Trust No One. Alex Walters

everyone could see her. Kerridge and his cronies. The taxi driver. The clustered smokers.

      Then the lights swept by and she was back in darkness. Kerridge, Boyle and Morton were tracking back towards the hotel now, apparently oblivious to her presence. Beyond the car park, lower on the hill, she could see the flicker of more cars arriving.

      She paused by the car park fence, safe now in the night, waiting for her heart to stop pounding.

      Shit, she thought. I’m really not cut out for this.

      ‘Have you any real grounds to think so?’ Salter had asked a few days later when she’d first brought up her thoughts about Morton. She remembered Salter slumped back in the hotel armchair, his feet propped up on the coffee table. It was impressive, she thought, the way he managed to sound simultaneously both scathing and uninterested. As if he couldn’t quite be bothered to tell her what a stupid suggestion it was.

      She shrugged, then made a show of pouring herself another cup of coffee, ignoring Salter’s empty cup. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Just a hunch.’

      ‘Ah. A hunch.’ Salter rolled the word round in his mouth, his expression suggesting that he might be about to spit it out physically. ‘One of those.’

      ‘Woman’s intuition, Hugh. You know how it is. We’re just better at that kind of stuff.’ She smiled. ‘You lot have parallel parking instead.’