Dead Scared

NICK’S RANGE ROVER was parked close by the side door when I arrived ten minutes later. There was no sign of any other vehicle.

Bell’s kosher. Been working with us.

Good God, what else was the bugger going to throw at me?

You think you’re the only undercover officer we have in town?

Nick Bell could not be an undercover police officer. A GP was far too complicated a cover story. But covertly working with SO10, in the same way Evi was? That wasn’t impossible. So did he know who I was? Or had he been covertly investigating me while I’d been … oh, Lord, it didn’t bear thinking about.

The back door was open and a handwritten note had been stuck to it with a drawing pin.

Upstairs, it said.

We’d almost had sex. Christ, this was going to be embarrassing.

A musical tone told me I had another text. Joesbury again.

ETA three minutes. Don’t let me catch you snogging.

It was beyond me. I was handing over to Joesbury and his ‘boys’ as soon as they got here and then I was never having anything to do with SO10 as long as I lived. I might even apply to join Traffic.

I pushed open the door and went through into the kitchen. No sign of the dogs. The room was warm but the house had an empty feel about it.

‘Hi!’ I called from halfway up the stairs. ‘It’s me.’

There was no response. Nick could be outside with the animals but the note had definitely said come upstairs. I stopped at the top. Still no sign of him. The master bedroom where I’d slept the other night was at the front of the house, behind me, as was the main spare bedroom. Both doors shut. The bathroom was to my left. Door shut.

‘Hey, gorgeous, I’m in here,’ he called.

I stepped forward, pausing on the threshold of a room I hadn’t seen before. I’d just registered that Nick was leaning over an old desk with a tin of polish in one hand and a leather bridle in the other when I heard the creak of a stair behind me. Joesbury.

I turned just as Nick straightened up and we both looked towards the door, the goofy smile freezing on my face. The man blocking our way out wasn’t Joesbury.

‘Good God,’ said Nick, over my shoulder.

I could have cut off my own arm for being stupid enough to get trapped in an upstairs room. The man in the doorway, whom I’d last seen running after a stolen van at the industrial estate, ignored me. ‘Hello, Nick,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

The room wasn’t brightly lit, the hallway quite dark, but even so Tom’s eyes seemed to have lost all their colour. They were like millponds at night, black and empty, and I couldn’t remember why I’d ever thought them kind. Then I was sizing up the situation, checking the room for ways out, weapons, distractions, anything. All I really had to do was to stay calm and stall them. Joesbury and the cavalry would be here any second.

‘I take it you’re Iestyn Thomas?’ I said. There were any number of hard objects I could introduce to Thomas’s head given the chance.

‘Laura, what on earth …?’ began Nick, his eyes going from me to the man in the doorway.

Then Thomas stepped into the room and any hope I’d had that he was alone was quashed. Scott Thornton was with him, his blue eyes gleaming at me the way they had through the ninja mask the night he’d half drowned me. And then another man appeared. This one I didn’t know, except that I’d seen him leaving Megan Prince’s house the day before.

‘John?’ Nick knew him, then, but from the tone of surprise and growing alarm in his voice it was obvious he was completely in the dark. ‘What’s going on? Has something happened?’

‘Nick knows nothing,’ I said. ‘Let him go. Or tie him up and leave him here. Either way, he’s not a threat.’

A nervous laugh that was more like a choke from Nick. ‘Laura, don’t be ridiculous. John is DI Castell. He’s a police officer. Local CID.’

John Castell, the man in charge of the suicide investigations. Oh, there weren’t words.

No, actually, there were. ‘I’m a police officer,’ I said. ‘He is a twisted, psychotic piece of shit.’

They moved forward at that. Thornton and Thomas took hold of Nick and, ignoring his increasingly alarmed protests, pulled us apart. Castell and I glared at each other and I was praying I’d have the nerve to do some serious damage before he overpowered me. Or before help arrived, and on that subject, where the hell was Joes—

‘Nick, how did you get my number?’ I asked without taking my eyes off Castell. ‘You phoned me just now on a new number. Who gave it to you?’

‘Will you lot get the fuck out of my hou—’

I’m not sure who hit Nick, I only saw him sink to the carpet, before someone else appeared on the landing outside and all I could do was stare like a halfwit.

Your nutty room-mate found it this morning when she went to the hospital to pick up some books.

Talaith Robinson, my nutty room-mate, sidled up to Castell and wrapped herself around him like a bad smell around rotten meat.

‘Hello, Lacey,’ she said.