Chapter 61
Sixty-One
Friday
ROMAN
In Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre, Roman sits propped up against stiff pillows trying to ignore the strong smell of disinfectant that seems to be lodged in his nostrils.
On the plus side, at least they’ve given him his own room.
On the downside, his right arm is uselessly trapped in a sling to keep his collarbone stable, but it’s still aching with every shallow breath he takes.
He’s stuck in here, under observation for a head injury and a ruptured spleen which has caused internal bleeding.
Worst of all, he can’t stop replaying the accident in his head.
That moment his thoughts went weirdly calm, as if his brain had accepted that this was how he was going to die.
Roman swallows and winces. His throat feels raw and he can’t rest—even for a minute. Each time his eyelids start to close he sees the same sequence of events on a loop.
The flash of silver. The bump in the road. Tim Walker-Dent’s manic face.
His parents have only just left.
His mum had hovered and fussed, straightening the blanket that didn’t need straightening, asking the nurse a hundred questions, ranging from what he’d had to eat to how many times he’d been to the loo.
She’d kept touching his good hand, squeezing his fingers, her eyes shiny every time she thought he wasn’t looking.
Roman had pretended it was irritating but, secretly, he’d loved it.
His dad had stood by the window the whole time, shoulders rigid, staring out at the car park. He hadn’t said much. Just a low growl, ‘All right, son?’, and a hand ruffling Roman’s hair that lasted half a second before he pulled away like he’d done something too soft.
Now Roman is alone again and the room is too quiet.
There’s a knock at the door and Roman’s body tenses, his heart lurching. He half expects to see the two detectives he’s spoken to briefly, even though he knows the doctors have said he has to be given time to rest before anyone can interview him again.
But it’s Sanj.
He slips in with a plastic carrier bag bulging with snacks, grinning like he never had tears rolling down his face when he thought his best friend was dead in that ditch.
‘Mate,’ he says. ‘Look what I brought.’
He lifts the bag up like a trophy. Roman’s mouth waters despite himself.
‘Haribo,’ Roman croaks.
‘Two packs.’ Sanj drops the bag on to the bed with a soft thud. ‘And Pringles. And those sour strips you pretend you hate but always nick from my desk drawer.’
Roman groans when he lets out a laugh, and his collarbone punishes him.
Sanj drags a chair closer and sits. His gaze flicks over Roman’s sling and the bruising that’s still creeping up his neck. The grin slips for a second.
‘You look proper grim, bro.’
‘Yeah? You should see the other guy,’ Roman says, then immediately regrets trying to be funny.
His stomach tightens. This is serious stuff.
Roman shifts against the pillows and pain bites down on his ribs. He hisses, his eyes watering.
Sanj’s face pinches. ‘Sorry you’re hurting, mate.’ He leans forward, nudging Roman’s hand lightly. ‘I’m just glad you’re not dead.’
Dead. The word hangs between them in the thick silence.
Sanj tears the top of the Haribo bag with his teeth and tips a couple of sweets into Roman’s palm like he’s five.
The sugar hits Roman’s tongue and for a second his body unclenches. Then the worry creeps back in, cold and persistent.
‘Did they . . .’ Roman starts, then stops. He doesn’t want to ask, but he has to know. ‘Ask any awkward questions?’
Sanj’s eyes flick up. He doesn’t answer straight away, which tells Roman everything.
Sanj exhales. ‘Yeah. Just asked a few questions. Like, “Does he have any enemies?”’ He makes air quotes with his fingers. ‘Enemies, though! Like you’re some kind of gangster.’
Roman laughs once, then winces again. It isn’t funny. Enemies is exactly what he had.
‘Come on then, spill. How did you find me, when nobody else spotted I was in that ditch?’
Sanj pulls out his phone and taps the screen. He turns it towards Roman.
A screenshot of a map fills the display. A blue dot.
‘Find My,’ Sanj says quietly. ‘I’d forgotten I still had you on there.’
Roman’s mouth goes dry. ‘I thought I turned that off.’
‘Clearly not.’ Sanj says. ‘You were cycling to mine and then you kind of stopped. No movement for ages. Nothing. You were just stuck there.’
He swallows hard.
‘I had this horrible feeling when you were messaging and saying you’d been to see Emily and stuff,’ Sanj admits. ‘It felt like something was gonna catch up with us.’
Roman stares at the dot and the memory sharpens. The tyres skidding, warm rain needling his face, his lungs burning.
‘So I gets on my bike,’ Sanj continues, ‘and I head to your location. I was half expecting to find you sitting on a bench somewhere, hacking Oliver Sharpe on your phone.’
Roman manages a wry grin. ‘Would’ve been on brand, to be fair.’
Sanj shakes his head. ‘The Find My app said I’d reached you, but you weren’t there. But the tech never lies, right? I poked around a bit and then the sun came out and I saw something shining. It was the broken wheel spokes of your bike poking up out of the ditch like a weird little flag.’
Roman’s skin prickles. He doesn’t remember being in the ditch. He just remembers fragments. Like the taste of metal in his mouth, his own rasping breathing, a distant voice calling his name as if from underwater.
‘I climbed in there, shouting your name,’ Sanj says, and now he’s not pretending to be cool about it at all.
‘You kept trying to talk, but you couldn’t speak.
Your eyes were open, but you looked so .
. . I dunno, out of it. That’s the bit that—’ His voice cracks, and then he stops, his jaw clenched and his eyes shining.
Roman looks away. He blinks hard, because he refuses to cry in front of Sanj. Once he gets better, his friend will never let him live it down.
‘You were lucky anyway, mate. Ambulance came quick for once.’ Sanj grins, forcing himself back into banter territory. ‘Paramedics said the internal bleeding was so severe that, if I’d been, like, ten minutes later . . .’ He shrugs. ‘So yeah. Let’s just say you owe me big time.’
‘Seriously, I’ll never make it up to you,’ Roman says.
Sanj points at him. ‘Yes, you can. When you sue Walker-Dent’s ass for nearly killing you, yeah?’
The name alone makes Roman’s insides twist.
‘How did the police know it was him who knocked me off my bike?’ Roman asks. Even though he’d seen Walker-Dent behind the wheel, he had been unconscious for a while when he was brought into hospital and, when he came round, his mum told him the police knew who the driver was.
Sanj shrugs. ‘Cameras. Plates . . . whatever. I dunno. But listen—’ He leans in, his voice dropping. ‘Heads up, mate . . . the coppers were also asking about, like . . . what you’d been doing online.’
Roman’s heart stutters. He knew this was coming, of course he did. He’d known it when he’d sent that email to DI Adebayo. He’d fired it off in a moment of madness. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time, even though it had got Oliver Sharpe off the hook for Vanessa’s murder.
He can suddenly see it all playing out so clearly: the police at his door, his kit seized, his hard drives taken, his mum crying, his dad going pale and furious.
All of Roman’s ‘mission control’ reduced to a pile of evidence bags.
‘Shit,’ Roman whispers. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
Sanj’s eyes are serious in a way Roman isn’t used to seeing.
‘They know you’ve been hacking,’ Sanj says. ‘And if they start really digging, they’ll find a way to prove you’ve been doing it for a couple of years with the whole street. They’ll be coming for me next.’
Roman’s mouth goes dry again. He thinks of Oliver. Of Vanessa. Of the emails he discovered in Emily’s cache. Of the thrill that had buzzed through him like electricity, making him momentarily reckless.
It feels so stupid now. Like he’s been playing with matches in a room full of petrol and the whole thing’s gone up in flames.
‘What am I going to get charged with?’ Roman murmurs, and he hates how small his voice sounds. ‘Fraud? Will they send me away?’
Sanj runs his tongue over his front teeth, thinking.
‘Dunno,’ he says finally. ‘But you did tip them off. You did help. And that might count for something.’
‘It should count for everything.’ Roman frowns.
Sanj pulls a face and shrugs. ‘We’ve still hacked people, bro. Even if we thought they deserved it, we shouldn’t have done it. Even if it’s uncovered something big that doesn’t make it legal.’
Roman stares at the sling on his arm. His broken body feels like proof of a lesson he needs to learn, but he isn’t sure what it is.
‘So what do we do?’ he asks.
Sanj reaches into the bag and pulls out the tube of Pringles. He cracks it open and passes it to Roman like a peace offering.
‘First thing is . . . we stop snooping,’ Sanj says. ‘Right now. No more email inbox fun. No more accounts. We’re done. Agreed?’
Roman’s chest tightens with a sudden, ridiculous grief. The screens. The control. The feeling of being better than everyone else. The feeling of digital firewalls turning paper-thin.
But then he recalls that helpless moment where he realized none of his skills mattered against a ton of metal. When he truly thought he was about to die.
‘What if I get away with it?’ Roman says. ‘What if they can’t manage to pin it on me?’
‘Then maybe it’s time to use our genius brains for something that doesn’t get us killed,’ Sanj says brightly. ‘App development or cyber security. Hack with permission from authorities. Get paid without someone trying to run you off the road again.’
Roman’s mouth twists. ‘Sounds boring.’
‘Yeah, you might have to get used to being boring if you want to stay alive,’ Sanj says drily.
Roman stares at his best friend’s red-rimmed eyes. At the bag of sweets he brought in, like Roman is still worth keeping alive.
‘All right then, agreed,’ Roman croaks. ‘Boring but alive it is.’
Sanj’s shoulders drop, and he grins again.
‘Cool,’ he says. ‘Because I’m not climbing into another ditch to save you.’
Roman huffs out a laugh, careful not to jolt his ribs. ‘That’s fair.’
For the first time since Walker-Dent’s car pulled up alongside him, he feels the tiniest shift inside. Not confidence, or fear . . . but something better. A new conviction to stay out of trouble.
It occurs to Roman that he might not need other people’s secrets in order to feel powerful.
It feels like simply being himself might just be enough.