‘Is it about the Pride of Maine?’

‘Among other things.’

She nodded carefully. ‘What happened with Lemon’s bolt?’

They’d called it that between themselves. A small private joke that now just bit into him, like salt in a paper cut.

‘I had my boss check it out. It was damaged before the engine let go. Looks like there was play in the fan disc. Maybe a fault in the actual alloy made it loosen round the bolts and start to move. I don’t know.’

‘Is that why, the night of the fire, they took the paperwork on it from Pam’s car?’

‘No doubt.’

‘Where’s the bolt now?’

Tom hesitated again. Now, the gift of his only bargaining chip to his arch rival seemed the height of stupidity. ‘I gave it to Lenny Munro.’

‘The other investigator?’ Ness couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘The one who wanted you fired?’

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled. He gave her a hang-dog look. ‘Please tell me you weren’t sleeping with me for my brains.’

She laughed then and kissed the side of his mouth. ‘No,’ she said huskily, ‘not for your brains.’

Her hand slid down his stomach and into his jeans. He turned and kissed her, his own hands finding their way under her T-shirt and across her hot nipples, feeling her breath thickening in his mouth, as his was in hers. He nearly passed a smart comment about her devotion to Richard, then surprised himself by thinking better of it. He pushed her down on the leather and forced his knee between her legs, pushing himself into her hip as he slid her skirt up her smooth thighs.

‘Why?’

‘Uh?’

She turned her head away from his lips. ‘Why did you give it to him?’

Tom took a moment to refocus. ‘What?’

‘Why did you give Munro the bolt?’

‘Cos I’m stupid.’ He ducked his head to suck the nipple he’d just exposed – but she held his head off her.

‘I’m serious.’

He saw that she wasn’t going to shut up about it. ‘Because he’s investigating the Oklahoma crash. The site’s a nightmare and I thought he could use the help. I wasn’t doing anything with the bolt except trying to buy my way back in. He needed it to maybe find probable cause.’

She stared at him, assimilating the information.

‘If you’re quite finished, can I suck your nipples now?’

She smiled but he could see she was still distracted. What the hell. He decided to just get on with it and let her catch up, so he dipped his head to her breasts once more, feeling the dizzying air of unreality that this woman – this beautiful, perfect woman – was letting him do this to her. The thought made him groan and press himself against her more firmly, feeling the heat build in him. He needed her naked – and fast. He started to drag her panties down her hips.

‘Tom,’ she said.

Jesus! Did she never shut up?

‘What?’ he muttered breathlessly.

‘Ask him to speak to your boss.’

‘What?’ He didn’t understand what she was saying. Ask who? What boss?

‘Lenny Munro. You gave him the bolt. You helped him. Now maybe he’ll help you get your job back.’

Tom actually laughed in her face.

Then he got off the couch with a sigh, went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

*

The flight back to Irving was a bumpy one. Tom tried not to grip the armrests but by the time they landed, on what felt like wagon wheels, he was queasy and already drained by his second trip to Texas in a week.

32

NICHOLAS NICHOLAS WAS a hero, but he didn’t feel like one. The memory of finding that girl – that poor girl – had leached every ounce of pleasure out of the high regard in which he was suddenly held at home and at work.

He’d been offered a month off with counselling – more for insurance purposes than sympathy, he was sure – but he’d turned both down because if his mother ever found out he was seeing a shrink she’d consider that bringing up six children alone, steering them around crime and into worthwhile employment, plus helping to raise eleven grandkids so far would all have been a terrible waste: one of them had turned out crazy anyway.

Nicholas grinned at the thought, then sighed. People at work knew him now. He was no longer just a uniform in a booth as they passed. People said hello. Smiled. Gave him cheerful waves. That was good in one way, of course, but in another every hello, every smile, every wave was a reminder of why he was suddenly somebody. And he didn’t want reminders: all he wanted was to do his job and forget Annette Lim’s face, caved in like an empty rubber mask; Chuck Zhong’s vomit-flecked lips under his; the boyfriend howling like a giant toddler in the parking lot …

Nicholas shook himself out of that night and back into this one.

The new guy seemed okay: Raoul Estanza, ‘but you can call me Rollo’. Nicholas didn’t know whether this was because Estanza liked the name Rollo or because he’d had ‘Raoul’ mispronounced so often that he’d given up on his own identity.

Nicholas liked his own name. It had something about it. A bald man in a bow tie had once told him it was a ‘slave name’ but Nicholas had no truck with that, and he’d like to see the emphatic little man try that line on his mother and see how far he got.

Jeff came back from the can, wiping his hands on his pants.

Nicholas didn’t like Jeff. He didn’t know why, but he suspected something was going on. He’d occasionally watched Chuck make the rounds on the monitors – only because it was mildly more interesting than watching dark, empty rooms – and there had never been anything too weird about them. Once he’d seen Chuck take something off a desk in the engineering office and throw it in the trash.

Then, a week after Nicholas had started, Jeff had started making the rounds too. Nicholas hadn’t been at WAE long enough to know whether that was usual. But what he did know was that one night, when Chuck and Jeff were both making the rounds (although they’d left at different times), he’d idly hit the button for the engineering-office camera and found it blocked. Not dead, but blocked by something not 100 per cent opaque; light filtered through, but nothing as defined as even blurred shapes was visible. Nicholas had slapped the monitor and run through other cameras on it. Everything else seemed to be working fine: it wasn’t the monitor. And when he rolled back round to the engineering-office camera again, there it was, gloomy and dark without light enough now to filter through a fishing net, let alone anything else.

So someone had been in there, and someone had covered the camera.

Why, Nicholas Nicholas could not even hazard a guess. But he did notice that while Jeff carried on being his usual domineering dickwad self, Chuck Zhong – who made dim sum to die for – started to look wary, fretful and thin.

He didn’t know either of them that well, and did make one clumsy move with a poorly judged crack about AIDS that almost had Chuck snapping his head off. It was only then that Nicholas really considered whether Chuck and Jeff were … What would you call it? Lovers? That sounded far too normal and okay-by-God to be right, but that was the word he settled on.

And immediately shied away from and tried never to think of again.

After that, whenever he was alone in the booth, he switched off the camera in Engineering. If that kind of thing was going on in there, he didn’t want to know about it.

Which was why there was no recording of Chuck Zhong killing Annette Lim, for which Nicholas was grateful, even though the cops had been incandescent with frustrated rage.