MacMillan moved beside me and watched him go. “I can’t pretend I’m happy to see you renewing your association with Meyer,” he said quietly.
“That’s my business,” I snapped, my own earlier doubts making my voice sharper than I’d intended. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my leather jeans. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m sure you believe that to be so,” he murmured, solemn. “Just be careful, Charlie.”
Sean reappeared with Clare’s keys and dutifully unlocked the coach house before rejoining us. Two policemen disappeared eagerly inside, only to return a few minutes later, shaking their heads, disappointed.
“Nothing, sir,” one of them reported. He jerked a thumb back towards the coach house door. “He’s got a lovely old Laverda Jota in there, though. Looks like new. I wouldn’t mind making him a bid at that.”
“That’s Jacob’s own bike,” I said, my voice cool. “He’d bite his own leg off rather than part with it.”
MacMillan glanced at me. “Everyone has their price,” he said, cryptic. He nodded to his men again and they made for their cars, then he inclined his head to me. “Thank you for your co-operation, Charlie. No doubt we’ll be in touch again soon.”
And with that slightly ominous promise, the police climbed back into their vehicles and departed up the dusty driveway. I turned and found Sean at my shoulder.
“So, if
“His friends?” Sean suggested. “Or his enemies?”
“I’m not sure who his enemies are,” I said, “but I do know how to get hold of one of his friends.”
I dug the number William had given me out of my jacket pocket, together with my mobile phone and dialled one into the other. William’s phone clicked straight onto voice mail and I didn’t think it was worth leaving him a message. I ended the call, muttering curses under my breath.
“Annoying, isn’t it?” Sean said, his voice suddenly cheerful. “When someone doesn’t leave their mobile phone switched on.”
***
The only person I could think of who might know something about Slick’s enemies was Clare. The only person I knew where to find, at any rate. I didn’t believe the remains of his bike had disappeared without good reason. Was it to protect Slick, or to hide the evidence of whatever had hit him? The only trouble was, I was increasingly unsure how much Clare would be prepared to tell us.
I wavered over calling the hospital first, to check it was OK to visit her again, but decided against it. Ask permission and you stand a chance of being refused – especially if the same nurse who’d chucked us out this morning was the one who answered the phone.
Sean offered to drive me into town and the prospect of being able to get out of my bike leathers in this weather was tempting enough to make me say yes.
I went upstairs and changed into the shirt and jeans I’d packed at the cottage. The skin round my knee was already starting to yellow where Eamonn had clouted it and a painful lump had come up on the outside of the joint. I prodded at it experimentally and was thankful I hadn’t taken the blow completely unprotected.
Sean was already in the Shogun with the motor running when I came downstairs and locked the front door. I hopped up into the passenger seat and we headed out along the drive.
Sean drove the same way he did everything, self-contained, with a relaxed casual competence. I found myself watching the way the definition formed and shifted in the muscles of his left forearm as he changed gear. Then I remembered those same muscles clenched around Eamonn’s neck, starving his brain. I looked away.
I sat in silence as we turned out onto the main road and travelled towards town. Even on a Monday a couple of big bikes passed us, heading in the opposite direction. The Shogun had air conditioning, which made the plush interior cool and bearable in the summer heat but I was aware of being one-step removed from the road and the conditions. Removed from the facts of what had brought Slick down.
The prospect of interrogating my friend as she lay helpless and injured in her hospital bed was not a pleasant one. That she’d lied to me and I knew it, only made it worse. Elderly Ducatis could be temperamental, but I couldn’t believe her bike had completely failed to start one day, and fired up first time the next. So what was she really doing out with Slick?
We pulled up at the traffic lights leading onto the motorway junction. There must have been another ferry into the port at Heysham from the Isle of Man or Belfast because a rake of bikes were waiting for the lights to change in their favour. Sports bikes rather than cruisers, but piled high with luggage like racehorses wearing donkey panniers.
“How do I handle this?” I asked suddenly. Sean hadn’t been privy to my thoughts but he seemed to know instantly what I meant, even so.
“It depends what you want to get out of it.”
I thought for a moment. “The truth?” I said. It should have been a decisive statement but it came out a lot more uncertain than that.
“About what, exactly?” The lights went green for the bikers and they flowed across the front of us like running deer. I watched them go, feeling the tug of not being on my Suzuki.
“About what Clare was really doing on the back of Slick’s bike,” I said, turning back to him. “About what really brought them off and why she won’t tell me what it was. And about what she was doing with ten grand in cash.”
“Come on, Charlie,” Sean said, mildly reproving as we moved forwards again. “You don’t know if she can remember the accident or not – anaesthetics can take you that way. And as for the ten thousand, we don’t know what’s happened to that. Not yet, anyway. The real question,” he went on, “is what are you prepared to sacrifice to find these things out?”
“Sacrifice?”
