Murder Club - Mark Pearson [4]
Stephanie had laughed, telling him that she had pegged him for it when she first saw him. She wasn’t surprised he was good at his job: he had something about him – charisma, she supposed, or empathy; either way, he was certainly comfortable to talk with. To trust. She guessed that went with his job too, but suspected it was something innate rather than a learned skill. God knows she had been sold to (or they had attempted to) by enough salesmen and women to appreciate the difference. She reckoned John should be getting lead parts, and he had confessed that his telephone voice was better than his singing!
She looked up at the monitor again: four minutes to go. She had made a decision. John had said he would call her in a couple of days and, when he did, she would agree to see him again. She smiled to herself and felt the warmth of it spread through her body. And it wasn’t just the champagne working.
Two minutes to go. Not only had she stayed later than she planned at Kettner’s, but the automatic ticket gates hadn’t been working at Piccadilly, wouldn’t recognise her Oyster card, and she had had to wait for a guard to let her through.
She’d arrived on the platform just as the doors of her train closed and it had started to move away. She hated missing her train. Another eight minutes to the next one. She’d have to run to make the connection at Marylebone to catch the fast overland. If she missed it, it was another half-hour wait.
She shivered and turned around, suddenly getting the feeling she was being watched. There were a few other people on the platform: a group of young women in their twenties, giggling and dressed more for summer than winter! A girls’ night out, by the look of it, and quite a drunken one. An office party or a hen-night. An older man further along the platform was pretending to read a poster on the wall, but she could see he kept flicking sideways glances at the group of laughing women. He caught her eye and looked away. More people piled onto the platform and a short while later the train arrived.
At Marylebone she ran as fast as she could; she wasn’t exactly wearing high-heeled shoes, but she wasn’t wearing flats either. People with the same idea flew past her, men mainly, who weren’t hampered by their footwear.
She hurried up the stairs leading from the Underground, up and onto the concourse, and then ran up to the barrier connecting to the overland Chiltern Railways; she had to run up almost one entire platform and then sideways to another platform – the train was still there, and she made it inside with seconds to spare.
She smiled apologetically to the man sitting opposite her as she drew in deep breaths and ran her hand across her forehead. He nodded almost dismissively and returned to the crossword he was studying. She looked at the paper, the Saturday Telegraph, and raised an eyebrow; he’d had long enough to complete it.
She looked at her reflection in the mirrored effect of the windows and smiled. She did look flushed, but happily flushed. She was pleased with what she saw. Today drew a line under everything. Today was going to change things. And so it would.
Just not in the way she imagined it.
Not in her worst nightmares.
3.
Easter week … Wednesday
ANDREW JOHNSON WAS a pillar of his local community. And he was quite happy to tell that fact to anyone who would listen.
It wasn’t entirely true.
He’d joined the Rotary Club at twenty-two years old and moved on to the Rotarians when he was past forty. He was a member of the local Masons’ Lodge and had been invited to dine with the Lord Mayor of London on more than one occasion. He was maybe still a few years away from getting the pin-striped morning-suit trousers, but it was only a matter of time. Patience and perseverance. That was Andrew’s mantra. All things come to he who waits. Even if you have to go out and get them sometimes.
He was the forty-five-year-old manager of a country pub called The Crawfish, in Lavenham, a pretty market