36
Kate left the MIR immediately, making her way down the stairwell and out of the station via the back door. Force of habit. Suddenly remembering where she’d parked her car, she turned towards the entrance gate, slinging her bag over her shoulder and giving Gormley a wave as he pulled away. Turning left, she dug her hand into her pocket for her keys and came to a sudden stop, her eyes searching the street.
‘Shit!’ Shit, shit, shit!
The Toyota wasn’t there.
With her heart thumping in her chest, she walked up the road a bit, making sure that tiredness hadn’t confused her. She passed a number of cars: an Audi A4, a VW Passat, Vauxhall Corsa, Land Rover Discovery, the old type – but no black Rav 4. The Corsa had its offside front light smashed. Fragmented glass lay on the floor beside it. No prizes for guessing what had happened there.
As she stood in the middle of the road with her hands on her head, a car tooted behind her.
Robson’s voice broke through her trance. ‘Boss? Why are you staring at the pavement?’
‘Some bastard’s nicked my car!’ she yelled, almost breaking into a run.
An hour later, having filed a report – for what bloody good it would do – she hailed a taxi and went home. Angry with herself for having parked the Toyota on the road outside the station in her rush to get into work, she decided that even if she got the car back she wouldn’t keep it, not after some arsehole had been raking it around doing God knows what inside.
No chance.
If a burglar had been in her bed she wouldn’t want to sleep in it again, would she?
There was a pile of mail on the floor in the hallway as she entered the house: several utility bills, a letter from her cousin in New York and a postcard from Venice that, despite her black mood, brought a smile to her face. It was unsigned but in the same handwriting as the other three she’d received that week. It contained just four words: Are you hungry yet?
It surprised her how much she’d thought about Fiona Fielding in the past few weeks, how tempted she was to ring and say hi. But on each occasion she’d lifted the phone, something had happened to stop her: yet another emergency cropped up, one of her team needed her ear, or Jo Soulsby leapt out of the shadows, pushing any thoughts of Fielding to the back of her mind.
How sad an excuse was that?
Fielding was a successful artist – a witness Daniels had interviewed on her last murder enquiry – an attractive woman with a raspy voice and deep blue penetrating eyes. She was very outspoken and had the world at her feet. Not a hang-up in sight. No worries she’d be held back in her chosen profession because of the way she chose to conduct her life. She was free to do whatever she wanted, with whoever she wanted.
Rereading the postcard, Daniels could feel her cheeks burning as she recalled meeting Fielding for the first time – an unforgettable encounter. If she was being honest, it was the same inexplicable feeling she’d had when she’d first met Jo, a spark between two people too powerful to ignore, something that went much deeper than physical attraction. In the space of half an hour or so, Fielding had somehow managed to get under her skin. Then she’d disappeared, never to be heard of again. Or so Daniels thought, until the postcards began arriving. She’d kept all twenty-eight.
The woman was relentless.
Putting the postcard in a drawer with the others, she wondered if her feelings for Fiona were stronger because she reminded her of Jo. She too had disappeared off the scene as quickly as she’d arrived, allowing Daniels to put her on a pedestal to idolize from afar. Until one day she materialized as the new criminal profiler.
Daniels sighed. What a fucked-up mess her life was.
She couldn’t go there again.
Why was she pretending she could?
Despite the late hour – it was almost ten and getting dark – she changed her clothes and went for a run in Jesmond Dene, her favoured circuit, a draw for locals and tourists alike. A haven of tranquillity on the edge of a busy city, it had a certain stillness she craved after a long day in the office, particularly late at night when her head was crammed with multiple problems. It gave her the opportunity to think things through, then file stuff away until morning and get a good night’s sleep.
Entering from the top road, she took a steep path down into the wooded valley past the pet cemetery and Pet’s Corner – a small city farm – keeping the stream on her left. She ran on, crossing the bridge, pausing a moment or two to listen to the refreshing rush of the waterfall, then peering over the stone wall to watch the water crashing into the moonlit stream below. Hard to imagine she was less than three miles from Newcastle City Centre on a Friday night.
When she got home, she showered and fell into bed.
But her run hadn’t done its job. Her sleep was filled with images of death and destruction: the Rav 4 racing through the streets, crashing through the security barrier at the station with Bridget and Ivy inside, banging on the windows like patients in a lunatic asylum; her running upstairs to get help – her heart almost bursting with the effort – and not being able to find any; the ear-splitting noise of a fire alarm.