dangerously frayed, rolled over and clung to it.
‘Be careful, MJ!’ she shouted, suddenly alarmed.
Holding on with one arm, he beat his chest with the other, making a series of Tarzan whoops. Then he swung out over the river, his bare feet almost touching the surface of the water. He swung back and forward in several arcs, then he let go and dropped with a loud splash.
Lisa watched anxiously. Moments later he surfaced and tossed his head, shaking wet hair away from his face. ‘It’s beautiful! Get in here, wuss!’
He struck out, doing a couple of powerful crawl strokes, then suddenly he raised his head with a pained expression.
‘Fuck!’ he spluttered. ‘Shit! Owww! Bloody stubbed my toe on something!’
Lisa laughed.
MJ duck-dived. Moments later his head broke the surface and there was a look of panic on his face.
‘Shit, Lisa!’ he said. ‘There’s a car down here! There’s a fucking car in the river!’
23
Lorraine stared in numb disbelief. The unlit cigarette between her fingers was quite forgotten. A young, female reporter, talking urgently to the camera, seemed totally unaware that the South Tower, just a few hundred yards behind her, was collapsing.
It was dropping straight down out of the sky, disappearing inside itself, neatly, almost unbearably neatly, as if for one brief instant Lorraine was witnessing the greatest conjuring trick ever performed. The reporter talked on. Behind her, cars and people were disappearing under rubble and swirling dust. Others were running for their lives, running straight down the street towards the camera.
Oh, Jesus, doesn’t she realize?
Still unaware, the reporter continued reading off her autocue or from a feed in her ear.
LOOK BEHIND YOU! she wanted to scream at the woman.
Then finally the woman did turn. And lost the plot totally. She took a startled, stumbling step sideways, followed by another. People were running past on either side, jostling her, almost knocking her off her feet. The mushrooming cloud was now as tall as the sky itself, and as wide as the city, tumbling like an avalanche towards her. In bewildered shock, she spoke a few more words, but there was no sound with them, as if the cable had been disconnected, then the image became just a grey swirl of shadowy figures and chaos as the camera was engulfed.
Lorraine, still in just her bikini bottoms, heard various shouts. The image on the screen cut to a jerky, hand-held shot of a massive slab of steel and glass and masonry crashing on to a red and white fire truck. It smashed through the ladder, then flattened the whole mid-section, as if this was a plastic toy truck a child had just stamped on.
A woman’s voice was shouting, over and over, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God.’
There were cries. Darkness for a second, then another handheld shot, a young man limping past holding a blood-drenched towel against a woman’s face, helping her along, trying to pull her faster, ahead of the cloud that was gaining on them.
Then they were in a studio news set. Lorraine watched the anchor, a man in his forties in a jacket and tie. The images she had been viewing were all up on monitors behind his head. He looked grim.
‘We’re getting reports that the South Tower of the World Trade Center has collapsed. We are also going to bring you the latest on the situation at the Pentagon in just a few moments.’
Lorraine tried to light the cigarette, but her hand was shaking too much and the lighter fell to the floor. She waited, unable to bear taking her eyes from the screen for even one second in case she missed a glimpse of Ronnie. There was an agitated woman on the television now, shouting unintelligibly. She watched an attractive woman clutching a mike, who was standing against a background of dense black smoke flecked with orange flames, through which she could just make out the low roofline silhouettes of the Pentagon.
She dialled Ronnie’s mobile number and once more got the lines-busy beep.
She tried again. Again. Again. Her heart was thrashing around inside her chest and she was shaking, desperate to hear his voice, to know that he was OK. And all the time inside her head was the knowledge that Ronnie’s meeting was in the South Tower. The South Tower had collapsed.
She wanted more pictures of Manhattan, not the sodding Pentagon, Ronnie was in Manhattan, not the sodding Pentagon. She changed channels to Sky News. Saw another jerky hand-held shot, this time of three dusty firemen in helmets carrying a busted-looking grey-haired man, their yellow armbands jigging as they walked urgently along.
Then she saw a burning car. And a burning ambulance. Figures appearing out of the gloom behind them. Ronnie? She leaned forward, close up to the huge screen. Ronnie? The figures appeared from the smoke like faces on a developing photograph. No Ronnie.
Then she dialled his number again. For one fleeting moment it sounded as if it was going to ring! Then she was thwarted by the lines-busy signal once more.
Sky News cut to Washington. She grabbed the remote and hit another button. It seemed that every station was now showing the same images, the same news feeds. She watched a replay of the first plane striking, then the second. It replayed again. And again.
Her phone rang. She hit the answer button with a sudden burst of joy, almost too choked to get any words out. ‘Hello?’
It was the washing-machine engineer, calling to confirm his appointment for tomorrow.
24
The target’s name was Ricky. Abby had met him on a few occasions at parties, when he always seemed to make a beeline for her and chat her up. And in truth, she found him attractive and enjoyed the flirtation.
He was a good-looking guy in his forties, slightly mysterious and very self-assured, with the air of an ageing laid-back surfer dude. Like Dave, he knew how to talk to women, asking her more questions than he answered for her. He was also involved in stamps, in quite a big way.
Not all the stamps were his own. Four million pounds’ worth, to be precise. There was some dispute over their ownership. Dave told her that he and Ricky had made a deal to split the proceeds fifty-fifty, but now Ricky was reneging and wanted ninety per cent. When she had asked Dave why he didn’t simply go to the police he had smiled. Police, it seemed, were off limits for both of them.
Anyhow, he had a much better plan.
25
Roy Grace was still struggling, even with the help of the direct beam of a halogen light, to see the minute object Frazer Theobald was holding up in his stainless-steel tweezers. All he could make out was something blue and blurred.
He squinted, reluctant to admit to himself that he was getting to the point where he needed glasses. It was only when the pathologist placed a small square of paper behind the tweezers and handed him a magnifying glass that Roy could see it more clearly. It was a fibre of some kind, thinner than a human hair, like a gossamer strand of a spider’s web. It appeared translucent one moment, then pale blue the next, and the ends were jigging from a combination of the faintest tremor in Theobald’s hand and the icy breeze blowing through the storm drain.
‘Whoever killed this woman did his best to leave no evidence,’ the pathologist said. ‘It’s my guess he put her down here expecting that at some point she’d be washed along through the drainage system and then flushed out of the sewage outfall into the sea – thinking a sufficient distance from the shore for sewage would be a safe enough distance for a body.’
Grace stared again at the skeleton, unable to get the possibility that it was Sandy out of his mind.
‘Perhaps her killer hadn’t considered the drain not flooding,’ Theobald went on. ‘He hadn’t reckoned on her getting embedded in the silt, and because the water table was down, there wasn’t enough flow through the drain system to wash her free. Or maybe the drain went out of use.’
Grace nodded, looking again at the twitching thread.
‘It’s a carpet fibre, that’s what I think. I could be wrong, but
I think the lab analysis will show it’s a carpet fibre. Too hard to be from a pullover or a skirt or a cushion cover. It’s a carpet fibre.’
Joan Major nodded in agreement.
‘Where did you find it?’ Grace asked.
The forensic pathologist pointed at the skeleton’s right hand, which was partially buried in the silt. The fingers were exposed. He pointed at the end of the middle finger. ‘See that? It’s an artificial nail – from one of those nail studio places.’
Grace felt a chill run through him. Sandy had bitten her nails. When they were watching television she would chew on them, making busy little clicking sounds like a hamster. It drove him nuts. And sometimes in bed as well. Often when he was trying to go to sleep, she would be gnawing away, as if fretting about something she could not or would not share with him. Then suddenly she’d look at her nails and get angry with herself, say to him that he must tell her when she was biting and help her to stop. And she would go to a nail studio to have expensive, artificial nails put over her bitten ones.
‘A plastic compound, glued on, somehow the nails didn’t get washed away when the skin beneath rotted,’ Frazer Theobald said. ‘The fibre was beneath this one. It could be that her assailant dragged her along a carpet and she dug her nails in. That’s the most likely explanation of how it got there. Bit of luck that it didn’t get washed away.’
‘Luck, yes,’ Grace said distantly. His mind was racing. Dragged along a carpet. A blue carpet fibre. Pale blue. Sky blue.
There was a pale blue carpet at home. In the bedroom. The bedroom he and Sandy had shared until the night she disappeared.
Into the blue.
