Джеймс Паттерсон: Revenge

So no, shock wasn’t exactly what he felt.

It helped explain her taking her own life suddenly. He doubted she would have been able to go home and admit her addiction to her parents. Guy was a good father, but he was the doting, overprotective sort, and probably not nearly as approachable as he liked to think. Susie? Shelley was sure Emma would have got a good hearing there, but even so, anything serious would likely have got back to Guy sooner or later.

“She obviously meant something to you,” said Claridge.

Shelley nodded. Yes, she did. But in that moment he was mainly thinking, Why, if she was a user, didn’t she just use smack to check out?

CHAPTER 6

TWO DAYS LATER, Shelley found himself in the living room of the home of a thirty-something actor in Berkshire, having completed the first phase of the one and only job on his books by safely delivering a supposedly top-secret script.

“So you’re the SAS man, are you?” the actor said, leading him into the house. He wore jeans and a tight T-shirt, his hair shaved in a number two or three. He stared hard at Shelley. “You don’t look much like an ex-SAS man.”

“And how do we normally look?” asked Shelley, feeling old and out of shape, and also thinking the guy was a weapons-grade arsehole.

“I don’t know,” laughed the actor, dropping onto a large sofa and propping bare feet on a glass coffee table before pulling the brown envelope onto his lap, “like Jason Statham, I suppose. You’re more stylish than I expected.” He pointed to Shelley’s boots. “Nice Red Wings, by the way.”

“Thank you.”

The actor cocked his head. “What’s that accent?”

“My accent?”

“Yes, what’s that? Where are you from, originally?”

Shelley shrugged. “Originally? Limehouse.”

“Limehouse in London?”

“Yeah, Limehouse in London.”

“Do you work out?”

“Not as much as I should,” said Shelley, thinking of that rarely used gym membership. “I stay mobile, that’s the important thing.”

“I stay mobile,” repeated the actor, trying to approximate Shelley’s rasping voice. “That’s the important thing. Limehouse. In Lahndahn . South of the river. Do you smoke?”

Oh, Christ, you’re a dick. “No, mate, no, I don’t.”

“You sound like you smoke.”

“Look, mate—” started Shelley, and then, belatedly, feeling like a man who’d only just understood the punch line to a bad joke, he realized why he had been asked to do this particular job. It wasn’t just a delivery for this guy. It was research. “Don’t tell me,” he sighed, “your script involves an ex-SAS man.”

Grinning, the actor gestured with the envelope. “I hope you haven’t had a peek.”

Typical. Guys like this thought the world revolved around them; they couldn’t imagine it any other way. “It was sealed,” said Shelley. “It’s still sealed. I didn’t look at your script. That’s your job. I’m just supposed to wait while you read it and then return it.”

He swiped the hat from his head and began to shed his woolen overcoat, indicating an armchair, all black leather and steel tubes, the kind that was popular in the 1970s but must have come back into style. “If it’s all right with you I’ll take a seat while you get on with it.”

“ Mi casa su casa ,” quipped the actor, and Shelley sat down in order to wait.

He was sitting watching the actor—who read his script while at the same time being supremely aware of Shelley’s presence, as though the process of reading the script was in itself a performance—when his phone buzzed. Claridge. Shelley excused himself and moved out of the living room to a quiet corner of the house.

“Good to see you the other day,” the MI5 man said. “I hope I was of some use.”

“I guess,” said Shelley, who still hadn’t decided what, if anything, he planned to do with the information he’d been given. It was like some bad movie tagline: he’d gone to Claridge in search of answers but all he’d got were more questions.

“Something else has cropped up since we spoke,” said Claridge. “I left a flag on the file and an old friend got in touch to let me know there’s been a development. Two developments, to be exact.”

“Fire away.”

“Well, the first thing is that you’re not the only one who’s been making inquiries about the death of Emma Drake. Don’t ask me who, I don’t have names. All I know is that, according to my contact, interest has been shown by party or parties unknown.”

Bennett, perhaps? thought Shelley. Was that it? Was Bennett doing investigative work for Drake? Could be, although an ex-Para wasn’t the first person you’d call on to do some detective work. Not unless there were other, related, duties you wanted performed.

“Right. I see. And this third party, are they being supplied with information?”

“That I couldn’t possibly say with any degree of authority. Ask me what I think, however, and I’d say yes, because . . . well, why not?”

“Okay. Well, thanks for that. And what’s the other thing?”

“The cops are working on a theory,” said Claridge. “Not that she was murdered. As far as they’re concerned it’s beyond doubt that she killed herself. But they seem pretty sure that the body was moved to the Clapham hostel. And if that is the case, then the body was moved complete with bedsheets. Wherever she killed herself, it was also on a bed. But not, they think, in that hostel.”

“I see,” said Shelley.

“One final thing, about the gun. It only had one bullet in it.”

“What, like one round remaining?”

“No,” said Claridge, “what I mean is that she only ever used one bullet. The bullet that killed her.”

“So she only loaded one bullet?”

“Exactly. But the odd thing is that there were no other bullets recovered. It seems that she bought a gun and one bullet. Or she bought a gun and several bullets but discarded all but one.”

Shelley considered. “Maybe she didn’t want them falling into the wrong hands.”

They fell into silence, knowing it was an implausible scenario. Shelley filed it away for later use.

“That twitching antenna of yours, what’s it doing now?” asked Claridge.

Shelley swerved that particular question. But he decided that the Drakes’ home in Ascot wasn’t too far away, and while he was in the area he might as well pay Guy Drake a visit.

CHAPTER 7

AS HE DROVE—ELVIS on the stereo—Shelley thought about the man he was on his way to see.

Guy Drake had launched Drake Electronics in 1980, when microchips were still making the journey from science fiction to everyday mundanity. It was because of entrepreneurs like Drake that chips dropped in price and became smaller. And then, as a result of their size and availability, came to be used in every gadget in every room in every house in the developed world.

But where Drake had prospered more than others was in spotting the military applications for this new, smaller, and less expensive microchip and being quicker to offer them for sale to the British Army. That had made him very rich, very quickly.

What’s more, Guy Drake had a great backstory. He’d been laid off from an engineering job in Salford, Lancashire, “victim of the bastard Tories,” he liked to say. But instead of retiring to the nearest pub and drowning his woes in cheap bitter, he’d used his redundancy payment to launch his new enterprise. What had previously been a spare-bedroom hobby had become Drake Electronics.

With his success had come a taste for publicity. Credit to him, it was usually for the right reasons. He donated to charity and he cultivated a reputation as a generous employer, often treating his staff to lavish parties—even, on one well-reported occasion, a holiday, en masse, for all his employees and their families.