Sean barely turned his head. “If you’re going to be sick, do it somewhere else,” he said shortly.
I forced myself not to turn away from Tess, even though the sight of her made my heartbeat struggle painfully inside my constricted chest.
“Her rings are gone,” I said, suddenly noticing her naked fingers dangling over the rim of the bath. “She was wearing them again at breakfast but they’re not there now.”
“Her left arm’s broken just above the wrist, so she must have put up a fight,” Sean said quietly. “But this is what killed her, look – she was hit with something, hard, across the side of her neck here, under her ear. You can see the bruising. One blow,” he went on, a strange sympathy in his face now, velvet on stone. “I doubt she would have known much about it.”
I glanced around. “Whatever it was they used, they must have taken it with them.”
“Mm,” Sean said, straightening. “You got a bruise very like that across your arm, remember?”
A fast picture of that wicked extendible baton unfolded in my memory. Sean saw from my anguished face that I’d connected the two. It seemed a bitter confirmation of my earlier fears.
“Eamonn?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he said, turning grim.
You should have let me finish him while I had the chance. Sean’s words came back to taunt me. It was a testament to his will power that he didn’t feel the need to repeat them himself.
***
“So, what the fuck do we do now?”
It was Paxo who spoke. He sounded somewhat subdued, defeated even. The most interesting thing was that the question was directed towards Sean.
The Devil’s Bridge Club members had put themselves totally into his hands. William had retreated into a blank silence so that it was difficult to know what he was thinking, while Daz was clearly in shock.
We’d shepherded the three of them back to Paxo and William’s room across the hallway, carefully hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to Daz’s. It wouldn’t prevent Housekeeping from making their nasty discovery but it would delay them, at least.
“I’m not entirely sure you can do anything other than call the gardai,” Sean said, leaning on the wall by the window and folding his arms across his chest. “Whether he was the driving force behind it or not, it would seem Jamie’s done the dirty on you. He took Tess to meet the courier, who’s now dead and minus the gems. He then brought her back here, and now she’s dead and the money’s gone as well. Face it – you’re in the shit. But it’ll make it ten times worse for you if you run.”
“What about the diamonds?” Daz said, his voice plaintive now. The three of them were sitting on one of the beds, slumped and dejected.
Sean shrugged. “Forget them,” he said, brutal. “If they were nicked we could try and drop Jamie in it with the authorities. I know a guy in Amsterdam who loves to track down and recover stolen gems. There might even have been a reward. But, even though I can’t believe they’re entirely legit, I’ve already run some checks and they don’t show up as stolen.”
Daz shifted uncomfortably. “They’re not stolen, exactly,” he admitted. “They just didn’t get here through the usual channels.”
Sean stared at him for a moment, face bleak. He’d taken on that stillness I recognised. He only wore it when things were raging all around him, or he was trying to contain it within. “As soon as I found out they weren’t stolen, there was really only one logical explanation,” he said quietly. “You bought blood diamonds, didn’t you?”
Daz flushed. “At the time, I didn’t know that’s what they were,” he protested.
“Not at first, maybe,” Sean said, and there was a dangerous softness to his voice now. “But it didn’t take you long to find out, did it?”
“Wait a minute, what the fuck are blood diamonds?” Paxo demanded.
“They’re also called conflict diamonds,” Sean told him but his eyes were still on Daz. “They’re smuggled out of the mines in places like Botswana and Sierra Leone by the workers – who’ll be shot if they’re caught, incidentally. The rough stones are traded on the black market, cut in the backstreets of India, and peddled into Europe usually to finance the drugs trade,” he said, glacial. “Good job there was ‘no way you’d have anything to do with shit like that’, right Daz?”
Daz wouldn’t meet his eyes as Sean threw his own earlier disavowal back in his face.
“We trusted you!” Paxo jumped to his feet and rounded on Daz. “You promised us a good laugh and a double-your-money deal. It was supposed to be a ‘victimless crime’ right?” he spat. “Now look at it – all gone to fuck.”
“I don’t like it any better than you do, Pax,” Daz said, voice rising. “And I had a hell of a lot more cash at stake!”
“Fuck that!” Paxo shouted. “Christ. You don’t get it, do you? Two people are dead! We could all go to fucking jail because of you. And getting fucked in the showers every morning by some hairy-arsed armed robber and his mates might be your idea of fun, mate, but it fucking isn’t mine, all right?”
“Hey, back off,” William said, without heat or volume. “OK, so he’s been a bloody fool, but having a slanging match now isn’t helping. The question is, what can we do about it?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘do about it’?” Sean said. “Our best plan is to contact the local police. We’ve already delayed longer than they’re going to like but I think we can explain some of that away. Leave it much longer and it starts to smack of conspiracy.”
“There’s always Superintendent MacMillan,” I suggested. “I know it’s way out of his jurisdiction but he might be persuaded to intervene on our behalf. And he did ask me to look into this in the first place.”
“What?” Paxo squawked. “You were going to sell us out to the filth? You little cow!”
“No, actually,” I said coldly. “He asked, and I told him to go take a running jump.”
“So what good’s he going to do us now?”
“Well,” I said, still smarting enough to be harsh about it, “he might make the difference between a couple of years for smuggling, and life for murder.”
“The other thing to consider is that even if these diamonds don’t show up on the official stolen list, they’ve almost undoubtedly been siphoned off by somebody,” Sean said, cutting in then. “If I drop the word in enough of the right ears your pal Jamie might find life suddenly gets very . . . difficult.”
“Don’t,” I said immediately, even though I could still see Tess’s lifeless face staring out of that bathtub at me. The trouble was, I could see Jacob and Clare’s faces, too, back in the hospital in Lancaster, pleading with me to keep Jamie out of trouble. I didn’t think I could have failed at that in any more spectacular fashion.
I became aware that everyone was watching me. “We don’t know if Jamie’s on his own in this, or if he’s having his strings pulled by Eamonn,” I said quickly. “Don’t you think it might be a good idea to find out before we feed him to the sharks?”