Already she was turning towards him, yearning for him, eager for his body. In their haste their faces collided, cheekbones knocked, lips crushed against each other, teeth grated momentarily. She thrust her tongue greedily into his mouth: he tasted sweet, cool and clean, as if he had just eaten an apple. She tore open the front of her blouse, and pulled his hard young body against her breasts, grappling her hands possessively across his straight
back, his narrow waist, his small tight buttocks.
The fingers of one of his hands rested on the tiny valve in the back of her neck, teasing at it with a precise, dainty lightness of touch. The other hand settled on her breast, as gentle as the mist of an aerosol spray.
Mitchell left her an hour later. She remained on her bed with the scattered sheets, her clothes, the pillows and covers, heaped around her. She lay on her side, still naked, her hand stretched out and resting lazily where his body had lain just a few minutes before. She thought contentedly of what they had done together, how it had felt, what it had been, the shocking flood of relief it had brought her. She was wide awake, physically rested.
His maddening masculine fragrance lingered around her: on her skin, on the sheets, on her lips, under her nails, in her hair.
Later she began to feel cold, so she dragged on her robe and found her hairbrush where it had fallen on the carpet. She sat on the side of the bed pulling the brush idly through the tangles and curls, staring at the wall, dissatisfied with herself, thinking about Ken Mitchell, remembering Andy.
The two men existed with equal prominence in her consciousness, unfairly but undeniably.
For the first time since Andy's death, her feelings about him had been changed by meeting someone else.
Progress towards the rest of her life had begun.
But as she went back to bed, and lay down under the covers, she felt a terrible sense of misery, and a belated but real betrayal of the man she had loved innocently and truly for so many years.
'Sorry, Andy,' she muttered. 'But 1 needed that. Shit, 1 needed it.'
CHAPTER 24
They had parked their satellite van next to her car again, and it loomed massively over it.
Teresa paused at the hotel door, trying to see if the van was in use. She knew that although Ken Mitchell and his colleagues sometimes drove the van away, more often than not they used it as a mobile office where it stood. Today Teresa saw the satellite dish was in position, aligned on somewhere in the sky. At once she ducked back inside the building. Her efforts to extricate her car would inevitably draw her to their attention.
She decided instead to walk up to the ExEx building on the Ridge; the weather was fair, which gave her enough of an excuse, and it would be a chance to see some more of the town at ground level. Anyway, she had had something in mind for a couple of days and this would be a good opportunity to try it out.
She walked down Eastbourne Road towards St Stephen's Church. On this crisply cold morning, with the usual traffic edging noisily past, the shops open and a few pedestrians going about their business, it was easy to imagine the chaos that Grove's outburst must have caused on that afternoon. The traffic here would have been brought to a halt by the vehicles that had piled up in the vicinity of the hotel, but the people in the cars would probably not yet have found out what was causing the delay. Teresa could visualize them sitting with their engines idling, waiting for what they must have thought was a temporary traffic holdup ahead to be
cleared. Those people would have presented easy targets to Grove. Six people had actually died inside cars in this short stretch of Eastbourne Road, but many more were wounded. The rest managed to scramble out of their cars, or found cover until Grove had passed.
Teresa reached St Stephen's Church, which was on the corner of a road called Hyde Avenue.
This was one of the alternative traffic routes up to the Ridge, bypassing the narrow streets of the Old Town, and Teresa herself had already driven along it several times on her journeys to and from the GunHo ExEx building. Next to the church Hyde Avenue was an attractive road, with good houses and numerous trees, but further up it was lined with estate houses and a few industrial sites. Near where it Joined the Ridge, the elevation afforded glimpses of the view across the town, and out to sea, but there were better vantage points and better panoramas in other parts of the town.
Looking at her town map Teresa had noticed that a series of footpaths and alleyways ran between the houses in this part of Bulverton; they were known locally as twittens. With a few road-crossings taken into account, the twittens provided a continuous network of paths behind the houses. Teresa had worked out that she could probably walk most of the way up to Welton Road and the ExEx building by this route.
She crossed Hyde Avenue. On the opposite corner was a tandooni takeout restaurant, and between it and the adjacent building was a narrow alley that led to one of the twittens. The alley was bounded by the walls of the buildings on either side, and overhead by the floor of an upperstorey extension of one of them. The alleyway floor was made of stone flags; as she walked through the metaltipped heels of her shoes set up a clacking that echoed around her.
The traffic noise from behind was quietened by the enclosed space.
Almost at once, in the halflight of the alley, she began to feel giddy. An alltoofamiliar display of brilliant but unseeable flashes began in the corner of her eye, and she paused, overtaken by a rush of familiar despair. She should have known that this was a day when a migraine attack was more than possible: she had hardly slept during the night.
She paused, resting one hand on the wall at her side, looking down at the uneven stone floor, trying to rid herself of the nausea. She wondered whether she should give up her plans for the day, return to the hotel for one of her pills and try to sleep.
While she stood there, undecided, a series of shots rang out in the street behind her.
The sound was so close she instinctively ducked. Between shots she could clearly hear the quick, efficient clicking of the mechanism of a semiautomatic rifle, a sound that in spite of everything continued to fascinate her.
Teresa looked back: she could see a stationary car framed in the rectangle of daylight. A wild imagining came
