Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3)

by Jennifer Young

  Dad appeared on the far side of George Square after fifteen minutes, swinging along with a retired boxer’s lightness of step, and opening the door of the café just as I was finishing my coffee. An uncharacteristic pause on the threshold was marked by him casting his eyes around, as if to check I was alone. Who else was he expecting? Marcus? The blonde?

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Bella. Traffic.’ He slid into the seat opposite me and smiled, but it was a smile that masked a refusal to compromise.

  ‘I was early.’ I’d planned and replanned my strategy several times while I’d been waiting. My instinct was to go charging in, go straight for the jugular, just as he would have done in a similar situation. But I was learning from Marcus — a careful, thoughtful approach might achieve more, if only because it brought with it an element of surprise. ‘How were things at the club?’

  ‘Same old, same old.’ He stretched out a hand for the menu, and caught the waitress’s eye without difficulty. Dad was in his late fifties and his once-red hair was grey, but his smile could still turn Mum’s irritation away in a second, and he was handsome enough to attract admiring glances from women far younger than he was.

  ‘I’ll have a black coffee, doll. Make it a double shot, eh? And another for my girl.’ He twinkled a cheerful smile up at her before he turned back to me. ‘Okay, Bronte. What do you want to flutter your eyelashes at your old dad for today? Or shall I guess?’

  Yes, it was an indulgent smile, but it overlaid a mind made up. So, he was up for a fight. Okay, Dad. Let’s play. ‘Why don’t you guess?’

  ‘There’s only one thing on your young mind. You want to talk to me about this so-called boyfriend of yours.’

  I couldn’t read his mind. What had the blonde told him? What had Eilidh’s report been like? Was he genuinely ready to listen, or committed to shooting my plea down in flames? ‘I don’t think you should judge Marcus without meeting him. That’s all. It isn’t much to ask.’

  ‘I don’t need to meet him.’ He pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, rolled his shoulders, never took his eyes off me. ‘His record stands for itself. He’s damaged you once and I’ll make sure he never does it again.’

  God, the body language was negative, but had I expected anything else? ‘Eilidh’s met him. Did she tell you that?’

  His smile gave way, briefly, to a frown. ‘Aye, she mentioned it.’

  ‘She spent enough time chatting to him. What did she say?’

  He brushed her opinion aside, as if it had no value. That meant she hadn’t come back with what he expected of her. For the first time, I scented hope. ‘I’ll be the judge, not Eilidh. You’re my daughter. You’re precious to me. I can’t risk your happiness with a man like that.’

  Once again, my good intentions went up in smoke. An insult to Marcus was a personal slight to me. ‘A man like what?’

  He took time out to smile at the waitress when she brought the coffees, but the second she turned away, he was back in the fight. ‘Your last boyfriend abused you.’

  ‘It isn’t the same.’ My heart hammered at the memory of Eden.

  ‘He lied to you. He used your good nature for political advantage. He tried to kill you. That’s abuse. And he did it with the full knowledge and support of the man you’re now dating.’

  ‘No.’ I pushed my coffee cup away from me. My temper was rising, and I could see that Dad’s was, too. My personal Armageddon moved a step closer. ‘You misunderstand what happened. Of course he knew that Eden was seeing me.’

  ‘That’s enough, in my book.’

  ‘You think it was cynical. It looks that way. But they had no choice. They were trying to stop damage at the G8. They thought there might be rioting. People were hurt. They could have been killed.’ I was spouting exactly the sort of justification that Marcus used and that I never let him get away with. It was just as well he couldn’t hear me. I could imagine his lips curling up into that irresistible smile; I’d never hear the last of it. ‘Eden broke the rules without approval or permission or knowledge, and it was his fault. No-one else’s. Marcus didn’t know what he was doing until it was too late to stop him.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ he snapped. ‘They have managed to brainwash you, haven’t they?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous. No-one brainwashes me.’

  ‘You mind your language when talking to me, young lady. And you can listen, for once. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that it’s very convenient for the authorities that you find yourself hooked up with a policeman?’

  I shook my head in exasperation. ‘Convenience doesn’t come into it. You can keep your conspiracy theories. He lives near me. We’d have met that way, if we hadn’t met any other.’

  ‘Aye, that’ll be right. But what matters isn’t how you met. What matters is that he put you at risk.’

  Rigid in my uncomfortable chrome chair, I flattened my hands on the table, not daring to take my eyes from Dad’s, knowing he’d interpret it as a sign of weakness. ‘Wrong again. I put myself at risk because I wanted to talk to Eden. Marcus did his best to persuade me against it, and when I wouldn’t listen to him, he went with me.’ I stared down at my coffee cup. Fear recreated hell so vividly that I felt the acrid smell of smoke in my nostrils. There had been a time when I could think of the G8 summit with detachment, but it was long gone. I fought to control myself. If I lost my nerve now, I’d never persuade my family that Marcus could ever be right for me.

  ‘You never listen to anyone.’ A grim smile. The first crack. Dad had more respect for me than for anyone else in the family, because I stood up to him.

  The key thing was not to give him an inch. ‘Marcus saved my life that night. He risked his own to do it.’

  ‘Okay. You’re grateful to him. So am I. You can tell him that. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that obligation is a basis for a relationship. You owe him nothing.’

  ‘This isn’t about obligation. Marcus is a good man, even if you don’t approve of what he does. I didn’t come here to plead for your blessing. I want you to like him, but I don’t need you to.’

  ‘You’ll get my blessing when you find a man who’s good for you.’

  ‘I’ll decide who’s good for me. If I want the relationship to go on, it will. If I want to end it, I will. But it’ll be my choice. Not yours.’

  He picked up the tiny circle of shortbread that had arrived in the saucer of his cup of coffee, and snapped it in two. Regrouping. ‘All right. But make it an informed choice. Make sure you’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘You’re not a great judge of men, Bronte. You can’t deny that.’

  ‘I made one mistake and I’ve learned from it. That’s how life works.’ I tackled my own shortbread, not because I wanted it, but for something to do. Then I broke the half into half again, and one of the halves again, until the whole thing shattered into a pile of pale, gold crumbs on the table.

  ‘And have you thought about what he might want out of the relationship?’

  I lifted an eyebrow at him. ‘Pretty much the same as I do, I imagine.’

  ‘You’re in a position to make life pretty difficult for him and for the police if you wanted to. I told you that at the time. You could have sued the hell out of them. You still can. Had it occurred to you that it’s in his interests — and in the interests of the police — to keep you onside?’

  ‘Nonsense. I accepted a full and final financial settlement from them, and a very generous one at that. The matter’s closed.’

  Abandoning losing arguments one after the other like a gambler discarding his weakest cards, Dad folded his lips into an obstinate line. ‘And now you’re working with another radical charity. Maybe the police are interested in that. Leopards don’t change their spots. They used you once. They’ll use you again.’

  Now I’d heard it all. He hadn’t even bothered with the tired old English-protestant trope, just focussing on the complexities of Marcus’s job, about which he cou
ld know nothing.

  ‘Okay, Dad. I’m not going to convince you. You’ve come up with some creative theories about him. Let’s just see if you can come up with something creative in the way of dealing with it, shall we? Because I’m not going to change my mind for any of the reasons you’ve given me.’

  If anything, my mind was more firmly made up than it had been before. Dad responded in exactly the same way when he was challenged. He should have known.

  ‘I’m your father,’ he snapped at me, his reserves of sweet reason spent. ‘I’m responsible for your welfare. I’m responsible for your happiness.’

  ‘No, you aren’t. You brought me up to look after myself, and I’m glad you did. That’s what I’m doing, and I’m quite capable of it.’ I paused for a deep breath. ‘I don’t need your help right now, but if I ever do I won’t be too proud to ask for it. So, you can tell that girl to stop following me and get back to work.’

  He sat back and stared at me, a long hard stare. ‘What the hell are you talking about? What girl?’

  Fear snatched at my heels again, just when I thought I’d shaken it off. ‘That blonde girl who keeps following me. Eilidh saw her yesterday. She thought she looked like one of the girls who works in the office. But she didn’t know her name.’

  ‘Karen’s the only blonde,’ he said, half to himself. ‘She hasn’t been following anyone. She’s on holiday in Majorca. Who’s following you? Why?’

  ‘I thought it was you.’ A pity there was no shortbread left for me to crumble, no coffee left to drink. I picked up the cup anyway, and pretended to sip. ‘I thought it was just the kind of thing you’d do. Send someone to keep an eye on me.’

  ‘I should have done that before, perhaps, and you wouldn’t have got in the mess you got into.’ But his moment of regret soon passed, flared up into anger. ‘Tell me about it. What happened? When?’

  I felt much less brave, as I outlined who I’d seen, what had happened. ‘She’s just a kid. She couldn’t hurt me.’

  ‘She’d better not try!’

  ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll report it. Marcus will look after me.’

  ‘Has he seen her?’

  ‘No, he—’

  ‘Calls himself a policeman? I’m taking you straight back home with me, Bronte O’Hara, where I can look after you properly.’

  I pushed my chair back. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going back through to Edinburgh.’ At the last, my courage wavered. ‘But you can walk me across to the station, if you like. And I’ll call Marcus and get him to meet me at the other end.’

  ‘He’d better look after you,’ he said, gesturing for the bill. ‘But I warned you, Bronte. I warned you about getting mixed up with the police. And if any harm comes to you because of that man, I swear to you now, I’ll kill him.’

  Chapter 29

  You learned from your mistakes. Sitting in the security of Cas’s car, in full view of the café where the girl had headed, Celina pulled her scarf around her blonde hair as they waited. It was a pity there was no sun, because then she could have worn sunglasses without attracting unnecessary attention, but if there was any blessing in a grey Saturday in Glasgow, it was that there were so many people on the pavement that the girl would struggle to see her through the crowd. To any passer-by, she and Cas were just a couple in a car, waiting on a yellow line, flouting the law as comfortably as everyone else seemed to do.

  But the thought of the law, even as soft as this, unnerved her. ‘What happens if we get moved on?’

  Cas’s face was paler than usual, and he had no smiles for her. Familiar with his body, she read the tension in the way he held his arms straight out in front of him, clinging to the security of the steering wheel. ‘You get out and stick with her.’

  ‘What about you?’ she asked, in some trepidation. Edinburgh had been bad enough, but the centre of Glasgow was another matter entirely. Celina was a city girl, but fear and guilt and the strangeness of the voices around her had robbed her of her confidence in this busy, alien place.

  ‘I’ll keep driving round and come and find you. Whatever you do, don’t lose her. And whatever you do, don’t speak to anyone.’

  ‘What if she gets on the bus?’

  Cas squinted to the side of the station, where the weekend replacement bus services to Edinburgh shuttled in and away again. A long sigh escaped his lips. ‘You’ll have to follow her. Dougie says we can’t afford to lose her.’

  Celina tightened her nails in the palm of her hand, and looked again at the girl. She was in the window of the café, sitting at a table with an older man, and they were arguing. That was all she dared find out, before she turned her head away, in case one of them saw her. ‘Should I call you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Cas had spent a long time on the phone to Dougie that morning, and had stopped at a shopping centre outside Edinburgh to buy her a mobile phone. It wasn’t much of one, just a cheap handset with limited credit and only his number programmed into it. But it indicated that whatever Yer Man had had to say, things were moving.

  And not in the right direction. Cas’s dawn confession had turned her life in an instant, from mere bad dream into a nightmare with no prospect of awakening. Jan, dead and a killer. Cas, caught up in responsibility for it. Yer Man, pressing them to dispose of the only witnesses as if it were a foolproof method of keeping themselves out of prison.

  Her expression hardened. She cared about Cas in a way she hadn’t thought she would, but at the end of the day she had herself to look after. If she only knew the best way to do that. Maybe, after all, it was to do what they wanted her to. Maybe it was to keep tracking that girl until she was in a place where they could get rid of her. And, in the grim reality of Celina’s life, someone else’s enforced silence might be the only way out.

  Should she stick with Cas, and hope that he’d protect her when he failed to protect Jan? Or should she throw herself upon the uncertain mercy of strangers? There was a right way. There had to be. If she only knew what it was.

  ‘Do we have to do this?’ She didn’t look at him, but turned back to the girl.

  ‘Do what?’ He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about him?’ The girl’s boyfriend hadn’t had the selfless appeal of the woman, but she sensed that he, too, was set through with goodness. Neither of them deserved to die.

  ‘Dougie will take care of him.’

  So that meant now. It meant that, somehow, they were to get rid of the girl. Two lovers, unaware that they’d never meet again. ‘An accident?’

  ‘There’ll be a chance. Somehow. There has to be.’

  You had to gamble, you always had to gamble, but this time it was different. Survival wasn’t about taking a chance on poverty, leaping into the unknown, and hoping to get lucky. This was about living and dying, and there had been two deaths already. Death bred death, it seemed. Maybe that was inevitable. ‘Cas, I think you’re mad.’

  ‘Very possibly.’ He tightened his fingers on the wheel.

  ‘Seriously? He wants us to kill them—’

  ‘You don’t know what he’s like.’

  ‘He wants us to kill them, and you think that’s okay? Seriously? You don’t think we’re going to prison anyway?’ Reality choked her, and the tears came after it. If they sent her back to Poland, she’d survive somehow. She’d have control. But if she killed someone, or even helped someone else do it, they might lock her up and she might never get out. ‘Don’t you have a conscience? Don’t you?’

  He shot her a sour look. ‘I’d like the luxury of a conscience. We have no choice. You don’t understand about Dougie. He’s been in prison. He killed a man in a fight.’

  Celina transferred her attention to the café. The girl got up, the man with her. They both stopped in the doorway of the café and scanned the square. She shrank back. Maybe it wasn’t that they’d been clever earlier on. Maybe they’d just got lucky, because if the train had been running they’d
never have known where she was going, what station she might have got off at. But it had been easy to follow the bus along the motorway.

  The trouble with riding your luck was that, eventually, it ran out.

  Cas turned the key in the ignition. ‘That’s a traffic warden. He’ll move us on. Get out.’

  ‘But what if—?’

  ‘There’s money in the glove compartment. Take it, and keep me informed.’

  She opened the glove compartment. A ten pound note and a twenty. And a set of keys, unfamiliar to her, with a keyring bearing an enamelled badge of red and white stripes and the words Stoke City. She picked them all up. ‘What are these?’

  ‘We found them. They’re his keys.’

  ‘It’s lucky for him your friend doesn’t have them,’ she said, with venom.

  He revved the engine. ‘Hurry up. And don’t let the police catch you.’

  In the one act of defiance left to her, Celina snatched up the keys as she jumped out of the car, stopped by the roadside, and slipped them down a drain. When she looked up, free in this strange new world, Cas had slid the car out of its illegal parking space and moved it forward beside her. He was shaking his head at her, but she thought he was smiling.

  The girl and the man headed around the side of the station, to where the replacement buses stopped. The stance was empty. The girl checked her watch then hugged the man in a rather cool way, as if it was something that had to be done. Then they walked together into the busy station and he turned to leave her, with a few sharp words that looked like a warning. She got out her phone. Calling the boyfriend, no doubt.

  In a moment, she’d be on the bus and Celina could go back and find Cas, and they’d race back to Edinburgh. Then the pursuit would go on until somehow the girl, with or without her boyfriend in tow, found herself at their mercy. And then, if they weren’t already, they would certainly be damned.

  Celina made up her mind, a sudden bold decision. Cas might not think so, but the best way was to front up. It was surely better to go to prison for burglary than for murder, and maybe, at last, she’d persuaded him. He hadn’t stopped her taking those keys and had looked almost relieved when she’d disposed of them. She didn’t delude herself that he loved her, or that she was anything more to him than a woman to keep his bed warm and his body satisfied — a perk thrown to him by Yer Man, to keep his mind off his sins. But there had to be a chance that the little he did feel for her, on top of his conscience, might be greater than his fear of his violent, controlling friend.