‘As the boss says, a book can be tossed in the furnace. A computer has magic ways of holding on to information that you might not want to share.’
‘Why write it down at all then?’
‘Even Old Nick makes you sign a contract, or so I’ve heard.’ The moving finger paused and he raised an eyebrow in an expression that made him look as if he might be on intimate terms with the man himself. ‘Okay, this is interesting. Naughty Hope.’
‘What?’
‘It appears that my boss isn’t the cold-hearted harridan I cursed her for all these years. She seems to have lent the doctor rather a lot of money.’
‘How much money?’
He turned the ledger round so that Stevie could see the entry his finger was resting on.
‘Over thirty grand.’
Simon’s share of Fibrosyop had guaranteed big returns. He had his own flat and a secure job. There had been no need for him to seek out back-street loans.
Stevie said, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t payment for a lucky bet?’
‘I don’t make mistakes about money. It looks like the good doctor stuck to his resolution, though a man who needs to borrow 30Gs from a bookie might not be entirely lily-white.’ He grinned. ‘No offence meant.’
Stevie whispered, ‘So that’s why Hope was there. She’d come to collect.’
The man looked up, all trace of cannabis mistiness gone.
‘You seen her?’
‘I meant that’s why . . .’ Stevie stumbled on the lie, ‘. . . that’s why she went there.’
‘No you didn’t.’ The man closed the ledger gently and said in a dangerously soft voice, ‘How did you get in? I thought Hope had forgotten to lock the door, but she didn’t, did she? You’ve got her keys.’
Their eyes locked and there was a moment when she might have been able to lie, but it passed.
‘I’m sorry.’ Stevie backed away from the counter. ‘She was dead when I got to Simon’s flat. Someone killed her. It was fast. She wouldn’t have felt a thing.’
The man’s features buckled, but his voice was the same quiet whisper.
‘You stood there, chatting to me as if she was still alive.’
‘I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘So you consulted your sense of decency and found you didn’t have one?’ His voice had been rising, but he paused, as if struck by a sudden thought, and whispered, ‘What did you do with her body?’
Stevie looked at the ground, ashamed.
‘I covered it with a sheet.’
‘You cold bitch.’ The man went to the door that separated the front shop from the back counter, stabbed at the security buttons and pulled the handle, but the lock stayed tight. ‘Fuck! Fucking thing!’ His voice was hoarse and he might have been crying. ‘I told her not to run around with cash on her. Told her and fucking told her.’ He slammed a fist against the door and stabbed another combination into the keypad.
‘Sorry.’ Stevie was still backing away, her eyes on the man, as if she could keep him there by strength of will. ‘I’m sorry.’
Her feet entered a shaft of sunlight stretching across the betting shop’s dingy floor. The heat of the day touched her shoulders and the spell was broken. She turned and ran. For an instant, the brightness outside robbed her of her sight, then she saw it alclass="underline" the empty road, the shuttered shops and the drawn curtains in the flats above them. The old man was still slumped against the side of the building, but this time she didn’t pause to check on him. Stevie kept on running until she reached Hope’s car, not daring to look back to see whether the bookmaker was chasing her.
Thirty-Four
Simon’s school photographs were tucked safely in her bag next to Hope Black’s gun. Stevie felt sure that whatever had happened to Simon was connected to the past, old loyalties reaching across the years to snare him in a scheme that had somehow resulted in his borrowing a small fortune from Hope, and finally, in his death.
She tried phoning Iqbal again, but the only response was from his voicemail so she left a message: Iqbal, it’s Stevie. Please call me when you get this, I’m worried about you. She wondered if she should head south, return to Iqbal’s apartment and check that he was okay. She had programmed the satnav with Geoffrey Frei’s address in Swiss Cottage. It told her to turn left and she turned left. Iqbal had seemed keen enough to hope for more than a one-night stand. She couldn’t imagine him deliberately ignoring her calls. The satnav directed her to drive straight ahead for four hundred yards. Stevie kept her hands on the wheel of the Jaguar and her eyes on the road.
Even if the key to Simon’s death lay in the past, instinct told her that the only way she would uncover it was to press on. The man who had attacked her, and killed Hope Black, might have come to the same conclusion and already be on his way to the Freis’ house. Even if she eluded him, the journalist’s wife might flee the city or succumb to the sweats, and then any chance of discovering what Frei had known would be lost. Stevie pushed Iqbal from her mind and kept on driving, a small knot of shame hardening in her chest.
Geoffrey Frei had lived in the kind of house beloved of British sitcoms. There were rows of them, as anonymous and indistinguishable to a stranger as the lines of little boys in Simon’s early class photographs. The houses made Stevie think of a lost London where bowler-hatted men in pinstriped suits wielded umbrellas rolled as tight as their emotions as they headed for the 06.45 train. And of wives who stayed at home, gearing up for the first consoling gin of the day.
The respectable-at-all-costs suburbanites had been replaced by a new type of middle classes. Journalists and TV producers, pilot fish to media sharks they mostly despised; senior lecturers hoping to make professor; Web designers and MBAs, looking for the next big app/craze/.com miracle, all passing through on the way to their next property upgrade, and all praying that the market didn’t collapse before they got there.
The curtains were drawn in many of the houses, as if they were homes in mourning, or occupied by honeymooners who had decided to stay in bed all day. But there were also pockets of activity: men and women in crumpled Boden and GAP casuals, loading their four-by-fours and estate cars with children, supplies and pets. It would have looked as if the district had decided to go on a sudden holiday, were it not for the grim stares and drawn faces. Stevie drove past a man sitting on the edge of the pavement, his face shocked free of expression. She saw doors and windows clamped with steel shutters. She heard screams and saw a woman being forced into a car by two men. Stevie slowed the Jag, wondering if she should intervene, until she saw that there were tears running down the men’s faces too.
An oversized Subaru sat outside Geoffrey Frei’s house. Stevie parked alongside it, allowing other traffic a lane to pass by, but boxing in the Subaru. She opened the gate to the Freis’ garden just as a tall woman came out of the house carrying a box of groceries. Her task was made more difficult by the blond, curly-haired child clinging to her neck, his thin legs clamped around her waist in a way that confirmed Darwin’s theories about evolution. The child looked at Stevie with wide eyes and then buried his face in his mother’s chest, wrapping himself even more closely around her. Stevie said, ‘You look like you could do with a hand. Would you like me to take the box?’
Sarah Frei had frozen on the doorstep, but the sound of Stevie’s voice galvanised her.
‘Get out of my garden and keep your distance.’
She sounded as if she had the authority of an army at her heels and Stevie took an involuntary step backwards.