His & Hers(52)

“Shh,” she said, before kissing me on the cheek.

I didn’t move and I didn’t say anything. I just lay there, and let her touch me in a place that I had never been touched before. When she was finished, she slid her wet fingers across my tummy and wrapped her arm around my waist. She squeezed me tight, as though I were a favorite doll, then whispered something in my ear before falling asleep. The sound of her gentle snoring created a curious lullaby.

I didn’t sleep at all.

I just kept wondering what had happened and why, hearing her words constantly repeating themselves inside my head:

“That was nice, wasn’t it.”





Him



Wednesday 08:00



It’s not nice seeing Anna so upset, but I do my best to reassure her.

A phone vibrates in the inside pocket of my jacket. I know it isn’t mine, because I’m holding that in my hand. I walk away from the team that has gathered around Anna’s Mini, and take out Rachel’s mobile. I think I’ve been in denial about finding it in my car trunk, but when I read the text message on the screen, it’s a little harder to ignore:

Miss me, lover?

Rachel is definitely dead, and I do not believe in ghosts, so there is only one conclusion I can reach: someone, somewhere, knows something they shouldn’t.

I put the phone away and look around. If whoever sent me the text is watching, waiting to see my reaction, I’m determined not to give it. I scan the parking lot and see Anna in the far corner. She’s a short distance away from everybody else now, staring down at her own mobile. It’s as though she feels my stare and immediately looks straight up at me, looking at her.

“I thought you might need these, sir.”

Priya appears out of nowhere, and it actually makes me jump. I’m about to snap at her, when I see a brand-new packet of my favorite cigarettes in her hand.

“Why do you have these?” I ask, but she just shrugs.

The way my junior colleague is staring up at me makes me feel even more uncomfortable than the phone in my pocket receiving text messages from a dead woman. Unlikely as that may sound.

“Well, thank you,” I say, taking the packet.

I open it immediately, pop a cigarette in my mouth, light it, and take a long drag.

The satisfaction is instant, only spoiled by Priya’s presence.

“Look, it’s very sweet of you, but you don’t need to keep buying me things and being so … thoughtful. It’s about the work, right? Solving cases. You don’t need to be so nice all the time. Just do your job and we’ll get along fine.”

“You’re welcome,” she replies, as though she didn’t hear my impromptu speech. “And I think I have an update that might cheer you up.”

“Go on.”

“Rachel Hopkins’s phone was never found, so I told the tech team to put a trace on it.”

I inhale far harder than I intended, and start to cough.

“I don’t remember asking you to do that?”

I continue to smoke with one hand, while reaching inside my pocket with the other, trying to switch off Rachel’s phone.

“You didn’t, sir. But you did tell me to start showing some more initiative. The phone received a text a couple of minutes ago, and someone read it. Someone has Rachel’s mobile, and they are somewhere near here. The guys are trying to triangulate the signal now. So long as the phone stays switched on, I think they’ll get a pretty accurate location.”

She stares at Anna.

“You think Anna has Rachel’s phone? You think she might be involved?” I ask.

Priya shrugs. “Don’t you?” She interprets my silence as an invitation to keep talking. I do my best to hide any signs of the panic I feel, while trying to turn off the phone inside my jacket pocket at the same time. “We know that someone called Anna’s mobile from the landline in the school office at five A.M. But we have no way of knowing where her phone was at the time. She could have been standing right next to it and called herself.”

My fingers finally find what they are looking for, and I turn off Rachel’s mobile. I laugh and it sounds as false as it feels.

“You had me going for a moment there! Great work on the phone trace, and good joke about my ex-wife being the killer,” I say, fully aware she wasn’t joking.

Priya gives me a strange look, then heads back over to the rest of the team by the car, her ponytail in full swing. Someone sent that text deliberately just now, and I’m sure I’m being watched. When I look around to try to locate Anna, I can’t see her anywhere.




It was a shame to do it, but I had to smash the window on the Mini. It isn’t as though it can’t be repaired, and the car will be good as new as soon as it gets mended. Not like me. But then people do tend to be trickier to fix than things. I’ve decided that succeeding in my plan is highly dependent on misdirection, so damaging the car was a necessary act of vandalism. Not that anyone would have suspected me of doing it. That sort of behavior goes against the idea that others have of me, but I am not who they think I am. Like most people, there is more to me than my job.

Watching things unfold and people unravel afterward was delicious. Better than anything I’ve read or seen on TV, because it was real. And I was the author of it all. I made use of that opportunity—seeing the fruits of my labor with my own eyes, enjoying the reactions of my handpicked cast. It left a bittersweet feeling.