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Muscle memory from my stunt days kicked in, and I collapsed and rolled. The slugs missed, but by the time I found my feet, Fripp’s body lay on the footpath thirty yards away, with a fleshy hole in the back of his head.
Red mist burst before my eyes. I closed them tight and tried to think happy thoughts, and failed.
Back in Sussex, on another case, a portion of Paul Green’s brain had materialised when he put a bullet through his head, and he didn’t die straight away.
I sat on the gutter and experienced the rollercoaster of sensations: cold sweats, anger, and fear. My heart raced, and I needed a drink, desperately. Maybe they were warning shots intended to scare me, or maybe it was time to buy a lottery ticket. I stayed put as police cordoned off the area around the body and set to work.
A nondescript station wagon arrived, and I half expected to see Detective Constable Ivers step out and shoot me a bored, disappointed look. Instead, a short woman with rock-hard hair emerged and worked her way through the bar owner and three other witnesses before approaching me. She introduced herself as Senior Detective Sandra Casumano, and I told her everything I’d seen. I’d missed the registration, make and model, but told her what I knew about Fripp.
I wanted to confront Lyons as soon as I could, and Casumano read it as nervousness.
‘Do you have anything you need to tell me, sir?’ She chewed the end of her pen.
‘It’s just shock,’ I lied. ‘I wasn’t planning on being gunned down in a back alley and having my thirteen-year-old daughter hear about it on the news.’
If someone was willing to hire a hitman and enact a hit in broad daylight, they were either extremely anxious, or desperate, or a mixture of the two.
I’d become complacent in actively looking for tails since Friday, when Gav followed me through the city, and resigned myself to the fact that I may have been the one who led the assassin straight to Fripp. If nothing else, it confirmed his paranoia.
I thought about his poor son.
Casumano made some notes, gave me her card, and said the same thing Ivers had when I found Renee Prestwidge’s body. Two and a half hours had passed before they let me leave the scene.
I stopped at an inner-city pub on the way back to my car and downed a shot of scotch. It didn’t stop the feeling of anxiousness, and it came back up within minutes.
With the window wound down, I drove back to St. Vincent’s and ran into Evelyn as she was coming out of Lyons’ ward.
‘Jeff’s critical, but stable,’ she said. Reading my face, she added, ‘They said he needs to avoid stressful situations.’
‘Look, Evelyn, I need to park whatever’s going on between us for today. I need to talk to Jeff.’
‘The doctor said he can’t have any visitors.’
I made my way down the hall and into his room, and Evelyn pushed in ahead of me. In a seat next to the bed sat the man who clubbed me with a blackjack when I’d visited Zara Venable in Clovelly last Saturday. He still wore the American flag bandana.
Lyons appeared small, his eyes dark and tired. He was propped up on pillows and a little out of it.
Mr. Bandana looked at me as if I’d shot his dog in the guts.
I said, ‘Haven’t we met someplace?’
He nodded and raised his eyebrows. ‘People tell me that all the time. Maybe you’re mistaking me for someone famous.’
‘You don’t look like anyone famous. Your eyes are too close together.’
‘You’re a fucking smart arse.’
Evelyn said, ‘Matt.’
‘A man’s been shot dead in the street, and I had four bullets whip past my ears.’
‘What are you talking about?’
I turned to Lyons. ‘If there’s something you know about this fucking book, you’d damn well better tell me, and I mean right now.’
Lyons shifted, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and raspy. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Do you know about a manuscript called Broken Trust?’
The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘No.’
‘Apparently, there are some very serious allegations in it.’
Lyons blinked slowly and turned his head to the window. ‘I’m not paying you to follow up wild goose chases, Kowalski.’
Evelyn looked at me worriedly. ‘What do you want, Matt?’
‘I want a revolution. George Orwell said it: ‘in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ I just want someone to tell me the truth.’
‘How about you get out before I throw you out?’ Mr. Bandana barked.
‘Shut up, Louis,’ Lyons said. He glanced at Evelyn worriedly, then lowered his eyes to the sheets and cleared his throat. ‘I fuck prostitutes.’
Evelyn flared. ‘Jeff!’
Mr. Bandana shifted in his seat.
‘For fuck’s sake, Evie,’ Lyons said. ‘He’s a private investigator. Either he finds out from me, or he finds out from some other prick who has it in for me.’
Evelyn’s chest rose and fell, and Jeff regarded her with tired eyes. ‘This way I tell it how I want it to be told.’
Evelyn moved next to the bed and gently took Lyons’ hand. ‘Let me call Lexie. He can be here within the hour.’
Lyons shook his head weakly. ‘No.’
‘You know how pedantic he is.’
‘No fucking lawyers, Evie.’
Lyons held firm and Evelyn relented. She let go of his hand and rounded the bottom of the bed to take up a single lounge seat by the window, facing away from the three of us.
The goon glanced between me, Lyons, and Evelyn.
Lyons drank a glass of water and wiped his mouth. When he spoke, he didn’t meet my eyes. ‘On my fifteenth birthday, I lost my virginity to a prostitute. My father paid for it. He told me on his death bed he was in love with her, almost married her. My mother never knew. You could say I’ve had a predilection for prostitutes ever since. I’ve never seen it as anything bad or wrong. It was the way I learned how to be with a woman. Zara found out, and it cost me eleven million dollars.’
‘That’s not what I found out today, Mr. Lyons.’
‘It’s not my concern what you found out. You wanted the truth? You got it.’
I ignored the look from Mr. Bandana and crossed my arms. ‘Jeff, I need to trust my clients, at least part of the way. Between you and Evelyn, there’s a gap in the information, and I feel as if I’m not being told something important, something serious enough for Tamsin to walk away from her life, to delete all her social media accounts, to vanish. I need to know what it was.’
I gave him my hardest look, and he absently rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. ‘I told you, I wasn’t there for her when she was growing up. She exaggerated things when she was young. She had a talent for it. She acted out, made up stories. She only ever wanted my attention. The father-daughter relationship is special, unique. She wanted something I couldn’t give her.’
‘Don’t you think that’s why your marriage to Zara broke down?’
‘Have you even spoken to my ex-wife?’
‘I have.’
‘And you haven’t given any consideration to her motives in all this?’
‘I’ve questioned Zara in relation to Tamsin’s disappearance. She seems to check out.’
Lyons scoffed. ‘Evie?’
Evelyn turned her head.
Lyons pointed to the bedside drawers. ‘Be a darl’? Get my wallet from the drawer, will you?’
She hesitated, then stood rigidly and shuffled in front of Mr. Bandana to get to the bedside drawers. She retrieved a thick brown wallet from the top drawer.
Lyons said, ‘Give him three grand.’
She removed a bundle of notes, counted out the right amount, and held the pile out to me.
I took it, reluctantly.
‘How much trust does that buy, Kowalski?’ Lyons said.
About as the same amount of trust between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.
He continued. ‘I appreciate you calling the ambulance, Mr. Kowalski, but I’ll remind you of the agreed terms in the contract. Find my daughter.’
I didn’t buy Lyons’ desperate diversion tactics, and didn’t notice a change in his behaviour at the mention of the allegations. The one thing I did notice was the look of concern Evelyn swapped with Mr. Bandana when I’d entered the room.
