‘Oh, I’ve an idea all right. You were sticking it in my hip. Pretty big clue.’
He feigns shock. ‘Oh my God, was I?’
‘Yeah right, like you didn’t know.’
‘Let’s change the subject before one of us gets embarrassed.’
‘It won’t be me.’
‘I believe you. How do I get to see you again?’
‘Good question.’
‘And?’
‘And you have to be patient. You can use this phone to call me, it’s my own pay-as-you-go, but it may be a while before we can meet up.’
‘What about my aching?’
‘Be inventive. Goodnight.’
The phone goes dead.
He’s left staring at it. Wondering how he’s going to cope with his pounding heart and a hard-on so big he could spin a plate on it.
23
After yesterday’s sleepless night, Megan is relieved to have her daughter tucked up and sound asleep in her own bed tonight. Loath him as she does, Adam had a point. She switches off the bedroom light, closes the door on her already snoring angel and the army of soft toys surrounding her. Sammy’s temperature’s down, she’s less clammy and feverish. Come the morning her little angel may be back to her normal self.
Megan wanders into the open-plan kitchen-lounge of her small cottage and empties the last of a bottle of Chianti into a glass. Maybe she’ll turn on the TV and watch something dull, clear her head of the worries about Sammy, money and the ever-present problem of balancing motherhood and her job.
But the Chase case is bugging her like a wasp. Suicides usually put a gun to their head and mess up the walls for one of three reasons: they can’t live with the guilt and shame of something they’ve done, they’re afraid of something they’ve done being exposed and their personal or private reputation ruined, or they’re desperately ill, either physically or mentally.
Nathaniel Chase doesn’t seem to fit any of those categories. She’s pulled all the background intelligence she can. Bank records, mortgage accounts, stockbroker dealings, everything financial and personal on both father and son. But there are no real clues. Fascinating family — and deceptively wealthy. Or at least now the son is. He’s getting it all, the solicitors told her. From what she can see, that turns out to be more than £20m in property, cars, stocks and savings. As well as the estate and the two cars garaged in it — a seven-year-old Range Rover and a vintage Rolls valued at more than a million — there are paintings and antiques held in vaults, collectively worth in excess of five million. There is Nathaniel Chase’s portfolio of personal investments and private banking matters, all routed through UBS in Switzerland. Another six million. Strangely, UBS didn’t handle his company activities. He left that to Credit Suisse and this year’s figures show a bottom-line profit of more than a million. The old professor owned land across the county too, no doubt of obscure archaeological worth.
Now it’s all Gideon’s.
She looks again at the money trail. If in doubt, follow the cash. If it’s not about sex, it’s about money. If there’s no other explanation, then it’s money. Always money.
Could the son have faked his father’s suicide? He had so much to gain and she knows he’s lying to her. Might explain why he didn’t identify the man who attacked him in his father’s study. Maybe the attacker was an accomplice. Perhaps Gideon Chase is really a murderer and a fraudster?
Then again she could just be very tired and not thinking straight. She gives in and switches on the TV. The X Factor. Fantastic. Utter drivel. Just what she needs to forget about work.
24
It’s the middle of the night and Sean Grabb can’t sleep.
He knows a good rest is a long way off. Years away. He pulls a fresh bottle of vodka from his fridge, unscrews the top and swallows almost a quarter without even getting a glass. He’s not so dumb that he doesn’t understand what’s happening. If any sane man had done half the things he has, they’d be hitting the bottle as well.
That’s how he rationalises it, as he finally gets a tumbler from the loose-hinged cupboard in the tatty kitchen of his terraced home. Some nights the memories are just too much to bear. They hit the back of his retinal screen like the flash frames of a horror film. Tonight is one of those nights. The image of the sacrifice’s smashed skull won’t go away. Nor that of his dull empty eyes or his moon-white, bled-out flesh.
Grabb downs another blast of vodka. It was done for the greater good. He gets that. But it doesn’t stop the horror show rerunning in his head. One blink and he’s back there dealing with the corpse. Dead meat, that’s what Musca had called it. Told him to treat the kid that way. Imagine the body was a rack of lamb, a leg of pork.
They threw the mutilated corpse into the back of Musca’s van and drove out to the abattoir, for which he had keys. The kid weighed a ton as they hoisted him up on to the processing line. Musca dangled him upside down, like a stunned cow, then he slit his throat and drained the last of the blood into a run-off grid.
Grabb can still hear the clank of the chains, the buzz of the electric motor and the ghostly echoes of equipment clunking into life and towing the dead body along the line. Then the monstrous mangling. The decapitation. The organ removal. The skin peeled off by hydraulic pullers. He almost threw up when Musca had to free flesh clogged from the claws of their automated accomplices.
He takes another hit of vodka. But the images stick. They’re clogged in his memory. Stuck as doggedly as the awful clumps of flesh that jammed the process line. He tells himself that the visions will fade but deep down he knows they won’t. They’ll always be there. Now the soft, warm wave is coming. Not fast enough, but it’s coming. He can feel it rolling in. But it won’t wash away the guilt. Or the fear of being caught.
The line stripped the kid’s bones clear of any shred of flesh or evidence that could be used against them or anyone. The advanced meat recovery system at the plant reduced it all to mechanically recovered meat — ready for human or animal consumption. It was so damned efficient it even produced neat packages of bone, lard and tallow. The blood and fecal matter just got dumped, washed away like sewage.
‘No need to worry,’ Musca kept saying. ‘No need to fret.’
But he was worried. Is fretting. Not just about the nightmares. Or the guilt. But that it’s all got to be done again.
Soon.
25
Caitlyn Lock squints through the morning’s bitter yellow haze across the shimmering water of the Thames. She is lying in the warm soft bed at her father’s apartment, just one of his many properties. There is a house in Rome. Another in Paris. And two or maybe three more in Spain and Switzerland. So many she can’t remember. Then there are the places back home: LA, New York, Washington. Pop is famous and loaded. And Caitlyn is on track to become more famous and loaded than he is. Or her mom.
She will talk about her father at the drop of a hat, but not her mother. Oh, no. Mom is out of bounds. Kylie Lock is a minor Hollywood star who walked out on them to set up with her toy boy co-star. Caitlyn can barely give her the time of day, let alone free publicity. If she was honest, maybe she’d admit understanding what she sees in François, a dark-eyed Frenchman who tops six feet and looks like he could model swim shorts.
She gives up hugging the quilt and slips naked out of bed. Hands on hips, she admires herself in the long mirror next to the giant picture window overlooking the London Eye. She turns. Strikes a coy look over her shoulder and completes a three-sixty. Her mom would kill to have a body like this.