by Zoe Sharp
The dog was massive. I didn’t realise just how big until it stood up. Up until that point I’d thought it was already on its feet. I began to back away, moving carefully, not straightening up in case the animal took me as more of a threat than it did already.
I kept moving backwards until I was just about in the centre of the workshop. The dog followed me out, head low, hackles up, still growling. As it came out into the light I could see it was a Rottweiler bitch wearing a chain collar around its enormous neck. She moved with amazing delicacy for her bulk, hinting at speed and agility as well as sheer muscle. The eyes gleamed with a shifty intelligence.
I backed past the partly constructed frame and snatched up a section of tubing, just in case. The dog shook its head just once, jangling the collar, as if to tell me that such a puny weapon wasn’t going to do me much good.
Behind me, the main door opened suddenly. I half turned so I could still keep my eye on the Rottweiler as Gleet stepped through. He stopped, saw me poised to take on his guard dog and almost smiled. Just for a moment it crossed my mind that he wasn’t going to call her off, then he clicked his fingers.
It was like he’d flicked a switch. The dog forgot all about me and trotted over to his side, butting against his thigh with her mammoth flat skull.
“I see you’ve met my Queenie,” he said, leaning down to ruffle her ears. The dog squeezed her eyes shut and yawned in pleasure, leaning against him. Even Gleet had to brace himself to take her weight.
I slowly put down the tubing and allowed myself to uncoil.
“We were just getting acquainted.”
“There’s no harm in her,” Gleet said, “if you don’t cause no trouble, like.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said dryly.
Gleet gave a grunt in reply and pushed the door all the way open. The dog sat down where she was and watched me carefully, just in case, barely turning her head as William and the tall Aprilia rider in the race-replica leathers half-pushed, half-dragged the remains of my bike into the workshop.
The gallant little Suzuki was looking pretty sorry for itself. Ignoring Queenie I hurried across for a closer look. The left-hand side of the fairing was wrecked, half of the clutch lever was broken off and one mirror was dangling. The whole of the plastic bodywork around the rear lights was smashed away, too. But that hadn’t happened out in the yard.
“It’s stuck in gear,” William said, waving a hand towards the locked-up rear wheel. “The gear-lever must have snapped off when you hit the wall.”
“Shit,” I muttered. Until then I’d fostered the vain hope that the Suzuki might still be rideable.
Gleet leaned across the seat and had a look. “Give me five minutes and I’ll cobble you something together,” he said, brusque. “It’ll get you home, if nothing else.”
“Thank you,” I said, surprised. Expressing my gratitude to his family was getting to be a habit, so while I was at it I added, “Your sister’s a bit handy with that crossbow.”
Gleet shrugged as he wheeled the welder over. “Yeah, well. They took away her shotgun licence,” he said, like that explained it.
He moved around the workshop, rooting through a box of spare bits for some square-section tubing he could graft on, then choosing clamps to hold it in place while he tacked it all together.
Meantime, I was aware of the scrutiny from the tall biker I’d seen with William and Paxo earlier.
“So you’re Charlie Fox,” he said. He had a soft voice that seemed given easily to mockery.
I didn’t reply to that one. There wasn’t much I could say other than to agree with him.
He flicked his eyes to the bike, then back to me. They were very blue, and intense with it. “Somebody doesn’t like you, Charlie,” he said.
“Hmm,” I said, thinking of my earlier ejection, “I get a lot of that.”
He almost smiled. “So who have you been upsetting?” he asked. “Or do you just have a confrontational personality?”
“Well, look on the bright side,” I threw back, reckless. “I haven’t hit you yet.”
William’s face creased into a big smile. “I like this girl,” he said.
The other biker glanced across at him, frowning. “Yes, but that’s no reason,” he said, cryptic.
“True,” William agreed gravely.
I didn’t ask what they were discussing and they didn’t seem inclined to expand. At that moment the workshop door opened again and Paxo walked in. He took his helmet off and shook himself like a dog, scattering water off his leathers in all directions. Even his normally spiky hair looked bedraggled.
“Pigging weather! There’s no sign of him, Daz,” he said to the tall biker. “We’ve been a few miles in every direction but he’s long gone.”
“Never mind,” Daz said. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”
“Considering it’s probably the same van that went after your mate Slick, I don’t think chasing after it on bikes was a good idea to start with, do you?” I said mildly. “What were you planning on doing if you caught up with it, anyway?”
Paxo scowled at me, but Daz silenced whatever snappy comment he’d been about to make with a single look.
“We don’t know who was chasing you,” he said carefully, “and we don’t know what hit Slick, either – or why. It could just be one of those freak accidents and freak coincidences.”
“Come off it,” I said, letting the frustration show through. “What was Slick up to the day he died, Daz? If he was racing then why the hell was he doing it with a pillion passenger? You running a handicap system all of a sudden?”
“Of course not.” Daz’s eyes flicked in the direction of the others as he hurried to cover the slip. “I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“Of course you don’t,” I agreed tiredly. “Funny that, when it’s not exactly a secret that the Devil’s Bridge Club have been road racing up and down the Lune valley all year. Are you planning on disbanding now that Slick’s dead, or are you just going to wait until the cops catch up with you?”
Daz looked startled for a moment, then he took a deep breath, letting it out down his nose. The silence was broken by Gleet belting something with a lump hammer on the far side of my bike. I thought of the Suzuki’s delicate aluminium alloy engine and tried not to wince.
“Slick wasn’t supposed to be doing anything on Sunday,” Daz said when Gleet stopped hammering. He spoke with low precision, like he was speaking through tightly clenched teeth. “He was just picking up your friend and bringing her along to Devil’s Bridge, that’s all.”
“Why?”
Daz opened his mouth, frowned sharply and closed it again. “I don’t know,” he said, too quickly. He gave me a slightly cold-edged smile. “Maybe he got lucky.”
I mentally ducked under the jibe and kept coming. “I don’t think so. Why was he knocked off?”
“Hell, I don’t know!” he tossed back. “That’s what William and Paxo were trying to find out when they came to the hospital, wasn’t it? And it could just have been an accident. Who says it was deliberate?”
“I would have thought tonight proves it wasn’t.” I nodded to where Gleet was fiddling with my bike. “Besides, I spoke to Clare just before she went into theatre,” I said, not adding that she’d since changed her mind. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with this Irish trip Slick was running, would it?”
Gleet chose that moment to strike an arc on the other side of the Suzuki. The workshop was abruptly bathed in an intense blue-white light. So it might have been my imagination or something bright and quick might really have flashed across behind Daz’s eyes.
He and William and Paxo had tensed, I saw, and that had nothing to do with the welding process going on nearby. Daz’s face closed down. He moved in, got right in my face and loomed over me.
“You want to back up a little, Charlie, and look at this from another direction,” he said tightly. “What makes you think that Slick was the target, huh? It could have been your mate
who was the one they were after and Slick just got in the way.” He stepped back and delivered his parting shot. “And I’d watch my step if I were you, Charlie, because it looks like you’re next.”
Ten
As soon as Gleet had finished his makeshift repairs he wheeled the Suzuki back out into the yard for me to leave. It was clear that none of them wanted me to hang around and I wasn’t keen on the idea myself.
“Looks like a dog’s breakfast, but it should get you home, like,” Gleet said shortly, nodding to his handiwork. “Just don’t tell anyone who done it, OK? I got a reputation to think of.”
I agreed solemnly not to say a word and he almost smiled at me. Almost.
The gear lever now consisted of one piece of tubing rammed onto the broken shaft and another shorter piece welded on at right-angles to form a foot peg. It wasn’t exactly pretty but it would do the job.
It was very dark outside now but the rain had eased off to a persistent drizzle. Behind the barn the sky glowed orange from the bonfire that burned on, undeterred by the weather. Most of the onlookers who’d gathered to watch my arrival had gone back to stand around it. Only a few of the nosier ones still remained and I was surprised to see that Tess was among them.
She had abandoned her little girl to someone else’s care and, as I swung my leg over the Suzuki, she came forwards to speak to me. I waited to hear what she had to say before I tried kicking the bike into life. I wasn’t sure the engine would still turn over after all it had been through and the fewer witnesses to my struggles the better.
As it was, she glared at Gleet and the others until they reluctantly moved away. She waited until they had all disappeared through the gate out of the yard before she turned her attention back to me.
“Why did you come?” she asked then, abrupt. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Don’t tell me you were another of Slick’s bits on the side?”
I tried to remind myself that grief can make you say things you might otherwise regret.
“Of course I wasn’t, Tess,” I said, keeping my voice reasonable. “I just came to find out what he was up to.”
She eyed me for a moment. “So you don’t believe that he was knocking off that blonde tart?” she asked, her voice suddenly more uncertain.
I bit my tongue and shook my head, reasoning that a smack in the mouth was not designed to make Tess more forthcoming.
“Not for a moment,” I said. She looked so relieved I didn’t add that my certainty was more down to belief in Clare’s good taste than in the morals of a man who made an alley cat look positively choosy.
“You’re about the only one here who don’t believe it,” Tess said gloomily, twisting at the rings she was wearing. She had them just about to the first joint on every finger. “God knows what I’m goin’ to tell Ashley.”
The daughter, I remembered belatedly. Well, if she hadn’t wanted the little girl exposed to malicious gossip, I considered, she should have left her with a baby-sitter or a grandparent rather than bringing her to a biker’s wake.
“And now I know,” Tess said, her breath gushing out on a long sigh, “I can’t tell ’em.”
“What do you mean?”
She glanced at me, still looking miserable. “I found out tonight that Slick was just giving your mate a lift up to Devil’s Bridge. He wasn’t the one she was—”
She broke off, uncomfortable, giving me a sideways flicker of her eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
It was my turn to sigh. “Just spit it out, Tess,” I said tiredly. “I don’t believe Clare would ever cheat on Jacob, so just say your piece and get it over with.”
Her chin came up, defiant, like I’d asked for it. “Don’t think of it as cheatin’, so much,” she said and there was something a little sly about her now. “Think of it as tradin’ him in for a younger model . . .”
It took a beat before that one went in but it rocked me when it did.
“Jamie? You’ve got to be joking!” I managed. “Who the hell told you that.”
Tess didn’t reply directly but her eyes slid over towards the field where the wake had been held and I knew instantly who she meant.
Jamie himself.
I remembered her anger, which had turned to relief when he’d come over to speak to her earlier. Had he admitted that Slick was just playing taxi driver on his behalf?
Other smaller facts crowded in on me, jostling for position. Jamie’s familiarity with a house he hadn’t lived in for more than five years. The way the dogs hadn’t barked at him when he’d broken in in the middle of the night, like he was still a regular visitor despite his denials. Clare’s desperation for me to protect him in Ireland. Her lies about the day of the accident.
I saw again a picture of Jamie standing by the fire, toasting Slick as a friend and looking very like Jacob must have done when he was a young man. And I could well believe that anyone, even Clare, might have fallen for those good looks and that easygoing charm.
I glanced back at Tess and found her watching me speculatively.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I asked around about you,” she said. “You’ve got a name for gettin’ your teeth into something and not lettin’ go.” She moved in, put a hand on the sleeve of my jacket. “I’m just warnin’ you, friendly like, that you do that this time and you might not like what you find.”
***
I was tired enough not to bother trying to avoid the driveway alarm when I got back to Jacob and Clare’s place. The Suzuki had run like it was on its last legs, but it got me there. As I rolled down the driveway I leaned down and patted the crumpled side of its tank. Even if it died on me now, I could still coast into the yard.
When I put my feet down on the forecourt and cut the engine I half-expected Sean to have heard it and be waiting for me, but only silence greeted my arrival. Not even the usual frantic barking of the dogs. The house seemed to be in shadowed solitude and for a moment I was assailed by unformed fears.
Sean hadn’t been happy that I was intending to go to the wake with Sam, and Sam hadn’t helped by his gloating attitude when he’d turned up earlier. Sean had retreated into the cool, icily civil shell in the face of it. It was either that or deck him. Sam might not have crowed about it quite so much if he’d realised the fact.
I’d hurried Sam out of the house and tried not to worry about what I’d have to deal with when I got back. If it wasn’t for the Shogun still parked outside, I might almost have wondered if Sean had packed his bags and headed back down to King’s Langley. Almost. But Sean didn’t like quitting.
Even when the army had tried to lever him out of his career after the scandal of our affair had surfaced, he’d clung on with a tenacity that must have surprised them. It had taken a couple of years of shitty postings and near-suicidal operations before he’d finally bowed to the inevitable and got out while he could still do it on his feet.
And even then, he hadn’t let them beat him. Driven to succeed, he’d built up the close protection agency to its current level just by being better than the competition. I knew Sean hadn’t offered me a job for any other reason than because he believed I could meet his standards. I suppose events in Florida – however much a baptism of fire that had turned out to be – had proved I was up to it.
Now, as I put the bike away in the coach house and went inside, I was aware of a tightening in my shoulders. And it had very little to do with the prospect of explaining what had happened at the wake.
I found Sean slouched on the sofa in the living room, watching one of the satellite news channels. The reason for the lack of noise from the dogs became immediately apparent. The terrier was asleep on his lap and Bonneville, not to be outdone, was stretched out alongside him on the cushions with her head resting on his thigh. She was too old and arthritic to jump onto the sofa any more, so I knew Sean must have lifted her up there.
“Hi. I’m back,” I said unnecessarily.
There was a bottle of Jim B
eam and a glass on the low table in front of him. The cap was off and the bottle was half empty. I eyed it warily. I’d seen Sean drink before but I’d never seen it have any particular effect on him. I hoped this wasn’t going to be a first time.
He took one look at me and sat up suddenly, muting the sound on the TV.
“What happened?”
I gave him a tired smile. “Long story,” I said. I gestured to my leathers. “Just let me go and get changed first. I’m filthy and I’m soaked and—”
He stood up fast, tipping the terrier onto the floor. Before I knew it he’d grabbed my shoulders and turned my face into the light.