by Zoe Sharp
“Don’t worry about me,” he said with a grim little smile. “Are you going to go back to the house and keep an eye on Jamie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But first there’s someone I’ve got to see as well.”
***
Sean didn’t ask questions and I didn’t fill him in on what I had planned. Instead I threaded the Suzuki through the traffic and cut through one of the side streets to bring me out close to the main police station. I parked the bike up in an inconspicuous alley nearby and walked in through the front door.
The officer on the desk took one look at my helmet and bike jacket and already had his hand out for my documents when I brought him up short with a demand to see one of his superiors. We had a brief stare-out competition while he decided whether to take me seriously or not. I won.
“Well, Charlie, this is an unexpected surprise,” Superintendent MacMillan said, rising from his chair a few minutes later as I was shown into his office. We were on a high floor with what amounted to a view, further away from the machine-gun chatter of a road drill breaking up part of Great John Street below.
He offered me his hand to shake, something he hadn’t done when he’d come to see me at the cottage. There he’d been on my terms. Here I was most definitely on his.
I hovered for a moment, came within a fraction of turning round and walking out again. Then I remembered Clare’s spiked figure and sat down abruptly. When I looked I found MacMillan watching me with that coolly calculating gaze of his, waiting for me to find my starting point.
That was another thing about MacMillan. Silences didn’t make him uncomfortable, however awkward others might find them. He would have sat there until doomsday and waited for me to speak if he thought it might be to his advantage.
“You remember Clare Elliot?” I asked but it was a rhetorical question.
“Of course.”
How could he not? Clare had been in the wrong place at the wrong time – my time, my place – and had nearly died for it. To my unending surprise both she and Jacob seemed to have forgiven me for that, even though I had yet to forgive myself.
“She was nearly killed yesterday,” I said. “On the back of Slick Grannell’s bike, on the road to Devil’s Bridge.”
“Ah.” MacMillan stood up. “Wait there,” he said and went out, not quite closing the door behind him.
I sat alone in the policeman’s office, staring at the wall behind the desk but not seeing it. I was seeing Clare and Jacob as I’d last seen them, on the terrace at the back of their house after a relaxed supper.
We’d sat and watched the local bat population scything through the midge swarms by the edge of the wood as the sun had gone down. My friends, happy and whole. And I saw how, whatever happened next, nothing was going to be the same again after this.
The door was pushed wider and I heard MacMillan come back in. He walked back round to his side of the desk, reading a typed report and frowning as he regained his seat and put the report down in front of him.
I cleared my throat. “Do you still need someone to infiltrate this road race gang?” I asked. “Because if so, I’m in.”
He leaned forwards and placed his elbows on the desktop, steepling his fingers together very precisely. He regarded me for a few long moments. I stared back at him and tried not to fidget.
“When I asked you to get involved in this, Charlie, it was solely because you were completely uninvolved,” he said. “Now you’re not. Now, I fear, it’s become personal.”
“Dead right it’s personal,” I said evenly. “Why else would I agree to this?”
“You do realise that there can’t be any favouritism here?”
“Favouritism?”
“If this Grannell character was indeed taking part in an illegal road race at the time of his death, then anyone connected to organising or taking part in these races is open to prosecution as an accessory,” he said.
I held his gaze steady and didn’t reply.
“At the moment,” he went on, tapping the report, “we can’t be certain exactly what happened. There was too much contamination of the scene by the other motorcyclists who arrived there before we did. Grannell and Miss Elliot were certainly hit by another vehicle, but as yet we don’t know if that actually caused the accident. We were hoping,” he added mildly, “that Miss Elliot herself might be able to help us.”
I thought of Clare’s confusion of this morning, compared to her apparent clarity of last night, and shook my head. “I doubt you’ll get much out of her,” I said carefully.
MacMillan was too self-contained to snort, but he let his breath out faster than normal through his nose. “Now there’s a surprise,” he murmured, “considering that, if she was a willing participant, she might also be liable.”
I felt my body stiffen, however much I tried to control it, and knew that MacMillan had seen it too.
“Whatever other game Slick was playing, he was just giving Clare a lift to Devil’s Bridge,” I bit out, ignoring the clamour of doubt at the back of my mind. “Nothing more than that.”
The policeman regarded me with a fraction of a smile. “You see?” he said gently, shaking his head. “You’re much too close to this to be objective, Charlie. I can’t use you.”
I stuck my open hands up in front of me to indicate surrender, stood abruptly and turned on my heel. I was halfway through the doorway when MacMillan’s voice halted me.
“We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye in the past, Charlie, but I hope you have enough respect for me to listen to some advice,” he said quietly. “Stay out of this.”
There was finality in his tone. No second chances. I ducked my head back round the door and gave him a tight little smile.
“That’s always been my trouble, Superintendent,” I said. “I’m really bad at taking advice.”
Five
I rode straight from my abortive interview with MacMillan back to Jacob and Clare’s. All the way I ran my conversation with the policeman over in my head. I didn’t like it any better the fourth or fifth time than I had the first.
Bearing in mind Jamie’s comment about digging in the alarm sensor, I made particular attempts to ride round anything on the driveway that I thought might be a likely candidate. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe I wanted to check the dogs’ reaction, or maybe I wanted to catch Jamie doing something he shouldn’t when he thought he had the place to himself.
In the event, it wasn’t Jamie I had to worry about.
His Honda was parked up at a rakish angle outside the house. No surprise there. But what I wasn’t expecting was a big square Mercedes saloon to be lying alongside it.
The front door was open and as soon as I shut off the Suzuki’s engine I could hear the racket the dogs were making. Just for a moment I hesitated over what I might be walking into, then anger got the better of my judgement.
I left my helmet hooked over one of the Suzuki’s mirrors and went straight into the house with no further hesitation. I ignored the dogs who were going ballistic behind the closed kitchen door and headed straight for the study, where the noise was of a different and more human nature.
I nudged the door open and found a middle-aged woman was just in the middle of sweeping piles of paperwork off Jacob’s desk onto the floor and looking like she was enjoying her work.
Jamie was standing near the fireplace, looking unusually defensive, with his hands rammed in his pockets like he’d been told not to touch anything. I shot him a vicious look. When he saw me his face went into a kind of shameful spasm. He was not, I realised at that moment, an entirely willing participant in this enterprise.
“Charlie!” he said quickly. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
The woman’s head snapped up, her eyes glittering.
“And who in hell’s name are you?” she demanded and, not waiting for an answer, “Get the hell out of my house!”
She had a deep slightly husky voice that might have been attractive without the harsh note now flattening it.
Her face was strong, full of character, mapped by fine thread veins under the surface of her skin.
“Your house?” I said mildly, not moving. I’d never met Jacob’s ex-wife but in this case I didn’t think I needed a formal introduction. “I don’t think so.”
For a moment Isobel Nash glared at me. Her gaze had turned calculating now, flicking from me to her son and back again. She might have been weighing up the possibilities of forcibly ejecting me and realising that Jamie probably wasn’t going to be any help in the matter. She looked physically strong enough to consider doing the job herself but, if nothing else, she could see I had the best part of thirty years on her. Common sense prevailed.
After a moment she gave a slight nod, almost to herself, and seemed to relax. She dragged a battered pack of Dorchesters out of her pocket and shook one out before offering it halfheartedly in my direction. I shook my head. She shrugged as though I’d deliberately slighted her and lit up.
“Well now, there’s no reason we can’t be civilised about this,” she said as she exhaled her first deep drag. For someone who was pretending to be civilised she seemed to have been the cause of a lot of wanton destruction. I eyed it without comment as she perched on the corner of the desk, watching me intently through the smoke.
“Civilised about what?”
“Well, we’re both after the same thing,” she said carefully. She had suddenly dropped her voice and seemed to be making an effort to keep impatience at bay, as though I was being unutterably dense. “I expect we can come to some kind of arrangement.”
I had no idea what she was on about but Jamie’s face was a picture of horrified embarrassment. His eyes slid away over my shoulder like they wouldn’t stick.
“I expect we can,” I said evenly. “How about you leave right now and I don’t call the police. That civilised enough for you?”
She made a snorting sound that might have signified amusement. Jamie stood silent between us, equally ignored. I kept my eyes on Isobel’s face and her hands and paid him no attention.
“If it came to it I do have a right to be here,” she pointed out at last. “Legally I am, after all, still Jacob’s wife.”
That was news to me. I knew Jacob and Isobel had been separated since before I’d moved to Lancaster to begin with, but that didn’t mean they had ever actually jumped through the hoops and made it official. I tried to remember if he’d ever mentioned it but couldn’t bring it to mind. She still could be lying, though. Isobel struck me as the kind who would try to brazen out being caught in the wrong.
I inclined my head, mentally crossing my fingers.
“Technically, yes,” I agreed with just enough of a drawl to be insulting. “As far as the laws on trespass go, probably not. Would you care to put it to the test?”
Her eyes narrowed again at that. Her hair was dark and glossy, the colour younger than her face. She pursed her lips and let out a long stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “So Jacob’s left you to play guard dog, has he?” she said sharply. “Where is the old bastard, by the way?”
“Away,” I said. “In Ireland, as a matter of fact.”
She cast a glance towards Jamie but he didn’t catch it. I saw something flicker behind her eyes, fast as a flame, then it was gone and I was left wondering if I’d seen it at all.
“Well, that’s all right then.” She stood up and stubbed the last half of her cigarette out in a saucer containing foreign coins on the mantelpiece. “Last chance. Are you going to play ball or not?”
I shook my head.
She hid the faintest flicker of a smile and shrugged. “Well, if that’s your attitude, I can’t help you,” she said, then raised her voice and barked, “Eamonn!”
I heard a door open behind me and footsteps moving quickly down the flagged passageway from the living room. I’d time to turn as a slim man in a pale grey suit came bowling across the hallway and scooped me up as he came by with an ease that took me by surprise.
“Get rid of her,” Isobel instructed, her tone indifferent.
I heard Jamie begin to protest as I was borne away down the hall towards the front door. His mother told him to shut up in the same crushing kind of voice she must have been using since he was six.
I cursed myself for not expecting that Jacob’s wife might have brought some extra muscle. The man wasn’t a traditional heavy but he was deft and professional, nonetheless. He’d undoubtedly done this kind of thing before and the confines of the hallway was not where I wanted to find out how much. I went limp in his arms and waited for the space to make a stand.
When we reached the forecourt Eamonn let go with a jerk, so I was abruptly sent scattering across the mossy cobbles on my hands and knees. Thankful I was in my bike leathers, I rolled through the fall without injury and came back up on my feet.
I found myself facing a pale man with narrow pointed features and dark reddish hair parted at the side. He wasn’t wearing a tie and his shirt collar was open. The jacket of his suit had been intended for someone with wider shoulders, so the front bagged. Maybe he just liked to have plenty of room to manoeuvre, which was probably not a good sign.
He’d also been expecting the surprise manhandling to have thoroughly unnerved me. That it had clearly failed to do so must, I suspected, have been something of a disappointment to him. But there was a gleam of speculation and interest there, too, and that I did find disturbing.
As I watched, his tongue flipped out to wet his thin lips like he was trying to scent the faintest trace of my fear.
“Who sent you?” he demanded. He had a Northern Irish accent and his voice was all the more deadly for being so soft.
I thought of Clare. “None of your damned business,” I said.
“Oh but it is my business,” he said. “It is very much my business.” He smiled unpleasantly at me and moved in, putting his feet down with careful delicacy. I backed as he came on. “I want you to take a message back to your boss man – whoever he is,” he went on, still smiling. “You can tell them it was a nice try, but if they think that’s going to stop me, they can think again.”
Before I had time to ask what the hell he was on about, Eamonn had reached into his jacket and pulled a black cylinder out of his inside pocket. I recognised it instantly and all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
As he brought it out he flicked the cylinder downwards with enough force to deploy the two inner segments. They telescoped outwards with a smooth mechanical click and locked into place making a solid baton about a foot and a half long.
The baton was similar to the asps the police use, the kind I’d been trained on for crowd control when firearms were not an option. The kind that, if wielded skilfully, could inflict all manner of nasty damage on the human body. And Eamonn struck me as someone who would practice with an unbecoming zeal.
His smile grew broader but my eyes were drawn to the baton which he was lazily swinging in front of me. I flicked my glance outwards, trying not to become blinded to other threats but there weren’t any. It was just Eamonn and me.
“Now don’t you be worrying too much,” he said. “I’m only planning on breaking the one ankle, so you’ll still be able to ride away on that little bike of yours.”
When outnumbered or outgunned and retreat is not an option, the only thing left to do is attack. And the best defence against a long weapon like a baton is to get in close, to negate the effect and hamper them with the one thing they thought was going to put them ahead.
I launched straight in, timing it between the swipes like the kind of skipping game we used to play as kids. I knew I had to get under Eamonn’s guard and disable the arm holding the baton as fast as possible. Before it disabled me. But getting from safe distance to engagement meant passing through Eamonn’s kill zone and that was never going to be easy.
I feinted a short right to his throat. He jerked his head back automatically and I grabbed the arm holding the baton with my left hand. I ignored the baton itself, aiming to get my thumb jabbed in
hard to the radial nerve that sits on top of the forearm, a couple of inches below the elbow. I nearly made it, too.
Eamonn hadn’t been expecting me to go for him there and it took him a fraction longer to react than it might have done otherwise. But not long enough. He wrenched his arm free and danced back. The baton swept round in a slashing arc and cracked against the outside of my left knee.
If I hadn’t loosened his grip slightly, or been dressed for the possibility of falling off a motorbike, at speed onto tarmac, the blow would have put me on the ground and probably in the hospital. As it was, the lessened impact was partially absorbed by the closed-cell foam padding in my leathers. It stung like hell but it didn’t do anything permanent and I didn’t go down. With barely a break in stride I slapped Eamonn’s wrist out sideways and brought the outside of my right forearm round and up hard into the side of his face.