Not Dead Yet

was Gaia , the earth goddess! Mother Earth would protect her the same way she protected it.
    And on a more practical level, the production was all set and depending on her, ready to go next week. If she pulled out now, it would collapse. The producers had made it clear it would be impossible to relocate the production to LA. Besides, how long would she have to remain in hiding? If someone out there wanted to get her, they could wait. Weeks, months, maybe even years. She just had to get on with it.
    She hugged Roan. ‘You know Mama loves you more than anything in the world?’
    ‘I love you too, Mama.’
    ‘So we’re cool, right?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Looking forward to going to England?’
    He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ Then he frowned. ‘Is that a long way?’
    ‘It is. We’re going to a place by the seaside. They have a beach. You want to play on the beach?’
    His eyes brightened. ‘I guess.’
    ‘You guess?’
    ‘Will Marla be there?’
    ‘No, hon, she won’t. It will be you and me. Taking care of each other. Will you take care of Mama there?’
    He stared at her for some moments with round, trusting eyes. And in those moments she had never loved him more, nor felt more scared for him – and for herself. She hugged him tightly, tenderly, pressing her face against the soft young skin of his cheek, smelling the chlorine from the pool on his skin and in his hair. Tears rolled uncontrollably down her face.

28
    Roy Grace had met a few coppers who were counting down the years to their retirement day, and the lucrative pension package that came with it, particularly with all the recent budget cuts that were demoralizing much of the force. But he knew far more who, like himself, lived in dread of that day.
    With twenty years of service clocked up, he still had ten years in front of him, which might be extended to fifteen if the changes that were under discussion by the powers-that-be went through. But there were times when he worried just how fast time seemed to be passing.
    Those were the occasions when he cut a moment’s slack to take stock, and count his blessings, as he did now while waiting for the last of his team to file into MIR-1 for the Saturday evening briefing.
    Some days he couldn’t truly believe his luck, that he was doing a job he loved so much. Sure there were people he disliked, such as his former ACC, Alison Vosper, and there were bureaucratic processes that at times got him down, but when he looked back on his career so far, he could honestly say there had been no more than a handful of days when he had not looked forward to going to work. And one of the things he especially liked about his job was that few days were ever the same.
    And right now he was doing what he loved best of all, the thing that really got his adrenalin pumping: the early days of a murder enquiry.
    ‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Saturday, June the fourth,’ he read out from the notes in front of him, prepared by his trusted Management Secretary, Eleanor Hodgson. ‘This is our third briefing of Operation Icon . I’ll summarize where we are to date.’ He glanced down at his notes, then around at his team. Apart from the honeymooning Emma-Jane Boutwood, the only one who was absent wasBella Moy, still at the hospital with her mother. Then he gestured to Glenn Branson.
    ‘Could you bring us up to speed with the findings from the post-mortem?’
    ‘The information I have so far, chief, from the pathologist Dr Nadiuska De Sancha, and from the forensic archaeologist Joan Major, is that the victim is male, Caucasian, aged mid- to late forties. The broken hyoid and the cut mark further around the top vertebra indicate the likelihood of strangulation by a thin wire. There has been considerable degradation of the stomach contents, as would be expected. But chemical analysis reveals a fragment of oyster shell as well as the presence of ethanol, which indicates he had been drinking wine.’
    ‘Er – do we know if it’s red or white?’ asked Norman Potting.
    ‘Does that matter?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
    ‘It would tell us if he had a bit of class or not,’ Potting commented, with a grin. ‘We’d know we’re dealing with rubbish if we found he’d been drinking red wine with oysters.’
    Ignoring him, Branson continued. ‘We took fragments of cloth found in the torso’s immediate proximity for analysis and showed them to the Brighton tailor Gresham Blake. They believe it is a heavy tweed man’s suit material, and are now