Chapter 18
‘I swear to God I will kill the guy,’ says Steve, after Tony has told him his story. ‘I will put a bullet in his head.’
‘No, Steve, I’m going to kill him,’ says Felicity. ‘I’m going to tear him to pieces with my bare hands.’
‘You can both kill him,’ says Rosie. ‘Shoot him and tear him to pieces with your bare hands.’
‘I will rip out his throat for you, Tony,’ says Felicity.
‘While he’s still alive,’ says Steve.
‘Thanks, both,’ says Tony, propping himself up a bit more. ‘Where did you park, Steve? In the end?’
‘The senior registrar let me use his space,’ says Rosie. ‘Big fan.’
‘He thought you were Joan Collins,’ says Steve.
‘Still, ￡4.50 saved is ￡4.50 saved,’ says Tony. ‘You didn’t have to come. I said to Felicity, don’t make a fuss, they’re busy people. Well, Rosie is busy, I said that, and Steve has a cat.’
Steve nods. Although nothing would have kept him away from this man and this room, once he’d heard the news. That said, he is looking forward to seeing Trouble later and spoiling him. Who else has he got to spoil?
Steve and Rosie had been driving home when he got the call. Rosie had taken it because Steve was driving. And Steve was driving because Rosie is insufficiently respectful towards the Highway Code, believing it to be voluntary and very much ‘for other people’.
‘I’m so sorry, mate,’ says Steve. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been caught up in this.’
‘Honestly,’ says Tony, ‘it’s quite nice to be involved. Painful, but nice. Can something be painful and nice?’
‘A really big sneeze?’ suggests Steve.
‘That’s a good one,’ says Tony. ‘Or like when you’ve eaten ice cream too quickly and you have a terrible headache, but then you reach that bit where you know it’s about to stop.’
‘That’s another good one,’ agrees Steve. ‘Or –’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ says Felicity. ‘Just tell him you care about him, Steve.’
Steve looks at his friend Tony, lying on the bed pretending not to look scared. Like the two of them are just friends chatting in the pub one summer lunchtime.
‘Or pulling off an old plaster,’ says Steve, and Tony nods. Steve can’t make it any clearer to Felicity than that, surely?
‘How are you going to catch him?’ Felicity asks. ‘Eriksson?’
That’s better, thinks Steve, a question about the case rather than about caring for people. Cases are about thinking and analysing. Caring for people is about doing things. Easier to think in life than to do.
‘We’ve just been visiting a suspect,’ says Rosie. ‘Vern Blackwood’s ex-wife.’
‘And?’ says Felicity.
Rosie shrugs. ‘She said she didn’t know Jakob Eriksson, but I think she was lying.’
‘Where does she live, Steve?’ asks Tony.
‘Rickmansworth way,’ says Steve.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Felicity says to Rosie, with some force. ‘He’s out there, free as a bird. Maybe she knows where he is?’
Steve can see Rosie approves of this steelier side to Felicity. When Rosie hired Felicity, she had said that theatrical agents are not to be messed with. In fact, her exact words were, ‘They are the cyanide lacing the candyfloss of showbusiness.’
‘I promise you we’ll keep an eye on her, Felicity,’ says Rosie. ‘Which shouldn’t be hard. She took a shine to Stevie. Didn’t stop flirting.’
‘She did not,’ says Steve. ‘I would have noticed if she was flirting. Women touch their face, don’t they?’
‘Stevie,’ says Rosie, ‘at one point she literally looked at you and licked her lips.’
‘She’d been eating a digestive,’ says Steve. ‘They dry you out.’
‘They do dry you out,’ agrees Tony. ‘What time did you leave Rickmansworth?’
‘4.15,’ says Steve. ‘Something like that.’
‘Why do you think she was lying?’ Felicity asks.
‘Tiny pause when we showed her the photo,’ says Steve. ‘Smile a bit plastic too.’
Steve had noticed Georgie Glazier’s lying smile. And the pause. Even while distracted about the exact duration of the drive home. And they say men can’t multitask.
‘Why would she lie?’ asks Felicity. ‘If she wasn’t involved?’
‘All sorts of reasons for lying,’ says Steve.
He and Rosie had been speaking about exactly this on the drive home.
Before the phone call. It would be completely normal for Georgie to have heard of Jakob Eriksson.
They moved in the same circles. Almost stranger if she hadn’t heard of him. So why pretend she hadn’t?
Tony has been thinking. ‘You left at 4.15? Something like that?’
‘About then,’ says Steve.
‘About then?’ asks Tony.
‘4.19 maybe,’ says Steve. ‘Give or take.’
‘You have to find Eriksson,’ says Felicity. ‘I need to meet this man. Preferably alone.’
‘Only you got here at 5.13,’ says Tony.
Steve sees where Tony is going with this. Steve has been distracted thinking about murder, and his friend looking so vulnerable. He’s fallen into a textbook Tony Taylor trap.
‘Which would give you,’ says Tony, cocking his head at Steve, ‘an average speed of eighty-three miles an hour? Hello, Her Majesty’s Constabulary, I’d like to report a crime.’
‘His Majesty’s Constabulary,’ corrects Felicity.
‘Too soon, Phil,’ says Tony.
‘I can explain the timings,’ says Steve.
‘Can you now?’ Tony says. ‘Because it sounds to me like someone’s been speeding.’
Speeding is one of Tony’s deadly sins. If you need to get somewhere quicker, you simply leave earlier. No excuses.
Of course Steve can explain the timings.
His phone had started ringing. Rosie had seen the name TONY PONY MACARONI on his screen. Steve had thought his old friend had been quiet for a while. He had sent Tony a meme of a hedgehog, for example, and hadn’t even got a cry-laugh back.
Rosie had asked if he was going to answer it, and Steve had said that of course he wasn’t going to answer it, he was driving, did Rosie want him to kill her on the M25?
Rosie had asked him if he didn’t have ‘hands free’, and Steve had had to explain to her that it’s not just your hands you need for advanced driving, it’s your brain.
The concentration. The road awareness. He further explained that he and Tony can get into some pretty deep stuff on the phone, and before you knew it they’d be under an articulated lorry and there would be tailbacks for miles. Absolute chaos for everyone.
This prompted a quick sidebar, where Rosie had asked whether, were Steve to have a serious car accident, his first thought would really be about the traffic building up behind it, and Steve had said that of course it would be, as no one likes to be a nuisance. Particularly in rush hour.
So Rosie had grabbed hold of Steve’s phone – leaning across him, Steve might note, another absolute no-no in any form of driving, let alone motorway driving – and taken the call.
Tony Taylor. In a bed at Southampton General, beaten unconscious by a thug sent by Jakob Eriksson.
Not sent by Tommy Griffin, not sent by Georgie Glazier.
After the briefest, the very, very briefest question about parking charges, Steve had driven at close to a 100 mph all the way back to the New Forest, often on the wrong side of the road.
He could have sworn at one point that even Rosie gripped on to her door handle. Careful what you wish for, Rosie.
That’s how, and why, Steve had made the drive from Rickmansworth to Southampton in fifty-four minutes.
‘Got mixed up,’ says Steve. ‘That’s all. We actually left Rickmansworth at 3.19.’
Tony looks at him. ‘Well, that would give you an average speed of 39 miles an hour. On a motorway?’
‘I suppose so,’ says Steve.
‘Driving too slowly on a motorway can be as dangerous as speeding,’ says Tony. ‘I’ve shown you studies.’
This is true, he has. The two of them have had lunch together virtually every day for five years, and you cover an awful lot of ground in that time.
‘We stopped,’ says Steve. ‘At the services. I wanted a pie.’
‘An afternoon pie?’ Tony asks. ‘I’ve never seen you eat a pie between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.’
‘I missed lunch, because I was doing murder investigating,’ says Steve. He anticipates the next question. ‘We stopped for twenty-one minutes.’
He sees Tony doing some maths in his head. The only maths Steve has ever seen Tony do is ‘journey-time maths’ and ‘darts maths’.
Eventually Tony nods his satisfaction. ‘Forty-nine miles an hour. Factor in build-up around Rickmansworth and Southampton and I’m happy. Sorry I doubted you, Steve.’
‘It’s okay,’ says Steve. ‘You’ve had a bump on the head.’
Tony knows Steve drove like a maniac to get here, and Steve knows that Tony knows. But now they will never have to say that out loud.
There are, Steve thinks once again, lots of reasons for lying.
‘Are the two of you done?’ Felicity asks. She sounds stern, but she can see just as well as Steve how much more Tony looks like the old Tony now he’s been thinking about traffic build-up. ‘Any other leads?’
‘I’ve had a couple of messages from Ernesto,’ says Rosie. ‘He’s our Interpol contact.’
‘What did they say?’ asks Felicity.
‘Haven’t opened them yet,’ says Rosie. ‘In our rush to get here.’
‘But we weren’t rushing, because we stopped at the services,’ says Steve.
‘For a pie,’ agrees Tony, and the two men give each other a thumbs-up.
‘How’s Amy’s getting on?’ Tony asks.
Steve sees Rosie scrolling through her phone.
‘Making friends with bodyguards,’ says Steve. ‘Dug up a body too.’
‘Don’t you ever worry about Amy with men?’ says Felicity.
‘With men?’
‘She doesn’t spend a lot of time with her husband,’ says Rosie, opening Ernesto’s message. ‘She’s very attractive.’
‘Amy?’ says Steve.
‘I’d worry,’ says Felicity.
‘They’re not like that, Amy and Adam,’ says Steve. ‘They don’t have to live in each other’s pockets.’
‘Still,’ says Rosie. ‘You don’t worry she’s sneaking into Korbin’s cottage or something? He had very powerful thighs. As does she.’
‘Amy and Adam are like camels,’ says Steve. ‘They store their love up.’
Felicity and Rosie share a doubtful look.
‘Amy wouldn’t cheat on Adam,’ says Steve.
‘I don’t want to come over all Georgie Glazier, but a woman has needs, Stevie,’ says Rosie.
‘Amy doesn’t have needs.’
‘Okay.’
‘She doesn’t,’ says Steve.
Rosie looks back at her phone and goes quiet.
‘Do you know the world record for eating eggs?’ asks Tony.
‘What sort of time frame?’ Steve asks.
‘Minute,’ says Tony.
‘Shells on or shells already off?’ asks Steve.
‘Shells off,’ says Tony.
Steve has a think. ‘I could do twelve, so let’s say twenty-nine?’
‘Forty-eight,’ says Tony. ‘In case it ever comes up at the quiz.’
‘Stevie,’ says Rosie, looking at her phone. She stands, very slowly, very quietly. ‘We have to go.’
‘I just have a couple more questions about the eggs,’ says Steve.
Rosie yanks him up by the collar.
‘We have to leave. Right now.’