Reed swallowed hard. ‘How’s Becky?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘I want to see her, Ellen.’
‘We were thinking of going away for a few days - it isn’t convenient now.’
‘You’re talking about my daughter,’ he rasped. ‘I want to see her.’
‘Look, I’ll call you, right?’
‘Ellen. You can’t do this to me. She’s my daughter. If I have to get the police I will. You won’t keep her from me. I’ll do-‘
‘Do what you fucking want,’ she snarled and slammed down the phone.
He sat at his desk, the receiver still pressed to his ear, the buzz of a dead line the only thing he heard.
Very slowly, he slipped the phone back onto its cradle.
Fucking bitch.
Reed waited a moment then snatched up the phone and dialled another number.
And waited.
Thirty-one
Sean Harvey thought how aptly named the restaurant in Hays Mews was.
The Greenhouse was more like a large, immaculately decorated, conservatory than an eatery. He sat glancing
around at the faces of the other diners, relatively few for a lunchtime, his gaze turning towards the restaurant’s main door every so often.
He glanced at his watch.
She was late.
Despite the fact that the windows near him were open, it was very warm inside the restaurant, as the sun hovering high in the sky overhead blazed down. The plants potted carefully all around the tables, obviously responded to the temperature and blossomed.
Harvey felt a bead of perspiration forming on his forehead.
He wasn’t sure how much of it was apprehension.
He looked at his watch again.
What if she didn’t turn up at all?
He looked at his menu, sipped his Perrier and attempted to look nonchalant.
The gesture failed miserably.
Harvey glanced towards the main entrance again and this time he saw her.
Thank Christ.
He stood up as she made her way towards his table, smiling at him, brushing her blonde hair away from her face.
Hailey Owen was dressed in a short, rust-coloured skirt and matching jacket.
She walked gracefully in a pair of high heels, the tips clicking on the tiled floor of the restaurant. Harvey couldn’t resist an appreciative glance, allowing his gaze to linger on her slender legs.
‘Sorry I’m late’ she said, sitting down opposite him.
‘You’re not, I was early,’ he told her. ‘Do you want a drink?’
She nodded as he called the waiter to him and ordered another Perrier for himself and a Baccardi and Coke for her.
‘I would have been here earlier,’ Hailey told him. ‘But I couldn’t get away.
Debbie wanted me to go for lunch with her -I had to make up an excuse about shopping. I said I was going to a wedding and had to get a dress. Then she wanted to come with me to help me pick it. I thought I was never going to get away.’
The waiter returned with the drinks.
He watched as Hailey took a sip of hers.
‘No one knew where you were going?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘What about you?’
‘I told my secretary I was meeting a client, I said I might be late back,’ he announced.
‘You don’t think anyone knows, do you, Sean?’
He shook his head.
‘We’ve been careful so far.’
‘We’ve been lucky so far,’ she reminded him.
‘We don’t even work on the same floor, Hailey, why should anybody suspect we’re …’
‘Having an affair?’
‘Three lunches and two dinners hardly constitute an affair, do they?’
‘Your wife might disagree if she found out. Where did you tell her you were the other night?’
‘She knows I work late, that I meet clients. She doesn’t suspect anything, trust me.’
‘You might be used to this, Sean, but I’ve never had an affair before. I just don’t want anything to spoil it.’
‘Stop worrying.’
He pushed a menu towards her.
‘Let’s order,’ he said, smiling.
Harvey watched her as she ran her gaze up and down the list of offerings, one hand pulling lazily at her long hair.
She noticed his attention and smiled. ‘What are you looking at?’
‘I’m just looking. You don’t blame me, do you?’ he said, quietly.
She shook her head and giggled.
‘You’re a real smoothie, aren’t you?’
Beneath the table he felt her foot brush against his calf.
Briefly. Tantalisingly.
She sipped her drink, wondering what the dark shadow was that had suddenly fallen across the table.
It was as if a cloud had passed before the sun.
But this was too small, too dark to be a cloud.
They both looked up.
Harvey opened his mouth.
Hailey didn’t even manage to give voice to the scream.
The man’s body plunged down towards them, slamming into the glass roof of the restaurant.
Glass exploded inwards, the strident eruption of splintering crystal mingling with a deafening crash as the body came hurtling through.
It struck the table where they sat, crushing glasses beneath it, overturning the table as more shards of glass rained down, exploding on the tiled floor.
And there was something hot and red splashing Hailey now.
Blood, jetting madly from a dozen wounds on the body, lacerated by the glass and the impact, spurted in all directions, some of it across her face and hair.
Finally, Hailey managed to scream.
The body flopped over onto its back, face shredded by the glass fragments, one long sliver embedded in the eye like a crystal spear.
Harvey fell away from the blood-spattered table, trying to control his churning stomach, aware that there was already a dark stain spreading across the front of his trousers.
Blood began to spill rapidly around the corpse which lay motionless amidst the shattered glass, broken crockery and scattered cutlery.
Other diners looked on in horror, one or two glancing up at the gaping hole in the glass roof left by the plummeting body. Pieces of broken glass were still dropping from the edges of the break.
