Alias

by Cari Hunter

  “She brought you to the body,” Pryce says.

  “Yes.” There’s more, there has to be more, but I can’t patch it together, and she doesn’t try.

  “Fucking hell.” She stands, paces, and then turns to study her own footprints. We’re leaving evidence everywhere, and I can see the sheen of sweat on her face as she starts to consider the consequences. “I should report this. I have to call it in.”

  I, not we. She’s factored me out of this equation.

  “And say what?” I ask. “How the hell do you explain this?”

  “I don’t know.” For the first time since we met, she appears to be at a loss. “Just…just let me think.”

  She stares at the body. It’s unrecognisable, so bloated that it barely looks human. I crunch another Polo, and the heat of the peppermint helps to clear my head.

  “As soon as you make that phone call, we lose every advantage we have,” I say. “MMP might not be able to ID him, but they’ll have to ask questions at Hamer’s, and any officers on Hamer’s payroll will instantly go to ground.”

  She takes off her gloves and wipes her damp hands on her jeans. “What about an anonymous tip? It’s not unfeasible that someone might break in here and find him. I’m surprised they haven’t already.”

  I shake my head. “That keeps us out of the loop, but the knock-on effect will be identical.”

  “So, what? We pretend this never happened and leave him here?”

  “Yes,” I say, hating myself. “Until we figure something else out.”

  “And in the meantime, we give the culprits every opportunity to come back and clean house.”

  “They’ve had two weeks to do that. If they gave a shit about anyone finding him, they’d have moved him by now. Their witness is dead, to all intents I’m neutralised, and no one has reported Krzys missing.”

  “He’s in their warehouse,” she says. “It puts them high on the suspect list.”

  “Their abandoned, easily-accessible-to-smackheads warehouse,” I counter. “It almost works in their favour, in a way. ‘Your Honour, why would we be stupid enough to leave a body on our own turf? And why on earth would we be involved in a gangland slaying? We sell garden furniture and George Foreman Grills.’ Trying to dispose of him would put trace evidence in their vehicles and on their clothing, adding layer upon layer of complications, whereas this allows for a far cleaner getaway.”

  “Hmm,” she says. Calmer now, she’s put on a fresh pair of gloves and is running her hand over the wall. “The body doesn’t look as if it’s been moved.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  There are no drag marks, and the spray of bone fragments and bloody grey matter she’s just found on the breeze blocks are definitive proof that Krzys was murdered here.

  “How much of a rush do you think they were in?” she asks, still examining the rough concrete. “They had Jolanta to deal with, who was probably hysterical, and they’ve just killed a lad, so they’re likely to have been agitated off the scale as well.”

  “The bullet,” I say, catching on at last. “Shit. Have you got a spare glove?”

  Safely clad in nitrile, I join her in a fingertip search, starting with the wall directly behind the body and then branching out to account for a ricochet. It’s a painstaking task, made even more arduous by the possibility of someone discovering us, and hamstrung by inadequate light. I’m on my knees, chasing a glimmer of metal that turns out to be an errant bolt, when I hear Pryce exclaim and call my name. There’s a blinding flash as she takes a photo on her phone.

  “Have you got…aw, hell. I need a knife or something.” Her voice is muffled, half her upper body wedged into a tiny gap between a shelf and the wall.

  Knifeless, I scout around for alternatives and hand her a thin strip of rebar I find on the floor. “Any good?”

  She surfaces to give me a thumbs-up and delves back in. Five minutes of scratching, tapping, and swearing later, she yelps in pain and then in triumph, re-emerging with a bleeding thumb and the mushroomed remains of a small-calibre bullet.

  “Bloody hell,” I say as she drops the bullet into my gloved palm and sticks her thumb in her mouth. “How on earth did you spot it?”

  “I didn’t,” she says, around her wounded digit. “I spotted the dent it made when it pinged off the opposite shelf, and I took a wild guess.”

  I pull her thumb free and assess the damage. “I think you’ll live. Did you bleed on anything?”

  “No, I caught it in time. We need more photos and to get rid of these footprints.”

  As I use my own phone to document the scene, she seals the bullet into a tiny evidence bag and scuffs away the prints we’ve made. When she’s satisfied we’ve done as much as we can, she takes one last, troubled look at Krzys’s body. “We should go,” she says at length. “Before I change my mind.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  We don’t speak on the way back to Pryce’s hotel room. She concentrates on the roads, and I watch the streets pass by in streaks of rain and sodium orange. We’re at the Apollo roundabout when bright flashes of blue suddenly light up the car. She decelerates as a burst of sirens makes us both jump, but the ambulance tears past, heading for Manchester Royal, and we take the right toward Piccadilly instead.

  “Come up,” she says, once she’s parked in the underground car park and turned the engine off, and I nod despite the late hour, because I’d rather have this conversation now than go home and try to sleep on it.

  She makes coffee, doctoring it with generous slugs of whiskey and cream, and we sit on the sofa as the gas fire throws shadow puppets onto the ceiling and soothes the cold from our bones.

  “Any further thoughts?” she asks, midway through her mug. I assume she’s used the journey to bash her own ideas into shape and wants to avoid me tagging along on her coattails. A “you show me yours before I show you mine” sort of thing. So to speak. As it happens, though, I haven’t been idle either.

  “Could Krzys have known about the drugs?” I say. “It wasn’t obvious from the shop floor unless you knew what to look for, but what if he worked it out or saw something he shouldn’t have, and he tried to threaten Hamer’s with it in exchange for getting Jo out? Killing him just seems too extreme otherwise, especially if Jo wasn’t refusing the work at Copthorne.”

  “Might you have confided in him?” she asks. “You trusted him as a friend. Could you have recruited him unofficially to collect data for you?”

  “No, absolutely not. I wouldn’t have risked involving him like that. I wouldn’t have. We were mates, that’s all.”

  She’s watching me in that unique way she has, analysing every twitch of my body language, every nuance of my speech.

  “You think we were working together, the three of us, and I got them killed,” I say. No matter what, it always comes around to this sooner or later, and it’s easier for me to throw it into the mix than wait for her to blindside me with it. She lowers her gaze, but she doesn’t refute the accusation.

  “I have to consider all possible avenues. I wouldn’t be doing my job otherwise.”

  “I know. I understand.” I try for a smile, but my bottom lip trembles. Over the past couple of days we seemed to have forged a truce, however tentative, tiptoeing toward a conclusion where I’d actually been trying to help Jo and hadn’t been complicit in her death. The possibility that I fucked up, getting not just one but both of my best friends murdered, hits me all the harder as a result. And because of what? Greed? Stupidity? Naivety?

  Even worse is the way Pryce is looking at me now, clearly asking the same questions. She makes me feel ashamed of something I don’t even know I’ve done.

  “I want to go home,” I tell her. I close my eyes, and tears run down my face. I rub them away but then start to cry in earnest. “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t live in fucking limbo like this. I want to go home.”

  She offers me a tissue. “It’s gone four, and you probably shouldn’t be driving. Not in this state. Stay on
the sofa.”

  “No. Thanks, but no.” I grab my mug and lurch into the kitchen, bouncing off a stupidly situated floor-to-ceiling pillar as the alcohol, the late hour, and Krzys—mainly Krzys—steal the strength from my legs. The mug clatters into the sink, its handle breaking as it hits the plug.

  “Sorry. I’ll pay for it,” I tell her. A laugh bubbles up, bordering on hysterical. “Just add it to my tab.”

  She catches hold of my hand as I try to walk past her. “You’re not running a tab, Alis. How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t owe me anything.” Her fingers tighten on mine. “Sleep on the sofa. Then I’ll know you’re safe.”

  We’re only inches apart, so close I can feel the flutter of her breath on my cheek. She’s flushed from the fire and the whiskey, maybe from our proximity, and she’s beautiful, even at stupid o’clock under the harsh kitchen spotlights. Not that this latter detail is news to me, but the booze seems to have loosened the guard I’d set up around it.

  “They might be watching my flat,” I protest half-heartedly. “They’ll wonder why I’ve not come home.”

  “Let them wonder.” Her eyes are locked on mine, and there’s a challenge there, not just to the perps keeping their theoretical vigil, but to me, and that’s all the warning she gives me before her lips brush against mine in a tentative question and then press in with knee-buckling intensity when I do nothing to object.

  She forces me back against the counter, her hands tangled in my hair and her tongue flicking out to tease mine. I groan at the sensation and the absolute insanity of what’s happening, but there’s no fucking way I’m calling a stop, not when she’s tugging my T-shirt over my head and I’ve slid my hand between her jeans and the curve of her arse.

  “Not here,” I gasp, stilling her fingers on my bra clasp, and she acquiesces at once, leading me away from the window and back to the soft firelight of the living room.

  She keeps me standing while she unbuttons my jeans and slides my bra down and off. She kisses the arc of my cheekbone, my jaw, the roses on my tattoo, as her hands find my breasts and then my nipples. I smile when her teeth tug gently on my nose ring, the mild sting eased almost immediately by her tongue, and I bring her lips back to mine, tasting sweetness and whiskey and something unfamiliar that must be her.

  Lowering her head, she follows the path of her fingers with her mouth, eventually trailing a line south to the sensitive skin of my abdomen.

  “Sofa,” she says, and I nod, letting her work my jeans and my underwear over my hips. She kneels between my legs as I sit, and she unbuttons her shirt.

  “Take it off,” I tell her. I don’t recognise my own voice; it’s hoarse and tremulous and not a little reckless. I’d love to do the honours for her, but with the cast and my luck, I’d probably knock her unconscious.

  She shrugs out of her shirt and unfastens her bra, swaying forward so I can remove it completely. I leave it loose and suck at her breasts through the lace, until she moans low in her throat and wrenches it off. Without missing a beat, she nudges my thighs apart and dips her head to kiss just below my belly button. There’s a question in her eyes when she looks up at me, and I answer with a soft “please,” just before I feel her tongue push inside me.

  “Jesus, Pryce!”

  I grab the sofa, digging my nails into the leather, as she uses her fingers and her mouth to fuck me, her free hand tucked firmly beneath my backside to keep me in place. Not that I have any intention of escaping. It’s all I can do to keep breathing, especially when I feel her smiling against me. She settles in and takes her time, allowing me moments when I can focus enough to watch her, though these are outweighed by glorious periods where my toes curl and I communicate entirely through profanities.

  My feet somehow end up propped on the coffee table, and she uses the extra space to thrust into me, soothing the fierce drive of her fingers with the slippery warmth of her mouth. I come in an undignified spectacle of shuddering and convulsing, my heels clouting the table so hard that she turns to check whether I’ve broken anything. She lowers my stiff legs one by one and leans her head on my thigh, tracing patterns with her fingers, while I wait for the room to stop spinning.

  “Come here,” I say. I hook my fingers through her belt loops and guide her onto the sofa. Bless the Ducie Hotel management, they’ve chosen supersized sofas for their guest rooms, and when she’s got her jeans off she lies back, naked apart from her white cotton briefs, and beckons me to her.

  I straddle her obediently, brushing her sweaty hair from her forehead and then taking my time kissing her. Wound tighter than a spring, she’s less inclined to be leisurely, and it’s not long before she starts to squirm beneath me. As she murmurs encouragement, I ease my hand under the elastic of her briefs and slide two fingers inside her, a gradual slow glide that’s rewarded by a crook of her leg and the sight of her head falling back on the cushions. I pull back just as slowly, and her mouth opens in a soundless “oh.”

  Curled into the space she’s made for me, I rest my head on the curve of her breast and find a rhythm that makes her pant and rise to meet me. I move my head slightly, capturing a nipple between my lips and grazing it with my teeth, and she makes a noise I’d never have dreamed her capable of making as she comes hard and without warning.

  “Oh God.” She covers her face with a slack arm. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what?” I twist my fingers inside her, setting off another series of spasms that she rides out with a hedonistic sigh. “For doing this?”

  “No. Well, no. It’s just that I usually…” She licks her lips. She’s blushing to the tips of her ears, but she’s smiling. “I usually take longer.”

  I smile back at her. “I’m going to consider that a compliment.”

  “Do,” she says, all languid and limp, and not caring that we’ve probably ruined the sofa. “You definitely earned it.”

  * * *

  We add more whiskey and a few ill-advised beers to the growing list of ill-advised things we’ve done while most of the people in the city acted like responsible adults and went to bed. We do go to bed, but only to preserve the sofa’s integrity, and we don’t sleep until the din of the morning rush hour has subsided to a background drone.

  I wake alone, wrapped in sheets that still smell of her, my body aching pleasantly in some places and less pleasantly in others.

  “Fuck,” I whisper, holding a sticky palm to my sore head. That’s as profound a reaction as I can muster right now. I’m naked beneath the bedding, but my clothes from the previous night are in a neat pile on the bedside cabinet, along with a glass of water and two ibuprofen. I take the pills, drink the water, and hobble into the en suite for a shower, making enough noise to give Pryce fair warning that I’m alive and about to put in an appearance.

  I find her in the kitchen, nursing a mug of strong tea, her face as pale as the whitewashed walls.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey.” She gestures at the counter, where she’s arranged milk, sugar, and a mug.

  I opt for tea as well, hoping it’ll be kinder to my stomach lining, and then I sit opposite her at the table, offsetting my mug so the smell can’t reach me. I haven’t had tea since my mum died. It was the only thing she could taste at the end, and she drank it by the bucketful.

  “I didn’t hear you get up,” I say.

  “You were asleep.” The mug wobbles as she raises it, and her eyes are puffy. I’d lay the blame on a hangover and a very late night, if it weren’t for the crumpled tissue poking from her sleeve.

  “Pryce,” I begin, and shake my head. Jesus fucking Christ. I’ve spent a good part of the last six hours with my fingers buried in her, and I can’t even call her by her first name. “Look, what happened—”

  She holds up a hand to cut me off. “It was my fault. I started it.” She inhales deeply, and I see her fight to correct her posture, to insert the rod into her spine and jut out her chin. “And it should never have happened. I can’t—I don’t know what t
he hell I was thinking.”

  “Neither of us was thinking,” I say, trying to be reasonable. We were both consenting adults, when all’s said and done.

  “Are you sure about that?” she asks, in a tone that would curdle milk. The headache pounding behind my eyes puts everything on a two-second delay, and I’m still processing the question when she clarifies it for me. “Or did you fuck me for your ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card?”

  “Jesus!” I react more to the crudeness of her language than to what she actually said, but the latter hits me like a fist as she glares at me.

  “I’ve compromised everything, even more so than I already had. And you let me,” she says quietly.

  “No, I didn’t mean for that. That’s not why—Christ, I won’t tell a soul. I promise.” The words sound pathetic even to my own ears, and her answering laugh is short and wild.

  “It’s easy for you to say that now, Alis, but how can you know what you’ll do if this all goes badly for you?”

  “I wouldn’t tell anyone,” I insist. I’d get down on my knees and beg her to trust me if I thought it would make a difference. “Fucking hell, Pryce, I forgot everything else. I can forget about this.”

  She’s so unravelled that she almost looks hurt, but I can’t retract it. Better to let her think last night meant nothing, even if all I want to do is kiss her until she realises I’m lying.

  “We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” Her shoulders sag. She’s obviously exhausted, and she no longer seems to have the strength to be angry or bitter or anything much at all.

  We sit for a while, not talking, not drinking our tea. There’s a finality to the silence, as if she’s come to a decision and she’s waiting to see whether I work out what it is. I swap my tea for a glass of water, and stay by the window once I’ve drained it.

  “What do we do now?” I ask, because apparently, I’m a glutton for punishment and I need her to tell me she’s abandoning me and returning to Wales.

  “I can’t stay here,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “It might be better if you come clean about everything: what we’ve found, what we suspect, Krzys’s body. Perhaps the SMIU will be able to keep a lid on it and investigate from their side. Tell them I’ve been helping you”—her voice cracks and she shakes her head—“or tell them whatever you want. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”