Dead Man's Footsteps

‘What you should have done is fill in the room service breakfast menu and hung it on the door last night. Then you’d have had everything you wanted this morning. But I guess you were a bit tied up, ripping your old love Ricky off.’ He grinned. ‘ Tied up . That’s quite funny, isn’t it?’
    She said nothing, trying hard to think clearly, to make sure she said the right thing when she spoke and didn’t antagonize him further. It was good, she thought, that he was letting her speak finally. She knew how desperately he wanted back what she had taken.
    And he wasn’t a fool.
    He needed her. In his mind that was the only way he was going to get it. Whether he liked it or not, he was going to have to cut a deal with her.
    Then he held up his mobile phone to her ear and pressed a button. A recording began to play. It lasted just a few seconds, but they were enough.
    It was herself and her mother speaking. A phone conversation they had had on Sunday, she remembered clearly. She could hear her own voice talking.
    ‘Listen, Mum, it won’t be long now. I’ve been in touch with Cuckmere House. They’ve got a beautiful room with a view of the river coming free in a few weeks’ time and I’ve reserved it. I’ve looked it up on the internet and it really does look lovely. And of course I’ll come over and check it out and help you move in.’
    Then Abby heard her mother replying. Mary Dawson, her brain sharp despite her crippling illness, retorted, ‘And where are you going to get the money from, Abs? I’ve heard these places cost a fortune. Two hundred quid a day, some of them. More even.’
    ‘Don’t worry about the money, Mum, I’m taking care of it. I—’
    The recording stopped abruptly.
    ‘That’s what I like about you, Abby,’ Ricky said, pressing his glaring face up close to her own. ‘You’re all heart.’

67
OCTOBER 2007
    The interior of the café was a fug of frying grease. Taking his seat opposite the two men, Grace reckoned that just breathing in here could raise anyone’s cholesterol up to heart-attack levels. But he went ahead and ordered egg, bacon, sausage and chips, fried bread and a Coke, glad that neither Glenn Branson nor Cleo was around to chide him about his diet.
    Terry Biglow ordered egg and chips, while his vacant friend, Jimmy, just ordered a cup of tea and kept giving Grace imploring looks, as if the Detective Superintendent was the only man on the planet who could save him from something that he didn’t seem very clear about. Himself, most likely, Roy thought, watching him slip a half-bottle of Bells from his coat pocket and take a long swig, and clocking the prison tattoos on his knuckles. One dot for each year inside. He counted seven.
    ‘I’m on the straight and narrow now, Mr Grace,’ Terry Biglow suddenly said.
    He had dots on his knuckles too, and the tail of a serpent on the back of his hand, its body disappearing up his sleeve.
    ‘So you told me. Good.’
    ‘Me brother’s very ill. Pancreas cancer. Do you remember me uncle, Eddie, Mr Grace? Sorry, Inspector Grace?’
    Grace did indeed, more clearly than he cared to. He had never forgotten taking a statement from one of Eddie Biglow’s victims. His face had been ripped open in jagged lines by broken glass, down both sides from the hairline to the chin, because he had complained when Biglow barged in front of him at the bar of a pub.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember him.’
    ‘Actually,’ Biglow went on, ‘I’ve got a bit of cancer myself.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Grace said.
    ‘Me tummy, you know?’
    ‘Bad?’ Grace asked.
    Biglow shrugged, as if it was only minor. But there was fear in his eyes.
    Jimmy nodded sagely and took another swig. ‘I dunno who’ll look after me when he’s gone,’ he whined to Grace. ‘I need protecting.’
    Grace gave him a cursory shrug with his eyebrows, then took his Coke from the waitress and immediately drank some. ‘You and Ronnie Wilson were mates, weren’t you, Terry?’
    ‘Yeah, we was once, yeah.’
    ‘Before you went to jail?’
    ‘Yeah, before then. I took the rap for him, you know.’ He stirred sugar into his tea wistfully. ‘I did an’ all.’
    ‘You knew his wife?’
    ‘Both his wives.’
    ‘ Both? ’ Grace said, surprised.
    ‘Yeah. Joanna and then Lorraine.’
    ‘When did he remarry?’
    He scratched the back of his head. ‘Cor, that was a few years after Joanna left him. She was a looker, Joanna was, a stonker! But I