Chapters (130)
- Cover
- FIND THEM DEAD
- Dedication page
- Maps
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- FOUR MONTHS LATER
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- GLOSSARY
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- NOW A MAJOR ITV SERIES
- I FOLLOW YOU
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- DISCOVER THE ROY GRACE BOOKS
- FIND THEM DEAD
- The Detective Superintendent Roy Grace books in order
- Also by Peter James
Georgie Maclean’s sports watch had frozen. The lights at the pedestrian crossing she took most mornings over the busy road to the seafront were red, against her, as they usually were. But for some moments she was fixated on her watch. She’d been running fast, on course for a personal best – and then the damned watch crashed.
No, don’t do this to me!
These lights were the slowest in the world. They took forever to change. They messed up her times for her run when she missed them, forcing her to wait, jogging on the spot to keep warm in the freezing early-morning air, with traffic streaming past too fast to risk a dash between the vehicles, almost all of them way exceeding the speed limit.
She stared at her fancy new running watch, silently pleading with it, the all-singing, all-dancing, top-of-the-range model that seemed to do everything but tell the time, and which wasn’t doing any of those other things either. Right now, it was a useless big shiny red-and-black bracelet on her wrist.
All she had wanted was something to replace her trusted old sports watch that had died, something that had a heart-rate function and GPS that would connect her to the app RunMaster. The salesman in the sports shop had assured her this one had more computing power in it than NASA when they put the first man on the moon. ‘Seriously, do I need that just for a running watch?’ she’d asked him. ‘Seriously, you do,’ he’d assured her, solemnly.
Now she was seriously pissed off. As she finally got a green and ran out into the road, she noticed too late the black Porsche. The driver hadn’t seen the lights were now red, against the traffic. The driver with fancy sunglasses who wasn’t even looking at the road.
She froze. Flung her arms, protectively, around the tiny bump growing inside her.
3
Friday 7 December
Marcus Valentine was irritated by what part of I have to go, I have an emergency operation, Claire didn’t understand.
He’d been besotted with her the very first time he’d seen her. It was when he’d attended management development training she’d delivered at the hospital, the year after he’d moved to this island to start his new life as a consultant gynae-oncologist. She was tall, willowy, beautiful and always smiling. Although blonde, she’d reminded him so much of the girl he’d been infatuated with as a teenager – Lynette.
He would always remember the first time he’d seen Lynette on that perfect mid-summer Saturday afternoon. He was sixteen, lying in long grass behind a bush, out of sight of teachers, smoking illicitly with a bunch of schoolmates, all of them skiving off from cricket. Jason Donovan had been playing on a radio one of them had brought along. ‘Sealed With a Kiss’.
When an apparition had appeared across the field.