On her arrival at Heathrow Terminal 5 Suzie moved swiftly through customs towards baggage retrieval. For the first time she began to feel nervous about her expedition to London, arranged largely to show Grant what was on the fourth DVD. ‘No time to be faint-hearted,’ she admonished herself. She knew he would be waiting when she emerged in the arrivals hall. She stopped briefly, ostensibly to check where she had put the scrap of paper with the address of her aunt’s flat in Bayswater but actually to buy a little time before the anticipated encounter with Grant, an event that she knew would set the hares running. She was the genie in the bottle – and then with a shiver she thought she was Dr Frankenstein about to unleash the monster. She hesitated a moment longer before reverting to being the no-nonsense, pragmatic person she had become: the practical nurse dispensing care and performing her duties with a sense of purpose and appropriate professionalism. This was merely another task that had to be undertaken, she told herself. But still she hesitated. She had been through so much with the Galvins, and even though Paul, Danny’s ogre of a father, had long since passed away, the sudden breakdown of her engagement was never far from her mind. She still harboured strong feelings of affection for Danny … She pulled herself together, braced herself and walked purposefully into the bright lights of the arrivals hall.
Grant’s broad smile – more from relief that she had arrived than pleasure at seeing her – greeted her, but she presented a slightly frosty, businesslike countenance to which he was oblivious. ‘So good to see you,’ he said with an enthusiasm she knew was sincere. He kissed her formally on both cheeks and took her heavy luggage. She retained her hand luggage, which he felt sure contained the precious DVD.
After his routine inquiries about her journey she got quickly to the point. ‘OK, I have the disk, and I know you are breaking bones to see it, but first I must deal with niceties at Aunt Mary’s where I’m staying.’
‘Yes, sure. Of course,’ he replied, privately cursing her aunt. He knew that he must not be too pushy. Parking ticket in hand, he left Suzie in order to retrieve his car, having arranged where he would pick her up. What if she were mugged? What if she had a stroke? Such was his paranoia that he ran through the short-stay car park to locate his Toyota and could barely contain himself as he screeched out of his parking spot as if racing in a Grand Prix. On reaching the assigned meeting point he scanned the pavement, thronged with people awaiting collection. Where was she? Where in the name of the Almighty was she? She was nowhere to be seen, and he felt panicky. He sensed the blood rush to his head, his breathing becoming shallow. He stopped the car, controlled his breathing with deep intakes and expulsions of air from the pit of his abdomen, which immediately evoked memories of his panicky nights in Zennor.
Several agonizing minutes passed. Still no sign of her. Had she been kidnapped. Had a Galvin or a Youlen waited in the wings, watched her making her way through arrivals and pounced? To his huge relief she suddenly appeared in his rear-view mirror walking calmly, almost nonchalantly, towards him. He jumped out of the vehicle, almost in one motion, and felt a sharp twinge in his lower back. ‘Damn,’ he exclaimed as quietly as he could. But that was nothing compared with the pain and disbelief he experienced when he noticed with horror that she was no longer carrying her hand luggage.
‘Grant, I’m so sorry. I had to go to the ladies’. It’s the rush-hour. It could have been ages before …’
‘And you’ve lost your hand luggage?’
‘Didn’t lose it. I put it down to wash my hands, and while I was using the dryer it was taken.’
‘Have you reported it?’
‘Yes, I tried,’ she replied. ‘I have to go to Lost Property at some building on the airport perimeter.’
Grant didn’t know whether to cry or curse, but he had little option other than to play the gentleman. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll drive there now. There’s bound to be CCTV footage. Hopefully we can identify the thief, which might give us a breakthrough.’
‘Why? What makes you think we’ll be able to identify him?’
‘Because people have been trying to thwart me for months now, trying to scare me and generally put me off the scent. I have a pretty good idea of who we will see on CCTV.’
Suzie looked at him, her face betraying a trace of triumph that confounded him. ‘Don’t worry. I have a duplicate of the DVD in my luggage. I know the contents are dynamite, and I was never going to risk coming all the way to London with just one copy.’
Her words transformed his mood, and he found himself genuinely in awe of her. ‘Phew.’ Grant released the word as if he was relieving all the tension that had built up since she had arrived. He could now focus his thoughts. ‘But someone’s followed you and in all likelihood me as well today,’ he continued as they drove off towards the West End. ‘They knew of your journey and your arrival time, and in all probability they will know you have the DVD. We have to be very careful now. We are probably being followed now. I’ve been tailed quite a lot recently.’
‘Should we call the police?’
‘I have thought of doing so many times, but if the truth … Well, we may yet have to, I suppose, if things get worse.’
She fixed her eyes on him and for the first time thought he might be quite a catch, a feeling she had never had in Cornwall on those family holidays. The chemistry had never been right between them, unlike that between her father and his mother. She knew he had been involved with Caroline and briefly with Jenny Charnley. (Who hadn’t? she reflected.) Her own romantic involvement had centred on Danny. Meanwhile she had been all too aware of her father’s abiding passion for Grant’s mother, which had always been something of a major complication. She knew her father would have disapproved of a second liaison between the two families, and that had made any glimmerings of attraction to Grant a total no-go zone. For a brief moment she wondered how her life might have panned out if she had fallen for him. And would she have prevented the crusade that now so consumed him?
‘How’s Brigit?’ she asked breezily, as if their previous conversation had never occurred.
‘Fine,’ he replied. He had no more intention of discussing his private life with her than he had had with Danny on his unexpected visit to his home in Mill Hill. ‘So how long are you here for, and when can I watch Apocalypse Now?’
She laughed and relaxed a little. ‘As soon as Aunt Mary has left the flat. She has a hairdressing appointment at eleven.’
He glanced at his watch. It was only eight, but he knew he had to be patient. He found himself reflecting on how odd the situation had become, Suzie having travelled all the way from Cape Town with the cherished DVD on which so much seemed to rest. He, too, wished there was more of a rapport between them; he had never felt very comfortable in her presence. At least as an adult she had gained some self-confidence.
‘OK, so why don’t I drop you off, go and get a coffee near by – which might throw off any unwanted hangers-on – and return at eleven-fifteen? But first let’s go to the Lost Property place.’
‘Oh, I have a number. I’ll call it now.’
No sooner had she dialled than she was put through. After being asked at which terminal she had arrived, her time of arrival and place of embarkation, she was told, ‘No, we’ve had nothing from Terminal 5 since six last night. If you call in after three today we usually have the items handed in from six p.m. last night onwards.’ Suzie cast a knowing glance at Grant, which seemed to suggest she had anticipated an answer like this.
He headed into the West End, a journey made onerous by the morning rush-hour; a trip that should have taken no more than forty minutes was more than doubled.
‘How on earth do people cope with this every day?’ Suzie asked, staggered by the volume of traffic. As with much of their conversation in South Africa, the flow of conversation was stilted. They decided to keep off the subject of the DVD. He thought of inquiring after her family but decided not to invite any reference to her father.
After some minutes of silence he suggested putting the news on the radio; Suzie welcomed this diversion, remarking that she felt very out of touch with UK news when in Cape Town. The first item they heard could hardly have been more appropriate: a piece about advances in DNA technology and how murderers should live in perpetual fear of being convicted because even the most microscopic strand of hair could provide evidence in a new prosecution. Suzie listened in silence, glancing at Grant to see if he showed any reaction to the news story.
Meanwhile his intermittent curses about the M4 arterial route into London grew more vocal at the blockage around Hammersmith. Finally, he decided to break their own conversational traffic jam. ‘Did you ever want to go back to Cornwall after 1972?’
‘Danny suggested it once, but I thought there were a lot of other places to visit.’
‘A pity,’ replied Grant. ‘We all had five or six great holidays there, our parents rebooking for the following year the moment the latest one ended.’
‘Perhaps we just grew up. We were no longer characters in Alice in Wonderland. It wasn’t even as if it was the way normal people in their late teens generally behaved back then. Normal teenagers would have spent the summer backpacking around Holland or camping out at music festivals. I remember thinking that I should have been at the Isle of Wight festival.’ She said this with some vehemence, almost intentionally raining on Grant’s parade, before softening slightly. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not soaked in your nostalgia for it all.’
‘Yeah, probably I am – but it was fun while it lasted. I guess it was a bit of a bubble. At least we all avoided marrying one another!’ He was deliberately lightening the tone but also trying to get her to reveal more about her relationship with Danny – especially why the wedding had been cancelled at such short notice. It failed, as did all attempts to scratch beneath the surface of her past.
‘Well, whatever. It was a pretty false world, being on family holidays in our late teens in an expensive hotel financed by the Bank of Mum and Dad.’
It was the Bank of Dad that Grant would have loved to have asked about. How wealthy had her father been? Had he been trying to play God with his experiments? What risks had he taken in his professional and private life at his cottage in Zennor? But Grant knew he had neither the communication skills nor the rapport with Suzie to broach the subject.
Just after nine-thirty they arrived in Bayswater. Grant dropped Suzie off. She removed her luggage with the minimum of fuss or even acknowledgement and proceeded to ring the front doorbell, with a merely cursory backward glance towards him. He welcomed the opportunity to park several streets away and undertake some surveillance. From the time he had left his home to stay with his brother near Guildford he had been convinced that he was being followed. In his mind there was only one suspect: Danny Galvin, although he knew now that the stalker in Zennor and the driver of the car that followed him to Glen’s home might not be one and the same person. Danny had, after all, alerted him that Trevor Mullings might be involved.
Grant monitored cars parking near Suzie’s aunt’s residence. The fact he had at least ninety minutes to kill before he could finally view the film footage was very convenient. Anyone following him would surely despair of him entering the flat after such a long wait, even if he had been spotted dropping Suzie off.