Betrayed by Roberta Kray

Author:Roberta Kray [Kray, Roberta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

41

There should have been better things Will Sutherland could be doing on a Sunday morning than sitting in his car in a Whitechapel back street, but it was a sad reflection on his life that there wasn’t. No one to eat a late breakfast with, to pore over the newspapers with, to go back to bed and have lazy sex with. So he was working on the premise that doing something was better than doing nothing, even if that something was waiting for an unreliable snout called Ned Langley.

To his left was a row of boarded-up shops, to his right a derelict factory with crumbling blackened walls. The view was less than inspiring. The whole street had an abandoned, hopeless feel to it, as though everyone had just given up, moved out and left the place to decay. The pavements were cracked, the gutters swimming in litter. A grand advertisement for the state of the economy and the ruin of a community. The sky was low and grey, full of rain.

He checked his watch. Langley was ten minutes late but that wasn’t unusual. The man did sod all and still didn’t turn up when he said he would. Will decided to give him another five and that was it. There was a limit to his patience. Waiting around gave him time to think, which was precisely what he didn’t want to do.

A couple of weeks earlier, he’d seen Belinda going into a cinema with her current husband and their two kids. He had watched from a distance, feeling oddly removed, like he was viewing his life as it might have been. Was he sorry for screwing up his marriage? He still felt ambivalent about it: half regretful, half relieved. The break-up, of course, had been entirely down to him. A brief affair – if it could even be called that – with Jenny Walbroke. He had thrown a grenade into his marriage, exploding every last remnant of trust.

Will wondered what Jenny was doing now. Last he’d heard, and that was a while ago, she was a DS in Manchester. Probably a DI by now. She was the ambitious sort, and good at her job. What she wasn’t so good at was spotting seriously bad relationship material. He’d let her down, unsurprisingly, screwing things up like he always did. He rolled his eyes and sighed. But it was water under the bridge, past history; there was no point in dwelling on it.

Eventually, just as he was about to call it a day, Will glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Ned Langley approaching. The man couldn’t have looked shiftier if he’d tried: he was walking fast, shoulders hunched, his head going from side to side as he nervously examined every doorway, every blank window, for potential witnesses. Informing was a risky business – the consequences, if caught, would be dire – but it could be lucrative too if the information was sound. Langley didn’t just do it for the money, though;

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