Page 120 of Joker in the Pack

This new life I’d fallen into certainly was different. None of Edward’s friends knew how to pick a lock. The one time Edward managed to lock himself out of his house, on a Sunday evening, no less, he’d had to call the emergency locksmith and spent the next week moaning about the cost.

“Hey! We’ve come to help.”

A girl’s voice I didn’t recognise echoed through the flat, and seconds later, a young brunette bounced into the kitchen. Nye groaned, and she pressed the corners of his mouth into a smile with her fingertips.

“Don’t be such a misery guts. Where do we start?”

“We start by leaving me in peace to finish my coffee. I’ve been up half the night.”

“Max said you caught the asshole?” She jerked her head at the man who’d appeared behind her in the doorway, a Chinese guy who would have been handsome if he’d smiled.

“We caught someone. Not sure if it’s the right man. Olivia, this is Tia. She’s a friend of Emmy’s, and she likes to stop by and annoy everyone from time to time.”

Tia stepped forward and surprised me with a hug. “I also live in Lower Foxford, so I thought I’d come and give you a hand. Well, I sort of live there. I’ve mostly moved to the US now.” She turned back to Nye. “So, who’d you catch? Do I know them?”

Nye shrugged. “Warren Hannigan.”

“The taxi driver?”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously? Warren?”

“The surveillance team found him in Olivia’s garden last night, plus he’s been in trouble over a woman before.”

“The Claire Downing thing?”

“You’ve heard about that?”

“Everybody at my old school knew.” She shook her head and tutted. “Claire’s such a bitch.”

Nye raised an eyebrow. “Really? She made some very serious allegations.”

“And it backfired when she realised the police needed, like, you know, evidence.”

“You think she made the story up?”

“Claire’s sister Marianne told my friend Arabella that Claire’s boyfriend flipped out when he found a used pregnancy test in her bathroom bin when they hadn’t even slept together yet. So, rather than admit she’d cheated, she told him Warren took advantage of her while she modelled for one of his paintings.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, it was. We felt sorry for Warren, and Arabella’s brother, Mark, is a cop in London, so she told him what Marianne said. He had a word with Claire, and she dropped the charges.”

“The local policeman doesn’t have a record of any of that.”

“Graham? He’s an idiot. But Warren’s nice. Once, Arabella and I bought too many drinks in town and didn’t have enough money for the cab fare home, so he drove us for free.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don’t tell my brother that, okay? He doesn’t know.”

“Your secret’s safe. Dammit, I was ninety percent sure Warren was our man, but that throws more doubt in. Have you got Mark’s number?”

“I can get it. Is that coffee? I could do with a cup before we start on this tidying, searching, whatever.”

With the news from Tia, I felt both anxious and relieved. Relieved that my instincts about Warren hadn’t been totally wrong, and anxious because if Warren wasn’t the culprit, the man was still out there somewhere, watching us and plotting.

And Nye still had his doubts.

“Who checks on a woman in the dark without calling to warn her first?” he muttered in the evening. “We’re running out of surveillance teams.”

“Someone might be a teensy bit jealous,” Tia whispered to me as Nye took a phone call.

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