“Sit back and shut up if you want that eye looking at,” I said.
The cut was small and just above his eyebrow where it would tend to bleed a lot and look worse than it was. I managed to clean it up for long enough to get the Steri-strips to stick and hold the sliced edges of skin together.
He sat without complaint while I worked on him, not taking those startling blue eyes off me. It was like being watched by a Siamese cat.
“There you go,” I said at last. “Try and let the air get to it tonight, but I’d put some sticking plaster over it before you try and get your lid on tomorrow morning.”
He delicately traced the repair with his fingers and nodded his thanks.
The kettle boiled. Sean poured water into both mugs and handed one to me and the other to Daz. I perched on the corner of the bed while Sean took the chair opposite Daz and sat leaning forwards with his forearms resting on his knees and his hands relaxed between them. There was a scrape across the middle two knuckles on one hand, I saw. Other than that he bore no signs of having been in a fight.
“What’s going on, Daz?” he asked gently then. “People are getting hurt. One of you’s been killed. Is it worth it – whatever it is?”
It was neatly timed. Daz was physically at a low ebb, felt isolated from his friends, and we’d just patched him up and been nice to him. Classic interrogation techniques.
He shrugged, still pigheaded despite everything that had happened.
I sighed. “Look Daz, you’re in the shit and we can protect you. It’s what we do,” I said, trying to be persuasive rather than exasperated. “But we can’t do it if you won’t tell us what we’re trying to protect you from.”
“Who says we need protection?”
I stood up, frustrated into action, but with three people in it the bedroom was too cramped to pace. “I’m only here because I made a promise to a friend,” I said, turning back to him. “And Sean’s only here because I am. But you need us, whether you like it or not. Tonight should have proved that. For God’s sake – what do we have to do to get you to trust us?”
“We do trust you,” Daz said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“Ha!” I said, scathing. “Where’s ‘here’, Daz? Because from where we’re standing the only place we are is in the dark.”
He let his breath out in a huff and sat up. “OK,” he said, sounding weary, like we’d finally battered him down into submission. “We’re here because we’ve made a deal to buy something over here and bring it back to the UK.”
I was aware of a sickly taste in the back of my mind. “What kind of a deal?” I demanded, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. “Drugs?”
“Fuck, no,” Daz said quickly. “We may be many things, Charlie, but there’s no way we’d have anything to do with shit like that and that’s the truth.”
“So what kind of shit
Daz shrugged. “Diamonds,” he said.
“Diamonds?” I repeated blankly, glancing at Sean. I checked Daz’s face carefully for any sign of guile but it was clear and open. I sat down on the corner of the bed again. “Why the hell have you made a deal to buy diamonds?”
“For my work,” he said, sounding almost surprised that I should have to ask. “A lot of the stuff I do is ceramics and glassware from local artisans, but I deal with jewellery makers all the time. Didn’t you know?”
I shook my head slowly. Diamonds. After all our fears and speculation, it was almost an anticlimax. When Sean had said Daz ran a craft centre I’d expected something a little more homespun. It never occurred to me that he might be dealing with precious gems. From the look on his face, Sean hadn’t made that connection, either.
“So, did you provide Tess with the stones she’s wearing?” Sean asked. “The ones she’s trying very hard to pretend are not real?”
The surprise showed on Daz’s face. “You spotted that one, then?” he said, rueful. “No, that was Slick.”
“Convenient to pass that one over to someone who can’t refute it, isn’t it?”
He flushed. “That’s not what I’m doing,” he said quickly. He sighed heavily, took a drink of his coffee. “Look, in the last year I started to buy in some secondhand jewellery and I was getting in loose diamonds to replace lost stones. I was using Tess to do a bit of that repair work for me.”
“Why Tess?”
“We were at art college together,” he said. “She dropped out to have the kid, Ashley, and we lost touch for a while. Then one day she came into the shop with this boyfriend of hers, Slick. We chatted, you know how it is, old times. She’d been keeping her hand in, making her own stuff, and she was interested in doing more, so I got her doing some work for me.”
“And what about the diamonds she was wearing?” I asked. I took a sip of my coffee but the little pockets of UHT milk the hotel supplied had done little to cool it down.
“The first time she came in I’d noticed the rings she had on, of course,” Daz said. “She showed them to me as examples of her work and, well, you couldn’t miss rocks like those, could you? So I asked about them. She told me Slick had a contact who could get stones and was I interested?”
“And it didn’t occur to you that there might be something ever so slightly underhand about all this?” Sean said, keeping his voice mild.
“Of course,” Daz said. “But I asked around in the trade – discreetly – and no flags came up that they were stolen, so I bought them. They were a mixed bag of cut stones – circular and pear-shaped brilliants, mostly. The biggest was about point-eight of a carat. I used it to replace a poor quality solitaire emerald in a ring I’d bought in
