabbed his face between her hands and plastered kisses over it. ‘I’d been wondering why we found those statements in such an odd place. She was about to file them away, wasn’t she? But she didn’t because…because the phone rang, the doorbell disturbed her…something. She put them down, they got buried beneath her sweaters somehow, and she forgot about them. Which means, we’re getting warm, baby boy. Jump down, I need to check this out.’

  Cosmo sent Alexi an appraising look, then leapt agilely down from the high shelf and stalked from the room. Alexi lost no time in removing everything from the shelf, which is when she noticed that it wasn’t as deep as the ones above it, but the lower ones were equally shallow. Euphoria swept through her. She was definitely onto something. The hiding place was ingenious. She doubted whether the police would have found it, even if they did a systematic search of the premises. She tapped the back wall, producing a hollow sound that confirmed her suspicions. Her problem was, there was no obvious way to remove the panel and get to the goods behind it.

  ‘I ain’t giving up now,’ she said aloud, feeling carefully for any hidden catches and not finding them. ‘Right, there’s only one thing for it.’ She removed the spanner from her back pocket, thought for a minute, then put it aside. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she muttered. ‘This calls for something a little more subtle.’

  Alexi slipped back down to the kitchen and rummaged in a drawer, looking for something flat to slip between the panel and the wall that would enable her to prise the panel away. Natalie obviously had a clever way of separating the two but Alexi was too impatient to try and figure it out. Instead, she found a small flat-headed screwdriver, which would do the job nicely, causing minimal damage. She turned back towards the stairs and noticed in the periphery of her vision the tall plants in the back garden swaying rather frantically, even though there was little or no breeze.

  Momentarily she panicked. Was someone there?

  Relief flooded through her when she noticed Cosmo in hot pursuit of some hapless rodent. Well, he’d earned his recreation but she had no desire to be presented with a half-dead mouse—one of his less endearing habits that was probably supposed to make her feel privileged. Still, it was a chance she’d just have to take. No way was she shutting him out there. She needed him close at hand, just in case…well, she wasn’t exactly sure why she needed him. But Seaton’s visit had given her the jitters.

  Stupid, but there it was.

  She ran back up to the dressing room, carefully applied the tip of the screwdriver to the slight gap between panel and wall and put pressure on it. The panel came loose with a loud cracking noise and fell away. Her heart thumping, Alexi slid her hand into the deep space that opened up to her, and pulled out an old-fashioned concertina file bursting at the seams with papers.

  ‘Yes!’

  Alexi punched the air with a clenched fist before placing the file on the floor and returning her hand to the gap. There were more files that looked as though they contained bank statements and other official papers. There was also
a heavy bag that she struggled to bring through the gap. Eventually managing to do so, she placed it on the floor and unzipped it. Bundles of banknotes spilled onto the floor—all used, all twenties and fifties.

  ‘My God!’ Alexi covered her gaping mouth with her hand. ‘There has to be thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Who the hell was she blackmailing?’

  Whoever it was, she’d obviously only banked a fraction of her ill-gotten gains. Alexi was now more curious than ever to get to the bottom of things. A cursory glance at the files containing Natalie’s bank papers convinced her that the answers lay not there but in the concertina file.

  She left everything else where it was and carried the file to Natalie’s bed. It was meticulously organised, just like everything else about Natalie’s life appeared to be. Alexi removed the contents one section at a time and placed each one on a different part of the bed. Then she went through them, forcing herself to be methodical. There wasn’t room for all the papers and her, so she sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor and started to read. She was tempted to ring Tyler and tell him what she’d found, but since she wasn’t yet sure what she had found, she restrained herself, not wanting to appear needy. Besides, he hadn’t called her all day. Probably had better things to do with Cassie. Don’t go there!

  The oldest section of the file contained diaries, written in the round hand of a teenager. A veritable treasure trove which would undoubtedly lend a clue as to what it was that Natalie had over her adoptive father. It would take ages to read through them and Alexi wanted to get a snapshot of what else was hidden away before she started on them.

  She gasped when she came across a letter from a solicitor, and a bequest from Natalie’s birth mother—a lady called Laura Brooks.

  ‘So, she found you,’ Alexi muttered aloud, reading through the letter. ‘Oh my God!’

  Its contents made spine-chilling sense. Everything fell into place and she knew now what must have happened to Natalie.

  And why.

  ***