‘No.’
‘It’s not all bad surely? I mean, you’ll get credit for this idea won’t you?’
‘Yes but that’s not what I care about right now. It’s the trust thing that’s worrying me.’
‘I know, I do know what you mean,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘it’s like with the Watson case, when Thomas wouldn’t hand it over to me without continuing to be involved. It was like he just didn’t trust me to do a good job.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘no, with respect to you Laura, it’s not like that at all. The consequences could be very different.’ I actually wanted to say ‘why does it always have to be about you?’ but I managed to not go down that road.
‘Alright,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘if you think your boss doesn’t trust you any more, here’s a radical idea…’
‘What?’ She gave me a challenging look, ‘no, seriously I’m interested, I really am, honestly. What’s your radical idea?’
‘Think the unthinkable,’ she offered enigmatically.
I creased my eyebrows together, in what I hoped was a silent way of conveying the question, ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Leave.’
‘Leave?’
‘Yes,’ she said, almost triumphantly, ‘why not. If you’ve had enough, just leave. Go and do something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’. She was acting as if I could turn up for work at an RAF base tomorrow and start flying Tornado jets instead.
‘In case you haven’t noticed, my Curriculum Vitae is a little unorthodox; graduated from college, worked for a notorious gangster… That’s it. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to get me into Microsoft.’
‘I’m only saying… ’
‘What?’ I interrupted her, even though she hates that, ‘what are you saying? You’ve used that big lawyerly brain to help me and you’ve come up with a whole new radical idea? Leave? Simple as that, leave?’
‘Why the fuck not?’ she raised her voice.
‘Why the fuck not? I’ll tell you why the fuck not, because I don’t work for Marks & Spencer or the local council. Get real. You don’t leave a job like mine. It doesn’t fucking happen. Bobby won’t allow it. He’s not going to give me severance pay and a bloody carriage clock.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ I almost screeched, ‘are you fucking mental? Because I know all about him and his business. He’s not going to let me go off on a gap year, is he? Don’t you know anything?!’
‘No!’ she was still up for a fight, ‘I don’t know anything and why is that? Because you never tell me anything! I don’t know what you do for Bobby because you keep telling me I don’t want to know. I know you’re not a gangster because you’ve told me that one over and over again but it seems you do work for one. So what does that make you then eh? Sometimes I think I don’t even know you at all.’
‘You didn’t mind me working for a gangster when it was all about corporate hospitality and money coming in, expensive presents and holidays in Thailand. You didn’t mind me working for Bobby Mahoney then. You even like the guy.’
‘I do not!’
‘Yes, you do. Don’t deny it Laura. Wandering over to chat with him, flirting with him at his parties, laughing at his jokes, so some of that gangster glamour rubs off on you.’
‘I laugh at his stupid jokes because he’s your boss.’
‘Bullshit. It’s so you can go back to your chambers and tell everybody you’ve had a barbeque at Bobby Mahoney’s house, the home of Newcastle’s most wanted. With all of those divorce cases it’s the closest you’ll ever get to any real crime but believe me, it isn’t so glamorous when you’re stuck right in the middle of it.’
‘You’re a complete bastard sometimes, do you know that?’ she said and she climbed off the sofa, ‘you’re so cold and you can’t even see it.’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘I don’t want to hear any more of this,’ she said and she walked out of the room.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ I called after her, ‘is that what you tell the judge when he says something you don’t like? “I don’t want to hear any more of this” and then you walk out, eh!’.
NINETEEN
I’m not some exercise Nazi but I do like to stay in shape. That morning, I did my twenty minutes on the treadmill then some weights then changed for the pool. It wasn’t busy.
It was a modern place, all pristine, white tiles and new age background music that sounded like whales shagging. There were a couple of wrinkly, old blokes sitting around and a middle-aged wifey doing lengths. I’d done mine and was about to go into the sauna and sweat for ten minutes but I stopped by the side of the pool to get a drink from the water fountain. It was near the entrance to the female changing rooms and as I bent my head towards the water I saw her. As my head was at an incline, I got a view of her that started with her bare toes and rose up over her slim, tanned legs and into the white ‘V’ of her bikini bottoms, a little pair that just about covered her lady bits. It was enough to keep her decent but there wasn’t a lot in it. Her stomach was still tanned from months of travelling abroad during the summer and her breasts swelled over her bikini top in a way that left one of the old geezers in the pool standing there with a look of undisguised longing on his face. Her long, blonde hair was tied back for the pool.
‘Hello David,’ she said, smiling at me like she knew exactly how good she looked.
‘Sarah,’ I said, resisting the temptation to say something cheesy like ‘you’ve grown’. I just about managed to avoid sounding like Sid James and instead I said, ‘haven’t you got a proper swimming costume?’
She frowned at me like she didn’t understand what I was talking about, but she knew alright. Sarah Mahoney had to know the effect she was having; on the middle aged bloke pretending to read by the pool as she dropped her towel on one of the loungers next to him, on the old geezer who had stopped staring at her and shuffled off out of there sharpish, in case he got a lob-on for the first time in years, and on me. She must have known the effect she had on me
I was not supposed to find Sarah Mahoney distracting. In fact an inner voice in my head was already cautioning me that even acknowledging the fact she had grown into a very hot young girl indeed was tantamount to suicide. Bobby did not want his pride and joy, his most precious possession, letched at by members of his crew. Bobby, though he makes a lot of his money out of the sex trade, would prefer it in fact if Sarah didn’t have a boyfriend at all until she was at least 25, then immediately married the first nice, harmless guy who took her out. He’s from the old school and what he definitely, categorically does not want is one of his closest men eyeing her up in the swimming pool. Not when he has tasked him with looking after her tonight at her big birthday party.
There is however one slight problem, something that Bobby is in fact quite unaware of. Sarah Mahoney has the hots for me, has done for a very long time. Sarah has fancied me since she was about 16 in fact, before her cute, hard-bodied figure lost all of its puppy fat. I know this because she has made it clear. As crystal. She doesn’t come out and say the words exactly but she can flirt for England.
‘So,’ she said, as she laid her big bath towel out on a lounger, ‘what you doing?’
I shrugged, ‘nothing too knackering, a few lengths. I come here the same time every morning.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling, ‘dad said.’
Of course. I’d mentioned it to Bobby. He must have told her in passing and, the first chance she got, she came down here.
‘So what are you doing here?’ I’m not sure what I’d do if she said ‘I came down here to see you’ but thankfully she took the politician’s tactic and answered a different question to the one I actually asked.