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  Alan Murray smiled, but the smile lacked any genuine humour and his eyes – grey and penetrating – held an expression which was almost sad. ‘Why don’t you put the scissors down, Lynn?’ he said.

  ‘And why don’t you tell me what the hell you are up to?’ she retorted, her voice now trembling with suppressed emotion. ‘Why you have got all this stuff on me?’

  He shrugged. ‘Background information,’ he replied.

  ‘Background information? Look, who the hell are you, and why all this blind man crap anyway?’

  ‘I needed a convincing cover,’ he said simply.

  For a moment she just stared at him, her mouth hanging open in disbelief.

  ‘Convincing cover?’ she choked. ‘What are you talking about? You slept with me, for frig’s sake!’

  He grimaced, his eyes focusing grimly on the scissors in her hand. ‘Yes, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to go that far, but as it turned out, it was the only way.’

  She shook her head several times, the scissors now shaking in her hand. ‘The only way? The only way for what?’

  He sighed. ‘I had to get close to you. I knew you had been scarred by that bomb blast and realised you might wonder why a perfect stranger who was fully sighted would choose to hit on a young woman with your obvious disfigurements—’

  She flinched at his brutal candour. ‘You bastard,’ she breathed. ‘You total bastard!’

  He lowered his gaze, but ploughed on. ‘At the very least you would have expected me to question you about it, which could have compromised my position and put paid to any chance I had of forging a meaningful relationship with you. Look, do you mind if I sit down somewhere?’

  ‘Stay there,’ she grated. ‘Where I can see you.’

  He shrugged again and continued with his explanation, carefully leaning one shoulder against the wall. ‘The blind man routine seemed to be the ideal solution, though I have to say, it took a lot of expert instruction to ensure that I could maintain a credible performance – plus an awful lot of money before I was able to persuade the appropriate people to loan me a fully-trained guide dog I could work with.’

  She caught her breath. ‘Archie.’

  ‘Yes, Archie. We took to each other immediately, which is obviously very important in such situations.’ He smiled faintly again. ‘I must be a natural with animals.’

  ‘Maybe Archie is as gullible as I’ve been,’ she grated. ‘He didn’t realise what a prize shit you are either – though I must admit, I’ve had my suspicions about you all along. Especially when you managed to find your way to my place on your own, then fed me all that crap about being knocked over by a jogger—’

  ‘Oh, that bit was true enough,’ he cut in. ‘Except that the character who knocked me over was not a jogger, but a rather unpleasant vagrant I caught watching your bungalow from the clifftop with a pair of binoculars. I chased after him, but lost him – and Archie – in the scrub.’

  She showed little interest in his explanation. ‘Whatever,’ she almost spat. ‘Now, I’ll ask you again – exactly who the bloody hell are you?’

  He pursed his lips, meeting her gaze again. ‘Well, my name is Alan Murray, but I’m not a failed writer. Not a writer at all actually.’

  ‘What then? Press?’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, nothing so exciting, I’m afraid. Just a run-of-the-mill investigator.’

  ‘Investigator? Investigator for what?’

  He sighed. ‘I’m what you would call a freelance detective.’

  ‘What, you mean like a … a private eye? A gumshoe?’

  ‘More or less, yes. I work for major insurance companies.’

  ‘Doing what exactly?’

  ‘Looking into dodgy claims.’

  ‘Dodgy claims? So why would you be interested in me?’

  ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘No, I damned well can’t. How could I?’

  He sighed heavily. ‘Think about it, Lynn. Following the bombing of The Philanderer’s Night Club, you made an injury claim against the New Light Modelling Agency and received a very substantial pay-out from their insurers – the company I represent.’

  ‘So what? Are you saying I wasn’t entitled to that money?’ She pointed to her scarred face. ‘What’s this – scotch mist? I was disfigured, hasn’t that dawned on you yet?’

  He nodded. ‘Oh, your scars are real, that’s beyond question, but it is how they were caused that the company I represent had doubts about. That’s why I was sent down here to look into your claim.’

  Lynn still didn’t get it. ‘Are you suggesting my injuries weren’t caused by the bomb?’

  His eyes glinted and touched by the shadows where the light from the table lamp failed to reach, his face seemed to have shrunk into a cold bleak mask. ‘No, Lynn,’ he said tightly, that’s not the issue. It’s the suspicion that you were in the act of planting the device yourself when it blew up prematurely, which would mean you got exactly what you deserved.’

  ****

  For a few seconds Lynn just stared at Murray, unintentionally lowering the scissors in her hand, hardly conscious of the rain crashing into the window behind her like millions of tiny marbles.

  ‘Are you mad?’ she breathed. ‘Why on earth would I want to plant a bomb at The Philanderer’s Club? That fashion show was to be my big chance. There were scouts from one of the top fashion houses there that day. Fat Freddie had already told me I was certain to get a contract with them.’

  He nodded. ‘But my earlier inquiries have revealed that he said much the same thing to your arch-rival, Felicity Dubois. Maybe she told you what he’d said – you know, catty one-upmanship. That would have got you really upset, wouldn’t it? Upset enough possibly to decide to take out the competition altogether?’

  ‘That’s absolute crap and you know it.’

  He sighed again. ‘But it is feasible, isn’t it? And then there is your previous history to add weight to things.’

  ‘Previous history? What are you on about?’

  He pursed his lips for a moment, as if trying to choose his words. ‘This was the second major claim you benefitted from, wasn’t it? You made one six years ago too when your father died in that house fire at Maidenhead.’

  She looked totally bewildered now. ‘My father? Yes, of course I claimed. But my solicitor dealt with it on my behalf. Dad … dad was a prominent member of a far right group and someone torched his home with him inside it. It was a dreadful business.’

  ‘The police never caught the perpetrator, did they?’

  ‘No. It was an isolated house and there were no witnesses and no forensic evidence left behind.’

  ‘Convenient, wouldn’t you say?’

  She gaped at him. ‘Are you suggesting I burned him?’

  He shook his head. ‘I suggest nothing, but you did have a good enough motive, didn’t you? When you were a child, he took to abusing you after your mother died, didn’t he? He was arrested and went to court. But he got off with it all in the absence of corroborative evidence and you ended up in psychiatric care after a nervous breakdown. My clients feel it was a bit of a coincidence that he died a month after you were released – and of course, there’s this latest claim …’

  She was shaking with emotion now, tears flooding down her cheeks. ‘And … and you deliberately seduced me in an effort to extract a … a confession between the sheets?’ she choked. ‘You … you twisted, unfeeling bastard.’

  He stepped forward quickly, then halted when the scissors in her hand jerked upright again as she stared at him through her tears, her face twisted into an expression of such bitter anguish that it made him visibly wince.

  ‘I … I’m sorry, Lynn,’ he said hesitantly, ‘but I had a job to do and, as I said before, I hadn’t meant things to go so far.’

  She ran the back of her free hand over her eyes to try and sweep away the tears and gave an unnatural laugh. She was near to hysteria, he could see that. ‘You had a job to do?’ she ejaculated. ‘So I wa
s nothing more than … than a job, was I?’

  He clenched his fists into tight balls by his side. ‘That’s not true,’ he replied, his own voice breaking up with emotion. ‘The fact is, I … I have fallen in love with you. I didn’t mean to, but I just couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Fallen in love with me?’ she echoed incredulously. ‘Don’t give me that load of balls, you hypocritical shit.’

  There were tears in those grey eyes now. ‘But it’s true. I will always love you – no matter what you may have done.’

  ‘What I may have done?’ she almost screamed. ‘I’ve done nothing. I am innocent – do you understand that? Innocent! I didn’t plant that bomb. I had nothing to do with it and – and in case you were wondering, I didn’t murder Freddie Baxter either.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ an icy voice confirmed from the doorway. ‘I did!’

  As Lynn stared in disbelief over Murray’s shoulder and he swung round to face the speaker, there was a loud crack and a tongue of flame seemed to leap towards his chest, sending him crashing to the floor in a heap.

  ‘Hi there, Lynn,’ Carol Amis sneered as she stepped into the room, an automatic pistol in one hand. ‘Nice to see you again.

  CHAPTER 19

  There was silence in the small bedroom for several seconds, broken only by the fury of the storm. It was a long pregnant pause, during which Lynn Giles stayed perfectly still, her gaze fastened in shocked silence on Murray’s prostrate body. Outside, the rain still lashed the windows, drumming on the roof tiles and pouring in cascades from the overfull gutters, and a crack of thunder produced a brilliant lightning flash, which sent the table lamp into a spasm of flickering.

  Carol Amis tensed, obviously anticipating a sudden power-cut and conscious of the fact that if it happened, the room would be plunged into the deepening gloom, jeopardising the drop she had on Lynn. But after two or three seconds the lamp finally steadied into a single glaring eye and she smirked. ‘Sorry about your boyfriend,’ she said.

  Lynn snapped out of her temporary paralysis and started towards Murray, only to be halted by Amis’ sharp warning. ‘Stay where you are. This is a .32 Tomcat semi-automatic, loaded with hollow point rounds. It’s small but deadly, and as a former professional soldier and markswoman, I am a crack shot.’

  Lynn wiped the rest of the tears from her eyes, gripping the scissors even more tightly in her hand. ‘But he’s hurt,’ she choked, noting the pool of red spreading across the floor from under his out-flung arm. ‘He’s bleeding. I must help him.’

  ‘Nothing you can do for him,’ Amis retorted. ‘He’s dead. But drop the scissors.’

  Lynn swayed drunkenly and gripped the edge of a small dressing table to stop her legs from buckling under her, the scissors falling from her nerveless fingers and clattering to the floor.

  ‘That’s better. Now we can have the little talk I always wanted.’

  But Lynn was not listening. The shock of Amis’ appearance and the ruthless shooting of Murray had achieved what no amount of regressive therapy had managed to achieve so far. As a violent stabbing pain in her head signalled the opening of a trapdoor in her brain, clarity was suddenly there in the form of a burning flashback, which served to answer all the questions that had been plaguing her for so many months.

  ‘It was you I saw at The Philanderer’s that day, wasn’t it?’ she accused in a strangled voice. ‘I … I remember now. I went to the club a lot earlier than necessary to beat the traffic and caught sight of you leaving Felicity’s changing room as I was coming out of the loo. But you had no reason to be there at all, had you? Freddie had left you at New Light’s offices to hold the fort—’

  ‘Ah, it’s all come back to you now, has it?’ Amis mocked. ‘I feared it might eventually. That’s why I knew I had to find you before it did. Problem was, Freddie was the only one who knew where you were hiding and he wasn’t telling anyone. Bit of a bummer, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘So … so you followed him down here to Cornwall,’ Lynn whispered, ‘and after you had found me, you pushed him off the cliff?’

  Amis seemed to relax a little and she smiled again. ‘Very good, my dear. You win the prize. But I hadn’t anticipated that the fat man’s demise would cause so much heat, and as a result, I had to temporarily shelve the plans I had for you and Foxtrot-Oscar back to the Smoke until all the fuss died down.’

  Lynn gave a bitter grimace. ‘To think I suspected Cate Meadows and Felicity Dubois of being up to something when I ran into them down here,’ she said, ‘and all the time you were the one.’

  Amis raised an eyebrow. ‘What? Felice and the old Sidewinder are in Cornwall too now, are they? So almost the whole gang is here then? How nice. We could have had a party.’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Lynn said, throwing a brief tortured glance at Murray as she forced herself to get a grip on her emotions in order to play for time while she desperately tried to work out what to do next. ‘Why would you want to kill Freddie in the first place? You were his PA.’

  Amis emitted a shrill unbalanced laugh. ‘His PA, you say? Oh yes, I was his bloody PA all right – but nothing more. Five long years I worked for that arsehole as his general dogsbody. Setting up his dodgy deals. Fiddling his accounts for him. Spying on his staff. Doing all his dirty work – and everything on the promise of a partnership in the business. Instead, he dumped me and started shagging that bitch, Felicity.’ Her smouldering anger surfaced in a rush of emotion and the pistol trembled in her hand. ‘And when I tackled him about it, do you know what he said? Do you know what that bastard said? He told me that if I didn’t like it, I could always go and look for another job – after all I had done for him!’

  Abruptly she recovered her composure, but her face had shrunk into a tight, vengeful mask. ‘Well, I didn’t like it, so I decided it was high time the fat man got what was coming to him – and his bit of tail too. I made contact with someone on the Dark Web who advertised “people solutions”, met up with him at a derelict in London and paid him to make me a little package that went bang. He came up with a nice touch too: a box of chocolates with truffles on the first layer and oblivion on the next.’

  She smirked. ‘I knew Freddie would be sitting in the lounge at the club, as he always did during fashion events, and made sure when I planned the show with him that Felicity’s changing room would be right next door, enabling me to plant my little device in her room and take out the pair of them in one hit.’

  ‘Except that neither Freddie nor Felicity were in their appointed places when the bomb went off, were they?’ Lynn breathed.

  ‘No,’ Amis replied with a sigh, ‘and you got what was reserved for them, I’m afraid – though, rest assured, Felicity will get hers later. A little accident, I think. You can be thankful, however, that my dick-head of a bomb-maker economised on the quality and amount of charge he used, otherwise you wouldn’t have survived the blast at all.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I hadn’t,’ Lynn retorted. ‘Sometimes I think I would have been better off dead.’

  Amis treated her to a cold smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ my dear,’ she said, ‘your wish will soon be granted. Then it will all be over.’

  ‘Nothing’s over until the fat lady sings,’ Lynn blurted again. ‘You might kill me but there’s still your bomb-maker and if the police trace him, there’s every chance he will finger you.’

  Amis chuckled. ‘Ah, but I understand they already have traced him,’ she sneered. ‘The thing is, though, I put a bullet in his head after collecting my chocolate box, so talking is way beyond his capabilities now – as it is for that nasty little creep, Vernon Wiles.’

  ‘You’ve murdered Vernon too?’ Lynn gasped.

  Amis simply shrugged in answer to her question. ‘He wasn’t worth anything anyway,’ she said, ‘but he had driven Freddie up on to the headland and was parked nearby, waiting for him, when I thumped the fat slob over the head with a tyre-lever I had taken along with me and pushed him off the cliffs. I thought it be
st to put him out of his misery, just in case he had seen something he shouldn’t have seen. It’s always best to tidy up properly after a hit, don’t you think?’

  ‘You’re crazy – a proper head-case.’

  Another cold smile, but Amis’ eyes flashed dangerously. ‘Maybe I am, my dear. The army certainly thought so, that’s why they medically discharged me. Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder they called it. But then, when I really went off the rails and got a bit violent with people, I was sectioned and spent some time in a psychiatric unit until they apparently cured me. Same as you, dear – yes, I know all about your previous history and I overheard Mr Murray confirming it just now, which was most helpful.

  ‘Thing is, you see, because of your past, no one will have any difficulty believing that you could have gone off the rails again and turned into a psychotic killer. A dangerous psychopath, in fact. Capable of planting a bomb at a fashion show to kill, not only your rival, but the boss who, you had discovered, was about to renege on his promise of a major modelling contract for you.

  ‘Someone so full of vengeful hatred that you were prepared to pursue that boss to Cornwall when the first attempt failed, so you could finish the job. Someone who had good reason to waste, first the person who had made the bomb for you and then the man who had been with your boss on the clifftops the night he was murdered – to remove any possibility of him testifying against you in the future. And of course, someone who also had good reason to murder your own boyfriend after finding out that he was actually a private detective and was about to finger you for your indiscretions.’

  Lynn swallowed hard, still trying to hold back her tears. ‘Your madcap scheme will never work,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Someone will see through it.’

  Amis’ smile broadened. ‘As the heroine always says towards the end of almost every gripping movie ever produced,’ she mocked. ‘The only difference here, though, is that this is a real situation, not a fictional one.’