Val McDermid - Kickback

'So why kill Cheetham? Why not just finish the job they'd started on you?' he asked.

Thank you, Richard. You don't have to sound quite so eager. The reason I'm still here is that they didn't know how much I knew, or how many people knew what I knew. But the Lomaxes figured Cheetham was the weak link in the chain, the one who'd crack under pressure. They also figured that with him out of the way they could destroy the evidence and leave themselves in the clear. So Nell arranged to meet Cheetham for one of their little games sessions. Then, when she'd got him all tied up, Brian arrived and smothered him. The pair of them tipped him over the balcony, so it looked like a nasty sex game that had gone horribly wrong.'

'And I thought my ex-wife was a bitch. Jesus. What kind of a woman does that to her lover?'

'One who's more in love with money than she is with him, I guess,' I said. They thought they'd got rid of all the evidence. But neither of them knew anything about computers. They thought all the data was on the floppies.'

'And will Alexis get her money back?'

'She'll probably have to take Brian Lomax to court. But at least she knows where he's going to be for the foreseeable future. She won't have any trouble filing the papers. Her money should be safe as houses.'

Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. She is now a full-time writer and lives in South Manchester.