I didn’t ask what they were discussing and they didn’t seem inclined to expand. At that moment the workshop door opened again and Paxo walked in. He took his helmet off and shook himself like a dog, scattering water off his leathers in all directions. Even his normally spiky hair looked bedraggled.
“Pigging weather! There’s no sign of him, Daz,” he said to the tall biker. “We’ve been a few miles in every direction but he’s long gone.”
“Never mind,” Daz said. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”
“Considering it’s probably the same van that went after your mate Slick, I don’t think chasing after it on bikes was a good idea to start with, do you?” I said mildly. “What were you planning on doing if you caught up with it, anyway?”
Paxo scowled at me, but Daz silenced whatever snappy comment he’d been about to make with a single look.
“We don’t know who was chasing you,” he said carefully, “and we don’t know what hit Slick, either – or why. It could just be one of those freak accidents and freak coincidences.”
“Come off it,” I said, letting the frustration show through. “What was Slick up to the day he died, Daz? If he was racing then why the hell was he doing it with a pillion passenger? You running a handicap system all of a sudden?”
“Of course not.” Daz’s eyes flicked in the direction of the others as he hurried to cover the slip. “I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“Of course you don’t,” I agreed tiredly. “Funny that, when it’s not exactly a secret that the Devil’s Bridge Club have been road racing up and down the Lune valley all year. Are you planning on disbanding now that Slick’s dead, or are you just going to wait until the cops catch up with you?”
Daz looked startled for a moment, then he took a deep breath, letting it out down his nose. The silence was broken by Gleet belting something with a lump hammer on the far side of my bike. I thought of the Suzuki’s delicate aluminium alloy engine and tried not to wince.
“Slick wasn’t supposed to be doing anything on Sunday,” Daz said when Gleet stopped hammering. He spoke with low precision, like he was speaking through tightly clenched teeth. “He was just picking up your friend and bringing her along to Devil’s Bridge, that’s all.”
“Why?”
Daz opened his mouth, frowned sharply and closed it again. “I don’t know,” he said, too quickly. He gave me a slightly cold-edged smile. “Maybe he got lucky.”
I mentally ducked under the jibe and kept coming. “I don’t think so. Why was he knocked off?”
“Hell, I don’t know!” he tossed back. “That’s what William and Paxo were trying to find out when they came to the hospital, wasn’t it? And it could just have been an accident. Who says it was deliberate?”
“I would have thought tonight proves it wasn’t.” I nodded to where Gleet was fiddling with my bike. “Besides, I spoke to Clare just before she went into theatre,” I said, not adding that she’d since changed her mind. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with this Irish trip Slick was running, would it?”
Gleet chose that moment to strike an arc on the other side of the Suzuki. The workshop was abruptly bathed in an intense blue-white light. So it might have been my imagination or something bright and quick might really have flashed across behind Daz’s eyes.
He and William and Paxo had tensed, I saw, and that had nothing to do with the welding process going on nearby. Daz’s face closed down. He moved in, got right in my face and loomed over me.
“You want to back up a little, Charlie, and look at this from another direction,” he said tightly. “What makes you think that Slick was the target, huh? It could have been
Ten
As soon as Gleet had finished his makeshift repairs he wheeled the Suzuki back out into the yard for me to leave. It was clear that none of them wanted me to hang around and I wasn’t keen on the idea myself.
“Looks like a dog’s breakfast, but it should get you home, like,” Gleet said shortly, nodding to his handiwork. “Just don’t tell anyone who done it, OK? I got a reputation to think of.”
I agreed solemnly not to say a word and he almost smiled at me. Almost.
The gear lever now consisted of one piece of tubing rammed onto the broken shaft and another shorter piece welded on at right-angles to form a foot peg. It wasn’t exactly pretty but it would do the job.
It was very dark outside now but the rain had eased off to a persistent drizzle. Behind the barn the sky glowed orange from the bonfire that burned on, undeterred by the weather. Most of the onlookers who’d gathered to watch my arrival had gone back to stand around it. Only a few of the nosier ones still remained and I was surprised to see that Tess was among them.
She had abandoned her little girl to someone else’s care and, as I swung my leg over the Suzuki, she came forwards to speak to me. I waited to hear what she had to say before I tried kicking the bike into life. I wasn’t sure the engine would still turn over after all it had been through and the fewer witnesses to my struggles the better.
As it was, she glared at Gleet and the others until they reluctantly moved away. She waited until they had all disappeared through the gate out of the yard before she turned her attention back to me.
“Why did you come?” she asked then, abrupt. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Don’t tell me you were another of Slick’s bits on the side?”
I tried to remind myself that grief can make you say things you might otherwise regret.
“Of course I wasn’t, Tess,” I said, keeping my voice reasonable. “I just came to find out what he was up to.”
