Love You Dead

63 Thursday 5 March

‘Roy? Roy? Roy?’

‘Urrr?’

‘Are you OK? You’re so restless.’

‘Wassertime?’

‘Two fifteen. You keep tossing and turning and shouting out. What is it? Is your leg hurting?’

Grace rolled over in bed and touched Cleo’s face with his nose. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Were you having a bad dream?’

‘Yeah. Sorry I woke you.’

They lay still for a moment.

‘Want to tell me?’

He did want to tell her, so badly. They’d always promised each other they would have no secrets. Yet how could he tell her? The taboo subject. Sandy.

So often over the time that they’d been together, Cleo had tried to get him to move on from his first wife. She’d been understanding, yet in bad moments had told him that at times she felt she wasn’t married only to him, but to him and a ghost.

Sandy.

Back in January Roy had looked at the woman lying in her hospital bed. Sandy. He had denied to himself that it was her, but he knew the truth and had been suppressing it. At some point it was going to have to come out, and how on earth was he ever going to start that conversation? And deal with the fallout that would follow? It was something that would take many hours, maybe days, to work through with Cleo — if she would accept the situation at all — and with all the authorities.

The information he had, to date, was that for a time she had been a heroin addict — and had then gone clean. And she had a son.

Whatever.

He and Sandy had tried repeatedly for a child, with no success.

So now this woman had a child.

And there was too much at stake with his new life. The past was the past. So the woman in the bed at the Klinikum was Sandy. But she was no longer his Sandy. She had made the decision, whatever had been going on in her mind at the time, to walk out on him and fabricate her disappearance — and cause him ten years of hell. He wasn’t about to disrupt his life now, however unfortunate her circumstances were.

But for the last two nights he had been unable to sleep properly.

Ever since that phone call from Kullen. Grace had met him for the first time a few years ago. Since then Kullen had helped him through a possible reported sighting of Sandy in the past, when he had gone to Munich on what turned out to be a wild goose chase.

‘Roy,’ he had said this time. ‘All is good?’ His voice had sounded strangely hesitant.

‘Very good. You? Still driving crazily, like Lewis Hamilton?’

‘Yah! I have a new car, a Scirocco Storm. It is fast! I take you for a drive sometime!’

Grace remembered his friend’s driving on his first visit to Germany. He loved fast cars himself, but at 160 mph on the autobahn, with Kullen constantly taking his eyes off the road to talk to him, he had been somewhat nervous. ‘Look forward to it!’ he had replied, with bravado.

‘So, this woman you came to see in January, in the Klinikum Schwabing? To make sure she was not your former wife, Sandy?’

‘Yes? How is she doing?’

‘Not good, Roy. Her condition is unstable. The prognosis is bad. But there is something you need to know.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I sent the hairbrush you mailed me to the DNA laboratory. I just got the results back this morning. The match is conclusive. This woman is Sandy.’