“Sharks are too fucking good for him,” Paxo muttered. “I want to feed him to something with really blunt teeth so it hurts like fuck when he’s being ripped in bits.”
“What do you suggest?” William asked me, ignoring Paxo.
“Well, for a start, where’s his bike?” I said. “He would never have left his helmet if he was planning on riding out of here, so how else did he leave? Maybe you’ve got it all wrong and he and Tess were ambushed on their way to meet the courier. Maybe he’s not to blame for this.”
Nobody looked convinced but Sean was frowning. “We need to see if the bike’s down in the car park,” he said. “We should go and do a search now, before we call anyone.” He checked his watch. “Another ten minutes isn’t going to make much difference, one way or the other.”
Everybody stood, started heading for the door. As I made to follow them Sean tapped me on the shoulder and I paused, waiting until they’d gone on ahead.
“You do realise,” he said gently, “that if Jamie isn’t a willing participant in this enterprise, then once they’d got the diamonds and the money they might not have had any further use for him?”
“I know,” I said, trying to suppress a shiver. “I’m trying not to think about what we might find down there.”
***
Once we hit the underground car park we split up to cover the ground faster. I found myself automatically checking underneath and in front of all the parked cars. The kind of spaces where you might conceivably dump a body.
I was just peering into one of the big industrial waste bins near the service entrance when I heard a deep shout from William. I let the lid clang shut and spun round.
I must have been furthest away because by the time I arrived the others were already gathering next to a shiny black pickup truck just across from the exit ramp. As I rounded the front of the truck I saw Sean crouched by the body of a man lying sprawled alongside it and my skin shrank instantly at the sight of him. Sean glanced up.
“It’s not Jamie,” he said immediately, reading my fear, although the logical side of my brain had already processed that information. The man was too big and his leathers were plain black rather than Jamie’s more garish colour scheme.
Now I looked more closely I could see his dark hair was shorter, too, but it was difficult to tell under the blood that was matting the back of it. A small pool had formed around his head like a halo, staining the dusty concrete almost black. Sean slipped two fingers against the man’s neck, just under his ear.
“Is he—?” Daz asked, his voice hesitant.
As if in answer, the man lurched like Sean’s touch had burned him, starting to thresh. Sean put his hands on the man’s shoulders and braced against him.
“Hold still,” he said sharply. “We’re here to help.”
He had to say it several times before the man quieted down. By the way he was moving it was clear the blow to the head hadn’t done him any serious damage, so we rolled him fully over.
“Bloody hell,” William said in surprise, almost his first sign of emotion since we’d found the courier’s body. “Gleet?”
It was hard to recognise the man who’d hosted Slick’s wake in the field behind the farm in Wray. It seemed a long time ago. One side of his face was coated in dried blood where it had rested on the ground, giving him the wild-eyed look of a tribal warrior.
Sean got an arm under Gleet’s shoulders and helped him to sit up. He did so with a groan, suddenly clutching at his right elbow with his left hand and cradling it across his body. From the way his right hand drooped, his arm was pretty badly busted.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Paxo demanded of no one in particular.
“Let me guess,” I said when Gleet himself didn’t respond. I had a brief flashback of Daz in the hotel room at Portaferry when we’d told him about the Lucky Strike Suzuki. He’d known exactly who the rider was and hadn’t seen him as a threat. Now I knew why. “The name on your driver’s licence wouldn’t be Reginald Post would it, by any chance?”
Gleet looked up briefly with eyes that struggled to centre but I thought I saw a sliver of recognition in them.
An engine started up somewhere behind us and moved off. We instinctively gathered round Gleet, obscuring him, as a car went past and disappeared up the exit ramp.
“We need to move him away from here,” Sean said, tense. “Gleet! Come on, man, stick with me! Can you stand up?”
With Sean and William supporting him, we managed to get the big biker on his feet and steer him a slightly staggered course across the car park towards the lifts. On the way we passed the Suzuki that Gleet had been riding to follow us through Ireland. It was parked at a haphazard angle, like he’d stopped suddenly and just jumped off.
Daz rushed ahead of us, jabbing at the call button for the lift. I held my breath as I watched the floor indicator dropping towards us and the doors opened, but nobody was inside. I reckoned we might have difficulty finding an explanation for Gleet’s macabre appearance if we did bump into another guest, but our luck held.
I went to fetch my first-aid kit from Sean’s and my room. By the time I returned to Paxo’s room they had Gleet sitting down on the closed loo seat in the bathroom and had mopped the worst of the blood away from the wound on his head. It turned out to be little more than a tear in his scalp that had bled more alarmingly than its severity warranted. Nevertheless, it had been enough to knock him cold and, even now, it was taking him a while to come round fully.
When William let me back in, though, Gleet at least looked up and more or less focused on me. Daz had the kettle on and Gleet blinked rather than nodded his thanks when he was handed a mug of sugary tea. They’d got his jacket off him somehow and his right arm was resting across his lap, lifeless apart from the unconscious twitching of his swollen fingers.
“You must have the skull of an ox,” Sean said to him. “I don’t know many people who could have taken such a belt across the back of the head like that and lived to tell the tale.”
“Yeah well, shame I ain’t got bones to match,” Gleet said, lifting the shoulder of his injured arm with a wry smile that didn’t hide the pain he was in.
“What the fuck happened?” The question burst out of Paxo like he’d been doing his best to contain it until now but it had finally got away from him.
“Where do I start?” Gleet murmured, closing his eyes for a moment. He opened them again. “OK, Tess asked me to come over and keep tabs on you lot. Where is she, by the way?”
The casual question took us by surprise so that no one had a chance to prepare a face against it. Gleet took a sip of his tea, eyes darting round us. He caught our dismayed expressions and lowered the mug very slowly, his face going through phases of denial, shock and anger before finally settling on a deep abiding sorrow.
“Oh no,” he muttered, almost to himself. “I knew it was gonna be bad when I saw them taking Jamie, but . . . oh Jesus, no. Not Tess . . .”
He choked into silence, head down, his left hand clutched round the half-drunk mug of tea like it was his only anchor. After a moment his shoulders began to shake and I realised he was weeping.