out a moan as he touched them, then took him in her mouth again, deeper, far deeper.
Moments later, with his shoes still on and his trousers and boxers around his ankles, they were lying on a leopard-skin print throw on her bed. Staring at each other in silence. He slid his hand across her shoulders, feeling her strong shoulder blades, the contours of her back, her warm skin, and he was thinking – and he was trying not to think this, but he couldn’t help it – how so different she felt to Sandy. Not better – just different.
Flashes of Sandy began coming into his mind. Comparisons. Sandy was shorter, her body fleshier, less well toned; her breasts were smaller, a different shape, her nipples larger, pinker. Cleo’s were smaller, like crimson studs. Sandy’s pubes were brown, a wild tangle. Cleo’s were the winter-wheat colour of her hair, trimmed, neat. She was entwined around him, her fine strong limbs like some amazing pedigree racehorse, writhing, whispering, ‘Roy, you are amazing. God, Roy, I’ve wanted this for so long. Make love to me.’
And he was gathering her up into him, not able to get enough of her, as if he was lost in some fairy tale. She was trying to pull him inside her, but he wasn’t ready, not yet. It had been so long, he was trying to remember, had to hold back, had to remember how to hold back.
Had to slow everything down, somehow. Had to please her first. That had always been his private rule with Sandy, and with the small number of girlfriends he had slept with before her.
He moved down her body, caressing her breasts with his lips, then the contours of her stomach, running his tongue through the soft bristles of those winter-wheat hairs and then tasting her moistness, breathing it in, an incredible taste, smell, an even more intoxicating muskiness than the perfume she was wearing.
She was moaning.
Oh God, she tasted so good, so good, so damned beautifully good.
His phone started ringing.
She giggled. The phone persisted. Then it stopped. He went in deeper with his tongue.
‘Roy!’ she murmured. ‘Roy! Oh Roy! Oh my God, Roy!’
Two sharp beeps from his bloody phone. A message.
He was beyond caring.
64
Chris Willingham stared at the hysterical man with puke spattered down the front of his T-shirt standing in the doorway of the living room, screaming at him, and tried desperately to remember from his recent training how to deal with a situation like this.
‘YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING! PLEASE, YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. YOU HAVE TO HELP ME FIND MY WIFE!’
Talk quietly, he remembered. That was the first thing. So, in a soft voice he said, ‘What’s happened, exactly?’
‘SHE’S SCREAMING. SHE’S TERRIFIED OUT OF HER FUCKING WITS, OK?’ Tom Bryce entered the room and grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘YOU’VE GOT TO FUCKING DO SOMETHING!’
The young family liaison officer gagged at the stench of the vomit. Keeping his voice soft, he said, ‘Tell me, Mr Bryce, what’s happened?’
Tom Bryce turned and walked out of the room. ‘Come on, come and see! She’s on my computer!’
The PC followed Tom up the stairs and into the small den lined with books and files and framed photographs of his wife and children. He saw a laptop on the desk, the lid open, the screen blank. Tom Bryce tapped the carriage return on the keyboard and his email in-box appeared.
The stench of vomit was even stronger in here, and Willingham, concentrating on the screen, carefully stood clear of the mess on the carpet. He watched Bryce sit down, stare at the screen, frown, then search down through it.
‘It was here,’ Tom said. ‘It was here, an email with a fucking attachment. Oh Jesus, where the hell is it?’
Willingham said nothing; Tom seemed a little calmer for a moment. Then he appeared to lose it again. ‘IT WAS HERE!’
Tom stared in disbelief. The bloody email had vanished. He tapped in as a search key, one after another, every word from the email that he could remember. But nothing appeared. He sank forward, cradling his head in his hands, sobbing. ‘Please help me. Oh please do something, please find her, please do something. Oh Christ, you should have heard her.’
‘You saw her, on your screen?’
Tom nodded.
‘But she’s not there now?’
‘Nooooo.’
Willingham wondered about the man’s sanity. Was he imagining something? Flipping under the pressure? ‘Let’s take it from the top, shall we, sir?’
Trying to keep calm, Tom talked him through exactly what he had seen and what Kellie had said.
‘If you received an email,’ the PC said, ‘then it must be on your computer somewhere.’
Tom searched the deleted folder, the junk mail folder, then the rest of the folders in his email database. It had gone.
And he began to wonder, just for a moment, whether he had imagined it.
But not that scream. No way.
He turned to the constable. ‘You are probably thinking I imagined it, but I didn’t. I saw it. Whoever these people are, they’re clever with technology. It’s happened before – I’ve had emails this week that vanished, wiping my entire database out.’
Willingham stood there, unsure what to believe or what to do. The man was in a bad state but did not seem mad, just in shock. Something had happened, for sure, but in his limited knowledge of computers emails did not just disappear. They might get misfiled; that had happened to him. ‘Let’s try again, sir. Let’s go through all your files, one at a time.’
It was past midnight by the time they finished. Still they had not found it.
Tom looked up at him, imploring. ‘What are we going to do?’
The FLO was thinking hard. ‘We could try the High Tech Crime Unit, but I doubt if anyone will be there at this hour on a Sunday night. How about the technical support of your internet service provider – they might be twenty- four-hour?’ Then he frowned. ‘I, er… Actually, on second thought, I need to run this by DS Grace first.’
‘Let me just try,’ Tom said. He looked up the number and dialled it. An automated response put him on hold. After ten minutes of drecky music a human voice came on the line, an Indian accent, helpful and eager to please. After a further ten minutes that felt like ten hours he came back and reported that he could find no sign of the email or the attachment.
Tom slammed the phone down in fury.
In a tone that told Tom the FLO was becoming increasingly sceptical, Willingham asked, ‘What were the exact words your wife said to you?’
Trying desperately to think clearly, Tom related her words as accurately as he could remember.
‘She said, “Don’t tell the police. Do exactly what they tell you, otherwise it will be Max next then Jessica. Please do exactly what you are told. You must not tell the police – they will know if you do.”’
‘Who are “they”?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, feeling so utterly helpless.
Willingham pulled out his digital radio. Tom immediately clamped his hand over it. ‘NO!’
There was a long silence between them. Several more emails came in and the junk filter deleted them. Tom checked the folders. Nothing.
Finally, Willingham said, ‘I think I should file a report on this.’
‘No!’ Tom snapped back.
‘It will be secure, sir; I will only file it on the police system.’
‘NO!’
Taken aback by the man’s vehemence, the constable raised his hands. ‘OK, sir, no problem.’ He grimaced.
