Spiking the Girl Read Free Page B

with me?’
    Gemma’s initial reaction was to refuse. But the soft beseeching so obvious in Daria’s huge eyes touched Gemma. The best thing to do was humour her, do the job she wanted and send her a large bill.
    Gemma took the long white candle passed to her, inclined it to be lit and followed her new client through the house, proceeding in and out of the remaining rooms. She’d worked in a lot of weird places, Gemma thought, but never in a million years did she think she’d be wandering round a stranger’s house with a lit candle in her hand.
    ‘Thank you,’ Daria whispered when they’d finished. ‘I also want someone to watch the place at night.’
    ‘You want physical surveillance as well as cameras?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That will be very expensive.’
    Daria Reynolds handed Gemma a key from under a vase in the hallway. ‘You can throw the key back through the window grille when you’ve finished. And as for expensive, I don’t really care.’
    ‘We’ll get cameras installed in the back and front gardens,’ said Gemma. ‘And in the bedroom. When would be convenient?’
    ‘How about now?’
    Gemma watched while Daria Reynolds hurried to her small silver Honda and drove away. It’s as if she suddenly doesn’t care anymore, Gemma thought. As if my visit here today was all that’s necessary to sort out a stalking ex-husband. If only, Gemma thought. I’d be a rich woman.
    She went back to her car and picked up the radio, calling Spinner. ‘Tracker Three. Copy, please.’
    The sound of her number one operative’s voice was calming. Spinner was a gem—her most treasured business asset. It was hard work being a surveillance operative, out on the road all day. His particular talent lay in his silent patience, his capacity to sit, hour after hour if necessary, waiting for a cheat to slip up, to forget to adopt the limp, just once, on the way to get the newspaper, or forget the bad back and start building a swimming pool. Spinner would be there with his zoom camera, shooting his damning footage, getting it all down for the insurance companies’ assessors. His contemporaneous notes were clean, clear and concise, despite his truncated education—or maybe because of that. Gemma was blessed to have him on the payroll. Good road operatives were hard to find—and even harder to keep. Since last year’s collapse of her business, Spinner was her only full-time employee, with Mike Moody, ex-Federal policeman and in-house IT manager, now just working part-time—as the need arose and her finances permitted.
    Gemma told Spinner what she wanted.
    ‘I’ll meet you there,’ he said after she’d filled him in and given him the address. ‘And give you the files of the jobs I’ve finished. You can take them back with you to the office. Save me driving over later on.’
    Gemma rehoused the radio then checked the street up and down. It looked innocuous, incapable of hiding evil or danger, just a pleasant suburban morning streetscape. So why this beating of her heart? This crawling of her scalp?
    Gemma took a deep breath, before pulling her laptop out and taking it back inside Daria’s house. Balancing the computer on her knees, she transferred the scrawled notes she’d just written into her electronic file: the date, time, address, the weather, their conversation, everything necessary to ground her report as far as possible in reality.
    When she’d saved her notes, she folded the laptop lid down and gazed sightlessly through the window. This time yesterday everything had been fine with Steve. She’d gradually been getting closer to letting go of her jealousy and pain around his infidelity. But when he talked about the possibility of them buying a bigger place together, those issues had suddenly loomed large again. The argument had flared. Now it didn’t matter if she had all the time in the world.
    Her mobile rang and she dived for it, eager for distraction from her sad thoughts.
    ‘Miss Lincoln?’ A frail,