Free Dangerous Games by Sally Spencer Page B

colleagues in London would have immediately recognized – a smile which would have made most of them break out into a sweat. Because when she smiled like that, it meant her latest scheme was right on the track, and someone – quite possibly one of them – was about to have his life – or at least his career – seriously damaged.
    Rutter had finished checking the doors, and now tried the boot, to make sure that was locked too.
    He was a very careful man, Elizabeth Driver thought. A meticulous man. The sort of man who knew – down to the last penny – how much money there was in his bank account; who took his suits back to the dry cleaner’s
exactly
a month after he had last collected them from the same establishment; who would have checked that the water pipes in his new house were properly lagged before the ink had even had time to dry on the contract.
    So it was ironic that when such a careful man
did
make mistakes, they were such monumental ones. And Rutter had made not just one, but two.
    The first had been over his affair with Monika Paniatowski. It hadn’t been a mistake to
have
the affair, as far as Driver was concerned. There was nothing wrong with grabbing your pleasure where you could. No, the mistake had been to feel
guilty
about it, once it was over. Because guilt slowed you down – guilt could stop you doing what you wanted to do the next time an opportunity arose. And if you couldn’t do
exactly
what you wanted, then what was the point of life?
    As for his second mistake, he wasn’t even aware that he’d made it yet, though it was already of such proportions that it towered above the first one as an elephant does over a rabbit.
    This
second
mistake was to welcome his own destruction by allowing the enemy right into the heart of his camp – and not only allowing her in, but giving her a key to the front door.
    He had lowered his guard to her – this careful man – because he thought they shared a secret which bound her to him, and made her safe. He
thought
that she was writing a book about his life with Maria, an honest book which would serve as a penance for the way he had behaved to his blind wife before her murder. He was quite wrong about that, of course. Such a book would never be written.
    But there would be
a
book, and he, by making it possible for her to see into the workings of Central Lancs Police, would all unknowingly be helping her to write it. It would be a blockbuster of a book, exposing the Whitebridge force as not only incompetent, but also vastly corrupt, and her own newspaper had already promised to buy the serial rights.
    She had worried, for a while, that the Lancashire force might actually turn out to be not quite as corrupt and incompetent as she might have hoped, but she had long since left that concern behind her. After all, it was not the truth she was searching for, but something that had the
appearance
of being the truth – and the myriad authentic details that Rutter could feed her with would provide her with the ideal camouflage for a score of outrageous stories of her own concocting.
    She heard the key turn in the front door lock, and then Rutter stepping into the hallway.
    â€˜I’m in here, Bob,’ she called out.
    When he entered the living room, she inclined her head a little, so that he could kiss her lightly on the cheek.
    Later on in her book’s development, she thought, it might be necessary to go much further with their physical intimacy. Later on, it would probably be necessary to actually sleep with him.
    The prospect did not bother her. She’d gone to bed with dozens of men – some of them really quite repulsive – in the interests of her career. And Rutter was not repulsive at all. In fact, he was so dishy that she felt an urge to seduce him at that very moment.
    She forced herself to hold back. The role she was playing for Rutter’s benefit called for her to act more like a