Page 9 of The Black Trilogy

In the end, I gave up and let my broken heart make the decision. I couldn’t risk anybody else getting hurt. I’d already lost my soul mate, and the thought of the others getting picked off one by one was something I couldn’t entertain.

I had to shut this down, but how?

My head throbbed, and I rubbed at my temples, trying to relieve the pressure. The events of the last fortnight were sucking me down like quicksand. I hadn’t felt so out of control of my own mind and body since I was a teenager. Back then, my husband taught me to take all the anger and fear and channel it into whatever was necessary to fix the problem, but this time I couldn’t see a solution.

Deep breaths.

Take deep breaths.

I forced myself to count to five on each inhale and exhale, but the weight on my chest only got heavier.

My husband’s voice echoed in my head, deep and gravelly, always so calm. He’d know what to do. He always did.

“It’s like a fire, Diamond. First you get it under control, then you put it out.”

He’d told me that more than once.

But I couldn’t extinguish it, not yet. To do that, I’d have to take out the source, and I didn’t have it in me right now. But I could stop fanning the flames.

How? By stopping the investigation, at least until I got my head straight and came up with a game plan that gave us a reasonable shot at winning.

I thought of what waited for me at home—the cops, the pity, and worst of all, the constant reminders of my husband. Memories lay everywhere in that place. I’d never get the space I needed to think things through there.

Soaked through from the rain, which was no longer a drizzle but a steady downpour, I got back into the car. Out of habit, I had my iPad in my handbag, and it only took a few minutes to log onto the server at work and use my administrator privileges to clear out the files relating to the investigation. That would put the brakes on things. They could stay in my personal cloud storage until my sanity returned.

As guilt ate away at me, I replaced them with a single document:

I have to leave. All this—I can’t deal with it right now. And I need you to put a hold on the investigation. I can’t tell you the reasons why, but I’m safe and I’ll be back to explain. I just need some time. Please. Look after each other, okay?

Looking back, it was a horrible thing to do, but at that time, I couldn’t see a better option. Making stupid decisions is what happens when your brain’s out of kilter.

Flawed logic told me that my friends would be upset, even more so when they couldn’t find me, but I preferred them upset to dead. I was doing the best thing for them; at least that was how I saw it.

With my heart a cold lump of lead, I turned off my red phone, started the engine, and set the navigation system for the airport.

It’s always darkest right before it goes pitch black.

CHAPTER 5

THE FLIGHT TO England was one of the more unpleasant ones I’ve taken. Okay, I’ll admit I’ve been spoiled over the past few years, first with business class and then my own jet, but that was only so I could deal with my never-ending stream of calls and emails. On the other hand, I’ve also taken military transport in some of the worst countries in the world, and half of those planes didn’t even have seats, let alone trolley service.

So when I say it was bad, that meant the flight sucked.

When I booked my ticket, the only seat left was in the middle of a row of three, near the back. I spent the eight-hour flight wedged between a snoring salesman with a body odour problem and a stomach the size of the national debt, and a teenager who only stopped playing computer games long enough to throw up into a paper bag.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, after he’d puked for the third time. “It happens every time I fly.”

Well, if it always happens, I’ve got a suggestion—don’t eat a super-sized McDonald’s in the departure lounge right before you get on the plane. I’d seen him doing exactly that.

Between that pair, the toddler behind me who reckoned he was the new David Beckham, and the bachelor party in front that managed to drink the plane dry of vodka before we got halfway over the Atlantic, I’d had enough. I was seriously regretting not stuffing my gun into a diplomatic pouch and bringing it along.

By the time we landed, the entire cast of Riverdance was holding a rehearsal in my head. As I only had hand luggage, I avoided the crush at the baggage carousel and half crawled, half sleepwalked over to the railway station to catch the Heathrow Express into West London. Morning or not, all I wanted to do was sleep, so I checked into some dive of a hotel on a backstreet in Bayswater.

I slept for most of the day, but not well. Six times, the headboard in the next room banging against the adjoining wall woke me, accompanied by the wild cries of a woman faking an orgasm. Yes, all through the morning and early afternoon. It takes a special kind of desperate to pop out for a little hanky panky along with your coffee and McMuffin, but I guess there’s a market for everything.

Finding a hotel that didn’t rent its rooms out by the hour jumped to the top of my to-do list.

By evening, I’d found a room smaller than my closet at home, having forked out an obscene amount of money for the privilege. At least I’d had lunch and stocked up on painkillers for my headache, as well as shopping for the essentials.

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