Sophie was sporadically aware of her pillow, soft against her aching jaw, voices phasing in and out, the sound of heavy feet coming and going. She opened her eyes. Katie was sitting on the bed beside her. A man was pressing her wrist, fingers against her pulse. Sam was in a chair pulled close, his hair matted with dried blood, his bare chest smeared burgundy and brown. Another man was applying a dressing to the top of his arm. There were bloodied wipes over his lap. She could feel her chest heaving. ‘Where’s Laura?’
Sam leaned slightly towards her. ‘Downstairs. With Barbara. She’s fine.’
Sophie tried to push herself up, but she was trembling so badly that her arms wouldn’t support her. Her head felt as if someone was hitting it with a mallet. ‘He shot you.’
‘I’m OK.’ Sam winced as the paramedic wound a tight bandage over the dressing.
‘Luckily the bullet went straight through. Didn’t hit anything important. Might have nicked the bone.’ It was Jesse’s voice. ‘They’ll have to take him in and patch him up.’
Sophie tried to turn her head but the pain in her neck made that impossible. ‘Are you sure Laura’s all right?’
Now Jesse was beside Katie. ‘Perfect. But we had to remove the door to get to her.’
Sophie tried to think but her mind was full of the memory of a bloody half-head. Cold steel pressed against her temple. That hard, polished piece of metal just moments away from penetrating her skull. Beyond Sam she could see the door lying inside Laura’s room, its hinges still attached to the frame. She looked down at the crumpled sheet of plastic on the floor and realised what it was. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes,’ said Katie. ‘Two dead, two unconscious. Good riddance to the lot of them.’
Suddenly, three men in black protective gear were stomping past the foot of the bed, heading for the corpse, throwing down a stretcher. As one of them turned away from her, Sophie could see the letters NCA in white across his back. ‘Just this one to go, boys,’ he said.
Sam pulled away from the paramedic and barked instructions. ‘Officers, stand down! I don’t want her seeing any more of this.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said one of the men. He turned to the others. ‘Leave this until Officer Barnes’s girlfriend is out of here.’ He turned back to Sam. ‘Would you like one of the men to carry her downstairs, sir?’
‘I’ll take her,’ said Jesse.
Sophie looked at the man, at Jesse. At Sam. She caught her breath as realisation gouged its way through her aching head. ‘You’ve lied to me.’
Sam began to sag forward. ‘Sophie, I’ll explain. I didn’t… I merrrr…’ The paramedic caught him before he fell forward onto the floor.
Jesse hurried to help, held his brother’s head down over his lap. ‘Just take it easy, Sam.’ The three NCA officers stood observing the scene.
‘Is he OK?’ said Katie.
‘It’s probably shock,’ said one of the officers.
‘That never happens on the TV.’
Jesse looked at her. ‘Katie, love, the people that write that stuff have probably never been shot and most of them wouldn’t have actually killed anybody.’
Sophie tried to sit up. ‘What if there was poison on the bullet?’
Jesse helped Sam pull himself upright. ‘Sam, you’ve got to stop Sophie reading that crappy crime fiction of yours. You OK? Any poison careering through your veins?’
‘I’m good. Sophie, let Jesse take you downstairs. I’ll follow you down.’
Jesse carried Sophie down to one of the guest suites on the first floor and laid her on the bed. Katie followed them in with a glass of water and some codeine, waited as Sophie gulped them down then left to check that Barbara was managing with the children. A stampede of heavy boots went thundering past the door. Sophie tried not to think about what was being carried downstairs. ‘Are we safe, Jesse?’
‘Yes. The house is awash with Christmas policemen.’
‘Is Sam OK?’
‘I think so. Just lie still and let the painkillers work. I’ll stay with you.’
Suddenly, Sam was standing in the doorway, a shiny blanket around his shoulders, two paramedics supporting him. He pulled himself away, walked over and sat on the bed, close enough to take Sophie’s hand but not taking her hand, his face deathly pale, pieces of his blond hair adhering to the dried blood on his forehead. She could hear his breathing, each inhalation laboured, each exhalation erratic.
‘Sophie, I need to explain.’
‘You’ve been lying to me the whole time.’
‘Yes, but I… I was…’
Jesse touched his shoulder. ‘Sam, you’re not up to this.’
‘Jess, I need to say this.’
He tried to touch Sophie’s hand but she pulled it away. ‘What are you, Sam?’
He took a deep breath. ‘I was seconded from the home police force to work undercover as an SI, a senior investigating officer, with the NCA, investigating organised crime. Just after I came back to the UK.’
Sophie felt sick with disbelief, her mind a chaos of all the time she had known him, right back to that first moment she caught sight of him, a bent bicycle wheel in his hand. ‘So, you weren’t just cycling past that day?’
‘That day I really was going to my mother’s grave. But I’d been watching your house for a couple of weeks. Sophie, the NCA have been investigating a cybercrime network: identity theft. But worse than that, there were links to prostitution… child trafficking and exploitation. That’s what I was working on in the Far East. With the Hong Kong and Thai Police. But I needed to quit my posting and come home for Jesse.’ He caught the blanket as it was about to slide off his shoulder and winced with pain. ‘Then, last July, the Agency received intelligence that Robert Perrin might be peripherally involved. Brokering identities. We discovered he’d been manipulating a chain of compromised accounts to facilitate the movement of money overseas. We traced him to his Exeter address but Rosemary insisted he was in Bahrain…’
‘You knew he was married to Rosemary? When we first met?’
‘I couldn’t tell you. We accessed his accounts. Investigated his employees. You were the only one that checked out. We traced his car and discovered he was living with you. Leading his dual life between Exeter and…’
‘You knew about the pretend employees before Inspector Blake told me about them?’
‘That’s when I told Blake who I was. I told him we’d been monitoring the people visiting the house.’
‘Like Mrs Davies? And Katie?’
‘No. People that might have been doing business with Jonah. Sophie, that first day, I knew straight away that you had no idea what was going on.’
‘But you still carried on lying to me.’
‘I had no choice; I was undercover. Telling you the truth would have compromised the investigation and put you in danger. So, I stayed close. And fell in love with you. Sophie, whatever these people are trying to find, it’s clear it will spill the beans on something very nasty, involving people that don’t grubby themselves with the kind of carnage we’ve just witnessed. Those were four paid thugs.’ He began to sag forward. Jesse stepped closer but he raised his hand in reassurance, causing the blanket to fall away from his shoulders and reveal his chest, still smeared with his own and Bald Man’s blood. Jesse pulled it back over him.
‘Sam, you need to go to hospital.’
‘I need to say this now, Jess.’ He took a moment to breathe. ‘Sophie, keeping you and Laura safe is all I’ve cared about. I didn’t want to carry on deceiving you. I’m so sorry.’
With difficulty, Sophie pushed herself upright. Now that the headache was slowly decreasing, she was aware that all her teeth felt too close together. She recalled that smack on her jaw and tried to remember whether or not the man that had done it was one of the dead ones. But it had all happened so fast. She looked at Sam. His pallor was worsening. He stretched to touch her arm and started to slide forward. Jesse moved to catch him. ‘Come on, mate. There’s an ambulance waiting.’
The paramedics hurried over to help but Sam shook himself back. ‘Sorry. I’m being a complete wimp. Sophie, when I get back, I’ll explain everything.’
Sophie leaned close to hold his cold hand. ‘Just go and get mended, OK?’
Sophie listened as Sam was escorted downstairs and away into the frozen darkness. She remembered some random TV episode where a person had been shot and the bullet had hit a bone and caused it to leak something or other and the person had died of a pulmonary embolism. ‘Will he be all right, Jesse?’
‘He should be.’ His face was lined with worry.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Almost. But blowing someone’s brains out is never easy. I prefer clays.’
‘Jesse, did you know about Sam being a… whatever?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when you came to my house that first time, were you helping him check me out?’
‘No. I told you at the time. Sam had come home that previous night desperately upset. So, I came to speak to you. To try and tell you about him without actually telling you everything about him. I was just trying to prevent my brother collapsing into another mental wipeout.’ He sat down on the bed. He looked exhausted. ‘And if you’re at all interested, I’d like you to know that, after meeting you that first time, I told Sam that he should hurry and get this case out of the way and concentrate on sorting his life out. With you and Laura.’
Sophie tried to smile. ‘So, I suppose this means you’ve been lying to Katie.’
He exhaled audibly. ‘No. Against Sam’s insistence, I told her about Sam’s undercover work. At the university…’
‘So, he does actually teach English then?’
‘Yes, he does. Anyway, Katie went crazy. She wanted to tell you. We had a huge bust up about it. But after a couple of days of not speaking to me she agreed it was best if you didn’t know the truth.’
‘That was when you and Sam were yelling at each other, right? So, everyone’s been lying to me. Even Katie.’
‘She hated keeping secrets from you.’
‘Secrets? They were not just secrets, Jesse. They were lies.’