I sighed. ‘They won’t take it seriously. Not until he actually does something. And no, that little incident in the car park doesn’t count as something.’
We all stared glumly at our drinks in silence for a few minutes. Then Simon perked up. ‘What about if you knew a friendly cop you could draft in to give him the hard word?’
‘That would be worth a try,’ George said. ‘If you knew the right chap.’
‘I was thinking . . . what about the one who ran the inquiry into Joshu’s death? He seemed like a decent bloke. And you got on quite well with him, didn’t you? You were talking to him at the memorial service, I seem to remember.’ Simon smiled encouragingly.
And that is how Nick Nicolaides and I got to be an item.
47
Nick wasn’t generally indecisive but standing outside Phat Phi D in the rain on the wrong side of midnight, he couldn’t make up his mind what to do for the best. He understood only too well that the most important thing was recovering Jimmy alive and well. But he wasn’t convinced that the best way of achieving that was by passing the latest information about Pete Matthews directly to Special Agent McKuras. OK, he wasn’t an expert in the ways of foreign law enforcement, but the image of the Americans going in with all guns blazing hadn’t become a cliché out of nowhere. He remembered Waco. He didn’t want Jimmy literally getting caught in the crossfire. Or Matthews either, come to that, if he was completely honest with himself. The guy was a bully and a sleaze, but he didn’t deserve to die.
He turned up his collar against the weather and walked back slowly to his car. Slumped behind the steering wheel, he mulled over his encounters with Pete Matthews. The first time, at Joshu’s memorial service, he’d walked into something he didn’t understand. Stephanie had said he’d be doing Scarlett a favour by asking Matthews to leave, and yet she hadn’t denied it when Nick had suggested she was using him as cover to make her getaway. Which hadn’t quite made sense. He wasn’t even sure why he’d leapt to that conclusion. Something about her body language, he supposed. His psychology degree had included a fascinating module on kinesics. It seemed to Nick that kinesics codified what many people still thought of as intuition. He’d worked on absorbing the information till it had become second nature.
He hadn’t needed kinesics to realise how pissed off Pete Matthews had been by his approach. Nick hadn’t said he was a cop at first. He’d simply walked up to him and said, ‘Mr Matthews, this is a private function to which you have not been invited. It would be much appreciated if you would leave.’
Matthews’ eyes had widened and his mouth tightened in an expression of outrage. He glared at Nick and took a half-step towards him. When he realised Nick was not intimidated, he drew his brows down in a scowl. ‘Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do? It’s not your party, I know that much.’
Nick slipped his warrant card from his jacket pocket. ‘Detective Sergeant Nicolaides. Met Police. This is private property where you have no right to be and you are being asked to leave. I’m sure the last thing you want is to make a scene when there are so many members of the press here.’
Matthews sneered at him. ‘You have no idea what’s going on here, copper. You’ve got yourself caught in the middle of a lovers’ game. Whatever promises Stephanie’s made to you, she’s playing you. She’s not going to deliver, because she’s my woman. You understand? She’s making a point to me, showing me she can get a mug like you to do her bidding.’ He gave a harsh laugh, like one of those mynah birds they used to keep in the local pet shop when Nick was a kid. ‘Sucker.’ Then he held his hands up, palms out in the universal placatory gesture. ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to kick off and spoil Scarlett’s party. Even if it is just a hypocritical bit of headline-grabbing.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s not shedding real tears, you know, copper. Ask Stephanie how many more copies of the latest book they’ll sell now Joshu’s popped his clogs. Scarlett would rather have the money than the man any day.’ Then he looked over Nick’s shoulder and swore.
Nick turned to follow his eyes and realised Stephanie was no longer where he had left her. He scanned the room but couldn’t see her anywhere. When he turned back, Matthews was already near the door, pushing his way through the crowd. Whether it was, as Matthews claimed, a lovers’ game, or something less romantic, Stephanie had clearly made her escape while he’d distracted Matthews. And whatever it was, it had diminished Stephanie’s appeal where Nick was concerned. He wasn’t interested in an involvement with a woman who was still entangled with another man. That was a scenario guaranteed to provoke sleepless nights and too many hours playing maudlin love songs.
And so he had put Pete Matthews and Stephanie Harker out of his mind. Nevertheless, he’d recognised her voice as soon as she spoke on the phone. ‘Sergeant, I don’t know if you remember me—’
‘Stephanie Harker,’ he said. Annoyed that she had made him blush.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s impressive.’
‘I’m a musician, remember? I’m good at voices,’ he improvised. ‘How can I help you?’
‘It’s a bit awkward over the phone. Would it be possible to meet for a coffee? Or a drink?’
In spite of his determination to have nothing to do with trouble, he’d agreed. They’d met at a Costa Coffee near his office. She’d been sitting at a table away from the windows when he arrived, but she’d sprung up when she saw him and insisted on buying his espresso. When they’d settled down and got past the inquiries about how Jimmy was doing, he’d sat back and given her an encouraging smile. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’
And out had spilled a tale that ticked many familiar boxes. A possessive man who won’t take no for an answer, who convinces himself a woman belongs to him and only needs to be reminded of that fact enough times in order for it to become the truth. A man who stalks her with flowers and emails and letters and texts, who fills up answering machines and voicemail boxes, who can’t be invading her space because her space already belongs to him so how can that be an invasion?
Nick listened, his coffee untouched, a chill in his guts. He’d heard this story before. Too often, he’d heard it from the grieving family and friends of a woman already lying in the morgue because she’d stood up to her persecutor once too often. Or not managed to escape far or fast enough. When Stephanie stumbled through a halting account of her confrontation with Matthews in the Essex hotel car park, he felt a mixture of rage and frustration burning like indigestion in his stomach. He wanted to punch Pete Matthews until he cried like a brutalised child. And also knew that wasn’t his way.
‘I spoke to a lawyer when he began pestering me after we first split up and she explained that there wasn’t much I could do unless he actually broke the law. But I don’t know what the law is. And it seemed to me that the way he made me feel, the threat in how he was with me – well, surely there must be something the police can do about that?’ She looked at him with a mixture of anxiety and apology that filled him with anger against the man who had put her in that place. But he also knew there wasn’t much he could lawfully do about Pete Matthews.
‘The lawyer was right, I’m afraid. If you kept a diary of his harassment, you could probably get a restraining order against him. But it wouldn’t have the power of arrest. You couldn’t just call the police if he breached it – you’d have to go back to court.’
‘Which means it would be meaningless, in effect?’
‘Yes. For us to take action, you would have to demonstrate that you have reasonable grounds to be in fear for your life, or at least in fear of serious violence. And from what you’ve said, he’s been very careful not to threaten you in that way.’