Thirty minutes later, I’m just about ready to give up and go back to the Battersea apartment. I’m cold and I’m hungry – but above all,I’m tired. Tired of feeling the way I do, wracked withthese toxic feelings of resentment, of retributionand rage. I can’t live like this anymore. I reallywillgo mad. Perhaps today is not my day of reckoning. Maybe my day willnevercome and I’ll just have to skip the revenge part and go straight onto —
Oh, he’s coming back out of the apartment complex! I sit up straight, switch to high alert. He’s standing on the doorstep, he’s with… he’s with a woman! I can’t quite make her face out from this distance though. I’ll have to move down a bit if I want a closer look.Rats!I wince at the throaty sound of the engine as it turns over, hoping I haven’t drawn attention to myself as I slowly begin to move the car forwards towards them.
Then I switch it back off, turn, and look.
FORTY-FIVE
DAN
Tilly had come all the way down the stairs and up to the front doors of the apartment building to see me off.
‘It’s the furthest I’ve got in the last day or so,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel safe in the outside world anymore. I almost had a panic attack in Tesco’s when I went shopping for a few essentials yesterday. Maybe I’ll do it online from now on…’
‘All this terrible mess, eh?’ I said as I touched her shoulder, gently. I can tell that she doesn’t want me to leave. ‘I’ll be back to see you soon, Tilly. Don’t leave the country, eh?’ I don’t know why I said it, the poor wretched woman can’t even leave her own home.
‘Will you, Dan?’ She suddenly threw her arms around my neck. ‘Thank you,’ she signed to me as she pulled away. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’
‘You’re welcome, Tilly.’
‘Mmm,’ she said, with a strange look on her face as she stood back from me. ‘You smell…lovely.’
It must’ve been that tiny squirt of Baccarat Rouge I’d give myself in the bathroom, though I wasn’t going to tell her that. That would be giving the game away that I’d been poking around her personal things.
‘It reminds me of something Samanthaused to wear,’ she says, leaning in closer – a littletooclose perhaps. ‘… Or I suppose I should now say, Erin.’
Davis has her feet up on one of the desks in the incident room as I enter.
‘Come with me.’ I knock them off, stoop down to whisper in her ear as I pass.
‘Boss?’ She jumps up in surprise, follows.
‘I’ve just been to see Tilly Ward,’ I say as she closes the door behind her.
‘I know. You said she’s identified Santos as Samantha Valentine in the mugshot photo.’
I chew at my thumbnail, nibble at a tiny piece of loose skin at the quick.
‘Yes, yes, she did. But there was something off, Lucy, something not quite right about her.’
‘About Tilly Ward?’
‘Yes. Something different.’ I chew some more.
‘Such as…?’
‘I can’t put my finger on it.’
‘No, and you won’t be able to put your thumb on it either if you keep gnawing at it like that.’
I drop my hand down into my lap.
‘I’m going to go through all the tapes again… the interviews we did with Tilly…’
‘Now, boss? But that’ll take ages.’
‘Pull up a chair, then,’ I say, ‘get comfortable. I need to know what it is that was different about her, because I know it’ssomething.’
Davis sighs. ‘Okaaaay…’
