Roy Grace was gripped with panic. He was running across grass, running at the edge of the cliff, with its sheer drop of a thousand feet, with a howling wind blowing in his face, almost pushing him to a standstill, so that he was just running on the spot.
Meanwhile a man was running towards the edge of the cliff, holding the baby in his arms. His baby.
Grace threw himself forward, grabbing the man’s waist in a rugby tackle, bringing him down. The man broke free and rolled, determinedly, cradling the baby like a ball he was not going to lose, rolling over and over towards the cliff edge.
Grace gripped his ankles, jerking him back. Then suddenly the earth beneath him gave way, with a crack like thunder, a huge chunk of the cliff breaking off like a crumbling piece of stale cake, and he was plunging, plunging with this man and his child, plunging down towards the jagged rocks and the boiling sea.
‘Roy! Darling! Roy! Darling!’
Cleo.
Cleo’s voice.
‘Roy, it’s OK, darling. It’s OK!’
He opened his eyes. Saw the light on. Felt his heart hammering. He was drenched in sweat, as if he was lying in a stream.
‘Shit,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Falling again?’ Cleo said tenderly, looking at him with concerned eyes.
‘Beachy Head.’
It was a recurring dream he had been having for weeks. But it wasn’t just about an incident he’d been involved with there. It was also about a human monster he’d arrested a few months ago.
A sick monster who had murdered two women in the city, and had tried to kill Cleo as well. The man was behind bars, with bail refused, but even so, Grace felt suddenly nervous. Above the thudding of his heart and the roar of the blood coursing in his ears, he listened to the silence of the city at night.
The clock radio panel showed 3.10 a.m.
Nothing stirred in the house. Rain was falling outside.
Pregnant with his child, Cleo seemed more vulnerable than ever to him now. It had been a while since he had checked on the man, although he had recently dealt with some of the pre-trial paperwork. He made a mental note to make a call to ensure that he was still safely in custody and had not been released by some woolly-minded judge doing his bit to ease the overcrowding in England’s prisons.
Cleo stroked his brow. He felt her warm breath on his face. It smelled sweet, faintly minted, as if she had just brushed her teeth.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice low, barely above a whisper, as if that would be less intrusive.
‘You poor darling. You have so many nightmares, don’t you?’
He lay there, the sheet below him sodden and cold with his perspiration. She was right. A couple of times a week, at least.
‘Why was it you stopped going to therapy?’ she asked him, then kissed each of his eyes, softly, in turn.
‘Because…’ He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t helping me to move on.’ He eased himself up in bed a little, staring around.
He liked this room, which Cleo had decorated mostly in white – with a thick white rug on the bare oak floor, white linen curtains, white walls, and a few pieces of elegant black furniture, including a black lacquered dressing table – still damaged from the attack on her.
‘You’re the only thing that’s helped me to move on. You know that?’
She smiled at him. ‘Time is the best healer,’ she said.
‘No, you are. I love you. I love you so much. I love you in a way I never thought it would be possible to love anyone again.’
She stared at him, smiling, blinking slowly, for some moments.
‘I love you too. Even more than you love me.’
‘Impossible!’
She pulled a face at him. ‘Calling me a liar?’
He kissed her.
47
Glenn Branson lay wide awake in the spare room of Roy Grace’s house, which had now become his second home – or, more accurately at the moment, his main residence.
It was the same every night. He drank heavily, trying to knock himself out, but neither the booze nor the pills the doctor had prescribed seemed to have any effect. And his body, which he normally kept in shape by working out relentlessly at home or in the gym, was starting to lose muscle tone.
I’m bloody falling apart, he reflected gloomily.
The room had been decorated by Sandy in the same Zen minimalistic style as the rest of this house. The bed was a low, futon-style affair, with an uncomfortable slatted headboard that, because of his tall frame, he constantly bashed his skull on as he tried to stop his feet sticking out the other end. The mattress was as hard as cement and the frame of the bed felt loose, wobbling precariously and creaking every time he moved. He kept meaning to sort it out with a spanner, tightening the nuts, but away from work he was so despondent he didn’t feel like doing anything. Half his clothes, still in their zipped plastic covers, lay across the armchair in the small room – some of them had been there for weeks and he still had not got round to hanging them up in the almost empty wardrobe.
Roy was quite right when he told him he was turning the house into a tip.
It was 3.50 a.m. His mobile phone lay beside the bed and he hoped, as he hoped every night, that Ari might suddenly ring, to tell him she’d had a change of heart, that she’d been thinking it over and realized she did still love him, deeply, and wanted to find a way to make the marriage work.
But it stayed silent, tonight and every damn night.
And they’d had another row earlier. Ari was angry that he couldn’t collect the kids from school tomorrow afternoon, because there was a lecture she wanted to go to in London. That sounded suspicious to him, rang alarm bells. She never went to lectures in London. Was it a guy?
Was she seeing someone?
It was bad enough coping with being apart from her. But the thought that she might be seeing someone, start another relationship, introduce that person to his kids, was more than he could bear.
And he had work to think about. Had to focus somehow.
Two cats, fighting, yowled outside. And somewhere in the distance a siren shrieked. A response unit from Brighton and Hove Division. Or an ambulance.
He rolled over, suddenly craving Ari’s body. Tempted to call her. Maybe she was-
Was what?
Oh, God almighty, how much they used to love each other.
He tried to switch his mind to his work. To his phone conversation yesterday evening, with the wife of the missing skipper of the Scoob-Eee. A very distraught Janet Towers. Friday night had been their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They had a table booked at the Meadows restaurant in Hove. But her husband had never come home. She had not heard from him since.
She was absolutely certain he’d had an accident.
All she could tell Glenn was that she had contacted the coastguard on Saturday morning, who had reported back to her that the Scoob-Eee had been seen going through the lock at Shoreham Harbour at nine on Friday night, along with an Algerian-registered freighter. It was common for local fishing boats to enter the lock behind a commercial cargo vessel, enabling them to skip the locking fees. No one had paid any attention to the vessel.
Neither the boat nor Jim Towers had been seen since.
No accidents at sea had been logged by the coastguard, she had told Glenn. Jim and his boat had literally disappeared into thin air.
Suddenly, in his sleepless state, he remembered something. It might be nothing. But Roy Grace had taught him many important lessons about being a good detective and one of them was going around in his head now. Clear the ground under your feet.
He was thinking back to Friday morning, when he had been standing on the quay at Arlington Basin, waiting to board the Scoob-Eee. To a glint of light he had seen as they cast off, on the far side of the harbour, beside a cluster of refinery tanks.
At half past six that morning, Glenn pulled his unmarked police Hyundai Getz up, putting two wheels on the pavement of Kingsway, opposite a row of houses. He climbed out into drizzle and breaking daylight, eased himself over the low wall, then, clutching his torch, half slid and half ran down the grassy embankment behind the cluster of white petroleum storage tanks, until he reached the bottom. Across the far side of the dark grey water he could make out the timber yard, the gantry and, further up, the lights of the Arco Dee dredger, disgorging its latest cargo of gravel and sand. He could hear the rattle of its conveyor belt and the falling shingle.