‘Yeah, great. Have a brilliant evening.’

Tom raised his empty glass, took one more long, lusting look at the girl and suddenly realized he was feeling a bit drunk. He needed to be careful, he thought. Philip Angelides had been well up the rankings in the recent Sunday Times Rich List, with a personal net worth of over two hundred and fifty million pounds. He had a business empire that included a company making generic drugs, a chain of car dealerships, a group of travel agencies, a property company that built developments in Spain and a very successful sports management company – all areas that could use BryceRight products.

Tom had met him, as he met many of his potential clients, at the golf club, and he owned, by all accounts, a very serious house about half an hour’s drive from Brighton in the country. Tonight’s invitation to a dinner party was a big opportunity. Except Tom wasn’t in any mood to go out tonight.

He had been fretting all day since going to the CID headquarters building up on the Hollingbury estate and telling his story to the tall black Detective Sergeant. DS Branson appeared to have taken everything he had told him very seriously, and had given him assurances that it would be treated with total confidentiality. Nonetheless it had made him extremely nervous when Branson had asked if they could borrow his laptop over the weekend to see what they could find from it. He had returned to the building with the laptop a little later that morning with many misgivings, although Kellie remained adamant he was doing the right thing.

This afternoon he had played a totally crap round of golf – one of the worst games of his life. His mind had just not been on it. He was scared; a deep, insidious darkness swirled through him. He could not stop thinking about what he had done: that he had put his wife and his kids in danger.

That maybe, just maybe, he had made the worst mistake of his life.

39

‘A vodka and tonic, please,’ Cleo Morey said.

The waiter turned to Roy Grace.

‘I’ll have a Peroni.’ Then he changed his mind, suddenly deciding he was in need of a stronger alcohol hit than beer, despite the fact that he was driving. He would worry about that later. ‘Actually, no, make that a large Glenfiddich on the rocks.’

They were seated at a table towards the back of Latin in the Lanes, an Italian restaurant just off Brighton seafront. There were newer, hipper restaurants he could have chosen, like the Hotel du Vin; smarter, more inventive ones, like Blanche House; there were a load of restaurants that he had never been to with Sandy.

So why had he chosen the one that had been his and Sandy’s favourite?

He wasn’t sure of the answer. Perhaps because the place was familiar to him he thought he might feel comfortable there, know the ropes. Or was it a further laying of her ghost to rest?

He recognized some familiar faces from way back among the staff, and a couple of them seemed to remember him – if not his name – welcoming him back like a long-lost friend. The place had a lively Saturday evening buzz to it, and at nine o’clock – later than Grace had planned on being here – every table was occupied.

The six thirty briefing had taken longer than he had anticipated, and he’d needed to stay on after, doing follow-ups, although there had really been only one development during the day.

Bella had tracked down Janie Stretton’s previous boyfriend Justin Remington and discovered he had just flown back this morning from his honeymoon in Thailand. She had gone to see him, and it was now her opinion, supported by the visa stamps in his passport, that he could be crossed off the suspects list.

DC Nicholl’s trawl of the bars, pubs and clubs in the Brighton and Hove area with a photograph of Janie Stretton had so far yielded nothing. It was Jon Rye in the High Tech Crime Unit who seemed to have come up with their first real lead.

DS Rye’s examination of the computer belonging to the witness who had made a statement to Branson that morning had revealed that this witness – apparently unwittingly – had followed a complex internet routing to a server in Albania. This was the same routing, the same IP addresses and protocols found on the computer seized from a suspect in a major child porn ring investigation, which DS Rye had recently examined. Its owner, Reginald D’Eath, was already on the Sex Offenders List, with past convictions for a violent sexual assault and for trafficking child pornography.

D’Eath, now a key prosecution witness in a child pornography case being prepared against a Russian syndicate operating in the UK, was currently in hiding for his own protection in a safe house provided by the Witness Protection Scheme. Grace had spent a frustrating hour on the phone after the briefing, dealing with a jobsworth WPS duty officer, politely at first then losing his rag with her, trying to get the damned woman to put him through to someone who would sanction the release to him of Reggie D’Eath’s address. In the end he’d had to settle for a grudging undertaking from the jobsworth that someone would call him in the morning by ten o’clock.

Cleo, facing him across the table, across the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling glasses, looked simply stunning. Her hair was shimmering in the flickering candlelight, and her eyes were the colour of sunlight on ice. She was wearing a perfume which was tantalizing Grace. It wafted over him, overpowering the tempting smells of hot olive oil, frying garlic and searing fish coming from the kitchen. He breathed it in, getting increasingly turned on.

In truth he was aroused by everything about her. By her cute turned-up nose, her rosebud lips, her dimpled chin. By her stylish cream jacket, the loose, low-cut silky grey T-shirt, the ocelot scarf slung around her slender neck, by her two huge, funky but classy silver earrings. He noticed more rings on her fingers: a gold signet ring with a crest on it, an ornate antique with a large ruby set in a clasp of diamonds, and a modern-looking silver one with a square, pale blue stone.

She was a classic, English-rose beauty in every way. And she was here, on a date with him! The butterflies in his stomach were out of control. The waiters were all eyeing her. So were other diners. She was the most beautiful woman in this restaurant by a thousand miles. She was looking absolutely, bloody, drop-dead gorgeous!

There was just one problem. Suddenly he could think of absolutely nothing to say to her.

Not one word.

His mind was a blank, as if some geek had hacked into his brain and removed every thought from it. Smiling at her, trying to think of something that would not sound totally inane, he leaned forward to reach a packet of breadsticks and knocked an empty wine glass over in the process; it struck Cleo’s side plate and shattered.

He felt his face reddening. Cleo immediately put her hand out to help pick up the larger shards, before a waiter intervened.

‘Sorry about that,’ Grace said to her.

‘It’s meant to be lucky, to break a glass,’ she said.

‘I thought that was at Greek weddings.’

‘It’s plates at Greek weddings. Glasses at Jewish weddings.’

He loved her voice; it was just so plummy and posh and confident. It was a voice that belonged to a different world to the one he had come from. The world of private schools, money, privilege. Society. She was way too upmarket to be working in a mortuary. Yet Janie Stretton had been posh too, judging from her family home. And she had worked for a sleazy escort agency.

Maybe being brought up posh gave you a veneer of being different. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer he liked, had written that the rich were different. But maybe they weren’t so very different.

‘I, er – love your rings,’ he said lamely. It was all he could think of to say.