Need You Dead Read online

  NEED YOU DEAD

  PETER JAMES

  MACMILLAN

  TO CAROLE BLAKE

  My absent close friend and mentor.

  A brilliant star who left us far too soon.

  You will always shine brightly in my sky.

  RIP

  CONTENTS

  1: Thursday 14 April

  2: Thursday 14 April

  3: Saturday 16 April

  4: Saturday 16 April

  5: Saturday 16 April

  6: Monday 18 April

  7: Monday 18 April

  8: Monday 18 April

  9: Monday 18 April

  10: Wednesday 20 April

  11: Wednesday 20 April

  12: Wednesday 20 April

  13: Wednesday 20 April

  14: Wednesday 20 April

  15: Wednesday 20 April

  16: Wednesday 20 April

  17: Wednesday 20 April

  18: Wednesday 20 April

  19: Wednesday 20 April

  20: Wednesday 20 April

  21: Thursday 21 April

  22: Thursday 21 April

  23: Thursday 21 April

  24: Thursday 21 April

  25: Thursday 21 April

  26: Thursday 21 April

  27: Thursday 21 April

  28: Thursday 21 April

  29: Thursday 21 April

  30: Friday 22 April

  31: Friday 22 April

  32: Friday 22 April

  33: Friday 22 April

  34: Friday 22 April

  35: Friday 22 April

  36: Friday 22 April

  37: Friday 22 April

  38: Friday 22 April

  39: Saturday 23 April

  40: Saturday 23 April

  41: Saturday 23 April

  42: Saturday 23 April

  43: Saturday 23 April

  44: Sunday 24 April

  45: Sunday 24 April

  46: Sunday 24 April

  47: Sunday 24 April

  48: Sunday 24 April

  49: Sunday 24 April

  50: Sunday 24 April

  51: Sunday 24 April

  52: Sunday 24 April

  53: Sunday 24 April

  54: Sunday 24 April

  55: Monday 25 April

  56: Monday 25 April

  57: Monday 25 April

  58: Monday 25 April

  59: Monday 25 April

  60: Monday 25 April

  61: Monday 25 April

  62: Monday 25 April

  63: Monday 25 April

  64: Monday 25 April

  65: Monday 25 April

  66: Monday 25 April

  67: Monday 25 April

  68: Monday 25 April

  69: Monday 25 April

  70: Tuesday 26 April

  71: Tuesday 26 April

  72: Tuesday 26 April

  73: Wednesday 27 April

  74: Wednesday 27 April

  75: Thursday 28 April

  76: Thursday 28 April

  77: Thursday 28 April

  78: Thursday 28 April

  79: Thursday 28 April

  80: Thursday 28 April

  81: Thursday 28 April

  82: Thursday 28 April

  83: Thursday 28 April

  84: Friday 29 April

  85: Friday 29 April

  86: Friday 29 April

  87: Friday 29 April

  88: Friday 29 April

  89: Friday 29 April

  90: Friday 29 April

  91: Friday 29 April

  92: Saturday 30 April

  93: Saturday 30 April

  94: Saturday 30 April

  95: Saturday 30 April

  96: Saturday 30 April

  97: Saturday 30 April

  98: Saturday 30 April

  99: Saturday 30 April

  100: Saturday 30 April

  101: Saturday 30 April

  102: Saturday 30 April

  103: Saturday 30 April

  104: Saturday 30 April

  105: Saturday 30 April

  106: Saturday 30 April

  107: Saturday 30 April

  108: Saturday 30 April

  109: Saturday 30 April

  110: Saturday 30 April

  111: Sunday 1 May

  112: Sunday 1 May

  113: Sunday 1 May

  114: Sunday 1 May

  115: Sunday 1 May

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABSOLUTE PROOF

  1

  Thursday 14 April

  At the first salon she worked in after qualifying as a hairdresser, Lorna had a client who was an anthropologist at Sussex University. He’d told her his theory, and it intrigued her. That early human beings communicated entirely by telepathy, and we only learned to speak so that we could lie.

  Over the subsequent fifteen years she’d come to realize there really might be some truth in this. There’s the side of us we show and the side we keep private, hidden. The truth. And the lies. That’s how the world rolls.

  She got that.

  Boy, did she.

  And right now she was hurting badly from a lie.

  As she brushed the colour into Alison Kennedy’s roots, she was thinking. Distracted. Not her usually chatty self. Thinking about Greg. Devastated by what she had discovered about her lover. She was desperate to finish Alison and get back to her laptop before her husband, Corin, came home in an hour’s time.

  Her six Labradoodle puppies that she had bred from their mother, Milly, yapped away in the conservatory adjoining the kitchen that doubled, these days, as her salon. She’d started working from home, much to Corin’s annoyance, so that she could indulge in her passion of breeding these lovely creatures, and it brought in a decent extra bit of income – although Corin sneered at it. He sneered at pretty much everything she did these days, from the food she put in front of him to the clothes she wore. At least her dogs loved her. And, she had thought, so did Greg.

  Client after client opened up to her, treating their time with her, whilst she did their hair, as being in a kind of psychiatrist’s chair. They would tell her their most intimate relationship problems, and reveal even the secrets they kept from their partners. Alison was babbling away excitedly, telling her about her latest affair, this time with her personal trainer.

  Was there anyone who didn’t have a secret? Lorna sometimes wondered.

  She had also just discovered, by chance from a client earlier today, sometime before Alison, something intensely painful. Finding out the truth about someone – in particular someone you love – can hurt like hell. A truth that a part of you really wishes you hadn’t learned. A truth that can turn your entire world upside down. Because you can’t unlearn something, can’t wipe that discovery from your brain the way you can delete a file from your computer, however much you might want to.

  After Alison Kennedy left, at a few minutes before 6 p.m., Lorna hurriedly opened her laptop on the kitchen table and stared once more at the loved-up couple in the photograph in front of her. Stared in numb disbelief, her eyes misted with tears of hurt and anger. Anger that was turning to fury.

  2

  Thursday 14 April

  You bastard. You lying bloody rat.

  Lorna balled her fists, lunging at the air, imagining she was punching his smug face, his smug smile, his phony sincerity. Punching his bloody lights out.

  Eighteen months into their affair, Lorna had suddenly, unhappily, found out the truth about him. Discovered that the man she was besotted with, and with whom she had been planning to spend the rest of her life, had been lying to her. Not just lying. Living a total second life with her. Everything he had told her about himself was a lie.

  She was gutted. And angry at hersel
f. What a bloody fool she had been, again.

  She had trusted him totally. Believed his endless promises that he was just waiting for the right moment to tell his wife. He’d given Lorna one excuse after another for delaying: Belinda was ill; Belinda was close to a breakdown; Belinda’s father was terminally ill and he had to support her through it until he died; Belinda’s brother was in a coma following a motorcycle accident.

  Poor sodding Belinda. And now Lorna had found out she wasn’t even called Belinda.

  ‘Greg’ had recently come back from a holiday with ‘Belinda’ in the Maldives. The doctors had told him his wife needed a break to recover her mental health. Before he went, he’d promised Lorna that he was going to leave Belinda just as soon as he could after their return. They’d even been planning a date. His escape from ‘Belinda’. Her escape from her bastard of a husband, Corin.

  Yeah?

  How stupid did ‘Greg’ think she was?

  Until just a few days ago, Lorna had been feeling really happy and secure. Believing that the soulmate she thought she had finally found in life, who had for the past year and a half made the nightmare of her abusive marriage just about tolerable, would rescue her from her living hell.

  Then her first client today, Kerrie Taberner, who she had squeezed in at the last minute, had come in looking more beautiful than ever, with a glorious tan from a holiday in the Maldives. She’d shown Lorna some of her pictures of the island of Kuramathi on her phone and there, totally by chance, was one of a couple she and her husband had met in a bar one night. A totally loved-up couple, Kerrie had said. She had wittered on about how nice it was to meet a couple who clearly really loved each other, when so many couples who’d been married a long time just seemed to end up bickering constantly.

  The man in the photograph was, unmistakably, ‘Greg’.

  ‘Greg’ and ‘Belinda’. Arms round each other, laughing, looking into each other’s eyes.

  Except those weren’t the names that they’d given to Kerrie. They’d given quite different names. Their real names.

  What a bastard. What a stupid bastard. Didn’t it occur to him that it might show up on Facebook or somewhere like that?

  ‘Belinda’!

  Belinda and Greg.

  And what hurt most of all was that she had believed him. Trusted him.

  Trusted ‘Greg’.

  He’d lied about his name. He wasn’t bloody ‘Greg’ at all. And she wasn’t ‘Belinda’.

  Once she had his real name it had only taken her moments on Google to find out who he really was.

  But now she knew, in her confused, angry state, she wasn’t sure whether she was glad to know the truth or not. Her dream was shattered. Her dream of a life with this man – this two-timing love-rat bastard. Everything he had told her was a lie. Everything they had done together was just a bloody lie.

  She sat at the kitchen table of the house – the home – she had shared with Corin for the past seven years, and stared bleakly at the huge glass fish tank that took up almost an entire wall. Brightly coloured tropical fish swam or drifted through the water, some gulping bits of food from the surface. Corin was obsessed with them, knew all the breeds. Gobies, Darters, Guppies, Rainbow fish, Gars, and all the rest.

  He doted on them. Several of them had mournful expressions, reminding her of her own life. Just as they were imprisoned in this tank, which was all of the world they would ever know, she was imprisoned here in this house in Hollingbury, on the outskirts of Brighton, with a man she despised, scared this might be all the world she would ever know. And now that seemed even more likely.

  God, it had all been so different when she had met Corin. The handsome, dashing, charming computer sales manager, who’d swept her off her feet and taken her to St Lucia, where they’d spent wonderful, happy days, snorkelling, sunbathing, making love and eating. They’d married a few months later, and it was soon after then that it had all started to go south. Maybe she should have recognized the signs of a control freak when they’d been on that idyllic holiday; by the obsessive way he had laid out his clothing, applied his suntan lotion through measuring applicators and chided her for squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle, instead of rolling it from the end. From the way he planned out every hour of every day, and had been unhappy when they’d gone off schedule, even by a few minutes. But she hadn’t, because she’d been crazy for him. She had paid for that, increasingly, day by day, ever since.

  The first time she had become pregnant with the child she so much wanted, she had lost the baby after Corin punched her in the stomach in a drunken rage. The second baby she’d lost when he had pushed her down the stairs in another rage. Afterwards he would cry, pleading forgiveness or try to make her think it had never happened, that she had imagined it. And each time she had, dumbly, forgiven him, because she felt trapped and could see no way out of the relationship. ‘Gaslighting’, her friend Roxy had told her was the expression for what Corin was doing to her.

  Things had become so bad with him that she’d secretly started to record on her computer all the times he hit her, and her thoughts. Then she had met Greg in Sainsbury’s in West Hove, when their trolleys had collided coming round the end of an aisle. It had been an instant attraction and they’d become lovers a week later.

  They’d rented a tiny flat – their love nest, Greg had called it – on the seafront. They’d met there whenever they could, twice or even three times some weeks, and when his wife was away, flying for British Airways long-haul. They’d had the best sex of her life. It was like a drug they both craved. Driving home afterwards she sustained herself by thinking about the next time, and how to pass the days before they met again – and survive Corin’s endless bullying.

  It was a relationship founded totally and utterly on lust. Yet she had sensed something far, far deeper was going on between them. Then, one afternoon, lying in each other’s arms, ‘Greg’ had said, almost apologetically, ‘I’m in love with you.’

  She’d felt closer than she ever had to any human being, and told him she was in love with him, too.

  She’d read somewhere, once, that good sex is just one per cent of a relationship. Bad sex – the kind she’d been having for years with Corin – is ninety-nine per cent.

  One per cent.

  Great.

  Do you have any idea how it feels to be just one per cent of someone you love’s life? she thought.

  I’ll tell you.

  It feels pretty shit.

  Everything about this sodding bastard had been a total lie, she realized. Except for the orgasms. They were real enough. Hers and his.

  Mr One Per Cent.

  God, I’m a fool. She felt so much anger inside her. Anger that she had been so stupid. Such a fool to believe him. Anger that her entire dream had been shattered. Anger that her husband was such a loser.

  She sat back down and stared at the photograph on her screen.

  You know what I’m going to do, Mr One Per Cent? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.

  I’m going to ruin your life.

  3

  Saturday 16 April

  At 11a.m., suffering the hangover from hell, Lorna sat at her kitchen table, drinking her third double espresso. At that moment, just when she thought her day could not get any worse, it suddenly did.

  An email pinged into her inbox.

  Dear Mrs Belling,

  You have until the end of today to either give me ownership of your Mazda MX5 car or repay me the sum of £2,800 which you are pretending not to have received. I know all about you and your dirty little secret. Give me the car or pay me back or else.

  You’re probably wondering what ‘or else’ means, aren’t you? Just keep wondering. I know about your lover, you slut. You know what you owe me. I know your husband’s name. Do the right thing, because if you don’t, I won’t either.

  4

  Saturday 16 April

  Dear Mr Darling,

  I don’t understand what has happened, but I�
�ve just checked my PayPal account and there is still no money from you showing. As soon as I get notification it is there, the car is yours. I’ve sent PayPal an email, to see if it has somehow gone astray, and I’ll let you know soonest. In the meantime, please be patient, I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out very quickly. I can assure you, I’m a completely honest person.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lorna Belling

  5

  Saturday 16 April

  Oh right, Mrs Belling. If you call screwing someone behind your husband’s back ‘honest’, then I’m a banana. SD.

  6

  Monday 18 April

  PC Juliet Solomon was thirty-two, and had been in Brighton and Hove Response for almost a decade; she still loved it, although she was hoping for promotion to sergeant soon. Her slender, petite frame belied a very tough character, her lack of height never a disadvantage in awkward confrontations.

  A few minutes into her early shift, she sat at a desk, mug of tea beside her, typing up her report on an incident she had attended yesterday – a local café proprietor had called in that a man had run off without paying and with another customer’s handbag. They’d spotted the suspect a short while later, from the proprietor’s description, and chased him on foot before finally arresting him – and she was pleased to be able to return the handbag to its owner.

  Juliet’s stocky, shaven-headed and bespectacled work buddy for this shift, Matt Robinson, two years her junior, was a Special Constable – one of a number of unpaid volunteer police officers in the Sussex force. At this moment he was hunched over his mobile phone, talking to someone at the company he owned, Beacon Security.

  Working ‘Section’, on alternating shifts responding to emergencies, is the ultimate adrenaline rush for young police officers – and for some older ones who never tire of it. No officer on Response can predict what will happen in five minutes’ time. The one certainty is that no one – apart from the occasional drunk or nutter – dials 999 to tell the police they are happy.

  The team was housed in a long ground-floor space in Brighton police station. The recently refurbished room spanned the width of the building, with windows on one side giving a spectacular view to the south, down to the English Channel, and on the other side the car park and a drab office building beyond. Blocks of work stations were ranged along both sides, the cream-and-blue walls and charcoal carpet giving it a smart, modern appearance. It smelled a lot fresher than its predecessor, which had always had an ingrained reek of sweat, spilt coffee and years of microwaved meals and takeaways.