Why We Die by Mick Herron Page B

that?’
    ‘You kind of just told me,’ said Zoë. ‘By not denying it. And let’s face it, Win, once he’s been bagged, your long-term career prospects look about as good as a Defence Against the Dark Arts tutor’s.’
    ‘I could always go back to ambient stock replenishment.
    ’ ‘No you couldn’t. That’s the kind of job they mean when they say it’s a small world. You’re too big for it now.’
    ‘You planning on shopping him?’
    Zoë said, ‘You’d not believe how much it’s hindered me in the past, but the courts don’t usually bang people up on my say-so. They like charges, trials, evidence. Stuff like that.’
    ‘So remind me why I care.’
    ‘Because I can be an unbelievable fucking nuisance when I try.’ Zoë drank more coffee. Her throat hurt, but she didn’t let it show. ‘I notice you’re not in a hurry to contradict.’
    ‘You’re already a fucking nuisance. And I can tell you’re not trying.’
    ‘But once I start, he’s got trouble.’
    ‘I could stop you.’
    ‘Probably. You’re bigger than me, and we’ve both noticed you’re stronger.’ She wished she still smoked. Now would be a good moment to light up. ‘But why bother? This isn’t TV, Win. The guy your boss ripped off doesn’t want cops involved, or no more than William Tell’s involved them already. Here and now, we can make it all go away. All you have to do’s give me the names of the guys involved in the robbery.’
    ‘Which robbery’s this?’
    ‘You’re five minutes late asking, Win. But on the off-chance there’s been more than one lately, we’re discussing last Tuesday’s. The one that happened at the jeweller’s your boss just visited.’
    ‘Maybe he was looking at rings.’
    ‘And maybe you didn’t just try to pull my head off. Back in reality, we both know Price set it up, but the client doesn’t, and I’m not about to tell him. All he wants are the guys who took his stock. You give them to me, I give them to him. That way, he gets what he wants, I get paid, and your boss discovers the thugs doing his dirty work aren’t just whackos, they’re unreliable whackos he’d be safer not using. Everybody’s happy.’
    ‘We haven’t mentioned me.’
    ‘You? You get to stop worrying about your boss mixing it with guys with crossbows.’
    Win thought for a moment; said, ‘Any names I give you, your client’s going to pass right back to my boss, yes?’
    ‘On the assumption he’ll wreak vengeance on them.’
    ‘Whereas all he’ll do is give ’em the boot, because what use are they if they’re found that easily?’
    ‘Like I said,’ Zoë repeated. ‘You get to stop worrying.’
    ‘You think you’ve got me typed, don’t you?’
    ‘I think I could study you for a decade, Win, and still find you an original. But all we’ve got’s the next five minutes.’
    On the wall above their heads, the clock chipped this away.

Chapter Four
    i
    It had the air of a prison break: a day Tim Whitby should have been at work, and wasn’t. Okay, he’d given notice, but . . . The roads were quiet at first; more happening overhead than in the lanes – seagulls, presumably lost, flapping about in noisy convocation; kestrels hovering, alert for groundlife on the hard shoulder. There did not have to be much traffic for things to be deadly.
    Enough, though. One day off from grief.
    But it was like trying not to probe a sore tooth with a tongue. There were times when it seemed that Emma’s death occupied his thoughts more than Emma, alive, had done, with the probable exception of the moments he’d spent inside her. Because what else did he have? While they’d been together, the future had been one blank page after another, waiting for their story to be written. Now, instead of blank, Tim’s future was empty; the best he could scribble on it being versions of a life he’d already had, and couldn’t now retrieve.
    Signs punctuated the motorway: service stations; emergency phones. As if it were that