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“All right,” said Annie. “We’ll do it your way. You were right the first time when you guessed what I do for a living. I’m a policewoman.
A detective inspector, as a matter of fact.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“You’re supposed to do as I say.”
“What will you do if I don’t?”
“Do I have to spell it out?”
“Get some of your Neanderthal cronies to beat me up?”
Annie smiled and shook her head slowly. “I really don’t think I’d have to bring in any help, but no, that’s not the plan.”
“Pretty confident, aren’t you?”
“Look,” said Annie, “let’s stop playing games, shall we? What happened happened. Maybe it was good. I don’t know. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t do me any credit to say that. But no matter what, it was a mistake. If —”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
Eric sat up. “How do you know it was a mistake. You haven’t given me a chance to—”
“It was a mistake for me. Just accept that. And your recent behavior hasn’t helped matters at all.”
“But why?”
“I really don’t want to go into it. I didn’t come here to cause trouble. I just came to ask you—nicely—to let me delete those photos.
They’re embarrassing and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t even want to consider a relationship with anyone who would take them.”
“You didn’t object at the time. And don’t forget, you took some, too. Can’t you lighten up a bit, cut me a bit of slack? It was just harmless fun.”
“Give me the fucking BlackBerry!” Annie was shocked at her own vehemence, but Eric was pushing her patience way beyond its limits.
She couldn’t be bothered explaining the difference between her taking a few innocent photos for fun in a club and his taking more intimate ones, that she couldn’t even remember, in the privacy of the bedroom. If he couldn’t understand that himself, he didn’t deserve any slack.
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He seemed shocked, too. He said nothing for a moment, then reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his mobile and tossed it to her.
She caught it. “Thank you,” she said. When she found the media library, she scrolled through all the photos he had taken that night. In addition to the ones she had seen, in which she had at least been awake, there were others of her sleeping, hair tousled, a breast exposed. Nothing really dirty, but crude and invasive. She deleted them all. “Now the computer.”
He waved her to the desk in the corner. “Be my guest.”
The same pictures were on his computer, so she deleted all those, too. Just as a precaution, she also emptied his recycle bin. She knew there were ways of getting back erased data, but she doubted that Eric was up to the task, or even that he could be bothered, for that matter.
Maybe he’d stored them on a CD or a smart drive, too, but short of ransacking his entire f lat she couldn’t do much about that. “Is that all?”
she asked.
“Yeah, that’s all. You’ve got what you came for. Now just fuck off.”
He turned away, picked up his drink and pretended to watch television.
“Before I go,” Annie said, “let me just tell you what will happen if you do have copies and if any of them turn up on the Internet. You were wrong about me enlisting people I know to beat you up. That’s way too crude. But I do have friends, and, believe me, we can make your life very uncomfortable indeed.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Eric, not bothering to turn his gaze away from the television. “And just how will you do that?”
“If any of those photos turn up anywhere, I’ll not only claim I was drunk at the time they were taken, which is true, and which anyone can see, but that I think I was given a date-rape drug.”
Eric turned to face her slowly, an uncomprehending expression on his face. “You’d actually do that?” he said.
“Yes. And if it became necessary, the police officers who searched your f lat would find Rohypnol or GHB or some such thing. You’d be surprised how much we have lying around the station spare.” Annie felt her heart beating in her chest, and she was sure that Eric must be F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
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able to hear it, or even see the twitching. She wasn’t used to lying, or threatening, like this.
