Текст книги "The Risk of Darkness"
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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“I just wish c”
He lowered his cup of tea. He knew what, from her tone of voice.
“It takes time,” he said, as he always did.
“But how much time? If they made an effort, came to meet you, it’d be all right then.”
He must be tired of it, always reassuring, always getting her to see the girls’ point of view, look on the bright side, give it time.
“What do you want to do tomorrow? Go on a trip, stay here?”
“You—”
“No,” Eileen said. “You. You always give me the choice, now it’s your turn.”
He turned his head and looked out across the bay. Then he said, like a small boy wishing for a treat and fearing he would not get it, “I tell you what, then.”
“Go on.”
“I’d give a lot to go out on a boat.”
Thirty
A bird was making an irritating noise just outside the window, not a song, a regular high-pitched sound, like no bird Serrailler knew.
He came awake with a shock to find a body beside him in the bed and his mobile beeping. The hotel’s clock-radio read seven twenty.
“Serrailler.”
“Guv? I wasn’t sure what time I could wake you c”
Simon sat up. Diana stirred and turned over. “It’s fine. What’s up, Nathan?”
“I know you’re on leave, only we got her. She’s nailed.”
Simon whistled. “Forensics?”
“Yep. Came through late yesterday, I tried to reach you—”
“What have we got?”
“David Angus.”
“Oh God.”
“Two hairs.”
“In the house?”
“Nope, in the car. Car boot.”
Simon blanked out the picture that came into his head. “That it?”
“No. There’s something else c fingernail c not David, not Scott, not the little girl c they haven’t got a match yet.”
“So anotherchild?”
“Looks that way.”
“Christ. Oh Christ. Has anyone been to see Marilyn Angus?”
“Not yet.”
“Then don’t. This is mine.”
“Guv.”
“I’ll be there in a couple of hours. No one else is to pick it up and go there, understood?”
“Got it.”
Simon sat forward, his knees up, head down. It was the best news. It was what they wanted. It was what they had all worked for and prayed for. It was Ed Sleightholme nailed. The rest would follow, it would only be a matter of time. However many there were.
But it was also the last faint flicker of hope snuffed out. For Marilyn Angus, for other parents, God knows how many, for everyone in the country who had watched and prayed, hopelessly yet always hopeful, that somehow, somewhere, David Angus and the other child, or children, would be found alive.
His throat felt dry.
“Darling?” Diana put out her hand and stroked his shoulder.
He did not respond and after a couple of seconds, pushed back the duvet. “I have to get to Lafferton.”
“Why? You’re on holiday for a week.”
“That was my sergeant.” He went into the bathroom, locked the door and turned the shower on hard.
Ten minutes later he was dressed, his hair roughly rubbed dry, and putting his things into his holdall.
Diana sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you coming back to London tonight?”
“Shouldn’t think so.”
“Tomorrow? How long is this going to take?”
He shrugged, packing his camera into the side pocket.
“Can I come with you?”
“No c sorry, but no, I might not be there long.”
“So c”
“Probably have to go to Yorkshire again.”
“Is this about the woman in the papers? The one with the little girl in the boot of her car?”
“Don’t rush, order breakfast, take your time.”
“When will I see you?”
He did not want to look at her because he felt ashamed of himself and angry, angry with her. Angry. Her hand was outstretched to him. He looked at it but did not touch her.
“I see,” Diana said.
“This is what it’s like. You know that by now.”
She did not reply.
“This is what police life is like.”
“No. This is what youare like.”
He picked up the holdall and went.
He was out of London and on to the motorway before he allowed himself to reflect on what had happened. What had he been thinking? Why had he taken Diana out to dinner? And above all why had he then slipped lazily into the temptation of letting her go back with him to the hotel and his bed? It had been the way things had once been and he had fought to break free of that way. He cursed himself and swore half a dozen times, picking up speed. Then he pushed Diana and everything that had happened in London out of his mind and began to think about Edwina Sleightholme.
An hour into the drive, he had to stop for petrol and went into the service station to check the papers and get a coffee. He was paying for it when his mobile rang.
“Darling?”
“Sorry, can I call you back?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice. I wish you could have stayed.”
Negotiating the narrow gap between tables with his cup, Simon dropped the phone and it skidded away. By the time he had retrieved it and sat down, the line had gone dead.
He rang in to the station, checked that Nathan had no updated news, and told him he would be off-line until he got back.
“Fair enough, guv, you are supposed to be on leave.”
“I want to think. There won’t be anything that can’t wait.”
The papers had nothing new to say. That suited him. He flipped through the rest of the news and finished his coffee. In the car, he put in a call to the Yorkshire CID but Jim Chapman was out.
His mind was full of the case. There was a resolution. They had the killer and the evidence with which to charge her on at least two counts. He should have been pleased, but there was no pleasure in any of it, only a grim satisfaction that the small, dark-haired woman he had chased down the cliff path and crouched with on the narrow ledge above the sea was going to prison for life. But there had to be more. He had to understand why. What kind of a person was she, what had made her tick all her life? “Mad” would be the word bandied about, but Ed Sleightholme had not seemed so to him. Simon had known the mad and felt sorry for them, while being unable to relate to them on any level either of them had understood. “Mad” was an easy explanation and it was the wrong one. Yet what was saneabout a woman like Ed?
He tried to unlock the puzzle, twisting and turning it inside out in his mind, for most of the way home. He concentrated on it. That way he avoided thinking about Diana.
The CID room was humming as he walked in to look for Nathan. The atmosphere was different. There was a sense of relief. They had a result.
“Nathan out?”
“Yes, guv, the DI wanted him on an op out at Starly c some weirdo been posting threatening notices up.”
“Up?”
“Yeah, on noticeboards, shop windows c quite nasty. Anyway, aren’t you off this week, guv?”
“You haven’t seen me.’’
He went to his room. The team seemed to be focused on new cases, to have moved on. What had he expected? Why had he come back at all?
He sat at his desk and checked over the forensics report, then sat for several minutes staring out of the window. The faces of the murdered children as they had appeared on posters everywhere burned into his brain. Small bodies, small lives, snuffed out to gratify the urges of a woman who looked so normal, spoke like anyone else, would not stand out in any crowd, a woman who lived in a neat house and had neighbours, including a small girl who liked to go round and spend time with her. He had encountered psychopathic murderers often enough and he knew that at some place inside themselves they did not relate in any way to any other human being, were unrecognisable to other human beings, in the nature of their cravings and their lack of inhibition about gratifying them, in their focus and self-absorption, their cunning and deviousness, their lack of conscience, emotion, empathy, imagination. But the Ed Sleightholmes of this world were not mad, not in the sense that they could not function, could not hold down jobs and eat and sleep and drive cars and talk to people in shops and on buses. They did not hear voices urging them on or have fits of raving mania during which they behaved in the way people expected lunatics to do, raging in the middle of the street wearing nothing, singing and dancing crazily their eyes unfocused, their brains a kaleidoscope of whirling, random fears.
Cold, calculating, unfeeling. Ed Sleightholme was all of those things and more but she was not, in the DCI’s book, insane and unfit to plead. He knew that the psychiatric assessments would be under way and he was pretty sure that whoever did them would not be fooled, whatever tricks Sleightholme tried to pull.
He swung his chair round. He had to see Marilyn Angus. He had to go to the house now so that David’s mother heard the news from him, privately, face to face.
His phone rang. He ignored it. On the way out to his car, the mobile rang too. He did not take it out of his pocket.
Just over an hour later, he was driving out of Lafferton and into the country. He had gone to see Marilyn Angus expecting to witness her raw grief and anguished tears again, as he had during the days and weeks immediately following David’s disappearance and her husband’s death by suicide. Instead, she had been controlled and calm, her mood neutral, as if, as a solicitor, she were receiving news of one of her clients. She had been neatly dressed and made up, and by the time he had finished giving her the information about her son, he had felt that she was trying to comfort him rather than the other way about. Certainly she had thanked him, told him how sorry she was that he had had to bring the news to her, said that she was less distressed than he might have expected simply because, in her heart, she had accepted that David was dead long ago. “I knew there would be something,” she had said, “some sort of confirmation. But I didn’t need it. The law needs it. That’s all.”
Simon had felt there had been no contact between them. Marilyn Angus had built an invisible, impenetrable shell around her like a coat of varnish. He thought it would be there for the rest of her life. Perhaps her daughter Lucy was allowed in beyond it. Perhaps not.
In one way, she had made the visit easy for him, far easier than on those occasions soon after David’s disappearance when she had made no attempt to conceal her angry, raging outbursts of grief. He wondered what she would do now, whether she would remain in Lafferton, in the same house, the same job, or change everything, go abroad, become a different person.
Lines came into his head. O, call back yesterday, bid time return.
People had the wrong image of policemen, he thought, imagining they did not, could not, let themselves be affected by the job, touched too deeply, stripped too near the bone by things they saw and heard and had to do. Much of the time that might be true, but only because the work was routine and there was nothing about it to upset anyone. But then a David Angus case came along and however experienced, however professional, you were shot to pieces by it and the cracks were only poorly mended. He knew how keenly his team had felt everything and that the rejoicing at the arrest was still tempered with distress. When it was all over, perhaps a year on, it would be the distress that would still be embedded in their psyches, never the triumph at a killer caught.
He pulled up in front of his sister’s farmhouse. Cat was not yet working full-time and he had hoped to see her, maybe take her out for a pub lunch. But there were no cars in the drive, the windows were shut, doors locked. He wandered across to lean on the paddock fence. The grey pony looked up from grazing for a moment but did not make a move to come nearer. Chickens pecked about in the grass at its feet. It was very quiet. A bleak, depressed mood threatened him, like a cloud hovering at the edge of the bright sky. He was on leave. The station was buzzing along cheerfully without him. So was his family. He had behaved stupidly with Diana. The prospect of seeing her again at the private view was troubling.
Simon understood what made people disappear, take off for an airport or a ferry and simply go, wherever, leaving no trace. He could do it now. Africa. He had always wanted to go to Africa.
He shook his head to clear the thoughts. Such responsibilities as he did have were perfectly real and his conscience was better developed than his sister would believe.
He left the pony and the red-brown, pecking hens, and took the road that led to Hallam House and his parents. If anybody would welcome a good pub lunch and his company, it might be his mother.
Half an hour later, he was on the motorway back to London. There had been no one in at Hallam House either. Simon scanned through the radio stations in search of music, or comedy, or at least some good news.
Thirty-one
At half past seven Lynsey Williams put her gear into the sports holdall, covered the salmon salad with cling film and wrote a note saying “Matt, food in fridge, xxxx”and went out. Matt was at the floodlit five-a-side courts with the boys he trained out of school hours.
She wondered, as she walked down St Luke’s Road, why some couples apparently found it so difficult to live together and be committed but also have individual lives. She and Matt hadn’t found it a problem. Whatever people said, school holidays were quite long and she worked her own time off around Matt’s, so they could go off together at least three times a year, skiing, diving, climbing, with one week doing nothing on a hot beach. In term, he was out from dawn till dusk teaching and then spent extra time coaching, travelling all over the place to matches, training. Lynsey crammed all her own work into Matt’s term time. She was lucky, she could. Five years ago, she had bought her first semi-derelict property and done it up with a bit of help on the heavy work from Matt and her brother. Now, she was on to her twelfth house, selling some on quickly, letting others. She had hit the right time, the market had boomed. She was doing well.
The only problem was whether or not to expand, take on staff and double her turnover. She had played about with the figures for months, but it was not the money that worried her so much as taking the giant step up from being small and single-handed. She liked to do most of the work and all of the decision-making herself. Expansion? What was she thinking? But she knew she would go on brooding about it as she ploughed up and down the sports centre pool, doing her forty lengths, and it was pointless talking to Matt. “Search me,” was his usual answer.
She turned the corner. Then, someone called her name. She looked round. The man was waving and calling again, running towards her up the road. Lynsey hesitated. She did not recognise him and he was still some way off but as she heard him shout her name urgently again, she waited. Perhaps he had looked round one of her houses, perhaps he was one of the tenants, though she did all the letting through an agency.
“Lynsey c” Was that what he said?
He was nearer now and the expression on his face was strange, as if he were astonished to see her and excited and somehow c the only word she could find was wild.
“Lizzie c”
He stopped dead, a yard or two from her.
“Hello?” Lynsey said. “Sorry, were you meaning me?”
He was staring at her, his face contorted into something like anger, something like bewilderment—again, she could not read it. But she was nervous now and as she spoke, began to turn and move away quickly, towards the main road, towards passing cars and open shops and other people.
“No c don’t go, don’t. Stop. Please. Stand still. Stand STILL.”
She stood still. He came slowly nearer to her.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Lynsey c” she managed.
“No. No, you’re Lizzie. Turn round. Let me look at your hair.”
She froze.
“You’re Lizzie. You have to be.”
“I’m Lynsey. I’m sorry, I have to go, someone c someone’s waiting for me over there.”
He stood, staring, his eyes scanning her face desperately. “Turn round.” Her hair was long, pulled into a cotton scrunchy “Please loosen your hair c I want to see your hair. I must, please c”
He did not come nearer but his voice was urgent, and his expression still so strange that she put down her sports bag, and obeyed, pulling the band off and shaking her head until her hair fell loose.
“Lizzie?”
“No. I said. I’m Lynsey c Lynsey Williams. Look, you’ve just mistaken me for someone else c please let me go, I’m late, I have to meet someone, I said.”
“Your hair’s the wrong colour. It isn’t Lizzie’s hair.”
“No,” Lynsey said. “Sorry. No.”
There was a low wall in front of the house beside them and the man suddenly reached out for it, as if he felt faint, then sat heavily down. Lynsey stood, watching, wanting his signal so that she could go, run, fast round the corner and out of his sight.
Then she saw that he was weeping, openly, silently, putting the back of his hand up to his face to wipe his eyes, which then filled and overflowed again. She felt embarrassed and awkward, unsure what to say, desperate to go. And in the end, because he took no more notice of her but sat on, wrapped in himself and his own distress, she simply did so, turning and walking away, slowly though. As she reached the corner, she looked back, upset at what she saw, wishing she knew how to help him—except that she did not know what had happened or what he needed or why.
It was not until she had swum a dozen slow lengths of the pool that she felt calmer, but for the rest of the evening, she had the image of the man in her head and could not wipe it away.
She took a different, longer route home and walked quickly, looking behind her time and again, listening in case she heard someone calling her name again.
No one did.
*
Matt was in the kitchen, the salmon salad eaten and the plates and cutlery washed and put away. Matt was a dream to live with, neat and tidy about everything, clean, organised, punctual. He was sitting at the kitchen table trying to finish the cryptic crossword.
“Hi, babe. Good swim?”
Lynsey dropped her bag.
“Lyns?”
“Something weird happened.”
He looked round. “What? Are you OK?”
“I think so. Yes. Yes, I am. Only it was c a bit weird, that’s all.”
She got a bottle of water from the fridge and wandered to the table, to the sink, back to the fridge. The man was still in her head, sitting on the wall in the street, crying.
Matt listened carefully. “And he didn’t do anything, didn’t touch you?”
“No. I think c when I wasn’t whoever he thought—this Lizzie, not Lynsey—he just crumpled up, you know? He didn’t, sort of, notice me again.”
“Right, well, people do make mistakes, you see someone’s back view, they turn round, it isn’t whoever at all c but you don’t ask them to take the band out of their hair. That’s weird. That’s what I don’t like.”
“No.”
“What do you want to do?”
“How do you mean?”
“Go to the police? Now? Tomorrow?”
“What would I go to the police for? Don’t be daft.”
“He could have been up to anything. You were on your own in a quiet street, he shouted after you c he could have been a rapist.”
“He wasn’t. I don’t know what it was all about but he wasn’t going to attack me c it wasn’t like that.”
“You can’t be sure. We had a serial killer round here not that long ago, don’t forget.”
“I haven’t. No one has. Only, I said, this was c different. I wish I hadn’t told you now.”
“OK.”Matt turned back to the crossword.
He was like that. He was hopeless to argue with because he never would, he just dropped a subject, forgot it, got on with something else. It drove her nuts sometimes but it made for a quiet life.
She went upstairs and ran a bath. The man was still there, in her head, still sitting on the wall, crying. She heard his voice, calling to her above the sound of the water gushing down from the taps, calling out her name, but not her name.
She wasn’t frightened. But it troubled her.
Thirty-two
They had stayed in small B & Bs before, but on this trip Dougie had booked into a hotel, Sandybank, overlooking the bay. In the foyer was an advertisement for Turkey and Tinsel Weekends, from October. He nodded at it as they went in. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You are joking, Dougie Meelup! Christmas is all very nice, I quite enjoy it when it comes, but it doesn’t come until the last week in December. Some people want to get a life.”
He laughed. Dougie laughed a lot. It was one of the things she had liked about him from the start, his laughter and the way years of it had set his face in a laugh, so that even when he was asleep, he sometimes seemed to be smiling. They had a room at the front with a sea view, but the sun had gone in now and the sea was churning about inside itself under a threatening sky.
“What would you like to do? Drink in the bar here or wander along and find somewhere else you fancy for a glass of wine?”
“I think here looks very nice.”
The hotel was bright and clean and not too large, they had been welcomed as if they were wanted, not just customers, and she would be happy sitting looking out at the bay and the life on the seafront. Happy.
She was happy.
There was a handful of other people in the bar and in a small room next to it the television was on.
“I like that,” Eileen said, taking her glass of wine. “I don’t like places where the telly blares out at you whether you want it or not.” She looked behind her through the window. Most people had left the beach and the benches along the promenade now that the sun had gone. It was quiet. The tide was on the way out.
“I could live here,” she said.
Dougie raised his beer glass to her. But then he set it down again. “Do you mean that?”
“Live here? Yes. By the sea. I would. It’d suit me very well.”
“Well, there’s nothing to stop us. Eighteen months’ time, I’ll be a free man and I could always get a bit of a part-time job somewhere here. So could you, come to that.”
She took a sip of wine and tried to picture it.
“Oh, I don’t know really. It’d be such an upheaval.”
“What’s wrong with an upheaval? Keep you young.”
But she knew she would have to roll the idea about slowly in her mind, turn it over and over like a penny in her pocket, look at every bit of it, see the problems and drawbacks. She couldn’t begin to take it all in now. It would be weeks. Pleasant weeks though. Whatever side she came down on, the thinking would be pleasant.
“I’ll just go and have a look at the news,” she said. It was too exciting, that was the thing; she realised that the moment Dougie had suggested it, she had wanted to leap in then and there, say yes, yes, and move, be in a place like this, a house with the sea view beyond the windows, and it was a dream and you had to be careful with dreams. Very careful. She had had too many of them broken to be anything but wary by now.
She needed to calm down and have her mind taken off it. For now. Just for now.
The small TV lounge looked over the garden, with blue hydrangea bushes and a bird feeder swinging from the branch of a rowan tree. That was the sort of garden they could have, with bushes and trees and not too much weeding to do. So long as they had a view of the sea from it.
Dougie stayed in the bar. He took up the evening paper and ordered a second glass of beer. She glanced affectionately at him through the open door. He looked like anyone else. He was neither very tall nor too short, neither fat nor thin, bald nor with his youthful head of hair. No one would look at him twice, nor remember him, no one would stare at him, no one would envy her or feel sorry for her when they saw them together. No one could have known the goodness of him, the kindness and the way he had given her a new life.
The news was announced by the music Eileen always thought of as angry, but Katie Derham had an extremely nice navy blue suit on with white pipings.
“Good evening.”
Dougie Meelup went through the local evening paper quite thoroughly, always having believed that you learned more about life that way than from any national media. He had meant what he said about moving to somewhere like this, right on the sea, and after reading the news and sport he moved on to the property pages to get the measure of the house prices. They shocked him. Anything facing the sea or even with a fairly distant view of it looked out of their price range by miles, though there were some nice small new houses a short walk behind the promenade. But would Eileen like the view? He had seen the way she had looked out across the bay, from the bench and then from the bedroom window. He wondered how much money he might be able to raise and whether one of the boys might even be interested in coming in with them.
He took the pen he had won in a spot-the-ball competition years ago and which had been his only pen ever since and started to jot down figures in the margin of the Gazette. He was immersed in them, trying to juggle and massage them to make them look more promising, when he sensed Eileen standing near.
Dougie glanced up. She was in the doorway between the bar and the television lounge. Her face was so odd, so contorted somehow, in an expression he had never seen and could not interpret, that for a second he wondered if she had had a stroke. She was very pale but with two high spots of colour on her cheekbones and her mouth was twisted.
He put the pen down. “All right, love?” But it was so clear that she was not that now the girl behind the bar looked at him and started to ask if there was anything she could do.
Eileen did not move. Her mouth opened and shut again but she did not move. Dougie went to her. Her eyes were huge and bewildered. He felt her shaking. But then, in a dreadful, surrealistic moment, she started to laugh, a weird, giggly laugh, not loud.
Another couple had come into the bar, they were standing staring, looking uncertain as to whether they wanted to sit down after all.
Between them, Dougie and the girl got her to the table and sitting down.
“Shall I fetch her a brandy?” the girl whispered.
“Maybe a glass of water.” He took her hand between his and chafed it. “Eileen c” Her expression was still odd. It panicked him.
She fumbled for her bag and handkerchief and wiped her eyes and then her mouth in an aimless, unfocused way, looking at him, then away from him, and once or twice glancing round at the door to the television room, as if checking something.
“Do you feel ill? Shall I get them to ring a doctor? Can you just tell me what happened?” He kept her hand between his.
She smiled a wonky smile. She tried to lift the water but her hand shook, so Dougie held it up to her mouth as she took a few sips, before pushing it away.
“The thing is, it’s all so stupid, it’s not true, I mean, it isn’t the right one, it’s stupid, but it gave me a terrible shock. Well, of course it did.”
“What gave you a shock?”
“When they said her name.’
“Whose name?”
She glanced at the doorway again. Then she gave a deep, juddering sigh. “It isn’t as if it’s such a common name, is it? Weeny’s name. Edwina.”
“Not so common, no. No, I can’t say I’ve known any other.”
“Only there it was. Edwina Sleightholme. Of course it isn’t her, my Edwina that is, my Weeny, of course it couldn’t be, but you can see how it gave me a shock, coming out of the television like that. The room went round.”
It took several more minutes for him to get the story fairly clear.
A young woman, the same name as Eileen’s younger daughter, the same age, had been charged with the abduction and murder of two children, and the abduction, with intent to murder, of a third.
“It just seems unbelievable, that,” Dougie said. “Just unbelievable. No wonder it gave you such a shock. Was it that little lad disappeared last year, that one?”
“Yes. And another boy and a little girl. It’s terrible.”
“Of course it is. I suppose if they’ve got someone c it’s c no, it’s terrible.”
But there was something not right. There had to be.
“Where was this?”
“On the news. Katie Derham.”
“No, where was the c the one with the same name as your Weeny? Where was she?”
“That was the funny bit.”
“What was funny, Eileen?”
“The funny bit was not only her name and her age but where she lived. She lived there. Same as our Weeny. They even live in the same town!”
She started to laugh the terrible giggling laugh again, but her eyes were on his face and would not focus anywhere else, her eyes begged him to laugh with her, to see how funny it really was, that there should be two women of the same name and age, two Edwina Sleightholmes living in the same town, two c
Dougie Meelup’s heart began pounding so hard he felt a pressure inside his chest, inside his ears, inside his head, an awful, pulsating pressure.
Thirty-three
“It’s me.”
“Hi, you. How did it go?”
“Good. Great.”
“Many there?”
“Packed.”
“Sell any?”
“About half of them, straight off. At least half, I didn’t count them properly.”
Simon sat in his car in a quiet street behind the gallery. It was just after nine o’clock and he had dodged away from the private view before everyone else, before Martin Lovat, the gallery owner, could buttonhole him to go out to dinner and, above all, before Diana realised that he had left.
“Si, I’m really, really pleased. I wish we could have been there. Did the folks turn up?”
“No. Ma sent a loving note.”
“Oh, honestly.”
“You know Dad wouldn’t be seen dead in an art gallery and Ma wouldn’t come without him. They’ve never been. I didn’t expect them this time either.”
“Hang on, Si c I thought I heard Felix. Wait.” There was an acute few seconds of intent, listening silence before Cat said, “No, false alarm. You going off to celebrate now then? Somewhere Mayfair and glam?”
“Nope. I’m driving back. I slightly wondered if I could come in.”
“What, tonight? You won’t be back till gone eleven.”
“Sorry, not a good idea then.”
“Honestly not. His lordship is waking me two or three times a night at the moment and Sam keeps coming into our bed. I was just about to go up when you rang in fact.”
“OK.”
“You sound bleak. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Did you see any news by the way?”
“Yes, it was all over the six o’clock. Hordes of screaming women racing after the police van taking her from court. Makes you shudder.”
“Ed Sleightholme would make you shudder.”
“Want to come tomorrow? I’ll be home by four. Supper and stay.”
“Only if you mean it.”
“Oh bugger off, Simon,” Cat said cheerfully as she put the phone down.
Through his rear-view mirror, he saw a knot of people from the gallery coming up the street. He gunned the car away from the kerb and sped off.
