Road Kill

your wrist with half a million in gems inside, you’d be jumpy, too.”

I didn’t answer that. He’s going. I felt a sudden tightness in my chest, the anxiety upgraded close to panic.

“I think it might be for the best, in any case,” he added.

“Oh. I see,” I said. Stupid, when clearly I didn’t. “Why?”

He shrugged again, little more than a restless lift of a shoulder. “I need you to come to a decision about me – us, the future,” he said, turning away. “I’m not sure you can do that when we’re together.”

I opened my mouth to speak, realised I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say, and shut it again. The silence stretched between us until it had become a chasm too wide to fill with mere words.

“OK,” I said at last. Tell him, an internal voice urged loudly in my ear. Tell him not to go. Tell him how you feel.

But I couldn’t, and I didn’t.

Thirteen

The motorway was quiet. Sean kept the Shogun at a steady eighty-five in the centre lane, overtaking a strung out line of trucks. At the same time he was making arrangements for the Heathrow job on his mobile, which was plugged into a hands-free kit on the dash.

I sat in the passenger seat staring out at the countryside flowing past my window. I tuned out Sean going over the logistics of mapping the route they were going to take to the courier’s destination, the possible bottlenecks and choke points, how many vehicles, how many men.

I knew he would have already pre-planned all this meticulously enough not to need to double-check it now. It was just Sean’s inbuilt thoroughness.

That didn’t make it any easier to bear.

With my stomach clenched tight, I was trying not to let my desperation show on my face. But I could feel my chances of getting across half of what I wanted to say to him slipping away with each passing mile.

It had seemed like an ideal opportunity at first. Sean was heading back down to King’s Langley and I needed to collect my Honda FireBlade from my parents’ place in Cheshire. It meant only a relatively minor detour off the M6 for Sean and I’d thought the hour-and-a-half journey would have given us plenty of time to talk. As it was, we were already passing the Blackpool turnoff and had barely exchanged a word.

Before we’d left Jacob and Clare’s I’d had a thorough look at the damage to the Suzuki, just in case it could be patched together to last me a bit longer. It looked a lot worse in daylight than it had in Gleet’s workshop the night before. The back end was a mess. It was pure luck, I considered, that the Transit driver hadn’t wiped my rear wheel right out from under me. I patted the bike apologetically on its dented tank.

“What are you going to do with it?” Sean had asked. “Claim on your insurance?”

“It’s not worth it,” I’d said, shaking my head. “They’d just write it off. No, I’ll ring round some bike breakers and see what bits I can pick up secondhand. It might take me a while, but I’ll get it back on the road eventually.”

“And in the meantime?”

I knew he already had the answer to that one. He just wanted to hear me say it.

“Well, it’s a good job I’ve got the FireBlade,” I said, aiming for lightness.

Sean was well aware of the superbike I’d been given and, without us ever actually discussing the subject, I knew he wasn’t particularly happy about it. He stared at me for a long time without speaking and I felt it have the usual effect on my chin, which was rising almost of its own accord. I suppose we were just as stubborn as each other. Maybe that was the problem.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed, Charlie?” he demanded and there was a raw note to his voice I hadn’t heard for a long time. “I know you’re planning on trying out for this Devil’s Bridge Club, despite what’s happened. It was bad enough when you were planning to do it on the Suzuki, but on a ‘Blade . . .”

He let his voice trail off but I didn’t need him to finish the sentence.

“Clare’s my friend,” I said. “Probably my best friend. I know she’s not telling me the whole story and that hurts, but I have to do this for her.”

Sean made a rare gesture of frustration. “Friends don’t ask you to do something for them that could get you killed.”

A microsecond image flashed into my head like a strobe light. A picture of a dark cold night with the looting fires burning, of Sean wounded and vulnerable, of a man with a gun. And of me, putting myself between them without a second thought. Sean would willingly have died rather than have asked me to do it, but it had never occurred to me not to.

“That’s just it,” I said gently. “Friends don’t have to ask.”

***

My parent’s house, on the outskirts of a little village near Alderley Edge, was a gracefully proportioned Georgian pile with a stiflingly manicured walled garden at the back and impressive circular gravel drive at the front.

They’ve lived there since they were married, before the area went stratospheric and all the celebrity Manchester United footballers moved in. My mother pretends to sneer but I suspect that she’s secretly as smitten by their glamour as everyone else.

We arrived a little before eleven o’clock. Early enough that my mother’s beautiful manners didn’t oblige her to invite Sean to stay to lunch. Her barely concealed relief, when he apologised that he didn’t even have the time to come in for a cup of tea, might have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic.