They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

38 26 July 2007

After Hans-Jürgen had left, I felt even more unsettled and on edge. I sat in the armchair and buried my face in my hands, thinking, Shit, what have I done? Shit, shit, shit.

Was it too late to reverse it? I had my ‘job’ phone or even phone B; I could call Roy right now, tell him everything and he would forgive me and we would sort it out.

And get Roy killed in the process by Albazi?

I started thinking about what clues I’d inadvertently left that Roy would find.

My laptop, which Nicos had insisted I leave behind, would be the first thing he would start checking. Well, once he had cracked my password. We didn’t have any secrets and in the past he always knew my password. But that was before I started online gambling. I’d changed it then to stop him from finding it out. I imagine some of the boffins in the Police High Tech Crime Unit would be able to crack the password easily enough. But I’d cleared the history caches on the search engines, so maybe my laptop wasn’t going to be of much help to him. But, God, I wished I had it with me now. Just to have something to do to occupy myself.

They’d find my car at the airport, of course, but I didn’t know how long that would take. What else would Roy find? He’d be able to get my phone records, but my personal phone records would show nothing untoward. He’d speak to my friends, but I’d not told them anything. Nor my work colleagues. Weighing it up, I felt so far, with Nicos’s help, I’d covered my tracks pretty thoroughly.

My window was open and it was a fine summer evening. I heard the drone and clatter of a lawn mower a short distance away and I could smell the scent of freshly cut grass. It made me think of my beautiful garden — that I would never see again. And suddenly, for the first time in this hectic day, the full seriousness of what I had done began to overwhelm me and I started sobbing, uncontrollably.

When I calmed a little and dabbed my eyes, I put my hand on my stomach, apologized to my unborn baby and popped another Valium — then started trying to think it all through.

What was Roy doing now? Was he wondering where I was? What would he have done when he saw my car wasn’t there?

Dick and Leslie Pope would have got all dressed up to go to Roy’s birthday dinner, at the Gingerman, one of our favourite Brighton restaurants. What happened when I didn’t turn up?

I was never going to speak to them or see them again and that made me really sad.

One of the things I’ve learned from my years with Roy is that you need to be anal to be a good detective. Painstaking, methodical, highly organized. How did he ever fall in love with slapdash me? The attraction of opposites?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that was a fault with him. The fault was with me. Always me. Because I always wanted more than I had. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for, right? Robert Browning said that. I think he meant that if we wanted to achieve anything, we always had to strive beyond our limits, beyond our comfort zone.