‘Fancy some meatballs, darling?’
‘Yeah, right,’ Caitlin said sleepily, without looking up, as if her mother was offering her poison.
‘We’re just passing IKEA – we could stop.’
She worked the keypad for some moments, then said, ‘They wouldn’t be open now.’
‘It’s only quarter to eight. I think they’re open until ten.’
‘Meatballs? Yuck. Do you want to poison me or something?’
‘Remember when we came here in April, to get the stuff for your room? We had some then and you really enjoyed them.’
‘I read about meatballs on the Net,’ Caitlin said, suddenly becoming animated. ‘They’re full of fat and crap. You know, some meatballs – they’ve even got bits of bone and hooves in. It’s like some burgers – they literally put the whole cow in a crushing machine. Like, everything, right? The head, skin, intestines. That way they can say it is pure beef.’
‘Not IKEA’s.’
‘Yeah, I forgot, you worship at the altar of IKEA. Like their stuff is blessed by some Nordic god.’
Lynn smiled, reached out a hand and touched her daughter’s wrist. ‘It would be better than the hospital food.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t worry. I’m not going to eat anything while I’m in that fucking place.’ She tapped her keypad again. ‘Anyhow, we just ate supper.’
‘I ate, darling. You didn’t touch your food.’
‘Whatever.’ She texted some more. Then she said, ‘Actually, that’s not true. I had some yoghurt.’ She yawned.
Lynn halted the Peugeot at traffic lights, removed her hand for a moment to put the gear lever into neutral, then put it back again on Caitlin’s wrist. ‘You must eat something tonight.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘To keep up your strength.’
‘I’m being strong.’
She squeezed her daughter’s wrist, but there was no response. Then she dug the map out of the door pocket and briefly checked it. The exhaust pipe banged on the underside of the car as the engine idled. The lights turned green. She jammed the map back into the pocket, wrenched the sticky gear lever into first and let out the clutch.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m scared. And I’m so tired.’
Following the traffic, she changed gear again, then up into third, and squeezed Caitlin’s wrist once more.
‘You’re going to be fine, darling. You are in the best possible hands.’
‘Luke’s been on the Internet. He just texted me. He said that nine out of ten people on the liver transplant waiting list in the USA die before they get one. That three people die every day in the UK waiting for a transplant. And there’s 140,000 people in the USA and Europe waiting for transplants.’
In her fury, Lynn did not notice the brake lights on the vehicles ahead were glowing and she had to stamp on the brakes, locking up the front wheel to avoid rear-ending a van. The Internet! she thought. Sod the fucking Internet. Sod that jerk, Luke. Has that brainless twerp not got anything better to do than spook my daughter?
‘Luke’s wrong,’ she said. ‘I discussed it with Dr Hunter earlier. It’s just not true. What happens is that some very sick people get put on the waiting list far too late. But that’s not your situation.’
She tried to think of something else to say that would not sound patronizing. But her mind was suddenly a blank. The consultant, Dr Granger, had said they would try to get her a priority position on the waiting list. But, equally candidly, he’d said that he could not guarantee it. And there was the added problem of Caitlin’s blood group.
She drove on in silence, to the sound of the steady click-click-click of Caitlin’s phone keys and the occasional ping-ping of an incoming text.
‘Do you want some music on, darling?’ she said finally.
‘Not the crap stuff that you have in this car,’ Caitlin retorted, but at least she said it good-humouredly.
‘Why don’t you try to find something on the radio?’
‘Whatever.’ Caitlin leaned forward and switched the radio on. An old Scissor Sisters song was playing: ‘I don’t feel like dancin’’.
‘That’s me,’ Caitlin said. ‘No dancing today.’
Lynn gave her a wry smile. In the sudden flare of a street light, a thin, scared ghost in the passenger seat smiled wistfully back.
16
‘Well, well, guess who’s here! And you’ve even beaten the blowflies to this one!’ Roy Grace said, as, followed by DI Mantle, he walked past the scene guard at the bottom of the gangway and reluctantly acknowledged the reporter from the local Brighton newspaper, the Argus.
It did not seem to matter what time of the day or night, Kevin Spinella always turned up ahead of all other reporters, particularly when there was a whiff of a suspicious death.
Or perhaps it was the whiff of death itself. Perhaps the young reporter’s razor-sharp nose could smell death from the same four-mile distance as blowflies.
Either that or he had found some way of cracking the latest secure police radio network. Grace always suspected he had an insider in the police and was determined, one day, to find out, but at this moment his thoughts were on something else entirely. He needed to get to the party for Chief Superintendent Jim Wilkinson as quickly as possible and find out just what Cleo had meant when she’d said coldly, I want to tell you face to face, not over the phone.
Just what did this woman he loved so much want to tell him? And why had she sounded so off? Was she going to dump him? Tell him she had found someone else? Or that she was going back to her previous boyfriend, her born-again Christian barrister jerk?
OK, her ex was an Old Etonian, and Grace knew he could never compete with that. Cleo came from a different background from his own, a wholly different class league. Her family were rich, she had been educated at a private boarding school and she was ferociously intelligent.
By comparison, he was just a dumb, middle-class copper, the son of a middle-class copper. And he had no aspirations beyond that; that was all he wanted to be and all he would ever be. He loved his work and he loved his colleagues. He would happily admit that if he could just freeze time, he would like to remain in his job forever.
Had Cleo now realized that?
Despite all his attempts to keep pace with her Open University degree studies in philosophy, he was falling way behind. Had she decided he was simply not bright enough for her?
‘Nice to see you, Detective Superintendent Grace, Detective Inspector Mantle.’
The reporter flashed a big smile and stepped right into their path. For a moment, their faces were so close he could smell Spinella’s spearmint chewing gum.
‘So what brings two senior detectives to the harbour on a chilly night like this?’
The reporter had a thin, keen-eyed face and a short, modern haircut. He was wearing a beige, gumshoe mackintosh with the collar turned up, over a thin, summer-weight suit and a carefully knotted tie. His tasselled black shoes looked cheap and loud.
‘You don’t look like you’re dressed for fishing,’ Lizzie Mantle quipped.
‘Fishing for facts,’ he retorted, with a quizzical raise of his eyebrows. ‘Or perhaps dredging them up?’
Behind him, the mortuary van began driving off. Spinella turned to glance at it for a second, then he looked back at the two detectives.
‘Could either of you give me a comment?’
‘Not at this stage,’ Grace said. ‘I may hold a press conference after the post-mortem tomorrow.’
Spinella pulled out his notepad, flipping it open. ‘Might be just another floater, then. Can I quote you on that, Detective Superintendent?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve no comment,’ Grace said.
‘A burial at sea, perhaps?’