‘The kid showed me something,’ Doyle said. ‘I showed him something.’
‘What happened, Doyle? If you touched that boy …’
‘I never put a fucking hand on him. Ask him. You know if I had he’d have come screaming to his old man.’ He wiped some crumbs from his mouth. ‘How’s the servant?’
‘He needed twenty-six stitches and a couple of pints of blood,’ Mel said.‘He won’t say what happened either.’
‘Has the Sheikh asked?’
Mel shook her head.
‘He probably knows what that little bastard did anyway,’ Doyle mused.
Mel glanced at her watch. 2.11 a.m.The house was silent. The Sheikh and his family were sleeping, as were those servants not needed for night duty.
‘Do you want some company?’ Mel asked.
Doyle stood up and offered her the chair.
She smiled and shook her head.
He watched as she sat down on the floor next to him, slipped off her shoes and
drew her legs up beneath her.
‘How are you coping?’ she wanted to know.
‘With sitting on my arse outside the bedroom of some psychotic Arab kid?’
Doyle said. ‘I can think of better ways to spend my time.’
‘I meant with the job.’
‘Like the man said, it ain’t what it used to be, but it’ll do,’ he murmured.
‘We move tomorrow. All three of us. A new job. Cartwright phoned me earlier.’
‘What about the Sheikh?’
‘He’s going back to Saudi. His business here is finished.’
‘And us?’
‘Another client. You must have done okay, Doyle. I mean, Cartwright hasn’t sacked you.’
Doyle took another bite of his sandwich. ‘Who made this?’ he asked.
‘I did.’
‘You’re quite domesticated when you have to be, aren’t you?’
Mel smiled and shook her head. ‘Domesticity isn’t for me, Doyle,’ she told him.
‘Career woman?’
‘You could say that.’
‘What about boyfriends? There must have been one or two.’
‘I didn’t come up here to talk about my private life,’ she said a little warily.
‘Fair enough. I was just making conversation.’
‘Polite conversation?’
‘About as polite as I get.’
There was a moment’s silence between them finally broken by Mel.
‘Yes, there were boyfriends,’ she confessed.‘A couple long term but I’ve always been wary of getting too close to people. My parents were both killed in a plane crash when I was twelve. They were everything to me. I’ve always been frightened of getting close to anyone in case I lose them too. Does that sound crazy?’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he told her.
‘Blokes are always saying that women want commitment. I must be one on my own.
I’m as happy with a one-night stand as any bloke would be.’
He grinned.
‘Does that make me sound like a tart?’ Mel wanted to know.
‘It makes you sound honest. Just give me a shout next time you fancy some uncomplicated sex.’
They both laughed.
Doyle watched as she stretched first one leg then the other out in front of her. She flexed her toes then returned to her sitting position.
‘Please, Mel, sit on the bloody chair, will you?’ he said, again getting to his feet.
‘I’m fine, really. I shouldn’t be here anyway. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’ She smiled that infectious smile at him.
‘Didn’t the Sheikh want to know how one of his servants got cut up?’ Doyle asked.
She shook her head.‘It’s not his concern,’ Mel said.
‘His kid is waving a fucking Stanley knife around and it’s not his concern?’
That’s the way things are. It’s a different culture. A way of life we’ll never understand.’
‘Good. I don’t want to understand it’
‘But you wanted to understand the IRA.’
He looked at her, puzzled for a moment.
‘You were undercover in the CTU. You infiltrated the IRA on a number of occasions. You must have had to understand them to do that.’
That was different,’ he said quietly.
‘Who was Georgina Willis?’
The question took him by surprise. He looked angrily at Mel.
‘What the fuck’s that got to do with anything?’ he snapped.
‘Cartwright said she was your girlfriend. He said she was killed when—’
‘Cartwright should keep his fucking information to himself.’
‘I’m not prying, Doyle. I’m just making conversation. I’m interested.’
‘In what?’
‘In you. If we’ve got to work together then it’s in my interests to know about you.’
That depends what you want to know. Georgie’s not relevant to this. Or what went on between me and her.’
They regarded each other silently for a moment, then Doyle took a sip of his tea. It was cold but he swallowed it anyway.
‘Look, I said I wasn’t prying,’ Mel told him.
‘Just forget it, Mel. I have.’ He reached for his cigarettes but Mel shook her head. Doyle muttered something under his breath and shoved them back into his pocket. ‘Right, no smoking, I remember.’ He exhaled wearily. ‘So, tell me about the next client.’
‘His name’s William Duncan. He runs a pharmaceutical company. He’s rich.’
‘Aren’t they all? Who’s after him?’
‘Muslim extremists. A fatwa’s been declared against him. His company was building a new factory in the Middle East, apparently they bulldozed some holy ground.’
‘So we have to protect him from a bunch of religious nutters? Great.’
This one will be different, Doyle.We’ll all be armed twenty-four hours a day.
It’ll be dangerous.’
He looked down at her and shrugged. ‘Life’s looking up,’ he said flatly.
BELFAST:
Are you sure the fingerprints match?’ Chief Inspector Peter Robinson ran a hand over his bald head and sat back in his chair.
‘No doubt about it,‘John Morris told him.The prints on the shell cases we found in Best’s car match those taken from the flat in Dalton Road.There is no mistake. Declan Leary killed Ivor Best and Jeffrey Kelly.’
Robinson got to his feet and looked first at the coroner’s report then at the man himself.
Morris was a stocky man in his late forties, a year or two younger than Robinson. He wore round glasses that were constantly sliding down his small nose. Each time they did, he pushed them back into position with his thumb.
‘The question is, was the hit approved?’ Robinson mused.
‘Best and Kelly were known members of the UVF. It’s possible. I would have thought the main question was
