‘Jesus.’ He dropped his head, teeth clenched, and his foot kicked harder. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
Tentatively she raised the hacksaw, edging the blade into the space between the wall and the hand, lowering it until it bit into the shaft of the nail. Steve stopped talking and went still. His eyes rested on her face. She moved the saw back and forth experimentally once or twice. He’d gone curiously quiet. She adjusted the blade and felt it lock into the metal, knew it was right, and began to saw.
‘Sally,’ he whispered suddenly, while she worked, ‘I really need you.’
Her eyes shot to him and she saw something she’d never seen in them before – something naked and scared. When he had said ‘need’ he had meant more than just needing her to cut him away from the wall. It was a bigger ‘need’ than that. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could the blade slipped through the metal and the nail came apart. Steve’s hand dropped and the head of the nail fell out of it. He took a couple of steps back and she jumped off the chair and caught him, lifted the hand and held wads of kitchen towels round it to stem the blood. She made him sit down, his hand positioned on his shoulder.
‘Take deep breaths.’
He shook his head. His T-shirt had dark circles of sweat at the neck and under the arms. There was a fine spatter of blood on the floor and the tools were scattered all over the place. After a minute or two, he spoke. ‘Yesterday was the most fucking awful day, Sally.’
‘Yes.’ She crouched, peering up into his grey face. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’
He looked up at the ceiling as if he was trying to find a steady place to rest his eyes and keep everything together. ‘It’s work. Fucking crap crap crap.’
‘Is it America?’
‘No. God, no – that’s a breeze. It was the meeting. In London. With … You know who I was meeting.’
Mooney, she thought. I was right. ‘What happened?’
There was a long silence. Then he turned his grey eyes back to her and looked at her seriously. ‘I got offered a novel way to earn thirty K. No tax. Would solve all your problems in the blink of an eye.’
‘What?’
‘Killing David Goldrab.’
She put her head to one side and gave a small smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Right. I’ll kill him and you steal all his champagne.’
Steve didn’t laugh, just went on staring at her.
‘What? You look weird, Steve. Don’t scare me.’
‘But I’m serious. That’s what they offered me at the meeting yesterday. I sat in the Wolseley in Piccadilly drinking two-hundred-quid-a-bottle champagne and got offered thirty K to off David Goldrab. I told you it was going to be dark.’
They stared at each other, stony-faced with shock.
After a moment he shook his head. ‘No – forget it. I didn’t say that.’
‘Yes, you did.’ She straightened, groped blindly for the sofa behind her. Sat down with a bump on the arm. ‘It’s not true – is it?’
His eyes flickered across her face. ‘Good God, Sally, what the hell have I wandered into?’ His shoulders slumped wearily. ‘It’s like being in a bloody Tarantino movie.’
‘You’re serious? You’re really serious?’
‘Fuck, yes. Yes.’
‘Do people really do things like that? In real life?’
He shrugged, as mystified as she was. ‘Apparently. I mean, Christ, I always kind of knew it happened from time to time to people in my job. You’d hear about it – this and that bent PI giving some ex-IRA guy ten K to drive a Range Rover over someone’s wife in their driveway. Just like I always knew the really shit stuff in life existed. The reality of all the bastards who walk the streets unchallenged. They’re not stopped because they’re dressed in Armani suits, drive high-end Audis and get called “sir”, but they’re psychos just the same, for their ruthlessness and for the scalps they take. I knew all that – that lives were being destroyed under the veneer. I knew complete and utter bare-faced greed really existed. And on some level I knew things like this must happen. People must get killed – for a price.’ He leaned back in the chair, clutching his hand. ‘I just never, ever, thought it would come near me.’
Sally let all her breath out. She gazed up at the ceiling, spent time fitting this into her head. After a while, when neither of them had moved, she said, ‘Steve?’
‘What?’
‘Those people. Weren’t they nervous when you said no?’
He was silent for a moment. Then he unwrapped his hand and inspected the wound. Licked his finger and rubbed at the blood.
She lowered her chin and squinted at him. ‘Steve?’
‘What?’
‘You did say no. Didn’t you?’
‘Of course I did.’ He didn’t meet her eyes. ‘What else do you think I’d have said?’
Chapter 30
Zoë strode down the corridor from the incident room to find five teenagers standing moodily outside her office. The three boys had spiked hair and wore their school trousers belted under their skinny buttocks. The girls were straight out of St Trinian’s, with school skirts rolled up at the waist to show their legs and shirts tied at the waist like Daisy Duke.
‘Auntie Zoë?’ said the smaller of the two girls. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’
That stopped Zoë in her tracks. She leaned a little closer, peering at the girl. ‘Millie? Jesus. I didn’t recognize you.’
‘What’s wrong with me?’ Millie put both hands on her hair, as if to check it was still there. ‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just …’ She’d only ever seen Millie in photos Mum and Dad had sent, and twice in the flesh, in the street, just in passing. But she was pretty – really pretty. It took a moment for Zoë to gather her wits. ‘What do you want? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’
‘The headmaster let us come here. We’ve been waiting to speak to you. Can we do it in private?’
‘Yes. Of course. Come in, come in.’ She unlocked her office and kicked the door open, scanned the room quickly for anything the kids shouldn’t see – post-mortem photos or notes on Lorne’s case. ‘There aren’t any chairs. Sorry about that.’
‘’S OK,’ said the tallest boy. ‘We won’t be staying.’
Zoë closed the door. Then she sat on the desk and regarded them all carefully. She had to stop herself staring directly at Millie, though she monitored her out of the corner of her eye. Was it her imagination or did Millie look more like her, Zoë, and less like Sally? ‘What can I do for you all?’
‘We need some help,’ said the tall boy. He was blond and good-looking. You could tell from the body language of the rest of the group that he was the alpha male. That he threw his weight around and generally got what he wanted. ‘It’s about Lorne Wood.’
‘Right.’ Zoë glanced cautiously from face to face. ‘OK. And I take it from the way we’re all standing here, the way that you approached me, that you want, for the time being, to have a private chat?’
‘For the time being.’
‘That’s fair enough. But before we start I’d like to get your names. I give you my word it won’t go any further. Here.’ She pulled out a spiral-bound jotter and handed the bigger boy a pen. He studied it for a moment, unsure. Zoë nodded. ‘You have my word,’ she repeated. ‘You really do.’
Reluctantly he took it, bent over the desk and wrote Peter Cyrus. He handed the pen to Millie, who glanced at Zoë, looked about to say something, but instead bent over and wrote Millie Benedict. Benedict, Zoë noticed, not Cassidy. So it was true what she’d heard: Sally really had divorced Julian. And here was Millie – using Sally’s name instead of her father’s. What did that say about the separation?
The other teenagers lined up and took turns to write on the pad.
Nial Sweetman, Sophie Sweetman, Ralph Hernandez.
Ralph Hernandez.