newspaper. That damned headline in the Argus last night. It was all coming back. Christ, oh Christ. What the hell were the morning papers going to say? Criticism he could cope with. Ridicule was harder. He already got stick from a number of officers for dabbling in the supernatural. He'd been warned by the previous Chief Constable, who was genuinely intrigued by the paranormal himself, that to let his interests be known openly could harm his promotion prospects.
'Everyone knows you're a special case, Roy - having lost Sandy. No one's going to criticize you for turning over every stone on the damned planet. We'd all do the same in your shoes. But you have to keep that in your box, you can't bring it to work.'
There were times when he thought he was getting over her, when he was getting strong again. Then there were moments like now when he realized he had barely progressed at all. He just wished so desperately he could have put an arm around her, cuddled up against her, talked through the problem. She was a glass-half-full person, always positive, and so savvy. She'd helped steer him through a disciplinary tribunal in his early days in the Force which could have ended his career, when he'd been accused by the Police Complaints Authority of using excessive force against a mugger he'd arrested. He'd been exonerated then, largely through following Sandy's advice. She would have known exactly what he should do now.
He wondered sometimes if these dreams were attempts by Sandy to communicate with him. From wherever she was.
Jodie, his sister, told him it was time to move on, that he needed to accept that Sandy was dead, to replace her voice on the answering machine, to remove her clothes from the bedroom and her things from the bathroom, in short - and Jodie could be very short - to stop living in some kind of a shrine to Sandy, and start all over again.
But how could he move on? What if Sandy was alive, being held
captive by some maniac? He had to keep searching, to keep the file open, to keep updating the photographs showing how she might look now, to keep scanning every face he passed in the street or saw i a crowd. He would go on until--
Until.
Closure.
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Sandy had woken him iWith a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of ?Champagne and a very rude birthday card. He'd opened the presents the had given him, then they had made love. He'd left the house later than usual, at 9.15, and reached his office in Brighton shortly after half past, late for a briefing on a murder case. He'd promised to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with another couple his best friend at the time, Dick Pope, also a detective, and his wife, Leslie, who Sandy got on well with - but it had been a hectic day and he'd arrived home almost two hours later than he had intended. There was no sign of Sandy.
At first he'd thought she was angry with him for being so late and was making a protest. The house was tidy, her car and handbag were gone, there was no sign of a struggle.
Then, twenty-four hours later, her car was found in a bay of the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one for 7 pounds 50 penceat Boots, and 16 pounds 42 pencefor petrol from the local branch of Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.
His neighbours in this quiet, residential street just off the seafront had not seen a thing. On one side of him was an exuberantly friendly Greek family who owned a couple of cafes in the town, but they had been away on holiday, and on the other side was an elderly widow with a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 3.45 a.m., he could hear an American cop drama through the party wall between their semi-detached houses. Guns banged, tyres squealed, sirens whupwhupped. She'd seen nothing.
Noreen Grinstead, who lived opposite, was the one person he might have expected to have noticed something. A hawk-eyed, jumpy woman in her sixties, she knew everyone's business in the
street. When she wasn't tending to her husband, Lance, who was steadily going downhill with Alzheimer's, she was forever out front in yellow rubber gloves, washing her silver Nissan car, or hosing and scrubbing the driveway, or the windows of the house, or anything else that did or did not need washing. She even brought stuff out of the house to clean it in the driveway.
Very little escaped her eye. But, somehow, Sandy's disappearance had.
He switched the light on and got out of bed, pausing to stare at the photograph of himself and Sandy on the dressing table. It had been taken in a hotel in Oxford during a conference on DNA fingerprinting, a few months before she disappeared. He was lounging back in a suit and tie, on a chaise longue. Sandy, in an evening dress, was lying back against him, hair up in blonde ringlets, beaming her constant irrepressible grin at a waiter they had sequestered to take the picture.
He went over, picked up the frame, kissed the photo then set it down again, and went into the bathroom to urinate. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee was a recent affliction, a result of the health fad he was on, drinking the recommended minimum eight glasses of water a day. Then he padded, clad only in the T-shirt he slept in, downstairs.
Sandy had such great taste. Their house itself was modest, like all the ones in the street, a three-bedroom mock-Tudor semi, built in the 1930s, but she had made it beautiful. She loved browsing the Sunday supplements, women's magazines and design magazines, ripping out pages and showing him ideas. They'd spent hours together, stripping wallpaper, sanding floors, varnishing, painting.
Sandy got into Feng Shui, and built a little water garden. She filled the house with candles. Bought organic food whenever she could. She thought about everything, questioned everything, was interested in everything, and he loved that. Those had been the good times, when they were building their future, cementing their life together, making all their plans.
She was a good gardener, too. She understood about flowers, plants, shrubs, bushes, trees. When to plant, how to prune. Grace liked to mow the lawn but that was about where his skills ended. The garden was neglected now and he felt guilty about that, sometimes I Wondering what she would say if she returned.
Her car was still in the garage. Forensics had been through it with |i toothcomb after it had been recovered, then he'd brought it back f home and garaged it. For years he kept the battery on trickle charge, Bt in case .. . The same way he kept her slippers out on the bed)m floor, her dressing gown hanging on its peg, her toothbrush in its mug.
