‘Ronan Cobb isn’t your real problem.’
‘I think I know my problems better than you do.’
‘Uh-uh. Ronan is muscle, that’s all. He does what he’s told.’
Scott didn’t like the sound of this.
‘Told by who?’
‘His mother.’
‘His mother?’
‘That’s right, man. Myra Cobb. She pulls all the strings in that family. Only reason you’re not dead already is that Myra will have decided she can squeeze something out of you first. And this scheme to rip me off tonight? That’s not Ronan. He doesn’t have the brains to come up with something like this, or the connections to make it happen. This is all Myra.’
Thoughts and fears swam through Scott’s head. Could this be right? He remembered his first encounter with Ronan at the flat, and how he had gone to the far side of the room to have a quiet telephone conversation before he came back to them with an ultimatum that seemed out of the blue. Had he been talking to his mother? Could all this really have been her doing?
He cursed himself. That call had bothered him since the beginning. Ronan had always talked in the singular, claiming that it was his money and that he was demanding its return. But the phone call left open the possibility that someone else was pulling the strings, or at least knew what was going on. Scott should have explored that further, should have factored it into his thinking, instead of burying his head in the sand and hoping it would go away.
‘So what are you saying?’ he asked.
‘I’m saying that if you’re going to kill Ronan, you’ll have to waste his mother too. If you don’t, she will come after you and she will hurt your family so badly they’ll be begging to die.’
Shit, he thought. Not now. After all I’ve been through, don’t tear my plans to shreds now.
Mentally, he felt fully prepared to kill Ronan. The man had pushed him to the edge of a cliff, leaving him with only one way out. He knew that the deal Ronan had offered him was worthless. He couldn’t be trusted. It was kill or be killed.
But the man’s mother?
He had no idea how to find her. And even if he could obtain that information, he didn’t think he had it within him to turn up at her house and murder her in cold blood. In recent days he had cast aside much of his morality out of sheer necessity, but he hadn’t yet shucked off all that made him human.
And yet . . .
Ronan would have told her everything. She would know his address, and if all that Barrington said about her was true, she would undoubtedly seek revenge.
Tick-tock.
He had to decide.
‘I’ll do it.’
This from Barrington.
Scott turned to him. ‘What?’
‘The mother. I’ll do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not a favour. It’s self-preservation. Myra’s already got me in her sights. If I help to kill the only son she’s got left and then run away with her money, it won’t matter where I go. Myra’s not the force she used to be, but she can still pull in some favours. After she’s finished playing with you and your family, she will hunt me down. Besides, even if she can’t cut it no more, she’ll be the only one alive who knows the truth about yours truly ending up with a lot of money that ain’t mine. Believe it or not, there are people who would kill me to get it back.’
The concern that refused to leave Scott’s face must have been obvious.
‘No other choice, man. Not if you want to protect your family. And personally, I want to be able to relax when I get to that beach villa.’
‘You know where she lives?’
‘Yeah. She’s got this farmhouse out in the sticks.’
Scott had no more time to debate the matter. He nodded at Barrington. It was something he’d have to come to terms with later.
‘You got a gun?’
Not so long ago, this would have felt like the weirdest of questions, but Scott had come to learn that, to the Cobbs and Daleys of this world, strapping on a firearm was as mundane as pulling on underwear.
‘Funnily enough, if you’d turned up here a few minutes later, I would have had it on me. I like to be prepared in case a pick-up goes wrong.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘You’re sitting on it.’
Scott stood up from the sofa and lifted the seat cushion. A black pistol stared back at him. He took it and said, ‘You’ve got two minutes to grab some things. Once we leave, it probably won’t be a good idea for you to come back here.’
Barrington pushed himself up from the floor. ‘Crazy thing is, I’d have signed up straight away if you’d told me all this in the first place. There was no need to get all violent and shit.’
Barrington had followed Scott in his own car, then parked up a good distance behind him to avoid being seen. Scott had left Barrington’s gun in his glove compartment for him to collect once he’d started up the path. It had crossed his mind once or twice that Barrington might close the gap, shoot him in the back, and then try to run off with the money before Ronan could get down there, but his fears had proved unfounded.
And now here they were, staring down at their second corpse of the evening.
