Gladly!
“Thank you for your invitation, Herre Nielsen,” I managed to say, rather calmly, I thought, as I stood myself again. “I wish I could say that it has been a pleasure, but if this is your idea of gratitude, we want no more of it. Mads, you’re welcome to join us if you like. We can all get something to eat elsewhere and have a nice, civilised meal.”
“I’d be delighted,” Mads assured me, glaring at his father. “Shay doesn’t give a damn about any of your secrets, Papa, and he’s certainly not anyone’s hired spy. The fact that he and his cousin risked their lives to save me, my guests, and your staff and property yesterday should have been enough to tell you what kind of men these two are.”
Outside, Shay finally cracked, snickering delightedly. “Oh, do calm down before you pop a blood vessel Con. Sticks and stones, et cetera. Come on. We can stop in at the rental for some lunch. Mads can come and help me at the new house after, if you’ll lend him some old clothes. It’ll be a lot more fun than sitting through some stuffy meal with those two would have been.”
Mads just smiled at him uncertainly, bemused and thoroughly bewitched, the poor devil.
Shay, breaking all precedents, even let his new friend hang around for a few more days, and Mads seemed quite happy to be enlisted as a spare pair of hands as my cousin threw himself into making up the time he’d lost whilst we’d been away. Moving the van meant that they could stay over there perfectly comfortably, especially as Shay had made sure to fix up one of the bathrooms as a first priority. Well, whatever made Shay happy, however strange and unlike him, it all seemed. Was he doing this to make a point to the rest of the Nielsen clan or for his own enjoyment? Perhaps it was a little of both, mixed in with the unthinking generosity he tended to extend to anyone that he decided was worth befriending.
The hamper containing the whisky, some very nice wine, white Alba truffles and other expensive delicacies arrived for Shay a week after Mads left, along with a long letter of apology from Herre Lars Nielsen. He’d apparently decided that whatever Shay had done, he’d done out of necessity and for an inarguably good reason. Maybe he’d even managed to do a little successful digging by then. With his resources, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
A couple of weeks after that, I heard from Trish. Cory Phelps had managed to kill himself in his cell by severing his own jugular vein with an improvised blade. Well, I can’t claim I was surprised, or particularly sorry to hear it. Shay took the news with a sniff and a shrug.
“His choice, and it saves the government a lot of wasted money. Jordan will probably cost them over a million by the time he’s got any chance of being released.” It was pretty much the pragmatic reaction I’d been expecting. Much as Shay enjoyed fixing up broken old furniture and making it useful again, he’d never been the kind to store things that weren’t worth salvaging. Besides, we already knew that Phelps didn’t have any close family.
There would be nobody like Vanessa Price, or her husband’s shattered parents, weeping at that man’s funeral.
Epilogue
Daniel Keane carefully placed the casserole dishes back in the oven before turning it off. They would keep nice and hot in there while the kids demolished their starters. The gleaming, rustic kitchen table was set for seven; crockery and cutlery set ready on the woven placemats, glassware glinting and bottles and bread baskets standing ready to be eagerly plundered.
He smiled to himself. There was nothing like getting the gang together to put some life, and some appetite, into them all. Shay, especially, had seemed particularly exuberant all day and Conall always seemed more cheerfully relaxed when his cousin was in such a buoyant mood. Well, Daniel decided, he’d better go and call them all for dinner before Liam started chewing up the furniture. They’d been oddly quiet since he’d kicked them all out of the kitchen. Apart from the odd burst of amused laughter, Daniel hadn’t heard a peep from the sitting room for the last couple of hours.
He soon discovered why. They’d talked his son into spinning one of his engrossing tales for them and were sitting spellbound as Conall narrated the events of five months ago, the murder case in the Outer Hebrides. Conall was editing on the fly, as usual, and it sounded like he’d just about finished. Leaning in the doorway, Daniel caught his son’s eye and gestured at him to wrap it up quickly before quietly withdrawing again to a brief, amused, flash of teeth from Shay.
Sure enough, minutes later, he heard them all heading off to freshen up, and they were soon all crowding in to whisk dishes helpfully over to the table and settle down. For a wonder, they somehow managed not to trip each other up or drop anything in the process.
“What about that Butler guy?” Liam asked, between mouthfuls of his smoked salmon and prawns. He clearly still had Conall’s story on his mind, despite his ravenous appetite, “Did you ever find out what had killed him? Daniel, this is amazing, by the way, as ever!” Liam had always loved the horseradish laden sauce and the spicy dressing that Daniel added to that particular dish.
“Yeah, the toxicology report revealed a dangerous amount of cocaine in his blood.” Shay could be very matter of fact about that kind of thing. “I guess that Butler was feeling pretty groggy after he woke up, and they’d anticipated that. There were very small amounts of cocaine in the water bottles, not enough to make it taste too strange,
