Dead Man's Footsteps

‘Of course, there is someone else who springs to mind.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘I hear Chad Skeggs is in town,’ he said, giving her a hard stare.
    And she couldn’t help it. Her face turned the colour of a beetroot. Then she asked if he would call her a taxi.
    Hugo Hegarty saw Abby to the front door. There was a frosty silence between them and she could not think of anything to say that would break it, other than a lame, ‘It’s not what you think.’
    ‘That’s the problem with Chad Skeggs,’ he retorted. ‘It never is.’
    When she had left, he went straight back to his study and phoned Detective Sergeant Branson again. He didn’t have a lot more to add to his previous conversation, other than to give him the name of the young woman’s aunt, Anne Jennings.
    Anything he could do, anything at all, to get one back on Chad Skeggs would not, in his view, be enough.

104
OCTOBER 2007
    Abby opened the rear door of the taxi, deeply distressed by the encounter with Hugo Hegarty, and shot a bleak glance through the pouring rain up and down Dyke Road Avenue.
    The British Telecom van was still there and the small, dark blue car was still parked further along. She climbed in the back of the taxi and pulled the door shut.
    ‘The Grand Hotel?’ the woman driver checked.
    Abby nodded. It was the wrong address, which she had given deliberately when she phoned from Hegarty’s office, not wanting him to know where she was staying. She would bail out somewhere before there.
    She sat back, thinking. No word from Ricky. Dave was wrong. It was going to be a lot harder to sell the stamps than he had told her. And it was going to take much longer.
    Her phone started ringing. The caller display showed it was her mother. She felt sick with fear as she answered, clamping the phone tightly to her ear, aware that the driver would be listening.
    ‘Mum!’ she said.
    Her mother sounded disoriented and deeply distressed. Her breathing coming in short bursts. ‘Please, Abby, please, I’ve got to get my medication, I’m getting—’ She stopped and drew her breath in sharply, then let out a gasp. ‘Thespasms. I’ve – please – you shouldn’t have taken them. It’s wrong—’ She let out another gasp.
    Then the call terminated.
    Abby redialled frantically, but it just went straight to voicemail, as before.
    Shaking, she stared at her phone’s display, expecting it to come back to life at any moment with a call from Ricky. But it remained silent.
    She closed her eyes. How much could her mother take? How much more could she put her through?
    Bastard. You bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard .
    Ricky was smart. Too bloody smart. He was winning. He knew she wouldn’t be able to sell the stamps easily and that therefore she almost certainly still had them all. Her plan to palm him off with a small cash payment, telling him that she’d transferred the bulk to Dave, was now out of the window.
    She didn’t know what to do any more.
    She looked at the phone again, willing it to ring.
    Actually there was one thing she could do, and she had to do it as fast as possible. She had to stop her mother’s suffering, even if that meant making a deal with Ricky. Which was going to mean giving him what he wanted. Or at least pretty much everything.
    Then she had a thought. Leaning forward to speak to the driver, she said, ‘Do you know any local stamp dealers?’
    The name on the driver’s ID card read ‘Sally Bidwell’.
    ‘There’s one in Queen’s Road, just down from the station, called Hawkes. I think there’s one out in Shoreham. And I’m sure there’s one in the Lanes, down Prince Albert Street,’ Sally Bidwell said.
    ‘Take me to Queen’s Road,’ Abby said. ‘That’s nearest.’
    ‘A collector, are you?’
    ‘I just dabble,’ Abby said, reaching inside her coat and unbuckling her belt.
    ‘More of a boy’s hobby, I always thought.’
    ‘Yes,’ Abby said politely.
    She retrieved the Jiffy bag, held it down, below the line of sight of the interior mirror, and shuffled through the contents, looking for some of the lower-value items. She pulled out a block of four stamps with Maltese crosses on them that were worth about a thousand pounds. Also, there were some blocks of stamps featuring Sydney Harbour Bridge that were worth about four hundred pounds a sheet. She kept these out, then replaced the rest in the Jiffy bag and belted it back securely under her pullover.
    A few minutes later the taxi pulled up outside