Peter James - Need You Dead

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.

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.

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.

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.