Lethal Profit (7 page)

Suddenly he was still. ‘She's involved.'

‘Involved in what?'

‘In what happened to Jackson. She has something to do with it.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘I just do!'

Leon seemed anxious, almost manic. This is really not a good situation, Eva thought to herself once again.

‘What did you find at Shaun's flat?'

Eva almost answered and then stopped short. ‘The only way you could know that I went to his flat is if you followed me.'

‘I followed you.'

Eva stood up. ‘Okay, I think I'd like to leave now.'

‘You can't!' said Leon, jittery and overexcited. ‘Didn't you see what just happened outside?'

Eva recalled the bag over her head, the prone man lying shot on the floor. He had certainly not been a rescuer. She sat down again, focusing hard on keeping her heartbeat below danger level.

‘OK, Leon, explain to me what happened outside and I will tell you what I found in Shaun's flat.'

Leon nodded. Clearly he liked the idea of a bargain.

‘He was one of
them
.'

Eva sighed. ‘You're going to have to be more specific than that.'

‘The Africans.'

‘The Africans,' Eva repeated.

‘They appeared on the scene six months ago. They killed Jackson, I know they did.'

Was this man completely crazy? He certainly looked pretty crazy. And yet he seemed to be the only person who thought Jackson had been killed like she did. What that said about her, she didn't know.

‘You don't believe Jackson committed suicide?'

‘Ha!' Leon laughed. ‘I knew your brother for four years. He was happy, he was clean. Besides the police claimed it was heroin he was taking. Jackson didn't
do
heroin.'

‘He didn't.' Eva's voice was expressionless.

‘No. Coke, pills, weed, acid yes. Heroin, no. He hated needles.'

God, thought Eva to herself, he's right. She remembered what Jackson's boss had told her – that he had even risked a work trip to the Sudan without his shots because he was so afraid of needles.

‘You can smoke heroin, can't you?'

Leon looked at her and laughed. ‘Of course. But didn't you see the police “report”? Needle marks in his arms they said. Impossible!'

Eva nodded slowly. She remembered reading that in the one page summary they had been sent. In fact, that part of the report had made her particularly sad. Heroin seemed such a sad drug to get addicted to, a drug people craved so much they would inject it into anywhere they could.

‘Why include that in the report you saw?' Leon continued. ‘They fucked up there!'

‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?'

Leon thumbed open his pack of blue Gauloises and Eva took a white tab. She rolled it momentarily between two fingers and then took Leon's proffered lighter and lit the cigarette.

‘How did you meet my brother?' she said as she exhaled.

Leon's eyes sparkled. ‘Rehab.'

‘What were you there for?'

‘The same as him. I have trouble with drink though, too. The only alcohol I can't drink more than three glasses of is cognac.' He gestured at her empty glass. ‘Anything else and I get through a bottle in an hour.'

It was hard to know what to say to that.

‘Did you know him in Paris?'

‘Yes. We left the UK together after rehab. He came to my parents' farm and spent a year with me getting back on track. Then we moved to Paris together.'

‘Did you live together?'

‘No. That wouldn't have been a good idea. I need my space. There's little enough space in the city as it is.'

‘Look,' Leon suddenly got up. He walked quickly over to a bookcase and returned with a handset in his left hand. ‘I got your phone.'

He handed it over to Eva who looked at it in amazement.

‘But those kids…'

‘Estate scum.'

She took the phone.

‘What exactly is it you do?'

‘If I told you that I'd have to kill you.' He smiled at her but Eva had the chilling feeling that he was serious. She pressed the On button on her phone, entered her pass code and began going through the phone. Among spam emails, a large number of text messages from worried friends and several missed calls from her father she found a text from Valerie. After hesitating for a second, she showed it to Leon.

‘She wants to meet me on the 20
^th
. That's tomorrow.'

‘You have to go.'

That wasn't the response she had expected. ‘After everything you said?'

‘She's the key to this, trust me.'

‘Right.'

‘Suggest that you meet at the Tuileries Gardens at 1pm. I'll be there too.'

‘Right.' Eva replied to the text. She felt uneasy about the idea of being shadowed by Leon.

He picked up on it immediately. ‘It's better than the alternative.'

‘Which is?'

‘More like him,' he said and indicated towards the ground outside where they both knew the body lay. After several seconds of silence, Eva got up. ‘Don't you think we should search him? Try and find out who he is – was?'

Leon produced a small black wallet from his back pocket and tossed it to her. Inside she found a book of carnet travel tickets and forty Euros in cash.

‘Clean. Just like all the others,' said Leon.

‘The others?'

‘Like I said, he's not the only one.'

‘But who are they?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Are they something to do with his work?'

‘
I don't know.
'

‘Right.'

An hour later and Eva was sitting in her hotel room. Leon had driven her back in a small, rickety Citroen and had seemed surprisingly willing to let her leave once he had returned her phone.

Eva felt nervy. But she reasoned with herself that whoever it was that had been outside Leon's tower block, they had not been there for her. She half-believed that.

She closed and locked her hotel door and then, after some hesitation, dragged the night stand over and pushed it up against the door frame. It took some effort as the table had a heavy metal base. But at least it would be more use than a chair for keeping intruders out. After a stiff drink from the bottle of Calvados she had bought from the supermarket on the day she arrived, she settled down on the bed with the sandwich she had bought before the accident and opened her laptop. Her left leg still ached mightily after the crash, but she was still walking and the pain had at least not spread to her back, which was her usual weak spot. She thought about the events of the last few hours as the heat of the Calvados dripped down her throat. She had absolutely no idea what she had stumbled across but she felt she had taken a step closer towards the truth. Leon's revelation about the needle marks was important and she felt like this confirmed her fears that Jackson had indeed been murdered. By who and why, though, remained a total mystery.

She still had Shaun's phone and had not fulfilled her side of the bargain and told Leon about it during the encounter at his flat. In the end he seemed to have forgotten that he had asked her what she had found and she felt there was no need to share too much with him. It would be great to think she now had some kind of ally in Leon but he had also tailed her and possibly knocked her down with his car, and his jittery, manic behaviour didn't encourage her to trust him.

Out of habit, she navigated to Facebook and looked at her own page. Her profile picture was a shot taken on a night out. She had used a camera app with a flattering filter and she was sitting in the middle of two of her best friends, each of them brandishing a huge curved bowl of a cocktail glass filled with a red liquid. The snap had been taken way before Jackson's death and looking at it made her feel sad. She scrolled down the page and on the left saw that Jackson was still listed as her brother. She clicked on his smiling face and opened the page. His ‘wall' was full of messages in French that she didn't understand. She recognised the sad face emoticons and realised the page had probably been turned into some kind of tribute. She looked at all the faces of his French friends, her mouse scrolling over each face in turn. Over one face she stopped. A short-haired woman with a nervous smile looking directly at the camera. She had seen her before. Eva opened up the woman's main page and saw immediately that it was the woman from the photo Leon had shown her earlier that night. Her name was Sophie Vincent. The rest of her profile was restricted. Eva took out her Moleskine notebook and printed the name in black letters.

T
HE
NEXT
DAY,
E
VA
MADE
HER
WAY
slowly along the crowded Parisian streets. She was finally on her way to meet with Jackson's girlfriend Valerie for the first time, but she felt foggy and unfocused and her mouth was dry. Arriving at Exit 5 of the Tuileries Métro station precisely at 1pm, Eva scanned her immediate vicinity. No sign of Valerie. Whilst the two women had never met, Valerie's flame-red hair and model-like poses had featured frequently on Jackson's Facebook pages in the year before he died, and Eva felt familiar enough with that face to pick it out in a crowd. When she realised she had a few minutes to herself, she moved out of the flow of pedestrians to the back edge of the pavement. At her back a sandy stone wall topped with rusted black railings, behind which stretched the beautifully manicured grounds of the Tuileries Gardens. In front of her, a busy Parisian road bustling with cars, bikes and mopeds, bumpers glinting in the morning sun. Eva found a railing to lean against and rested the back of her head against the cold metal as her gaze drifted up towards the sky. She closed her eyes.

‘Eva.'

Eva jumped, knocking her head against the railing. Valerie was standing directly in front of Eva, her auburn hair glinting in the winter sun. They shook hands awkwardly.

‘How are you?'

Valerie hesitated before answering. ‘I am fine. You?'

‘Quite hungry. Shall we get lunch?'

Valerie looked taken aback. ‘I had thought we were to have just coffee.' She held up a take-away coffee cup.

‘I'm going to have to eat, or there's a serious possibility I might pass out.'

Valerie didn't laugh at the joke. ‘OK.'

They set off in silence at a brisk pace away from the gardens, through a covered walkway carved with arches and lined with shops selling postcards and painfully expensive coffee. As they walked, Eva looked for signs of Leon but as far as she could tell he was nowhere to be seen. But then that was probably exactly as he wanted it. They had made no arrangements before he dropped her at the hotel the night before, and as Eva had been keen to get back to an environment in which he wasn't in control, she hadn't pushed the issue. However, she did wonder what the next steps should be after what had happened that night – and deep down she knew the encounter had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. The fact that she seemed suddenly to have become his target made her feel unsure of her own ability to protect herself, something she had never considered before. He had seemed unstable, paranoid, and volatile, a combination she would usually swiftly distance herself from – but his conspiracy theories had somewhat chimed with her own. She would just have to wait to see what it was he really wanted from her and hope her nerves could stand it.

Valerie led the way to a modern-looking local establishment with large windows and red velvet curtains. It was warm inside and there was a smell of toasted cheese. The waiter greeted them and put the menus down. Valerie immediately pushed hers away.

‘Why did you want so desperately to see me?'

Eva looked up from the menu, surprised at all pleasantries being so swiftly dispensed with.

‘There are a few things I wanted to ask you.'

‘Well…,' began Valerie but stopped as the waiter had arrived to take their order. After he left, an awkward silence persisted until the drinks were set down on the dark wood table. Valerie took a short sip of a thick black coffee and squared her narrow shoulders. ‘What are your questions?'

‘I think Jackson was murdered.'

‘What?' Valerie's hand flew to her rosebud mouth; her long-lashed eyes widened around each startling green iris.

‘No.' Her voice was surprisingly firm. ‘He killed himself. Because of drugs, Eva. Why would you say that?'

Eva was a little surprised by the ferocity of Valerie's reaction. She decided to tread carefully. ‘Because I don't believe that's how he died. You identified the body?'

‘Yes. But he was disfigured, Eva. Beyond recognition. In the end they had to use dental records. He shot himself in the head.'

Across from their table, Eva felt the gazes of a young couple and a dark skinned man in a black suede coat fall on them. ‘Doesn't it seem strange to you that he did what he did?,' she continued in a lower tone, moving away from the emotive topic. ‘I thought he was finally happy.'

Valerie stared at her in silence, her gaze steady, and then looked away as the waiter arrived and set the plate of food down in the middle of the table. Eva started to eat, reluctant to allow Valerie time to think but keen to satisfy her hunger.

‘I didn't know him.' Valerie's voice was so quiet Eva almost didn't hear her. She looked directly into those big green eyes, tearing up slightly at the corners, and then took another bite of the cheese sandwich. ‘I did not want what happened to him,' she continued, ‘but your brother was not all he seemed.'

‘What do you mean?'

Valerie visibly swallowed hard and fiddled with an ashtray in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. ‘He was… he was… unpredictable.'

‘How?'

‘He changed. In the last month. He became… ugly.'

‘What does that mean?'