‘Piss off,’ she replies.
‘Ah, now I know you like me,’ says Hossein. ‘English people only tell their friends to piss off. It’s a cultural rule.’
He stops on the corner of Beulah Grove and takes the bag off his shoulder. Holds it out to her. ‘Okay,’ he says, and there’s a sweet twinkle in his eyes. ‘Have a nice day.’
‘Aren’t you coming home?’
‘Oh, no. I was going to the station.’
She gawps. ‘You…?’
‘Oh, hush,’ says Hossein, and lopes off up Bracken Gardens.
She stands on the corner and watches him go, feels odd emotions course through her. Confusion, pleasure. And then fear. She’s had three years of avoiding involvements. I mustn’t, she thinks. He turns on the far corner and gives her a wave, and she’s waved back before she’s thought about it. He’s lovely, she thinks as she crosses the road and climbs the steps of number twenty-three, but I mustn’t. I can’t afford friends, and I can’t afford lovers. Not when I might have to go at a minute’s notice. It’s bad enough when you’re alone, but if there are people to leave…
Her phone rings in her bag. She gets it out and looks at it, surprised. She’s only given the new number to the care home. No one else knows it. No one. It’s a withheld number. It must be Sunnyvale. She picks up as she comes in to the hall.
It’s a woman. ‘Lisa?’
She almost says yes, but something stops her. The fact that she’s called her by her first name – and not just her first name, but her nickname. She’s always been an Elizabeth in all her dealings with Sunnyvale, and they’re quite scrupulous about calling her Ms Dunne; some gesture of respect to the bill-payer. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘you’ve got the wrong number.’
She’s about to hang up when the woman says: ‘Lisa, it’s Merri here. Merri Cheyne. Please don’t hang up.’
Collette’s heart jolts. She thinks about doing it anyway, for a second. Then thinks: she’ll just call again. She’s found me already and she knows it’s me. I’m not going to put her off by not talking to her. ‘Detective Inspector Cheyne,’ she says. ‘How did you get this number?’
She uses the rank with a faint note of insult attached, to emphasise the distance, walks up the corridor, clutching the phone so hard that the tips of her fingers go white.
She hears that her tone has hit home, for the voice that replies is changed, more formal, less pally. ‘We’re better at this stuff than you seem to think, Lisa. We’ve known you were back in the country since you caught the Santander ferry. Computers don’t just go to plugs in the wall, these days.’
She unlocks the mortise on the door to her room, turns the Yale, throws the door wide and checks the interior before she enters, as she always does. It’s stuffy and hot and smells of the washing-up she didn’t bother to do last night, but it’s empty. She steps inside, closes and locks the door, shoots the bolt and throws open the window.
‘So what do you want?’
She doesn’t really know why she’s bothered to ask, because she already knows the answer. The calls from DI Cheyne began just weeks after she ran from the club.
‘Same as I ever wanted, Lisa. You know that. I just wanted to reiterate our offer.’
‘No, thanks,’ she says.
‘Think about it, Lisa,’ says Merri. ‘It’s really your best choice.’
‘It really isn’t,’ she says bitterly. ‘Thanks all the same.’
‘Well, you may think that…’
‘I know that,’ she snaps.
A sigh. ‘Okay. Well, look, just so you know, the offer’s still open. We still want you as a witness. We’ll still protect you and you can sort this whole thing out, now. Tell us where you are, and I can come and pick you up and put you somewhere safe in the time it takes you to pack. Get Tony Stott behind bars and your problems are over.’
They don’t know where she is. That’s one hit in her favour. ‘You know that’s not true,’ she says. ‘They’ll never be over. Tony doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They’ll always be after me.’
Merri laughs, and the laugh has a nasty edge. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Lisa, but they’re after you now.’
Collette gasps.
The policewoman carries on, presses her point home, ‘And Lisa? Remember. We have plenty enough evidence to prosecute you too, you know. It doesn’t look good, from where I’m standing; we know Stott’s using that place to launder money, and when we bring him down, every single person who handled money in that place will be going down with him. So then it won’t just be Tony Stott who’s looking for you. It’ll be Interpol, too. Your shout, Lisa.’