Road Kill

“Sean,” I said, my voice strangely flat. “I think you need to see this.”

The others knew from my tone that something was very wrong but they seemed unable to react more than to stare blindly at me. Sean pushed them aside and stepped past me, opening the bathroom door wide.

Tess was lying in the bath, fully clothed, with one leg folded back underneath her and both arms draped over the sides. She looked small and fragile and rather childlike. Her head was turned at an unlikely angle and her eyes were open. It didn’t take a genius to work out that her neck had been broken.

“Ah . . . shit,” Sean murmured under his breath.

“This wasn’t Jamie,” I said quickly, like I was abruptly short of breath. “It can’t have been. He would not have done something like this. Not to Tess.”

Sean moved in and bent closer, eyes inspecting the body with cold precision. The others seemed to come out of their trance at that point. Daz took one step over the threshold and stopped with something approaching a whimper.

Sean barely turned his head. “If you’re going to be sick, do it somewhere else,” he said shortly.

I forced myself not to turn away from Tess, even though the sight of her made my heartbeat struggle painfully inside my constricted chest.

“Her rings are gone,” I said, suddenly noticing her naked fingers dangling over the rim of the bath. “She was wearing them again at breakfast but they’re not there now.”

“Her left arm’s broken just above the wrist, so she must have put up a fight,” Sean said quietly. “But this is what killed her, look – she was hit with something, hard, across the side of her neck here, under her ear. You can see the bruising. One blow,” he went on, a strange sympathy in his face now, velvet on stone. “I doubt she would have known much about it.”

I glanced around. “Whatever it was they used, they must have taken it with them.”

“Mm,” Sean said, straightening. “You got a bruise very like that across your arm, remember?”

A fast picture of that wicked extendible baton unfolded in my memory. Sean saw from my anguished face that I’d connected the two. It seemed a bitter confirmation of my earlier fears.

“Eamonn?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he said, turning grim.

You should have let me finish him while I had the chance. Sean’s words came back to taunt me. It was a testament to his will power that he didn’t feel the need to repeat them himself.

***

“So, what the fuck do we do now?”

It was Paxo who spoke. He sounded somewhat subdued, defeated even. The most interesting thing was that the question was directed towards Sean.

The Devil’s Bridge Club members had put themselves totally into his hands. William had retreated into a blank silence so that it was difficult to know what he was thinking, while Daz was clearly in shock.

We’d shepherded the three of them back to Paxo and William’s room across the hallway, carefully hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to Daz’s. It wouldn’t prevent Housekeeping from making their nasty discovery but it would delay them, at least.

“I’m not entirely sure you can do anything other than call the gardai,” Sean said, leaning on the wall by the window and folding his arms across his chest. “Whether he was the driving force behind it or not, it would seem Jamie’s done the dirty on you. He took Tess to meet the courier, who’s now dead and minus the gems. He then brought her back here, and now she’s dead and the money’s gone as well. Face it – you’re in the shit. But it’ll make it ten times worse for you if you run.”

“What about the diamonds?” Daz said, his voice plaintive now. The three of them were sitting on one of the beds, slumped and dejected.

Sean shrugged. “Forget them,” he said, brutal. “If they were nicked we could try and drop Jamie in it with the authorities. I know a guy in Amsterdam who loves to track down and recover stolen gems. There might even have been a reward. But, even though I can’t believe they’re entirely legit, I’ve already run some checks and they don’t show up as stolen.”

Daz shifted uncomfortably. “They’re not stolen, exactly,” he admitted. “They just didn’t get here through the usual channels.”

Sean stared at him for a moment, face bleak. He’d taken on that stillness I recognised. He only wore it when things were raging all around him, or he was trying to contain it within. “As soon as I found out they weren’t stolen, there was really only one logical explanation,” he said quietly. “You bought blood diamonds, didn’t you?”

Daz flushed. “At the time, I didn’t know that’s what they were,” he protested.

“Not at first, maybe,” Sean said, and there was a dangerous softness to his voice now. “But it didn’t take you long to find out, did it?”

“Wait a minute, what the fuck are blood diamonds?” Paxo demanded.

“They’re also called conflict diamonds,” Sean told him but his eyes were still on Daz. “They’re smuggled out of the mines in places like Botswana and Sierra Leone by the workers – who’ll be shot if they’re caught, incidentally. The rough stones are traded on the black market, cut in the backstreets of India, and peddled into Europe usually to finance the drugs trade,” he said, glacial. “Good job there was ‘no way you’d have anything to do with shit like that’, right Daz?”

Daz wouldn’t meet his eyes as Sean threw his own earlier disavowal back in his face.

“We trusted you!” Paxo jumped to his feet and rounded on Daz. “You promised us a good laugh and a double-your-money deal. It was supposed to be a ‘victimless crime’ right?” he spat. “Now look at it – all gone to fuck.”