wild-eyed look of a tribal warrior.
Sean got an arm under Gleet’s shoulders and helped him to sit up. He did so with a groan, suddenly clutching at his right elbow with his left hand and cradling it across his body. From the way his right hand drooped, his arm was pretty badly busted.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Paxo demanded of no one in particular.
“Let me guess,” I said when Gleet himself didn’t respond. I had a brief flashback of Daz in the hotel room at Portaferry when we’d told him about the Lucky Strike Suzuki. He’d known exactly who the rider was and hadn’t seen him as a threat. Now I knew why. “The name on your driver’s licence wouldn’t be Reginald Post would it, by any chance?”
Gleet looked up briefly with eyes that struggled to centre but I thought I saw a sliver of recognition in them.
An engine started up somewhere behind us and moved off. We instinctively gathered round Gleet, obscuring him, as a car went past and disappeared up the exit ramp.
“We need to move him away from here,” Sean said, tense. “Gleet! Come on, man, stick with me! Can you stand up?”
With Sean and William supporting him, we managed to get the big biker on his feet and steer him a slightly staggered course across the car park towards the lifts. On the way we passed the Suzuki that Gleet had been riding to follow us through Ireland. It was parked at a haphazard angle, like he’d stopped suddenly and just jumped off.
Daz rushed ahead of us, jabbing at the call button for the lift. I held my breath as I watched the floor indicator dropping towards us and the doors opened, but nobody was inside. I reckoned we might have difficulty finding an explanation for Gleet’s macabre appearance if we did bump into another guest, but our luck held.
I went to fetch my first-aid kit from Sean’s and my room. By the time I returned to Paxo’s room they had Gleet sitting down on the closed loo seat in the bathroom and had mopped the worst of the blood away from the wound on his head. It turned out to be little more than a tear in his scalp that had bled more alarmingly than its severity warranted. Nevertheless, it had been enough to knock him cold and, even now, it was taking him a while to come round fully.
When William let me back in, though, Gleet at least looked up and more or less focused on me. Daz had the kettle on and Gleet blinked rather than nodded his thanks when he was handed a mug of sugary tea. They’d got his jacket off him somehow and his right arm was resting across his lap, lifeless apart from the unconscious twitching of his swollen fingers.
“You must have the skull of an ox,” Sean said to him. “I don’t know many people who could have taken such a belt across the back of the head like that and lived to tell the tale.”
“Yeah well, shame I ain’t got bones to match,” Gleet said, lifting the shoulder of his injured arm with a wry smile that didn’t hide the pain he was in.
“What the fuck happened?” The question burst out of Paxo like he’d been doing his best to contain it until now but it had finally got away from him.
“Where do I start?” Gleet murmured, closing his eyes for a moment. He opened them again. “OK, Tess asked me to come over and keep tabs on you lot. Where is she, by the way?”
The casual question took us by surprise so that no one had a chance to prepare a face against it. Gleet took a sip of his tea, eyes darting round us. He caught our dismayed expressions and lowered the mug very slowly, his face going through phases of denial, shock and anger before finally settling on a deep abiding sorrow.
“Oh no,” he muttered, almost to himself. “I knew it was gonna be bad when I saw them taking Jamie, but . . . oh Jesus, no. Not Tess . . .”
He choked into silence, head down, his left hand clutched round the half-drunk mug of tea like it was his only anchor. After a moment his shoulders began to shake and I realised he was weeping.
I glanced up. The boys were standing around uncomfortably in the tiny bathroom, all squeezed in together, trying not to touch or meet each other’s gaze. I saw Sean take a breath to ask Gleet questions and, however desperately I knew we needed answers, I couldn’t let him do that to the poor guy. Not right now.
“OK. Everybody out,” I said, herding them through the door into the bedroom. When Sean would have argued, I added, “Give him a minute, for pity’s sake.” And I shut the door firmly behind them.
When I turned back Gleet was openly crying, tears sliding down through the dried blood on one cheek, leaving smeared greasy tracks.
“I loved her,” he said, more to himself than to me. “And I never got the chance to tell her.”
“Oh Gleet – she knew,” I said softly, but couldn’t have explained my certainty.
“I would have done anything for her,” he said, running straight on as though I hadn’t spoken. “I even lent Slick part of his share of the dosh for this caper.” He gave a harsh snort that never quite made it into a laugh. “Should have known he’d mess it up. He never had nothing he didn’t trash, that lad. So I talked Tess into coming along, just to make sure she got her share. And now—”
He broke off, mouth compressed into a thin line with the effort of damming back the floodwaters. His lips quivered under the strain and finally broke banks.
“It’s all my fault,” he said, oozing bitterness like a polluted beach. “I knew the kind of people Daz was getting himself mixed up with and I didn’t warn him or nothing.” He looked up, seemed to focus on me properly for the first time since my return. “I might as well have killed her myself.”
Twenty-six
“So, what happened, Gleet?” Sean asked.
I’d let Gleet pull himself together for a moment longer before we went out. He’d heaved himself upright and, awkwardly with one hand, had splashed cold water onto his face first. He didn’t bother to dry it, just shook his head a couple of times like a wet dog.
