Peter James: Need You Dead

The first time she had become pregnant with the child she so much wanted, she had lost the baby after Corin punched her in the stomach in a drunken rage. The second baby she’d lost when he had pushed her down the stairs in another rage. Afterwards he would cry, pleading forgiveness or try to make her think it had never happened, that she had imagined it. And each time she had, dumbly, forgiven him, because she felt trapped and could see no way out of the relationship. ‘Gaslighting’, her friend Roxy had told her was the expression for what Corin was doing to her.

Things had become so bad with him that she’d secretly started to record on her computer all the times he hit her, and her thoughts. Then she had met Greg in Sainsbury’s in West Hove, when their trolleys had collided coming round the end of an aisle. It had been an instant attraction and they’d become lovers a week later.

They’d rented a tiny flat — their love nest , Greg had called it — on the seafront. They’d met there whenever they could, twice or even three times some weeks, and when his wife was away, flying for British Airways long-haul. They’d had the best sex of her life. It was like a drug they both craved. Driving home afterwards she sustained herself by thinking about the next time, and how to pass the days before they met again — and survive Corin’s endless bullying.

It was a relationship founded totally and utterly on lust. Yet she had sensed something far, far deeper was going on between them. Then, one afternoon, lying in each other’s arms, ‘Greg’ had said, almost apologetically, ‘I’m in love with you.’

She’d felt closer than she ever had to any human being, and told him she was in love with him, too.

She’d read somewhere, once, that good sex is just one per cent of a relationship. Bad sex — the kind she’d been having for years with Corin — is ninety-nine per cent.

One per cent.

Great.

Do you have any idea how it feels to be just one per cent of someone you love’s life? she thought.

I’ll tell you.

It feels pretty shit.

Everything about this sodding bastard had been a total lie, she realized. Except for the orgasms. They were real enough. Hers and his.

Mr One Per Cent.

God, I’m a fool . She felt so much anger inside her. Anger that she had been so stupid. Such a fool to believe him. Anger that her entire dream had been shattered. Anger that her husband was such a loser.

She sat back down and stared at the photograph on her screen.

You know what I’m going to do, Mr One Per Cent? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.

I’m going to ruin your life.

At 11 a.m., suffering the hangover from hell, Lorna sat at her kitchen table, drinking her third double espresso. At that moment, just when she thought her day could not get any worse, it suddenly did.

An email pinged into her inbox.

Dear Mrs Belling,

You have until the end of today to either give me ownership of your Mazda MX5 car or repay me the sum of £2,800 which you are pretending not to have received. I know all about you and your dirty little secret. Give me the car or pay me back or else.

You’re probably wondering what ‘or else’ means, aren’t you? Just keep wondering. I know about your lover, you slut. You know what you owe me. I know your husband’s name. Do the right thing, because if you don’t, I won’t either.

Dear Mr Darling,

I don’t understand what has happened, but I’ve just checked my PayPal account and there is still no money from you showing. As soon as I get notification it is there, the car is yours. I’ve sent PayPal an email, to see if it has somehow gone astray, and I’ll let you know soonest. In the meantime, please be patient, I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out very quickly. I can assure you, I’m a completely honest person.

Yours sincerely,

Lorna Belling

Oh right, Mrs Belling. If you call screwing someone behind your husband’s back ‘honest’, then I’m a banana. SD.

PC Juliet Solomon was thirty-two, and had been in Brighton and Hove Response for almost a decade; she still loved it, although she was hoping for promotion to sergeant soon. Her slender, petite frame belied a very tough character, her lack of height never a disadvantage in awkward confrontations.

A few minutes into her early shift, she sat at a desk, mug of tea beside her, typing up her report on an incident she had attended yesterday — a local café proprietor had called in that a man had run off without paying and with another customer’s handbag. They’d spotted the suspect a short while later, from the proprietor’s description, and chased him on foot before finally arresting him — and she was pleased to be able to return the handbag to its owner.

Juliet’s stocky, shaven-headed and bespectacled work buddy for this shift, Matt Robinson, two years her junior, was a Special Constable — one of a number of unpaid volunteer police officers in the Sussex force. At this moment he was hunched over his mobile phone, talking to someone at the company he owned, Beacon Security.

Working ‘Section’, on alternating shifts responding to emergencies, is the ultimate adrenaline rush for young police officers — and for some older ones who never tire of it. No officer on Response can predict what will happen in five minutes’ time. The one certainty is that no one — apart from the occasional drunk or nutter — dials 999 to tell the police they are happy.

The team was housed in a long ground-floor space in Brighton police station. The recently refurbished room spanned the width of the building, with windows on one side giving a spectacular view to the south, down to the English Channel, and on the other side the car park and a drab office building beyond. Blocks of work stations were ranged along both sides, the cream-and-blue walls and charcoal carpet giving it a smart, modern appearance. It smelled a lot fresher than its predecessor, which had always had an ingrained reek of sweat, spilt coffee and years of microwaved meals and takeaways.

Most of the occupants were in uniform black tops, with shapeless black trousers and heavy-duty boots. A cluster of stab vests and yellow hi-vis jackets hung on pegs and police radios sat on several work surfaces, emitting incessant low-volume bursts of sound. The room was manned round the clock, the twenty-four hours divided into three shifts — earlies, lates, nights — and there was a briefing at the start of each shift to update the incoming officers on all ongoing police activities in the city, and potential situations.

Some crews went straight out on patrol in vehicles. Other officers, as Juliet Solomon was doing, remained at their desks, filling out forms and reports, transcribing statements from their notebooks, radios sitting just below their chins in their stab vest pockets, listening out for a Control Room request to attend a call, or sometimes a more mundane delivery mission.

Shortly after 7 a.m., Juliet’s radio came alive.

‘Charlie Romeo Zero Five, are you available to attend 73 Crestway Rise, off Hollingbury Road? Distressed call from a woman who says her husband has just pushed dog faeces into her face. He’s threatening to kill her. She’s locked herself in the toilet. Grade One. She’s hung up, but I’m trying to call her back.’

All calls were graded. ‘Grade One’ meant immediate response. ‘Two’ meant get there within one hour. ‘Three’ was attend by appointment. ‘Four’ was no police attendance required and to be resolved over the phone.