‘Much worse. One to avoid.’ Em looks down at her phone.‘I’m out of questions. Richard, do you have any more?’ I have none, and she takes over again. ‘Can you keep this to yourself, Lulu? There are good reasons why your father wouldn’t want it known that he’d hired us. And there are good reasons for us to do our work undisturbed by anyone. Including the police.’
Lulu nods. Oh dear. The poor girl thinks we’re going to get justice for her father, when the most she can reasonably expect is that we get away with breaking into his house and are never seen again. ‘Can I call you if I think of anything?’
‘Of course you can. Rich, take her details.’
Another tie to this family. More evidence, all the time. I feel like we’re just doing a future jury’s work for them now, but I hit ‘stop’ on my voice recorder, hand over my phone, tap her number in, then give her a missed call.
‘Thank you, Lulu. You won’t regret talking to us.’ And with that Em stands, gives the grieving girl a brief but enormous hug, then walks out, with me trailing behind her.
17
‘You weren’t very kind earlier, you know.’
We’re back in London, at Balfour Villas. When we got back Elle looked in the fridge, which contained two onions and three rashers of bacon, and somehow produced a huge and nutritious stew. She’s now doing the washing-up, on the grounds that ‘It’s unfair for one person to make a mess and for other people to have to clear.’ Jonny’s retreated to check the footage from his cameras around the house, to see if anyone paid us a visit while we were gone. Em and I are looking for any possible ideas about Dead Man Davy’s appointment tomorrow. 215 Feathers. So far, we have nothing, yet again.
‘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 Nîmes.’
‘Oh right.’ I clearly don’t sound as confident as intended here, because she rolls her eyes.
