inheritance from an aunt, which she did not tell Roy about, she was independently well off. She could afford to leave. And she did.
She didn’t say a word to her parents, whom she despised. Did not tell anyone. Instead she went into hiding with the only people who had ever given her a feeling of self-worth. The only people who, she felt, regarded her as someone in her own right, and not someone defined by who had given birth to her, or who had married her.
For the first time in her life, she had been her own person. Not her parents’ daughter, Miss Sandy Balkwill. Not her husband’s wife, Mrs Roy Grace. She had her new name, which she had borrowed from her maternal, German grandmother. Her new identity. Her whole new life ahead of her.
Sandy Lohmann.
Sandy Lohmann was a woman who had cleared everything from her head: the husband who constantly let her down because he had to go to a crime scene; the father who let her down because he could never tell the truth about a damned thing in life; the mother who’d never had an opinion of her own.
The Scientologists operated the
It was while living in their headquarters near East Grinstead in Sussex that she had met Hans-Jurgen Waldinger. He had subsequently persuaded her to move with her infant son to Munich, where he introduced her to the organization he had helped to establish, called the International Association of FreeSpirits. The organization offered similar mental regeneration to the Scientologists, but in what she felt was a less aggressive – and costly – process.
She had found Waldinger very attractive. And still did. But living with him had not worked out. She rapidly ended up arguing and rowing with him just as much as she had done with Roy. In the end she had moved into an apartment of her own.
So what the hell was she doing back here?
A damned advertisement in a Munich newspaper she had just happened, by chance, to see a month ago. That was why.
SANDRA (SANDY) CHRISTINA GRACE
Wife of Roy Jack Grace of Hove. City of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England.
Missing, presumed dead, for ten years. Last seen in Hove, Sussex. She is five feet, seven inches tall (1.70 metres), slim build, and had shoulder-length fair hair when last seen.
Unless anyone can provide evidence that she is still alive to Messrs Edwards and Edwards LLP at the address beneath, a declaration will be sought that she is legally dead.
Of course, at some point Roy was going to move on with his life, what did she expect? But all the same it hurt like hell. She couldn’t help it. It was his damned fault she’d had to leave in the first place. Now it seemed he was trying to dismiss his past with a single wave of his hand. Having herself declared dead could only be for one reason: so he could be free to marry again.
Marry his pregnant bitch.
She pulled the particulars of the house out of the glove locker. The house where they had once been so happy. Their home. It was on the market now, and it might never come back on the market again for the rest of their lives, because it was the kind of house people lived in for years. The kind of family home where people could grow old together.
The two of them could have grown old there together. That had been the plan. She and Roy. What would that have been like? What kind of an old couple would they have made?
‘How long do we have to stay here?’ Bruno asked suddenly in German.
She looked at him, the son Roy had always wanted, and was about to reply, but then stiffened. A man was striding down the street towards them, dressed in a dark suit, and carrying a bulky attache case. It had been ten years since she had last seen him, but in this fading light it could have been just twenty-four hours. His trim figure was just the same and his face had barely aged. Only his hair was different, cropped short and gelled. It suited him.
He looked happy, and that sent a deep twinge of sadness spiralling through her.
She knew there was no chance he would recognize her in the falling darkness, wearing large sunglasses, a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead, and with her hair dyed black. But even so, she tilted her face down. A thousand thoughts were going through her mind.
She waited some moments then took a cautious peep. Just in time to see him tapping the entry panel keypad. Then he pushed the wrought-iron gate open and entered. Moments later it swung shut behind him, with a clang.
Swung shut on her.
Locking her out of his new life.
She kept looking until he had walked out of sight.
Then she twisted the key in the ignition, so hard that for a moment she thought she had snapped it. The engine fired. She checked her mirrors, then accelerated up the road, squealing the tyres, sending Coke spurting over her protesting son.
74
‘Goddamn lucky it ain’t raining,’ Drayton Wheeler said. He turned, as if for confirmation, to the awkward-looking woman standing behind him in the long line of people stretched back from the main entrance to Brighton Racecourse; the building had been commandeered by the film production as the assembly point for the extras.
She looked up from the copy of the
‘You’re fucking telling me.’
He was definitely a weirdo, she thought. Tall and gangly, with a grey pageboy fringe poking out beneath a wash-faded baseball cap. He was all twitchy, his face screwing up in frown lines, as if filled with pent-up anger, and had a sickly, sallow complexion. There were fifty people in front of them, all shapes and sizes, waiting to sign on and be fitted for costumes. They had been standing for over an hour, in the blustery wind high up on Race Hill. White rail posts marked the oval race track, and there were fine views across the city and south, over the Marina and the English Channel.
Suddenly, from the front of the queue, a cheery woman’s voice called out, ‘Are family Hazeldine here? Paul Hazeldine, Charlotte Hazeldine, Isobel Hazeldine and Jessica Hazeldine? With their dog, Benson? If you are here, could you make yourselves known to us please! Come forward to the front of the queue!’
Wheeler looked at his watch. ‘Gonna be another hour at least.’ He looked at the woman, who was about his age. She had an angular face, with blonde hair styled like Gaia’s from a photograph that was in a large spread about the shooting of the movie in today’s edition of the local paper.
His movie.
His script they had stolen.
He could do with sex. She wasn’t attractive, but she looked like she was single and she wasn’t a paper bag job. No wedding band. Great legs. He was a legs man. Maybe she was up for sex? Maybe, if he played it right, he could get her back to his room for a screw afterwards? He could focus on her legs, and not her face. His apparatus still functioned – one of the side-effects of the happy pills he was on to help him forget that he was dying. She looked lonely. He was lonely.
‘Done this before?’ he asked, trying to break the ice.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘that’s none of your business.’ She lifted her newspaper, to block him out of sight, and
