Trust (15 page)

I didn’t look back.

That wasn’t one I’d needed to learn from him. It was a lesson deeply ingrained: when you walk away from a man, never look back.

§

I didn’t have a plan. My brain was still working frantically to process everything.

Him. Dean Bailey. The man with whom I’d spent a night of incredible passion and intimacy.

That guy had played my body like no-one had ever done before, and only now was I coming to understand he’d played my mind, too.

He’d known about the crash. He’d known
detail
.

And when I’d confronted him with it, he’d just clenched his jaw and told me to leave.

Worse than that...

It wasn’t just the knowledge, the fact that he had known and kept that information from me.

The big question was
Why would he do that?

Not so much what did he know, but what had he
done?

§

I found a café – a proper, old-school East End caff, with a chalkboard behind the counter offering jellied eels, pie and mash, cockles by the cupful and PG Tips tea by the mug. Okay, perhaps not the genuine article: the staff were identikit hipsters, with beards and man-buns and artsy tattoos, and the place had the air of somewhere that had only been open three weeks, but still...

I ordered a fried breakfast sandwich – sausage, bacon, eggs and sauce between doorstep slices of artisan white bread – and sat at a small Formica-topped table by the window, looking out across a square courtyard. I was surprised to be so hungry, but it was lunchtime already, and I’d only had coffee since last night.

Surprising how all that walking, fresh air and heartbreak could give you such an appetite.

I forced myself to think it all through again. That running away thing of mine, it wasn’t just a physical thing, it was a head thing, too. Running away from difficult issues; just stop thinking about them when they hurt too much.

I think I actually sat there shaking my head, like someone suffering some kind of breakdown.

I had to get things straight.

Had to stop
running
.

So I closed my eyes and relived that exchange by the river. Moment by painful moment.

That’s when I started to understand that it simply didn’t add up, and that’s when I started to wonder just what that man was
really
up to...

For starters, he hadn’t actually told me anything, apart from that slip-up over knowing more about my parents’ crash than he’d previously let on. It was me who’d suggested it might have been some kind of professional hit, that maybe my parents had turned evidence on Eddie Bailey and that their deaths had been an act of revenge. Dean had neither admitted nor denied that explanation.

But if Mum and Dad had done that, wouldn’t some kind of protection have been part of the deal? If you give evidence against someone like Eddie Bailey, you’d want new identities as an absolute minimum, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t just carry on living your same old life in a town barely an hour out of London as if nothing had happened.

And why wait ten years? They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but ten years is beyond cold. It’s Arctic.

I hadn’t touched my food. I took a bite, chewed, trying to recover some of the appetite that had suddenly vanished.

I remembered that last look we’d exchanged. The narrowing of those dark eyes, the twitch in the jaw.

I’d never want to play cards with Dean. He was impossible to read.

But I knew now he’d been lying. Maybe not lying, as such, but he’d been allowing me to believe things that weren’t true.

Or at least... That’s what I believed.

A small part of me was doubting, questioning even that interpretation. Was I thinking this way just because I couldn’t accept the alternative? That the man I’d slept with, and had developed ever-more complicated feelings for, might have had something to do with the death of my parents?

I left my food, went back outside.

I didn’t know what to believe any more, but I knew one thing for sure: this time Jess Taylor was not going to run away.

§

I went to the Old Duchess and caught the tail-end of the lunchtime crowd. The same girl was behind the bar: short blond hair, tatts on her bare arms, thin lips that she kept sucking in. Dean’s cousin. What was her name again?

“Hi... Sadie,” I said, and she turned to me, responding to the name and appearing to recognize me from the day before. “I’m looking for Dean. Any idea where he is?”

She smiled and shrugged apologetically. She gave me the kind of pitying look you give that sad girl who calls around after a one-night stand in the hope or belief that it had been something more. Maybe I was.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll call.”

Stupid. I didn’t have his number. I’d just said that to save face.
Stupid
.

I walked the short distance back to my car, sat in the driver’s seat, plugged my phone in to charge while I tried to work it out.

We’d toured this area only the previous day, yet the only places I actually knew to look were the Old Duchess and the house where we’d spent the night – and I didn’t have a key to that. I’d seen a few houses the Baileys had an interest in, and a whole load of businesses they owned or ‘protected’; I’d been to the Greek restaurant where he was clearly a regular and well-known.

But I didn’t know where he actually lived, or where he based himself when he was doing whatever counted as work.

I didn’t have a number or an address, an email or a Facebook profile.

Nothing.

Until now I hadn’t realized quite how careful he’d been about what he gave away.

I picked up my phone and Googled ‘Doctor Malik’. Close to fourteen million results... Narrowing the search to London didn’t help, but I remembered he’d said the doctor had a surgery by a park in Bethnal Green.

A few minutes later I had a promising-looking address for a private practice on a road by the north side of Victoria Park. My map app told me it was about fifteen minutes’ drive away, so I fired the Mini’s engine and set off. No hesitation.

This was the new me. Pumped up. Not going to give up and walk away. Determined.

And about bloody time.

§

My memory of Lee Bailey was that he was a brute of a man, but now his resemblance to Dean was quite striking.

The previous night I’d only seen him from a distance: a broad-bodied man who stood with the body-builder’s stance where the muscles are too bulked up to allow you to stand straight. Body covered in tattoos, his shaved head with that creepy backward-looking skull tattooed across the scalp. And the eyes. Bulging, staring, wild. He’d had the look of a man pumped up on steroids and rage and God knows what else.

But this afternoon he was something else entirely, sitting in a winged armchair by the window in his room that overlooked the park, a paperback thriller held open by the flat of one heavy hand. The tatts were mostly concealed by stone chinos and a collarless shirt, and stubble that was almost a full beard softened features that still bore the marks of the battering he’d taken the night before.

His eyes, dark like Dean’s, moved to look at me as I paused in the doorway.

“Hey,” he said, smiling as he appeared to recognize me. “Jess, right? What brings you here?” His voice was a lot softer than I’d anticipated.

“I... I’m looking for Dean,” I said. “But I don’t have his number. He’d said you were here. I thought...”

Lee was grinning. “Our Deano doesn’t give much away, does he?”

He closed his book, leaned forward, and went on: “But I can read him. I saw how he was with you last night, and then this morning when I made him spill. So tell me, what are your intentions for my brother?”

I laughed. It was bizarre, a big, rough-looking dude like Lee leaning eagerly forward like that, just waiting for the gossip on his brother.

He nodded towards the vacant chair across from him and I sat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Up until half an hour ago I my only intention was to get as far away from him as possible.”

Lee nodded. “He has that effect, even on those closest to him. Don’t take it personally. So why the change of heart?”

“He was lying to me.”

That laugh again. Almost a girlish laugh.

“Did he tell you who I am?”

“I had to prize every little detail out of him. He’s not easy. But yes, I know you’re Phil and Stella’s girl. Do you know who
I
am?”

I couldn’t place him. I thought about the relative ages: he and I were probably about the same, so he’d have been one of the kids I’d run with when we visited. “You remember me from when I was a kid?”

His smile grew wider. “Yeah, I do. No special memories, but I remember that little blond kid who used to turn up with her folks every so often. Our Dean... it’s a job to convince him of anything until there’s absolute evidence. I know he didn’t believe you at first, but he does now. I saw to that this morning.”

“So why would he lie to me?”

“To protect you, perhaps?” he said.

“Or to protect himself?”

“From what?”

I realized Lee was a lot sharper than he let on. He could appear not much more than a violent animal in the ring, or he could carry off that disarming, almost effeminate charm in person, but underneath it all there was a perceptive mind working away.

“My parents,” I said. “I think he knows a lot more about how they died than he’ll admit.”

“You think he was involved?”

I shook my head decisively. For all his subterfuge and redirection, I didn’t believe that. I couldn’t.

“No,” I said. “But I think he knows who was responsible.”

I noted that Lee hadn’t challenged me – he hadn’t argued that it was just an accident; he’d admitted that there was something to have been
involved
in.

“’Course he does,” said Lee, and I felt my whole body slump.

“What do you mean? Who was it?”

A narrowing of those dark eyes again, sizing me up. An expression he shared with Dean.

“It was the Russians, wasn’t it? Putin and his mob. Your folks were killed by the Russians.”

I gave Lee a lift back down to Poplar, a much slower journey than the trip to Dr Malik’s clinic had been, now that rush-hour traffic had built up.

I’d come down here less than 48 hours ago to do something sweet. A gesture, designed to make up for some of the grief I’d caused my grandparents over the previous eighteen months. Maybe something to salve my conscience a little, for the knowledge that in that time my Gran had gone from the vibrant, ballsy old lady I’d loved to a virtual stranger. A stranger even to her own husband.

And now... this.

My parents had become strangers, too. Their lives, stories that were only now starting to unfold, to unravel.

Lee had clammed up after telling me it was the Russians who’d had my parents killed. He seemed to realize a little too late that he shouldn’t have said as much as he had, that Dean must have had his reasons for holding out. “You’ll have to ask Deano,” he said, when I pressed. “I’ve said too much already.”

“But why?” I demanded. “Why wouldn’t he tell me? Why wouldn’t he just
trust
me?”

 “Maybe it’s not about trust,” said Lee. “Maybe he was fending you off. He’s like that. Doesn’t give anything away without a battle. Protecting you, protecting himself. Keeping you out from getting to know him too well.”

“But why do that?”

I glanced across and Lee was just looking at me.

“Why does
anyone
keep someone they fancy at arm’s length?” He paused, then went on: “Dean doesn’t do this kind of thing. He never lets anyone get close. And the closer they risk getting, the harder he has to push them away.”

§

After a time we ended up on one of the narrow East End streets where Dean had brought me on his tour the day before.

“You coming in?” asked Lee.

I don’t know how long we’d been sitting there. I was still gripping the wheel. My heart was pounding.

What Lee had said:
He never lets anyone get close. And the closer they risk getting, the harder he has to push them away.

He could just as easily have been talking about me.

I looked at him, felt the need to say something of that out loud, but as soon as he caught my eye Lee nodded towards the houses.

I looked, and Dean was standing in one of the doorways, arms folded, watching us closely.

“I texted,” said Lee. “Told him we were coming. You need to talk to him. Give him a chance. He’s not easy, but he has his reasons, you know what I mean?” He smiled, then added, “I reckon you’re all right, you are.”

I watched as he climbed out, a giant of a man unfolding himself from my small car.

I could easily drive away now.

Run.

I opened my door, stepped out. Swung the door shut and locked it. Straightened. Turned.

Dean’s eyes never left me.

I don’t think I’ve ever been pulled so violently in opposing directions.

Seeing him again. I wanted nothing more than to go to him. Run to him. Feel those arms folding themselves around me again. Breathe him in.

I wanted the thrill and discovery of the night before.

I wanted the world not to matter.

But I remained by my Mini, the pavement and two steps up to the door between us.

Lee ducked his head low and went past his brother into the house, leaving us alone.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was the Russians who killed my parents?” I said.

That poker face. Dark eyes assessing me. Was he trying to work out what further lies and half-truths he could get away with?

“Why didn’t you tell me that this morning, instead of letting me believe the worst of you? I was thinking all sorts of things! That you knew what had happened. That it was a Bailey thing, a revenge thing. That you might even have been involved...”

I was gabbling, my mouth running away with me. I forced myself to stop, then added simply, “Why did you let me believe that?”

Those eyes, the tightening of the jaw, the body held rigid.

“Because I think I love you,” he said.

I think my heart actually paused. It certainly felt like it.