The Women's Club by Michael Crawley

Author:Michael Crawley [Michael Crawley and Laurie Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843581918
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Marieka waited until she was damn sure Lisa was dead. Before she left she cast an appraising glance around the loft. Now that the artist was no longer living, Lisa’s remaining work should sell for five times the original price. No word of a lie.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The rasp of a two-day growth of bristles on his chin against his starched white pillow woke Jack. It was late. His eyes were gummy. There was a nasty taste in his mouth. This just wouldn’t do. He’d been drinking too much. He’d even been thinking about the cigarettes he’d given up fifteen years before.

Jack took a hot shower followed by a cool rinse; shaved twice, ditto brushed his teeth, and splashed his face with the remaining drops of the exotic imported aftershave that Marion had given him for the last of his birthdays they’d had together. He remade his bed with crisp white sheets. There. Human again, almost.

Dressed properly, apart from a tie and jacket, he left the bedroom. A glance at the balcony doors told him it was raining again. He tidied his living room. His desk needed straightening. He’d been working at it last night, in a sort of fog, trying to remember the url he’d seen noted in Celia’s file.

He’d been spying on his own daughter? That wasn’t nice. Deliberately not looking at the notes he’d made, Jack swept them into his waste basket.

He called Don Mancroft’s office to arrange that wild evening he’d promised his friend, and was told that Don was no longer with the brokerage and no, no one knew where he’d gone. Jack tried Celia again. He couldn’t get past the receptionist. He phoned Anne. She picked up but made excuses.

That wasn’t fair. He knew she was mad-busy. The opposite of him. He was going mad with not being busy. It was time for lunch but he felt queasy. A drink would settle his stomach, but that was a slippery slope. There was nothing on television, despite the two hundred-odd channels he subscribed to. There were book-club books he hadn’t read yet but somehow reading seemed like too much bother. He booted up his computer.

There was a lot of email, all of it spam. He erased each junk message individually, just for the satisfaction of jabbing his delete button. Then what? He could surf, researching something, but what? Googling ‘women’s club’ offered him forty-six million results. If he decided to continue his spying, checking that many might take a while. Looking at one per second, that’d be…

Incredibly silly, that’s what it’d be.

He could empty his waste bins but the only one that had anything in it was the one beside his desk. It only contained the notes he’d made last night. Not allowing himself to think about what he was doing, Jack fished the crumpled pieces of paper out and smoothed them on his blotter.

www.xp… What’d come next? It was a low use-frequency letter, he was sure. ‘q’? He tried ‘q’ but it didn’t look right. How about a ‘j’? Yes, that was it.

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