“If it had pierced the fuselage, the cabin could have depressurized and you could all have died,” says Amy. Amy had once parachuted out of a plane after exactly such an incident. She had spent the next five days evading rebel forces in Burkina Faso. Actually a lot of fun in the end. Amy finds adrenaline good for the soul, and very good for the skin. Sometimes she watches skincare tutorials on Instagram, but there’s not a single one that will do for your skin what being shot at and then jumping out of a plane will do. Perhaps she should do her own videos? Again, she finds that she is thinking, and so she stops.
“Lucky it didn’t, then,” says Rosie, knocking back the rest of whatever goop is sitting in her glass. “I’m getting itchy feet, Amy. Can’t we go somewhere on the mainland? Have a drink? Raise a bit of hell?”
Rosie’s troubles had started when she had included a character in her most recent novel, Dead Men & Diamonds, very clearly based on a Russian chemicals oligarch named Vasiliy Karpin. Vasiliy, it seemed, had lacked the sense of humor one usually associates with chemicals billionaires, and, after a bullet in the post and a botched abduction at a Nashville book signing, Rosie had called in the professionals, and was confined to barracks for the foreseeable future.
People are talking to people. Jeff Nolan, Amy’s boss, has reached out to some of Vasiliy’s colleagues in London. Conversations are ongoing. Vasiliy will be persuaded to drop this particular vendetta soon enough. Maximum Impact Solutions has clients who could do him a few favors. An accommodation will be found, Vasiliy will be placated, and Rosie will be free to go about her business again. And, if not, Amy will be ready.
Until then, Amy and Rosie are stuck on this idyllic island, with their hastily trained executive chef. Amy could definitely use a few days here, probably needs the rest if she’s being honest, but she’ll have to be back on the move soon. No one is going to kill Rosie D’Antonio, so Amy is essentially just a very expensive babysitter. And where’s the fun in that for either of them?
“We’re going nowhere for the moment,” says Amy. “You might get murdered.”
Rosie rolls her eyes and starts to roll another joint. “Oh, Amy, I’d rather be murdered than bored.”
And on that point, Amy Wheeler, who spent so much of her childhood trying to be as quiet and as small as possible, is inclined to agree.
3
“Cat, ginger, unapproachable. Haughty even, the little bugger. Mason’s Lane. Contact attempted but rebuffed. 3:58 a.m.”
Steve puts his Dictaphone back in his pocket. He hears the sound of the ginger cat inexpertly scaling a back fence. It was not often he saw an unfamiliar cat on his walk. It was almost certainly nothing, but almost everything was almost certainly nothing, wasn’t it? And yet some things did eventually turn out to be something. He once caught an armed robber because of a Twix wrapper in a blast furnace. One rarely knows the significance of things at the time, and it doesn’t cost a penny piece to note things down.
Steve turns left on to the top of the High Street, and sees it stretch out like an unspooling gray ribbon before him, lit by the dim bulb of the moon.
If you were to visit Axley—and you should, you’d like it—you might think you had found the perfect English village. A gently sloping high street, looping around a touch at the bottom where it skirts the bank of the village pond. There are two pubs, The Brass Monkey and The Flagon, identical to the tourists but teeming with subtle and important differences to the locals. For example, one flies a Union Jack and the other the Ukrainian flag. There’s a butcher, a baker. No candlestick maker, but you will find a little gift shop selling scented candles and bookmarks. Striped awnings, bicycles leaned against shop fronts, chalkboards promising cream teas or tarot readings or dog treats. There is a church at the top of the village, and a small bookmaker at the bottom of the village, take your pick. Steve used to visit both, and now visits neither.
And, all around, there is the New Forest. The forest is the whole point of the place. The village itself simply found itself a small clearing and settled in. There are walks and trails, the chirrup and buzz of wildlife, and the backpacks and rain macs of the tourists. Stray New Forest ponies some days wander on to the main road and are accorded due reverence. It was their forest long before it was yours, and it will be theirs long afterward too. Axley simply shelters among the trees, curled into a little nutshell.
When Steve first moved here—twelve years ago, was it? Something like that, Debbie would remember, probably fifteen the way time goes—it hadn’t fooled him for a second. Steve hadn’t been hoodwinked by the hollyhocks and the cupcakes and the cheery “Good morning” greetings. Steve had seen secrets behind every pastel front door, seen corpses in every back alley, and every time the church bells rang in the hour, Steve had heard the chimes of death.
A crisp packet has blown into a hedge. Steve retrieves it and places it in a bin. Monster Munch. They don’t sell Monster Munch in the local shop, so that will have been a tourist.
No, Steve had refused to be fooled by Axley. Twenty-five years in the police force had taught him to always think the worst of everyone, and everything. Always expect the worst, and you’ll always be prepared. Never let anyone, or anything, take you by surprise.
Ironic, given what soon happened.
Steve stops by the window of the estate agent and peers through the glass. If he was moving to the village today, he wouldn’t be able to afford it. The only way anyone can afford to buy a house these days is to have bought it fifteen years ago.
Steve had been wrong about Axley—he’d be the first to admit it. There were no murderers lurking behind the doors, no mutilated corpses in blood-soaked alleys. And, thus, Steve had begun to relax.
Steve had never relaxed as a child; his dad had made sure of that. School? Too bright to fit in but not bright enough to get out. Then joining the Metropolitan Police at the age of eighteen, seeing the worst that London had to offer, day after day. Sometimes this included his own colleagues. Every day a fight.
Steve takes out his Dictaphone once more. “Pale-blue Volkswagen Passat, registration number PN17 DFQ, in car park of The Brass Monkey.” Steve walks around the car. “An ancient tax disc.” There is the wrapper from a Greggs in the footwell. Where is the nearest Greggs? Southampton? The services on the M27?
He resumes his walk. He will go as far as the pond, sit there for a while, then head back up. Of course he will—that’s what Steve does every night.
Axley had transformed Steve. Not all at once, but, smile by smile, favor by favor, and scone by scone, the people and the place had taken down the wall that he had built up over so many years. Debbie had told him it would, and he hadn’t believed her. She had been born here, and, when Steve finally left the Met, she had persuaded him to make the move. She knew.
Steve had worried there would be no excitement, no adrenaline, but Debbie had reassured him. “If you get bored, we’re only twenty miles from Southampton, and there are plenty of murders there.”
But Steve didn’t miss the excitement, and he didn’t miss the adrenaline.
Steve liked to stay in; he liked to cook for Debbie; he liked to hear birdsong; he found himself a solid pub-quiz team. Good but improvable.
A stray cat, a proper bruiser, came to visit them and refused to leave. After a week or two of snarling and bullying, from both Steve and the cat, they each let down their guard. And now you’ll find Steve, reading his paper in an old armchair, Trouble curled up on his lap, purring in his sleep. Two old rascals, safe and sound.
Debbie persuaded him to set up his agency. He was happy not working—she was bringing in enough money from painting—but she was right. He probably needed something to do, and probably needed to contribute something to the community. The name of his agency, “Steve Investigates,” was his idea. He remembers a Sunday lunch when his boy, Adam, had come round with his wife, Amy. Amy is a bodyguard, works with billionaires and oligarchs, always on the other side of the world. Adam does something or other with money. Steve speaks to Amy more than he speaks to Adam. She’s the one who rings; she’s the one who makes sure they visit if she’s in England on a job.
Amy had told him to call the company “Maverick Steel International Investigations.” Branding is very important in the world of private investigations, she had said, but Steve had countered that his name was Steve, and he investigates things, and if that wasn’t a brand, what was?
Amy is working with Rosie D’Antonio, the author, somewhere or other in America. Steve will play it cool when he next talks to Amy, but he will want all the gossip. There’s always gossip when she’s protecting celebrities. Once Amy was working with a singer in a boy band, and he took heroin on an elephant.
“Google America time difference,” says Steve into his Dictaphone.
Steve Investigates keeps him pleasantly busy and adequately afloat. He has a few contacts with insurance companies. If you’ve ever claimed a year’s salary because of a bad back anywhere in the New Forest, Steve has probably sat outside your house at some point, perhaps followed you to the gym. It makes Steve happy to find that people are almost always telling the truth about these things. He’ll look into affairs if you really, really want him to. His only rule is that he won’t travel any distance. Steve doesn’t want to stray too far from Axley. He’ll drive up to Brockenhurst if you need him to, couple of nice pubs up there. At a push he’ll head over toward Ringwood or down toward Lymington, but ask him to go to Southampton, or Portsmouth, and Steve will politely decline.
Get yourself involved in a murder case, say, and before you know it your time is not your own. Steve never misses the Wednesday-night quiz at The Brass Monkey now. A murder would almost certainly get in the way of that at some point. No thank you.
Steve reaches the pond and takes his customary seat. Debbie’s favorite. The ducks love this bench, but they are all safely asleep now, tucked up, like the rest of the village, Steve keeping watch over them all. Least he can do after everything Axley has done for him.
Steve still remembers that feeling of relaxation, of finally letting life settle around him. Of trusting that people wished him well, and that each day would bring happiness. Of feeling safe. It didn’t work out that way, of course. When does it?
In one sense, Debbie’s death hadn’t taken him by surprise. He’d mentally prepared for it every day since they’d fallen in love. That something would surely take her away. Cancer, heart disease, a car hitting her bike on a country road, a stroke, burglars. Something would steal his immense good luck at loving her, and being loved by her.
In the end it had been a train carriage that derailed as it approached a country station. There had been three people on the platform: Debbie and two other poor souls, who left their lives behind that rainy January day.
And, despite his assiduous preparation, it had taken him by surprise. You can think something often enough, but you will never be prepared for your heart disintegrating.
After Debbie’s death the village gathered around him, carried him through. Walking through this village, where he knows everyone and everyone knows him, Steve is grateful that at least he feels loved. Because if you don’t feel loved, it’s difficult to feel anything at all.
