driven Danny in the direction of the FPU. It gave her a burning desire to catch and convict people like Trent who ruined young lives without a thought for anything but their own sadistic pleasures.
Trent had been sentenced to seventeen years’ imprisonment, with the Judge’s recommendation he serve the full term.
It wasn’t enough for Danny, but it would have to do.
Seventeen years did not give back to even one of those girls the chance of enjoying a healthy family life when she reached adulthood. Nor did it give the other little girl the chance of ever going to the toilet and not screaming in agony. Nor did it repay the other thirty children he had molested in a reign of terror lasting eighteen months.
But seventeen years would have to do, because the justice system said so.
Seventeen years for thirty-two ruined lives.
Now he was back on the streets, no doubt with the intention of resuming his activities.
Danny shivered at the thought.
She prayed he would not return to Blackpool, but knowing he probably would — because he had unfinished business to attend to — Danny decided that tomorrow she would make it her task to ensure every police officer within a twenty-mile radius of Blackpool was carrying an up-to-date photo of Trent.
Danny left her desk and walked to the lift. Whilst waiting for its creaky arrival, she stared blandly at the buttons, picturing Trent’s evil eyes.
Hearing clearly the voice that went with them. At the conclusion of one of Danny’s interviews with Trent, nine years before, he had said, quite blatantly at a point when Danny’s interviewing partner had left the room briefly, ‘Guilty or not guilty, Danny, one fine day I’m going to come back and kill you for this.’
Her partner came back into the room to find Trent smiling pleasantly at him, then at Danny for whom he added a salacious wink.
She had nearly wet herself there and then, because she believed him.
The lift arrived, the doors slid open, she stepped in and pressed the ground-floor button. The doors began to close.
At eighteen inches apart, Jack Sands contorted sideways through the gap and a second later the doors were shut. Only he and Danny were in the lift.
She cowered away from him in the confined space.
‘ Danny, I need to talk to you.’ He held out his arms. His face had a look of total desperation and misery on it.
‘ Get away from me, Jack,’ she warned him. ‘I’ll knee you in the balls again.’
‘ Whoa, okay, honey. But we need to talk. You know I love you and I know you love me. You’re denying yourself. I need you and you need me, so let’s stop pretending and get back to what we were.’
‘ It’s over,’ Danny stated through gritted teeth. ‘Now leave me alone.’
The lift clattered to a halt at the ground floor.
‘ Please, God, let there be someone waiting to get in,’ Danny grovelled in her mind. Sands’s finger was pressed on the button for the fifth floor and he was standing across the doors. He wasn’t going to let her go anywhere.
Danny’s legs became wobbling strips of blubber when she thought that somehow Sands had succeeded in preventing the doors opening. An agonising couple of seconds passed. She eyed her ex-lover fearfully
… until, thankfully, the doors opened. Several people were in the corridor, waiting to get in. A gush of relief flushed through her system.
Sands glanced over his shoulder, a look of rage on his face. Danny took advantage of the moment to duck past him, shove her way through the waiting people with a strained, ‘Excuse me,’ and head for the exit.
Her legs, having turned back from blubber into muscle, carried her swiftly down the corridor, past the entrance to the custody office, out of the back door and into the rear yard.
Head high, vision tunnelled, she commenced what had become a very long walk to her car.
She sensed, rather than saw, felt or heard, Sands by her shoulders. Walking with her. Slightly behind.
‘ Fuck off, Jack,’ she hissed without turning her head.
‘ We haven’t finished.’ He sounded breathless. ‘You can’t cut me out like this, Dan. It’s not on. You owe me more.’ His voice was pleading and threatening at the same time.
She refused to rise and make a reply, and carried on walking. As she wheeled into the parking area where her car was parked, she saw it was dark, badly lit. Making a quick decision, she stopped abruptly and spun to face Jack.
‘ Don’t come to my car, Jack. I’ve let what happened pass, but I’m not prepared to do that again. Next time you touch me, you’ll get locked up. I won’t have any hesitation whatsoever — and if you want the hassle of our affair finding its way to your wife’s ears, then so be it.’
Sands said nothing, simply stared unemotionally at her.
She nodded quickly and made towards her car. The walk seemed to take an hour. Each footfall reverberated around her skull. All the time expecting Sands to pounce and drag her to the floor.
Nothing happened. She reached the car unmolested, but her hands were trembling wickedly.
Next thing she was reversing out of her spot, engaging ‘D’ and driving out of the car park.
Sands lounged against a wall near to the exit. He was holding his right fist out towards her. The consideration of running the bastard down quickly entered her head. As she drew alongside him, he opened the fingers of his fist, showing Danny the palm of his hand… in which was a Mercedes three-pointed star.
Danny’s foot rammed down on the gas. The car surged ahead with a squeal of tyres. She gunned out of the yard, glancing fleetingly in her rearview mirror, catching a glimpse of Sands’s face. He was laughing uproariously.
Danny yelled something incomprehensible as the implication of what she had seen smacked her with the force of a slab of concrete coming through her windscreen.
It was now confirmed. Jack Sands was the person responsible for smashing her bedroom window, nearly causing her serious injury and damaging her beloved car.
Sands turned on his heels and slid the badge into his pocket. He walked back into the police station, a smirk of superiority on his face.
He failed to notice the lurking figure of Henry Christie in the dark shadow next to the police van.
‘ That was a one-off — two-off, actually, I suppose — but having said that, it was definitely the nicest two-off I’ve ever experienced,’ Myrna Rosza admitted to Steve Kruger. ‘It can’t happen again. It’s just that we seem to have gone through so much together in such a short space of time that my head was spinning with it all. I needed some sorta relief… but with someone who understood.’
Kruger uttered a kind of reply from deep in his throat.
He understood completely. It was one of the reasons why so many cop marriages failed. Non-cop partners didn’t fully comprehend some of the situations and emotions that only other cops could. Usually those of the opposite sex, although not necessarily so. Too often, when he’d been a cop, he’d found himself in similar situations, one of which was responsible for the demise of his first marriage.
Kruger and Myrna were lying askew his king-size bed. He was on his back, an arm thrown lazily around Myrna’s wonderfully soft-brown shoulders. She was tucked under his armpit, his fingers playfully curling the thick hairs on his chest.
Their legs were entwined, toes playing with each other’s toes. The heat of Myrna’s sex pumped against his thigh.
It had been incredible.
From the shallow end of the swimming pool, right through the house, taking a few moments to dry each other off before hitting the sack. Then an unbelievable fuck in the greatest tradition of the word.
Even though all the time he had been telling himself what a stupid fool he was being.
Firstly by breaking rule number one — never ever fraternise with the staff.
Secondly because he knew Ben Rosza, Myrna’s husband. A soft, gentle man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. A decent hardworking doctor who Kruger quite liked and whose wife had just mounted him from several directions.
But hell, it had been good, the second one even better. And good sex was something Kruger had been short of recently. Actually he had been short of sex, full stop.
