In the Still of the Night

‘Just as I was thinking of ringing the police, though, Miss Lang arrived in her car, and went into the house. The chauffeur drove off and the guy in the old car got out and went into the house too. Miss Lang was expecting him, I’d say, because she left the front door open for him and I saw her waiting in the hall.’

‘Waiting for him?’ Sean broke out hoarsely. ‘Sure about that?’

Phil Grover gave him a sly grin. ‘Thought you’d be interested in that. Yes, she definitely waited for him to join her. He shut the front door as he went in, and then about ten minutes later they both came out. He was carrying a suitcase. He hadn’t had it when he went in. They got in his car and drove off.’

‘I don’t suppose you got the number?’

Phil Grover grinned again. ‘If I did, it would cost you another forty quid.’

Sean’s hands screwed into fists by his sides; the other man looked down at them with a flicker of nerves, backed a little, then said, ‘Well, do you want the number or don’t you?’

Sean sat in his car and rang Tom Moor before he drove off; Tom was out and Cherie took the call.

‘He’s working on your case,’ she assured him.

‘Can you get one of his assistants to check a licence number for me with the police computer?’ Sean read it out. ‘And ring me back as soon as you get the name and address of the driver.’

‘Sean, is this case dangerous for my Tom?’ Cherie asked, anxiety in her voice.

‘I doubt it, unless he’s very stupid,’ Sean curtly said.

‘You know my Tom can be very stupid,’ she groaned. ‘If anything happens to him I’ll never forgive you, Sean.’

‘I’d never forgive myself! Tom’s one of my best friends, you know that.’

‘Yes, I know that.’ Her voice softened. ‘I still wish he was in some other business. It was bad enough when he was a copper and I never knew when – or if – he was coming home again, but at least there he was backed up by mates. Now he’s out there on his own.’

‘That was his choice, Cherie! But don’t underestimate Tom’s sense of self-preservation. Stop worrying, Tom’s a big boy. Look, will you also tell him that Roger Keats has surfaced at last? He rang his ex-wife last night, it seems, and boasted of having killed Derek Fenn. Ask Tom to try all his friends still in the force to see if they’ve come up with any more than that. If they track Keats down, for instance.’

‘Tom says Chorley told him to bug off last time he bumped into him down at the nick.’

‘Charming. Chorley’s such a nice guy. Well, when Tom does ring you, ask him to give me a ring, would you? Bye, Cherie, love to the kids.’

Sean rang off and stood at the window, his fists pushed into his denim jacket pockets. While he was talking to Cherie, he had kept his thoughts at bay, but now they came back like a tidal wave, swamping him.

Where in God’s name was Annie? Sweat started out on his forehead and in the palms of his hands.

He didn’t want to know what she was doing. He could guess. Unfortunately. That was what was grinding in the pit of his stomach like a surgeon’s knife, the images of what he suspected she was doing – jealousy was the cruellest emotion you could ever feel, but he could live with that. If he had to. He had learnt long ago to accept what he could not alter.

A policeman learnt to discipline his imagination – to deal just with facts and evidence and never let himself think about the pain and suffering he sees. The world was a pretty nasty place in some corners of it. Sean had thought himself totally cauterised against emotions.

He hadn’t reckoned with his own. For one particular woman. Annie had got under his skin, into his bloodstream – day by day she had come to mean more to him than he had ever thought any woman could.

He liked women, but had only twice come close to a serious relationship – one when he was in his late teens, with a girl from his school who went off to university and dropped him within weeks when he became a police cadet. She wrote explaining that she wasn’t dating a policeman, thanks! He gathered he was no longer good enough for her. Policemen were the wrong income group. The last he heard she had married a stockbroker and was living in Pinner. He hadn’t cried over her, he’d been too furious. Later he’d started dating a secretary who worked in the same police station; they’d seen each other for several years until she went to a police union conference, got drunk and spent the night in a wild orgy with a number of other delegates. It hadn’t taken twenty-four hours for the news to reach Sean; the whole station was buzzing about it before she even reappeared at work. That had been the end of that relationship – not so much because he was jealous, or angry, as because he could no longer trust her. He no longer liked her, either. He felt a fool for having been so wrong about her.

It had left him cynical, disillusioned, inclined never to take women on face value, and what he had learnt about Annie over the past days had reinforced his cynicism, but he didn’t care about any of the secrets from her past that he had uncovered. He could forgive her anything … so long as she was safe, but his mind was possessed with dread, afraid that the next time he saw her she would be lying on a mortuary slab.

Annie and Johnny stopped on the way to the forest to buy a take-away meal, Greek kebabs and pitta bread and rice which she re-heated in the kitchen oven for a couple of minutes while Johnny was lighting the fire in the shabby drawing-room. They drew the curtains to shut out the forest and lit candles to give the room a shimmering glamour it did not have by the harsher reality of electric light.

Since Johnny had got out of prison he had visited the house a number of times, he told her, to take the covers off the furniture, have the electricity switched back on, heat up the house with electric fires and log fires to get rid of the faint dampness and smell of mould which years of emptiness had build up. His lawyers had had a woman come in once a month to clean the place and had paid any bills for rates and water. There had been just enough money from his grandmother’s insurance policy to pay for that.

They ate from one large plate, using the slit pitta bread to hold their food; Annie had mixed salad with the meat before she filled the hot pittas. The food seemed ambrosial; she had never tasted anything so good.

Johnny put Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number I on the old gramophone; the romantic music and the candles and the firelight took them to a dimension where only they existed and there was no world outside.

She had forgotten Sean and Harriet completely; it never occurred to her to ring and explain where she had gone. When she was with Johnny nothing else mattered.

After they had eaten they drank coffee and Johnny lay with his head in her lap while she stroked his thick black hair and watched him. This time they did not feel a deep urge to make love at first, although they