Kelly had obviously had second thoughts about a face-to-face confrontation and was going to try it all anonymously. The door slammed shut behind him and he pressed the green button to answer.
‘Pull the scarf more tightly round your neck,’ a woman’s voice purred. ‘We don’t want you catching your death, do we?’
He didn’t reply. His eyes scanned the horizon for Kelly. It didn’t sound like her, but she would no doubt try to disguise her voice or get a friend to call for her. If only she had put this much imagination into her performances in the bedroom, he might not have got bored so quickly. She was close by, watching him, he was sure of it. His ears were tuned into her soft, steady breath. He closed his eyes, just for a second, and imagined his hands around her throat, squeezing every last drop of air from her lungs. What would that be like? Would he enjoy watching as her eyes bulged and she gave up trying to scream?
‘Cat got your tongue?’ she said, interrupting his reverie. ‘We can be nasty or nice, it’s up to you.’ She hardened her tone. ‘It’s no skin off my nose. Either way, you’ll pay.’
‘I don’t know what you’re selling,’ Marshall replied, tightening his jaw and listening to the nuances of her breath. This definitely wasn’t Kelly–there was no accent as such, it was unlikely such a caller would have given anything away in such a manner, he supposed, but there was no trace of Kelly at all from what he could tell. So, she’d brought a third player to the table, had she? If they were as stupid as she was, it wouldn’t make any difference.
‘Wipe that innocent look off your face: your playacting doesn’t wash with me,’ the caller said snippily There was a pause before the woman continued, and the words she came out with seemed to have meaning for her, seemed to matter more than they would to a two-bit blackmailer only after enough spare cash to buy a new handbag, if it indeed was Kelly behind all of this nonsense. ‘My mother always said a leopard can’t change its spots.’
Marshall drew breath but said nothing.
‘Do you hear me?’ she asked. ‘Do you hear me? Don’t you think I deserve an answer?’
‘You didn’t ask a question,’ he said, smiling to himself.
‘I thought that maybe you were so smart that you might have guessed it by now,’ she told him. ‘Isn’t there a question that you’ve been avoiding for years, Dr Graham Marshall?’ She emphasized his name as if she was spitting it out of her mouth. He answered with silence. ‘Why don’t you tell me the answer to this, then,’ the woman continued. ‘How would you like people to know? Would you like that, Dr Graham Marshall?’
This didn’t feel like the sort of prank Kelly might play. This had an edge, but was it the edge he had peered over in the past? In spite of himself, Marshall was intrigued.
‘You clearly have a lot of time to waste, haven’t you?’ said the woman. ‘I’ve been to London, Dr Marshall, spoken to your old neighbours. They were very helpful, told me about you, your habits–they even showed me photographs, wasn’t that nice? You’re older, of course, but who isn’t? I took the snaps to a specialist–isn’t it amazing what they can do? It turns out that, with computer age progression, you can’t cheat Nature really. You’ve been caught, Dr Graham Marshall. Caught. Your lies and your cleverness–none of it matters. I know it’s you.’ The woman’s breath was getting faster, rushing towards him as the words fell out of her mouth towards his carefully constructed life. She was rustling paper so much that he could hear it. There was no point telling himself that it could all be fake, that she could be rustling today’s Daily Record and some supermarket receipts.
She knew.
So what? he asked himself. He was Dr Graham Marshall and he would not be taken down by some lowlife scheming blackmailing bitch. Not now. ‘I’m sure you think that your points are terribly interesting, Miss,’ he said, ‘but really, it’s rather old news, don’t you think? Now, I’m assuming that this is all about money and that you’d rather have cash, as opposed to a cheque or money into your bank account,’ he laughed quietly, ‘but I do like to keep things civilized–who am I dealing with? What’s your name?’
‘Names only matter to some people,’ she hissed at him. ‘They’re not everything, are they? For some people, they can be changed as easily as a pair of socks; for others I guess they can be the key to their whole world collapsing around them.’
He felt cold. This needed to end. ‘Name your price,’ he said.
‘You’ve earned a fortune over these last years, haven’t you, Dr Marshall? And, in your game, reputation is everything. If you’re so sure that this is about money, why don’t you tell me what you’re willing to offer?’
‘Have you told your…employer what you’ve discovered?’ Marshall asked, playing for time until he felt more confident. His voice was cold and hard. He needed to know who had instructed her to delve into his past. All he heard was a slow clapping start from her end. A steady, irritating sound that only told him she was using a hands-free and that she was getting stronger, more confident as this conversation went on. It was a long time since anyone had treated him with such disrespect.
‘Well done, good question. What’s the answer, do you think?’ she asked. He heard her drumming her fingers impatiently on a hard surface.
His eyes searched all the parked cars, but from what he could tell she was nowhere in sight. Marshall stared unblinking into the distance and shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘The answer, my dear, is…’ He raised his forefinger to his lips. ‘That I suspect you’re too smart to share this tidbit with anyone else. You’re not working for anyone else at all, are you? Let’s just say I still think it’s our little secret.’ The blackmailer was quiet but her silence revealed nothing more to him. ‘One thing does bother me, though…’ He pushed a stray hair out of his eye as he spoke. ‘You seem very confident about all of this. About dealing with me.’ Marshall paused before he said the next words and they formed a question for himself as much as for his would-be blackmailer. ‘Why aren’t you scared?’
The woman seemed to wait forever before laughing into the phone. ‘When you want something so badly, so desperately, you don’t really care about anything else. You don’t feel fear, you don’t feel anything.’
He had no idea what her game was, but was very keen to believe that she was actually just a money-grabbing lowlife. If so, she would presumably have worked out how much would keep her going for life. Well, let her believe it. ‘I think that five hundred thousand would be fair, don’t you?’ he asked, to no reply. ‘I don’t have that kind of money just lying around,’ he continued, hoping that he sounded convincing enough to buy some time. ‘I need a few days to raise it, to liquidate it. How much time do I have?’
‘Once you’ve paid me exactly what I need, I’ll be out of your life. The sooner the better.’
She switched the phone off just before he whispered, ‘But I won’t be out of yours, sweetheart.’
A bare tree branch lashed against the kitchen window. The drumming noise made Pauline Pearson even more impatient to see her husband, to hold him, and tell him she was sorry. Very sorry. When he was away, she genuinely did feel guilty about the constant arguing–when he was there, she was more than happy to blame Alan for his fair share of it. But she really did miss him when
