Riot Act (24 page)

No, it didn’t. That was the trouble.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, suddenly tired.

“For your own good,” he said, looking disgusted with himself. He took another few steps, reaching the doorway before he turned back, shuffling his feet. “You didn’t rat on me to that bastard West,” he said, looking embarrassed, and defiant. “I owed you. Now we’re even. OK?”

I nodded. “But Jav,” I added grimly, making him pause. “You ever break in here again, and next time I won’t call the dog off.
OK?
”

He nodded, face grave, then disappeared out into the darkness of the back garden. He left me with a barrage of unanswered questions that meant a long and largely sleepless night.

***

I got a few of them answered the next morning, but that didn’t make me feel any better, on the whole. I was due in at the gym at ten, but I hit town just after nine o’clock and was soon rolling into the car park of the
Defender
on Meeting House Lane.

Clare was already at her desk in the busy Accounts office when the disapproving woman from reception showed me through. My friend looked up with a ready smile that faded when she saw my face.

She swept a batch of files off the chair next to her desk and patted the cushion. “Come, sit, and tell me all about it,” she said. She was wearing a brown suit that would have been frumpy on me, but looked like a catwalk special on Clare’s willowy frame. She studied me with worry lines between her eyebrows. “Spill it, Charlie, you look like death.”

“Thanks,” I said, dredging up a smile from some recess. She suggested coffee. I agreed, even though I’d had the dubious pleasure of the paper’s office coffee machine before. Her brief absence gave me a chance to marshal my tattered thoughts.

“There you go,” she said, plonking down a plastic cup full of a sludgy dark grey liquid in front of me. “Now, come on, what’s happened?”

I filled her in on the weekend’s events, mentioning Sean’s name for the first time, but only as Roger’s older brother. “The thing is,” I said, “I need to check what Jav’s told me about him. You said after that attack on the Asian boy a few years ago they arrested some of the National Front group. Were there any names mentioned other than Langford’s?”

Clare leafed through the papers on her desk. “I’ll check,” she said. “You’re lucky. I haven’t had time to put the files away again yet.”

She handed over the clipping and I realised that I hadn’t bothered to look at it myself when I’d gone round to Jacob and Clare’s place. I hadn’t needed to, because she’d read the highlights out to me.

If I had, then Sean Meyer’s name would have leapt out at me like it was printed in dayglo ink.

My heart stuttered, then froze as I read on. Sean had been arrested, along with a number of other group members including Langford, on suspicion of the crime. I looked up at Clare unable to keep the grief out of my face. “What happened to them?”

“Like I said, they were all released because of lack of evidence. Are you OK?” she went on, in a rush. “You’ve gone really white.”

“What? Oh, don’t worry – I missed breakfast,” I muttered, which was nearly the truth. I stood up. I needed to get out of there, to find some space to think.

“Before you go,” Clare said, looking doubtful, “you wanted to know more about Nasir Gadatra’s death. I asked my pal on the crime desk about it first thing, but it’ll keep if you’d rather.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “No, no, let’s hear it now,” I said. I scraped another smile from my emergency stash. Supplies were starting to run pretty thin.

“Well, according to the post mortem report – and you mustn’t breathe a word of this, Charlie, or you’ll get me lynched – he was shot with a nine millimetre handgun fired from a distance of around fifteen feet. They recovered the bullet, so if the gun turns up they’ll be able to do a ballistics match on it, but they still don’t know where he was shot. Until they do, they’re struggling to—”

“What do you mean ‘where he was shot’?” I broke in. “I thought he was hit in the chest?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, yes, but that’s not what I meant. There wasn’t enough blood found around the body for him to have been shot where he was discovered, in the rubbish skip, so they reckon he must have been shot elsewhere, then dumped there when he was already dead, or pretty close to it. Charlie, are you
sure
you’re OK? You’re swaying.”

Despite his promise, Sean didn’t call me on Monday. I’m ashamed to admit that I stayed up late, pretending to watch a mind-bendingly tedious film, just in case. Still, the delay gave me some time to work out what I was going to do about his invitation, when it came.

The strategy I’d worked out was going to take some nerve, but I’d been running scared from the spectre of the man for over four years. It was time to confront my demons.

It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon, just after five, that the phone at the gym rang. By chance, I was standing nearer to the counter than Attila, so I was the one who picked it up, without the faintest stirring of alarm to warn me.

“Hi, it’s me,” Sean’s voice said, assuming that I’d automatically know who. It nettled me that he was right. “Sorry, I know I said I’d ring yesterday, but we’ve had another panic on.”

I put my irritation on hold. “What’s happened?”

“First my brother does a runner, now my sister Ursula’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” I repeated. Where did
that
fit in?

“Yeah, she was staying at a friend’s flat, but she hasn’t been there since late last week. Nobody’s seen her. I suppose Mum told you she’s pregnant? That doesn’t help.”

He sighed, sounding tired even at the other end of a phone line. For a moment I thought he was going to postpone our date indefinitely. After I’d spent all day Monday screwing up my courage to face him, I felt oddly let down.

“Look,” he said, “I know it’s short notice, but are you free later tonight? Can we meet?”

My mouth opened, but no words came out straight away. I had to shut it and start again. “Erm, yes OK,” I said, and suggested that he pick me up from the gym when I clocked off at eight. “I’ll need to change, but we could stop in at the flat.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll see you at eight.”

I put the phone down with my heart suddenly clonking against my ribs. Of all the bad ideas I’d ever had, why did I get the feeling that trying to play Sean Meyer on a line like a marlin could well turn out to be the worst of them?

***

He strolled into the gym only a few minutes after eight o’clock, wearing a gorgeous long black leather coat. Some of the lads were in catching a late workout, including Wayne, who favoured Sean with a slight nod. That kind of quiet acknowledgement of old ties. It had never occurred to me that the two might know each other.

The others gave the new arrival a wary appraisal, but there was an air of calculated violence about Sean that held their tongues. They took in the width of his shoulders, and the cool, flat gaze, and showed more restraint than I would have given them credit for.

Attila greeted him with a big grin, and a friendly slap on the back that would have had most other men reeling. Sean rode the abuse easily enough, then turned to me. “Hello Charlie, you all set?”

I nodded. “I’ll pick the bike up later,” I said to Attila as I shrugged my way into my own somewhat more battered leather jacket, and followed Sean to the door.

The Grand Cherokee was parked outside. It felt weird to climb into it without having been beaten up or shot at first.

“Do you mind if we stop for a moment on the way?” he said as we set off round the one-way system. “I need a cashpoint machine.”

“No problem.”

He pulled over on one of the quiet city centre streets without having to ask where the nearest branch of his bank could be found. For someone who’d been away from Lancaster for so long, he still seemed to know his way around.

“I won’t be long,” he said as he slid down onto the pavement. “Feel free to fly the radio.”

I watched him disappear across the road and past a row of shops, the coat flapping round his legs as he walked with that long easy stride. I gritted my teeth and reminded myself to focus on the facts. It had been easier to hate Sean without having him in front of me.

I reached for the stereo in the centre of the dashboard, but as I pulled my hands out of my jacket pockets, my sleeve caught on something and I heard the dull metallic thunk of my keys dropping down the side of my seat.

I muttered under my breath as I stuffed my hand into the narrow gap between the seat bolster and the central transmission tunnel. The keys dropped away out of sight under the seat itself.

“Damn it.” I undid my seatbelt, leaning forwards until the dashboard made my neck crick, reaching blindly underneath me. All I could feel was carpet.

I shifted off the seat until I was almost crouching in the footwell. I glanced up, hoping that Sean wouldn’t return and catch me making a contortionist fool of myself, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The move gave me another couple of inches and this time my groping fingers touched something cold and hard. Metal. I tried to push it aside, heard the clink of it brushing against my keys, then my hand suddenly stilled.

Very slowly, carefully, I managed to work my forefinger and thumb onto the object, gripped it, and pulled it out onto the rubber floor mat. The hooked-up keys came with it, but they were suddenly of minor interest.

I whispered, “Oh shit.”

It was a gun.

In the gloom of the footwell, it gleamed dully, a blue-black semiautomatic. Hesitantly, I picked it up, weighing the cold heaviness of it in my hand, smelling the sheen of gun-oil like some half-remembered brand of scent.

Just for a moment my imagination moulded it into the FN that Nasir had used that night at the gym, but then sense kicked in, and I realised this was different. There was no hammer at the back of the slide and that jogged distant memory banks. A Glock, Austrian made.

What the hell was Sean doing with a handgun under the front seat of his car?

Numbly, I operated the release for the magazine. It dropped smoothly into my hand. The first snub-nosed round was clearly visible wedged up against the top lip of the mag. When I thumbed it out into my palm, the next one sprang up to take its place. Standard full-metal-jacket ammunition, definitely not a blank.

Suddenly, my carefully worked-out plan of pumping Sean gently for information over the course of the evening shattered around me. I’d been trying not to acknowledge the possibility that he could be in this much deeper than he seemed. Now it was drowning me.

“Oh Jesus, Sean,” I muttered. “What the hell are you up to?”

Sean!
I flicked my gaze up again, but still he was out of sight. Quickly, I rammed the round back into place, feeling the resistance. The spring at the base of the magazine must have been wholly compressed. A full load.

I slotted the magazine back into the pistol grip and pushed it home firmly with the flat of my hand. It seemed like a hell of a long time since I’d handled firearms, but the drills drummed into us on the ranges meant it was done on a reflex, even under the shadowed streetlight. I actually had to stop myself snicking back the slide to chamber the first round.

I looked up again and this time a dark figure rounded the corner by the row of shops. I grabbed my keys and slid back up into my seat. Instinct made me shove the Glock into my inside pocket, hoping the bulk of it wouldn’t pull the jacket noticeably out of line.

Sean opened the jeep door and climbed into the driver’s seat. I blinked as the interior light came on, tried to act calm and casual.

He reached for the ignition key, then paused. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling, lying through my teeth. “I’m fine.”

***

Sean drove down onto St George’s Quay as though he knew the way. I waited for him to ask for precise directions, because my place is above a cheap carpet wholesalers, and doesn’t follow any numbering pattern recognisable in the modern world, but he pulled up right outside. I felt a cold finger of suspicion trip down my spine.

How did he know where I lived? He couldn’t have been following me, because I’d hardly been back to the flat since Pauline had gone away, and that was before Sean turned up on the estate. Or was it?

When he switched off the engine I opened my door and forced another smile. “Come on up, if you like,” I said. “This won’t take long.”
I hope . . .

He followed me up the wooden staircase to the first landing, and waited for me to unlock my front door. I flicked on the lights as we moved inside.

“This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Sean said, looking round as he moved further into the living room.

While his back was towards me, I pulled the Glock quietly out of my jacket pocket, bringing it up level with my right hand even as I worked the slide with my left. My movements were a little jerkier than I would have liked, but it was an old rhythm. One I hadn’t danced to for years.