by Zoe Sharp
“Is the big feller causing you trouble, then?” the marshal persisted, nodding towards Sean.
For just a moment, Daz hesitated. If he said yes, the chances were Sean would be thrown out of the circuit and Daz must have known that I would go too. I could see the debate flitting through his brain on whether that would alleviate or exacerbate his problems. Jamie – and Tess, presumably – had gone for the diamonds and had not returned. He might just need us . . .
“No, everything’s fine,” he said, giving the marshal a bright smile. “He’s just jealous ‘cos I rode rings round him.”
The marshal eyed them both for a few seconds, face layered with doubt, then he shrugged.
“A bit of friendly rivalry is good,” he said, his tone a warning. “Just as long as it stays friendly, all right?”
***
“So, would you care to tell us what’s really going on, Daz,” Sean said tiredly when we were all out into the paddock and they’d parked up near to our bikes. “And for fuck’s sake make it the whole story this time.”
Daz had the grace to flush a little, hunching his shoulders. The adrenaline generated by the track was dissipating now and the cooling sweat made him shiver. It had started to rain again and that didn’t help.
“All he was supposed to do was go meet with the courier and Tess was supposed to verify the diamonds were kosher,” he said.
“When?”
“We rang the guy when Jamie came back off his session,” Daz admitted, flicking nervous glances at William and Paxo for support. “The two of them went to meet him while you were both out on track.”
Sean didn’t reply right away, just stood with his hands on his hips staring from one face to another as though he couldn’t believe their naive stupidity. He wasn’t the only one.
“You bloody fool, Daz,” he said quietly at last.
“It was a straightforward exchange,” William put in evenly, coming to his friend’s defence.
“Yeah – for a shit-load of diamonds you’ve already paid for,” I shot back. “Did it not occur to you that they might try and keep the cash and the diamonds?”
“Erm, actually, they don’t have the cash,” Daz said, not quite meeting our eyes as he confessed to yet another lie. “Not all of it, at least.”
Sean rolled his eyes. “So where’s the rest?”
“In the safe in my room,” Daz said. He caught the look of outright disbelief on our faces and flushed again, deeper this time. “Look, all Jamie was supposed to do was check the gear over with Tess, yeah? Then he was supposed to give us a shout over the radio and we were going to take the guy back to the hotel and give him the rest of his money. Now we can’t raise him, so he must have gone out of range. I don’t understand what’s gone wrong. It was supposed to be so easy.”
Sean flipped him a bitter and cynical smile. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what they always say.”
***
It took us less than ten minutes to get back to the fuel station where the clandestine meet was to have taken place. It was nearly twelve o’clock now and the forecourt was still bustling with bikers either on their way to the afternoon sessions at Mondello Park, or coming back in to refuel from the morning.
Beside the small squat kiosk itself there was the brick-built toilet block Jamie and Paxo had used earlier, and a large rutted car park at the rear. Two cars were parked on the rough gravel, an elderly battered Fiesta that looked as though it belonged to the kiddie serving in the petrol station, and a nearly new Audi A8 on Dublin plates. Was that, I wondered, the kind of car a dodgy diamond courier would drive?
Of Jamie’s little Honda, there was no sign.
We pulled up alongside and climbed off the bikes. Sean turned a slow circle, eyes narrowed as he surveyed the scene.
“Spot on, isn’t it?” he said to me.
“No overlooking houses and the CCTV only covers the pumps,” I agreed quietly. “Yeah, it probably is.”
Sean indicated the door to the ladies’ loo. “You want to check in there for any sign of Tess while we do this side?” he said.
I nodded and did a quick sweep. Inside, the ladies’ had a cracked tiled floor, a grubby stainless steel handbasin and two cubicles with planked wooden doors. Neither of them were occupied.
I came out just in time to see Paxo come rushing out of the gents’ and vomit into the weeds by the side of building. I didn’t stop to ask him what was wrong, just pushed the door open and went in.
The gents’ toilet was bigger than the ladies’, with a row of four cubicles as well as the usual urinals along the wall opposite. It stank to high heaven – not an uncommon state of affairs for public loos. But in this case the smell was overlaid with another, more rancid tone.
Blood.
Oh shit. Oh please, not Jamie . . .
As I came in, William backed out of the largest cubicle right at the end of the row, clutching at the door jamb for support. Daz followed him out so fast they nearly tripped over each other’s feet. He looked up in alarm when he saw me approaching.
“Charlie, no!” he said. “Don’t go in there—”
I didn’t bother to explain to him that, whatever was in there, it was unlikely to be the first time I’d seen it. Or something very like it. I pushed past him, gathering myself for the shock, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.
The dead man was a stranger. He was sitting fully clothed on the pan with his body propped against the cistern and his head thrown back. The pose revealed the gaping wound across his throat, like he had a second mouth that was silently screaming.
The blood had soaked down through a good suit that had once been dark grey. His knees were together but with the feet splayed apart, revealing slender ankles in pale grey silk socks. His hands dangled straight down at either side. If he’d been wearing rings or a watch, they were gone. To one bloody wrist was chained a leather briefcase that was lying open and empty on the flooded tiles.
Sean looked up as I entered. He was crouched just out of reach of the blood, staring at the dead man with cool detachment.
“One ex diamond courier, I presume,” I said with as much composure as I could manage. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone with their throat cut and the memories that returned now were both abiding and abysmal.
“I would say so,” Sean agreed, rising. “Well, he’s no diamonds on him now, so that probably takes care of the why he was killed but, the question now is, who by?”
“Jesus, man, how the fuck can you two stand there and calmly discuss this?” Daz demanded, his voice a strangled squawk. “I mean, Jesus!”
“Good point,” I said to Sean, my voice bland. “We should get out of here.”
“Mm.” He nodded shortly, turned to the others. “Have you touched anything?”
They shook their heads but I carefully ripped out some paper hand towels from the dispenser and wiped the door jambs on both sides, just in case. I flushed them down the loo in the next cubicle, operating the lever with my elbow.
Outside again, the rain suddenly smelt fresh and clean, despite the petrol station fumes close by. Paxo obviously felt far enough away from the pumps to light up and when we emerged he was hovering next to his Ducati, puffing on a cigarette with all the fervour of an expectant father in a hospital waiting room.
“Right,” Sean said, swinging his leg over the Blackbird. “Back to the hotel.”
“Why?” William demanded with a trace of bitterness. “What the hell difference does that make?”
Sean just looked at him. “Does Jamie know you brought the rest of the money with you?”
The boys exchanged glances, then Daz said, “Well, yeah, of course he does. But it’s locked in the safe in my room.”
Sean jerked his head back towards the toilet block and its grisly secret. “After this,” he said grimly, “do you really think he’s going to let a little thing like that stop him?”
Twenty-five
Jamie cannot have done this.
All the wa
y back from Mondello Park to the hotel, that was the only thing I could think about.
That, and what the hell was I going to tell Jacob and Clare? They’d trusted me to look after Jamie. To keep him out of trouble. You couldn’t get any deeper in trouble than a vicious killing and, one way or another, he was up to his neck in this one.
At the same time, part of my brain just couldn’t accept that he had actually done the deed himself. I remembered tackling him in the hallway of the house in Caton. His instinctive response to the fright of his discovery had been to take a swing at me. But that didn’t mean he could slash someone’s throat, rob them, and leave them propped on a toilet.
No, that was much more Eamonn Garroway’s style.
The thought started as a niggle and grew into a monster as we thrashed through the countryside back towards Naas. Jamie might not have murder in his psyche, but his mother’s boyfriend certainly had.
The question was, how big a part had Jamie played in his schemes?
I backtracked. We’d been followed off the ferry by someone who knew we were coming. They hadn’t bothered trailing us to the hotel, but had turned up later. Then they’d been waiting for us on the road to the Giant’s Causeway the following day. How had they known where we were going, if not because someone had been tipping them off?
But, even as the thoughts came whizzing towards me like a summer midge swarm, I did my best to swat them away. After all, why had somebody tried to run Tess down when she was needed to make contact with the diamond courier? Why had somebody arranged for Davey and his mates to attack us in the pub at Portaferry? Who was the guy on the Lucky Strike Suzuki?
And, even before we’d ever got to Ireland, who had deliberately run down Slick and Clare, and then tried to do the same to me after Slick’s wake? Not to mention what had happened to Sam during the Devil’s Bridge Club audition. But however hard I tried to slot it together, nothing fitted.
Nothing at all.
***
We didn’t bother with niceties when we got back to the hotel, abandoning the bikes right outside the front entrance and just about running through the foyer. Daz stabbed at the call button for the lift a couple of times and, when it failed to miraculously arrive, headed for the stairs with a muttered curse.
We burst out of the stairwell at the fifth floor, some of us rather more out of breath than others, and thundered down the corridor to Daz’s room. He fumbled in his leathers for his key card, but when he swiped it through the reader, it flashed the red light at him and stubbornly refused to disengage the locks.
Daz tried it several more times, then Paxo snatched it out of his hands and tried too, also with no success.
Daz swore at some length. “I’ll have to go back down to reception and get another,” he said, trembling with nerves now. “What was wrong with a good old-fucking-fashioned key, for Christ’s sake?”
“OK,” Sean said. “Charlie – go with him.”
“What’s the matter?” William said sharply. “Don’t you trust us?”
“No,” Sean said, not bothering either to glance at him or pull his punches. “The rest of us will wait up here. Which are your rooms?” he asked the others. William nodded towards the door opposite. When he dug out his own card, it operated the lock without a glitch.
Daz and I headed back to the foyer. Going down the stairs was easier than coming up but Daz was still gasping for breath by the time we reached the ground floor. As we reached the door at the bottom I grabbed his arm.
“Hang on,” I said. “Take a moment, calm down and think about what you’re going to say. If you go up to them in a panic they’re going to be suspicious. And, right now, we can’t afford too many awkward questions, hmm?”
He looked set to argue but then he nodded, fighting to regain some self-possession. He didn’t make a bad job of it considering his whole world must have seemed like it was coming down around him.
“You almost sound,” he said with a shaky smile, “like you’ve done this before.”
“Yeah well, I suppose that’s because I have.”
We managed to approach the front desk with something like a saunter in our stride. I feigned an interest in the spa treatments on special offer while Daz waited for the bloke on the desk to finish on the phone. They must have had an infinite number of staff members at that hotel, because I don’t think I’d ever seen the same one twice. Certainly, the man who put down the receiver and smiled politely at us now was a stranger.
“I wonder if you can help me, mate. I seem to be having a bit of trouble getting back into my room,” Daz said, managing to produce a smile of his own as he held up the offending key card.
“Oh, and I’m very sorry about that, sir,” the man said, sounding for all the world as though he meant it. “What room would you be in?”
He tapped away at his computer terminal as he spoke, but when Daz gave his name and room number, the man’s smile became a puzzled frown. There was a betraying stiffening of his neck and he flicked his eyes covertly back up to Daz.
“Erm, would you mind if I was to be asking you for some identification, sir?” he said, adding hurriedly. “Just for security purposes, you understand.”
“Erm, no. Not at all,” Daz said, digging his wallet out of an inside pocket and folding it open to show his driver’s licence. His voice was commendably calm, but when he leaned on the desk the fingertips of his left hand tapped a jittery rhythm against the polished granite surface. I moved in close and put my hand over his, giving him my best simpering smile even as I crushed his fingers into immobility under mine.
“Is there a problem?” I said innocently.
“No, no! Erm . . . but I think I’d better be calling security,” the man mumbled, looking mortified as he reached for the phone again.
I saw the alarm flare in Daz’s eyes and nipped the knuckles of his middle two fingers together hard enough to keep him quiet.
“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to tell us what the trouble is first,” I said, taking a flyer and putting the ominous note of the disgruntled guest into my voice, “and we’ll be the judge of whether it can be sorted out here and now, without all the hassle of going any higher up the chain?”
The man hesitated a moment, then put the phone down again. “Well, I had another guy come to me, less than an hour ago, and didn’t he say just the same thing – gave me the same name and the same room number and told me that his key card wouldn’t work. It happens sometimes – people put them next to something in a pocket and it wipes them. So I programmed him another card up, quick as you like, without asking him to prove who he was and I think I’d better get security to come up to your room with you now, just so you can check there’s nothing missing or—”
“No!” Daz yelped. I gripped his fingers again and he took the hint to modify his voice before he went on, sounding less panicked, “I know who that was and there won’t be anything wrong. Honestly! There’s no need for security.”
The man looked unconvinced. I leaned over the counter and lowered my voice confidentially. “It was almost undoubtedly one of our lot – he fancies himself as a bit of a practical joker,” I said, rolling my eyes to invite him in on the secret. I jerked my head towards Daz. “It’s Daz’s birthday, you see. Now if I know good old Jamie, he’ll have been in there and decked the place out with balloons, ready for us getting back.”
The relief on the man’s face was almost comical. “Oh well, that’s all right then,” he said, his hand fluttering at his chest. “And here was I, imagining the worst . . .”
***
The corridor was deserted when we got back up to the fifth floor but, as soon as Daz ran the new key card through the lock, the door across the hallway opened and the others piled out.
The room was the same layout as the one Sean and I were sharing on the next floor up. The in-room safe where Daz had stowed the rest of the money for the diamonds was tucked away in the bottom of the little wardrobe area just as you went in, opposite the bat
hroom. It didn’t need a close inspection to spot that the door was standing open and the safe was empty.
Daz stuck his hand in anyway, just in case, like that amount of cash in used fifties could somehow still be lurking out of sight at the back. When he’d finished his fruitless search he sat back on his heels with a groan.
Paxo and William stood around watching him with slightly dumbstruck expressions on their faces. Sean, meanwhile, did a circuit of the room, giving it a fast check over, moving with intent economy. On the far side of the bed he bent down and lifted a helmet off the floor.
Right away, I recognised it as Jamie’s.
Sean nodded shortly to me. I was still standing by the entrance, and as I was nearest, I ducked my head into the bathroom.
