The Elephant Girl(97)
‘Who the hell do you think you are? You can’t just go bundling people into the back of bloody cars!’
‘Language, Miss Stephens, language,’ Derek Moody signalled to the man to shut the door.
Having done so, both goons slid into the front of the car, which was separated from the back by a glass screen, and the car pulled away from the kerb.
‘Where are we going?’ Helen demanded.
‘For a little drive.’
‘Where to? The river? Are you going to throw me in with something heavy around my legs?’
‘Such originality. Tut-tut.’
Helen sat back against the leather seat and crossed her arms. ‘Nice car,’ she sneered. ‘You’d better be careful you don’t get blood on the seats. I’ve heard it’s difficult to get out, and what a shame that would be.’
‘Thank you. It’s my favourite.’ A small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘For your information, I tend to do my bloodletting elsewhere. Forensics, and all that.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
He laughed suddenly, a hearty guffaw, which under different circumstances would have been contagious, but Helen had lost her sense of humour at the mention of bloodletting.
‘I have to hand it to you,’ he said, ‘you’re one in a million.’
‘You got that right.’
‘The thing is, my dear, I only want to talk to you.’
‘Oh, that’s what they call it,’ she retorted, emboldened by his laughter. ‘Attacking people in the street and bundling them into the back of a car? That’s a real conversation opener.’
He shrugged. ‘Sometimes people think they don’t want to talk to me so I need a little extra persuasion. I don’t like the word “no”.’
His expression returned to the glacial stare she remembered from her uncle’s dinner party. Not many people would dare say no to this man and live to tell the tale. Except perhaps his son.
Jason had rejected his father’s lifestyle and did what he believed in, helping others less fortunate than himself, despite the threat that his father could throw a spanner in the works at any time.
And Jason was her friend. At least she thought he was.
She stuck her chin out, the chin everyone said she’d inherited from her mother. ‘You wanted to talk to me, so talk.’
He was silent for a heartbeat or two, and she regretted her cockiness. ‘What are you up to?’ he asked.
‘What am I up to?’
‘I didn’t take you for an idiot. Please answer my question.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Derek Moody leaned closer, his nearness in itself threat enough. ‘Don’t insult me. I’ve been in business a long time. So has your uncle. Our paths occasionally cross, but mostly we respect each other’s territory. And then suddenly you pop up, in my son’s well-meaning but misguided little get-up of all places. Flaunting your assets, as it were, and what red-blooded young male could possibly resist?’
He looked her up and down, implying he’d have no trouble resisting any kind of temptation, least of all anything she had to offer, and Helen, who’d never flaunted anything in her entire life, felt her blood boil.
‘What does Stephanov want from me?’ he asked.
‘Nothing! It has nothing to do with him. I’ve only just met him.’
‘Well, of course you have, otherwise he’d have mentioned you before. He talks of nothing else now.’
‘Who? My uncle?’
‘My son,’ Moody replied.
‘Jason?’ Helen shook her head. ‘I’ve only just met both of them. A few weeks back. I knew I had an uncle, but I’d never met him before, and Jason … well, that was a complete coincidence.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences. Try again.’
‘But it’s true!’
The goon in the front passenger seat cranked his fat neck around and sent her a malevolent stare, but Moody shook his head, and the man turned back.
‘And this?’ Jason’s father produced a manila folder, which he laid across his knees. ‘Care to explain?’
An ordinary brown folder like a thousand others, but she knew without looking what was inside. The newspaper clippings covering her mother’s murder.
‘How did you get that?’ She’d moved it from under her mattress when everyone found out who she was. There seemed to be no point in hiding it any more.
‘Let’s just say, I borrowed it from your room.’
‘You stole it.’
‘Taking the moral high ground, are we? Like I said, I don’t believe in coincidences. That woman, Fay Cooper, lives under Jason’s roof, and you’—he jabbed a finger at her—‘are using my son as leverage to get closer to her. I want a full explanation, and it’d better be good.’