– the treacherous she-wolf Tessa – but he suspected she had been a tailor-made artefact perfectly designed to ensnare him. (‘I can be your type,’ Tatiana said. ‘I can be French if you want.’ She said it to provoke, not seduce. She seemed to derive a lot of amusement from his bachelor state. It was bad enough that Julia had long ago taken up occupation in his brain, but to have Tatiana now buzzing around in there as well was an unwelcome development. It gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘inner voice’. At least between them they had managed to eject his first wife, Josie.)
‘And what do you want me to do if I find out who it is that’s following you?’ he’d asked Crystal Holroyd, fearing another search-and-destroy request like that of Chloe’s mother, Ricky Kemp.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I just want to know who it is. Wouldn’t you?’
Yes, he would.
‘And you are experienced at this kind of thing, aren’t you?’ she asked, a doubtful little frown momentarily creasing her smooth features. Botox? Jackson wondered. Not that he knew the first thing about it except that you paid someone who wasn’t medically qualified to stick needles in your face. It seemed like the macabre stuff of horror movies. Jackson liked his women au naturel. (‘Warts and all,’ he said to Julia, who didn’t seem to take the remark in the spirit of a compliment.)
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Holroyd – Crystal – it’s not my first rodeo.’
‘But you’re not a cowboy, I hope,’ she said, giving him a level look. She had startlingly green eyes, the green of glacier waters in the Rockies. (He’d been there, with the daiquiri-drinking woman from Lancashire. She’d been a travel writer – still was, he supposed – which was why their surprisingly antagonistic relationship had been conducted almost entirely on foreign shores.)
‘No,’ Jackson laughed. ‘I’m not a cowboy. I’m the sheriff.’
She didn’t seem impressed.
He took down her details. Crystal didn’t work, she was ‘just’ a housewife and a mother, although that was a full-time job, she added defensively.
‘Absolutely,’ Jackson said. He wasn’t going to be the one to stand up and question the choices women made. He had done that once or twice in his life and it had always ended badly. (Luddite still echoed in his brain.)
Crystal lived with her husband, the aforesaid Tommy, in a big house called High Haven a few miles from here. Tommy owned a haulage firm and, as well as the mini Snow White, there was a stepson, Harry, from the first marriage. He was a good boy, Crystal said. Sixteen but ‘a bit young for his age. Also old for his age,’ she added.
‘Was your husband divorced?’ Jackson asked, thinking so far, so cliché, the first wife traded in for a newer model, but Crystal said no, she had died in an accident.
‘What kind of an accident?’
‘She fell off a cliff.’
‘A cliff?’ Jackson’s little grey cells held hands with each other and started to skip with excitement. People didn’t fall off cliffs – he himself had recently acquired expertise in this matter – they jumped or they were pushed or they wrenched you over with them.
‘Yeah, a cliff. It was an accident. Well, I hope it was.’
The choice of café was his, the choice of car park was hers – ‘The one behind the Co-op. Park near the wall by the railway. I’ll try and park there as well,’ she had told him on the phone. He had complied with this instruction although he hadn’t understood it, certainly hadn’t interpreted it as meaning that ten minutes after finishing his second coffee and paying the bill he would be slowly tailing her Range Rover as it exited the car park.
It was a big car park and if he had been parked further away from her, he realized, it would have been well-nigh impossible to keep track of her when she left. He liked a woman who planned ahead.
‘You leave the café first,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow five minutes later.’
‘Okay,’ Jackson said. He had no trouble being compliant with a good-looking woman. A willingness that had been the cause of his downfall on more than one occasion.
Crystal had already given him the number plate of her car – a big white Evoque that was easy to spot – and he sauntered past it now, pretending nonchalance, although he was scrutinizing it, inside and out. You could tell a lot about a person by their car. The windows were blacked