Road Kill

with the feet splayed apart, revealing slender ankles in pale grey silk socks. His hands dangled straight down at either side. If he’d been wearing rings or a watch, they were gone. To one bloody wrist was chained a leather briefcase that was lying open and empty on the flooded tiles.

Sean looked up as I entered. He was crouched just out of reach of the blood, staring at the dead man with cool detachment.

“One ex diamond courier, I presume,” I said with as much composure as I could manage. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone with their throat cut and the memories that returned now were both abiding and abysmal.

“I would say so,” Sean agreed, rising. “Well, he’s no diamonds on him now, so that probably takes care of the why he was killed but, the question now is, who by?”

“Jesus, man, how the fuck can you two stand there and calmly discuss this?” Daz demanded, his voice a strangled squawk. “I mean, Jesus!”

“Good point,” I said to Sean, my voice bland. “We should get out of here.”

“Mm.” He nodded shortly, turned to the others. “Have you touched anything?”

They shook their heads but I carefully ripped out some paper hand towels from the dispenser and wiped the door jambs on both sides, just in case. I flushed them down the loo in the next cubicle, operating the lever with my elbow.

Outside again, the rain suddenly smelt fresh and clean, despite the petrol station fumes close by. Paxo obviously felt far enough away from the pumps to light up and when we emerged he was hovering next to his Ducati, puffing on a cigarette with all the fervour of an expectant father in a hospital waiting room.

“Right,” Sean said, swinging his leg over the Blackbird. “Back to the hotel.”

“Why?” William demanded with a trace of bitterness. “What the hell difference does that make?”

Sean just looked at him. “Does Jamie know you brought the rest of the money with you?”

The boys exchanged glances, then Daz said, “Well, yeah, of course he does. But it’s locked in the safe in my room.”

Sean jerked his head back towards the toilet block and its grisly secret. “After this,” he said grimly, “do you really think he’s going to let a little thing like that stop him?”

Twenty-five

Jamie cannot have done this.

All the way back from Mondello Park to the hotel, that was the only thing I could think about.

That, and what the hell was I going to tell Jacob and Clare? They’d trusted me to look after Jamie. To keep him out of trouble. You couldn’t get any deeper in trouble than a vicious killing and, one way or another, he was up to his neck in this one.

At the same time, part of my brain just couldn’t accept that he had actually done the deed himself. I remembered tackling him in the hallway of the house in Caton. His instinctive response to the fright of his discovery had been to take a swing at me. But that didn’t mean he could slash someone’s throat, rob them, and leave them propped on a toilet.

No, that was much more Eamonn Garroway’s style.

The thought started as a niggle and grew into a monster as we thrashed through the countryside back towards Naas. Jamie might not have murder in his psyche, but his mother’s boyfriend certainly had.

The question was, how big a part had Jamie played in his schemes?

I backtracked. We’d been followed off the ferry by someone who knew we were coming. They hadn’t bothered trailing us to the hotel, but had turned up later. Then they’d been waiting for us on the road to the Giant’s Causeway the following day. How had they known where we were going, if not because someone had been tipping them off?

But, even as the thoughts came whizzing towards me like a summer midge swarm, I did my best to swat them away. After all, why had somebody tried to run Tess down when she was needed to make contact with the diamond courier? Why had somebody arranged for Davey and his mates to attack us in the pub at Portaferry? Who was the guy on the Lucky Strike Suzuki?

And, even before we’d ever got to Ireland, who had deliberately run down Slick and Clare, and then tried to do the same to me after Slick’s wake? Not to mention what had happened to Sam during the Devil’s Bridge Club audition. But however hard I tried to slot it together, nothing fitted.

Nothing at all.

***

We didn’t bother with niceties when we got back to the hotel, abandoning the bikes right outside the front entrance and just about running through the foyer. Daz stabbed at the call button for the lift a couple of times and, when it failed to miraculously arrive, headed for the stairs with a muttered curse.

We burst out of the stairwell at the fifth floor, some of us rather more out of breath than others, and thundered down the corridor to Daz’s room. He fumbled in his leathers for his key card, but when he swiped it through the reader, it flashed the red light at him and stubbornly refused to disengage the locks.

Daz tried it several more times, then Paxo snatched it out of his hands and tried too, also with no success.

Daz swore at some length. “I’ll have to go back down to reception and get another,” he said, trembling with nerves now. “What was wrong with a good old-fucking-fashioned key, for Christ’s sake?”

“OK,” Sean said. “Charlie – go with him.”