Питер Джеймс - Left You Dead

As if further dampening her thoughts, a heavy shower was pelting down outside, rattling as loud as hail on the roof of the small conservatory adjoining the kitchen. It was just gone 10 p.m.

She craved a drink, but didn’t dare risk it — being stopped and breathalysed would screw everything up. Although, she reasoned, as she sat at the little dining table beneath the glass roof, digging her fork into a microwaved pasta — turning it over, letting the steam escape, her stomach too knotted to consider eating even a mouthful — maybe that would be the easy way out of all of this? Just get drunk. Pass out at home. Apologize to Bex later.

Or have a couple of drinks and take her chances. That was so tempting right now. And if she got arrested for drunk-driving, fess up and see what happened. Surely it wasn’t illegal to disappear? OK, she’d left a trail of evidence to implicate that bastard, but she hadn’t harmed him, she hadn’t made any false claims against him. Rebecca was wrong, surely — she hadn’t committed any offence, had she?

More wisps of steam rose from the white slop in the tinfoil carton. Tagliatelle or rigatoni or cannelloni — she’d forgotten what it had said on the label. The cheesy smell made her stomach churn.

Just a small drink? A tiny whisky to settle her? One wouldn’t do any harm, would it?

She got up, poured herself a finger of Macallan and downed it in one gulp. Wincing at the burn as it went down her throat and hit her stomach, she stood tight. Then it began working its magic and she started to feel better. Not much, but a little. Dutch courage.

What the hell.

She raised her glass and toasted her weak reflection in a windowpane. ‘Cheers, Eden!’

Although she wasn’t actually Eden any more. According to the driving licence and passport that Rebecca had somehow obtained for her — no questions asked — well, only a few — she was now Ginevra Mary Stoneley, tenant of Woodbury Cottage, Chiddingly, East Sussex, and the not very proud owner of an inconspicuous, dark-blue, ageing Nissan Micra.

She even had a new appearance, a brand-new hairstyle and bright blonde colour, courtesy of a hairdresser friend of Rebecca who’d spent two hours at the cottage this morning.

Raising her glass again, this time she said, ‘Cheers, Ginevra, you hot, sexy creature!’

Ginevra winked back at her.

Was Ginevra about to become a murderer?

She put the glass down and checked her watch. Needed to pace herself. Only 10.10 p.m. Another twenty minutes before she had to set off for her rendezvous.

She opened the cupboard door, removed the bottle and took it outside, ducking through the rain and putting it on the passenger seat of the Micra. One final nip of it when she was at her destination. Didn’t warriors always get something to stir them into battle? She’d read that the Zulus fought their wars so ferociously because they were tripping on magic mushrooms. The GIs fought in Vietnam high on cannabis. How else could anyone kill a fellow human being face to face?

Then she sat back down and stared at the steadily congealing pasta. Rebecca had told her to think through to beyond tonight. To the far side. To the fortnight they had booked in a villa with its own pool in a resort in Cancun, Mexico. And to their life beyond.

For years, she could never have imagined being with anyone other than a man. Now she could never imagine being with anyone other than Rebecca.

She would do anything for this woman.

And was about to.

Roy Grace and Glenn Branson sat in the unmarked Ford, parked on Eastbourne’s almost deserted seafront. A short distance away the streetlights ended, and a steep dark hill rose ahead, the start of the Seven Sisters chain of chalk cliffs, the most notorious of which was Beachy Head. It was just gone 10.57 p.m. and they’d been here for the past hour. Grace was both anxious and bored. Branson just seemed plain bored. The other members of the team were at HQ awaiting deployment.

Peering through the windscreen, made opaque by the pelting rain, Branson said, by way of conversation, ‘You don’t like heights much, do you?’

Grace shook his head. ‘I get acrophobia. If I look down an unguarded drop — or even a guarded one — I feel a strange pull to jump, almost as if I’m being tempted or my brain is taunting me. You ever get that?’

The DS nodded. ‘This is about as close to the edge as I like to be: a good quarter of a mile of terra firma between me and any drop. I get acrophobia standing on a kerb!’

Grace smiled distractedly.

Glenn looked at him concerned. ‘You OK, mate?’

‘I’m OK, I just get flashes when it hits me and I think of his accident. I just hope to God he didn’t feel anything. But I’d rather be here, especially if we get a result tonight.’

Then he focused back on why they were here. Despite what he had told his team at the briefing earlier in the week, he had been toying ever since with turning this into a full-blown operation, with Gold, Silver and Bronze commanders to cover his back if anything went wrong. But mindful of Cassian Pewe’s scepticism about this entire investigation, he worried the ACC would order him to abort his whole plan, so in the end he’d stuck to his decision of keeping it low-key, not getting Pewe involved.

And hoped it wasn’t all going to go badly tits-up.

Although the weather had already gone just that. Far from the forecasted clear night, at the moment there was dense cloud cover and a heavy rain shower was falling. It pattered down on the roof of the unmarked Ford as Grace sat with Branson. A strong wind was blowing, too, sending something — an empty drinks can, Grace guessed — rattling along.

Three of the vehicles of Mark Taylor’s Surveillance Team, each with a crew of two, one with Sharon Orman, were parked up close by, covering the exits to the conference hotel where Rebecca Watkins was staying. The others were stationed on the main roads out of Eastbourne. Inside his jacket pocket Grace had a printout of his risk assessment for tonight. But his nerves were ragged.

A figure, head bowed against the rain, walked along the pavement with a dog on a lead, and passed by their car. Branson yawned. ‘Think you need to use a better weather forecasting method,’ he said with a wry smile, watching the rain. ‘There’s technology you can use, apps, you know? They’re a lot more reliable than sticking your finger out of the window — or was it the entrails of a chicken you were studying?’

Grace gave him a withering look.

‘Sorry, boss, that was tactless.’

‘You could say that.’ He grimaced at the reminder of the previous week. ‘I looked at the forecast for around midnight, it’s meant to be clear skies then.’

‘Definitely, for sure it will be, somewhere in the world, just not here,’ Branson retorted.

But Grace barely heard this, he was back in his thoughts, again thinking through what lay ahead tonight. The words of Sharon Orman, relaying the conversation between Niall Paternoster and Rebecca Watkins in the pub in Croydon. Whenever I can get away without being rude. Probably be near to midnight. Does that sound like a plan?

A lovers’ rendezvous? Was that all it was going to turn out to be? He would have egg all over his face, for sure, if he’d organized an operation simply to watch a couple getting it on in the back of a car.

What, he wondered over and over, was he actually expecting to see tonight, if not that? But all his instincts were sensing this was going to turn into something more than a simple bit of canoodling lovers. Rebecca Watkins was up to something.

But what?

Where would she choose? Which remote location, ideal for lovers wanting to be away from prying eyes, and yet close enough to Eastbourne to be just a short drive away?