‘Trying to get away from people like you.’
‘And how’s that working out for you?’ He stared at her face. The wound from Dragovic’s pistol cut a thin crimson ribbon down her chin; the bruising around it was in full flower. Abby looked back defiantly and said nothing. Jessop took a long sip of his drink.
‘We showed your necklace to some boffin at the British Museum. He authenticated it as genuine fourth-century Roman, the real McCoy.’
‘Can I have it back, then?’
‘It’s in London. If you tell me the truth about how you came by it, maybe I’ll ask them to FedEx it.’
She stared into his face, the hard lines and no-nonsense haircut. There wasn’t much to trust there.
‘I told you the truth in London. Michael gave it to me. He didn’t say where he got it.’
‘Did you know he was an obtainer of rare antiquities?’
But she wasn’t interested in that line of conversation. ‘My turn,’ she countered. ‘Why did you meet Michael here the week before he died?’
Jessop was too professional to look surprised. ‘Did he mention it?’
‘I found a note in his diary.’
He drank his Guinness and wiped foam off his upper lip. ‘Nice to get a decent pint, in this part of the world.’
She didn’t smile. ‘Why did you meet him?’
‘OK – since we seem to be getting on so well being honest with each other. I’m on the anti-trafficking taskforce. I met with Michael to discuss arms smuggling.’
‘He was working with you?’
‘He thought I was representing a Russian businessman who wanted to import Ukrainian-made AK-47s to Italy.’ He held her gaze, waiting for the penny to drop. ‘He was going to help me.’
The bar erupted in cheers. Up on the TV screens the home team had grabbed an equaliser. Abby just stared at Jessop. She wished the noise could change what he’d said, sweep it back and drown it. She drank a deep gulp of beer, bitter liquid sour in her mouth. Nothing changed.
The game restarted, more urgent now.
‘Do you have proof?’ Abby asked. ‘You were pretending, so you could trap him. Maybe he was, too.’
‘We’ve got plenty of proof. We’d been tracking him for months.’
His face offered no hope. Abby pushed back her chair and ran to the bathroom. When she emerged five minutes later, eyes wet and skin red, Jessop was still there. He hadn’t touched his drink while she was away.
‘What do you want from me?’ she whispered. ‘Michael’s dead. Who are you still chasing?’
‘There’s a man called Zoltan Dragovic …’
‘I’ve met him.’
Now it was Jessop’s turn to look stunned.
‘He picked me up in Rome on Friday. Shouldn’t you have been following me or something?’
‘Jurisdictional issues,’ Jessop muttered. ‘Go on.’
‘His men bundled me into a car and took me somewhere that looked like a museum. Like his villa in Montenegro. I thought he was going to kill me.’ She touched her chin. ‘He made do with this.’
‘What did he want?’
‘What does he have to do with Michael?’
Jessop sighed. ‘Dragovic is the biggest people-smuggler, gun-runner and drug-trafficker in the Balkans. Michael worked in Customs for the most porous country in the region. Do you need me to spell it out?’
She still couldn’t believe it. She told herself she didn’t believe it. But deep down, in the cold recesses of her soul, she knew it made sense. Michael’s never-ending supply of easy money, the car and the holidays that were extravagant, even by Pristina expat standards. The villa. A memory flashed into her head, stripped of all the darkness and denial that had obscured it for so long.
‘That night at the villa,’ she said slowly. ‘I woke up and went outside. Michael was by the pool with the man who killed him, but they weren’t fighting. They were looking at something together. He only attacked Michael when he saw me.’
She remembered Jessop’s original question. ‘Dragovic wanted to know why I survived.’
‘They left you for dead. They were almost right.’
‘No.’ She pinched the skin of her forehead between finger and thumb, fighting back the headache pounding against it. ‘Dragovic said there was someone else there. The man he sent never came back, but there wasn’t any body.’ She looked up. ‘Was there?’
‘The police only found Michael’s. I suppose the other chap could have been swept out to sea.’
‘But then who killed him?’ Abby looked down. She’d finished her drink and not even tasted it. ‘What do you want from me?’ she said again.
Jessop reached across the table and took her hands in his. She tried to pull away, but his grip was tight and he wouldn’t let go.
