Chapter 17
‘You weren’t very kind earlier, you know.’
‘Not kind? How so?’
‘Giving that girl hope. Telling her we’d find out who killed her father.’
‘Are we not going to do that then?’ Em is scrolling through an online thesaurus for any words even slightly related to ‘feathers’, and is not-quite-listening to me.
‘Em. Em. This is crazy. Why are you doing it?’
‘It’s our best hope of getting out of this intact. At some point, Bowling Ball or the police are going to find us. That’s inevitable. If we can give them something, they might let us go.’
‘It must be nice having such simple faith that the police would ignore massive circumstantial evidence and an easy conviction in favour of the truth.’
‘I guess I’m just an old-fashioned believer in civil society.’
My phone buzzes again, and before I get it out, I look at my watch.
It’s twenty-four hours, almost exactly, since the last messages came through.
I glance down so it unlocks. You’ve spent your whole life running away from your own life, Al.
And now it’s catching up. Ugh. Straight onto flight mode, back in the pocket.
‘Someone trying to get hold of you?’ I look at Em, who is after all holding her own phone. She couldn’t be, could she? Sending something through a spoof number? No. Not possible. Don’t be paranoid, Al.
‘No. Look, why don’t we go to the police now?
It’s far less suspicious if we approach them.
And we know lots. We know Davy had a huge row with his co-founder.
We know his daughter will benefit from his death.
We know he was on the brink of reconciling with Charli.
Maybe he had another woman who was worried she was going to lose everything. ’
‘And turned up to blow him away? That’s not normal jilt-ee behaviour, Al. That’s gangland stuff.’
‘It’s high-end London. Or posh country. These people are all nutters and half of them have shotgun licences. Maybe Lulu—’
‘Lulu plays board games about renewable energy. The overlap between her sort and shotgun murderers is nil.’ Em smiles. ‘Why are you so determined we stop doing this?’
‘Because I’m not sure I can trust any of you, let alone anyone we’re talking to. It’s just a terrible idea.’
‘You can’t trust me?’
‘This afternoon you changed our story halfway through the interview without warning me in advance. You stitched me up and then expected me to go along with it. You think that’s trustworthy?’
‘I knew you’d cope.’
This is as good a time as any to ask the question I’ve been wanting to since Em was threatening to bisect my diaphragm with a letter-opener. ‘Where do you two even come from, anyway?’
‘Why should I tell you?’
I can’t think of a good enough answer, but there must be something I can say that’ll get her to open up. ‘Because it might make things easier. I told Elle a little about myself on the way down.’ I don’t mention how much of it was accurate.
‘Yes, she said you’d given her your version of events.’ Em yawns. ‘All right. If you’re so desperate to know, our dad is British, and our mum’s from N?mes.’
‘Oh right.’ I clearly don’t sound as confident as intended here, because she rolls her eyes.
‘In the south of France.’ I nod sagely: Of course I knew where N?mes is.
‘No accent?’
‘Educated here, mostly. Plenty of trips back. But Dad only got one of us in the divorce and then we went back home with Mum. I was ten and Elle was eight.’
‘Wait, which one of you went with him in the divorce?’
‘Neither of us. We have a third sibling.’
‘OK. So who are they – a brother, a …’
She glides past that. ‘We stayed with Mum, and then she died a year ago, and we were doing a lot of this stuff already by then, just for fun. Plenty of nice and under-occupied places on the Mediterranean coast. And then we just thought we’d …
piscine our way around for a bit, spending our limited inheritance all the way.
We picked Jonny up in Paris.’ It sounds a bit glib to me, the way she puts it, but she does have a way of making things seem easy.
‘How much of this is true?’
She cocks her head, just like her sister does sometimes, and leans closer to me. Provocatively close. ‘You tell me. You’re the great deceiver.’
‘Me being able to tell whether you’re lying is hardly the point.’
‘Yeah? What is the point?’
‘I don’t …’ We really are quite close to each other now, and I lose my train of thought. ‘I don’t know what the point is.’
‘Stop talking, then.’ She leans in an inch or two further, and kisses me.
Now. I’m not going to pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something between me and Em.
I’m not stupid. And I’m not going to pretend I hadn’t liked the idea, when it occurred to me.
But it was still a shock. I haven’t been with anyone for a while now – not with with, I mean.
I don’t think the occasional drunken thing at the end of a night in the pub counts.
If you only go ever back to the other person’s place because you don’t want to compromise your own accommodation, and if you make sure to leave before they wake up, and if you make sure you have two specific cover stories lined up, it probably doesn’t count as a ‘relationship’.
But Rule 8 is If the situation changes, change faster, and I do my best to adapt now.
About thirty seconds pass. If we hadn’t heard Jonny clumping down the stairs, I don’t know what would have happened next, but by the time he can see into the main room, we’re at opposite ends of the sofa, maybe slightly readjusting our clothes.
‘Any progress?’ Jonny asks. He’s changed into a T-shirt that reads: WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA.
‘Er,’ I say. ‘Yeah, some.’
‘Oh really? What?’
Em frowns at me. ‘Actually, Al’s being a bit optimistic there. We don’t have anything new.’
I remember what Jonny’s actually asking about.
‘Oh. Yeah. Er, 215 Feathers. No, there’s nothing.
I’ve tried Davy’s name in connection with every species of bird.
I’ve tried looking up pillow shops, bed shops.
There’s a road about three miles from his flat called Horse and Feathers Lane but it doesn’t have anywhere you’d want to meet someone on it.
Maybe we just go there at two fifteen tomorrow. ’
‘Possible he was meeting someone at two fifteen in the morning?’
I think back to our brief encounter with Davy. I know he was a drinker, but he seemed like an in-bed-before-Newsnight kind of guy. ‘Not his style, I reckon.’
‘All right. I’m getting some tea. Anyone want some?’
Jonny goes off to the kitchen. On the back of his T-shirt are the words WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA.
Em and I look at each other. I couldn’t stand up right now without making a fool of myself.
She breaks the silence. ‘I’m not going to try and blackmail you into staying again, Al.
I’m really not. If you run, I won’t go to the police.
But I like having you around. And I really think we can work out what happened to Davy as collateral for when things catch up with us.
’ She wakes her laptop up, and the screen’s glare lights her face.
‘Maybe we can even work out what happened to that money that he mentioned before he died.’
‘Is that what you want? The money?’
‘No, Al. What I want is for my sister to be safe. She’s not built like us. We’ve always looked after each other. I got her into this piscining stuff …’
‘Interloping.’
‘… whatever, this interloping stuff in the first place, so now it’s my job to look after her.’ I feel a bit chastened, until her serious look cracks into a smile. ‘Although if there’s any money going …’