The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(59)

“Of course,” he said, sadly. “I don’t know what we’ll do without him.”

“Well, that’s easy, isn’t it?” Ryan continued, in the same pleasant tone. “The circus will pass to you, now. It’ll be you at the helm, and not Charlie.”

He saw the moment the truth of it hit home for Duke, and caught the quick flash of excitement that was quickly concealed.

Yes, he thought. Everyone had a motive, if you looked hard enough.

Sometimes you hardly needed to look at all.

*

Their final interview of the evening was with Sabina, who had buried her grief behind a wall of anger.

“Your son will get his place at university,” she was saying, as they stepped inside her small motorhome. “Good fortune rests on your horizon.”

Catching sight of the new arrivals, the community support officer sent them both an apologetic look, and hastily excused himself.

“Sorry to trouble you, so late,” Ryan said. “May we sit down?”

Sabina looked between the pair of them and nodded.

“Why not? I can crack open a bottle of wine,” she said, in a brittle voice. “Let’s get a takeaway and make an evening of it.”

“It’s alright to be upset,” Phillips told her. “You’ve had a terrible shock.”

“Have I? Yes, I s’pose I have. He always was a man to keep you guessing. Well, he’s really taken the prize, this time. Bastard,” she tagged on.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Ryan asked, shaking his head when she offered a packet of cigarettes. He kept a close watch on Phillips, who seemed to be sniffing second-hand smoke everywhere they went, lately.

“It was just after he finished the show, a couple of minutes after nine,” she said. “I was waiting for him by the main entrance and I called out to him, but he said he didn’t have time, or something like that, and kept walking. He was in a hurry to kill himself, apparently.”

Phillips reminded himself that her acerbic remarks didn’t necessarily mean anything sinister; some people laughed at funerals; others cried. People dealt with their grief in very different ways.

“You two had known each other a long time,” he murmured.

Sabina leaned back against a wall, to stop herself pacing.

“Yeah. I grew up in O’Neill’s, and he was older than me. Cool, the bad boy—you know, all that stuff.”

She took a long drag of her cigarette.

“You probably know, by now, that we had something going on for years. Off, on, off and on again. That’s how it went, until Esme messed up the rhythm.”

“You didn’t have any kind of physical relationship while they were married?” Ryan asked, because he was interested to know what made the dead man tick.

“Right at the beginning, just before they buggered off to get married, I thought things were going to turn back my way,” she said, in a funny, faraway voice. “But she won. She always won.”

“She was your friend, wasn’t she?” Phillips asked.

Sabina looked him dead in the eye.

“I haven’t got friends, sergeant. I have people who help to distract me from how shit my life is,” she said. “You can call them what you like, but we don’t spend time together because we’ve got so much in common. It’s because there’s nobody else.”

“If you hate it so much, why not leave?” Ryan asked.

She smiled.

“Because of him, chief inspector. I always hung around because of him,” she replied. “But now he’s gone, so I’m free to go anywhere and be anything I want.”

The cigarette burned down to the end and she stabbed the butt into a porcelain teacup on the counter near where she stood.

She turned to them both with another hard smile, and her eyes were over-bright.

“See? Good fortune rests on my horizon, too.”

*

It was after midnight by the time Ryan and Phillips finished on the moor. It had taken some time to oversee the process of collecting statements and transferral of the body, to seize the tapes from the camera which was positioned next to a motion-activated light on the side of the ticket office, and to deal with the endless round of inane questions from the general public, which was par for the course in their job.

After a final word with Faulkner, whose team was finally packing up for the day, each man returned to his car and looked forward to the comfort of home.

Neither of them noticed a car crossing the moor shortly after, following at a safe distance. Just as they hadn’t noticed it the day before, either.

Its driver was adept at blending in—driving neither too fast, nor too slow—and remained focused on finding the one person who had the ability to destroy it all.

Samantha.

There was only one place she could be.





CHAPTER 32


The nightmare was dark and all-consuming.

It made no allowances for age, nor softened the edges of its horror to protect the little girl’s mind. Instead, it turned against her, ravaging her heart while she slept.

She saw her mother’s face, smiling down at her. There were crinkles at the corners of her eyes. She raised her arms to be held but was too late. There was nothing but air; icy cold against her skin, and sickly, like fruit rotting in a bowl.