her. The most important thing now was to keep Candy safe, but Harry needed to be kept safe as well, didn’t he? He was still just a kid. Crystal had no idea what she was going to do, but she knew what she wasn’t going to do – she wasn’t going to stand up in court and talk about the past. What kind of a stain on her kids’ lives would that be? Keep your mouth shut, Christina.
On the other hand, she was no one’s pawn any more. Of course, that was something else the judge’s chess-playing friend, Sir Cough-Plunkett, had taught her. In the endgame a pawn can change into a queen. Crystal had a feeling there was an endgame in play, she just wasn’t sure who her opponent was.
Crystal had just opened the driver’s door when it happened. Two men – big brawny blokes – ran up and took her completely by surprise, and one punched her in the face.
The Wing Chun kicked in and she bounced back up to her feet and landed a punch or two, but the bloke was like Rambo. It was over in a second and she found herself on the ground. The bloke who had hit her was already in the driving seat and the other one was slamming Harry’s door shut, with Harry still inside, not to mention Candy, and then throwing himself into the front passenger seat. They drove off with a showy squealing of tyres and, just like that, the entire content of Crystal’s life disappeared up the road.
She struggled to her feet and ran after the car, but there wasn’t much point. Even at her fastest she wasn’t going to beat the Evoque. She could see Harry staring out of the rear windscreen, open-mouthed in shock. His little face, she thought, a tug of something cataclysmic in her heart.
Jackson Brodie appeared out of somewhere. He’d been following her all day. Did he really think she hadn’t noticed?
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘My car’s just been hijacked with my kids in it, so no, I would say, not all right. Some fucking sheriff you are. Where’s your car?’
‘My car?’
‘Yes, your fucking car. We have to follow them.’
En Famille
‘Mrs Mellors? I’m DC Ronnie Dibicki and this is DC Reggie Chase. I wonder if we could come in and have a word with Mr Mellors. Is he at home?’
‘No, he’s not, I’m afraid. Do call me Sophie,’ she offered, holding out a hand to shake. ‘Is there a problem? Is it something to do with a case he’s working on?’ she asked, all spousal support.
‘Sort of …’ Reggie said.
Sophie Mellors was a very well-put-together polite fortysomething. She was tall, wearing a neat dress and a modest pair of heels, and everything about her was fifty shades of mellow, from the brown of her eyes to the honey of her dress to the caramel of her shoes. Expensive shoes. Reggie always looked at the shoes first. You could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. Jackson Brodie taught her that. She would like to see him again, despite her initial antagonism at the sight of him on the cliff the other day. In fact she wanted to catch up with him quite badly. For a brief period of time she had masqueraded as his daughter and it had felt nice.
‘Come in, why don’t you?’ Sophie said. ‘Gracious’ was the adjective for her, Reggie thought. She was wearing what Reggie believed was called a ‘tea dress’. She was garden-party ready. Reggie thought of Bronte Finch, dishevelled in her workout gear, encouraging them to eat strawberry tarts. Small animals only.
Sophie Mellors led them into a huge kitchen that must have once been the beating heart of a farm. Reggie imagined farmhands in here, sitting round a big table for a harvest supper or a hot breakfast before lambing. A big table groaning with hams and cheeses. Yellow-yolked eggs, freshly laid by hens pecking in the yard. Reggie knew absolutely nothing about farming except that farmers had one of the highest suicide rates of any profession, so she supposed it wasn’t all hams and lambs, just a lot of muck and mud and worry. Anyway, whatever farming had happened here was long gone, the kitchen in Malton was now a hymn to expensive appliances and craftsman-built cupboards. A lasagne was sitting cling-filmed on a counter, waiting to go into the Aga. Of course there was an Aga, you would expect nothing less of a