DECOY (Kindle Single)

  But whether it was her or not, Adam wasn’t taking the bait. ‘That’s all right,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said, feigning disappointment. What’s wrong with a bit of fun?’ She smiled suggestively. ‘I can be a lot of fun.’ Now she was beginning to understand how hard acting was, even with a gin and tonic warming her inside.

  ‘I’m getting married tomorrow,’ he blurted out.

  Kate put on a look of surprise. What she was really feeling was a flood of relief. She realised now that his glance down her dress before had been just embarrassment. ‘This is your stag party?’

  Adam shrugged, nodded.

  ‘Who’s the lucky girl? Anyone I might know?’

  ‘Her name’s Tracy,’ he said, and Kate could see the tenderness in his eyes. At the mention of Tracy’s name, he seemed to relax and began to talk more freely. He told her that the stag night had been his mates’ idea, not his. This wasn’t really his scene. He’d rather be at home, getting ready for the big day. He hoped she wasn’t offended that he didn’t want to dance.

  She assured him she wasn’t. ‘Well, it was great seeing you again. Congratulations. I’m really pleased for you.’

  Kate picked up her bag and left him at the bar, already putting together the report she was going to give Tracy. Adam hadn’t even offered her a drink, and didn’t as much as glance at her as she left. He was too deeply in love with his soon-to-be bride, who for the small fee of five hundred quid could now be assured that her man wouldn’t succumb to temptation. At least, not for a while.

  Mission accomplished, Kate checked her watch and realised that she’d earned her money in less than twenty minutes. She shook her head in disbelief and left the hotel to call a cab home.

  She should have asked the driver to wait for her.

  Three

  ‘And what happened then?’

  Charlie’s voice was muffled by the bedclothes that he’d drawn up all snugly around himself as he lay curled up listening. Perched on the edge of his bed, Kate reached over and delicately stroked his hair. It needed cutting. His blond curls were all over the pillow and he was looking up at her, perfectly angelic. He must have heard this story ten thousand times and knew what happened next better than she did. But interrupting her with questions was all part of the ritual they both loved every moment of.

  ‘Then the baby bear was reunited with his family and they all lived happily ever after,’ Kate said without needing to look at the book.

  Charlie nodded and smiled in satisfaction, taking comfort in the fact that the story never changed, and never would. No matter what happened, the baby bear would be safe and happy for all time.

  Kate closed the book and laid it on his bedside table. ‘You go to sleep now,’ she said, kissing his soft round cheek.

  Charlie’s smile fell and he looked pensive. ‘Mummy?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, babe?’

  ‘You’ll always read to me, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘I mean … when I can’t see any more?’

  Kate almost choked. She didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh, Charlie—’

  ‘And you’ll tell me what the pictures look like, so I won’t forget them.’

  A tear rolled down Kate’s face and she quickly wiped it. ‘I’m not going to let that happen to you. You need to believe me. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ he said in a small voice, and rolled away from her with his face buried in the pillow.

  Kate turned off the bedside lamp, left the little night-light glowing for him and left the room quickly so he wouldn’t hear her cry.

  At five to three the following afternoon, Kate was sitting on the bench nearest the tree-shaded entrance to Florence Park in east Oxford. She was dressed the way she might have for a job interview, with her hair carefully done and a professional-looking but cheap briefcase on her lap. The rest of the money from last night had been paid into the bank earlier that afternoon.

  If it hadn’t been for Hayley, who’d valiantly cried off sick from work to help out with Charlie, none of this running around would have been feasible. Good old Hayley.

  It was another bright day, and the sun was warm. Florence Park was mostly empty, aside from a few strollers, young mothers rolling pushchairs and some studenty types stretched out on the grassy areas. Lost in deep intellectual contemplation, no doubt.

  The woman Kate had arranged to meet appeared at one minute to the hour. She was small and mousy, and looked nervous as she approached. Kate stood, smiled, tried to put the woman at her ease and conceal her own nervousness. Meeting a client in a park this way felt clandestine, even tawdry. Like they were doing a drugs deal, or arranging a murder. But Mrs Susan Tribe had been clear about not wanting Kate to come to her home in nearby Campbell Road in case her husband, a self-employed locksmith, happened to turn up unexpectedly in the middle of the meeting.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me at such short notice,’ Susan Tribe said as they shook hands.

  ‘Why don’t you take a seat,’ Kate said, motioning at the bench as if it was a chair in an office.

  Mrs Tribe perched herself on the bench, glanced about her, then began to spill out the same anxious flurry of information she’d given Kate on the phone. As requested, she’d brought a photo of her husband for recognition purposes, which Kate looked at as her client talked. The photo had been taken on holiday somewhere warm and exotic, white beach and palms in the background. It showed a fortyish, chubby, round-faced man in a colourful T-shirt, grinning at the camera. Faded tats on his chunky forearms. One beefy hand clasped around his wife’s shoulder. His wedding ring was catching the sunlight. Mrs Tribe looked tanned and about a hundred years younger, even though the photo had only been taken last summer.

  The Tribes had been together for three years, a second marriage for both of them. Susan was open about the fact that her first husband had dumped her for his secretary; she never had managed to pin down why Kev’s first wife had upped and left.

  After what had seemed to be two happy years, Susan had begun to get suspicious that Kev might be seeing other women on his travels about Oxford as a locksmith. He worked alone, responding to callouts twenty-four-seven in his little van. Numbers obtained from sneak inspections of his phone suggested that some of his emergency callouts to rescue customers in distress, often late at night, were frequently to the same addresses. Maybe they were just careless folks who kept locking themselves out. Maybe they were something else. Mrs Tribe had called some of the numbers, heard a woman’s voice each time and then hung up without a word.

  Meanwhile, Kev had cooled towards her. He often seemed furtive and secretive, gave vague and sometimes inconsistent answers when she asked him as casually as possible about his day’s work; and now and again she’d thought she could detect perfume on him when he came home. The one time she’d challenged him about it, he’d got indignant and gone on about how could he help it if a customer’s house smelled like a French brothel? She couldn’t argue with that, but nonetheless she was convinced he was messing around.

  She couldn’t afford to have a private detective trail him from place to place – and who could tell anyway what went on behind closed doors? A lot of Kev’s jobs were inside work: interior doors, security systems, window locks, garages. Mrs Tribe believed there was only one effective way to probe at the truth and get the evidence she wanted, and feared, of her husband’s infidelity. She told Kate that after seeing her female decoy services ad, she’d copied down the number and then quickly disposed of the back page of the local paper she’d found it on. She’d been agonising for two days and nights before contacting her.

  ‘Can you tell me anywhere your husband frequents regularly, like a bowling alley or a local pub?’ Kate asked. ‘Somewhere I’m likely to run into him accidentally?’

  ‘I was thinking about that,’ Mrs Tribe said. ‘Kev does auto work, too. You know, people getting locked out of their cars, losing their keys, that kind of
thing. Would that be a way to … you know?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Kate said, nodding. She thought about it for the next couple of minutes as she reconfirmed some of what she’d told Mrs Tribe on the phone. It was important for the client to know that because nothing of a sexual nature could actually take place between the decoy and the subject, the only evidence the final report could contain was of the man’s intention or willingness to break his marriage vows. It didn’t constitute legal proof that he in fact had done so in the past, or would do so in the future. It wasn’t grounds for divorce, but it did give a fairly reliable indication of how elastic his notion of marital fidelity was.

  Susan Tribe listened, nodded, understood and said that was good enough for her. ‘When can you start?’ Now that she’d taken the plunge, she couldn’t wait. For better or for worse, she desperately needed to be put out of her misery.

  ‘Right away,’ Kate assured her. She could see the fatigue and emotional strain in Mrs Tribe’s face, and she felt sorry, and felt guilty for being happy about the money. As they parted and Kate left Florence Park with an envelope full of cash, she hoped that Kev was as innocent as Adam.

  But they couldn’t all be innocent. Could they?

  Four

  By the time she returned to her little Nissan on Florence Park Road, a simple plan of attack was already forming in Kate’s mind. Back home, she checked in on Charlie, spent a few minutes chatting with Hayley, then retreated to her bedroom to do some scouting on the computer.

  It didn’t take long to gather the details she needed from Kev Tribe’s locksmithing website. After shutting down the laptop, she rooted in the wardrobe and dug out some mid-heel gladiator sandals, a white T-shirt that was a little tight on her, and an old pair of faded Levis. A couple of minutes of radical scissor-work saw the jeans converted into Daisy Dukes. She painted her fingernails and toenails red, did her lips in the most provocative shade of scarlet gloss she’d been able to find, put on heavy blue eye shadow, squeezed into the jeans and the T-shirt and tousled and teased her hair until she looked like a rock groupie.

  ‘Jesus Christ, look at you!’ Hayley said, eyebrows shooting up.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ Kate replied.

  Half a grand yesterday. Half a grand today. So far, easy money. She wondered what tomorrow might bring.

  By five-thirty that afternoon, the setup was in place. Kate drove east across Oxford, the rusty exhaust of her Nissan rattling worse than usual, and headed up through Cowley to the DIY superstore car park off Between Towns Road, near Templar’s Square Centre. It was as good a place as any, she thought. She found a space in the busy car park, then got out of the Nissan holding a tiny handbag that looked the part. She left the key in the ignition, closed the car door, took the spare key from her handbag and used the remote to clunk the central locking. Then she walked away from the Nissan and across the car park towards the nearby shops. She hadn’t gone twenty paces before she began to notice men checking out the Daisy Dukes and the tight T-shirt.

  Who needs a red dress?

  Twenty minutes later she returned to the Nissan, laden with bags of groceries. Rather than try to open the car, she put down the bags and took out her phone. It was time to spring the trap.

  He answered on the fourth ring. ‘Kev’s Keys.’

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Kate said, putting on a flustered damsel-in-distress voice. ‘Can you help me? My car’s locked itself with the keys inside. I’m on my own and I don’t know what to do.’

  In his reassuring manly way, Kev reeled off a few questions about the car, then asked where she was. He told her he was just finishing up a job in Rose Hill and would be with her within half an hour or so. She thanked him profusely, then tucked the phone away and leaned against the car to wait. The afternoon sun was still warm, so at least she wouldn’t freeze to death in the skimpy shorts.

  A few people passed by as she stood waiting. Guys with their families in tow couldn’t give her more than a sideways peek, but a couple of men on their own deliberately veered close to have a better look at her, as if some magnetic force was dragging them off course. ‘You all right, love?’ one of them asked with a grin. She just smiled and said she was waiting for someone. The last thing she needed now was another knight in shining armour getting in the way.

  Soon afterwards, a small van turned into the car park and rolled up towards her. It was bright green, with aftermarket alloys and tinted windows. On the side was a cartoon-style graphic with the legend KEV THE KEY, and underneath LOCKED OUT? GIVE KEV A SHOUT.

  Kate made a big show of gratitude when he got out of the van. The spare car key was still hidden in her handbag, but Kev didn’t need to know that. His eyes bugged at the sight of the blonde in the denim shorts and tight T-shirt who’d called him out, but so far he wasn’t acting any differently from any of the other guys who’d clocked her in her Daisy Duke outfit. With all the strutting ‘just doing my job, Ma’am’ modesty of a true hero, he set about tearing his gaze off her chest and attending to the task in hand.

  She watched him as he got down to work. Like in his picture, he was a squat guy with thick arms and about twenty years’ worth of serious lager drinking invested into his overhanging belly. Same faded blue tattoos. He’d maybe gained a few pounds since the holiday snap Susan Tribe had shown Kate. But one difference jumped out at her.

  No wedding ring. Maybe he took it off for working on locks. Or maybe he had other reasons. While he was working with his back to her, Kate took out her phone and activated the video camera and positioned it on top of one of her shopping bags, making sure it was pointing in the right direction and discreetly covered.

  Whatever else he might be, Kev was a pretty useful locksmith and he got the car open in minutes. He also had the good grace not to mention that a rusted pile of junk like this was hardly worth fixing. ‘There you go,’ he said, popping the locks as she gushed with gratitude. ‘All done.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘You’re welcome, love.’ He grinned. His gaze was doing a little tour of her body.

  ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘That’ll be seventy five quid.’

  Kate already knew what he charged, but she affected a look of shocked surprise. ‘Oh – but I don’t have that much cash,’ she lied. ‘I’ll have to write you a cheque.’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry, love. The real stuff only. No cheques, no cards. That’s the deal. Terms and conditions, you know?’

  She’d known that, too. ‘But I only have a twenty,’ she said plaintively. ‘I’d go to the cashpoint for the rest, but I’m right on my overdraft limit.’

  He smirked, like that wasn’t his problem.

  She frowned, as if thinking hard. ‘I’d have to withdraw it from the building society. It’s shut now. How about I meet you here tomorrow with the money?’

  ‘Sorry, flowerpot. Doesn’t work like that.’

  Flowerpot. ‘Then what am I going to do?’ Kate said, affecting a worried look.

  Kev gravely pondered the matter for a moment, then cocked an eyebrow. He glanced about the car park, which had gradually become emptier over the last few minutes. The nearest people were forty yards away, with their backs turned. Kev rolled his eyes sideways at the van. ‘Maybe we could come to some kind of agreement,’ he said in a knowing sort of voice.

  Here we go, she thought. ‘What kind of agreement?’

  Kev glanced left, then right, as if to double-check that nobody was watching. Then he reached a hand between his legs and cupped his groin in a slow squeeze, scrunching it around in a circular motion as a big smile spread over his face.

  That was going to look great on video, Kate thought.

  Kev grinned more broadly. He jerked his chin at the van. ‘Case of suck it and see,’ he said in a kind of growl. ‘Maybe then I’ll settle for the twenty. Or if you’re really good, I’ll let you off the whole whack. How’s that sound?’

  How it sounded was like was a line Kev wasn’t using for the first time. I
n fact, he sounded very practised indeed. Even though she’d played out all the possible scenarios in her mind and was theoretically prepared for the worst, the grossness of his proposition and the look on his face made Kate want to vomit. Either that, or kick him in the balls. The professional decoy in action.

  But she had a third option, one she’d planned from the start. She reached into her bag and took out the sheaf of notes, rolled up in a rubber band. Expenses money, courtesy of Susan Tribe. ‘Well, look what I found. Seventy-five quid exactly. Too bad, arsehole.’ She flung the money at him, and it bounced off his chest and fell to the ground. He was staring at her, colour rising in his cheeks.

  Kate snatched her shopping bags and threw them in the back of the Nissan, tore open the driver’s door and went to jump in behind the wheel.

  ‘Hey. Hey.’ Face flushed purple, Kev grabbed at her arm. His fist closed on her wrist in a strong grip, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her. Maybe he didn’t even care about the CCTV cameras overlooking the car park. His blood was up. He might do anything to her. She twisted violently away from him and managed to snatch her arm free.

  ‘You fucking little tease.’

  ‘Get lost, pervert.’ Kate slammed the car door, nearly trapping his fingers in it. She twisted the ignition into life, stamped on the accelerator and the little car took off with a jerk and a squeal. Her heart was pounding hard and fast as she sped away across the car park and left him standing there with his fists clenched and the cash on the ground at his feet. She reached the exit. As she joined the traffic, she reached breathlessly back towards the rear seat for the phone in her shopping bag. It was still recording. She turned it off, knowing she must have caught a good segment of what had happened on video. Certainly enough. Susan Tribe was going to get her money’s worth, although she wasn’t going to like it.

  I can’t do this any more, Kate thought. That was the last.