part0034

EVAN WATCHED GUILLORY follow Lydia back from the ladies’ room, trying to see her face. At first, she kept her head bowed. As someone might if they’ve decided to do the right thing about something, then backed down. And because he was watching her, he wasn’t looking out of the window, still didn’t see Ryder parked opposite them. With her head down, neither did Guillory.

But if either of them had looked out and seen Ryder pull away a moment later, they’d have known that he’d seen them, their guilty secret, secret no longer.

Then she looked up, met his eyes. He knew then that she’d made up her mind. She would tell Ryder what she’d done. But at a time and place of her own choosing.

And he would tell her what he’d done, here and now if necessary.

She was still only halfway to the table when a red Ford Transit van, the model with the extended high roof, climbed the curb and parked immediately in front of the window shielding them from view from the buildings across the street.

He slid out from the booth.

‘Come on, let’s go.’

Lydia jumped in front of them as Guillory joined him, her phone in her hand. She held it towards Guillory, the image of Guillory’s earring on the screen.

‘You really want me to show this to your fat partner?’

A frown creased Guillory’s forehead as she remembered Lydia’s previous reference to him— the fat detective . Somehow the girl knew they were partners. How and when she’d found that out was irrelevant now. Now that she’d made her decision.

‘She’s going to tell him herself,’ Evan said for her.

‘Better coming from me.’

They both thought it would knock some of the confidence out of Lydia as her last card proved redundant.

But it was Lydia’s reply that hit harder, delivered with a shrug.

‘He’s probably expecting it. He just drove off after watching you come back.’

Guillory kept her face deadpan. Didn’t let the girl see the damage she’d done, the realization of the effect her deception would have on her relationship with her long-term partner.

‘Let’s go,’ Evan said again.

He knew that Lydia hadn’t played her last card. And there was nothing redundant about the one she had left. If she chose to play it, so be it.

‘Don’t you want to know how I got hold of this?’

Momentarily, anxiety and anger tightened up Guillory’s face as she stared at the girl’s smug half-smile and the mocking eyes. The hollow void in her gut told her she was missing something here.

‘You didn’t get it from the pedophile gang?’

Lydia didn’t answer. Evan did, talking over her, silencing her with a voice that proclaimed that the time for lies and deception was over.

‘She got it from me.’

Her mind froze, refused to process the information, as she watched Evan’s mouth moving. Looking as if he had to wrestle every word out into the widening void that lay between them.

‘Tell her where you found it,’ Lydia chirped with all the malevolent enthusiasm of a mischievous imp busy doing the Devil’s work.

‘In Garfield’s house?’ Guillory said for him.

He worked a sad smile onto his face, nodded.

‘In a puddle of sick.’

She almost laughed then, knew he would too if she started it. Instead they just stared at each other as the understanding of what the other one had done sank in, the laws they had broken for all the best reasons but which had conspired to bring about a lose-lose situation all round.

‘What were you doing there?’ she said.

‘Same as you.’ He hesitated as the image of Robert Garfield with his throat slit wide open suddenly filled his mind. It was only a split second. Still, it was enough. She’d noticed. It seemed to him that something died in her eyes. So he quickly finished the sentence with words that were too little, too late. ‘Looking for information.’

‘You found the body?’

‘And called Donut.’

Any other time she’d have told him not to call Ryder that. Just not today.

‘Of course he doesn’t know.’ He didn’t care that he snapped, let out an aggravated sigh at the stupidity of the question, the stupidity of the whole crazy situation. ‘Why would we have gone through all that nonsense with you hiding in the ladies’ room if he did?’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Just the three of us,’ Lydia sang out. ‘And I’m bored with this tearful confession shit. Now you tell me what happened to my brother.’

Guillory gave her a look. A god-give-me-strength, withering look and Evan prayed that she never used one like it on him.

‘Or what? I told you, I’m going to tell them myself.’

‘Come on,’ Evan said. ‘We’re done here.’

Lydia had done her worst, had nothing more to use against them. What she’d already done and said would do for now, would give him and Guillory plenty to be going on with.

They were both wrong.

Lydia sat down and slid along the seat as if she knew they’d be following in after her.

‘I can tell you who hired my brother to kill you.’

If she expected to see Guillory’s knees buckle, feel the table rock as she clutched at it for support, she was mistaken. So was Evan. He expected to see her go flying across the table, arms outstretched and mouth open in a demonic howl, fingers tightening around Lydia’s neck until the name popped out.

Instead she gave a small shrug, that’s yesterday’s news.

Evan’s head jerked around at the name. Not that he recognized it. Just that she knew it at all. Guillory met his eyes. There was no apology there for not telling him despite the many occasions he’d asked her about it. Instead, an understanding passed between them on a level that didn’t need words.

So he just nodded mechanically, wondered why the hell he’d broken into a house in the middle of the night where he’d found the corpse of a murdered pedophile and evidence of Guillory’s possible complicity in that deed, all in the hope of finding a name she already knew. He didn’t know about God, but fate certainly moved in mysterious ways. He realized that he’d missed what Lydia had just said in response to the name Liverman. But he saw Guillory’s open-mouthed reaction to it.

‘What was that you said?’

‘I said that’s what she knows him as. But it’s not his real name.’ She turned her attention to Guillory who stood frozen as if she was waiting for the music to start again. ‘Had much luck tracing the name Joseph Liverman?’

Guillory’s silence answered for her. Lydia gave her a tight smile, tapped the table with her chewed fingernail.

‘So why don’t you two sit down and stay sitting down until I tell you that you can get up. You tell me what I want to know and maybe I’ll give you his real name. And how to find him.’

Evan had never wanted to be the man at the top of a pedophile gang. Not even once. The look in Guillory’s eyes made him especially glad today that he wasn’t the man known to her as Liverman. He’d have sworn he heard the wooden table splinter as she gripped it to lower herself slowly down.

Despite the anger and loathing and hatred burning in her eyes that might cause a person who didn’t know her to think that she’d built an impenetrable shell around herself to protect her from the memories, he knew that the last thing she needed was to run through the events that followed her abduction for the benefit of the crazy young woman sharing their table. He lifted his hand before she had a chance to begin.

‘Let me tell it.’

She nodded gratefully, sank back into the seat. She didn’t close her eyes. He guessed that was when the horrors crawled out of her subconscious to torment her, make it real again.

‘I found him,’ he said to Lydia by way of explanation as to why he was qualified to tell the story. ‘And there isn’t much to tell. He got a flat.’

Lydia’s features collapsed into confusion, then rebuilt themselves into an expression of suspicion.

‘He dumped Kate at a cabin in the woods’—Lydia nodded at the mention of the cabin, a detail she clearly recognized—‘then headed off for something, don’t ask me what. That’s when he got a flat. It must have been from the rough track leading up to the cabin. Unfortunately for him, the first person to happen along was a low-life gangster called Chico who’d just been ambushed. His own car was shot to hell. So he shot your brother and took his van.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Because I was the one who found your brother’s body and a flat tire in the back of the van.’

He shot her a warning glare, knew that she’d been about to say and the Vanquish . She caught the flash of his eyes, clamped her mouth shut. Next to him Guillory now had her eyes shut and damn the demons.

‘We found Chico’s car shot to pieces hidden nearby as well as the aftermath of the ambush. So we put it all together. That’s all there was to it. Wrong place, wrong time.’

He made it sound as if her brother had been an innocent casualty, not some murdering bastard himself who deserved everything he got. He let his story sink in. Held his breath, hoping she wouldn’t ask how come he was the one who found her brother. That was a story he didn’t want to get into.

Beside him Guillory suddenly came awake. Her eyes showed the remnants of what had been going through her mind as she listened to Evan talk about the day she nearly died as if he was telling Lydia about a great movie he’d watched the previous week.

He couldn’t begin to imagine what must be going through her mind. The situation was surreal. To be sitting in a diner with the sister of the man who’d been paid to kill her, trying to convince the girl that she wasn’t the guilty one. In those few seconds as they all sat in silence, he understood the depths of her hatred for the man she knew as Liverman, that she would suffer the outrageous situation. He felt it like a fourth person at the table with them, the malevolent presence that now lived inside her.

‘What happened to this guy Chico?’ Lydia said finally.

‘He’s gone to ground,’ Guillory said. ‘Either that or somebody’s done to him what he did to your brother.’ She put a lot of spiteful emphasis on the words, something Evan reckoned she wouldn’t have risked earlier. ‘It’s dog eat dog. They screwed up the ambush, maybe they got him another time. Either way you’re not going to find him. And anyway, what would you do if you did?’

Evan had a pretty good idea. But he kept it to himself. He doubted there would ever be a good time to mention the Vanquish. Now definitely wasn’t it. Seemed Lydia agreed with him. She gave a small shrug, that’s the way it goes.

He knew that she hadn’t dropped it just like that. But for the moment they all played along. Then she stood up, clutched her bag tightly to her.

‘What about Liverman’s real name?’ Guillory said, her voice proclaiming zero expectation of a positive response. ‘Or was that just another lie?’

Lydia shook her head solemnly.

‘No lie. But I need to think things through.’

Evan and Guillory both did the translation from crazy to English: I need to think of a way to make this work for me.

Guillory lifted her hand, let it drop again, words on her lips that she swallowed back again. There was no point in wasting any more breath. Lydia would give them what they wanted or she wouldn’t. There was nothing they could do to influence the decision either way.

They sat in silence until Lydia had gone, thankfully turning left out of the door so that they didn’t have to watch her walk past the window, maybe give them one last unbalanced smile. Guillory broke the silence with the only words that needed to be said.