The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

“Looking forward to more of your stories about this place, you should write a book.”

She burst out laughing. “Yours would be better.” She waved her AirPod at him. “It’s a non-date.”

Luke checked his watch on his way out of the morgue, sidestepping to give a mum space to manoeuvre her baby’s pushchair between him and the crowd of a group. Breakfast time in the brother’s state, but he probably wasn’t an early riser. Luke would let him sleep longer before delivering his news.

A quick cab ride and outside a glass office block, his next call was answered straight away, as it always was. “Josiah Johnson.”

“Hey, Mr President.” Luke’s joke on first meeting Josiah had developed into a codename between them.

Josiah laughed his loud guffaw. “You should talk to the big boss, tell him I deserve a raise for my important sounding name.”

“Question for you, why would your tribe bump off a middle-aged expat?”

The slightest of pauses. “We did?”

“Query heart attack until I found an injection site.”

“I can’t confirm or deny—”

“I’m outside, only need a minute.”

Josiah burst out of the building and strode around the corner, Luke gave him a few seconds then followed.

Josiah looked Luke’s suit and shirt up and down as he approached. “Man, you look rough, off the peg today?”

Luke gestured at Josiah’s large checked trousers. “If I ever wear a pattern like that, I’ll agree with you.”

Josiah patted his afro. “You don’t have the style.”

“Absolutely, I don’t. The name Antonio Castillo mean anything to you?”

“Your corpse?” Luke nodded. “One of ours?”

“US citizen, moved to London, changed his name to Tony Banks. Something not quite right about his situation. His brother, still State-side, had a number if anyone came looking for him. When I did, I’m guessing he called.”

Luke held back what Tony Banks had instructed The Society to do, Josiah was a true patriot, and he’d call in everyone he could on this if he had a ghost of an inkling. Luke didn’t need all those investigating bodies muddying everything. The trail was already hard enough to follow.

“I’ll check it out.”

“Appreciate that.”

Josiah shook Luke’s hand. “Cheers.”

“Cheers? You’ve gone native.”

Josiah adopted a shockingly bad Cockney accent, “Gotta blend in, mate.”

“Best change those trousers then.”

While Josiah got to work, Luke let himself into Eva’s house. The new cameras he was trialling were easy to install—four in place in less than ten minutes—leaving him time to check what had piqued his interest in his walk around last night, even before he’d understood he wasn’t looking at a burglary, but at a search gone badly.

He used the walking stick on the upstairs landing to pop open the loft hatch and pull down the ladder. The suitcases and boxes, stacked with an engineer’s precision, had been discounted in the frantic search that had tornado-ed through the downstairs. So why go up there and not look through anything? Luke stepped around the stacks. On the joists up against the neighbours’ wall was his answer. A safe, door left open. Luke brushed aside the spilled chess pieces and board to pull out the only paper inside it.

The folded sheet showed a copy of an old photo, pre-digital. At one end of the row of smiling people, he recognised a much younger version of Eva’s husband. In the centre, was that? Could be, but the fold had worn away some detail, he’d need to check. It could be a lead.

Time to make that call.

He folded the photocopy into his inside jacket pocket, put back everything he’d disturbed, and let himself out of Eva’s house before he rang the number.

“Yo, yo, yo.” Castillo had been watching too much Breaking Bad, Luke almost hung up.

“It’s your English friend.”

“You shouldn’t be calling here.”

“What did I tell you about not using that phone number?” His silence confirmed Luke’s hunch. “You didn’t remember your promise to me.”

“You were pointing a gun at me, I’d have promised you anything you wanted, stop you pulling the trigger.”

“Why did you give up your brother’s location?”

Castillo huffed. “Aw, shit, it’s no big deal. It was Antonio’s idea, tell ’em I got his location, get them to give me the big pay-out.”

“Why now?”

“It’s important he said, to take care of business.”

To pay Luke’s fee for carrying out the hit Banks ordered? He was all in on this.

“Did you get it?” Luke asked.

“No man, any day now.”

“Yet you gave up your brother’s location.”

“I ain’t dumb, I only told them London, they don’t get more till they pay up.”

They were more organised and had weight beyond that suggested by the burner phone number Castillo had used, dead as soon as Banks was.

“When I said don’t call the number, I meant don’t call the number. You trying to rip off big hitters, it comes with consequences. Your brother died.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’ve got nothing to gain by lying, Westminster morgue in London can confirm.” Luke hung up.

21

Every parents’ nightmare didn’t have to be Eva’s.

Lily. Eva forced her face to relax. “My husband managed to get here? He wasn’t sure he could.”

The receptionist delivered her bad news with a smile. “I’m afraid I can’t say, data protection.”

Eva switched her weight to her good leg, wincing at the tightening of her damaged tendon, the stiffness she could feel puffing out the surrounding tissue. “I’ll need confirmation from you it was my husband, Charles Buchanan. If you’ve let Lily go with her biological father, I’ll have to get the police involved because she’s the subject of a court order.”

Eva’s biggest lie got her a hurried call to the Head of Pastoral Care, a large lady who fussed and worried at the boundaries of protocol until Eva asked to use her phone to advise the court that the school was in contempt.

“I can put your mind at rest, Mrs Buchanan.” Eva let the mistake slide. “It was Lily’s uncle who picked her up.”

Lily’s non-existent uncle.

Eva clamped her mouth shut on her scream.

Using Lily to get to her was far more controlled than handing her poisoned cake. But using a child, her