Page 58 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
‘You wanted to talk to us?’ The sergeant, who was young and pretty and kept casting Flynn sidelong glances as he brought biscuits on a tray, asked me. They were clearly baffled as to why they were here.
‘Have you got any closer to finding anyone connected to the bomb, yet?’ I asked.
The police looked at each other. ‘Not really,’ the constable said. He was also very young and had a sort of ‘scraped clean’ look, with very pink, bare skin, as though he didn’t shave, he scoured. Neither of them could look at me directly for any length of time. ‘Nobody is saying anything. We’ve got the names of his mates, but no one is talking, just saying it’s nothing to do with them.’
‘So, Dexter gets away with it.’ I took a deep breath. ‘All right. Here.’ I handed them the two phones.
One of them said a muffled ‘bloody hell!’ and then it was all a crackling of radio and some hurried phone calls being made. I gave Flynn a sad look.
‘I don’t know what’s going to happen now,’ I said. ‘But I bloody love you, Flynn.’
He jerked. The L word hadn’t been uttered by either of us, neither in passion nor when he’d been carefully helping me in or out of bed. We cared, that was evident and enough, for now. But – I wanted him to know.
‘I dunno, we can’t get in without the experts.’ I was being looked at seriously by the police sergeant, the first time she’d actually focussed on my face. ‘But it looks like a good ’un.’
‘Fee?’
I sighed. ‘In case they think it’s anything to do with me, Flynn. I could have been in on it all. After all, I’vegot the phones.’
‘But youfoundthose! When you worked out what he’d been doing!’
I gave a one-sided shrug. ‘They might not believe that. This is what they call, I believe, a calculated gamble.’
Flynn’s expression was fierce now. ‘I won’t let them take you,’ he said, and his voice was low. ‘Dad can…’
‘Your dad can be kept out of it. Let’s see how things pan out.’ I raised my eyebrows, although this must have made my scar stretch horribly and I felt like aMunstersouttake. ‘You can’t turn to your father every time things go pear-shaped.’
I got a half grin for that, and the two police officers, who were both still talking on their respective devices, gave one another an eyeball roll.
‘No. You’re right. I can’t say that I want independence on the one hand, and then go running to him to sort stuff out every five minutes, can I?’ Flynn looked a bit shamefaced now. ‘I need to learn to walk the walk.’
‘Don’t worry, I can give you lessons,’ I said cheerily, because nobody had threatened to arrest me yet and things were looking up. ‘Only not in the walking bit. I can show you how to lurch, though, if you like.’
Flynn moved as though he wanted to hug me, eyed the police presence, and resumed his place over by the table.
The sergeant, looking a bit shell-shocked, finally hung up her phone. ‘That’s… err, we’re hoping that’s going to provide enough evidence to put a lot of people away.’
‘Dexter hid them here to be out of the way,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know, so I couldn’t tell anyone. His fingerprints will be all over both phones and they should have everything you need about his drug empire – and I use the wordempirein a form so loose that it’s hanging on the floor. He was using me, not just for sex’ – that eyeroll again, I clearlylooked as sexually alluring as the fish this place smelled of – ‘but as somewhere to hide his evidence. I’ve just found it,’ I added quickly, in case they thought I’d been keeping something from them.
‘You’ve done the right thing.’ The constable still looked flabbergasted.
‘And you can’t think that Fee had anything to do with any of it,’ Flynn put in quickly, still obviously worried that I was going to be bundled off into a van.
I waved my working hand at my face and smiled. Clearly the ‘stitches and broken bones’ look was still working, because everyone shuddered, and Flynn began collecting teacups in a busy way.
‘You’ve been the one reporting him all down the line,’ the sergeant said. Then, with admirable honesty, she added, ‘I wish we could have put him away sooner for you.’
‘If he’d left me alone, I might never have found these.’ I pointed to the phones, now in evidence bags on the table. ‘They might have stayed under my floorboards forever. Or until Dexter could get in to take them back. Either way, you wouldn’t have them. Now – well, if you can connect him and the phones to the explosion and get him on attempted murder… I need never worry about running into him again.’
‘I can’t believe you put it all together,’ Flynn said, when the police had gone away with the phones held at arm’s length in their carefully sealed plastic evidence bags, leaving Flynn and me standing on the pavement watching them go. I’d forced myself to bump back down the stairs to see them off, trying my best to look bloodied but unbowed. Now I was out of breath, tired and propped up against the front wall. I’d been given a frame to help with the walking, but I wasbuggeredif I was going to use that when anyonewas watching.
I did the one-shoulder shrug. ‘I’m glad all that reading I did before – well, before all this – came in useful,’ I said.
‘I rang Dad.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘If it comes to… Well, if they try to get you as an accessory… if you need it… we’ve got the best legal team in the business on our side.’
