Madeleine didn’t know what had happened, I told myself. She couldn’t do. I was just being paranoid. Over-sensitive. Wasn’t I?
I opened my eyes, stepped up to the mirror, and stretched the collar of my shirt to one side. The scar wasn’t old enough to have faded much. They’d warned me that it would always be visible, and they’d offered further surgery as an alternative, but with only dubious chances of success. In the end, I’d decided to leave it well alone.
After all, it was a sharp reminder to me that I should follow my own teachings more closely. That I should run instead of standing to fight. Next time I was faced with a lunatic wielding a knife, maybe I’d do just that.
Next time.
Someone tripped down my spine wearing icy boots. I shivered, took a deep breath like a submerging swimmer, and straightened my collar again. A normal-looking girl stared back out of the mirror, giving no hint to what lay beneath the surface. I turned away before I was tempted to try and look much deeper, and walked back into the gym.
Madeleine glanced up at me as I moved back across the floor, but before she could say much the door went again to herald Sean’s arrival.
He flashed a quick grin in Madeleine’s direction, then turned his attention on my boss. “Hi, Attila,” he said. “Can I steal your lovely assistant away from her work for a little while?”
“For sure,” Attila said. He stood up with a ripple of muscle under his T-shirt, and looked from one of us to the other as if reassessing the relationship between the three of us. “But first you can help me move another of these benches, yes?”
Sean rolled his eyes, but pitched in without any real complaint, taking off his jacket and pushing up the sleeves of his vee-necked shirt. He didn’t have Attila’s sheer bulk, but he didn’t seem to find the weight a problem, either.
Looking back with an even mind, it had been that economy of movement, that air of total competence, which had all been part and parcel of Sean’s attraction. I don’t think I’d ever seen him fumble.
When they’d finished he moved over to Madeleine, touched her shoulder in a way I might once have found intimate. Now it simply seemed one of friendship, concern.
For her part, Madeleine reached up to kiss him, but Sean stopped her.
“It’s OK, Madeleine,” he said, and his tone was wry. “You don’t have to put on a show in front of Charlie. She knows the score.”
For a moment the other girl allowed herself a scowl of pure wounded feminine pride, then the full import of his words dug in, and her eyes widened.
“You told her?” The disbelief was plain. “But, I thought—”
Sean shrugged it aside. “She had a gun to my head,” he said, without the barest flicker of a smile in my direction. “What can I say?”
Both Attila and Madeleine stared at him, hoping for some indication that he was joking. After a couple of seconds Madeleine gave up waiting, and started digging in her shoulder bag. I wondered what exactly he’d told her about our confrontation in the flat.
“I’ve been running a background check on Nasir Gadatra, as you asked,” she said, businesslike, retrieving a spiral-bound shorthand notebook and flipping it open. “He certainly had an interesting past. At one time there was a whole string of arrests for vandalism, burglary, stealing from cars, even assault. O’Bryan had to bail him out on numerous occasions. It seems that when his father died he went right off at the deep end. It was only when it looked seriously like he was going to get put away that he got his act together.”
She checked her notes again. “For the last few years he’s kept his nose clean, and there hasn’t been a sniff of trouble. He got the job working as a trainee electrician for Mr Ali and did his qualifications at night school. He paid his way towards the rent on his mother’s house, like a good boy. He was a member of a local snooker club, and he had a standing order to a gym as well. Sorry, Attila, not this one.” She shot a quick smile to the German and came out with a name I’d only vaguely heard of.
Attila grunted. “I know it. A poseurs’ place,” he said, dismissive. “No decent equipment. No decent staff.”
Madeleine grinned at him, but before he could add anything further, the phone on the counter started ringing. Attila went to answer it.
When he’d gone we sat down on the benches, Sean hunched forwards with his elbows on his knees, fingers linked. He nodded to Madeleine to continue.
“The only real oddity I could find is that although he paid his motorbike insurance in instalments, he did it in cash,” she went on. “He used to go into a local broker every month with the money.”
“Bike insurance?” I queried. “I didn’t know he had a bike.”
“According to the DVLA computer – and don’t ask, by the way – he’s been the proud owner of a new Honda CBR 600 sports bike practically ever since he passed his test.”
“How on earth did an eighteen-year-old sparky, who’s apparently firmly on the straight and narrow, afford a CBR?” Sean wondered aloud. “The insurance company must have been totally hammering him for it.”
“They were,” Madeleine said, and listed premiums that should have made Nasir’s hair stand on end.
“How the hell did he afford that?” I demanded.
“Good question,” Madeleine said, casting me a quick smile as though trying to make up for the earlier animosity between us. “His wages didn’t cover it, that’s for certain.”
“So,” Sean said, frowning, “he had to be getting the extra cash from somewhere. Any clues?”
“None, sorry. I’ll keep looking,” she said. “I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility that he was on the fiddle somewhere at work. Snaffling stuff away off the site he was on, maybe. What d’you reckon?”
Her words jogged my memory towards the conversation I’d overheard on that building site in Heysham. “What if he’d found out that Langford was working for Mr Ali, and threatened to spill the beans. He could have been doing a bit of blackmail,” I suggested.
Sean was frowning again. “Could be. I suppose that brings his boss into the frame, but don’t forget that Nasir had been paying out this extra cash for a while. Why would Ali wait until now to get rid of him? And surely on a building site they could have conjured up some likely-looking ‘accident’? Besides, who was Nasir threatening to tell, and was it really worth killing him over?”
We fell into a glum silence, pondering over the variables and not managing to make them slot together in any sort of order.
“What about you, boss, any sign of Ursula?” Madeleine asked.
Sean shook his head. “Nothing yet. I’ll keep on it, though. There’s only so many people she could have gone to.”
“Is there any point in talking to that Community Juvenile bloke, O’Bryan, to see if he knows anything either about Nasir or your sister?” I offered. “He seems to be the one with his finger on the pulse as far as extra-curricular activities go.”
“I don’t see why not,” Madeleine said. “We know Nasir’s been in a lot of trouble in the past, and O’Bryan would be the man who’d have the details. If Nas’s been up to anything recently it might even give us an idea where he was getting his money. What d’you think?”
He nodded. “OK,” he said slowly, then turned back to me. “Have you had a chance to find out any more from your friend on the paper?”
“A little,” I said. “They’ve fixed Nasir’s time of death to around three hours after we last saw him, and they reckon he was practically dead before he was moved.”
Sean rose, began pacing restlessly. “OK,” he said, “so let’s take some jumps in the dark here, shall we? Nasir comes and takes a pot-shot at you, Charlie, under duress, or so it would seem. He and Rog run away, and within a few hours Nasir’s been shot and left for dead. Question: why?”