Road Kill (21 page)

Sam shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He opened his mouth to protest that Sean must be mistaken, but then he took one look at the other man’s sudden alertness and clearly changed his mind.

“It was just something Tess said – after you’d left the first time,” he muttered, strangely reluctant to maintain eye contact with either of us. “Look, Charlie, they’d turned the music up by this time and I couldn’t get that close and I might not have—”

“Just spit it out,” Sean said quietly.

“All right, all right,” Sam said, miserable. “Someone asked why didn’t they just postpone this Irish trip. You know, leave it a bit, what with Slick . . . well, y’know. But Tess said they had to go. She was really insistent about it. She said it was too late to back out now, that the stuff was waiting for them.”

“‘Stuff’?” I queried sharply. “What stuff?”

Sean laughed without amusement. “From Ireland?” he said. “It could be anything. Quite apart from any terrorist connotations, there’s been a hell of a lot of counterfeit currency being filtered into the UK from over there in the last few years. Or drugs.” He glanced at Sam and his eyes narrowed. “But that’s not all, is it?”

Sam was looking thoroughly wretched. “She also said—” he hesitated again, “—she said they’d got Jacob on board.”

“Jacob?” I repeated blankly. “Are you sure?”

Sam squirmed again. “I’m sorry, Charlie, but she definitely mentioned him. By name.”

“Jacob’s in Ireland now,” I said, almost to myself.
Possibly with ten grand in cash on him. For what?

“But he’s on his way home,” Sean said grimly and, as if he’d heard my unvoiced question, he added, “So you can ask him yourself.”

I straightened. “You’ve heard from him,” I said, unable to suppress an accusing note. “When?”

“He called while you were out. I was going to tell you as soon as you got back but we were, ah, distracted.”

I hoped the lights weren’t up high enough for Sam to spot the way my colour rose but I wouldn’t have liked to bet on it.

“What did he say?” I rushed on. “Did you tell him anything about the accident? What—”

“Whoa.” Sean held up his hands. “I told him no more than he needed to know, Charlie,” he said. “Jacob’s down in County Cork. He was going to head straight up to Dublin and pick up the first available ferry service to Holyhead. He’ll be home sometime tomorrow.” He drained his coffee cup and regarded me with that unnerving calm of his. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk to him about what both he and Clare might – or might not – have been up to with Slick when he gets back.”

***

Sam left soon after that, slinking out like a dinner party guest who suddenly finds his hosts having a domestic over the soufflé. Not that Sean and I got to blows over the fact he hadn’t told me about Jacob’s call. I was just upset by the way he ducked out of answering any questions about it.

It wasn’t until we were alone that I found out the reason he was being so evasive.

“Your friend Jacob is not exactly squeaky clean when it comes to the law,” he said, folding his arms and leaning his shoulder against the kitchen doorway. “Did you know he’s got form for handling stolen goods?”

I was feeding the dogs and froze right in the middle of putting their bowls down onto the flagged floor. It was as much at the emphasis on
your friend
as on anything else.

“No,” I admitted. I straightened and stuffed my hands in my pockets, feeling my chin come up almost of its own accord. “How did you find that one out?”

He shrugged. “Madeleine,” was all he said.

“Sometimes,” I muttered, “that girl doesn’t know when to stop digging.”

“Better to know what we’re dealing with,” he said, his tone cool now. “You told me yourself you don’t think Clare’s being entirely truthful with you. Maybe that’s why.”

“Ah,” I said, aware of a sickly taste in my mouth, “I heard something tonight that puts a bit of a different spin on things. According to Tess, Jamie told her the reason Slick was giving Clare a lift up to Devil’s Bridge on Sunday was to meet him. She reckoned Clare and Jamie were . . . involved.”

“Ah,” Sean said, unconsciously echoing me. “That does alter things somewhat, doesn’t it? And you believe her?”

“I don’t know,” I said unhappily. “I don’t
want
to, but that’s not the same thing. It does make a twisted kind of sense. I mean, it would explain a lot of things.”

“It would explain why Clare’s been so cute with you, but it doesn’t explain why Jacob would want to get himself involved with something dodgy going on in Ireland.”

“We don’t know that he’s involved with anything,” I said quickly.

“When Slick’s bike disappeared, where was the first place MacMillan’s lot came looking? Here. Why do you think that was, hmm?” Sean fired back at me. “And he has Irish connections – not least of which is his ex-wife.”

“They’re not divorced,” I corrected automatically.

“Estranged then,” Sean dismissed. “Whatever. We don’t know what she was after here today, unless it was the ten grand, but if that was what they were after and they found it, why try and throw you out? Why not just leave peaceably, if they’d got what they came for?”

I thought about that one for a few moments, leaning my hip against the sink. The only sound in the kitchen was the scrape of the metal bowls being pursued across the floor as the dogs stuffed themselves.

“Do you think she knows about Jamie and Clare?” I asked then. “Could she have demanded money to keep quiet about it? What if that’s why Clare had the money in the safe, ready to pay her off? Then she has her accident with Slick and Isobel goes looking for the money because she knows it’s there.”

Sean shook his head. “You’re clutching at straws, Charlie,” he said. “It doesn’t answer who knocked them off – or came after you for that matter. And anyway, if Clare was in that kind of trouble, don’t you think she would have told you the truth?”

I thought of Jacob, who was just as much my friend as Clare was. “I don’t know.”

I wanted to cast Jacob’s former wife into the role of villain, I realised. With a boyfriend like Eamonn in tow, it wasn’t difficult.

“Did Madeleine manage to dig up anything on Eamonn?”

Mention of his name did something dark to Sean’s face, as though he was recalling the encounter with the Irishman and regretting something.

“She’s on with it at the moment,” he said. He gave me a weary smile. “The Merc was registered to Isobel, so all we’ve got to go on is Eamonn’s first name. Even for Madeleine that’s a tall order.”

“When were you going to tell me about this?” I asked quietly.

“I wasn’t,” he said, making no bones about it, “right up until Pickering mentioned that bit about the stuff waiting in Ireland and Jacob being in on it.”

“Just how long ago was Jacob done for receiving?” My own defensiveness made me snappy. “Only, in all the time I’ve known them the only illegal thing they’ve done is broken the speed limit. Oh – and given
you
shelter when MacMillan was after you for murder.”

Sean ducked his head in wry acknowledgement. “The conviction was a while ago,” he allowed. “Eight years, I think. Nearly nine.”

“Before my time.”
Before Clare’s time, too
. I remembered Jamie’s comment about helping Jacob dig the driveway sensor in. How old did he say he’d been at the time? Ten. He was barely twenty now. “I think he and Isobel were still together back then,” I said.

“So he could have learned to hide it better. Or he’s been keeping his nose clean and something’s come up that’s got him involved again.”

“Like what?”

Sean shrugged again. “You tell me?” he said. “His girlfriend’s just been knocked off another man’s bike and damned near killed; his ex- – sorry –
estranged
wife has turned up out of the blue, running around with a psycho who likes to burgle his house when he’s not there and beat up his friends; and his son’s part of an illegal road racing gang who may be about to be prosecuted for their part in Slick’s death. Oh and, to cap it all, his boy might just be knocking off his girlfriend. Face it, Charlie, Jacob Nash is in the shit – we’re just trying to work out how deep.”

I sighed and rubbed a hand across my eyes, defeated. “OK,” I said. “I give in. You’re right. The thing is, what the hell is he mixed up in, and how do we get him out of it?”

“He may not want to be got out of it, have you thought of that?”

I didn’t answer that one right away, just met his gaze and held it.
What are you saying, Sean – that not everybody wants to be saved?

“I know,” I said, “but I have to try.”

***

It wasn’t long before I dragged myself up to bed, hoping to catch up on some of the sleep I’d missed the night before, but it wasn’t to be. Instead, I lay awake for a long time after I’d turned out the light. Maybe I should start drinking decaf, but that wasn’t the only thing that kept me from sleeping.

Even after I’d talked it through with Sean, I still had no idea what Jacob and Clare might be caught up in. Again I berated myself for not seeing more of them lately. If there’d been something troubling either of them I should have been there to see it. Been there to offer my help.

Somewhere below me I could just hear Sean making phone calls in the study and I was washed with guilt that I’d dragged him away from his work.

And for what? He’d come because he’d heard the pain in my voice. He’d dropped everything and driven three hundred miles for no other reason than because I needed him. If there was one thing I didn’t doubt, it was the strength of his feelings for me.

Then I remembered again the way he’d calmly prepared to dispatch Eamonn, like he was a rogue animal who simply needed putting down. It wasn’t just the deadly skill he possessed, it was his apparent willingness to use it.

Not in a foreign country, hunted and on the run, in a desperate situation of kill or be killed. But in the middle of the English countryside, on a man who’d already been disarmed and who posed no immediate threat. The memory sent a cold fear clutching at my stomach, made me roll away and bury my face in the pillow.

Sean had been trained as a killer by the army, no two ways about it. That he’d found a legal use for that training and that instinct in civilian life was to his credit. But he’d been pushed to his very limit and beyond. What had he lost along the way?

I’d been frightened for Sean before. Of the danger he found himself in, of what it might do to him. But I’d never been personally frightened
of
him. My reaction tonight had shaken me more than I liked to admit. As if, by giving in to it, I was admitting he was out of control and dangerous. Even to me.

Perhaps
especially
to me.

I tossed and turned for over an hour. Eventually, I caught his soft footfall on the stairs. He didn’t know the house well, but he still intuitively managed to avoid the creaky boards. He moved along the corridor and paused, seemingly right outside my unlocked bedroom door.

I held my breath, not that it would make any difference. He’d be able to hear my heart hammering against my ribs anyway.

There was the slightest rattle of the old brass door handle being turned, the movement of hinges. I raised my head and peered into the gloom, but my own door had remained firmly shut. I heard the slight click of another door closing. The one across the corridor. The spare room Jamie had used last night.

I dropped my head back onto the pillow not sure if it was relief or disappointment that flooded through me.

I woke the next morning to the smell of fresh coffee. When I opened my eyes I found that someone – it could only be Sean – had been into my room and left a mug of it on the bedside table while I slept.

I sat up in bed fast, twisting round to stare at the door, but it was shut tight. I reached out to the mug and picked it up carefully. Still warm.

I’m a light sleeper. The slightest noise usually wakes me but Sean had always had the unnerving ability to creep up on you unawares. When I’d been training there were times when I would have sworn there was something paranormal about it. Now I knew for sure.

Feeling twitchy and vulnerable, I grabbed a quick shower, dressed and headed downstairs, only to find the house was empty. I ducked my head into all the rooms but there was nobody there, not even the dogs.

From outside came a distant yipping noise and when I looked out of the kitchen window I saw Sean heading up from the direction of the river. He was walking through the tall grass towards the back of the house with a long easy stride.

Behind him came Bonneville, holding her head up high out of the seeds like a nervous swimmer trying to keep water out of her eyes. The only sign of the terrier was an erratic swirling disturbance through the grass around Sean’s feet and the occasional excited bark as she encountered something interesting and furry lurking there.