Satisfied that there was no one around, she pulled away, regularly checking the rear-view mirror, and took a winding back route into London, making several circles, before finally relaxing as she pulled onto the Finchley Road, heading south.
She wanted to put Ray out of her mind but it was proving impossible. Their relationship might have lasted only a few months, but those months had been some of her happiest for a long time – happier than when she was with Mike Bolt, who might have cared about her but who’d been unable to set her world on fire as Ray had.
And then, in one bloody night, she and Ray had been torn apart. He’d rescued her from a house where she was being held by two associates of Kalaman and Sheridan, killing both associates in the process. He could have run that night but instead he’d set fire to the house to get rid of any evidence of Tina’s presence there, told her to get as far away as possible, and had then remained behind to take responsibility for what had happened so that she wasn’t implicated. In the end, he’d gone to prison for her, sacrificing his own freedom so that she didn’t have to sacrifice hers.
To have loved again after all those barren years and then to have had it all snatched away in one fell swoop had come close to tearing her apart. It had taken a long time to get over Ray Mason, and then, just as she was coming out the other side, he’d reappeared again, threatening to reignite those feelings. It had taken a lot of self-discipline to hold back the previous night. She’d pretended to be asleep as he’d leaned over and kissed her head, but had been seconds away from turning round, grabbing him and kissing him back. And yet she knew that sleeping with him would just hurt her more in the long term, which was why she was determined to keep as far away as possible from him in these next few hours.
Ray was going to leave after nightfall. He had a plan, which had a solid chance of working. Yet Tina felt conflicted. On the one hand, she wanted him gone before he got her into real trouble. But she also wanted to help him, not only because she still had feelings for him, but also because she too wanted to see the people he was up against suffer.
Which was why she’d volunteered to go in his place to collect the passport and driving licence he’d ordered the previous day. Ray had tried to talk her out of it, stating that it was too risky, and that he would be able to collect them either later tonight or tomorrow, but Tina knew that his plan had a far greater chance of success if he was already in possession of his new ID, and a lot safer for him if she went. So she’d insisted. ‘Call it my leaving present,’ she’d told him.
Her first port of call was the office where she ran her private detective business, located in a drab residential back street on the Kilburn/Paddington border. She’d considered closing it and working from home several times, but had always demurred. Tina’s cottage was her sanctuary, and it felt a lot better not to have to bring work home with her, or have people she didn’t know coming there.
She actually had a pile of paperwork to catch up on and she spent the next hour writing a report on an outstanding marital infidelity case she’d been working on, and doing invoicing. It was a good way of getting her mind off her current predicament, and frankly, she needed the money. Private detective work, certainly the mundane kind she dealt with most of the time, didn’t pay a huge amount.
At lunchtime, the office phone rang. Tina let it go to answerphone and listened as a distressed-sounding woman left a message saying that, although she knew it sounded foolish, she’d become convinced that her husband of twenty years might be trying to kill her.
Tina was never going to ignore a call like that, so she picked up before the woman had finished leaving her message.
The woman, who immediately introduced herself as Maria Ways, sounded extremely relieved to get Tina on the phone and asked if she could come and see her as soon as possible. ‘I don’t know if I’m going mad or not, but I think – I really think – he wants me dead.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Tina, calming her down. ‘Of course you can come in.’ She looked at her watch. It was 12.45. She had time. And anyway, she was intrigued. This might actually require some proper detective work. They agreed that Maria would come to the office at 1.30.
Tina was careful who she allowed to visit her at the office but Maria’s address in Holland Park checked out and when, forty-five minutes later, the outside buzzer sounded and the camera showed a middle-aged, flustered-looking redhead, Tina let her in straight away.
But it wasn’t the redhead who came through the door. Two men in suits did. The first was about forty-five, small and wiry with close-cropped dark hair and a scar like a lopsided half smile on his lip; the second was younger, and much,
