first. Things I need to do.'
'I've been all kinds of fool, Kate. I won't deny that. But it stops here for me, it stops right now.'
Kate nodded, unable to meet his eyes. She knew if she did kiss him, then all control on the train wreck of her life would be lost for ever. She took her hands out of his clasp. 'Take me home first, Jack.'
'It might not be safe.'
'I need to see if my scarf is there.'
Delaney hesitated for a moment and then fired the engine up and pulled the car away from the kerb. Kate stole a sideways glance at him and saw something she wasn't sure she had seen before in his eyes. She couldn't be certain, but it looked something like hope.
The busker, in tie-dyed jeans and a floral shirt, sitting near the bottom of the stairs had a small, portable amplifier to boost his voice and the sound of his guitar to echo around the mall. He flicked his long, braided hair and started singing. A John Lennon song. Ashley Bradley scowled as the music started up, he was never a fan of the Beatles. Any of them. Smug bastards in stupid suits, you asked him.
He flexed his knees a little bit more and held the bag he was carrying a little lower. At the bottom of the bag was a hole, and through the hole, pointing upwards, protruded the lens of a video camcorder. Just a little hole, which was great, because camcorders could be really small now and it made his job a lot easier. The one thing in the world that Ashley Bradley was truly grateful for, apart from stretch fabric, was technology. Technology was a marvellous thing. It gave him the Internet and it gave him the camcorder, with the built-in hard drive, which he was now positioning under the skirt of the young lady in front of him on the escalator. He liked to imagine what colour panties she was wearing, not that he really minded. Others did, of course, some of the guys he swapped files with on the web were very specific. Had to be white and cotton or no deal. Or leather. Or a thong. But for Ashley, the colour of them didn't matter at all, because it meant he had lucked out. Ashley Bradley was a commando hunter. But they were rare. And part of the thrill for him was the anticipation. He wouldn't know if he had bagged one until he got home and downloaded what he had shot so he could see it on the computer screen. And it had been some weeks since he had a result. He had a real good feeling about the woman in front of him. She looked like butter wouldn't melt, and in his experience they were the worst. He'd have loved to have had a rummage through her drawers, he reckoned he'd find all kind of toys.
He could feel the escalator begin to flatten out which snapped him out of his reverie; he moved the bag back towards him, looked up and saw two uniformed policemen at the top of the stairs staring straight at him. He turned around and began running down the stairs, pushing people out of the way but not getting very far. He leapt over the side of the escalator on to the steps travelling downwards and began running down them as the two policemen above him gave chase. At the bottom he clattered into a group of foreign-looking nuns, and after he had pushed them aside, the young black copper was nearly on him. He darted left and was putting his foot down but hadn't seen the busker who was sitting on the floor, tripped right over him, smashing his guitar into the ground and splintering the wood. The busker's shocked, amplified voice filled the shopping centre.
'You broke my fucking guitar!'
Danny Vine and Bob Wilkinson, who arrived a little later, had to drag Bradley bodily away to save him from being strangled by the outraged New Age hippy. 'Fucking muppet! I'll fucking kill you!'
Kate sensed as soon as she entered her house that something was wrong. She walked down the hallway to the kitchen. She looked at the hooks hanging on the back of the kitchen door and shook her head. 'It's not here, Jack. What the hell's going on?'
Delaney shrugged. 'I don't know. But I'm going to find out.'
Kate shook her head. 'No,
