Road Kill

Twenty-two

The guy Sean was chasing had plenty of incentive to escape but he was just about spent from the fight and he didn’t have Sean’s predatory instinct. He’d headed downhill as his best chance of survival, arms windmilling for balance as he ran, then skidded round a corner and disappeared from view.

Sean shot after him, gaining with every stride. By the time I’d rounded the corner myself, Sean had the guy on the ground down by the wall of a building and had hit him just to the outside of his left eye, hard enough to quell his struggles, to frighten and hurt him rather than put him out. Sean glanced up as I approached. I caught something in his face and gave him a single nod to show I was prepared to follow his lead.

The guy on the floor was in his early twenties, dark-haired and solidly built. He might have been brave when he was hunting as part of a pack, but now he was singled out and down and on his own his courage seemed to have deserted him. He was gasping for breath and sweating hard enough to stain through his shirt, his hands spread in front of him as though to ward off another blow.

“Don’t hurt me,” he begged, his accent local. “Sweet Jesus, don’t hurt me.”

“Now why would I want to do that, you wee fucker?” Sean said, perfectly slipping the slant and rhythm of East Belfast into his voice.

I thought the guy on the ground was going to have a heart attack, or wet himself, or both. His face buckled completely as he recognised the tones and made all kinds of wild and unsubstantiated connections.

“Sean,” I murmured, deliberately allowing a trace of unease to slide through. “You can’t kill him – not here.”

“And why not?” Sean said. “Didn’t your man here and his pals have it in for us?”

“We didn’t!” the guy yelped. “Honest to God, we didn’t! No one else was supposed to get hurt.”

“What about the young lad you had on the ground between you?” Sean demanded roughly. “You looked to have it in for him, right enough.”

“OK, OK,” the guy said, squirming backwards until his shoulders were hard up against the brickwork. Not a good idea if Sean decided to hit him again, but clearly he was too scared to think straight. “Look, we were told to do him over, right? To break something – stop him getting on a bike, or something. I don’t know any more than that. Honest to God!”

Sean and I exchanged glances.

“Now who would tell you to do a thing like that?” Sean said softly.

The guy’s eyes swivelled as though searching for an excuse he thought we might swallow. He failed to come up with one before Sean had straightened and made a big show of drawing back his fist.

“OK, OK!” the guy shouted, flinching his head away, hands still up. “I don’t know who it was, all right? Davey got this phone call earlier tonight, telling him this group of Brit bikers’d be in Portaferry and to look out for them. Said one of them was gay. We didn’t know someone like you’d be with them or we’d have stayed well clear.”

“Davey’s the big feller who came over?” Sean surmised. “So who would be calling him about that?”

“I don’t know!” the guy squawked, tension making the tears squeeze out and roll down his cheeks. “Davey works as a bailiff. He knows all kinds of folk. Sweet Jesus, that’s all I know!”

I believed him. He was too frightened to be inventive.

After a moment’s consideration Sean stepped back and jerked his head. “All right, you be on your way now,” he said, his voice still quiet, laced with contempt. “But I don’t want to see your face again, you understand me? Not ever. Or I’ll do more than tell your pals you cried like a girl.”

The guy scrambled to his feet, never taking his eyes off Sean just in case of a double-cross. As soon as he was upright again, he bolted. We watched him dive into the gap between two buildings and disappear from view.

“Well now,” Sean said then with a lazy grin, shouldering back into his own skin. “There’s a part I haven’t had to play in a while.”

“You’re very convincing.”

“Mm, well,” he said. “At one time, I had to be.”

We started walking. Staying put was foolish, as was going back to the pub. We had to assume that the boys had managed all right on their own so we headed downhill, back towards the hotel. I jammed my hands into my pockets.

The light was starting to go now, dusk softening the edges of the trees on the far side of the Narrows. The tide was running in fiercely, funnelling the water through the restricted gap into the Lough. The regatta of little boats clustered near the shoreline had all swung on their moorings to face into it.

“So who on earth rang this Davey bloke and told him to duff one of us up?” I wondered.

“That is an interesting one, isn’t it?” Sean said. “Our friend Eamonn has a fair amount of rental property and would undoubtedly know a few bailiffs.”

“But he’s living with Isobel. Why would he want to beat up her son?”

“Who says Jamie was the target? They could have been indulging in a bit of queer bashing and got the wrong man. After all, our boys didn’t make it easy for them to spot him.”

For a few moments we walked in silence. Then a sudden thought occurred to me. “If it was Eamonn, how did he – or those lads in the pub – know about Daz coming out? Now, apart from telling you on the ferry, he only made that one public this morning. So is this a new threat, or a continuation of the old one?”

“Good point.” Sean nodded. “Though without knowing what the hell it is they’re up to,” he said, “it’s hard to know who might have it in for them.”

***

When we got back close to the hotel we found the rest of the Devil’s Bridge Club sitting on a bench on the edge of the harbour, licking their wounds.

They looked pretty sorry for themselves, even though the group who’d set about us hadn’t succeeded in their aim to put one of us out of commission.

We might have come to Jamie’s rescue but he’d still taken a pasting. He was sitting with his arms wrapped gingerly around his body as though his ribcage would spring open if he let go of it. Tess was next to him, her arm across his shoulders. Daz sat a little apart from the others with his head tilted back and a wad of tissue pressed against a bleeding eyebrow.

“Well, well, where the fuck did you two piss off to?” Paxo demanded, flicking his cigarette butt over the harbour wall into the water.

“Finding out who that lot were who attacked us, and why,” I said.

“And did you?”

“The kiddie you picked a fight with was a bailiff called Davey,” Sean said to Daz. “It seems he had a phone call telling him all about you and instructing him to make sure somebody wasn’t in a fit state to get on their bike tomorrow.” He let his eyes pan over their shocked faces, then added, “Any ideas why that might be?”

Of all of them, Tess looked the most shaken but perhaps I was just being unkind to her. Even living with Slick she probably hadn’t been witness to too many skirmishes close up.

“Who would call this bloke and tell him to go after us?” she said, swallowing to firm up her voice. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Somebody did,” Sean said, eyeing her. “Someone who knew about Daz. You tell me.”

She threw her hands up in frustration and anger. “We were all there when he admitted what he was!” she snapped. “Grow up, Sean – it wasn’t me.”

“He never said it was,” I said blandly. “Guilty conscience, Tess?”

“So did everybody in this fucking place know about you before you told your mates, then?” Paxo wanted to know. “Laughing behind our backs, were you?”

Daz rolled his uncovered eye in Paxo’s direction but before he could answer I noticed a police car appear at the far end of the harbour and start to cruise slowly in our direction.

“I would suggest we continue this conversation inside,” I murmured. “Seems a waste to pay for a hotel bed and then spend the night in the local nick, doesn’t it?”

Once you had a room key you could enter and leave the hotel by a side door that opened out into a stairwell leading directly to the rooms on the upper floors. At least it meant we didn’t have any explaining to do to whoever was on the reception desk. Paxo was limping slightly on his right leg as we walked in and Daz’s eye was still bleeding.

“You ought to get that sorted out,” Sean said to him.

Daz’s eyes flicked in the direction of his mates for a moment, then back again. “Yeah, well, it’ll be fine.”

“I’ve got my first-aid kit upstairs if you want some help?” I offered.

He hesitated for a second, then nodded, looking grateful.

“OK,” he said then. “Thanks.”

We took Daz to the room Sean and I were sharing. It had been recently renovated by the looks of it, with striped wallpaper and antique pine furniture, and there was still a faint smell of new paint. Daz eyed the double bed but sat down on one of the armchairs by the window while I fished my kit out of my tank bag. Sean filled the small kettle on the side table and started putting together coffee from the little packets provided.

Daz threw the sodden tissue into the waste paper basket and folded up a fresh piece. He watched me unpacking disinfectant and Steri-strips and his lips twisted.

“You not going to put gloves on before you deal with me?” he wanted to know, his tone taunting. “The others seem to have developed a sudden strange reluctance to get my blood on them.”

“Sit back and shut up if you want that eye looking at,” I said.

The cut was small and just above his eyebrow where it would tend to bleed a lot and look worse than it was. I managed to clean it up for long enough to get the Steri-strips to stick and hold the sliced edges of skin together.

He sat without complaint while I worked on him, not taking those startling blue eyes off me. It was like being watched by a Siamese cat.

“There you go,” I said at last. “Try and let the air get to it tonight, but I’d put some sticking plaster over it before you try and get your lid on tomorrow morning.”

He delicately traced the repair with his fingers and nodded his thanks.

The kettle boiled. Sean poured water into both mugs and handed one to me and the other to Daz. I perched on the corner of the bed while Sean took the chair opposite Daz and sat leaning forwards with his forearms resting on his knees and his hands relaxed between them. There was a scrape across the middle two knuckles on one hand, I saw. Other than that he bore no signs of having been in a fight.

“What’s going on, Daz?” he asked gently then. “People are getting hurt. One of you’s been killed. Is it worth it – whatever it is?”

It was neatly timed. Daz was physically at a low ebb, felt isolated from his friends, and we’d just patched him up and been nice to him. Classic interrogation techniques.

He shrugged, still pigheaded despite everything that had happened.

I sighed. “Look Daz, you’re in the shit and we can protect you. It’s what we do,” I said, trying to be persuasive rather than exasperated. “But we can’t do it if you won’t tell us what we’re trying to protect you from.”

“Who says we need protection?”

I stood up, frustrated into action, but with three people in it the bedroom was too cramped to pace. “I’m only here because I made a promise to a friend,” I said, turning back to him. “And Sean’s only here because I am. But you need us, whether you like it or not. Tonight should have proved that. For God’s sake – what do we have to do to get you to trust us?”

“We do trust you,” Daz said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Ha!” I said, scathing. “Where’s ‘here’, Daz? Because from where we’re standing the only place we are is in the dark.”

He let his breath out in a huff and sat up. “OK,” he said, sounding weary, like we’d finally battered him down into submission. “We’re here because we’ve made a deal to buy something over here and bring it back to the UK.”

I was aware of a sickly taste in the back of my mind. “What kind of a deal?” I demanded, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. “Drugs?”

“Fuck, no,” Daz said quickly. “We may be many things, Charlie, but there’s no way we’d have anything to do with shit like that and that’s the truth.”

“So what kind of shit are you into?”

Daz shrugged. “Diamonds,” he said.

“Diamonds?” I repeated blankly, glancing at Sean. I checked Daz’s face carefully for any sign of guile but it was clear and open. I sat down on the corner of the bed again. “Why the hell have you made a deal to buy diamonds?”

“For my work,” he said, sounding almost surprised that I should have to ask. “A lot of the stuff I do is ceramics and glassware from local artisans, but I deal with jewellery makers all the time. Didn’t you know?”

I shook my head slowly. Diamonds. After all our fears and speculation, it was almost an anticlimax. When Sean had said Daz ran a craft centre I’d expected something a little more homespun. It never occurred to me that he might be dealing with precious gems. From the look on his face, Sean hadn’t made that connection, either.

“So, did you provide Tess with the stones she’s wearing?” Sean asked. “The ones she’s trying very hard to pretend are not real?”

The surprise showed on Daz’s face. “You spotted that one, then?” he said, rueful. “No, that was Slick.”

“Convenient to pass that one over to someone who can’t refute it, isn’t it?”

He flushed. “That’s not what I’m doing,” he said quickly. He sighed heavily, took a drink of his coffee. “Look, in the last year I started to buy in some secondhand jewellery and I was getting in loose diamonds to replace lost stones. I was using Tess to do a bit of that repair work for me.”

“Why Tess?”

“We were at art college together,” he said. “She dropped out to have the kid, Ashley, and we lost touch for a while. Then one day she came into the shop with this boyfriend of hers, Slick. We chatted, you know how it is, old times. She’d been keeping her hand in, making her own stuff, and she was interested in doing more, so I got her doing some work for me.”

“And what about the diamonds she was wearing?” I asked. I took a sip of my coffee but the little pockets of UHT milk the hotel supplied had done little to cool it down.

“The first time she came in I’d noticed the rings she had on, of course,” Daz said. “She showed them to me as examples of her work and, well, you couldn’t miss rocks like those, could you? So I asked about them. She told me Slick had a contact who could get stones and was I interested?”

“And it didn’t occur to you that there might be something ever so slightly underhand about all this?” Sean said, keeping his voice mild.

“Of course,” Daz said. “But I asked around in the trade – discreetly – and no flags came up that they were stolen, so I bought them. They were a mixed bag of cut stones – circular and pear-shaped brilliants, mostly. The biggest was about point-eight of a carat. I used it to replace a poor quality solitaire emerald in a ring I’d bought in cheap because it was damaged. I sold it on for less than it was really worth, but I still made a fat profit. The customer got a decent stone at a bargain price and everybody went home happy.”

“What happens when the customer goes for an insurance valuation at some later date,” Sean said, “and discovers just how much of a bargain he’s got?”

“What’s he going to do – come back and complain?” Daz jeered. “Human nature, mate. He just thinks he’s got a wonderful deal and he keeps his mouth shut. I’ve never had one back.”

Sean was silent for a moment, digesting that one, then he said, “And what was different about this time? This deal?”

Daz took another swig of coffee and spent a few moments turning the cup in his hands, to the point where I thought we’d lost him.

“The scale of it,” he said at last and his shoulders relaxed a little, as though he was relieved to finally get it out in the open. He looked up. “Slick kept coming back with more gemstones and I kept buying them until, a month ago, he told me about this contact he had in Dublin who had a job lot to get rid of. Only Slick didn’t have the cash to buy them up front. Shit, the kind of money he was talking about, neither did I. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you can go to the bank about, is it?”

“So you went to your friends,” Sean said quietly.

Daz rubbed a hand across his face, forgetting about the eyebrow, and winced. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I remortgaged my flat and scraped together as much as I could, and Slick managed to put some up, and then I got William and Paxo involved, and Jamie wanted in as well. They all put in an equal share.”

“Ten grand a hit,” I said. “They must really trust you.”

His eyes flicked to mine, then slid away, guilty. “Yeah, they did.”

“So how much have you put up, altogether?”

“Eighty grand,” Daz said.

I tried to keep my face as blank as Sean’s but I couldn’t prevent a small twitch. Eighty grand. People had killed for less. A lot less.

“For diamonds worth how much?” Sean asked.

“When I’m done with them – about a quarter of a mil,” Daz said, and there was a hint of a thrill in his voice. “Imagine it! All we had to do was meet with the contact in Dublin and carry the stones back to the UK. No taxes to pay, no import duties. I promised the boys I’d double their money and it would be a blast.”

“And then Slick died,” I said deliberately, watching the excitement fade, wanting to remind him this wasn’t all fun and games.

“We still don’t know it wasn’t an accident,” he said quickly.

“Not at the time, maybe, but what about afterwards? What about when that van chased me after Slick’s wake? When possibly the same van wiped out Sam Pickering? Did it not occur to you then to call the whole thing off?”

“Of course it did,” he muttered. “But it was too late then. Part of the money had been paid and none of us could afford to lose it – least of all me. Besides, Tess still had the contact in Dublin and she was up for it.”

“Hmm,” I said, thinking of her drunken candour. “She wanted you to get the diamonds but she wasn’t keen on actually coming with you, was she? It was her pal Gleet who was pushing for that.”

“Well, if she wanted the rewards she was going to have to take the risks as well,” Daz said. “As for Gleet – he lent Slick part of his stake money. That’s his angle. And he modified the bike for him.”

“Modified?”

“Yeah, he grafted in a false silencer can onto the exhaust to carry the stones.”

“Ah,” I said, “so that’s why Gleet nicked the wreckage of Slick’s bike back after the crash – he couldn’t afford to have the police taking it apart.”

“How did you—?” Daz began, then seemed to give up trying to figure it out. “Yeah,” he said then. “He did.”

“But you haven’t added on anything to your Aprilia,” I said. “How are you going to carry them?”

He grinned. “Well I’m not planning on swallowing them, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “No – waterproof bag dropped into the tank.”

“Hmm, they’ll never think of looking there,” Sean murmured and, louder: “So, when do you meet this contact? And where?”

Daz hesitated again, tried to cover it by finishing the last of his coffee and putting the mug down on the window ledge. “We’re going to do the deal on Sunday,” he said. “We’ll meet up with him sometime after the track day.”

“Track day?” I repeated.

“Yeah, it’s a free-for-all at Mondello Park circuit – the one just outside Dublin,” Daz said. He paused, taking in our blank faces, and grinned suddenly. “Did nobody tell you about that? Shit – I hope you both brought your driving licences then, or they won’t let you out on the track and you’ll be missing a treat. They only resurfaced it last winter.”

He got to his feet but only made it a couple of strides towards the door before Sean stopped him.

“One last thing, Daz,” he said. “Who’s been tailing us since we got here?”

Daz frowned. “We haven’t seen that Vauxhall since this morning,” he said. “I thought they’d given up.”

“What about the guy on the Suzuki?”

“What Suzuki?” His surprise seemed genuine enough.

“With Lucky Strike paintwork. It was on the ferry yesterday, came past us on the road up to the Giant’s Causeway this morning, and was in the car park at Bushmills.”

Daz’s face cleared and he shrugged. “No idea, mate. You worry too much,” he said. “Look, I’ll see the pair of you in the morning, yeah? Just do me a favour and don’t tell the others what I’ve told you.” He gave a rueful smile. “Old Paxo’s sulking enough with me as it is.”

It was only after he’d closed the door behind him that I stood and turned to Sean. “Why is he lying about knowing who’s on that Suzuki?”

“Who knows?” Sean said, getting to his feet himself. He collected the empty coffee mugs and put them back on the tray with the kettle. “I reckon he’s probably given us most of the full story there, but he’s still holding back.”

“Are you going to call Madeleine and see what she can dig out on any hooky diamonds?”

“Mm,” he said, distracted, moving across to flick on the bedside lamp and slip the chain onto the door. “I’ll do it first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?” I glanced at the bedside clock in surprise. “It’s not that late. Why not do it now?”

“Why?” Sean echoed softly, closing in on me with such plain intent that my mouth dried even as a sliding heat drenched slowly through my belly. “Because I’ve been alone in a room with you, Charlie – and a bed – for seconds now and yet, strangely enough, we both seem to still be dressed.”

He backed me up until I bumped against the wall by the door with a breathless laugh. Suddenly his hands had infiltrated my shirt without me ever knowing how he’d undone the buttons. “That’s why,” he murmured against my tipped-back throat.

“Really?” I managed, my voice a gasp as my eyes went blind. “You must be losing your touch . . . Oh, maybe not . . .”