Rupe placed the tips of his fingers on the table and loomed over Kyle. “When you put your hands on a woman in anger, you’re not owed a goddamn thing. You got exactly what you deserved. In fact, you got off lightly.”
Kyle expelled a breath through his nose. “I shouldn’t have done that to Jayne,” he said through gritted teeth.
Sensing an easy win, Rupe sat back down. “No. You shouldn’t have.”
“I still think I should get something. You did assault me after all.”
Rupe took a pen out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and reached for a napkin. “I’m already bored with your company, so here’s how this is going to go down. I will write a number on here.” He shook the napkin in the air. “It will be my one and only offer. You are going to accept it. And then you are going to take a reasonable divorce settlement. I’d prefer it if you didn’t get one penny, but that would look odd to Jayne.”
“And if I don’t?” Kyle said.
Rupe slowly grinned. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “Let me paint you a scenario. You’re a bug, scuttling around on the floor. Hovering over you is a great big fucking boot. That boot can choose to come down hard and end you, or it can let you scurry away with the morsel of food. Your choice.”
Rupe scrawled a number on the napkin and set it in front of Kyle. He stared at it. As the seconds scraped by, Rupe began drumming his fingers on the table. “My time is valuable, unlike yours. In ten seconds, I’m leaving, and that offer will no longer be valid.”
When Kyle remained silent, Rupe pushed back his chair.
“Fine,” Kyle spat out. “Deal.”
“See, Kyle, you’re not so dumb after all.” Rupe got to his feet. “There’s one more thing. You are to stay away from Jayne. If I hear you’ve been anywhere near her, now or in the future, I will make you sorrier than you can imagine.” He picked up his pen and slotted it into his inside pocket. “My lawyer will be in touch. Nice doing business with you.”
He left the coffee shop with a broad grin on his face and climbed into his waiting car. Winning was so much fun.
15
“So have you found anything out?” Jayne said to Frank, Rupe’s PI.
The three of them had met up in a local pub not far from Jayne’s apartment. The place smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke. Even though it was illegal to light up inside public places, Rupe guessed it was one of those pubs that had a few lock-ins where the rule of law was ignored.
“I tracked down the pusher. It wasn’t that difficult from the information you gave me. He maintains he sold you the heroin,” Frank said to Rupe. “But when I showed him four photos and asked him to pick you out, he couldn’t.”
“Surely the police would have done the same thing?” Rupe said, looking over at Jayne with a perplexed expression.
“You’d think,” Frank said.
Jayne made a note in her journal. “The list of questions I have for Detective Fisher is growing by the minute. The more I look into this, the shakier the ground this case seems to be built upon.”
“Ah yes, Detective John Fisher.” Frank moved their drinks to the side of the table and set down a folder. “Now, this is much more interesting. I did as you asked and looked into his background.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and began to read. “His parents were hard-working people. His mother was a nurse until she retired in 2007. His father was a supervisor at a factory that made cardboard boxes until he was made redundant five years ago when the factory closed down. Since then, he’s worked odd jobs here and there but nothing permanent.
“They live in a two-up two-down terraced house in Croydon. They still have a small mortgage on the property, but the mother’s pension and the father’s modest income mean they can afford the repayments.”
Rupe frowned. “Sorry to sound like an arse, but this is pertinent how?”
Frank gave Rupe a condescending look. “When researching someone’s background, Mr Fox-Whittingham, it is important to check all the strands of a person’s life. Please, if you’ll let me continue.”
Rupe spotted Jayne’s twitching lips and stuck out his tongue. Frank didn’t notice the exchange as he pressed on.
“Detective Fisher is their oldest child at thirty-eight. He’s been in the force since he was nineteen. When he reached the rank of detective five years ago, his career stalled. It seems our detective friend has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Tells anyone who’ll listen that if his parents were middle class, he’d be at least a DCI by now.”
“Ha,” Rupe said, flashing a triumphant look at Jayne, who shook her head at him. Frank continued as though Rupe hadn’t interrupted. Clearly, the PI was a man on a mission.
“His parents had three other children: David, who is thirty-five and works for the post office, Rory, thirty-two, who is a retail assistant, and the youngest, Julie, who died a year ago when she was twenty-nine.”
“Died?” Jayne and Rupe said simultaneously.
“Of what?” Jayne continued.
“Suicide,” Frank said.
“How awful,” Rupe muttered.
Jayne began to scrawl in her journal, but Frank stopped her. “I’ll give you all my notes. No need to make extra.”
“Terrible for the parents,” Jayne said, putting her pen down. “Suicide is never easy for those left behind. They always seem to blame themselves.”
Frank searched through his folder once more and pulled out a photograph of a pretty young girl. She had straight coffee-coloured hair and soft brown eyes and wore a yellow dress that made her tanned skin stand out. She was smiling into the camera and looked happy and relaxed. Frank pushed the photo in front of Rupe.
“This is Julie. Do you recognise her?”
Rupe barely looked at the photograph. “No. Why would I?”
“Because she worked for one of your businesses here in London.”
Rupe’s eyebrows shot up, nearly disappearing into his hairline. “She worked for me? Wow, small world. I still don’t know her. I have over twenty thousand people who work for my different businesses globally. I can’t know them all.”
“Ah yes, but Julie is a little different. You see, a month before she killed herself, you fired her.”
Rupe’s head flinched back as his mind began to race. He’d never seen the girl in his life, so how could he have fired her? He gave Frank an astonished look. “I can’t have done. I would have remembered something like that. Firing an employee is extremely rare.”
He picked up the photograph and gave it a more detailed look. Nope, nothing about the girl triggered any memory at all.
“Which of my companies did she work for?”
“FW Game World Limited,” Frank replied.
“Why was she fired?”
Frank shook his head. “I haven’t been able to find out. I was rather hoping you’d tell me.”
Rupe scratched his cheek. None of this made any sense. He took out his phone and snapped a picture of the girl in the photograph. He rose from his seat. “Give me a minute. I’m going to call the director of that division and see if he can shed some light on what’s gone on.”
Rupe stepped outside the pub. He stood off to one side, away from the smokers gathered around the entrance. These last few weeks, his life had taken on the feeling of an alternate reality. Dead bodies, arrests, murder charges, police cells, court, and now it seemed that he had an unknown connection to the lead detective on his case. Not to mention Jayne and his increasing attraction towards her. No wonder his head was spinning.
Rupe found the name he was looking for in his contact list and hit the call button. He tapped his foot as he waited.
Eventually Aaron, the head of his London branch, answered. “Hey, Rupe,” he said, his voice light, bright, energised. “How’s things?”
Fucking awful. “Not bad. How’s business?”
“Growing every day, my friend,” Aaron said. “Are you in London?”
“Yeah. I’ll swing by early next week.”
<
br /> “Before you head back to the yacht—hey, you lucky bugger.”
Rupe didn’t care to enlighten him about his current turn of bad luck. “Listen, Aaron, does the name Julie Fisher ring a bell?”
“Julie Fisher, Julie Fisher,” Aaron muttered under his breath. Rupe could imagine him, eyes raised to the ceiling as he tried to locate the right file in his brain. “Not offhand. Why?”
“I’m sending you a picture. Let me know when you get it.”
Rupe forwarded the photograph of Julie to Aaron’s number. After a few seconds, Aaron said, “Got it.” There was a pause. “Aha. Yes, I remember her now, although she went by the name of Julie Fraser, not Fisher.”
“But it’s definitely her?”
“Oh, yeah,” Aaron said, his voice taking on a harder edge. “I never forget a thief.”
“Thief? What do you mean?”
“She was caught trading software code for an upcoming release with one of our rivals. Silly woman. She should have known we’d have had programs that would pick such activity up. Fortunately, we caught her before she did any real damage.”
“Why don’t I know about this?” Rupe said as irritation began to prickle beneath his skin—irritation at himself. How could he have dropped the ball on something so important?
“You do know,” Aaron said. “I might not have given you a blow-by-blow account, but I emailed you about what she’d done, and you agreed with my decision to fire her.”
“Can you reforward the email to me?”
Fuck, he’d messed up. He had absolutely no recollection of an important issue in one of his main branches.
“Of course. Rupe?” Aaron’s voice took on a note of concern. “Is something wrong?”
“Did you involve the police over the incident?”
“No. She begged me not to. Said her brother was a copper, and she was worried it would affect his promotion chances. Because there hadn’t been a financial loss, I agreed. I did tell her that I’d make sure she didn’t get a job at another software company, though.”
“Fair enough,” Rupe said.
“Why are you raising this?”
“She killed herself.”
Aaron gasped. “No.”
“Yep. One month after you fired her, it seems.”
“Shit. That’s awful.”
“Locate the email, and send it to me straight after this call. It’s quite urgent, Aaron.”
“Sure thing.” His voice had become quieter, more reflective, tinged with guilt. “I made the right decision, though. I couldn’t condone theft.”
“You did the right thing,” Rupe said. It’s me who’s been doing the wrong things. “I’ll be in touch.”
Rupe headed back into the pub, a heavy weight pressing down on him. Could Fisher be so distraught about his sister’s suicide that he’d set up Rupe for murder as payback? And how did Nessa and her husband fit into this? Christ, trying to figure it all out was making his head hurt.
Jayne and Frank were exactly where he’d left them, their body language awkward, like two strangers trying to connect through small talk. As Rupe approached, Jayne turned her head and gave him a grateful look.
“Find out anything?” she said, moving her drink out of his way.
“Yeah.” Rupe ran a weary hand over his face as he recounted his conversation with Aaron. “I’m going to go over there on Monday and see if I can talk to some of her colleagues. Aaron is sending across the email where I apparently agreed with his decision to fire her.” He made eye contact with Jayne before turning his attention to Frank. “Do you think a copper would go as far as setting up a stranger for murder because he laid the death of his sister at that person’s door?”
Frank pulled a face. “I’ve seen less tenuous reasons for revenge.”
“Jesus.”
Jayne got to her feet. “I’m going to talk to Mike again. This potentially changes everything. I’ll see if he’s been able to look into the information Fisher submitted to his superiors and the CPS in order to get this case to court.”
Frank also rose from his chair and stuck out his hand. “If you need anything else, Mr Fox-Whittingham, you have my number.”
16
Jayne tore up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She strode down the hallway towards Mike’s office, a young police officer trailing in her wake.
“Ms Seymour,” he called out hopefully. “Hold on please, ma’am.”
Jayne ignored him and upped her pace.
Outside Mike’s office, his PA scrambled to her feet as she spotted Jayne on a collision course. “Wait, please,” she said, sticking out her arm.
“I need to see Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson right away,” Jayne said, her tone barely controlled.
“He’s in a meeting right now. If you’ll take a seat.”
“I’m sure he’ll want to hear what I have to say.” Ignoring the open-mouthed horror of Mike’s assistant, Jayne knocked once before pushing open Mike’s office door.
Three pairs of eyes swivelled in her direction.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said as the PA hovered to her right, mumbling apologies that weren’t hers to make. “I need a word with you.” Jayne fixed a stare on Mike. “Urgently.”
“Jayne, can you please wait outside,” Mike said through gritted teeth, his face pale, apart from two angry pink splodges on his cheeks. “I’m in a meeting.”
“You’re going to want to hear what I have to say, Mike.”
He half rose from his seat. “I am in a meeting with Assistant Commissioner Grimwald and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Saunders. Wait outside. Now.” His tone was adamant. As Jayne made eye contact with the two seniors filling Mike’s office, they looked even less impressed with her uninvited interruption than Mike had been.
“Sorry,” she said even as she straightened her spine in an unapologetic show. “I’ll be right outside,” she added firmly for Mike’s benefit.
Mike’s PA gave her a withering glance before burying her head in her computer, her fingers flying across the keyboard as she noisily typed. The young policeman who’d escorted her to the chief superintendent’s office bounced from foot to foot as if wondering what to do next. Eventually, he mumbled something about paperwork and left.
Jayne paced, hating the cooling of heels that had been foisted upon her. After fifteen minutes, the door to Mike’s office opened, and the assistant commissioner and deputy assistant commissioner walked out, both looking sombre. They didn’t even glance in her direction as they set off down the hall. Mike cocked his head, signalling for her to follow him.
Before he’d even slammed the door behind her, he bellowed, “What the fuck was that, Jayne? Thank you very much for embarrassing me in front of not just my boss, but my boss’s boss. Jesus!”
Jayne nibbled on her bottom lip. “Sorry, Mike. Really. But something has come up in relation to the case I spoke to you about.”
Mike narrowed his eyes. The tinge of red on his cheeks had travelled and now covered his entire neck in angry blotches. “The fact that you have an obvious sidebar going on with your client does not give you the right to barge into my office and behave in such an adolescent manner. Nor does our history.”
Jayne straightened. “Firstly, there is nothing going on between my client and me. And secondly, our history? We don’t have a history, Mike. We have a professional relationship where I scratch your back and you scratch mine, when needed. A drunken pass years ago from a man who should have known better does not constitute a history.”
Mike lowered himself into his chair, his hands gripping the arms until his knuckles turned white. “Well, Jayne, if you’re looking for my help, you’re not going about it the right way.”
Jayne sat in one of the two chairs opposite, the leather still warm from its previous occupant—an errant observation that was not in the least bit welcome. She squirmed and perched her backside on the very edge.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, this time with more feeling.
An uncomfortable feeling stirred in Jayne’s gut. She was unwilling to acknowledge her innermost thoughts to herself, let alone share them with anyone else. “Rubbish,” she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. “Hear me out, please.”
Mike nodded, his keen blue eyes focused on Jayne as she relayed what Rupe had found out about Fisher. When she finished, Mike leaned back in his chair and threaded his hands behind his head.
“Well?” Jayne said when Mike remained silent. “It’s a conflict of interest at best. And it brings into question the entire case evidence against my client.”
“It’s not ideal, I’ll give you that.”
“Not ideal?” Jayne scoffed. “The man has a clear vendetta against my client. I want him immediately suspended. I want someone else reviewing the evidence, and then I want this case dropped.”
“Steady on,” Mike said. “I can’t simply jump to conclusions on your say-so.”
Jayne’s skin began to prickle as rage boiled up inside her. Stay calm.
“Are you questioning my word?” she said, her voice trembling with an undercurrent of warning.
“No. I’m saying I need to look into things before I can act. Leave it with me.”
As Jayne began to speak, Mike held up his hand. “I said, leave it with me.”
Doing her best to curb her growing anger, Jayne rose from her seat. She leaned forward, placing both hands flat on Mike’s desk. “Twenty-four hours, Mike. I’ll be back tomorrow. I don’t care that it’s Saturday. I’m sure you agree this is best dealt with quickly. We don’t want the press finding out about a bent police officer.”
Mike’s face smouldered beneath a chilly expression. His lips were pressed into a flat line, his eyes narrowed to slits as he studied her face in silence. His chest rose and fell as he took a couple of deep breaths, clearly trying to calm himself down. Jayne inwardly cursed. She should have known better—Mike wasn’t the type to respond well to threats. She needed him to play ball, and she needed him on her team.
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