Page 124 of We Chase Shadows

‘Me and my dad arranged it.’

‘You and your dad arranged it?’

‘Yep.’

‘You and Steve?’ says Amy. ‘Together?’

‘Me and Dad, together,’ says Adam. ‘And he booked us a room at The Hunter’s Rest. Been planning it all week. We called it “Operation Lilongwe”. It’s the capital of Malawi.’

‘Happy anniversary,’ says Amy, and shares a long overdue kiss with her husband.

‘I’m sorry,’ says the taxi driver, now out of his footwell and staring forlornly back down the road. ‘But did I just throw a sixty-quid bag of grass out the window for nothing?’

64

There was a lot less to Connor Brooks when you saw him hunched and cuffed. He didn’t look like the monster Rosie knew him to be. The bogeyman who had stalked the globe killing for profit and fun.

They are assuming that he is Connor Brooks who faked his own death all those years ago in Málaga. They’re about to find out for sure.

Whoever he is, and whatever he might have been, he now looks like a lost old man, Ernesto pushing him through the entrance doors at We Solve Murders. Felicity had been there to let them in, which was handy because, although it has been made clear to Rosie that she has been given a set of keys and access codes, she is beggared just for the moment as to where and what they are.

Rosie was hoping that Felicity might make them a cup of tea, but Felicity had taken one look at Connor and told Rosie she didn’t want to be in the same place as the man who tried to have her boyfriend killed. Rosie can understand that, people get very sensitive around loved ones and attempted murder. In one of her early books a schoolteacher murders a Mafia boss for exactly this. So she understands Felicity’s sensitivities, but she would still really, really like a cup of tea, and, as with keys and access codes, knows that she cannot be trusted with a kettle.

‘Ernesto,’ says Rosie, ‘you couldn’t be a doll and make me a cup of tea, could you?’

Ernesto gives her a shy bow. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure. However, I am escorting one of the world’s most dangerous men, and so I fear I must focus.’

Rosie nods, understanding. She looks through to the kitchen and sees the kettle standing there. There’s always someone to make you a cup of tea. Or a delivery service to order one from. When was the last time she made one by herself? Thirty years ago? How hard can it be?

Ernesto guides the prisoner into the conference room. From the stooped, bald man, there is not a squeak of protest.

‘Chatty thing, isn’t he?’ says Rosie.

‘I’ll make him talk,’ says Ernesto. Rosie doesn’t doubt it.

Rosie looks into the kitchen again. The kettle bit is easy, she’s not an imbecile. But the teabag and the milk and the order, and how long should it take? Come on, Rosie, this is ridiculous. You can also make tea in a microwave, she has seen that done. But the difficulties remain. The process of the thing. She will have to give it up as an impossible dream. She curses, and not for the first time, that they don’t seem to have Deliveroo in the New Forest.

Rosie follows Ernesto and the prisoner into the conference room, but Ernesto holds up his hand to block her.

‘Sorry,’ says Ernesto.

‘If you’re talking to him, then I’m talking to him,’ says Rosie.

Ernesto gives a tiny smile. ‘Rosie, please, not this time. Señor Brooks is under arrest. He must be interviewed by police officers alone, and not by crime novelists, however beautiful they may be.’

Rosie tries to find an argument. Ernesto puts the blocking hand on her shoulder now.

‘You understand, Rosie? Maybe you make a nice cup of tea and wait?’

Would that I could, thinks Rosie. She steps back and the conference-room door shuts.

The whole thing is beginning to feel like an anticlimax. Doesn’t seem quite fair to Rosie. Where are the gunfights? Where are the breakneck chases? Where is ‘You’ll never take me alive’? If this was the end of one of her books, her publisher would send it straight back and tell her to write a proper ending.

But life doesn’t always have proper endings. And, thanks to the sales figures for And the Devil Blinked First, Rosie no longer has a publisher.

She never did come up with a grand plan to get back to number one. She is losing her touch, she supposes. How do you stay famous in this new world? What on earth do you have to do?

Whatever you have to have, Rosie no longer has it.