Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3)

by Jay Stringer

  “This popped up in my saved searches last night.”

  She turned the computer around to face me and pushed it across the desk. I leaned forward to read the screen. It was one of the national newspapers, the one that prided itself on being left wing but was really just about selling its contributors’ books. The headline read, “The Night Before The War.” I scanned the page and found I was reading a diary-like first-person account of life inside Hobs Ford. It spoke of riot police running drills outside the front gate and settlers standing round campfires, singing folk songs. It all sounded very poetic and evocative, but it didn’t seem much like the settlement I’d seen the day before.

  Then I got to a part that I did recognize.

  The prodigal son pulls me to one side. His name is Eoin Miller, and he’s the middle child of one of the camp elders. His heroics are well known in these parts; only two years ago he pulled immigrants from a burning building after they were attacked by a racist group. He’s put his work in the city on hold to come stand with his people. He looks over at the police, tightly assembled in their shining helmets to resemble a battalion of Darth Vaders, and sets his jaw. “They want a war,” he says to me. “We’ll give them one, and the whole world will see it on TV.”

  I pushed the laptop away and swore under my breath. “That little shit.”

  “So you were there, then?”

  “My father got arrested. I had to go pick him up and drive him back.”

  “And putting your life on hold?” She made a show of closing her eyes to quote from memory. “They want a war, and we’re going to give it to them.”

  I waved it away. “Just some kid who wants to be a famous reporter. Probably thinks he can get a book deal or his name on an award.”

  I was playing it cool but I filed the information away for later. I was going to find a way to fuck with this kid for twisting my words like that. Last thing I wanted was to be turned into somebody’s hero. I’d ended up in hospital every time that had happened.

  She shuffled her documents into a neat pile and then zipped them into a slim leather case; she placed the case on top of the laptop and slipped the whole thing into a bag. She nodded and stood up, straightening out her shirt before slipping on her jacket.

  “How do I look?”

  You look great. “Ready to go. Business?”

  “Meeting with my casino guy at the airport. Then with my money men in Birmingham.”

  I stood up and lifted her bag off the desk, pulling it toward me. She stared at me for a second, trying to figure out what was going on.

  “You shouldn’t go.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s been a threat against you. We need to get you somewhere safe.”

  “When is there not a threat against me? I’m going to this meeting, whether you get out of my way or not.”

  I buckled. Maybe we were better off in the car anyway. I could tell her about the cartel on the move, and we could drive to her father’s house.

  Her car was shiny and red, and once we were inside, she started it by pressing a button on her set of keys.

  “Fancy. Does it talk too?”

  “Maybe I’ll let you chat to the navigation temptress later.”

  The engine’s low hum barely changed as we pulled away and out onto the road. It never rose above a mild purr, and I did my best not to look as impressed as I was. I’ve never been a car person, but this seemed more like magic than engineering.

  “So what’s going on?”

  She waited until we were out of Wolverhampton before asking, almost as if the whole city was going to listen in on our conversation. We’d taken the Willenhall Road and the Black Country Route before climbing onto the M6 Motorway, and the car’s engine finally burst into a roar as Gaines eased across into the far lane and opened up. When I didn’t answer straight away, she looked across at me and raised her eyebrows.

  “My leads on what happened at the hotel are dead. Literally.” I looked across at her. “The two bodies found after the hotel fire were Pepsi’s customers. A husband and wife. They’d ordered one of our girls for the night, and then rearranged at the last minute, our girl went to their place. The Bridge Tavern”

  “Okay.”

  “When Tony called me in to look at Jelly’s body, a hooker was there with him—but turns out it was just the wife playing the role of the drugged-out call girl. And damn well, too. If she wasn’t high she sure knew how to act like it. Anyway, once I found out who she really was, I started thinking it must have been she and her husband who murdered Jelly and Tony. So I went to their place, but they’d done a runner. And there was blood in their living room.”

  “We know whose?”

  “Maybe it was from one of them. More likely from Pepsi’s girl. Whatever happened, the husband and wife ended up dead in the fire.”

  “Do I know them?”

  “Craig and Maria Cartwright?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Right. Well, they must have been in on it with someone else. Or maybe they were in on it with Jelly and betrayed him when they got a sniff that the cartel would pay more money than you to identify the leak. But if they were trying to pull off a job like that, things went really wrong for them.”

  “Did they die in the fire? Or do you think they were already dead when it started?”

  “I don’t know, but the cops must, since they found the bodies. I’d ask Laura but she’s been suspended.”

  “What?”

  “Becker made out like it was because of her links to you, but I think he was just fishing. If they knew you and Laura were such good friends, they’d already have arrested you. Real reason is that she was at the hotel on the night of the fire and her boss knows.”

  Gaines slowed the car down for a second and shot me a look. “Why was she there?”

  “She helped me clean up the mess. So anyway. Whoever the Cartwrights were working with must have seen them as a loose end. But they were also my only decent lead. So I went to Jelly’s place instead, thinking he might have a backup of whatever information he had brought to the hotel. Found a hard drive, but it’s gone.”

  “Gone how?”

  Deep breath. I thought things over in my head. How much to hold back? How much to share? “There was someone else after it. Some scary old silver-haired guy named Branko. He’s working for the cartel. He’s shown up twice, once at Jelly’s shop and once at his flat, when I was there searching for the hard drive. I left the device with Matt Doncaster. You know him, from the sports hall? Anyway, the police nabbed me, and by the time they let me go, Branko had gotten to Matt.”

  I saw her worried look again, the one I’d seen back when this all started, tugging at the sides of her mouth in profile, but she kept her eyes on the road. What was it?

  “So now the cartel has the hard drive?”

  “I think so.”

  “Wait.” She paused as she slipped into the middle lane, between two trucks, to overtake a car, then back across into the outside lane. “So how do you know all this? Branko and the cartel?”

  “Your dad spoke to me and—”

  “Daddy knows about the leak?”

  Her voice rose higher than I’d ever heard it, the words said in the panicked tone of a teenager, and the car skidded across the fast lane. I called out about the traffic and she nodded, easing us into slower lanes of traffic, but she still looked rattled. I saw her hand drift to behind her ear between changing gears and absently scratch.

  And then I had it. The panic. The strange looks. The fear she was showing over the leak. I’d assumed Gaines wanted me to find the identity of the person leaking information. But now I realized what she’d wanted all along was whatever “proof” Jellyfish had supposedly left her under the bed at the hotel. And if that was true, there was only one place for my mind to go.

&
nbsp; “It’s you, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re the leak.”

  She clenched her jaw and narrowed her eyes but kept them on the road. Her head bobbed as if she was having a debate with herself, and it seemed to be one that she lost because her shoulders sagged and she nodded.

  “Yes.”

  Birmingham International Airport is a mistake. That’s the only sane explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with. Someone was paid a fortune to design and develop the complex, but somehow gave the builders the wrong set of plans. Or perhaps it was all a practical joke.

  Whatever happened, what you find when you drive to the airport is a huge, insane maze of concrete, asphalt, and steel dropped into the countryside southeast of the city.

  The access roads are a mess of one-way systems and roundabouts, split down the middle by a railway line that leads to the city. If you’re very lucky you can solve the puzzle and get to the airport at the center. If you’re even luckier you can figure out how to get to the Exhibition Center, a large complex of halls, hotels, and restaurants on the other side of the train tracks. It’s here that you’ll come to see American wrestling, Bruce Springsteen, or the ideal home exhibition.

  We sat in a car park overlooking the large lake anchoring the Exhibition Center. Gaines wasn’t crying but there were tears in her eyes as she spoke.

  “It was Laura,” she said. Her words were slow and measured, thought out. I wondered if she’d rehearsed this moment or had never expected to be called on it. “Back when that Polish guy was trying to move in, when the Mann brothers wanted to go to war with him. That’s when everything changed. I’d just taken over the business, still feeling my way in, and Laura came to the club. She was sitting drinking at the bar, waiting for someone to approach her. I’d seen that before from cops, so I thought I knew her game.”

  When I’d tried to imagine how and when Laura had sold out, that’s exactly the scene that had unfolded in my head. Laura sitting where Gaines would notice her, waiting to be approached, ready to sell out but wanting to be asked.

  “When I introduced myself, she smiled, like she’d been waiting. I figured I had her number. Comped her drinks and took her to the office to talk, see what deal she was after. This was around the time you turned up at the club, you remember? You didn’t remember me, so I got to mess with your head a little. I got a kick out of it, playing both the husband and wife. You and Laura play the same game in different ways.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re a lot like each other. Always thinking, overthinking. You wanted to work for me from the moment you met me, but you had to be worked on, wanted to play hard to get.”

  “And Laura?”

  “There was something else. A strange look, like there was a joke she was keeping to herself. I didn’t care, though. She offered to help me with the Polish guy and the Mann brothers. Said the Pole, what was his name, Tommy? Said Tommy worked for her, but he’d gone missing so now she was looking to offer it to me.” A shrug. “We made a deal. We worked both ways. She’d give me things and I’d give her things, and it worked.”

  “Yes.”

  “You ever read old spy novels?”

  “Just getting into reading, actually.”

  “I loved them when I was a teenager. It was the opposite of all those stupid girly books with pink covers and titles in italics. But I didn’t want to read crime books either because I’d seen enough of that growing up. Spy books were fun. There would be scenes where you thought it was going one way, but really it was going another. Like, the old guy would be talking about selling out to the KGB, but really he was getting the KGB agent to sell out to him.”

  “Laura turned you?”

  “The relationship changed. Or I was just slow to realize what it always had been, I guess. I figured out I was giving her more than she was giving me, and it wasn’t such a two-way street. A cop who gives information to a criminal—well, they’re just dirty. But a criminal who gives information to a cop? There’s no going back up that slope. I called her on it, and she laughed. Said, of course that’s how it was working, what else did I expect? She said I was her criminal informant, started whispering to me about being a witness, about protection, immunity.” She wriggled in her seat to face me. Now she’d started, she wanted to get it all out. A kettle blowing out steam. “You already know I never wanted any of this. I didn’t want to take over the business, none of it.”

  “At the time I thought you were loving it.”

  “You saw what I wanted you to see. What I wanted everyone to see. I had no choice once Daddy got sick. But Laura was offering me a way out. And we were working on ways of doing it that would still protect certain people. Daddy, Claire, you. The more I worked with the cartel, with other suppliers and families from other parts of the country, the more information I’d have and the more valuable I would be.”

  “But this deal you’re working on?”

  She nodded. “That changed the plan. The cartel’s offer was too good.” She turned and pointed out her side window, across at a patch of wasteland overlooking us and the lake, a hill on the other side of the dual carriageway. “That’s where the casino complex will be. And if I can just hold out a bit longer, make a few more deals, then I’ll be out. I’ll be legal.”

  “And how’s Laura taking this?”

  She fidgeted. She didn’t quite bite her lip, but it was close. “I haven’t told her.”

  I’d been judging Laura for being corrupt, but the whole time she’d been trying to make a big case. I thought back to last night and how broken she’d looked. I’d had no idea.

  “Where does Jelly fit in all this? You mentioned before that he’d filmed something you could use against the Police Commissioner, right?”

  “Yeah, I thought I might need some leverage to get the deals done. I’d fronted the cash for Jelly to set up his business, on the condition he do certain favors for me. He’d film people I suspected of corruption or affairs, things I could use. He filmed himself having sex with Commissioner Perry’s son. It was meant to be leverage if and when I needed it.”

  “I think it just made you a target. Perry’s got it in for us, he’s behind Becker’s whole operation. Maybe he figured out it was you who set the whole thing up.”

  She gave me a tired smile and put on an imitation of her father’s voice. “That’s business, son.”

  “So Jelly didn’t stop there. Once you’d got him up and running he kept going for himself, filming more people. He recorded some of your meetings with Laura?”

  She looked away and nodded. There was something else there that she hadn’t wanted me to read in her eyes, something that the kettle still didn’t want to give out as steam, but I was fine with that. She’d already said enough to change my worldview. I put myself in Gaines’s shoes and felt trapped. Every choice she’d made had been a betrayal of some person or another, all in a bid to get free of the business.

  “Ronny, is there anybody that’s not going to be pissed at you over all of this?”

  She looked back at me.

  “You, I hope.”

  I walked Gaines across the car park to the hotel that rose up in a narrow tower beside the lake. She pulled a step ahead of me as we entered the restaurant to the left of the main entrance, and I saw her shoulders raise and straighten, the old mantle of power slipping back in place.

  “Wait at the bar. I’ve got this.”

  She didn’t have it. She knew nothing about the danger she was in. But I knew if I told her now it might kill whatever strength she was drawing on to keep going. I figured if we could just get through this meeting then I could tell her the rest. I let her walk away from me to a table by the window, overlooking the lake and the proposed building side on the hill beyond it. A small rotund man rose and grinned at her, taking her right hand in both of his, a gesture of both condescension and control.

  “Mi
ss Gaines,” I heard him say, his accent the fake kind of London bullshit you hear in Guy Richie films. “Good to see you again.”

  She said something I couldn’t hear and he nodded and said, “Ms. Of course. Sorry, I’m old fashioned. You know how it is.”

  He waved her to the empty seat opposite and waited until she was seated before he settled in. He glanced at me for a second, long enough to make eye contact. Then his eyes flitted to my right, to where another man was already sitting at the bar, watching me in the mirror that backed the bottles of expensive whisky. He was broad shouldered and shorter than me, with thinning sand-colored hair. I could see his shoulders bulge beneath the fabric of his dark suit, but it seemed more down to an ill fit than serious muscles. He looked more like a friendly bear than a bodyguard, but the gun-shaped bulge at the base of his jacket carried a threat all its own. He stared at me in the mirror as he sipped a tumbler full of amber liquid, nodding when our eyes met.

  I walked over and slipped onto the stool next to him, invading his personal space on purpose.

  “Force or forces?”

  He smiled. “Forces. You?”

  “Force.”

  “You don’t look like a cop.” He spoke with a warm Scottish accent that said he was already bored by anything I had to offer. “How long were you in?”

  “Too long.”

  He waved for the barman to pour two fresh drinks and then passed one of them to me, clinking my glass in a toast before we both took an inch off the top. He placed his glass on the bar and then offered me his hand and said, “Green.”

  “Miller. Why does fatty over there have an armed guard?”

  “He’s not what you’d call the honest face of business. I’m sure you can relate to that, much as I think you work with a better face than I do. Robeson there? He hooks people in and lines them up, walks them right up to the dotted line, then takes a cut and walks away before the legit people do the bits that show up in the papers. You don’t work in that game by meeting with honest people. Always pays to be prepared.”