by Zoe Sharp
“Oh,” she said, suddenly breathless, “so . . . are you still going to Ireland?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Especially after what’s happened to Sam.”
“Sam? Clare said with a flare of alarm. She swallowed. “What? What’s the matter with him?”
“The daft sod decided to come and try out for the Devil’s Bridge brigade,” I said. “Borrowed an old GPZ from a mate, specially, and got himself wiped out, big style.”
“Oh no!” Clare’s distress knifed at me but I hardened my heart along with my resolve to keep going. “Is he OK?”
I shrugged. “They’re working on him now,” I said. “But his leg was pretty badly smashed.”
She paled at the picture presented by the words. After all, she didn’t need much of an imagination to know what it was like to feel your bones breaking inside you.
“Oh God,” she murmured. “What happened, do you know?”
“I was there,” I said. “He was hit – by a white Transit van.”
“Oh no,” Clare whispered, pale as death now, a faint sheen of sweat breaking out across her forehead.
“What the hell is going on, Clare?” I said, aware that something of her anguish had transferred itself into my own voice.
She looked away. “I-I can’t tell you,” she said, her eyes filling.
“What can’t you tell me?” I demanded. “What’s so terrible that it can possibly be worse than what’s been going round inside my head since Sunday?”
“Please Charlie! I promised, I—”
“Promised who?” I cut in. “Jamie?”
Clare’s features went from colourless to flushed red like spilt ink in water.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Clare?” I said, talking fast and low now, angry, with a wary eye out for the ever-vigilant – and protective – nursing staff. “If you and Jamie have got something going, don’t you think you owe it to Jacob to tell it to him straight?”
“He—” Clare got one word out, then stopped, her hands rising to her face, her mouth a rounded O of shock. “Oh God, Charlie, it’s nothing like that. Jamie? I hardly know him. How could you think that? He’s Jacob’s son!”
Her horrified expression was too convincing not to be genuine. The doubt collapsed and relief flooded in, making me snappy and defensive.
“So what the hell is going on between you two?” And when she opened her mouth I forestalled her by adding: “There must be something pretty special because you’ve already lied for him.”
She flushed again, staring down blankly at the pages of her magazine as though she might find the answers written there. When she finally looked up it was straight into my face.
“He came to me last week, in trouble, needing money – a lot of money,” she said simply. “And I agreed to let him have it.”
“Just like that,” I said. “What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” I echoed, sitting back in my chair. “So, you agreed to hand over ten grand to someone you claim you hardly know and you didn’t even ask some difficult questions about what it was for? Come on, Clare – level with me!”
She stared. “How did you—?”
“Know the amount?” I finished for her. “When Sean and I threw Isobel and Eamonn out we naturally checked round to see if anything was missing. We found a bank slip for ten thousand, but no cash to go with it.”
Her shoulders came down a little, rounded in defeat. “OK,” she said tiredly. “Yes, I lent him ten thousand pounds and, however unbelievable you find it, I didn’t ask him that many difficult questions.” She sighed, pushed the magazine aside and smoothed down the front of her nightgown. “He said he was desperate, that he was in deep trouble, that he’d got in over his head.”
“The Devil’s Bridge Club,” I said and felt the despair wind through me. “Oh Clare, why didn’t you come to me? I could have tipped the word to MacMillan and he could have picked up the lot of them before it ever got this far.”
“Picked up who?” she shot back, not entirely out of spirit. “It’s not the lads in the club who are the problem, Charlie, it’s whoever’s after them. Slick was the one organising the Irish trip and look what happened to him.”
“If you thought Slick was a target of some sort, what the hell were you doing out with him on Sunday?”
“You think I wanted to be there – with that creep?” Clare said bitterly. “Oh, I know Slick’s reputation. I can imagine the rumours.”
“So why did you get onto the bike with him?”
She looked guilty as well as wretched. “I was supposed to go up to Devil’s Bridge and give Jamie the money there—”
“Why at Devil’s Bridge?” I demanded. “If he was getting off the Heysham boat, why didn’t he just go to the house?”
“I don’t know but, just as I was about to leave the house, Slick turned up, being his usual slimy self. He said how he knew all about the money I was lending to Jamie. He made all kinds of assumptions about that, I can tell you,” she added, giving me a twinge of guilt for my own train of thought. “He said how he wouldn’t shout about it if I agreed to ride pillion with him. I think he just wanted to turn up with me on the back of his bike. Bragging, you know.” She pulled a face. “I hope that was all he wanted, anyway.”
“But you left the money at home.”
She nodded. “I-I didn’t really trust him, so I said he could give me a lift up there, but that I’d get a ride back with Jamie. He agreed and, well—” she shrugged, indicating her surroundings, “—the rest is history. If I’d known how deep he was mixed up in it, I wouldn’t have gone within a mile of him.”
“You think whoever knocked you and Slick off did it because they were trying to stop them going? All the more reason to get Jamie out of there, surely?”
“And then what?” Clare said, strained. “He’s going to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.”
I paused. “What’s Jacob’s role in all this?”
She looked even more forlorn. “He didn’t know anything about it until he got back from Ireland yesterday and I-I asked him not to tell you too much,” she muttered. “I was too ashamed.”
I stood, pushing my chair back against the wall.
“The only thing you have to be ashamed of,” I told her then, “is not telling me the truth from the start.”
***
I waited until I got to the cottage before I called Sean. I’d hung around at the hospital until Sam had come out of theatre and it was late by that time, but I felt a desperate need to hear his voice. Even so, I wasn’t looking forward to what he might have to say.
I’d ridden the ‘Blade home sedately, thankful that the pair of us had escaped undamaged. When I’d locked the bike away in the lean-to at the back of the cottage, I went inside and picked up the phone before I’d even switched on the lights.
I called Sean on his mobile, not sure if the Heathrow job was over, or where he’d be, but he picked up on the second ring.
“Hi, it’s me,” I said.
“Charlie!” he said. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you but your damned mobile’s been off again.”
“Sorry,” I said, pulling the offending phone out of the inside pocket of my leather jacket and dropping it onto the table, along with my keys. “I turned it off while I was at the hospital and I guess I just forgot to turn it on again when I left.”
“How’s Clare?”
“Oh, she’s OK,” I said. “It’s Sam I was worried about.”
“Pickering?” He paused. “Tell me.”
So I told him about the Devil’s Bridge Club audition and Sam’s accident and my subsequent conversation with Clare.
“Call MacMillan,” Sean said right away when I was done. “I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but he’s all right for a copper. Dump it all in his lap and let him sort it out.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I said wearily. “You wo
uldn’t do it if it was Madeleine lying there in that hospital bed, would you?”
I heard him sigh. “No,” he said at last. “You’re right. But then, I hope she wouldn’t give me the runaround to start with. Are you sure Clare’s told you all she knows this time?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But I think it’s the best I’m going to get for now. I’ll have to see if I can crowbar the rest out of Jamie while we’re away.”
“While you’re—” The disbelief made his voice harder than normal, made me shiver. “You’re not still going to go,” he said, and it wasn’t phrased as a question.”
“What else can I do?”
“Don’t, Charlie,” he said urgently. “Madeleine’s been doing some digging but we haven’t had anything useful back yet. Until then you’ve no idea what you’re up against or who may be after these lads.”
I shrugged, a useless gesture when you’re talking to someone over the phone. “Then that’s exactly why I have to go.”
Seventeen
After everything I’d been through to get myself onto the Irish trip in the first place, I damned near missed the ferry.
I dithered over packing, even though I learned to travel light when I was in the army. Having to carry everything and still keep up with the blokes soon makes you drop out the unessentials. Besides, it was a bikers’ run, for heaven’s sake, not a garden party – how posh could it be? I put my washbag, first-aid kit, and anything hard into the squashy bag that clipped magnetically to the bike’s tank, and packed spare clothing into my old rucksack.
I wasn’t planning on coming off the ‘Blade, but if I did it was better not to have anything on me that was going to make the accident worse. A mate once made the mistake of carrying his tools in a backpack and, although having some dozy old bastard in a Volvo knock him off was bad enough, then getting his left kidney punctured by one of his own screwdrivers merely added injury to insult.
Traffic was heavy and obstructive. To cap it all, just when I needed to make up a bit of time I ended up in a group of cars on the motorway who were all travelling at exactly sixty-nine miles an hour because one of them was a jam sandwich being driven by a policeman with a warped sense of humour.
The end result was that I came howling into the Port of Heysham with barely fifteen minutes to spare before they would have told me to take a hike. I gave my name at the barrier and found that, true to his word, William had sorted my ticket.
They whizzed me straight through and onto the fast cat ferry that was standing at the dockside. I watched the deck crew strap the ‘Blade down, then headed for the stairwell to the passenger lounges. I found myself hoping that the rest of the Devil’s Bridge crowd were already on board, or I’d no idea where I was going once I reached the other side.
Inside, the catamaran had a wide open-plan restaurant across the centre bridgedeck area with a bar upstairs and rows of aircraft-type seating at either side.
The place seemed to be teeming with bikers. I did a quick tour but couldn’t see anyone familiar. A couple of times, though, I could have sworn someone was watching me. But when I turned round to scan the crowd, I couldn’t see anyone paying me particular attention. Nevertheless, it made me twitchy. By the time I went out onto the small section of outside deck I was starting to get worried. It was there I found Paxo.
He was leaning on the aft railing, his leathers stripped to his waist to take full advantage of the syrupy heat. Underneath, he was wearing a white vest that was already stained with sweat and his exposed shoulders had the pink tinge of sunburn to them that was going to sting in the morning. He had a crumpled packet of Lambert & Butler clutched in his hand like a talisman. I moved alongside him.
“Hi,” I said. “Where is everyone?”
He jerked his head towards the heavily tinted windows immediately behind us. “First Class lounge. William pulled some strings,” he said, adding sourly, “The rest of ‘em are in there but it’s no smoking.”
He gave me a look of resentment but I couldn’t work out if I was to blame or it was just brought on by the prospect of a lack of nicotine in his system for four hours. Or possibly both.
The last stragglers were loaded onto the car deck beneath us and the ramp was winched up like a drawbridge. There was a sign on the rail next to me that announced we were about to cross an area of special ecological interest and to do our bit not to pollute it by throwing any rubbish over the side. Then the captain eased us away from our berth and the whole view of the harbour disappeared in a belching cloud of black diesel smoke. It almost, but not quite, managed to obscure the slab-sided concrete monstrosity that is the nuclear power station next door.
Coughing, we both retreated inside and Paxo led the way through the opaque glass door into the First Class area. It was a sizeable room with windows on two sides. One of the cabin crew smiled at him and said, “You found her, then?”
Paxo scowled back, as though it was some sign of weakness to admit he might have been looking out for me.
There were sets of tables for four all round the walls and one larger table in the centre. William and Jamie had taken that over, spilling luggage and helmets into the surrounding area. The other tables were mostly taken by serious-looking couples who’d clearly been hoping to escape the bike crowd by coming in here and didn’t exactly look overjoyed when I added to their number.
The ferry cleared the harbour entrance and the jagged remains of the old wooden pier and the captain opened her up. The deck vibrations under our feet increased to a buzz as the four massive Ruston diesels began to work. Great rooster tails of spray curved up behind the stern, casting our own personal rainbow in the brilliant sunlight.
I stripped off my jacket, unzipping it from my leather jeans and draping it over the back of one of the bolted-down chairs.
“Where’s Daz?” I asked, but caught the quick glance Paxo exchanged with the others. “What? Don’t tell me he’s missed the boat.”
“Oh no, he’s not done that,” Paxo said darkly, and his tone indicated that he thought it might be better if Daz hadn’t made it on board.
Before I could ask any questions, the door to the lounge opened and Daz himself sauntered through, looking cool and handsome in his snazzy race leathers. He had that faint half-smile on his face, as though life was one big joke and he was in on it. In this case, perhaps he was right.
Behind him, also dressed in bike gear, was Tess.
I stared at her blankly, then skimmed my eyes across the veiled faces of the rest of the Devil’s Bridge Club and straight away I understood Paxo’s comment. Daz had not, I surmised, told the others that he was bringing Slick’s widow with him. After all the arguments, I could understand their anger at this sudden apparently about-face decision.
Tess smiled brightly at the group of us, seemingly enjoying the discomfort her presence was causing. I suppose it was better than being ignored. Her glee lost a little of its shine when she spotted me, though.
I got the feeling she enjoyed the position of lone female amid a group of men and, from the way her gaze turned calculating, she was trying to work out how much competition I was going to be for their attention. If the way her expression rapidly cleared was anything to go by – not much.
“Oh, hiya Charlie,” she said, wrapping herself round Daz’s arm like she was staking a claim on the alpha male and I’d have to make do with pickings lower down the food chain.
“Hello Tess,” I said, adding dryly, “I’m glad to see you’re coping so well with overcoming your grief.”
“Yeah well.” She pouted. “Life goes on.”
“You’re certainly proving that,” I said, watching Daz’s obvious uneasiness with some amusement. “I must admit I’m surprised to see you here, though.”
That injected a new smugness to her smile. “Well, this trip was my Slick’s idea in the first place and when the boys found out how I was the only one with certain vital—” her eyes slid over them, “—arrangements at my fingertips, they realised they rea
lly couldn’t do it without me. So what made them bring you along?”
“She was fast enough,” Paxo said shortly. It was a testament to his dislike of Tess, I reckoned, that he’d felt inclined to jump to my defence.
The ferry was out of the lee of the land now and pushing up towards its maximum cruising velocity as it struck out across Morecambe Bay. At that kind of speed the gentle swell had lumps in it like concrete sleeping policemen. As soon as we got into open water it had also begun a perceptible cindering motion, a slight corkscrewing, that always seems to come with a following sea.
I noticed Jamie was gripping the edge of the table like it was a designated flotation device. He had a sheen of sweat across his pale skin and when one of the cabin crew approached to ask if we’d like anything to eat, he actually took on a greenish cast.
