She tried to get her head around that. If he really knew where she was, why hadn’t he just lain in wait for her? What did he have to gain by getting her stuck in the lift? If he wanted time to try to break in, why hadn’t he just waited until she went out?

Was she, in her panicked state, simply putting two and two together and getting five?

Maybe. Maybe not. She just didn’t know. So most of the day, yesterday, instead of going out, buying the Sunday papers and lounging in front of the television, as she would ordinarily have done, she sat here, in the same spot where she was now, watching the street below, passing the time by listening to one Spanish lesson after another on her headphones, pronouncing, and repeating, words and sentences out aloud.

It had been a foul Sunday, a south-westerly twisting off the English Channel, continuing to blast the rain on the pavement, the puddles, the parked cars, the passers-by.

And it was the cars and the passers-by that she was watching, like a hawk, through the rain that was still pelting down today. She checked all the parked cars and vans first thing, when she woke up. Only a couple had changed from the night before. It was a neighbourhood where there was insufficient street parking, so once people found a space, they tended to leave their cars until they really needed to go somewhere. Otherwise, the moment they drove off, another vehicle took their place, and when they came back they might have to park several streets away.

She’d had two visitors yesterday, a photographer from the Argus, whom she’d told on the entryphone to go away, and the caretaker, Tomasz, who had come to apologize, maybe concerned for his job and hoping she wouldn’t make a complaint about him if he was nice to her. He explained that vandals must have broken into the lift motor-room and tampered with the brake mechanism and electrics. Low-lifes, he said. He had found a couple of syringes in there. But he wasn’t able to explain convincingly to her why the alarm system, which should have rung through to his flat, had failed to do so. He assured her the lift company was working on it, but the damage the firemen had done meant it would be several days before it was working again.

She got rid of him as quickly as she could, in order to return to her vigil of watching the street.

She called her mother, but she said nothing about receiving any phone calls from anyone. Abby continued the lie that she was still in Australia and having a great time.

Sometimes text messages went astray, got sent to wrong numbers by mistake. Could this have been one?

I know where you are.

Possible.

Coming on top of the lift getting stuck, was she jumping to conclusions in her paranoid state? It was comforting to think that. But complacency was the one luxury she could not afford. She had gone into this knowing the risks involved. Knowing that she would only get away with it by living on her wits, 24/7, for however long it took.

The only thing that had made her smile yesterday was another of his lovely texts. This one said:

You don’t love a woman because she is

beautiful, but she is beautiful because you

love her.

She had replied:

It’s beauty that captures your attention -

personality which captures your heart.

She saw nothing untoward in the street all Sunday. No strangers watching her. No Ricky. Just the rain. Just people. Life going on.

Normal life.

Something she was – for just a short while longer, she promised herself – no longer a part of. But all that would be changing soon.

Rain rattled down on the roof and the van rocked in strong gusts of wind. Although he was well wrapped up, he was still cold in here, only daring to run the engine occasionally, not wanting to attract attention to himself. At least he had a comfortable mattress, books, a Starbucks nearby and music on his iPod. There was a public toilet close by on the promenade with an adequate washing facility and it was conveniently out of sight of any of the city’s CCTV cameras. Very definitely a public convenience.

He had once read a line in a book someone had given him which said, Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

The book was wrong, he thought. Sometimes revenge could be fun too. Just as much fun as sex.

The van still had the FOR SALE note written in red ink on a strip of brown cardboard stuck in its passenger-door window, although he had actually bought it, for three hundred and fifty pounds cash, over two weeks ago. He knew Abby was sharp, and had observed her checking the vehicles daily. No point in removing the sign and alerting her to any change. So if the previous owner got pissed off with people phoning, wanting to buy it, tough. He hadn’t bought it because he needed transport. He had bought it for the view. He could see every window of her flat from here.

It was the perfect parking spot. The van had a valid tax disc and MOT and residents’ parking sticker. All of them ran out in three months’ time.

By then he would be long gone.

It was the same every damn time. Whatever confidence Roy Grace felt when he set off to come to this impressive place deserted him when he actually arrived.

Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was just a fifteen-minute drive from his office. But in atmosphere, it was on a different planet. Strike that, he thought as drove past the raised barrier of the security gate, it was in a whole different universe.

It sat within a ragbag complex of buildings on the outskirts of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, housing the administration and key management for the five thousand officers and employees of the Sussex Police Force.

Two buildings stood out prominently. One, a three-storey, futuristic glass and brick structure, contained the Control Centre, the Crime Recording and Investigation Bureau, the Call Handling Centre and the Force Command Centre, as well as most of the computing hardware for the force. The other, an imposing redbrick Queen Anne mansion, once a private stately home and now a Grade 1 listed building, was what had given its name to the HQ.

Although conjoined to the ramshackle sprawl of car parks, single-storey pre-fabs, modern low-rise structures and one dark, windowless building, complete with a tall smokestack, which always reminded Grace of a Yorkshire textile mill, the mansion stood proudly aloof. Inside were housed the offices of the Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable and the Assistant Chief Constables, of whom Alison Vosper was one, together with their support staff, as well as a number of other senior officers working either temporarily or permanently out of these headquarters.

Grace found a bay for his Alfa Romeo, then he made his way to Alison Vosper’s office, which was on the ground floor at the front of the mansion. It had a view through a large sash window out on to a gravel driveway and a circular lawn beyond. It must be nice to work in a room like this, he thought, in this calm oasis, away from the cramped, characterless spaces of Sussex House. Sometimes he thought he might enjoy the responsibility – and the power trip that came with it – but then he would always wonder whether he could cope with the politics. Especially the damned, insidious, political correctness that the brass had to kowtow to a lot more than the ranks.

The ACC could be your new best friend one day and your worst enemy the next. It had seemed a long time since she had been anything but the latter to Grace, as he stood now in front of her desk, used to the fact that she rarely invited visitors to sit down, in order to keep meetings short and to the point.