Chapter 41

After they had finished, Jessica unravelled herself from his embrace, pulled up her tights and started to tidy herself up; all the time avoiding his eyes.

Unsure, Priest zipped himself up and perched on the end of the desk watching her. From an expensive-looking bag on the floor, she had produced a small mirror and went about busying herself with her hair, although there wasn’t much wrong with it from Priest’s perspective. One side was a little ruffled from where he had slid his hand through it in the moment of climax – the point at which she had opened her eyes, albeit briefly. In that moment he thought he had seen something – evidence of the bond she had so vehemently denied.

Now the moment had passed and the CEO of Ellinder Pharmaceuticals had reappeared. The barriers were back up.

‘I have a meeting in fifteen minutes,’ she announced.

‘You want me to leave?’

She replaced the mirror and retrieved a lip balm. This was applied sparingly – as if the need for it in itself represented the most reluctant of concessions – and then also replaced.

‘I have a meeting in fifteen minutes,’ she repeated.

Priest scratched the back of his head, nonplussed at the suddenness of her metamorphosis from the lustful vixen who had clawed at his back to the cold, detached woman who was now holding the office door open, waiting for him to leave.

‘OK,’ Priest conceded. ‘Can I at least see you again?’

He walked to the door, stopping just short. He wanted to kiss her but everything about the way she was poised warned against it.

‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll call you.’

Back in his office, Priest found Georgie in a state of considerable excitement.

‘Look,’ she said, guiding him to her computer monitor and sitting him in her chair. She leant across him and fiddled with the mouse. She had her hair tied back and was wearing a sleeveless blouse; her freckly arm brushed against his cheek. He wondered if he smelt of sex.

‘Watch,’ she instructed.

She had found the YouTube clip of his chase down the dual carriageway taken from the perspective of the dash cam. The scene played out in the same way Rowlinson had showed him with the traffic proceeding in an ordinary manner until Georgie took control of the slide bar at the bottom of the screen.

So far, the video had been viewed over a thousand times and received nearly two hundred ‘likes’.

‘If we stop it fifty-three seconds in . . .’ she explained, clicking the mouse at exactly the right point. Priest didn’t see anything particularly out of place to begin with until she drew his attention to the top right of the screen.

‘That’s the person I was chasing!’ Priest exclaimed.