I am not worried about Amy Wheeler—please don’t think that—but I admit that I shall sleep a little easier when she is dead. I must get on to that. I shall talk to my man soonest.
Tally-ho!
9
“Eaten by a shark,” says Rosie D’Antonio, throwing a towel over her shoulder and heading for the sauna. “Probably already dead, though, so that would have taken the edge off.”
“Yes,” agrees Amy, and watches her client go. While Rosie had been reading out the news report, Amy had kept a straight face, not a flicker of emotion. But from the moment Rosie mentioned the name “Andrew Fairbanks” and said he was an “influencer,” Amy knew she was in trouble. She opens her laptop and heads straight for the same report.
There he is. Andrew Fairbanks. Smiling his final smile. He must have died fifty miles or so from where she’s sitting right now. A painless death if the bullet had killed him. A horrible one if it hadn’t. She checks one final detail online. As she suspected: Andrew Fairbanks had been a client of Maximum Impact Solutions.
Something was most definitely up, and Amy was at the heart of it. She messages Jeff Nolan immediately.
Andrew Fairbanks. Am nearby. Advise.
Jeff recruited her personally, ten years ago now. She was the receptionist at a gym in the City. “Concierge,” they called her, but Amy didn’t think concierges spent as much time as she did unblocking toilets. It’s where she had met Adam. She caught him trying to steal one of the towels, and soon they were in love.
A fight had broken out one day in the gym. Two steroid-crazed bankers, huge men both, started hammering each other with free weights. Amy had run into the gym, disarmed one of the men, and tackled him to the ground, while a series of young men in singlets pretended they had been about to rush forward to help her. Meanwhile, another, older, utterly harmless-looking gym member had somehow got the other monster in a choke hold. She knew the older man as Jeff, as he was always forgetting his locker key. When the police arrived to take the two meatheads into custody—good luck, officers—she had asked Jeff if he was okay, and whether he might like a complimentary glass of elderflower tonic. Jeff had replied that he was quite all right, thank you, all in a day’s work, and wondered if Amy might like a job?
There is a message on her phone. Jeff.
We need to talk.
You’re telling me, thinks Amy.
The day after the fight at the gym, she’d had an interview in a suite on the eightieth floor of a nearby iconic office building, which she has since learned never to mention for reasons of security. After she passed through a series of electronic doors, there stood Jeff Nolan, looking very different in a suit. Jeff proceeded to test her computer skills, and then asked her to punch him as hard as she could. Amy had always been strong and fast, always known where her body was and what it could do if she asked it. She could lift, she could hit, she could pivot, she could glide. Her computer skills were very poor, but Jeff, getting up from the floor after she had hit him, told her they could soon teach her those, and offered her a job on the spot.
“Self-protection” had been a lifelong necessity for Amy, so the idea of protecting others seemed a natural fit.
Jeff then made her do a “Psychopath Test” of his own devising, and was delighted to see she scored eighty out of a hundred. Seventy-five was the cut-off point for Jeff: anything under that and you could be certain a new recruit would be “too emotional.” Jeff himself had scored ninety-six, a number matched by only one other person, whose identity remained a secret but who was widely supposed to be Henk.
And now Jeff Nolan, a man provably lacking in gentle, emotional intelligence, “needs to talk.” Anytime an ex-boyfriend had “needed to talk” Amy had gone for a long run, deleted his contact from her phone, and moved on. Lots of people “need to talk,” but Amy is not one of them. And neither is Jeff Nolan.
Jeff must know what Amy knows. They haven’t spoken about Bella Sanchez or Mark Gooch. The coincidence. But now they will surely have to? Andrew Fairbanks too? It’s too much.
What will Jeff do? Will he give her some benefit of the doubt? Let her plead her case? She messages Jeff again.
I know what you’re thinking. You have to trust me.
Amy looks out across the ocean to the mainland: the beautiful South Carolina shoreline, framed with oaks and cypresses, huge magnolia trees covered in moss, greens and whites and blues.
Amy needs to talk through everything that has happened with someone. To spell out the facts of the last few months. Would anyone understand?
Who can Amy trust right now, thousands of miles from home? She hears Rosie approach, flip-flops slapping on stone.
“Are we allowed to ask someone to come out to fix the sauna? I don’t ask for much in this world, but two days without a sauna and I’ll kill you and I’ll kill Kevin and then I’ll swim to the mainland.”
“I’ll do it myself,” says Amy. “I’ll watch a YouTube video. May I ask you about something?”
“You can ask me anything,” says Rosie. “Ex-husbands, rehab, Burt Reynolds, I’m an open book.”
“I might be in trouble,” says Amy. “And I don’t know if there’s a way through it.”
“There’s always a way through trouble,” says Rosie. “Often into more trouble, but at least it’s different trouble. You fix my sauna, and I’ll fix your problem.”
Rosie pulls up a sun lounger and, as a mark of respect, sits on it, rather than lying down. She pours herself a large gin and tonic.
“May I have one too?” Amy asks. “D’you mind?”
“Finally!” says Rosie, unscrewing the cap once again. “I thought you never drank when you’re on duty?”
“They don’t test us for alcohol, only drugs,” says Amy. “And I suspect I may no longer be on duty.”
“Oh?” says Rosie.
“Oh,” says Amy. “Let me tell you a story.”
10
It’s the same crowd in The Brass Monkey most lunchtimes and this Friday is no different. The widowers, the divorcées, and the lushes. Each has their own area of expertise. Steve himself (widower) is asked all the legal stuff; John Todd (lush), who used to work on the Southampton Mercury, gets asked the show business gossip; the mechanic Tony Taylor (long-term divorcé, long-term lush) takes care of all the car problems, occasionally branching out into microwave and coffee-machine repairs; and Dr. Jyoti Das (widow, alcohol tolerance building steadily) fields all and any medical questions, despite the fact she’s a doctor of medieval history.
In the pub across the road, The Flagon, a similar, but by all accounts inferior, grouping can be found. Steve is very much the star man in The Brass Monkey, and occasionally there are entreaties from The Flagon as to whether he might be tempted across the street at some point. But Steve is loyal, Steve is steadfast, and, currently, Steve is having trouble with the clutch on his Vauxhall Corsa, something that Tony Taylor might be able to fix, so he is a Brass Monkey man through and through.
“That’s what killed him, the shark?” asks Tony.
“Probably the bullet,” says Steve. “The shark was attracted by the blood.”
“You wouldn’t want to be eaten by a shark,” says John. “I was stung by a jellyfish once in Portugal, and it hurt like hell.”
