‘I’m sorry – what do you mean, you started it? I thought all you did was take a call from Interpol?’
‘Roy,’ he said, in an imploring tone that suggested Grace was his very, very best friend ever, ‘it was my initiative that got everything moving so fast.’
Grace nodded, irritated by the man’s attitude and the interruption. ‘Yes, and I appreciate that. But you have to understand we operate on teamwork here in Sussex, Cassian. You’re in charge of cold cases – I’m running a live inquiry. The information you’ve given me may be very helpful and your swift action has been noted.’
Now fuck off and let me get on with my work, he wanted to say, but didn’t.
‘I appreciate that. I just think that I should be one of the team going to Australia.’
‘You are better off being deployed here,’ Grace said. ‘That’s my call.’
Pewe glared at him and, in a fit of sudden pique, snapped back, ‘I think you might regret that, Roy.’
Then he stormed out of Grace’s office.
80
Tuesday evening, 8 o’clock. Ricky sat in his van in darkness, back at the same cross-street vantage point opposite Abby’s mother’s flat where he had waited earlier. From here he could see both the front entrance and the street she would have to use if she tried sneaking out of the rear fire-escape door.
The chill was really seeping into his bones. He just wanted to get everything back, get Abby out of his face and get the fuck out of this godforsaken damp, freezing country and into some sunshine.
He’d hardly seen a soul in the past three hours. He seemed to remember Eastbourne had a reputation as a retirement town where the average age was either dead or nearly dead. Tonight it felt as if everyone was dead. Street-lighting fell on empty pavements. Fucking waste, he thought. Someone should talk to this place about its carbon footprint.
Abby was inside, in the warm with her mother. He had a feeling she would be staying there tonight, but he did not dare leave his post and go to find a pub and have a drink or three until he was sure.
About two hours ago he’d picked up the signal from her new mobile phone when she’d made a call to her mother’s new phone to test its ring tone and volume, and to give it her number. Now, thanks to that call, he had both of their numbers logged.
When they were testing the phones he heard the television in the background. It sounded like some soap opera, with a man and a woman bickering in a car. So the bitch and her mother were settled in for a cosy evening in front of the telly, in a warm flat, charging two new mobile phones that had been bought with his money.
The Intercept beeped busily. Abby was phoning rest homes, looking for somewhere that would take her mother in immediately for four weeks, until a room in the place she had chosen came available.
She was interrogating them about nursing care, doctors, mealtimes, ingredients of the food, exercise, about whether there was a pool, a sauna, whether they were near a main road or somewhere quiet, gardens with wheelchair access, were there private bathrooms? Her list went on and on. Thorough. As he had learned to his bitter cost. She was a thorough bitch.
And whose money would be paying for it?
He listened to Abby making appointments to go and see three places in the morning. He presumed she would leave her mother behind. That she had not forgotten the locksmith was coming.
By the time he had finished with her, it wouldn’t be a rest home she was needing. It would be a chapel of rest.
81
At 8.20 the next morning, Inspector Stephen Curry, accompanied by Sergeant Ian Brown, entered the small conference room in the custody block behind Sussex House. He was clutching today’s morning briefing notes, which comprised a comprehensive review of all priority crimes that had occurred in the district over the last twenty-four hours.
They were joined by Sergeant Morley and the second early-shift sergeant, a short, stocky officer with a fierce crew cut and even fiercer enthusiasm for her work called Mary Gregson.
They immediately got down to the job in hand. Curry started to go through all the critical serials. There had had been an ugly racist incident, with a young Muslim student badly beaten up outside a late-night takeaway in Park Road, Coldean, on his way back to the university; a traffic fatality involving a motorcyclist and a pedestrian on Lewes Road; a violent mugging on the Broadway in Whitehawk; and a young man beaten up in Preston Park in a homophobic incident.
He went through all of them with a toothcomb, working out areas of threat, making sure, in his terminology, that he didn’t drop a bollock which could be kicked into touch by the Superintendent at the 9.30 review.
Then they moved on to the current district mis-pers and agreed lines of enquiry. Mary brought up the details of a bail returning to be charged later that day, and reminded Curry that he had an 11 a.m. with a Crown Prosecution Service solicitor, about a suspect they had arrested after a spate of handbag thefts the previous set of shifts.
Then the Inspector suddenly remembered something else. ‘John – I spoke to you yesterday about visiting a lady down in Kemp Town. I didn’t see that on the list – what was her name? – Katherine Jennings. Any follow-up?’
Morley suddenly blushed. ‘Oh, God, sorry, boss. I haven’t done anything about it. That Gemma Buxton incident came in and – I’m sorry – I gave that priority over everything. I’ll put it on the serial and get someone down there this morning.’
‘Good man,’ Curry said, then looked at his watch again. Shit. Nearly 9.05. He jumped up. ‘See you later.’
‘Have a nice time with the headmaster,’ Mary said with a cheeky grin.
‘Yeah, you might be teacher’s pet today!’ Morley said.
‘With someone whose memory’s as crap as yours on the team?’ he retorted. ‘I don’t think so.’
82
Ricky slept fitfully, dozing off after the several pints of beer he had treated himself to in a busy seafront pub and waking with a start every time he saw headlights or heard a vehicle, or footsteps, or a door close. He sat in the passenger seat just so he didn’t look like a drunk driver, should an inquisitive policeman come by, only leaving the van a couple of times to urinate in an alley.
He drove off again in the darkness, at 6 a.m., in search of a workmen’s café, where he had some breakfast, and was back at his observation post again within the hour.
How the hell had he got himself into this situation? he asked himself repeatedly. How had he let himself be duped by this bitch? Oh, she’d played it so cutely, coming on to him, playing the horny little slut to perfection. Letting him do everything he wanted with her and pretending to enjoy it. Maybe she was really enjoying it. But all the time she was pumping him so subtly for information. Women were smart. They knew how to manipulate men.
He’d made the damned mistake of telling her, because he wanted to show off. He thought it would impress her.
Instead, one night when he was coked out of his tree and rat-arsed drunk, she cleaned him out and ran. He needed it back desperately. His finances were shot to hell, he was up to his ears in debt and the business was not working out. This was his one chance. It had fallen into his lap, then she had snatched it and run.
There was one thing in his favour, though: the world in which she was running was smaller than she thought. Anyone she went to, with what she had, would ask questions. A lot of questions. He suspected she had already begun to find that out, which was why she was still around, and now her problems had been further complicated by his arrival in Brighton.