“Who would call this bloke and tell him to go after us?” she said, swallowing to firm up her voice. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Somebody did,” Sean said, eyeing her. “Someone who knew about Daz. You tell me.”
She threw her hands up in frustration and anger. “We were all there when he admitted what he was!” she snapped. “Grow up, Sean – it wasn’t me.”
“He never said it was,” I said blandly. “Guilty conscience, Tess?”
“So did everybody in this fucking place know about you before you told your mates, then?” Paxo wanted to know. “Laughing behind our backs, were you?”
Daz rolled his uncovered eye in Paxo’s direction but before he could answer I noticed a police car appear at the far end of the harbour and start to cruise slowly in our direction.
“I would suggest we continue this conversation inside,” I murmured. “Seems a waste to pay for a hotel bed and then spend the night in the local nick, doesn’t it?”
Once you had a room key you could enter and leave the hotel by a side door that opened out into a stairwell leading directly to the rooms on the upper floors. At least it meant we didn’t have any explaining to do to whoever was on the reception desk. Paxo was limping slightly on his right leg as we walked in and Daz’s eye was still bleeding.
“You ought to get that sorted out,” Sean said to him.
Daz’s eyes flicked in the direction of his mates for a moment, then back again. “Yeah, well, it’ll be fine.”
“I’ve got my first-aid kit upstairs if you want some help?” I offered.
He hesitated for a second, then nodded, looking grateful.
“OK,” he said then. “Thanks.”
We took Daz to the room Sean and I were sharing. It had been recently renovated by the looks of it, with striped wallpaper and antique pine furniture, and there was still a faint smell of new paint. Daz eyed the double bed but sat down on one of the armchairs by the window while I fished my kit out of my tank bag. Sean filled the small kettle on the side table and started putting together coffee from the little packets provided.
Daz threw the sodden tissue into the waste paper basket and folded up a fresh piece. He watched me unpacking disinfectant and Steri-strips and his lips twisted.
“You not going to put gloves on before you deal with me?” he wanted to know, his tone taunting. “The others seem to have developed a sudden strange reluctance to get my blood on them.”
“Sit back and shut up if you want that eye looking at,” I said.
The cut was small and just above his eyebrow where it would tend to bleed a lot and look worse than it was. I managed to clean it up for long enough to get the Steri-strips to stick and hold the sliced edges of skin together.
He sat without complaint while I worked on him, not taking those startling blue eyes off me. It was like being watched by a Siamese cat.
“There you go,” I said at last. “Try and let the air get to it tonight, but I’d put some sticking plaster over it before you try and get your lid on tomorrow morning.”
He delicately traced the repair with his fingers and nodded his thanks.
The kettle boiled. Sean poured water into both mugs and handed one to me and the other to Daz. I perched on the corner of the bed while Sean took the chair opposite Daz and sat leaning forwards with his forearms resting on his knees and his hands relaxed between them. There was a scrape across the middle two knuckles on one hand, I saw. Other than that he bore no signs of having been in a fight.
“What’s going on, Daz?” he asked gently then. “People are getting hurt. One of you’s been killed. Is it worth it – whatever it is?”
It was neatly timed. Daz was physically at a low ebb, felt isolated from his friends, and we’d just patched him up and been nice to him. Classic interrogation techniques.
He shrugged, still pigheaded despite everything that had happened.
I sighed. “Look Daz, you’re in the shit and we can protect you. It’s what we do,” I said, trying to be persuasive rather than exasperated. “But we can’t do it if you won’t tell us what we’re trying to protect you from.”
“Who says we need protection?”
I stood up, frustrated into action, but with three people in it the bedroom was too cramped to pace. “I’m only here because I made a promise to a friend,” I said, turning back to him. “And Sean’s only here because I am. But you need us, whether you like it or not. Tonight should have proved that. For God’s sake – what do we have to do to get you to trust us?”
“We do trust you,” Daz said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“Ha!” I said, scathing. “Where’s ‘here’, Daz? Because from where we’re standing the only place we are is in the dark.”
He let his breath out in a huff and sat up. “OK,” he said, sounding weary, like we’d finally battered him down into submission. “We’re here because we’ve made a deal to buy something over here and bring it back to the UK.”
I was aware of a sickly taste in the back of my mind. “What kind of a deal?” I demanded, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. “Drugs?”
“Fuck, no,” Daz said quickly. “We may be many things, Charlie, but there’s no way we’d have anything to do with shit like that and that’s the truth.”
“So what kind of shit are you into?”
Daz shrugged. “Diamonds,” he said.
“Diamonds?” I repeated blankly, glancing at Sean. I checked Daz’s face carefully for any sign of guile but it was clear and open. I sat down on the corner of the bed again. “Why the hell have you made a deal to buy diamonds?”
“For my work,” he said, sounding almost surprised that I should have to ask. “A lot of the stuff I do is ceramics and glassware from local artisans, but I deal with jewellery makers all the time. Didn’t you know?”
I shook my head slowly. Diamonds. After all our fears and speculation, it was almost an anticlimax. When Sean had said Daz ran a craft centre I’d expected something a little more homespun. It never occurred to me that he might be dealing with precious gems. From the look on his face, Sean hadn’t made that connection, either.
“So, did you provide Tess with the stones she’s wearing?” Sean asked. “The ones she’s trying very hard to pretend are not real?”
The surprise showed on Daz’s face. “You spotted that one, then?” he said, rueful. “No, that was Slick.”
“Convenient to pass that one over to someone who can’t refute it, isn’t it?”
He flushed. “That’s not what I’m doing,” he said quickly. He sighed heavily, took a drink of his coffee. “Look, in the last year I started to buy in some secondhand jewellery and I was getting in loose diamonds to replace lost stones. I was using Tess to do a bit of that repair work for me.”
“Why Tess?”
“We were at art college together,” he said. “She dropped out to have the kid, Ashley, and we lost touch for a while. Then one day she came into the shop with this boyfriend of hers, Slick. We chatted, you know how it is, old times. She’d been keeping her hand in, making her own stuff, and she was interested in doing more, so I got her doing some work for me.”