‘Hang on a second. I’m putting you on speaker.’ The sound changes.
I get rid of the first deep breath, take a second one, then Istart telling the truth. I am about to break the first rule I ever came up with.
Rule 1:Nobody gets your real name.
… And no, I’m not going to repeat what I said to her. Are you mad? That’s private. You already got quite enough of an idea who I am from when I went back to Freddy’s place. But what I tell her now actually is true. What happened, how I started, why I kept going … She gets all of it, even the bits that don’t reflect well on me. There are a lot more of those bits than I thought. At the end of it, I run out of things to say, and I feel wrung out. I gaze at the grey sea while she and Elle muffle the phone and confer. Then the mouthpiece clears.
‘What would we have to do?’
‘You just need to put a message in the shared drafts folder. We know they’re checking it regularly. Do you still have Davy’s computer?’
‘Yes. By Jonny’s bed.’
‘All right. Write a message saying you’ve fallen out with me, that I screwed you over and tried to go it alone, but that you know where I’ve gone. Tell them I’m the only one who knows how to get into Davy’s half of the strongbox account. And name the cut of the proceeds you want for bringing them to see me. Say where we’ll all meet.’
‘Do we have to be there in person?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d like you to come along.’
‘What do we tell them they’ll get?’
‘A few things. They’ll get my head on a spike, they’ll get theperfect corpse to pin Davy’s death on, and they’ll get whatever’s in this shared bank account. They’re probably quite keen by now.’
‘Tempting.’
‘Mm.’
‘I’m tempted myself, to be honest.’
‘Then, of course, they’ll want to kill you, but ideally they won’t even manage to kill me, which will be higher on their agenda.’
‘You’ll send us the where and when?’
‘Yeah. Take care of yourself. Love to everybody.’
Em snorts, and hangs up, mutteringlove to everybodyas she does.
I start packing up the beach hut. I don’t have long.
45
I’ve just realised, I’ve no idea where the name ‘Bridling’ comes from. I do like a bit of amateur etymology – eventually when you’ve stayed in enough villages with weird names in off-season you start to get a bit nerdy about local history – but I never got around to researching Bridling. There’s Bridlington up in Yorkshire, which apparently means something like ‘the estate of Berhtel’ in Old English, but nobody has any idea who Berhtel was and it seems unlikely he had a second home in Oxfordshire. You get to reflect on these things when you spend twenty hours a day in your cell. Anyway.
This chapter opens with me back in – surprise surprise – Bridling, the village that started this whole farrago, the village containing Davy’s very big house in the country. The one welast saw in the rear-view mirror as we got out of there at triple the speed limit.
And now here I am again. Tariq provided a car on credit. I told him I needed not to be conspicuous, and in the sorrowful tone of a slandered man he said, ‘Al, my friend. When are my cars conspicuous?’ He even sent a lad from Mr Toad’s Motors down from London, all the way to the coast, after I explained the outer edges of my current difficulties. Thoughtful man. I picked the little Hyundai up without trouble, and drove, carefully and methodically, to the Cotswolds.
If I ever get out of this mess, I’m going to give Tariq first refusal on my first-born son.
I’m sitting on the bench outside Davy’s front door. The gate opened when I pressed ‘0’ on the keypad, so I just drove in, with no difficulty. The house is locked, although if you squint through the outer door you can see the shattered glass of the inner hall door. I haven’t been in yet. It’s important that they can tell I definitely haven’t been in.
One of the porch’s upright beams has a yellow ribbon tied round it, which seems romantic and mournful until I look closer and realise it’s police tape.
There’s a crunch from the other end of the gravel, and the gates swing open. Em and Elle hop out of a cab. They don’t say anything until it’s left again, and the noise of the engine has faded to nothing.
Em gives me a wary look. ‘Hiya.’
‘Hi.’
