‘It’s a long story.’
She pulled him towards her and kissed him. Kissed him as if she was discovering his mouth for the first time, exploring every part of it. Then she pulled back her face for a moment, grinning almost breathlessly.
‘It really is you!’
His hands had found their way inside her nightdress and were exploring her breasts. When she’d first had her boob job, they had driven him wild for a time, then he seemed to lose interest in them, the way he had lost interest in just about everything. But tonight this apparition, this Ronnie in her bedroom, was a totally different man. The old Ronnie she remembered from happier times. Ronnie who had died and come back?
He was undressing. Unlacing his trainers. Dropping his trousers. He had a massive erection. He pulled off his cagoule, his black polo-neck sweater, peeled off his socks. Now he pulled back the bedclothes and roughly pushed her nightdress up over her thighs.
Then he knelt over her and began to make her wet with his fingers, finding her sweet spot the way he used to, so brilliantly, finding it, working it, moistening his finger from his lips and from herself, setting the fire raging in her now. He leaned forward, untying the front of her nightdress, freeing her breasts, then kissing each of them for a long time, in turn, still working on her with his fingers.
Then his cock, bigger, harder than it had felt in years, hard as a stone, was pushing deep up inside her.
She screamed out in joy. ‘RONNIE!’
Instantly he pressed a finger to her lips. ‘Ssshhh!’ he said. ‘I’m not here. I’m just a ghost.’
She wrapped her arms around his head, pulled his face as close to hers as she could, feeling the bristles of his beard on her skin and loving it, and pushed against him, pushed and pushed and pushed, feeling him further, deeper, then deeper still inside her.
‘Ronnie!’ she panted into his ear, breathing faster and faster, climaxing now, and feeling him exploding inside her.
They both lay very still, gulping down air. The film was still playing on the television. The fan heater was steadily blowing out air, with an intermittent rattle.
‘I never realized ghosts got horny,’ she whispered. ‘Can I summon you up every night?’
‘We need to talk,’ he said.
100
PC Duncan Troutt felt a little less self-conscious this morning, his second day as a fully fledged police officer. And he was rather hoping for more action than yesterday, when he had spent most of his time giving directions to foreign students and introducing himself to some of the businesses on his beat, in particular to the manager of an Indian takeaway who had been beaten up recently, in an attack that had been filmed on a mobile phone camera and ended up on YouTube.
Turning into Lower Arundel Terrace shortly after 9 o’clock, he decided he would pay Katherine Jennings another visit in the hope of catching her in. He’d read on the log before setting out this morning that a fellow officer on the evening shift had tried her twice, at 7 p.m. and again at 10 p.m., with no luck. A call to Directory Enquiries had not yielded any phone number for someone of that name at that address, listed or unlisted.
As he walked down the pavement, observing each of the houses in turn and checking each of the parked cars for signs of break-ins or vandalism, two seagulls screeched above him. He glanced up at them and then stared for a moment at the dark, threatening sky. The streets were still glossy from last night’s rain and it looked as if it might start again at any moment.
Shortly before reaching the front entrance of number 29 he noticed, on the opposite side of the road, a grey Ford Focus that had been clamped. The car rang a bell from yesterday. He recalled seeing it there with a ticket on the windscreen. He crossed over, lifted the ticket from under the wiper blade, shook raindrops off its wet cellophane wrapper and read the date and time on it. It had been issued at 10.03 a.m. yesterday. Which meant it had been here for over twenty-four hours.
There could be all kind of innocent explanations. Someone who hadn’t realized these streets required residents’ parking permits was the most likely. It could possibly be an abandoned stolen car. The biggest significance to him was its location, close to the flat of the woman he had been asked to check up on, who had seemingly disappeared, if only temporarily.
He radioed in for a PNC check on the car, then crossed back over and rang Katherine Jennings’s doorbell. As before, there was no answer.
Then, deciding he would try again later, he continued on with his patrol, down to Marine Parade, where he turned left. After a few minutes, his radio crackled into life. The Ford Focus was registered to Avis, the car rental company. He thanked the operator and considered this new information carefully. People who rented cars often flouted traffic regulations. Maybe whoever had rented this one couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of getting it unclam-ped. Or hadn’t had the time.
But there still just
‘It’s probably nothing, sir,’ he added, concerned not to make a fool of himself.
‘You’re quite right to check like this,’ the Sergeant reassured him. ‘A lot of good police work comes from the smallest details. No one’s going to chew you out for being over-observant. Miss something that matters and that’s a whole different story!’
Troutt thanked him and continued on his way. Thirty minutes later the Sergeant radioed him back. ‘The car’s been rented by an Australian called Chad Skeggs. Lives in Melbourne, Australian licence.’
Troutt ducked into a porch to shelter his notebook from the rain and dutifully wrote the name down on his pad, spelling it back for him.
‘Does the name mean anything to you?’ the Sergeant asked him.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Me neither.’
All the same, Sergeant Brown decided to log it on the serial. Just in case.
101
Abby sat in silence in the back of the taxi in the pouring rain, staring at the display of her mobile phone.
The bubble-wrapped envelope was sandwiched between her pullover and the T-shirt beneath. She had a belt tucked tightly around her midriff to prevent the package from falling out – and from being visible to anyone. And she felt the reassuring bulge of the Mace in the front pocket of her jeans.
The driver turned right off Hove seafront by the statue of Queen Victoria and headed up the Drive, a wide street lined on both sides with expensive apartment blocks. But she saw nothing outside the windows of the vehicle. In fact, she saw barely anything at all. There was only one image in front of her raw eyes; one image burning in her mind.
The photograph on her mobile of her mother’s head sticking out of the top of the rolled-up carpet. And the words beneath:
Her emotions were in meltdown. She see-sawed from blind fury at Ricky to the most terrible fear for her mother’s life.
And the guilt that she had caused this.
She was so tired, she was finding it hard to think straight. She had been wide awake throughout the night. Wired. Listening to the endless traffic on the seafront, a pebble’s throw from her hotel window. Sirens. Trucks. Buses. A car alarm that kept going off. The early-morning cries of the gulls. She’d ticked off each long hour. Each half-hour. Each quarter-hour.
Waiting for Ricky to call.
Or at least to send a text saying something else. But there had been nothing. She knew him. Knew this kind of psychological game was his style. He enjoyed waiting games. She remembered the second time she had gone to his apartment. Their second
Afterwards he told her it was what she had wanted.
And she had totally failed on that occasion to get what
Her concern at this moment was that she did not know his limits – she suspected that he had none. She believed that Ricky was quite capable of killing her mother to get everything back. And that he could kill her too.
And probably enjoy it.
She was trying to imagine the distress her mother was in at this moment, when she realized, with a start, they had arrived at Hegarty’s imposing house.
She paid the driver, peered carefully out of the rear window and then the front. She saw a British Telecom truck a short distance away, which looked as if it was doing some kind of a repair, and a small blue car parked partially on the kerb a short distance further on. But no sign of Ricky’s Ford Focus or him.
She double-checked the number of the house, wishing she had remembered to pack her small umbrella. Then, head bowed against the rain, she hurried through the open gates, past a cluster of cars and into the dark porch. She stood there a moment, extricating the package from her midriff and tidying her clothes, then rang the bell.
A couple of minutes later she was seated on a large crimson leather sofa in Hegarty’s study. The dealer, dressed in a baggy checked shirt, elephant cords and leather slippers, sat at his desk, scrutinizing each stamp with an enormous, tortoiseshell-rimmed magnifying glass.
It always excited her to see the stamps, because there was such a mystique about them. They were so tiny, so old, so delicate, and yet so valuable. Most of them were black or blue or a rusty red colour, bearing the head of Queen Victoria. But there were other colours and other sovereigns’ heads.
Hegarty’s wife, a handsome, smartly dressed woman in her sixties, with elegantly coiffed hair, brought Abby a cup of tea and a plate of digestive biscuits, then went out again.
There was something about the man’s demeanour that was making her feel uncomfortable. Dave had told her to bring them here, that Hugo Hegarty was the dealer who would give her the best price and ask the fewest questions, so she had to trust that was the case. But she had a bad feeling about him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She needed to sell them urgently. The sooner she banked the money, the better her bargaining position with Ricky would be. All the time she had them, he had something on her. If he wanted to cut up really rough, he could go to the police. Then they would all be losers, but she believed he was spiteful enough to do that rather than be shafted.
