An excerpt from Tell Me
'So, where is she?'
CSI Grace McColl ducked under the taped cordon at the edge of the crime scene and showed her ID to the uniformed constable stationed there. The policeman jerked his head in the direction of the band shelter as she signed the log.
'You'll have your work cut out with this one, though,' he said.
Grace frowned and moved on. She was already dressed from head to foot in her disposable white suit and she made sure she followed the designated pathway, picking her way carefully to avoid undue contamination.
The girl was on the stone steps in front of the band shelter, no more than sixteen years old but still a child, with dirty blonde hair. As Grace approached she could see the girl had her thin arms folded, as though hugging herself against the cold. And she must have been cold, to be out in the park in this weather in just a mini skirt and a skimpy top. Unless, of course, he'd taken her coat with him when he'd left her . . .
Over to the right, the rhododendron bushes grew thick and concealing. It might have been Grace's imagination, but she thought the girl's eyes turned constantly in their direction, as though something might still lurk amongst the glossy foliage.
Grace squatted down on her haunches next to the girl and waited until she seemed to have her full attention.
'Hello,' she said quietly. 'I'm Grace. I'm going to be taking care of you now. Can you tell me who you are?'
There was a long pause, then: 'Does it matter?'
Grace eyed her for a moment. The girl might have been pretty if she'd taken a little time, a little care. Or if someone had taken a little care over her. Her hair was badly cut and her fingernails were bitten short and painted purple, the varnish long since chipped and peeling.
'Of course it matters,' Grace said, keeping her tone light. 'Finding out about you will help us find out who did this to you. Help us to catch him. You want that, don't you?'
''Spose.' The girl shrugged, darting a little glance from under her ragged fringe to see if her attitude achieved the desired level of sullen cool. The action revealed the livid bruise, like spilt ink on tissue, that had formed around her left eye.
Grace tilted her head, considering. 'He caught you a belter, didn't he?' she murmured.
'I bruise easy,' the girl said, suddenly defensive now. 'And I'm clumsy.'
An excerpt from The Getaway
Lenny Bright sat opposite the Holland and Seagrave Building Society in a gunmetal grey Honda Accord with the engine running. He hadn't taken his eyes off the front door for the last twenty minutes and right at that moment he would have sold his soul for a cigarette.
Lenny's cigarettes, together with a cheap disposable lighter, were in the inside pocket of his black bomber jacket, but he knew it was more than his life was worth to reach for them. He couldn't even fall back on another nervous habit, chewing his fingernails, on account of the string-back driving gloves he'd been told to wear.
'Come on, come on,' he muttered, flexing his skinny fingers around the rim of the Accord's steering wheel. 'What's taking you so long, for heaven's sake? Just get the money and get out of there!'
As if on cue, the building society's door was thrust open. A figure emerged, carrying a large bag, and hurried across the road towards him.
'At last!' Lenny said under his breath. The rear passenger door opened and the bag landed heavy on the cloth upholstery, followed by its owner. By the time the door slammed shut again Lenny had the transmission into Drive and was already moving out into traffic.
'Not too quickly, Lenny dear,' Mrs Esmé Wendover said from the back seat. 'I should hate you to get a speeding ticket on my behalf. My poor Harold never got one, you know, not in forty years of driving.'
'But you'll miss your train if we don't get a shift on, Mrs Wendover,' Lenny said. He flashed her a cheeky grin in the rear-view mirror. ''Sides, it's your car, so you'd be the one who gets the ticket.'
'Quite so,' she murmured, dragging her voluminous handbag towards her and burrowing through the contents. She paused long enough to favour him with a regal smile over her half-moon glasses. 'All the more reason to go steady, then, wouldn't you say?'
An excerpt from Served Cold
Layla's curse, as she saw it, was that she had an utterly fabulous body attached to an instantly forgettable face. It wasn't that she was ugly. Ugliness in itself stuck in the mind. It was simply that, from the neck upwards, she was plain. A bland plainness that encouraged male and female eyes alike to slide on past without pausing. Most failed to recall her easily at a second meeting.
From the neck down, though, that was a different story, and had been right from when she'd begun to blossom in eighth grade. Things had started burgeoning over the winter, when nobody noticed the unexpected explosion of curves. But when summer came, with its bathing suits and skinny tops and tight skirts, Layla suddenly became the most whispered-about girl in her class.
A pack of the kind of boys her mother was usually too drunk to warn her about took to following her when she walked home from school. At first, Layla was flattered. But one simmering afternoon, under the banyan and the Spanish moss, she learned a brutal lesson about the kind of attention her new body attracted.
And when her mother's latest boyfriend started looking at her with those same hot lustful eyes, Layla cut and run. One way or another, she'd been running ever since.
An excerpt from Postcards From Another Country
Somebody once said that the rich are another country − they do things differently there. It didn't take me very long working in close protection to realise that was true. Hell, some of them were a different planet.
The Dempsey family were old money and that put them at the outer reaches of the solar system as far as real-world living was concerned. Personal danger came a distant second to social disgrace, which was always going to make life tough for those of us tasked to keep them from harm.
The family didn't seem bothered so much by the attempted assassination − and that was how they referred to the botched hit that sparked my involvement − so much as the fact it was carried out with no regard to the correct etiquette.
So, they put up with the movement sensors in the grounds and the increased numbers of staff who regularly patrolled the boundaries, but they baulked at having the infrared cameras I'd recommended to blanket the exterior of the house, and absolutely dug their heels in about close-circuit TV coverage inside. It was my job, I was told firmly, to stop anyone from getting that far. No pressure, then.
The radio call came in at just after 3:00 AM, when I was in the east wing guest suite I'd commandeered as a temporary central control.
'Hey, Charlie, we just apprehended someone in the summer house,' came the crackling voice of one of the new guys. 'I think you'd, er, better come and take a look.'
An excerpt from A Bridge Too Far
I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as the boy climbed onto the narrow parapet. Below his feet the elongated brick arches of the old viaduct stretched, so I'd been told, exactly one hundred and twenty-three feet to the ground. He balanced on the crumbling brickwork at the edge, casual and unconcerned.
My God, I thought. He's going to do it. He's actually going to jump.
'Don't prat around, Adam,' one of the others said. I was still sorting out their names. Paul, that was it. He was a medical student, tall and bony with a long almost roman nose. 'If you're going to do it, do it, or let someone else have their turn.'
'Now now,' Adam said, wagging a finger. 'Don't be bitchy.'
Paul glared at him, took a step forwards, but the cool blonde-haired girl, Diana, put a hand on his arm.
'Leave him alone, Paul,' Diana said, and there was a faint snap to her voice. She'd been introduced as Adam's girlfriend, so I suppose she had the right to be protective. 'He'll jump when he's ready. You'll have your chance to impress the newbies.'
She flicked unfriendly eyes in my direction as she spoke but I didn't rise to it. Heights didn't draw or repel me the way I knew they did with most people but that didn't mean I was inclined to throw myself off a bridge to prove my courage. I'd already done that at enough other times, in enough other places.
Beside me, my friend Sam muttered under his breath, 'OK, I'm impressed. No way are you getting me up there.'
I grinned at him. It was Sam who'd told me about the local Dangerous Sports' Club who trekked out to this disused viaduct in the middle of nowhere. There they tied one end of a rope to the far parapet and brought the other end up underneath between the supports before tying it round their ankles.
And then they jumped.
The idea, as Sam explained it, was to propel yourself outwards as though diving off a cliff and trying to avoid the rocks below. I suspected this wasn't an analogy with resonance for either of us, but the technique ensured that when you reached the end of your tether, so to speak, the slack was taken up progressively and you swung backwards and forwards under the bridge in a graceful arc.
Jump straight down, however, and you would be jerked to a stop hard enough to break your spine. They used modern climbing rope with a fair amount of give in it but it was far from the elastic gear required by the bungee jumper. That was for wimps.
Sam knew the group's leader, Adam Lane, from the nearby university, where Sam was something incomprehensible to do with computers and Adam was the star of the track and field teams. He was one of these magnetic golden boys who breezed effortlessly through life, always looking for a greater challenge, something to set their heartbeat racing. And for Adam the unlikely pastime of bridge swinging, it seemed, was it.
I hadn't believed Sam's description of the activity and had made the mistake of expressing my scepticism out loud. So, here I was on a bright but surprisingly nippy Sunday morning in May, waiting for the first of these lunatics to launch himself into the abyss.
An excerpt from Last Right
The youth arrived like a peasant, hitching a ride on the flatbed of a rusty pickup truck to the end of the driveway − two bales of straw, a goat, and an iPod, his travelling companions.
The guards watched him walk the last half-mile in, shouldering his rucksack and trudging between the citrus trees, his feet kicking up the dirt into the shimmer of the hot dry air. They took lazy beads on him with their rifles, and joked with each other about whether they should shoot him before he reached the main gates, just to relieve the boredom.
It was only when he drew nearer that they recognised his face, despite the simple clothes, and they shivered at the thought that they had even contemplated killing Manuel de Marquez's son, just for sport.
They had the gates opened before he'd reached them and he walked straight through without acknowledgement or thanks, as though it had never occurred to him that things would be otherwise. He demanded to be taken to his father and had barely skirted the two bullet-proof Mercedes parked near the fountain before old Enrique hurried out to greet him, taking the youth's hand in both his own and gripping it fiercely, his rheumy eyes filling.
'Julio! he said. 'We feared you would be too late.'
'The old bastard's still alive then?'
Enrique tried to look shocked but couldn't quite bring it off. 'Your father is dying,' he said, quietly, as though afraid of being overheard.
Julio laughed and it wasn't a pleasant sound. 'He's been dying for years. Why the hurry now?'
'He's near the end. I think he has been hanging on, waiting for your return.'
The youth shook his head. 'More likely that he's bargaining with the devil over the terms of his admission.'
'The priest is with him.'
Julio turned in sardonic surprise as the pair mounted the front steps.
'You've managed to find another man of God who will stand his blasphemy?'
Enrique shrugged. 'Priests,' he said. 'It is their calling.'
Julio's amusement backed and died. 'For any that try to save the soul of my father,' he said, icy, 'it's more like a penance.'