It was done, it was over; he could stop worrying about it. He only wished he could stop thinking about it. He pulled his chin above the bar, the muscles in his arms and shoulders and chest and stomach screaming, then lowered himself down again.
They hadn’t been pleased.
‘That’s what we’re here for.’
‘You weren’t handling it,’ he’d snapped into the phone, cupping his hand over his mouth so no one in the park could hear what he was saying, or read his lips.
‘With respect, you have no idea what we were doing or not doing.’
‘You were letting them get too close.’
‘We were letting them look. They won’t find anything.’ The same level voice that had spoken to him when he called the number on the back of the photographs, two years before, his whole body shaking. A woman. He’d never seen her. Voice like velvet, heart like a stone. ‘There’s nothing to find.’
‘There are pictures.’
‘Not where they can find them.’
‘You need to destroy them.’
A note of amusement in her voice. ‘If we destroyed everything every time someone was interested in us, we wouldn’t have much left to work with.’
‘Maybe that would be a good thing.’
‘Really? Am I to understand you don’t want our help any more?’
He hesitated. How he wanted to say no. He really didn’t want them involved in his life. But if he said that, he had an awful feeling they’d hang the whole thing on him. And he wasn’t guilty. Or at least, not as guilty as some people.
Anyone who’d got hurt had deserved it. And it had sent a message that anyone who tried to get in his way would get hurt. You had to take control of these situations. You had to make it clear you weren’t going to let them take advantage of you. You weren’t going to let anyone betray you.
(What are you doing? Roddy’s face, white in the moonlight, and the other man holding the bottle, uncertain, staring at him like he was a stranger.
This is what happens to people who talk.
But I didn’t say anything? His voice making it a question, shaking with fear.
Even then, Roddy hadn’t realised it wasn’t him he was talking to. It had been a warning for the man with the bottle, and given the way he’d looked afterwards – white knuckles on the steering wheel, shock making fathomless holes of his eyes – it had sunk in.)
Whatever he’d done, he told himself, levering up again, grimacing with effort, he’d done the best he could in a bad situation. And no one could blame him for that.