‘No. But another good cover, right?’ She drags on the vape again. ‘You’ll have seen from his phone records that I spoke to Dave a lot. More than mutual-parenting one sulky student would require. But if we were getting back together, it works.’
‘Why was he so worried about Qumar, though?’ Em asks. ‘What made him book the appointment with the police?’
‘Oh, well, it was this new line of work. He’d never been totally comfortable with it. Kept wibbling that it wastreason. Silly bastard. I kept telling him, it’s all people stashing money here via other places. Half of our original clientele were from the UK. But he worried away about this dark police station stuff. Said he couldn’t trust the mentees, said he was gettingcold feet … Then an operation we’d set up for some Iranians fell apart a month ago – did you see that? – and they blamed him for it. Sent some twit boy to threaten Lulu in Brighton. Once Dave found out, he hit the roof.’
‘So the Iranian thing started it?’
Charli tuts like I’ve made a point that might be accurate but isn’t relevant. ‘The Iranians were the trigger, but they’re not the main clientele. That’s the Qumar lot. They’re about to launch a big expansion of their operation over here. Hundreds of thousands of Qumaris in this country; they need keeping an eye on. So Dave rang the police. He thought he could get himself and Lu into witness protection and me into prison if he confessed. Didn’t trust his friend Jay Hawthorne, which was sensible. Anyway, that had to stop.’
‘And then he booked a flight to Dubai, and holed up here.’ Charli shrugs yes. ‘But you weren’t in the country. We checked the records of that jet. It came back the day you said it did. So you must have sent someone else.’
‘You think he’d have opened the door to Alfie?’ Charli looks round at her bodyguard. ‘Some daysIdon’t want to open the door to him, and I’m his boss. No, it had to be me.’
‘But how …’
‘Did you check the previous flights for that jet?’ I look at Em, who looks at Elle, who looks at me, and Charli sighs. ‘It had just done another run from Dubai to London, then back. I was on the earlier return flight. It’s not that hard to tweak a name from one passenger list to another, not when it’s a private plane.’
‘And Dave opened the door to you. Because he trusted you.’
‘Afraid so. He was basically a nice man.’
‘What about Lulu? Is she involved?’
‘God, no. I’ll see if she wants to visit me in a few years, but she’s a big girl now, she can look after herself. Especially once she inherits two homes and enough money to hang around in Brighton her whole life. Such a shame. She takes after her father.’
‘You’ll miss it, won’t you? Life here, all the parties, the glamour?’
‘Like a hole in the fucking temple.’ Charli shakes her head. ‘Do you know how many parties for shoes – genuinely, shoe launch parties – I’ve been to in the last month? Three. I’m going to get to a beach somewhere and start reading the complete works of Trollope.’
Elle pipes up. ‘Aren’t you worried they’re going to catch you?’
Charli’s brow crinkles as far as is possible. ‘Who?’
‘The police.’
She shakes her head. ‘They’re all followingyou. Nobody is looking for me. They bought the private plane alibi, and they’ve seen the finances. They agree that I would have wanted nothing more than for Dave to keep earning to support our darling girl.’ Her tone changes. ‘Plus, I’m a particular friend of Jay Hawthorne, which is useful too.’
‘So Hawthorne won’t bother trying to find Davy’s actual killer. And Conor Vane wants to protect the relationship withQumar, and he doesn’t mind you benefiting from the dark police stations as long as nobody blows that open.’
‘You’re bright for squatters, I’ll give you that.’
‘What about Rob Wallace?’
‘What about him? He found out about the laundry operation a month ago. Broke his heart. He had to fire Davy, as he saw it. They were working on his exit from the firm when the Iranian thing happened and it all got messy. Rob has a very old-fashioned interpretation of criminal law.’
‘Oh.’ All this time, Rob Wallace was one of the few demi-angels in this story. Good grief.
‘Right,’ says Charli, briskly. ‘Are there any more piss-about questions before we do what we came here for?’
‘Oh. One, yeah. Why did you send spies to kill us?’
Charli looks surprised for the first time. ‘I didn’t. I sent Alfie and he bollocksed it right up, as you know.’ Alfie looks like he’s been tapped on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
‘Two people came to our place a couple of nights ago,’ says Em. ‘One of them died, and the other ran off after shooting our friend.’
‘Nothing to do with me,’ says Charli. ‘I assumed you’d pissed someone else off along the way. All right, can we crack on? You have access to Davy’s half of the account, I believe.’
‘I want to know you won’t kill us once you’re in.’
