Hunting for Crows (5 page)

Over a week had passed since Peter Grant had kissed Sarah Corbett in his office, but this was the first time they were both free of diary commitments to go out on a proper date. Without much discussion, as they seemed to like the same things, they settled on Graze, a ‘modern British cuisine’ restaurant on Western Road in Brighton.

The restaurant was busy, which was to be expected on a Friday night, but at least they weren’t seated near the window. It was still early days for both of them and there was no point in giving the gossip-hive a good poke if their relationship was going to fizzle out in a couple of weeks’ time. Now, did this sort of thinking make him a pessimist or a realist? He couldn’t decide.

Despite the time constraints of leaving work and getting ready to go out, it was obvious Sarah had made good use of her time. Her green eyes sparkled, her hair had lost the formal, business look and was now bouncy and full of life, while a set of pearls given to her by her late grandmother gave him a good excuse to have the occasional peek at her ample cleavage easing over the top of her dark blue dress.

‘It’s a nice place,’ she said as pre-dinner drinks were served, and after he took a surreptitious look around the room to make sure no business colleagues were dining close by. ‘Have you been here before?’

‘Once,’ he said, cringing at the memory. ‘About eighteen months ago, I came in with Kevin and Mike but I got so plastered, I don’t have any idea what I ate or how good it tasted; it could have been a Big Mac or a plate of whelks from a seafront seller for all I knew.’

‘Tut, tut,’ she said trying hard not to smile. ‘I didn’t know I was spending the evening with a drunken bum.’

‘Nor is it a good advert for a fitness company to see the MD lying in the gutter in his best suit, gazing at the stars with a stupid grin on his face. In my defence, it wasn’t long after Emily and the kids left home and I was going through my angry phase. For a few weeks I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘You seem much better now. At least I think you do.’

‘You sound just like my therapist.’

She may have been a skilled HR professional, but she couldn’t hide the look of consternation creeping across her face.

‘Hah, got you there,’ he said. ‘Do I look like the type to go to a therapist? I mean, if I acted any calmer I’d be asleep.’ He picked up the glass in front of him and drained the last of a gin and tonic. ‘If I have any issues I need to work through, I head down to the gym.’

‘Thank the Lord for that. For a moment I thought I was going out with a drunk and a basket case.’

‘I have my moments.’

‘Does it still bother you, Emily leaving?’

‘I’m over the hurt and the anger I felt at the time when she walked out. The practicalities of lawyers, money and houses, I must admit, didn’t trouble me as much as they should have, and now I’m trying to forget about the whole thing and move on.’

‘What caused the break-up in the first place, if you don’t mind me asking?’

He was about to speak when a wine waiter arrived with their selection. It was one of the most expensive bottles on the list and so it was only right he should treat it with respect. He took a sniff and a slurp, but in truth he was only going through the motions as he couldn’t tell Tannat from Tempranillo; he knew what he liked and how to drink it. Deference duly observed, the waiter poured the wine into glasses so large he could have emptied the bottle into both, but the amount he did pour only succeeded in creating a small puddle at the bottom of the glass.

‘Stop me if you’ve heard it before,’ he said when they were alone again. ‘We hadn’t been getting along for some time, mainly because she couldn’t get used to me being away on business as often as I was.’

‘I remember when I first started in the company,’ she said, ‘you were scooting off on business just about every week. If it wasn’t the US and Germany, it was the Far East and China. I don’t know how I would have coped with such a punishing schedule, although it’s calmed down a lot since then.’

‘Yeah, I did all that, plus I visited equipment manufacturers in Holland and Scandinavia as I was trying to flesh-out the idea for a mega-store, even at that time. As you say, it’s eased off since then, because the company is bigger and now it’s not only me who’s out there meeting suppliers and landlords; but by then the damage had taken its toll and she’d found someone else.’

‘I’m sorry it ended the way it did, it’s a real shame. I liked Emily.’

‘It is and it isn’t. If you believe in fate as I do, you’ll know it was meant to happen. Plus, it’s better for it to have occurred now and not later when we’re both too old and set in our ways to do anything about it.’

‘You have a very philosophical way of looking at it.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but the bit I can’t take is living alone. The house seems so empty without the kids running up and down the stairs and leaving dirty clothes everywhere else but in the washing basket.’

‘I felt the same after Andrew left, but if it’s any comfort, it does get better.’

‘I bloody hope so.’

‘It took me a while, but I soon got into a new routine and the hours I used to spend with him talking, arguing, shopping and all the rest are now filled with doing loads of other stuff. If you’re lucky, they can be just as fulfilling as the things they’ve replaced.’

‘You should be in HR, you’re good at making people feel better.’

The influence of the food and the wine gradually shifted the conversation onto lighter topics and he found out that she liked photography and gardening and swam twice a week, while she learned that his spare time was centred around his kids, taking them to coffee bars and the cinema or up to London to see a concert or an exhibition at the Barbican or Tate Modern.

‘What sort of access do you have to the children?’

‘God, it sounds so formal, so legal.’

‘It often is.’

‘Emily and me are pretty relaxed about it as they’re not young kids anymore. I mean, Graham’s sixteen and Danielle’s eighteen. Danielle comes to see me whenever she wants as she’s got her own car, although her visits will stop when she goes away to Durham University in September. Graham, well Graham has always been a bit of a mummy’s boy and so he’ll only come if Danielle or Emily are coming over, which is a shame.’

They left the restaurant at eleven-thirty, leaving behind two clean plates, an empty bottle of St Emilion and a handsome tip for the waiter, and this time Peter could say he enjoyed his meal and it would be remembered. If he was counting, her consumption of the ‘chateau’s premier wine, redolent of blackberries and fine wood shavings’ was more than his. It was not a thinly-veiled ploy to take advantage of a drunken woman and hope for a quick fondle as they stumbled into a doorway, but he’d taken the car; Brighton cops had a sound reputation in the pursuit of drunk drivers and he didn’t want to be the next name in their little black book.

The car was parked at the bottom of Brunswick Square and as they walked down the slope towards the seafront, a strong wind whipped up from the sea into their faces, bringing with it a tang of salt and seaweed. She snuggled in close and while it was good to have a warm body beside him, he was under no illusion it was the result of the inclement weather and not his expensive after-shave or any rough-boy-made-good charm.

Peter Grant lived in a four-bedroom, mock-Tudor detached house in Woodland Drive, Hove and if the floral parlance of estate agents was to believed, he lived in a ‘much sought-after road with a favoured south-westerly aspect.’ Despite the closeness of other neighbours, the house did have a double garage, a long back garden and ample parking space out front to accommodate three or four cars, which was just as well as a few years ago he’d converted the garage into a gym.

His ex-wife used to call the gym his ‘folly’, as the company offices in Woodingdean were equipped with a well-appointed gym and there were any number of clubs and sports centres in the Brighton and Hove area. He wanted one at home as he liked to exercise whenever the notion took him and couldn’t do so in a public gym, not after drinking a bottle of wine or at some time past eleven o’clock at night when most of the clubs were closed.

While he made coffee, Sarah rummaged through his record collection. Before starting the fitness business, he was the drummer in the Crazy Crows rock band and through this and his love of music, he had accumulated a vast amount of cassettes, CDs and vinyl albums.

Unlike most other people he knew, his LPs did not end up on the council waste tip or boxed-up and hidden away in the attic like an embarrassing relative; they were displayed in a floor-to-ceiling wall unit which also included a high-output amp, floor-standing speakers with a twelve-inch bass and played on a two-grand Linn Sondek turntable.

If pressed, he would have to admit he was ‘old school’ when it came to recorded music, and critical of the march of CDs and MP3 downloads, although he knew he couldn’t ignore them completely. To his ears, vinyl produced a much warmer and fuller sound than the treble-heavy CD or the top-and-tailed MP3, and he loved listening to an album while poring over a beautifully drawn cover like Cream’s
Disraeli Gears
or one stylishly photographed such as
Abbey Road
or
Sergeant Pepper
. Anyone who had ever peered frustratingly at a CD flyer in a vain attempt to read the minuscule song lyrics, or tried to identify the faces in a tiny photograph, would not dispute the LP’s superiority on this score.

He removed two coffee mugs from the cupboard, when he felt warm hands circling his waist. Slowly, as he enjoyed the little tingles the gentle massaging action of her fingers were causing and didn’t want to put her off, he placed the mugs back in the cupboard, closed the door and turned to face her. Her kisses were passionate and demanding, her lips caressing his with sensuous delicacy, while her tongue dipped in and out his mouth leaving him gasping for more. He ran his hands down her body with a burning desire to touch everything.

They staggered towards the stairs, he without his shirt and she without her dress, both of which were now lying on the kitchen floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra, a brave thing to do in the middle of winter, revealing large, rounded breasts which he found hard to keep his hands from touching. The belt of his trousers had been loosened and when he tried to climb the stairs, he almost tripped as his trousers fell to his knees. It was touch and go if they would make it to the bedroom or stop where they were and make love on the landing, but if working for a fitness company guaranteed one thing, there would be no shortage of stamina. It was going to be a long night.

With a sigh he turned and walked back to the van. He flicked the toothpick over with his tongue in one movement; five minutes one way, five minutes the other.

It was quiet here, full of big houses and flash cars but he knew from the web they could be a stroppy lot. Commuters often used this road as a rat-run to the by-pass at the top of the hill, and a few years back annoyed residents had tried to block access with rubbish bins. Not to be outdone by this petulant display of anger and frustration, the motorists dumped the contents of the bins on their smart driveways. Oh yes, he would have liked to have been there.

He had been watching the house for several days now, and was starting to believe this guy was a boring bastard, as his routine never varied. He left for work at the same time every morning and came back at the same time almost every night. He knew what he ate, how much he drank, what time he headed into the home gym and what time he went to bed, but it all changed this evening when he brought a woman home.

He liked the guy’s gym. It was better than the one he’d used in the nick which was full of big bastards with elaborate tats on their muscular arms that stretched and moved when biceps were tensed. He didn’t bother them and they left him alone, until he proved he could lift the same as they could and only then did he gain acceptance into their circle. It suited him fine inside as it was Category A and they protected him from a lot of serious nutters.

In this guy’s place there was a multi-gym, a running machine, exercise bike, loose weights; the dog’s bollocks. In all the time he’d been watching him, he never once did any of the aerobic stuff like running or cycling, and often he heard him grunting under the weight of the barbell. It would be a different sort of grunting he would be doing tonight, he thought, giggling.

He could see his van, a customised Mercedes Vito Euro parked in front of a row of shops, close to a wine shop and a posh hairdresser. Subtle it wasn’t with matt black bodywork, a flame effect along one side, chrome wheels, tinted windows and a sound system capable of blowing a pedestrian’s clothes off.

For doing surveillance, it was crap and stuck out like a tart at a vicars’ convention, more so in a snobby place like this where he often saw curtains twitching. He climbed in, closed the door and pulled out his phone.

‘Hi man, it’s me.’

‘Hi mate. Did you do it?’

‘Nope, he came back with a woman.’

‘What him, that ugly bastard? She must be a pro.’

‘Na, na. You forget summat.’

‘What?'

‘He's rich. Birds go for that.’

The voice on the phone grunted disapproval, but he knew he was right. ‘When you gonna do it?’

‘I told ya, I’ll do it when the time’s right. To do this stuff proper with no comeback takes planning. You know the score.’

‘Ach, sooner the better, is all I’m saying.’

‘You getting heat from Blakey?’

‘No more than usual. He wants the job done.’

‘Let me know if he hassles you. I’ll take him on, see if I don’t.’

‘It’s not him you need to be worrying about as he’s getting on, same as me. It’s his sons; they’re bastards.’

‘Yeah, they’re a bad bunch.’

‘You look after yourself, man. Be seeing.’

The phone went dead; a man of few words.

He started the van and a deep rumble shook through the bodywork. If he revved it harder, it would shake through the windows of nearby houses and wake up their children, but it didn’t make sense to attract unwanted attention. Oh no, he liked being anonymous.

He drove away slowly, the big engine straining at the leash, urging him to go faster, but he wouldn’t put his foot down until he reached the A23.