“Oh but now that’s not true,” Eamonn declared. He stopped, pushed the edge of the baton under Isobel’s chin and forced her head back with it. “Is it now, Isobel my darlin’?”
Isobel stayed stubbornly mute, pressing her lips together into a thin line and glaring at him with pure hatred in her face. Eamonn studied her dispassionately for a moment, then lowered the baton and moved round to Jamie, grasping his hair to lift his slack head up and wedge the baton across his throat. Jamie’s eyes flew open as he began to choke.
“Tell them,” Eamonn goaded, gaze locked on Isobel.
Up on the walkway we saw Jamie begin to struggle in Eamonn’s hands and moved forward instinctively. Eamonn’s head jerked round towards us.
“Hold off or I’ll snap his neck in a heartbeat and there won’t be a thing you can do to stop me,” he commanded. We stopped. He turned his attention back to Isobel. “Tell them, or your lying face will be the last thing your little boy sees.”
“All right,” Isobel said from between clenched teeth. “I killed him, is that what you want to hear? Well, I admit it and to hell with you!”
“Not good enough,” Eamonn said, tightening his grip. Jamie was panicking now, hands jerking so that Isobel was forced hard up against the other side of the pillar. “Tell them, Isobel,” Eamonn taunted her. “Tell them the kind of woman you really are. They’re prepared to die for you and this worthless brat of yours. Don’t you think they’re entitled to know?”
“I-I killed Slick Grannell,” she said, her voice wobbling. “It was an accident. I wasn’t aiming for him. I just wanted to stop that scrawny bitch from giving Jamie the money.” Her scornful gaze swept over her former lover. “I was trying to keep my son out of all this. To protect him from
“You were trying to kill Clare?” I couldn’t stop the shocked question bursting out. All the time the Devil’s Bridge Club had been slyly trying to point the blame for the accident that had claimed Slick’s life towards Clare, and they’d been right. I remembered my last phone call with MacMillan. The van that had hit Slick had been registered to Isobel and I’d ridden right over that fact and jumped straight to the conclusion it must have been Eamonn or one of his men driving it instead.
Eamonn took one look at the shock in our faces and released his grip on Jamie, who slumped forwards, coughing. When he could speak again he stared up at his mother with a kind of horrified disgust on his face.
“So that’s why you wouldn’t loan me the money in the first place,” Jamie said and there was no mistaking the sneer in his voice. “You live with this crooked bastard but you wanted to keep
“Oh she would have been in there like a shot if she’d had the chance, wouldn’t you, Isobel?” Eamonn mocked. “Truth is, though, she’s broke. Wasn’t that your real reason for trying to run Jacob’s blonde bimbo down? No imminent wedding means no divorce and you wouldn’t have had to pay the old man off, now would you? A nice little side benefit.”
“So why did you go along with all this?” Sean slung at him. “What was in it for you?”
“Oh I found out about the little deal your man there was putting together,” Eamonn said, nodding to a white- faced Daz. “It sounded too good to be true, so I thought I’d cut myself a slice by staking young Jamie. I must admit it was a bit of a surprise when his father’s jail-bait threw a spanner in the works by giving him the cash to try and pay me off.”
“Her name is Clare,” I said with a brittle precision that hurt my jaw. “And she’s twenty-seven. Hardly jail- bait.”
“She’s still young enough to be his daughter,” Eamonn returned. “She was a thorn in my side, I know that much. That ‘accident’ was a mixed blessing. When Isobel admitted to me what she’d done I thought she’d blown the whole deal by killing Slick. I thought he was the only link, but Tess had the same contacts, so all was not lost.”
“So why try and run Tess down on Friday night?” I said, although even as I spoke I knew the answer.
“Oh that was Isobel’s boys again. Getting inventive, weren’t we, my darlin’? Getting desperate, too. Thought that if you lost your contact, you’d give it up.”
She curled her lip at him but Eamonn just grinned back at her.
“And that bunch who jumped us in the pub at Portaferry,” I said. “Isobel again, I assume?”
“Oh yes,” Eamonn said cheerfully. “You see the kind of mother she is – prepared to have her own son beaten up to keep him away from the thick of it?” He tutted and shook his head. “Evil and vicious. My kind of woman.”
“So she knew you were planning on hijacking the diamonds as soon as the exchange was made,” Sean said. He’d gone very still, his only movement an unconscious counterbalance against the crashing of the ship. “Why wait until then?”
Eamonn shrugged. “Because without Tess, and the boy wonder here, we couldn’t flush out the courier. All we had to do was keep tabs on you until the rendezvous and we’d get the diamonds without having to lay out a cent. And all
“You two were the only possible fly in the ointment, but their own greed made them keep you out of it, otherwise we might have had more of a fight on our hands,” he went on, darkly now. “And it turned out I was right about that, wasn’t I? I knew you were trouble right from the start.” He touched a tentative hand to the plaster on his nose. “My lads did their best to get rid of you, Charlie, but it seems you’ve a habit of surviving.”
A brief and graphic snapshot of the van that had chased me from Slick’s wake, and Sam’s accident sprang into my mind. I doused it quickly.
“You must know that as soon as we reach Scotland they’ll be waiting for you, don’t you, Eamonn?” I said instead.
Eamonn’s smile blinked out to turn his face cold again. “I’m tired of listening to your yacking,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “I have a schedule to keep to. Hand over those gems.”
Sean unzipped his pocket with a show of reluctance and produced the pouch. Eamonn’s eyes locked greedily onto the prize.
