Not Dead Yet

back, paws in the air again. ‘Okay, jealous one!’ He knelt and rubbed his belly once more.
    ‘I know!’ she said. ‘I am amazing! Totally amazing. Never forget that, will you, Detective Superintendent Grace?’
    He grinned, standing up again. ‘Why would I want to?’
    He looked into her clear blue eyes, feeling so incredibly happy. Happier than he had any right to be. He loved her. He loved being here in her home, especially this living room, with the lights dimmed, candles burning all around.
    A City Books carrier bag lay on the floor – their favourite bookshop in Brighton. On the table lay a copy of The World According To Joan , held open by a solid glass paperweight.
    He’d long been a Joan Collins admirer, and he loved that Cleo had actually made the effort to get the book in order to try to understand why.
    For all these past years now since Sandy had gone, he had never believed it would be possible to feel happy – or even at peace – ever again. Cleo had changed that, and he felt almost guilty to be so happy again. Guilty because in all these years he had never stopped looking for Sandy. Her disappearance had been so sudden, so completely unexpected, without the remotest hint of any foreshadowing. One moment they had been totally happy together, and the next she was gone. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday they’d made love, as they always had done on each other’s birthdays. He’d gone to work, and when he had arrived home, looking forward to a celebratory dinner with Sandy and another couple, their closest friends, she had vanished. There was no note. All her belongings were still in the house, except for her handbag.
    Twenty-four hours later, her elderly black VW Golf was found in the short-stay car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two small transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one from Boots, and one from Tesco. She had taken no clothes, and no other belongings of any kind. Her credit card was never used again.
    In all the years since there had not been a single night, even when lying in Cleo’s arms, when he hadn’t fallen asleep wondering what had happened to her. Had she run off with a lover? That was possible, of course – how much did anyone really know about their partner? Had she decided, for whatever reason, to disappear and totally reinvent herself in a new life? People did that. But, when she had never given any hint that she was unhappy, why would shehave? Another possibility was that she’d had an accident. But that didn’t fit with her car being at Gatwick.
    More likely, he thought, she had been abducted, and whoever had taken her had left her car at the airport to throw pursuers off the scent. The grim reality was that in most abductions the person taken was killed within hours. Then again, there had been cases of abductees being held against their will for years.
    For a long time now his friends and his sister had been urging him to move on, to accept that Sandy was gone and that he had to live his life in the present, not the past. He was trying so hard to do that, and Cleo made it easier than he could ever have imagined. He loved her, totally, utterly, madly. Yet there was still something that he could not quite let go of.
    The nightmare that would wake him, screaming, every few months. Sandy down the bottom of a well shaft, like the abducted senator’s daughter in Silence Of The Lambs .
    And the guilt that followed in those sleepless hours listening to the dawn chorus – that he had not done enough to find her – that there was one key, something blindingly obvious, staring him in the face, that he had overlooked.
    His eyes fell on the copy of Autocar that was lying on the coffee table. He had bought it because it had a road test of the Alfa Giulietta. Ever since his own beloved, ageing Alfa had been written off following a chase last summer, he had hankered after another. They were cars that, in his view, had soul . At least, the only ones within his price range that did. There had been months of wrangling with the insurance company who had been trying to wriggle out of responsibility because, they argued, he should not have been using it on a police pursuit. But they had finally caved in.
    He’d fallen in love with one of their models, a two-seater, but with the baby on the way, that was completely impractical. A couple of friends, including Glenn Branson, had advised him that a people carrier would be the sensible