Sean was holding Tess’s ring up and something in his face had changed.
“What do you make of this?” he asked, throwing it across to me so I had to let go of my towel to catch it. I rolled the ring in my fingers for a moment and shrugged, frowning. “What about it?”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, that stone is a genuine diamond. A big one.”
“You’re joking!” I said, but knew even as I spoke that he was not. He had no reason to. I looked again, still doubtful. “But it’s huge.”
“Mm,” he said. “Best part of a carat. Beautiful clarity and hardly any occlusions.”
“Occlusions?”
“Flaws. You value diamonds on the four “c’s – carat, cut, clarity and colour. This is hitting all the buttons.”
“And you know this because . . .?”
“I’ve done some work out in Africa and there are a lot of these rocks about. It pays to know what you’re looking at.” He smiled. “Plus, I’ve just spent twenty-four hours with that very chatty and knowledgeable Dutch gemstone courier and I was interested in what he had to say.”
“Tess told me she’d made it herself,” I said, remembering how drunk she’d been. Too drunk, I would have thought, to have lied convincingly.
“She probably did make the setting,” Sean said, peering inside the band. “It’s not a bad effort but there’s no hallmark and it doesn’t do justice to the quality of the stone.”
“How the hell can she afford a diamond this size?” I wondered.
Sean shook his head. “Officially, she can’t,” he said bluntly. “She’s supposed to be a jewellery maker but she just about lives on state benefits more than she works – as far as the taxman is aware, anyway.”
“She had a fistful of rings like this one,” I said slowly. “If they’re all real she must be draped in a fortune. So where’s she getting the money?”
“I think that’s something we need to determine – and sooner rather than later,” he said, his face grim. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve no desire to find out the hard way that the reason I’m along on this jaunt at all is to play minder to a load of drug mules.”
By the time we got downstairs and checked out, the others were all waiting for us – rather pointedly, I thought – in the car park. The sun was already burning brightly and they sat and sweated inside their leathers.
They had unchained the bikes and were sitting on board. Daz even had his Aprilia ticking over. While Sean and I got ourselves strapped down and zipped up and sorted, he blipped the throttle repeatedly. The bike’s exhaust made an impatient gruff bark of sound but I refused to be rushed through my preflight checks. I knew, once we set off, I wasn’t going to get the chance to put right any minor irritations like a rucked-up sleeve or a wayward piece of fringe in my eyes.
I’d been hoping I’d get the opportunity to give Tess her ring back and ask her about it, but she was already mounted up on the back of Daz’s bike, helmet on. If anything, she seemed reluctant to meet my eyes, never mind talk to me, and she certainly didn’t look like someone who’s just lost a massive diamond. I left the ring in my jacket pocket. There’d be time later.
Once we were on the road it was clear that the boys were taking their temper out on their machinery. Daz set off as he meant to go on, with scant regard to Tess clinging on for dear life behind him. Paxo was right up there dicing with him, almost goading him to greater excesses. Every now and again I caught the mutter of cursing over my headset when sheer stomach-churning adrenaline made maintaining radio silence an impossibility.
I tried not to give the FireBlade too much pain until the engine had warmed through. Then I clicked my visor fully closed and dropped everything down a gear.
I shot past Jamie almost at once and ended up hard on William’s heels. The big guy had abandoned his usual laid-back riding style and let the devil take command. He was a natural rider, surprisingly quick for someone whose movements never seemed hurried, and whose natural bulk acted like a permanent drogue chute.
By the time we had covered the few miles up the coast to Glenarm I was actually enjoying myself. In my mirrors I kept getting the occasional glimpse of Sean holding station on Jamie’s rear quarter, like he was shepherding him along at a slower pace. And behind them, nothing.
Then, as we passed the road that turns back to Ballymena, a dark grey Vauxhall Vectra flipped out of the junction and fell in behind us.
I saw Sean react, dropping back slightly, coming off his line for corners and allowing the gap between Jamie and the Blackbird to widen. I knew he was putting himself between Jacob’s kid and the threat. He did it immediately, without any hesitation, and suddenly that very fact terrified me.
“Daz,” I said abruptly into my voice-activate mic, “Hey Daz, we’ve got company. That Vauxhall’s back on our tail again.”
“So what?” Daz’s voice came back, tight with concentration and bravado, both at the same time. “Let him follow us if he wants. We’ve got nothing to hide.”
The Vauxhall driver stayed with us, neither closing up nor significantly dropping back, until we turned off onto the steep and twisting coast road at Cushendun. Then he braked hard and pulled over, as though he knew where we were heading. As though he knew he had us cornered.
The thin film of anxiety took the shine off the rest of the ride. I should have been admiring the staggering scenery and the view of the Mull of Kintyre across the flat-calm water of the Irish Sea. Instead I spent too much time watching behind me and got a couple of corners badly wrong. Enough to jerk my heartrate up, to start my hands sweating inside my gloves and to make the FireBlade seem brutishly unwieldy under me.
By the time we turned off into the car park at the Giant’s Causeway I was relieved to be stopping. Daz and Paxo were already off the bikes with their lids on the bars and their leathers open to the breeze coming up off the water, revealing sodden T-shirts underneath.
