"I'm not worried, I just want to know, that's all."
She glared at him for several seconds.
"I was calling Robbie."
"I told you, no calls. No fucking calls!"
"I wasn't going to tell him where we were going!" she protested.
"Vicky, you can't tell him anything. Period. Okay?"
"I just want to talk to him." Her voice was a tired croak, almost a death rattle. She sounded at the end of her tether.
Sharkey kissed the top of her head.
"And you will do, Vicky. I promise, but let's get ourselves sorted first. Let's make sure we're not vulnerable. Then we can approach Den from a position of strength."
He straightened up and put an arm around her shoulder.
"Come on, you need a stiff drink."
He half pushed, half led her towards the bar. All the fight seemed to have gone out of her, and once she stumbled and Sharkey had to grab her to stop her falling. He guided her to the bar and helped her on to a stool before ordering her a double vodka and tonic. She drank it with shaking hands, almost in one gulp, and he ordered another for her.
As Vicky Donovan was downing her third vodka and tonic and Stewart Sharkey was anxiously looking at his watch, Den Donovan was less than a hundred yards away, collecting his suitcase from the carousel in Terminal One. Even though he was wearing his Panama hat and sunglasses, he kept his head down until he was out of the terminal building. The sky was a leaden grey, threatening drizzle if not an outright shower. Donovan joined the queue for a black cab, and forty-five minutes later he was being driven down the Edgware Road. He told the taxi driver to drop him in front of a small rundown hotel in Sussex Gardens. The reception desk was manned by a bottle-blonde East European girl with badly permed hair and a large mole on the left side of her nose. She had a pretty smile and spoke reasonable English. She told Donovan that they had a double room available and that she'd need to see a credit card.
Donovan told her that his credit cards had been stolen while he was on holiday, but he had a passport and was happy to leave a large cash deposit. She seemed confused by his request, but after she'd spoken to her manager on the phone she nodded eagerly.
"He say okay. Three hundred okay for you?" Three hundred pounds was just fine. Donovan never used credit cards if he could possibly help it they left a clear trail that could be followed. He gave her six fifty-pound notes and she held up each one to the light above her head as if she knew what she was looking for. He checked in under the name of Nigel Parkes, which was the name on one of the UK passports he was carrying.
Once in his room, Donovan opened his suitcase and took out a reefer jacket and an old New York Yankees baseball cap and put them on. He peeled off several hundred pounds in fifties from one of the bricks of banknotes in his suitcase and shoved them into his wallet. Then he put his sunglasses on, locked his door and went out with the door key in his pocket.
He walked down Edgware Road past the packed Arab coffee houses and the banks with camels and squiggly writing on the front. Little Arabia, they called it, and Donovan could see why. Three quarters of the people on the streets were from the Middle East: fat women covered from head to foot in black, grizzled Arabs in full desert gear, teenagers dripping with gold wearing designer gear and shark-like smiles. Not a pleasant place, thought Donovan. You never knew where you were with Arabs. He'd almost lost an eye in a shoot-out with three Lebanese dealers in Liverpool when he was in his late teens, and he'd refused to do business with Arabs ever again. Arabs and Russians. You couldn't trust either.
He walked into an electrical retailer's and bought eight different pay-as-you-go mobile phones and two dozen Sim cards. A CCTV camera covered the cash register, but Donovan kept his head down and the peak of the baseball cap hid virtually all his face as he handed over the cash.
"You gotta lot of girlfriends?" asked the gangly Arab behind the counter.
"Boyfriends," said Donovan. He leered at the shop assistant.
"What time do you finish, huh?"
The shop assistant took a step back, then looked at Donovan quizzically, trying to work out if he was serious.
"You make joke, yes?"
"Yeah, I make joke," said Donovan.
The shop assistant laughed uneasily, put the phones and Sim cards in two plastic carrier bags, and gave them to Donovan. Donovan walked back to the hotel. He stopped off at a news agent on the way and bought five twenty-pound phone cards.
There were four power points in the room, and Donovan put four of the mobile phones on charge before heading for the shower.
Barry Doyle stretched out his hand for his beer and took a sip from the bottle, keeping his towel over his eyes. He was lying by the side of Donovan's pool, recovering from a two-hour workout in his boss's gym. The staff of three a maid, a handyman and a cook stayed in a small house on the edge of the compound and were available around-the-clock even when Donovan was away, so Doyle figured he might as well take advantage of the amenities on offer. The cook was superb, a rotund Puerto Rican woman in her late fifties who knew her way around a dozen or more cuisines and who could whip up poached eggs and beans on toast just the way Doyle liked them. Just the way his mother used to make them.
He heard footsteps and Doyle smiled under the towel. It would be Maria, the maid. Twenty-two years old, an hour-glass figure and a Catherine Zeta-Jones smile. Doyle had been lusting after Maria ever since she started working for Donovan, and he'd told her to bring him a fresh iced beer every half an hour.
"Thanks, Maria," he said, spreading his legs apart to give her a good look at the bulge in the front of his swimming trunks.
Rough hands grabbed both arms and yanked him up off the sun-lounger. The towel fell to the floor and Doyle blinked in the sudden sunlight. A squat man stood in front of him, brown skinned with a thick moustache and heavy eyebrows. Doyle squinted and his eyes slowly focused. Carlos Rodriguez.
"Where is he?" asked Rodriguez.
"He's not here," said Doyle.
Rodriguez slapped him, hard.
"Where is he?"
"What the fuck is your problem?" spat Doyle. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth and he winced as he ran his tongue over a deep cut inside his cheek.
Rodriguez slapped him again and the men on either side of Doyle tightened their grip on his arms.
"He flew to Jamaica yesterday," hissed Rodriguez.
"Why?"
"Look, Carlos, what's going on? There's no need for this. If you've got a problem with Den, you'll have to talk to him. I'm not his fucking keeper."
Rodriguez stepped forward and grabbed Doyle's throat. He had long fingernails and they dug into Doyle's flesh as he squeezed.
"I want to talk to him, you piece of shit. That's why I need to know where he went." Doyle tried to speak, but Rodriguez's grip was too tight and he couldn't draw breath. He started to choke and Rodriguez took his hand away. Doyle coughed and blood splattered over Rodriguez's cream linen suit. Rodriguez looked down at the spots of blood disdainfully.
"Do you have any idea how much this suit cost?" he said quietly.
"Any idea at all?"
"I'm sorry," gasped Doyle.
Rodriguez dabbed at the blood spots with a white handkerchief.
"He flew to Jamaica and then he disappeared. I'm assuming he's not lying on the beach smoking ganja, so where the fuck is he?"
Doyle heard a scraping noise behind him and he twisted his head around. A fourth man in his twenties, thickset with a neatly trimmed goatee beard and weightlifter's forearms, had pulled the large umbrella from its concrete base. He grinned at Doyle and tossed the umbrella on to the tiled floor. He knelt down next to the umbrella base and took a length of chain from the pocket of his chinos.
Rodriguez grabbed Doyle by the hair.