Page 20 of Playing By Ear

“I never thought he’d be old or ill. With his line of work, I thought he’d go by way of a bullet or a blade.”

“He might yet do,” she said, “so press pause on your disappointment.” She grasped Jamie’s wrist so tightly, he feared for his future as a guitarist. “I’ve done the dangerous bit. Now it’s your turn.”

His turn for what, exactly? Jamie was so far out of his depth, his toes couldn’t find the proverbial bottom.

But everything he had—his freedom, his security, possibly even his life—was thanks to his sister. He owed her, big time.

Jamie shook off his panic. “Let’s do this.”

In front of the house, Belinda unlocked the wrought-iron gate (no mere hedgerow to guard this place). The rowan tree in the side garden was beginning to bud, and had grown twice its size since Jamie had last seen it. So his father hadn’t killed everything good here.

Belinda tapped a code into the security pad by the front entrance. After a short, sharp buzz, she opened the door.

From the outside, Jamie’s childhood home looked like most of the other modest, tawny semi-detached brick homes on this street. His father wanted to appear “of the people,” after all.

But inside, everything was of the finest quality, from the herringbone parquet hall floor to the carved staircase banister in front of him to the brass fixtures in the WC inside the front door.

“It’s even more posh than I remem—” Jamie stopped.

To his right, his once-cozy living room was now a bustling center of commercial activity. Men and women on cell phones rolled office chairs over the same floor where he and Belinda had sat playing Super Smash Bros. on their Nintendo 64. In the corner, where the Christmas tree had towered, was a column of whiteboards showing figures with £s, $s, and €s in front of them.

The low buzz of conversation faded into silence. The workers stared at Jamie as though he was a mythical creature that had just popped into their dimension.

“He’s in his office upstairs,” Belinda said.

As he turned to join her, the word Jimmy surfed through the living room on a wave of whispers.

That’s not me, he thought, but wasn’t it?

“What happened to our home?” he asked Belinda on the way upstairs.

“Dad lives next door now. He bought the other side of the building about five years ago, and this side became strictly business.”

“You could’ve telt me he moved house.”

“Why, so you could send him birthday cards?”

A deep bass bark boomed from the top of the stairs. A giant gray ghost appeared through the mesh baby gate, slobber dribbling from its saggy jowls.

“Sterling?” Jamie said to the dog.

“Sterling died ages ago,” Belinda said. “Layla’s his grandpup.”

“Sorry,” he told the Neapolitan mastiff—the spitting image of the one he’d grown up with—but didn’t reach down to stroke her as they passed. With dogs like that, it was best to let them make the first move.

“Remember how you used to call them ‘elephant dogs’?” Belinda asked.

“I remember.” He was remembering all too much.

A massive middle-aged bodyguard with a sharply pointed black goatee stepped out of the office, examining Jamie with the flat stare of a shark sizing up a seal pup. “Lift your arms.”

“Seriously?” Jamie obeyed, and the protector patted him down from shoulders to ankles, hard enough that Jamie felt the metal of the man’s enormous rings through his clothes. Atop the bodyguard’s pale shaven head was a birthmark in the shape of Norway (minus Svalbard).

“Bit much, Gerry,” said Belinda, who did not receive the same treatment.

The first thing Jamie noticed when he stepped into his dad’s office was its immensity. The wall had been knocked down between the master bedroom and the smaller third bedroom—which had once been Jamie’s room—creating one long chamber with a door at either end.

At the far end, where Jamie had slept as a child, sat Martin MacKray himself, working on a laptop behind that same old mahogany desk. Apart from the deepened furrows of his forehead and the silver strands scattered among the thick auburn hair on his head and face, he looked much the same as Jamie remembered.