to work, Attila was already in, and the place was buzzing, so I didn’t have much chance to mull over the information she’d given me until later that afternoon.
Things went completely dead after lunch, as they usually did. Attila and I were taking advantage of the total lack of clientele to shift some of the benches around when Madeleine walked through the door, immaculately dressed as always.
“Hi, Charlie,” she said guardedly, but treated my boss to a sunny smile that had him preening his muscles. I introduced her as a friend of Sean’s, and left it at that. If Sean wanted Attila to know the real score he could tell the man himself.
Attila came over all good manners and suggested coffee, which Madeleine accepted with enough enthusiasm to send him scuttling for the kettle in the office.
When he’d gone Madeleine looked about her with undisguised curiosity. “So, this is where you work,” she said. I couldn’t tell from her voice if she was impressed or horrified. Like I said, Attila didn’t go much for frills. I looked round, but what had, before, seemed businesslike and uncluttered, now looked spartan and shabby.
I shrugged, and finished moving a pile of loose weights across to the bench’s new position. When I straightened up, I found Madeleine was watching me closely. “I understand you teach self defence,” she said.
“I used to,” I said shortly. “I don’t any more.”
“Why not?”
For a few moments I considered the question. “I was injured last winter,” I said at last. It sounded so innocuous, like I’d fallen down a set of steps, or come off the bike. “Attila offered me this job while I was recuperating, and I never got back into it.”
She nodded, seeming to accept that watered-down explanation. “I’ve done a few courses myself,” she said now. “Tell me, what do you recommend for defences against someone with a knife?”
I looked up sharply, wondering if she thought she was being clever, but her face was without particular guile. My eyes slid past her to one of the mirrors on the wall behind her head, checking my reflection to see if the scar was on view above the collar of my polo shirt. It wasn’t.
I checked Madeleine’s face again. “What do I recommend?” I said, keeping my voice level with an effort. “That you run away. As fast as you possibly can. And you keep running.”
She frowned, and looked about to ask some more, but Attila returned at that moment with three cups of coffee bunched around a single fist, and the moment was lost. I was never so glad of the interruption.
“Excuse me a moment,” I muttered, and escaped to the ladies’. Once I was there I closed the door and leaned back against it, with my eyes shut.
Madeleine didn’t know what had happened, I told myself. She couldn’t do. I was just being paranoid. Over- sensitive. Wasn’t I?
I opened my eyes, stepped up to the mirror, and stretched the collar of my shirt to one side. The scar wasn’t old enough to have faded much. They’d warned me that it would always be visible, and they’d offered further surgery as an alternative, but with only dubious chances of success. In the end, I’d decided to leave it well alone.
After all, it was a sharp reminder to me that I should follow my own teachings more closely. That I should run instead of standing to fight. Next time I was faced with a lunatic wielding a knife, maybe I’d do just that.
Someone tripped down my spine wearing icy boots. I shivered, took a deep breath like a submerging swimmer, and straightened my collar again. A normal-looking girl stared back out of the mirror, giving no hint to what lay beneath the surface. I turned away before I was tempted to try and look much deeper, and walked back into the gym.
Madeleine glanced up at me as I moved back across the floor, but before she could say much the door went again to herald Sean’s arrival.
He flashed a quick grin in Madeleine’s direction, then turned his attention on my boss. “Hi, Attila,” he said. “Can I steal your lovely assistant away from her work for a little while?”
“For sure,” Attila said. He stood up with a ripple of muscle under his T-shirt, and looked from one of us to the other as if reassessing the relationship between the three of us. “But first you can help me move another of these benches, yes?”
Sean rolled his eyes, but pitched in without any real complaint, taking off his jacket and pushing up the sleeves of his vee-necked shirt. He didn’t have Attila’s sheer bulk, but he didn’t seem to find the weight a problem, either.
Looking back with an even mind, it had been that economy of movement, that air of total competence, which had all been part and parcel of Sean’s attraction. I don’t think I’d ever seen him fumble.
When they’d finished he moved over to Madeleine, touched her shoulder in a way I might once have found intimate. Now it simply seemed one of friendship, concern.
For her part, Madeleine reached up to kiss him, but Sean stopped her.
“It’s OK, Madeleine,” he said, and his tone was wry. “You don’t have to put on a show in front of Charlie. She knows the score.”
For a moment the other girl allowed herself a scowl of pure wounded feminine pride, then the full import of his words dug in, and her eyes widened.
“You told her?” The disbelief was plain. “But, I thought—”
Sean shrugged it aside. “She had a gun to my head,” he said, without the barest flicker of a smile in my direction. “What can I say?”
Both Attila and Madeleine stared at him, hoping for some indication that he was joking. After a couple of seconds Madeleine gave up waiting, and started digging in her shoulder bag. I wondered what exactly he’d told her about our confrontation in the flat.
“I’ve been running a background check on Nasir Gadatra, as you asked,” she said, businesslike, retrieving a spiral-bound shorthand notebook and flipping it open. “He certainly had an interesting past. At one time there was a whole string of arrests for vandalism, burglary, stealing from cars, even assault. O’Bryan had to bail him out on numerous occasions. It seems that when his father died he went right off at the deep end. It was only when it looked seriously like he was going to get put away that he got his act together.”
She checked her notes again. “For the last few years he’s kept his nose clean, and there hasn’t been a sniff of trouble. He got the job working as a trainee electrician for Mr Ali and did his qualifications at night school. He paid his way towards the rent on his mother’s house, like a good boy. He was a member of a local snooker club, and he had a standing order to a gym as well. Sorry, Attila, not this one.” She shot a quick smile to the German and came out with a name I’d only vaguely heard of.
Attila grunted. “I know it. A poseurs’ place,” he said, dismissive. “No decent equipment. No decent staff.”
Madeleine grinned at him, but before he could add anything further, the phone on the counter started ringing. Attila went to answer it.
When he’d gone we sat down on the benches, Sean hunched forwards with his elbows on his knees, fingers linked. He nodded to Madeleine to continue.
“The only real oddity I could find is that although he paid his motorbike insurance in instalments, he did it in cash,” she went on. “He used to go into a local broker every month with the money.”
“Bike insurance?” I queried. “I didn’t know he
“According to the DVLA computer – and don’t ask, by the way – he’s been the proud owner of a new Honda CBR 600 sports bike practically ever since he passed his test.”
“How on earth did an eighteen-year-old sparky, who’s apparently firmly on the straight and narrow, afford a CBR?” Sean wondered aloud. “The insurance company must have been totally hammering him for it.”
“They were,” Madeleine said, and listed premiums that should have made Nasir’s hair stand on end.
“How the hell did he afford that?” I demanded.
“Good question,” Madeleine said, casting me a quick smile as though trying to make up for the earlier animosity between us. “His wages didn’t cover it, that’s for certain.”
“So,” Sean said, frowning, “he had to be getting the extra cash from somewhere. Any clues?”
“None, sorry. I’ll keep looking,” she said. “I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility that he was on the fiddle somewhere at work. Snaffling stuff away off the site he was on, maybe. What d’you reckon?”
