Vince said anxiously, ‘You OK, sis?’
‘Yes, sure, I just banged my head.’
She put her hand to her brow and looked in the rear-view mirror. There was a small cut there with a trickle of blood which she wiped away with a tissue.
Vince, reassured, drove carefully away from Loudwater Villas. He was normally a flashy driver, but he knew that his sister would get seriously pissed if he did anything that drew attention.
Sometimes Fleur felt it as a blessing that he was so easy to fool. Sometimes it filled her with fury and resentment. Anyone else living as close to her as he did would have been aware for a couple of months at least that there was something seriously wrong. There had been times after the fatal diagnosis when she had come close to telling him that she hadn’t been away from home for a minor woman’s operation, that the drugs he sometimes saw her taking couldn’t be bought over the counter at the local chemist’s, that the wigs she’d started wearing weren’t a belated fashion statement in reaction against the onset of middle age. If she could have hoped for loving support and comfort, she might have given way to the temptation. But she knew that when the time came to say, ‘Vince, I’ve got news for you. I have an inoperable brain tumour and I’m going to die,’ the support and comfort would be all one way.
She wanted to have him safe and secure when she told him, she wanted him to be a long way away from London, and most of all she wanted him to be a long way away from Goldie Gidman. Spain wasn’t all that far, but it was as far as she could hope to remove Vince, and even then she had found it hard to get him to share her enthusiasm for the idea of buying a villa on the Costa del Sol and settling down there. For a holiday it suited him very well with its sunny beaches, cheap booze, and unending supply of succulent bimbos who’d left their inhibitions behind at Luton Airport. But as for living there…!
She’d countered with economic arguments. This was the perfect opportunity for them to invest some of their hard-earned savings in a bit of truly palatial real estate. The Spanish property boom had gone into a nose-dive as the credit squeeze left lots of ex-pats unable to keep up payments. Making a sale even at a substantial loss was better than repossession and for someone with Fleur’s long experience of the economics of distress it had been easy to snap up a real bargain: four bedrooms, sea views, private garden, swimming pool, games room, all mod cons, at just over half the price the owners had paid three years ago.
The deal was close to completion, but the way she’d felt over the past few days, the sooner it was done the better.
‘We’re here, sis,’ said Vince.
She opened her eyes. They were in the Keldale car park.
In the next row she spotted the red Nissan, so that was all right.
She said to Vince, ‘Take the laptop up to your room. You can keep a check on her in case she goes out again.’
‘Me?’ said Vince dubiously. Like following Blondie and Tubby into the cathedral, this wasn’t the kind of task he was usually given. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to get cleaned up, then I’ll take a close look at the stuff I took off that guy you shot, and then I’ll report in to The Man. That OK with you, Vince?’
She spoke sharply. She’d always felt the need to be firm with Vince, but lately firmness had drifted into irritability.
‘No need to get in a strop,’ he said. ‘All I meant was, how long will you be? If the guy I offed is our man, we’ll be heading for home, right?’
He sounded hopeful.
She said, ‘Maybe.’
She checked herself in the mirror. She looked a bit pale, but the cut on her forehead had stopped bleeding. Taking a deep breath, she got out of the car and willed herself to walk steadily towards the hotel.
It seemed to take an age, but finally she was in her room with the Do not disturb sign on her door. She kicked her shoes off, went into the bathroom and bathed her face in cold water. Then she took a couple of tablets. How many had she taken today? She couldn’t remember.
Back in the bedroom she looked longingly at the bed. It invited her to lie on it. Instead she spread across the duvet the trophies she’d brought with her from Loudwater Villas. A hip wallet, a mini recorder, and a phone.
First she examined the contents of the wallet.
A few pounds. A pack of condoms. Cards in the name of Gareth Jones.
Jones. Not Watkins. Was that good or bad?
Then she listened to the conversation on the recorder.
Nothing she heard there surprised her.
Finally she checked the incoming and outgoing numbers on his phone, wrote them down, accessed his messages, checked out his phone book and made notes.
She tried to make sense of what she’d found, or rather make of it the kind of sense she wanted to make. It was no use. No way she was going to sell this to The Man as job done. Best she could look for was damage limitation.
She took out her phone and rang Goldie Gidman.
When he answered she gave no name but started straight in with her report, editing out all references to timings and her collapse, and editing in a version of events that made Vince’s reaction absolutely essential. She was as selective as she dared to be with the details of the contents of the wallet and the info she’d gleaned from the phone, but she needn’t have bothered. He’d always had the knack of smashing through no matter how thick a coating of verbiage to the essential truth of thing. At least he wasn’t close enough to reinforce the process with a hammer.
‘It’s not the guy,’ he said.
‘Probably not,’ she agreed wearily. ‘So what shall I do now?’
There was a long pause. In her mind’s eye she could see him sitting there, the phone in his hand, staring into space. His mind would be checking over the known facts, formulating the possible outcomes. Eventually he would reach a decision about the best course of action. She’d known the process to take several minutes. She’d learned early not to interrupt with speech or movement, not even if your bladder was bursting or the ciggie in your fingers had burnt down to the skin.
He said, ‘Where’s the woman?’
‘In her room. Vince is keeping an eye on her.’
‘Let’s hope he doesn’t decide to shoot her.’
A joke, or serious? Without a video phone, she couldn’t tell. The plus was, he couldn’t see her sitting here, bald as a snooker ball.
If he was waiting for a laugh, he was disappointed.
He said, ‘Question is, if it wasn’t Wolfe, why the fuck was he bugging Gina?’
‘Don’t know, Goldie.’
‘Makes no odds, I still need Wolfe. And fast. Don’t let the wife out of your sight.’
The phone went dead.
She looked in the dressing-table mirror and saw that the dome of her head was beaded with sweat.
‘You look like you just landed from Mars,’ she told herself. ‘Pity you don’t have a return ticket.’
She had a sense of things falling apart, but when you felt like that the only thing to do was stick with the plan. Not that there was much of a plan. Follow the woman. If Vince saw the tracker moving on the laptop screen he’d bang on the door. Fleur hoped to hell the blonde cow stayed put for another hour at least. She needed the rest.
She swept the Jones/Watkins trophies to the floor, fell across the bed, rolled over to wrap the duvet round her, and closed her eyes.
In the room next door Vince had obediently set up the laptop. He realized he didn’t have its mains lead. That would be in Fleur’s room, but he didn’t want to risk worsening her mood by disturbing her. It wasn’t that he was scared of his sister, but no denying she could be scary! There was plenty of juice in the batteries anyway, so it didn’t matter.
The pulsating green dot that showed the Nissan’s position remained steady in the car park. He turned his TV set on, keeping the sound low. There was nothing on the sports channels that he wanted to watch, so he checked
