by Zoe Sharp
He moved back across to the bed but as he did so his foot kicked something that was hidden just under the valance. He bent to retrieve it and when he stood he was holding an ornate silver ring between his fingers.
“Yours?”
“Damn,” I said. “It must be one of Tess’s. She was here last night.”
His eyebrows went up. “Wow,” he said. “So Paxo was right about you. Girls as well – I’m impressed.”
“Oh please,” I muttered, trying to keep my face stern and failing miserably.
He snagged a corner of the sheet and whipped it out of my hands, ignoring my yelp of protest. “Come on,” he said, grinning. “Out of bed, you. You can fill me in while you’re in the shower.”
He showered quickly first, then shaved while I showered. I felt surprisingly relaxed amid the unfamiliar domesticity, helped by the fact that we were talking all the while. I ran through the events of the evening before, from the reappearance of the Vauxhall to Tess’s near miss and what both she and Jamie had told me.
When I emerged, it was to find Sean absently turning the ring he’d found over in his fingers, looking at the pretty cut of the stone against the light from the window.
“So we still don’t know why Jamie borrowed the money in the first place,” he said, sounding distracted.
“No,” I said, rubbing a towel vigorously over my hair. Although I kept it roughly in a bob, no longer than my jawline, there wasn’t the time to dry it properly and after a day scrunched under a helmet I knew it was going to be uncontrollable. “But I reckon he might fold if I keep nagging at him. I’ll have another go . . . what is it?”
Sean was holding Tess’s ring up and something in his face had changed.
“What do you make of this?” he asked, throwing it across to me so I had to let go of my towel to catch it. I rolled the ring in my fingers for a moment and shrugged, frowning. “What about it?”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, that stone is a genuine diamond. A big one.”
“You’re joking!” I said, but knew even as I spoke that he was not. He had no reason to. I looked again, still doubtful. “But it’s huge.”
“Mm,” he said. “Best part of a carat. Beautiful clarity and hardly any occlusions.”
“Occlusions?”
“Flaws. You value diamonds on the four “c’s – carat, cut, clarity and colour. This is hitting all the buttons.”
“And you know this because . . .?”
“I’ve done some work out in Africa and there are a lot of these rocks about. It pays to know what you’re looking at.” He smiled. “Plus, I’ve just spent twenty-four hours with that very chatty and knowledgeable Dutch gemstone courier and I was interested in what he had to say.”
“Tess told me she’d made it herself,” I said, remembering how drunk she’d been. Too drunk, I would have thought, to have lied convincingly.
“She probably did make the setting,” Sean said, peering inside the band. “It’s not a bad effort but there’s no hallmark and it doesn’t do justice to the quality of the stone.”
“How the hell can she afford a diamond this size?” I wondered.
Sean shook his head. “Officially, she can’t,” he said bluntly. “She’s supposed to be a jewellery maker but she just about lives on state benefits more than she works – as far as the taxman is aware, anyway.”
“She had a fistful of rings like this one,” I said slowly. “If they’re all real she must be draped in a fortune. So where’s she getting the money?”
“I think that’s something we need to determine – and sooner rather than later,” he said, his face grim. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve no desire to find out the hard way that the reason I’m along on this jaunt at all is to play minder to a load of drug mules.”
By the time we got downstairs and checked out, the others were all waiting for us – rather pointedly, I thought – in the car park. The sun was already burning brightly and they sat and sweated inside their leathers.
They had unchained the bikes and were sitting on board. Daz even had his Aprilia ticking over. While Sean and I got ourselves strapped down and zipped up and sorted, he blipped the throttle repeatedly. The bike’s exhaust made an impatient gruff bark of sound but I refused to be rushed through my preflight checks. I knew, once we set off, I wasn’t going to get the chance to put right any minor irritations like a rucked-up sleeve or a wayward piece of fringe in my eyes.
I’d been hoping I’d get the opportunity to give Tess her ring back and ask her about it, but she was already mounted up on the back of Daz’s bike, helmet on. If anything, she seemed reluctant to meet my eyes, never mind talk to me, and she certainly didn’t look like someone who’s just lost a massive diamond. I left the ring in my jacket pocket. There’d be time later.
Once we were on the road it was clear that the boys were taking their temper out on their machinery. Daz set off as he meant to go on, with scant regard to Tess clinging on for dear life behind him. Paxo was right up there dicing with him, almost goading him to greater excesses. Every now and again I caught the mutter of cursing over my headset when sheer stomach-churning adrenaline made maintaining radio silence an impossibility.
I tried not to give the FireBlade too much pain until the engine had warmed through. Then I clicked my visor fully closed and dropped everything down a gear.
I shot past Jamie almost at once and ended up hard on William’s heels. The big guy had abandoned his usual laid-back riding style and let the devil take command. He was a natural rider, surprisingly quick for someone whose movements never seemed hurried, and whose natural bulk acted like a permanent drogue chute.
By the time we had covered the few miles up the coast to Glenarm I was actually enjoying myself. In my mirrors I kept getting the occasional glimpse of Sean holding station on Jamie’s rear quarter, like he was shepherding him along at a slower pace. And behind them, nothing.
Then, as we passed the road that turns back to Ballymena, a dark grey Vauxhall Vectra flipped out of the junction and fell in behind us.
I saw Sean react, dropping back slightly, coming off his line for corners and allowing the gap between Jamie and the Blackbird to widen. I knew he was putting himself between Jacob’s kid and the threat. He did it immediately, without any hesitation, and suddenly that very fact terrified me.
“Daz,” I said abruptly into my voice-activate mic, “Hey Daz, we’ve got company. That Vauxhall’s back on our tail again.”
“So what?” Daz’s voice came back, tight with concentration and bravado, both at the same time. “Let him follow us if he wants. We’ve got nothing to hide.”
The Vauxhall driver stayed with us, neither closing up nor significantly dropping back, until we turned off onto the steep and twisting coast road at Cushendun. Then he braked hard and pulled over, as though he knew where we were heading. As though he knew he had us cornered.
The thin film of anxiety took the shine off the rest of the ride. I should have been admiring the staggering scenery and the view of the Mull of Kintyre across the flat-calm water of the Irish Sea. Instead I spent too much time watching behind me and got a couple of corners badly wrong. Enough to jerk my heartrate up, to start my hands sweating inside my gloves and to make the FireBlade seem brutishly unwieldy under me.
By the time we turned off into the car park at the Giant’s Causeway I was relieved to be stopping. Daz and Paxo were already off the bikes with their lids on the bars and their leathers open to the breeze coming up off the water, revealing sodden T-shirts underneath.
Paxo dragged on a cigarette like an asthmatic at his inhaler. Tess was sitting on the grass with her legs stretched out in front of her, looking slightly shell-shocked by the experience. Daz looked from one to the other and grinned triumphantly as William and I pulled in alongside him.
“You lot are riding like a bunch of old women,” Daz jeered.
“Old women?” Paxo said, his voice an outraged squawk that made his cigarette jiggle betwe
en his lips. “I was right up your arse all the way here, mate.”
“At least the rest of us stand a chance of surviving long enough to get to be old,” William said as he unbuckled his helmet and ducked out of it. His voice was placid but the sweat ran down his temples and beaded across his upper lip.
As I took off my own lid I ran a hand through my hair and realised that my prediction about the state of it had been on the optimistic side. I looked like a wet traveller’s dog and felt worse.
Jamie and Sean were last to arrive. The twisty roads had given Jamie a better chance of keeping his smaller bike close to the pack than long fast straights would have done, but still he looked exhausted. Sean yanked his lid off and, although I could tell by the muscle jumping in his jaw what he thought of the pace Daz was setting, he held his tongue.
“Who’s for an ice cream?” Daz asked brightly. Before anyone could answer, he headed off towards the café. As he walked away from us he was clicking his fingers together nervously, like he was on edge and couldn’t keep them still. I wondered seriously if he was on something.
As though the same thought had occurred to them at the same time, William and Paxo exchanged silent glances and followed Daz to the café. Jamie muttered about finding the loo and went after them.
Sean stripped off the top half of his leathers and leaned against the Blackbird to let the sun and the wind dry him off. He seemed relaxed but he had angled himself, I noticed, so he could keep an eye on the approach road.
I went across and sat beside Tess on the grass, digging in my pocket.
“By the way – I think you dropped this in my room last night,” I said, holding the ring out to her. The diamond sparked and flared in the sunlight.
I was watching her face carefully enough to see the spasm of horror that passed across her features, quickly damped down into something approaching mild relief.
“Oh brilliant, thanks,” she said, taking the ring from me. She dug in the inside pocket of her leathers and produced a clear plastic bag full of her remaining jewellery. I assumed her fingers were still too sore to get the rings back on. Small wonder she had hardly noticed one of them was missing.
“It’s a lovely ring,” I said, cautious. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Sean had stilled, listening, even though his attention seemed for all the world to be elsewhere. “It must be worth a bit.”
Tess laughed a little too loudly and for a little too long. “Nah, I told you – I made it myself,” she said. She swung the bag round her finger, casually, so the contents jingled together.
“So, what’s the stone?” I asked, guileless. “It’s a nice looking cut.”
“Mm, I liked it,” she said, still distracted by the way the rings danced in the light. “Shame it’s only paste.”
She looked up as she said it and I knew she’d realised full well that she didn’t have me fooled. And she didn’t care either. She caught my momentarily dumbfounded expression and laughed again.
“What? You never thought this lot was real, did you?” she demanded, shaking the bag and still grinning. “Oh yeah, right – like I’d walk round drippin’ in diamonds! Money comin’ out of my ears, me.”
For what it was worth, I would have pressed her further but the boys reappeared at that point.
“Oh good, ice creams,” she said unnecessarily. “Hey! Mine’s the one with the Flake in it.” She jumped to her feet and trotted over to them, stuffing the bag of rings back into her pocket as she went.
I got to my feet to follow, but Sean caught my arm as I went past and shook his head.
“Let it go, Charlie,” he murmured. “For now. You won’t get anything useful out of her.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I nodded reluctantly, leaned my hip against the FireBlade, and waited for the boys to reach us.
Apart from Daz, they were carrying two ice cream cones each, all of which had chocolate Flakes in that had already semi-melted in the heat. Jamie had given one ice cream to Tess and William passed me another. That left Paxo with the one for Sean, a fact that had him scowling more furiously than usual. He practically handed it over at arm’s length, snatching his fingers back like he was expecting the other man to bite them. Sean just smiled his predator’s smile, unnerving him further, and accepted graciously.
“Come on then,” Daz said, bouncing on his toes. “We’re here to see a bit of culture, so let’s go have a look-see at this causeway.” He picked the Flake out and sucked the ice cream off it. “Any ideas who built it?”
William rolled his eyes. “Nobody built it, you jackass,” he said. His sweat moustache had now been replaced with a vanilla ice cream one but he didn’t seem to care. “It’s made up of basalt. The rock forms that shape naturally, without any interference from anyone else.”
There was a bus ferrying people down the steep incline to the beach but we chose to walk, eating our ice creams as we went. The landscape was alien and deeply strange. A tangled pile of curious hexagonal stones, stacked and jumbled like someone had pushed them off the edge of the cliff above with a JCB and left them where they fell.
We joined the other tourists who were walking and clambering over the rocks. Close up the stones looked a little like interlocking concrete sections. It wouldn’t be hard to be convinced that the whole structure was man-made.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” William murmured, staring across the formation.
“Yeah, suppose so,” Paxo said, looking around him with a totally nonplussed expression on his face. He checked his watch. “Now then, where’s this distillery, mate?”
He glanced round automatically for Daz as he spoke, but discovered the other man was standing a little apart from the others, tense, wired. Sean was close to Daz, watching him as though he was about to break.
We converged on the pair of them in time to hear Sean say, “Tell them, Daz. It’s time. Tell them or I will. You can’t go on like this.”
Daz threw him a panicked look but we were too close by then and it was too late to say more if he didn’t want the rest of us to hear it, too.
“Tell us what?” Jamie asked, worried. “What’s going on?”
“Daz has something he needs to tell all of you,” Sean said, stressing the need. Not want, I noted. It was clear that whatever secret Daz had confessed to Sean, the last thing he wanted to do was share it any further.
“What is it?” Paxo demanded. He came forwards, slinging his arm round Daz’s shoulders and giving him a friendly shake, grinning. “Come on, mate! We’re all in this together, aren’t we? You can tell us anything. How bad can it be?”
With a final desperate glance at Sean, Daz swallowed and shrugged helplessly.
“OK,” he said. “You see, guys, the thing is . . . I’m gay.”
Twenty-one
Is that it? So what?
The words formed in my head but I didn’t let them out. In fact, for a moment the only sound was the rush of the surf against the rocks and the raucous cries of the gulls circling overhead. It sounded like they were laughing at us.
Then Paxo snatched his arm away, flushing furiously. He took a step back and gave a splutter of laughter that died in his throat.
“Ah, mate, come on!” His eyes swivelled from face to face, looking for the first chink in the practical joke. “Don’t kid us about!”
“I’m not,” Daz said calmly, more confident. It was like, now it was done, the act of coming out had lost its terrors for him. “It’s true. I’m gay.”
William nodded slowly. “Well, good for you, Daz,” he said. “I know that must have taken some doing, telling us that. I admire you for it.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Paxo wailed. “Not you as well?”
“What’s the big deal?” Jamie said, nonplussed. “So, he’s gay. So what?”
“Plenty – if you’re completely homophobic,” Daz said, body tense.
“Why did you wait until now?” Paxo demanded. “I have to tell you, mate, your timing on this stinks.”
; Tess, I realised then, had been standing silent in the background. But when I glanced at her I found she was wasn’t entirely still. She was trembling. As I turned towards her she took a couple of quick steps forwards and launched a long telegraphed right at Daz’s jaw, regardless of her swollen fingers. He ducked away easily enough and her punch hit his shoulder.
“You bastard!” she cried, flailing at him then. “You only wanted me along on this trip as cover!”
Jamie grabbed her arms and pulled her off and, after a moment’s struggle, she turned her face into his chest and burst into tears. He led her a little distance away and sat her down on a short basalt column, holding her hands and shooting reproachful glances in Daz’s direction.
“Is that right?” Paxo demanded, watching them. “You told us she wouldn’t be left behind, that you didn’t have a choice but to let her tag along. And all the time—” He threw up his hands and spun away.
