Her bus rolls up, a red wall. She hesitates. She has taken assignments from Michael Croft for two years. Been happy for the money. But this one—glitter and glass brilliance and twisted death. And the look in Harry’s eyes. Her throat thickens.
The bus pulls away without her.
She walks through the gleaming morning to the Marylebone Flyover. On the elevated roadway, rush hour traffic drones past. The trailer park sits beneath it. She jogs across the roundabout.
The Whalens’ trailer huddles on a rough patch of asphalt. A dog rises at her approach, chain clinking. Inside, teacups and spoons clatter. Shaz knocks.
Harry’s mum opens the flimsy door. “You missed him. He’s off down the road walking the girls to school.” Sleepily, Mrs. Whalen nods towards Wormwood Scrubs.
Ten minutes later Shaz rounds the corner across the street from the school. Harry and his sisters are outside the gate. From his lunchbox he hands one girl an apple, the other a juice box. His uniform is rumpled, tie askew. Shaz thinks: He looks spent. He’s ten.
She calls and waves. He shoos his sisters through the gate. As Shaz cuts across the street towards him, he checks for traffic and steps off the curb.
The roar of an engine comes out of clear air. A black car speeds up the street, sunlight burning against its windows. It veers over the center line, straight at her.
Shaz lunges across the road. Harry watches the car for a frozen second, and dives for the curb.
The thud is sickening. He spins and lands in a heap. The car squeals away.
“Harry!” Shaz drops to his side. He groans. Fumbling with her phone, she snaps the fleeing car but it rounds the corner, heading for the A40, a roadside fire, or the bottom of the Thames Estuary.
The crossing guard comes running, awkward in her bright yellow coat, lollipop stop sign flailing. “Oh, my God.”
Shaz kneels by Harry’s side. “Hold still.” She rings 999 with trembling fingers.
He sits up, dazed. “It’s okay. I think it’s okay. It only hit my rucksack.”
The rucksack lies in the road, ripped off his back. Shaz wraps shaking arms around him.
At Croft Security, the receptionist looks twice when Shaz storms in. Street team isn’t supposed to come through the front door during daylight. The woman says, “Hey, you can’t—”
“Hit and bloody run. I can.” Shaz sweeps past her.
Marching up the stairs, she hears voices in Croft’s office. She slows. Fallon sounds hot.
“Nic Ramsey’s a liar. Holly couldn’t have accessed the roof. The police confirm that. And ‘thrown’—by whom? Jeroen Dijkstra? Holly landed on him.”
“Dijkstra was an accessory, but not the criminal kind. He was Amelia Gordon-Lennox’s arm candy for the party. Boost her profile, let guests rub elbows with a celeb,” Croft says. “No. Only one man admits to being in the building when Miss Kendrick fell. Ramsey himself.”
“If Ramsey killed her . . .”
Shaz stops.
“If so, he was involved in the account data theft,” Croft says. “Either alone or with her. But there were no signs of a struggle in her office. Have the police found her phone?”
“No.”
No phone. No signs of a struggle in her office.
Shaz knocks. At his desk, Croft frowns, surprised.
She walks in. “A car just tried to run me down. And nearly killed Harry.”
“Good God,” Fallon says.
She fills them in. “The cops think it was a careless driver, or a drunk.”
Croft says, “You don’t believe that.”
“Not a chance.”
“Why would someone target you? Because of this case? Really, Shaz.”
She bears their stares, and approaches the desk. “If you’re saying I need to find out, then all right. I will.”
The library closes at eight. Shaz is there until they turn off the lights. She walks home down the weedy lane, rattles her key into the lock, and squeezes into the flat, past her sister’s partner and kids. She drops onto her bed. Her notebook is crammed with information from a Dummies book and company records she found online. The noise from the other room, laughter and arguments and the TV, skates over her as she reads her notes.
Her little niece pokes her head around the door to say good-night, then asks Shaz what she’s doing.
“Deducing.”
“Ick.”
Shaz feigns throwing her library book at the girl. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which has proved enlightening. She smiles, but thinks: It was no accident. Not the hit-and-run. Not Holly plunging from the MCB building.
She looks at the time; it’s late. She grabs her things and runs out of the flat. Hurrying towards the tube station in the twilight, she sends a text, then rings Harry. Over the phone she hears traffic on the flyover.
“Glad you’re okay, sprog. Get your mum, I need to talk to her,” she says.
Not long afterwards, she gets off the tube and jogs through Mayfair. The wind is rising and her nerves hum. Harry is in danger.