‘Is Paulie gone?’ Esme said, leaning over the desk and keeping her voice low.
North realized with a start that her make-up was hiding the damage of her beating. Hiding it, but not well enough. She’d missed the bruises either side of her jaw – bruises that looked as if a large hand had gripped her face tight – and now he’d seen the damage he couldn’t unsee the swelling on the right cheekbone, the purpling skin across the right eye and a small cut just by her ear.
At Esme’s question, Jarrod’s face lit up with a megawatt smile, his devoted eyes like those of the bulldog on the cover of the magazine. ‘I buzzed security as soon as he got in.’ Jarrod’s voice dripped with intrigue. ‘They had to throw him on to the street.’ He gave a theatrical shudder. ‘I mean – what did he expect? Totally outrageous. I’m biking his stuff round.’ He wafted a hand over the felt cactus, wrinkling his nose in disgust – at the mug or the cat, North didn’t know which.
Esme frowned as a tiny drone swooped out of the air to hover at eye level. ‘Bugger off, Paulie’s gone. Happy now?’ She batted away the tiny copter as it dipped and swerved, skimming the air around North and Fang, before zipping up and away again. She didn’t seem to think it was out of the ordinary, so North let it go. He wondered what crime Paulie had committed to be despatched without even the chance to clear his desk.
‘Can I get you anything, Esme? A vanilla latte?’ Jarrod was half out of his seat already. He had it bad, North thought.
His boss shook her head, but spared him a wink as if to say that as soon as she needed something, she had every confidence he’d be all over it. With a final yearning look, Jarrod settled back into his ergonomically designed seat.
The red jumpsuit and the brunette hair swept back into a severe ponytail accentuated the violet-blue eyes, but North couldn’t work out whether the dark shadows under them were due to the beating she’d taken or a chronic lack of sleep. As the violet eyes met his, there was a bleakness to them. He knew what she’d done, and she knew he knew, and under the make-up a blush washed up over her cheeks, but she kept her chin high.
Fang had hacked into the Met Police server for details of the break-in Hone had talked about. North wondered how they’d managed to keep the intruder’s untimely death out of the press, until he realized that the one-eyed man would have made sure of it.
Esme Sullivan Hawke had been attacked in her own home in what was assumed to be a burglary that went wrong. The police phrased it all in their own pedestrian way, but it boiled down to the fact that finding a naked woman, alone and vulnerable, the burglar went from opportunist thief to would-be rapist. And in exactly the same time frame, householder Esme Sullivan Hawke went from victim to killer. Fang had pulled up the unusually speedy CPS decision not to prosecute. Any trial would have been a circus and no jury in this world would convict the woman in front of him. But even if the Crown Prosecution Service had the temerity to decide differently, North was sure Edmund Hone would have changed their minds.
He thought back to the first time he’d killed a man – the abusive boyfriend of his drug-addled mother, who had battered her half to death. North had been thirteen at the time. He’d tried to defend her, to pull her attacker off her, and was knocked out for his trouble. When he came to, the teenage North found a hammer and the right moment. He’d never regretted it, not the act nor the years he spent behind bars because of it. But he’d never forgotten it either, nor the way he’d realized, staring down at the corpse, that he’d chosen a path he hadn’t even known was there. That his own life was altogether different than it might otherwise have been. Sympathy surged up for the woman across from him now. She’d survived something appalling, and he was astonished she’d managed to turn the tables on her attacker, let alone be back at work running her company.
‘I’m sorry – there’s way too much going on. Where are my manners?’ Esme extended her hand in greeting, first to Fang and then to him. As he took it, he received a tiny shock as if she were charged and the energy had leapt from her to him. She squeezed harder, placed her other hand over his to draw him in towards her. ‘My uncle is a hard man to impress, but he speaks very highly of you.’ She was talking about the one-eyed man as if he were a human being rather than a bastard of the first order.
Her hands were warm around his. She held his gaze, and he caught her almost silent sigh as she released him, reaching out to take hold of the security passes Jarrod had slid on to the desk.
Behind her back, Fang’s expression went from curious to mutinous. She mouthed, My uncle speaks very highly of you, casting her eyes upwards while she flicked one of her stubby plaits as if flipping long wavy hair. Esme Sullivan Hawke could be as charming as she wanted, but if she had the same blood running in her veins as the one-eyed man, she was nothing to Fang.
‘Will you both come with me?’ Esme said. She seemed to be fighting a smile and North wondered if she’d caught something of Fang’s gesture reflected in one of the shiny surfaces that surrounded them. ‘I’d like you to meet someone, and I don’t have much time.’
North had to hope that wasn’t true.