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  Lauren had hit her face and split her lip in the fall, and was feeling decidedly woozy as she regained an upright position. This, then, was the end of her marriage, was it? She let her thoughts wander back to her previous time in bed with Kenneth that evening and shuddered. This wasn’t a minute too soon in coming, when she reflected on how she really felt about him. Gerda was welcome to him, but he wasn’t getting custody of her children, and he wasn’t getting off lightly financially, either. She’d take him for every penny he’d got, by God.

  Mustering every ounce of courage she possessed, she shook her head to clear it, and also made off for the master suite, where she would pack a bag and leave for the rest of the night. It wasn’t too late, and she was sure that Olivia would put her up, even if it was just on the sofa.

  When she arrived at, what until now, had been her bedroom, the two of them were in bed together, without an ounce of shame between them. She sucked at her split lip as she put together some clothes and toiletries, not forgetting her trusty e-reader, and growled, with all the venom she could muster, ‘You’ll pay for this, buddy,’ as she left the room.

  INTERLUDE

  It had taken longer than they had thought to dig such a deep hole in the sand, but there was no one about on such a cold night, and there was cloud cover, limiting the natural light. Finally it was done, and the trussed and gagged bundle, lying just behind a rock to shield any view of it from the promenade, was ready for its fate.

  Had they been interrupted during their task they would have passed it off as digging for rare lugworms, but no one had passed since they had begun their task. They were at the end of the prom where the houses ended and gave way to municipal gardens – not somewhere to stroll after the hours of darkness, when the place was locked up anyway.

  Taking a quick look round to see that they were not being watched, they dragged the man over the sand and held his head over the hole, shining a torch down it to show him how deep they had dug. Immediately he began to struggle and moan, imagining that he would be lowered in feet first and left to drown when the tide came in.

  How wrong he was. To his utter surprise and horror, they dragged him to his feet, and lowered him in head first, the deepness of the hole dampening the groaned protests that escaped through his gagged mouth. Slowly the sand was replaced, filling first that part of the hole where his head was located. The world became darker and darker, until he found he couldn’t breathe, and he knew he was done for.

  They had not even finished filling the hole when the purposely visible feet gave a final jerk, and then were still.

  ‘Another one bites the dust.’

  That was the only comment, and the men tamped down their handiwork and walked off the beach, heading for the various places that they laid their heads for the night.

  This one had not been so much fun, because they had had to stay around and listen to the man slowly suffocate. It would have been better if they could have arranged it with a different scenario; one where they could walk away and just leave their victim to die, and not have to be there as it happened.

  Even the most evil of characters have their limits of tolerance, and can only stomach so much.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Afterwards, Lauren could never recall that drive to Olivia’s house. Blinded with tears, she was also suffering from a deep shock that things could have come to a head so suddenly and catastrophically. She had envisaged a civilised talk about how she and Kenneth had drifted apart and how it would be better if he got himself a little flat, or even stayed in the granny annexe when he was in the UK, so that he could maintain his relationship with the children, such as it was.

  This sudden acceleration of events, culminating in the shocking discovery that he had been sleeping with the evil au pair almost since she had started her employment with them, had been a completely out-of-the-blue revelation to her, and she felt mentally numb with disbelief. How could this have been going on under her nose? Would things have been different if she had been a stay-at-home mum who needed just the domestic assistance of a cleaner? How much of it was her fault?

  When she finally knocked on Olivia’s door clutching her holdall, she became aware that she had not brushed her hair, that there were tears streaming down her face, her nose was running unchecked, and her lip was swollen and still bleeding from her tussle with the enemy. Whatever would the guv’nor say at her appearance, unannounced and in a state, at this time of night?

  What Olivia said, quite sympathetically, was, ‘What the hell happened to you?’ – but her face had been stern when she first opened the door, before she realised who was calling on her so late. Although Lauren was only marginally aware of them, Olivia had mounting troubles of her own.

  ‘Come on in, Lauren. No, you’re not disturbing us at all. We’re never in bed early. You look like you could do with a drink to steady you. Glass of wine be OK?’

  ‘Thank you,’ mumbled Lauren, sliding down onto a sofa. She felt drained and exhausted, barely able to put coherent thoughts together.

  ‘White all right?’ the DI’s voice called from the kitchen, and Lauren grunted in acceptance. Reappearing with a tray with three glasses of wine on it, Olivia put it down on a coffee table and handed one to her sergeant. ‘Hal’s just getting his kit together for a gig tomorrow night. He’s upstairs, but he’ll join us shortly.’

  Lauren stared at her boss dumbly, not having the energy to say a word. ‘Get that glass of wine down you and try to relax a little, and we’ll talk whenever you’re ready. If you want to stay here tonight, you’re welcome to have Hibbie’s room. She’s still staying with her friend, and I’ve already stripped the beds and put on clean sheets. She should be back in a couple of days, but you’re welcome to stay here until you get whatever it is sorted out.’

  Lauren drained the glass of wine in one long gulp, then held it out for a refill. At the moment she didn’t care how ill-mannered that looked: all her veneer of good manners, painstakingly applied to her at home with her own nanny and at her private school, had fallen away in that bedroom with Gerda and, at the moment, she felt as savage as some of the losers that made her professional life so unnecessarily difficult.

  When she had drained her second glass and it had been refilled for a second time, she felt ready to speak but before she could, Hal’s voice sounded from upstairs, with a note of real panic in it. ‘Phone an ambulance. Dial 999 now.’

  ‘What is it?’ shouted the inspector.

  ‘Don’t waste a second. Make that phone call right this minute.’

  He sounded so panicky that Olivia did as she was told without any more questions, and Lauren sat as still as a statue, thinking that maybe she had chosen the wrong moment to come here to unburden herself.

  As Olivia looked around for the phone, Lauren rose and called up the stairs, ‘What shall she tell them, Hal?

  ‘Suspected drugs overdose. He’s unconscious. Tell Liv.’

  But Liv had already heard, and was in the process of ringing for an ambulance. She was taking no chances with her son’s life. When she ended the call she shot straight upstairs, taking only a second to glance apologetically towards Lauren. Some things had to take precedence, and this was one of them.

  Lauren sat quite still sipping at her third glass of wine, aware of a howl of denial from upstairs, then of the thundering of heavy feet back downstairs. Hal rushed through the room, muttering ‘coffee’, and made a cup in the kitchen, using instant granules and the hottest water the tap could provide. This was no time for boiling kettles and preparing cafetières; this was an emergency.

  Running back up the stairs, trying not to spill his liquid offering, she heard the sound of panicky voices and could imagine the scene upstairs. Olivia would have put her son in the recovery position and would be talking to him, trying desperately to keep him going …

  There was nothing practical she could do, so she just sat there nursing her glass and wishing that she smoked – at least she would have something to do with her han
ds, and the nicotine would help soothe her frayed nerves.

  The ambulance arrived exactly seven and a half minutes later, as the ambulance station was only a short distance away in the town, and the place was suddenly swarming with paramedics, a trolley being manoeuvred up the narrow turned staircase to assist the crew down with – what was his name? – Ben’s body; no, no, she mustn’t refer to him as a body. He wasn’t dead, merely unwell.

  She was only aware of a sort of scuffling noise from above, accompanied by low voices, so she assumed they were working on the boy on the floor of his room. Shortly afterwards, two paramedics started the descent of the awkward staircase, Ben strapped to their seat-trolley, Olivia and Hal following behind, their faces ashen and grave.

  ‘I’ll go in the ambulance with him and deal with all the booking-in procedure. You follow in a short while, when they’ve got him on a ward or whatever,’ Hal advised.

  ‘But he’s my son,’ replied Olivia in a strangled squeak.

  ‘He’s my son, too,’ retorted Hal, following the last paramedic out of the house and closing the door behind him.

  Olivia collapsed into an armchair and stared ahead of her blankly, unaware of anything else other than that her son’s life may be in danger: she may have to prepare herself to lose him.

  After giving her a couple of minutes undisturbed, Lauren asked quietly, her own problems temporarily forgotten in the drama of the present situation, ‘Have you any idea what he took?’

  ‘Not at the moment, but Hal said one of his friends had been round for a couple of hours before I came home and, although he seems a well-brought-up lad, Hal just thinks there’s something iffy about him. I know who he is and where he lives, so I’m going to phone his house.’ A quick riffle through the telephone directory gave her the number she needed.

  She grabbed the phone and started to dial. ‘Just speak calmly,’ warned Lauren as the number was ringing, earning herself a look that indicated that the boss was well aware of how to handle the conversation without outside help.

  After a few minutes of fairly hushed conversation during which Olivia kept her cool admirably, she ended the call. ‘That bloody junkie woman!’ she practically screamed.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lauren cautiously. She didn’t want her boss to come down on her like a ton of bricks, just to vent her spleen about someone else.

  ‘She had a look at her hoard of dangerous drugs and questioned her son about some that were missing, and discovered that he’d made off with a load of old-fashioned sleeping tablets that no doctor not in his dotage would prescribe now, and a load of Valium. I’ll have to phone the hospital before I leave, so that they can be prepared.’

  ‘Let me come with you,’ said Lauren quietly. She had rushed over here for comfort concerning her own problems and discovered that Olivia’s were just as serious and rather more immediate.

  ‘No. I could be there all night. One of us has to be fresh enough to go into the office tomorrow. By the way, why did you come over? You looked upset.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, for now,’ replied Lauren honestly, and it really didn’t. There was a way out of her hole, but if things went belly up with her son Olivia could well be facing a hole of a completely different sort – one about six feet deep …

  ‘I’ll be off then. If Hibbie comes home tell her she’ll have to sleep either in our bed or on the sofa. And don’t lock up. We’ll need to get in when we get back.’

  Having phoned the hospital, the stumpy figure of DI Hardy left the house, and Lauren was left on her own, her only immediate plans to finish her wine, have a quick look round for some more of the medication Hal had given her on her previous visit, and then go up to bed. Hibbie’s room should be easy enough to identify.

  She took her holdall upstairs, easily finding the girl’s bedroom, and put down the pills she’d located from her hand on to the bedside table, heading first for the shower before she went to bed.

  The sound of the door opening woke her just after four, followed by two pairs of footsteps mounting the staircase with evident caution. The Hardys had obviously not forgotten their unexpected overnight guest. Their footsteps mingled with their low voices and Lauren couldn’t resist pulling on a baggy jumper, one she had grabbed in her quick pack, and rushing out of the bedroom.

  ‘How is he?’ She blurted out the question, only afterwards, thinking what if the news were not good? To her utter relief, Olivia and Hal both smiled tiredly at her, and Hal said, ‘It looks like he’s going to be all right.’

  ‘We’ll tell you all about it after a couple of hours’ kip,’ said Olivia. ‘We’re a bit bushed at the moment, but there’s no need to panic anymore. The emergency is over, although it was touch and go, for a while.’ With that, her two hosts disappeared into their own bedroom, and she could hear them getting undressed.

  She slunk back into the room she considered her own, as a temporary measure, and got back under the covers, only now realising how cold her legs and feet had got while she was standing on the landing. She eventually went back to sleep, and it was the alarm on her mobile phone that woke her at half past seven.

  After showering, she dressed in the tidiest set of clothes that she had flung into her holdall and, applying a little make-up to cover her still red and puffy eyes, she dragged a brush through her not-quite-dry hair, applied a quick squirt of perfume, and took a look at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. She’d do.

  Knowing there was instant coffee in the kitchen, Lauren made a hurried breakfast of a cup of this, and a slice of toast, before scribbling a quick note on the notepad by the telephone and placing it on the kitchen table, weighted down by the salt cellar, then slipped out of the house, not quite knowing what to do, but knowing that Olivia would contact her sometime during the day to keep her up to date.

  When she arrived at the office everything was as normal, but after a while there was a hum of conversation round the desks of the DCs, until someone spoke up and asked her if she knew where the DI was today. With maximum discretion, she informed them that DI Hardy wouldn’t be in the office that morning, but would call later to let them know whether she’d be in that afternoon. Assuring them that she didn’t know why the boss was absent, she put her head down and tried to get on with a little investigation about what had happened to Ricky Dunbar.

  Her train of thought was interrupted by a message that there had been a report of a body buried in the sand on the beach. The uniformed constable who had taken the report, PC Liam Shuttleworth, thought it was a leg-pull, and that the lads who told him had buried one of their mates up to his neck, then left him, telling him that the tide would get him. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last either.

  They’d seemed so genuine however that he’d deigned to have a look, and what he’d found chilled him to the bone. Someone had indeed been buried on the beach, but it wasn’t up to the neck, it was down to the feet, which were the only visible parts of whoever it was. Shuttleworth felt his stomach writhe as he took in the sight, and immediately called for back-up and medical assistance, although he was sure the latter would be too late for this victim.

  A car with two uniformed officers arrived and spewed out the figures of PC Lenny Franklin, a man nearing retirement age who had always been happy with his lowly rank, and PC Teri Friend, so handy for unexpected call-outs. They both approached the lone figure of Shuttleworth as he guarded his gruesome buried treasure, and as they did so the car of Dr MacArthur arrived.

  He loped toward the little group that had just formed, his grey curls blown hither and thither as he crossed the open expanse of sand. Whatever was going on he wanted to be in at the kill, as it were. He looked at the feet sticking up, as if in imitation of paper flags pasted onto sticks, and tut-tutted. ‘Very nasty. Have you got a CSI team on the way?’ said the doctor, squatting to take a closer look at the feet and feel them for temperature, although what that could determine at the arse-end of the year he wasn’t quite sure. H
e was simply intrigued, never having seen a murder quite like this before. He’d read of cases where people had been buried up to their necks and left for the tide to finish them off, but he’d never read about someone buried up to the feet and left to suffocate.

  In Hardy’s absence, Lauren had driven down to the beach as soon as she heard about the incident, and wasn’t sad to leave the details of Ricky Dunbar’s gruesome demise behind her. What she found when she got there was absolutely sickening, however, and the sight of those lone feet made her gag. Teri Friend also looked a bit green around the gills, and even the large bulk of Liam Shuttleworth seemed somehow subdued. Only Lenny Franklin, of the police presence, was unmoved. At his age he’d seen everything there was to be seen, and was not easily disturbed. His only comment so far had been, ‘Shit sure does seem to happen in these parts.’

  When the photographer had taken stills and a short video, showing the position of the body in relationship to the promenade and the municipal gardens, the two PCs who had made a quick trip to the gardens to borrow a couple of shovels began the task of freeing the man from his sandy grave.

  When the body finally lay on the sand, as bruised and battered as Ricky Dunbar had been but at least freed from its beach tomb, Lenny Franklin took one look at the face and said, ‘I know that geezer, but I can’t remember where from.’

  ‘How can you, Len?’ asked Dylan MacArthur, scrutinising the contorted and empurpled features of the dead man.

  ‘You’ve never seen most of your customers in that there morgue alive, and wouldn’t recognise them if you did, but I’ve seen this fellow before, and him being dead doesn’t mean that I can’t remember what he used to look like before he went into that hole.’