‘Fine!’ she said.
‘Absolutely fine,’ her husband confirmed. ‘I just tripped over.’
‘But was it a nice trip?’ Prakash asked, with a winning smile.
‘Very nice,’ Jodie said.
‘I am always obliged to be at your very best service. Nowhere will you find better trips! Are you in need of any help?’
‘I’m fine, thank you, Prakash,’ Rollo said.
‘If you are happy then I am happy!’
‘We’re very happy,’ Jodie said. ‘Couldn’t be happier.’
62
Wednesday 4 March
The package Tooth had ordered on the internet arrived at his hotel at 11 a.m. on Wednesday. He tipped the young man who brought the large box up to his room, then hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on his door.
It was all there, just as he had requested. He took each item out and tested it. They were all working fine. He went out and bought a rucksack, then placed them all carefully inside it. Tonight, when it was dark, he planned to return to the empty house. It would take a while to complete the task, but there was no rush. He would have all night.
And after that, peace of mind.
Tooth didn’t smile often. But he smiled now.
63
Thursday 5 March
‘Roy? Roy? Roy?’
‘Urrr?’
‘Are you OK? You’re so restless.’
‘Wassertime?’
‘Two fifteen. You keep tossing and turning and shouting out. What is it? Is your leg hurting?’
Grace rolled over in bed and touched Cleo’s face with his nose. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Were you having a bad dream?’
‘Yeah. Sorry I woke you.’
They lay still for a moment.
‘Want to tell me?’
He did want to tell her, so badly. They’d always promised each other they would have no secrets. Yet how could he tell her? The taboo subject. Sandy.
So often over the time that they’d been together, Cleo had tried to get him to move on from his first wife. She’d been understanding, yet in bad moments had told him that at times she felt she wasn’t married only to him, but to him and a ghost.
Sandy.
Back in January Roy had looked at the woman lying in her hospital bed. Sandy. He had denied to himself that it was her, but he knew the truth and had been suppressing it. At some point it was going to have to come out, and how on earth was he ever going to start that conversation? And deal with the fallout that would follow? It was something that would take many hours, maybe days, to work through with Cleo — if she would accept the situation at all — and with all the authorities.
The information he had, to date, was that for a time she had been a heroin addict — and had then gone clean. And she had a son.
Whatever.
He and Sandy had tried repeatedly for a child, with no success.
So now this woman had a child.
And there was too much at stake with his new life. The past was the past. So the woman in the bed at the Klinikum was Sandy. But she was no longer his Sandy. She had made the decision, whatever had been going on in her mind at the time, to walk out on him and fabricate her disappearance — and cause him ten years of hell. He wasn’t about to disrupt his life now, however unfortunate her circumstances were.
But for the last two nights he had been unable to sleep properly.
Ever since that phone call from Kullen. Grace had met him for the first time a few years ago. Since then Kullen had helped him through a possible reported sighting of Sandy in the past, when he had gone to Munich on what turned out to be a wild goose chase.
‘Roy,’ he had said this time. ‘All is good?’ His voice had sounded strangely hesitant.
‘Very good. You? Still driving crazily, like Lewis Hamilton?’
‘Yah! I have a new car, a Scirocco Storm. It is fast! I take you for a drive sometime!’
Grace remembered his friend’s driving on his first visit to Germany. He loved fast cars himself, but at 160 mph on the autobahn, with Kullen constantly taking his eyes off the road to talk to him, he had been somewhat nervous. ‘Look forward to it!’ he had replied, with bravado.
‘So, this woman you came to see in January, in the Klinikum Schwabing? To make sure she was not your former wife, Sandy?’
‘Yes? How is she doing?’
‘Not good, Roy. Her condition is unstable. The prognosis is bad. But there is something you need to know.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I sent the hairbrush you mailed me to the DNA laboratory. I just got the results back this morning. The match is conclusive. This woman is Sandy.’
64
Friday 6 March
Tooth watched a man, in his sixties, warmly wrapped up, who appeared at the same time every day, so regularly he could set his watch by him. He was walking along the street towards him now, reading a novel, holding it so high he had to tilt his head upwards to read it.
Some days Tooth walked the round trip of several miles here and back to the hotel for exercise, and being on foot gave him a good opportunity to look carefully around. Also, and importantly, there were Neighbourhood Watch signs displayed in the windows of several of the houses. Someone vigilant would be likely to report seeing a car in the area, for several days running, with a lone occupant. He was less noticeable on foot.
As he strolled around the vicinity of Jodie’s house, he noticed some of the other regulars, too. The sad-looking man who pushed his wife along in a wheelchair, their fat dog waddling along beside it. The mad-haired woman in a white SUV who drove to the end of her drive and then spent a good sixty seconds checking in both directions before pulling out into the deserted street. The school-run mums. The newsagent in his little Mazda stopping outside houses and running in, then out again. The postman, in his red van, at 9.30, doing his delivery round.
The postman had only delivered three items to Jodie’s house all week. Tooth entered after it was dark to check them. All of them were circulars addressed ‘To the Occupier’.
He kept an eye on the house each day from eight in the morning until it grew dark, around 6 p.m. The weather had been good to him all week until this morning, when it had rained hard. That was fine, it meant fewer people were out walking around. But now it was dry a gain and there were patches of blue sky. He wondered how she was enjoying her cruise on the Organza, paid for out of the counterfeit $200,000 she had stolen, perhaps?
At 10 a.m., a grimy white van turned in through the gates of No. 191 Roedean Crescent and went down the steep drive.
Tooth strolled along the street. As he drew level with the entrance to No. 191 he glanced down and saw that the rear doors of the van were open, and a rugged-looking man in his forties, in work clothes and gum boots, was busily pulling some gardening tools out of the interior. On the van’s side panel was written ‘Stepney Garden Maintenance Services’.
He sauntered casually down the drive, and up to the man. With his fake English accent he said, ‘Hi, we’ve just moved in and are looking for a gardener.’ He jerked his thumb vaguely over his shoulder.
‘I’ll give you a card,’ the man said. ‘You’ll need to go through the office. Hang on a sec.’
Tooth waited while the gardener went to the front of the vehicle. A moment later the man handed him a card with green writing on it.
‘The people who live here, they’d be able to give a reference for you?’ Tooth asked.
‘It’s a lady on her own,’ the man said. ‘Hardly ever see her.’
‘Right. What’s her name?’
The gardener shrugged. ‘I dunno. I work for the company and just do the addresses they give me. I’ve probably not spoken ten words to the lady in two years.’