The Manhattan Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan
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him come home?
When she woke again after a disturbed sleep, London rumbled even louder. It was ten to eight. Her first thought was that he’d come back, and had already gotten up. He usually woke before she did. He could be down in the kitchen making toast with that new poppyseed bread.
He’d stick his jaw out when she asked him what time he’d come in, then run a hand through his thick brown hair and give her that blue-eyed innocent look, his secret weapon ever since she’d met him in Istanbul.
She turned.
His side of the bed was unruffled. A prickling sensation ran over her skin.
She picked up her phone, pressed his number. He’d better have a good explanation. A very good explanation.
The call went to voicemail. She wasn’t going to leave another message.
Her stomach tightened. She felt sick. Where was he?
Her life was not supposed to be like this. She was too young for all this crap. They’d gone through a lot when they’d first met, that watery tunnel in Istanbul, that hellhole in Israel, but all that was long behind them. Their life was peaceful now, family oriented.
So what about that last time he hadn’t come home?
It hadn’t been that long ago. Three weeks, to be precise. That had been a Thursday night too. He’d come home for breakfast, pleading for forgiveness, with that elaborate excuse on his lips. What had it been? Oh yes, a planning meeting that had gone on too long.
Did he think the bank’s mega-merger finally being completed would be enough to placate her? How could a celebration dinner, drinks, explain this? He wasn’t even a full-time employee there, he was a consultant, working for the Institute of Applied Research on a project that had already eaten up a year of his life.
She breathed in, told herself to calm down.
Someone would have called her if anything had happened.
He was late. That was it. That was all.
The same as last time. And she would make him pay properly this time. She listened for the soft click of the front door opening. He wasn’t going to let her down. Sean didn’t do things like that. They were going to Paris later that day. They were going to be soaping each other in a pink marble bath at the Franklin Roosevelt Hotel, just off the Champs-Élysées, before midnight.
That was his plan.
Everything was ready.
Since his uncle and aunt had invited them to stay in the hotel with them while they were visiting Paris, she’d been counting the days. And Sean knew it.
The trip was just what they needed. And such a great gesture from his uncle and aunt. They were the only people from Sean’s family that she really got on with. They’d insisted Sean find someone to look after Alek. The Louvre and the Opera House weren’t ideal places for a four-year-old, never mind one with a hyperactive streak. They deserved this weekend.
And they were booked into the hotel’s honeymoon suite. Tonight they’d be sleeping in a Louis XIV four-poster under a canopy of mauve silk. It was going to happen. No one was going to take it away from her.
Not even Sean Ryan.
The girl’s head rolled from side to side. There was no turning back now. The effects of Rohypnol wear off after a few hours.
He had work to do.
He ran his hands over her naked body. She winced as he pushed her legs apart, but didn’t wake. Looking at her splayed out made him want her properly this time. But he stopped himself.
He couldn’t afford for his DNA to be found.
He knelt.
The blade made a sighing noise as it cut through the air. There was a spasm of wet jerking as skin, muscle and artery were cut.
Even then she didn’t wake. The blood began to flow like paint cans tipped over, and as it did the shaking in his body slowed, then stopped, as if the flames of a fever were easing.
He was glad he’d done it quickly. The next job he had to do would be messy.
Isabel closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm.
They were going to have a wonderful weekend. Romantically speaking, the Franklin Roosevelt Hotel was about a million miles from Fulham, from working every spare minute helping people to find endless lost or deleted files on their computers and making sure Alek was dressed and fed and not wasting his life watching too much TV. And looking after Sean too, when he came home. She listened, and willed a faint noise to be the front door opening. She waited for him to bound up the stairs, for her life to go back to normal.
But all she heard was the freezing wind battering at the window.
And now the house felt different, as if she was in it for the first time again, even though the cream Edwardian armchair was in its corner, and the white rug – the snow carpet as Sean called it – was still in front of the dressing table, a little askew, the way she liked it.
Sean’s things stood out as she looked around. His books in a tottering pile under his bedside table. His watch collection in a row on top of it. His navy Macy’s dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. His silver pen on the dressing table.
She went to check Alek. ‘I love you,’ he’d whispered sleepily, looking up at her the evening before as she’d tucked him in. Alek, named after Sean’s friend who’d died in Istanbul, could make fuzzy feelings glow inside her just by smiling.
That morning he looked like a sleeping waif, his hair all over the place, his skin shining, ruddy from the warmth of his duvet.
She should have told Sean to skip the stupid merger celebrations.
She stared out at the back garden, shivering at the thought of how cold it had to be out there.
In the far corner there were remnants of the inch of snow that had fallen the day before. This winter was shaping up to be the worst in the city in years.
It reminded her of Decembers in Somerset, before her mother died. She shook her head. Those days were long gone. And anyway, they used to get proper snow then, a winter coat of it, not a thin veil like they did in London. At the bottom of the garden there was a snowdrift piled up against the six-foot-high red-brick wall at the back.
Something tightened around her, as if a ghost had hugged her.
Yesterday, as the afternoon light had been fading, she’d been out in the garden. In the corner, by the back wall, there’d been a mound of pristine whiteness. Now it all looked trampled.
Her nose twitched. That faint lemony smell was in the air again.
She glanced around the kitchen for anything else out of place.
Then she remembered the creak that had woken her during the night, the feeling that there’d been someone in the house.
She hadn’t experienced anything like that in a long time.
The buzz of the landline sent her flying to the phone. She held it to her ear, ready to scream at Sean as soon as he opened his mouth.
There was no one else she could think of who’d be ringing at this time.
Henry Mowlam scratched his head. The lights in the Whitehall