The Losing Game (27 page)

“I know. But she loved you too. She told me it was harder for her to leave you than it was to leave your father.”

Dante hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t known. It had never occurred to him.

“She left me money too,” Dante said. “More than I expected. And some jewelry that I can pass on to Lois, and Kit if she wants it.” Dante smiled. “Then there is that Le Creuset dish.”

“Didn’t she have a set?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, Lucas. Seriously. I have everything I need.” That was another thing that hadn’t occurred to Dante until he’d said it. At this very moment in time, he had not just everything he needed, but everything he wanted.

Dante helped Lucas empty the fridge and the bin. They bagged his dirty laundry and packed clean clothes. Lucas also added his laptop, his espresso pot, and the remainder of a bag of coffee beans to the holdall.

While they worked, Dante kept an intermittent eye on the street. Stood to the side of the living room window, he peered between the slats of the blinds, trying to see inside the few parked cars and over the garden walls belonging to Lucas’s neighbors. Nothing was awry.

They were readying to leave—Dante was on the front doorstep, about to put the rubbish in the outside bin—when a lady about Lucas’s age came up the front path.

“Hello. Is Lucas home?”

“Yes.” Dante leaned into the hallway, where Lucas was sifting through his post. “Lucas, you have a visitor.”

Lucas poked his head out of the door and brightened immediately. “Geetha!”

“Oh, you poor thing.” She sidled past Dante and straight into the house. “You were on the local news. Otherwise, I never would have known. Isn’t that terrible? My own neighbor.” She handed Lucas a card and a box of chocolates. “I was going to visit you in the hospital today, but when I called last night, they said you’d already come home. Is there anything I can do?”

Lucas looked at Geetha fondly. “Actually, I’m going to stay with my friend for a few days, until I get more strength back in my arm. But thank you for offering.”

“I can keep an eye on the place for you, if you like. Put your bin inside after the collection.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind.”

Geetha eyed the holdall and Dante stuffing the rubbish into the outside bin. “You were about to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Please come and visit us once you’re home. The children finish school in a week, and Dev has time off work. I’ll make you pani puri.”

“Then it’s a date.”

After she’d gone, Dante opened the envelope she’d given to Lucas. The card inside was homemade—a fiesta of brightly colored felt-tip and glitter, and Get Well Soon printed in pink. Inside, someone else, an older sibling maybe, had neatly written in labored cursive best wishes for Lucas’s speedy recovery. Lucas stared at it for a long time.

“Her daughter Shaili made it. She’s six.”

Dante remembered receiving similar cards, for his birthday, for Father’s Day, and at Christmas. Lois and Kit had been older, and their creations less flamboyant but no less heartfelt. A sudden rush of emotion brought a startling tear to Dante’s eye.

“It’s very cute. Do you buy the family gifts? We can do some Christmas shopping this weekend, if you like.”

“I don’t usually. They don’t celebrate Christmas. But this year, I think I’d like to get the children something anyway.” Lucas slipped the card into his messenger bag, beside his laptop. “They’re nice people.”

“She seemed so.”

Lucas took his blue peacoat from the coat peg in the hall. He was still thinner than Dante would have liked to see him. He had to be feeling the deepening December cold. If they were going to be strolling the shops…. It pained Dante to mention it, but sometimes practicality had to bear out over fashion. “You have a warmer coat? A sheepskin?”

Lucas looked at him askance. “That monstrosity? I got rid of it.”

“Oh. Shame.”

“Liar. You hated it.”

He was about to protest, but Lucas laughed, and he couldn’t help but follow.

Dante scanned the house one last time, secured all the windows and doors, and loaded the car. By the time they left, he only had an hour before he was due to meet Thierry.

Lucas was happy to be left to his own devices. Kit would pick them up lunch from Jim’s, and if Lucas felt like it, he’d have a look around the shop. He also had to make calls to his employer and update his friends on his well-being.

“Do you think your friend will tell you anything?” Lucas looked at home with his feet up on the office sofa, but there was no disguising his worry.

“If he knows anything, he will.”

Lucas wriggled his arm out of the sling with a slight wince. The effort it took him to flex his wrist and fingers showed in his grimace as he said, “Do you think he’ll suspect you of being involved?”

“He shouldn’t. He’s known me for ten years. Ten clean years.”

Despite the residual pain and the continuing lack of strength and mobility in his arm, Lucas looked several shades healthier than he had when he’d arrived at Dante’s house last night. He couldn’t feel temperature or pain in his left arm yet but could feel pressure. The scar on his shoulder was pink and dry, and if last night was anything to go by, he was sleeping soundly. Dante didn’t want to leave him, but he knew Lucas was safe.

Lucas was in Dante’s home, safe and sound.

It was strange and wonderful and more so when Lucas said, to Dante of all people, “Be careful.”

“It’s only lunch.”

“I know, but still….” Lucas stood, strode across the room, and pulled Dante into a one-armed hug. “I’ll see you later.”

Dante walked to Roseport Quay and arrived twenty minutes early. Thierry was already seated on a bench outside the Mariner’s Café, a scarf wrapped around his neck and a gray trilby on his head. He stood when he saw Dante skirting the marina.

“Do you mind if we walk first? Cecile says I’m getting fat.”

“I thought she liked your paunch.”

Thierry made a disgruntled noise. “I don’t know why you only use your charm on her. I wouldn’t mind it, too, you know?”

“I’m sorry. You look well. I thought you’d lost weight.”

Thierry rolled his eyes and muttered something in French that definitely included a line about Dante talking
merde.
Dante was pleased to catch him in good humor. They set off at a leisurely pace, in the direction of the dockyard, away from the lunchtime crowd and Christmas shoppers.

As soon as the path ahead was clear and quiet, Thierry said, “What do you need, Dante?”

“Information, if you have it. If you can give it to me.”

“What information?”

They’d never been down this road before. Dante was overstepping the bounds of their friendship simply by asking.

“I’ve been seeing someone. A man called Lucas Green.”

Thierry didn’t break his stride. “Lucas Green, who was shot in Milton?”

“Yes. You know about him?”

“I know you visited him in the hospital and that he was with you the night he was shot.”

Dante’s heart exploded into a gallop. What else did Thierry know? Would he tell him, if Dante asked? Dante braced himself against a gust of wind and the possibility that since the weekend he had unwittingly been under surveillance—until he remembered the police statement that Lucas made on his first day in the hospital. Still, thank goodness he hadn’t been near Shaw.

“You never said anything.”

“It wasn’t my place. But since you’ve brought it up….” Thierry took out his handset, and Dante nodded his consent to record their conversation. Thierry motioned to one of the abandoned lookout shelters on the dock, and they took a seat out of the wind, overlooking the water.

“There are, on average, three shootings a year on this island,” Thierry said. “It might be down to the plain clothes to investigate, but nevertheless, if someone gets shot, I make it my business to know everything about it. Is there something you want to tell me?”

Dante looked out to the horizon and a mammoth cruise ship sailing out into the Channel. “Nothing that will help. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something.”

“You first.”

“We were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. A lady called Avery Lister. I wasn’t sure about him at first. You know me. I’ve got used to being on my own, and Lucas seemed too young. But then Avery died, and I decided to ask him if he would like to come to her memorial with me.”

“He agreed?”

“Yes. We talked a lot that day. After, I asked him out for dinner. Saturday night was our first date.”

“How did it go? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I don’t mind. It went well. I thought, when I dropped him home, that he might ask me to come in.”

One side of Thierry’s mouth quirked up. “But he didn’t?”

“No. Not even for coffee.”

Thierry nodded, as if in commiseration, and Dante was quick to add, “I didn’t pressure him. You know I wouldn’t. It was our first date, and he wasn’t ready, but maybe I didn’t react with my usual charm.”

“What happened then?”

“He went into his house, and I left.”

“Did you go straight home?”

“No. I pulled up around the corner and called Lois and told her not to set the alarm. Then I sat in the car and stewed. About ten minutes later, I saw Lucas go out for a run. I thought he might come back, but I didn’t wait to see. I was getting cold, so I went home.”

Thierry switched off the record button and put his handset into his coat pocket. “I might have done that once or twice myself. The early days are butterflies and roses. But they’re also beestings and thorns.”

“Is that one of Cecile’s?”

“Yes.” Thierry’s right knee was bouncing. Seagulls, tilted sideways by the strength of the wind, soared and swooped and screeched too close for comfort. At last, he said, “Dante, do you believe his story?”

“Yes. Why? Do you know something?”

“No. We know very little. With the bullet lodged in his rib, we have next to no physical evidence except the caliber of the gun used. The same as every wannabe gangster in the south of England. The vomit—”

“He was sick?”

“No, but someone at the scene was. Perhaps the shooter. The specimen is in the labs for testing, but it’s unlikely that we’ll get much out of it. The stomach acids will have seen to that.”

Dante tamped down the urge to smile. To laugh. “Nothing else?”

“No. The ground was frozen solid. No tire marks, no footprints, no fibers except the ones from Lucas’s jacket. Nothing.”

The waves were lively and loud, crashing white foam against the breakers and the side of the dock, kicking up the putrid stench of rotting seaweed, tossing the smaller boats up and down, in a frantic rhythm akin to the beat of Dante’s heart. Luck was on his and Lucas’s side for now, but they weren’t away in the clear blue yet.

As if on cue, Thierry said, “You know Lucas lost his sister?”

“Yes. Back in April.”

“My officers spoke to some of his work colleagues. He hasn’t been himself for some months. Withdrawn, moody, unsociable. You don’t think he’s taking drugs? Or that he’s got in with the wrong crowd?”

“No. Absolutely not. He’s been sad and angry, like anyone would be. And he’d be the first to admit that on occasion he hasn’t made the best choices. But he’ll be careful from now on. No more late-night running.”

“Not while he’s staying with you.”

Dante reined in his surprise, took a breath, and said levelly, “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

Dante was no fool. That meant surveillance. He looked at his watch. “Time for lunch?”

The walk back to Mariner’s Café was into the wind. If Dante had felt like talking, he would have had to shout to be heard. Thierry seemed content to battle the breeze and keep his mouth closed for five minutes, and Dante was glad of the reprieve.

What were the odds that Thierry knew something he wasn’t letting on about? Dante had had no compunction lying when it suited him. Would Thierry do the same in the interest of law and order?

On the other hand, Thierry had said once, budgets were prohibitively tight. The cost of an investigation had to be carefully balanced against likelihood of getting an arrest and a conviction. If the leads dried up and Lucas didn’t push it, the case would be forgotten soon enough. Especially if the police were busy. Crime levels always spiked before Christmas.

This thought buoyed him through a largely tasteless lunch. He and Thierry talked family and Christmas. Dante put the date of Thierry and Cecile’s soiree into his calendar and promised he would be there—next Saturday, the Saturday before Christmas. And, no, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to bring Lucas. None of the investigating officers would be at the party, and Cecile would love to meet him.

Dante rushed home and made a beeline for his office.

Lucas was sitting on his office chair, both elbows on the desk. “I thought I’d make myself useful.”

“You should be resting.”

Lucas looked tense. “I don’t feel like it at the moment.”

“Why? What is it?”

“Come and look at this.”

Lucas scrolled back through the feed on Shaw’s house. Approximately half an hour earlier, Shaw and his wife had loaded four suitcases into the back of their car, locked up their house, and driven away.

“They’ve taken a trip.” Dante wasn’t one for stating the obvious. He was thinking out loud. “A winter break. Christmas in the sun.”

“Or an alibi for Shaw while he sends the heavies around to finish me off.”

Lucas was doing his best to appear lighthearted, but his untouched sandwich and the pallor that had returned to his face, gave his anxiety away. He was frightened, and he needn’t have been.

Dante swiveled the chair, and Lucas, to face him. Dropping to his haunches, he said, “Shaw won’t try anything. I promise you, I
told
you. I’ve taken care of it. He’s not going to do anything to draw attention to himself. But regardless of that, no one can touch you here.” Dante looked away and sighed. “I think the police have been keeping an eye on us.”

“You mean on me?”

“You. Me. It doesn’t matter. Thierry as much as told me they have no leads.”

Lucas lifted his left arm and slowly but surely, curled his hand around the back of Dante’s neck. He might not have been a killer, and thank God for that, but he had guts. No one could take that from him.