Want You Dead (8 page)

‘You are here before me – that is unforgivable of me! I am so sorry!’ His voice was strong, with a faint transatlantic drawl. He took her hand and kissed it, and she smelled his very sexy, musky cologne, then he settled opposite her and said, smiling again, ‘Wow! You are so not what I expected!’

She smiled at him. ‘Oh?’ She was thinking the same. How come such a gorgeous hunk needed to join a dating agency?

‘No, really, I mean . . . I had a feeling, from your photo on the site . . . and all the ones on your Facebook page, that you would be lovely. But wow . . . not this lovely!’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, you are a very nice surprise, too!’ she said. ‘And thank you for the flowers. That was really thoughtful of you.’

‘You like champagne?’

‘If you really twist my arm,’ she said with a grin.

He raised a hand in the air and waved, and almost instantly a waiter came over and began opening the bottle.

‘It’s vintage,’ Bryce said. ‘Only the best for you.’

When their glasses had been filled, he raised his. ‘So,’ he said with a smile that almost melted her heart. ‘
Single girl, 29, redhead and smouldering, love life that’s crashed and burned. Seeks new flame to rekindle her fire. Fun, friendship and – who knows – maybe more?
’

‘God!’ she said. ‘It sounds so cheesy, hearing it back.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s what caught my eye. It’s why we’re here! I’m already having a good time. Are you?’

‘I’m having a
very
good time.’

They clinked glasses.

He drank some and then said, ‘You know, I’ve been a bit presumptuous. I’m told the menu here is very good, but I thought for our first dinner we should have something a little special. In one of your emails you said you liked shellfish?’

‘I do.’

‘Excellent. I phoned and asked the manager to get us two lobsters. And to start, I thought we’d go off-menu also and I asked him to bring us Beluga caviar – does that suit you? It’s the finest in the world.’

This all seemed so amazing, for a moment she wondered if it was a set-up. Had Raquel – or one of her other friends – done this? Like a Mr Hunk date-o-gram or something? But why would they? They’d never be so cruel, surely. She looked at his face and his eyes smiled back at her, full of laughter and life. This was real. Totally over the top, but definitely real.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘Wow . . . but – I – I’ve actually never had caviar before – not real caviar. Just that lumpfish you get in jars.’

‘Nothing is too good for you,’ he replied. ‘You are stunning, do you know that?’

‘Thank you, but no, I don’t.’

‘Well, you are!’

They clinked glasses again.

Who was this Adonis of a man? It was like a dream. She’d kissed an awful lot of frogs since Dominic. Had she finally met a prince? She couldn’t be intoxicated, not from just one sip of champagne, but she was definitely feeling a little bit tipsy. There was something about him she found deeply charming – and very sexy.

And yet, a caution bell was ringing in her mind.

‘So in your emails, you never told me what you do?’ he said.

‘I work as a PA for a structural engineering firm,’ she said. ‘Although, actually I’ve always fancied becoming an estate agent.’

‘I’ve got contacts with several estate agents in the city. Just let me know and I can put you in touch with them.’

‘Thank you! And what about you? What do you do?’

‘Well, I used to be a pilot for United in the US, then I got a job as a private pilot for a Texan oil billionaire. Unfortunately my wife became sick with advanced breast cancer and I couldn’t be away all the time my job required. I felt I needed to be around to look after her. She was from England, and she really wanted to come back here to spend her last days near her family. I managed to retrain and get a ground job as an Air Traffic Controller at Gatwick.’

‘Like in the film
Pushing Tin
?’

‘Yes, except it is not like that at all in reality.’

The caviar was served. It arrived in a silver bowl surrounded by ice, with tiny blinis and a mound of sour cream. The eggs were the size of miniature peas, a silver grey colour. She had never seen anything like them. They reminded her of large frogspawn.

Bryce showed her the way to eat it, by putting a tiny smear of the cream on a blini, then spooning the eggs on top, and popping it in his mouth with his fingers.

She copied him, then tried to mask her shock at the taste. Her first bite evoked the memory of her mother spooning cod liver oil into her mouth when she had a cold as a child. Then she felt the silky texture of the eggs themselves melting, and experienced a sudden frisson of excitement, realizing she was eating the world’s most fabled and expensive delicacy.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘Amazing!’ she replied.

‘You’re amazing,’ he said. Then from his inside pocket he suddenly produced a deck of cards, and with a flick of his wrist fanned them out perfectly so that every single card was visible.

‘Wow! That’s pretty impressive.’

He turned the fan away so that only she could see them. ‘Select one. Just choose and touch it, but don’t show it to me.’

She touched the queen of hearts. ‘Okay, done.’

With another flick he snapped the deck shut. And with another he fanned them open again. ‘Do you see the card?’ he asked.

It wasn’t there. She frowned and glanced down at the table wondering where it was. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t see it.’

‘Open your handbag.’

She leaned down, picked her handbag off the floor and popped the clasp. She opened it and gasped. The queen of hearts lay there between her lipstick and phone. She lifted it up.

‘Was that the one you chose?’ he asked eagerly.

‘That’s incredible! How did you do that?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s my hobby,’ he said. ‘I do close magic for fun. Have you heard of the Magic Castle in Los Angeles?’

Red shook her head.

‘Have you ever been to LA?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe I’ll take you there one day. Who knows?’

She grinned. ‘I’d love to go to LA.’

‘Are you missing anything?’

‘Missing anything? I don’t think so.’

He dug his hand into his side pocket and pulled out a watch. It was her white Swatch.

‘How the hell?’ she exclaimed.

He handed it to her and she clipped it back on her wrist. ‘Okay, I’m impressed!’

‘I’m impressed too,’ he replied. ‘With you.’

Against all her principles – and Raquel’s advice – and partly because she was smashed at the end of the meal, she invited him up for coffee when, leaving the taxi waiting, he walked her to the front door of her building.

He stroked her face and ran his fingers through her hair, held both her wrists gently, then gave her a single light kiss on her lips. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘We’ve both drunk too much. When we make love for the first time, I want it to be special.’

She closed the door behind her, walked along the communal corridor, past her chained-up bicycle, and floated up the three flights of stairs. It wasn’t until she entered her third-floor flat, in a modern block beside the River Adur with its view out over Shoreham Port, that she noticed the bracelet on her right wrist.

It was a narrow silver band, completely circling her wrist, which fitted snugly. Too snugly to have been slipped over her hand. She stared at it, bemused, wondering exactly when he had put it on. Just now, when he had held her wrists outside?

But more puzzling still, there was no clasp. It was solid, all the way around. She examined it carefully, tugging at it, but there was no join, no seam that she could find. On the surface she saw tiny engraved writing. She had to squint to read the words.
Queen of Hearts.
Followed by a heart symbol.

Then her phone pinged with an incoming text. She pulled it out of her bag and looked at the display.

If you want it removed, you’ll have to wait for our next date.

She texted back,
XXX

And almost instantly the reply came.
XXX

20

Friday, 25 October

Red sat at her tiny breakfast bar, red-eyed from a sleepless night and her chest feeling raw from having smoked far too many cigarettes. Her flat was a mess – its usual state. Her CDs and DVDs were strewn around on the floor beneath the television and stereo stack. She needed to have a good tidy-up, but at the moment that was the furthest thing from her mind.

Her laptop was open, displaying the front page headline of the
Argus
online.
Brighton restaurant destroyed in blaze
. There was a photograph of the Cuba Libre surrounded by fire engines, its beautiful grey facade blackened. It was 8.20 a.m. and she stared at the television, waiting for the local news to come on, spooning porridge into her mouth with no appetite and sipping her coffee. Outside it was pelting with rain, making her dismal view of the fire escape opposite even more dismal.

Suicide?

It wasn’t possible. It was
so
not possible. It had to be mistaken identity. Whatever had happened to Karl, he had not killed himself. No way on earth.

She felt terrible. October was always a grim time of the year, with the prospect of months of winter ahead. And the prospect of a lousy weekend in front of her. Karl had talked about them going away to a hotel he knew in the New Forest. That was clearly not going to happen now. Unless, miraculously, he contacted her.

Otherwise, Sunday lunch with her parents loomed. Red, the saddo single, and her elder, hugely successful sister, married and very smugly pregnant.

She felt she was the lame duck of the family. Margot, in addition to being married to a successful London hedge-fund manager, had her own meteoric career in a City law firm.

And here she was, struggling to write sales copy for a grotty little house that no one in their right mind would want to live in. And living in hiding herself.

Stalked by her ex, and her most recent date dead.

Could Bryce have had anything to do with that?

Absurd. She stared down at the bracelet. The one Bryce had slipped on her wrist, unnoticed, that very first date at Cuba Libre restaurant. She remembered that on their second date, when she had told him she could not remove it and asked him how the hell he had ever put it on, he had grinned and told her a magician never reveals his secrets. He would only take it off, he said, when she was no longer his.

The tarnished thin silver band had been on her wrist for so long she rarely noticed it. But she stared at it now. She had lost over a stone in weight in the past few months from worry, and the bracelet hung looser on her wrist. But still nowhere loose enough to slide it over her hand. She had toyed with going to a jeweller and asking them to cut it off, but something held her back from doing that. Fear?

Fear that if Bryce saw her in the street without it, it might antagonize him further?

Then she heard the words
golf course
on the television, and instantly looked up at the screen. She saw a cluster of police vehicles in front of a wooded area. Crime scene tape. Officers in blue protective over-suits and a large screen. A male presenter, holding a microphone in his hand, hair matted by the rain and looking like he would rather be anywhere but here, said, ‘Sussex Police have not yet released the identity of the charred body of a male found in a ditch, close to the third tee of Haywards Heath Golf Club yesterday.’

Red felt a tightening in her gullet. Was this Karl? God. Was it? She grabbed her phone and dialled Raquel’s surgery number. But the answering machine kicked in. It was out of hours. She hung up and dialled Raquel’s mobile number. She’d left messages the night before, but her friend had not got back to her.

‘Sorry to call so early, Raq. Can you just tell me something – has Karl Murphy been in the office? I mean, was he in yesterday?’

Raquel’s voice sounded strange. ‘Sorry about last night, we were out at a dinner. No – no, he wasn’t.’

‘Maybe I’m going out of my mind . . . but I think something has happened to him. The police came and saw me last night about a body that’s been found.’

‘You’re not going out of your mind. I think you could be right.’

‘Why – why – what – why are you saying that?’

‘I had to come in early – at the request of the police. Karl’s a patient – they’ve asked for his dental records.’

On the television, the scene suddenly cut to a conference room. Against a curved blue backdrop of a display board bearing the web address www.sussex.police.co.uk and an artistic display of five police badges on a blue background – with Crimestoppers’ number prominently displayed beneath – a slim, suited man, with short gelled fair hair and blue eyes, looking very serious, was speaking. Along the bottom of the screen ran the caption,
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team.

‘We are hoping to have a formal identification of this man later today,’ he said. ‘However, at this time the post-mortem results are inconclusive. I would appeal to anyone who was either on Haywards Heath golf course or in the vicinity between the hours of midday Wednesday and 9 a.m. Thursday, who saw anything suspicious, or who noticed any motor vehicle parked out of place, to come forward and phone the police, or Sussex Crimestoppers, on the following numbers . . .’

21

Friday, 25 October

Bryce Laurent also had his television monitors on. All six of them. On one screen was breakfast television news. But it was a different one that interested him more. Red Westwood on the phone, talking to her best friend, Raquel.

He’d been out for meals with Red, Raquel and her husband, Paul, a local GP, as well as to the cinema and the theatre; they’d even spent a weekend away together, the four of them, in Bath. Raquel and Paul were all right. He hadn’t exactly warmed to them, but they’d not been negative about him. Not the way Red’s parents had been. Especially her bitch mother.