Dark Tide

  I was already taking my clothes off, my top tangled around my arms, trying to kick my boots off without undoing the laces, jeans around my knees; anyone would think I had no idea how to strip in an erotic and beguiling fashion.

  “I need a shower, I’m sorry,” I said, my voice muffled by fabric as I felt his mouth on my skin, his tongue on my naked stomach.

  “Like I care,” he said.

  That was all he said.

  I was made breathless by how much I wanted him. His physique was powerful, the tailored suits he wore hid the muscles, not to mention the tattoos that covered his left arm and both shoulders: a black dragon snaking around and across the back of his neck; a tribal pattern, a sun, all black ink, intricate and lovely on his nocturnal skin. And how pale and small my fingers looked, gripping the inked skin of his shoulder.

  It was the way he looked at me, so differently from the way he’d looked at me in the Barclay. It was as though he’d opened his eyes and was seeing me for the first time. And I’d been waiting, waiting unknowing for him to look at me in exactly that way. Why hadn’t I realized it before? Why hadn’t I seen him as he really was, this beautiful quiet man who looked out for me? His body fit against mine seamlessly; everything he did was at the right moment, just the right pace, just the right pressure. I loved how he tried so hard to make everything perfect and slow and sensual, and then, the way he lost control.

  And hours, hours later . . . we’d fucked and showered and had a drink from the minibar, and fucked all over again; I was so tired my body felt as though it was separate from me . . . It was starting to get light and I was lying stretched against him, fingers threaded through his. He was so quiet and still, I thought he was asleep.

  I couldn’t stop smiling. It felt as though my life had lurched back onto the right track; as if everything that had been wrong was suddenly, magically right. I would live on the boat, and during the week, when the club was quiet, Dylan could come and visit me. He could help me with the renovations, and if he didn’t want to do that we would get quietly drunk together sitting on the deck of my boat, watching the sunset, and then go down into my cabin and make love for hours and hours. Maybe in a few months’ time he would give up working in London and move down to be with me on the boat . . .

  “This was a bad idea,” he said.

  The sound of his voice after hours without speaking almost made me jump. “Don’t say that,” I whispered.

  He kissed the back of my neck slowly and ran his hand from my thigh over my hip to my waist to my back and my shoulder and my face, and I turned my head to look at him again, and he kissed me.

  “You could come and visit me,” I said, hopefully, but even before I’d finished the sentence he was shaking his head.

  “That’s exactly what I meant when I said it was a bad idea,” he said.

  “But why, Dylan?” I said, my voice hoarse.

  “Because of the package,” he said.

  “So give it to someone else!”

  He pushed me away and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m just trying to keep you safe,” he said.

  “Safe from what?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’re getting me involved in your sketchy deal, whatever it is, asking me to hide stuff for you. How’s that going to keep me safe?”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  “You’re ripping off Fitz? Is that what this is about?”

  He stood up and started to find his clothes where they were scattered, and I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut so I could hold on to him for a few moments longer. The pain I’d felt last night at the thought of leaving him was back, but it was worse now, much worse, because of what we’d done. He was probably right. It had been a bad idea. I could feel the anger coming off him like a scent, bristling like an electric charge.

  I tried again. “I’ll be safe wherever you are,” I said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, sitting up in bed.

  He already had his pants on. “Exactly,” he said. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand any of it. Remember when you let that guy touch you while you were dancing, at Fitz’s house, and I was pissed off at you afterward? You didn’t understand about that, either, did you?”

  He was looking at me with so much hurt in his eyes, as though I was wounding him still, just by sitting there, just by existing.

  “You made me watch,” he said. “You said you’d do it on condition that I was there. You made me stand there and watch you.”

  I think my mouth dropped open with surprise. “I did that because I thought you were my friend,” I said. “I thought you’d look out for me.”

  “I had to stand there and watch him with hands all over you,” he said.

  “You were looking at me as if I was a piece of furniture.”

  “I had no choice. If Fitz had had any idea how I felt about you it would have been all over.”

  “He said you liked me, so it seems he knew anyway.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And now look at us. Fitz doesn’t trust me anymore, Genevieve, because he knows how I feel about you. It makes me a liability as far as he’s concerned, especially now you’ve left. He’s going to be watching me like a hawk. And I need him to trust me.”

  “You never told me how you felt. How was I supposed to know?”

  “I need to work at straightening things out with Fitz,” he said, “and you need to forget this happened, okay?”

  “Dylan!”

  He was tying his shoelaces, his boots resting on the edge of the bed. Ten minutes ago we had been lying here naked, locked together as if we would never be able to be apart. How could we go from such bliss to conflict in such a short space of time?

  When he was dressed, I thought he was just going to go, to walk out without so much as casting a glance back at me, but he came back to the bed and took me in his arms and held me against him fiercely. I was crying by then. I tried to touch him, to kiss him, but he was holding me too tightly to move.

  “Keep yourself safe,” he said. “Be careful who you trust. Understand?”

  I nodded, sniffing, my face buried in his shirt.

  “It might be okay. In a few months, if it works out. If you can wait that long. All right?”

  “I can wait,” I said.

  He pulled back and wiped my tears away with his thumb. “Just keep safe,” he said. “Hide that package somewhere. Be safe. And I’ll come and find you.”

  Then he left me. He grabbed his jacket and he was gone.

  Later, when I had showered again and dressed, I looked in the bag and saw what it contained. A rectangular package, wrapped in a heavy-duty gray plastic bag and bound tightly and neatly with black electrical tape. A small black cell phone, new, and a charger. And two thick bundles of fifty-pound notes. I’d never seen so much cash in my life, but even so, I stared at it with no emotion.

  In the space of a few hours he’d gone from being a friend, someone I was doing a favor for, to breaking my heart by leaving me behind.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I had almost gotten as far as the town center when the rain started—big, heavy drops that threatened to soak me. I made a dash across the pedestrian crossing near the bus station and nearly ran into the back of a silver car that had stopped right in front of me. I went to pass it and the driver’s window slid down.

  “Genevieve!”

  It was Jim. He looked as though he’d had a busy day already: tired eyes, sleeves folded back to his forearms, tie loosened.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Thought you might need a ride.”

  “No, thanks.”

  I stood in the rain, staring at him. A car behind him honked, making me jump.

  I got in the car. It was warm, and almost as soon as I was inside the car started to mist up. He switched on the air-conditioning. I was already starting to shiver, my hair dripping. I wasn’t angry at him, not really. He
had a job to do like everyone else. I’d forgotten that police were never off duty and so nothing you told them would ever be considered private.

  We sat in the car, staring at the traffic, waiting for the light to change, the windshield wipers scraping noisily back and forth across the rain-spattered glass. The multistory parking lot looked as if it were sagging under the weight of its own ugliness. I bit my lip, my shoulders rigid, resolutely looking out the window at the rain.

  “Everything all right?”

  I didn’t answer. What possible answer was there?

  “Genevieve,” he said, “I had to tell them. You know that.”

  “Did you tell them you slept with me?” I said with venom. “No, I didn’t think so. Funny the part you left out.”

  I glanced across at him. His cheeks were pink. “There are good reasons why I can’t tell them that. Reasons that have nothing to do with you.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  There was an awkward silence, broken only by the noise of the rain, the wipers squealing across the windscreen.

  “Did they tell you what I said to them?” I asked, at last.

  Carling shook his head. “It’s their investigation now. Nothing to do with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Candace Smith was from London, so she’s their victim. It’s complicated. You’re the only thing linking her to Kent, so they’ve come down here to tick you off their list.”

  “Oh. You know, I thought they were going to arrest me.”

  “They probably would have, a couple of days ago. But they’ve got two people in custody, and they’ve just charged them, which makes things a bit different. It’s about evidence-gathering now.”

  “They have people in custody?” I asked. “Who?”

  He shrugged, as if to say he didn’t know, but what he probably meant was, he couldn’t tell me. For a horrible moment I wondered if they’d arrested Dylan. Maybe that was why he wasn’t answering his phone—maybe he was in some nasty London police station, locked in a cell.

  “So what did you say to them?” he asked.

  “They wanted to know how I knew her. I told them I met her when I was living in London. I worked weekends at a club—the Barclay. Caddy worked there, too. That’s about it.”

  “I know the Barclay.”

  “Do you?”

  “Were you a dancer?”

  I looked at him sharply, but his eyes remained on the road. “Have you ever been there?” I asked. “To the Barclay, I mean.”

  He shook his head. “No, some of my friends went for a bachelor party and I heard all about it. Couldn’t afford it at the time. Bastards went without me.”

  I hesitated and then said, “Yes, I was a dancer. That’s how I managed to buy the boat.”

  “You have a dancer’s body,” he said.

  “I haven’t done it for a long time,” I said.

  The line of traffic was creeping forward, a few feet at a time.

  “Look, I can walk if it’s easier,” I said. “We might be stuck here for ages.”

  “This place,” he said. “It’s pretty much guaranteed we’ll be stuck here for ages. It’s not even as if there’s any real traffic, it’s just the bloody lights slowing us down. There must be ten sets of lights along this one stupid stretch of road, all timed wrong, so it just brings everything to a standstill. I mean, what sort of arses think that changing a town designed entirely around a one-way traffic system into a two-way system is a good idea?”

  I thought for a moment that he’d finished and I nodded in agreement, but he was only pausing to get his breath.

  “You hope that when the government starts cutting costs, the people making these kinds of stupid decisions will be the ones to go, but no, there’s always enough money to keep a bunch of retarded planners employed so that they can deploy their million traffic cones for a short stretch of construction . . . And even if they do ever finish it, no one in their right mind is going to want to come here anyway.”

  “Finished?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was coming this way anyway, to be honest, despite the bloody construction. And besides, I wanted to see you again.”

  I took a deep breath. “I do like you, Jim. But it’s no good pretending that this is going to work.”

  “Whoa,” he said, at the sudden change of tone.

  “You can’t get involved with me when they still aren’t sure if I’m a suspect or not.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “And afterward, well . . .”

  “Well?”

  “By then you might have met a nice girl, or changed your mind about me, or . . . well, anything could happen. I’m just saying.”

  “You’ve got someone else,” he said. As though there could be no other possible explanation for my rejection of him.

  “No. I just—there was someone, but I haven’t seen him for months, since I moved here. I don’t even know if he still thinks about me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard his question, looking out of the window at the dirty, rainy streets. I couldn’t believe it was so dark in the middle of the afternoon. The sidewalks were full of Saturday shoppers, umbrellas, gray coats, and soaking pants clinging to wet legs.

  “What was she like?” Carling asked.

  “Who?”

  “Caddy.”

  I didn’t answer at first, wondering how I could do her justice in just a few words. I thought back to some of the good nights we’d had together, dancing and working, yes, but having as much fun as if we were on a girls’ night out at the same time. I pictured her laughing, doubled over, because one of the Russian girls was trying to chat up some lad from Streatham who thought she was from Scotland. Patting tears out of the corners of her eyes and flapping her hand in front of her face to give herself some air.

  “She was beautiful, clever, funny . . . And she was kind to me. Despite everything. She was kind.”

  “Despite everything?”

  “She thought—” I said, and stopped short.

  “She thought what?”

  He was sitting there, looking casual, looking as though he didn’t care very much what I was about to say, but I could tell he was paying attention to every single word.

  “Is this an interview?” I asked.

  “No, of course not.” His response was quick. “You don’t have to answer. I was just interested in her.”

  “She thought I was trying to steal her boyfriend,” I said at last, watching Carling’s face for his reaction.

  He looked back at me, his expression hard to read.

  “And were you?”

  Two weeks after I’d started living aboard the Revenge, I went back to London.

  Caddy lived in a flat in Walworth, not all that far from my old place in Clapham. I found it easily enough, taking my time about it, not even sure if being there was the right thing to do. It was a Sunday afternoon. There was no telling if she’d be awake, but it was a reasonably civilized hour for a visit, even for a nocturnal person like Caddy.

  To my surprise she answered the door quickly. She was dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt that showed off her chest and narrow waist.

  “Oh,” she said.

  She looked completely different with her hair loose, wavy down her back, no makeup. She looked young. I realized I’d never actually asked her how old she was, just assumed she was about my age, but, looking at her in the bright light of an April Sunday, she looked almost like a teenager.

  I thought for a moment she was going to shut the door in my face, but curiosity seemed to get the better of her and she stood aside to let me in.

  Her flat was spotlessly clean, and I must have interrupted the process of making it cleaner: a mop and bucket were in the kitchen and the tiled floor was wet. The wide, bright main room smelled faintly of bleach. A small balcony was visible through the open patio doors. From below, faint noise of traffic from the South Circular.

&nbsp
; “You want a drink or something?”

  “That would be nice, thanks. Water would be fine.”

  I perched on the edge of a white corner sofa, looking at the wallpaper, a dramatic black-and-white design. It was starting to make me feel dizzy.

  “Fitz was mad that you left,” she said, handing me a glass of water with two chunks of ice clinking in it.

  “He didn’t seem that concerned when I told him.”

  “You don’t know Fitz, then. Good thing you didn’t hang around.” She sat opposite me, her legs crossed, her bare foot flexing and circling. “So what happened? Why did you just take off like that?”

  “I’d just . . . had enough, I guess. I bought a boat.”

  She laughed. “What—like a yacht?”

  “No. It’s a barge. I’m going to live on it.”

  She was looking at me, shaking her head slowly. “You always were full of surprises.”

  “So were you. I just wanted to come and say that I’m sorry if things were bad between us there at the end. I thought of you as a good friend. I don’t want to lose touch with you.” There. I’d said it. I’d apologized for whatever it was she thought I’d done.

  She pulled her feet up onto the chair so that she was cross-legged, biting at her lower lip. “This is all weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “You leaving. Did you hear about the raid?”

  “The what?”

  “Last Friday. The club got raided, loads of police all over the place. It was a fucking nightmare. We didn’t get to leave until ten in the morning.”

  “Shit! Did they find anything? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody tells me anything anymore. The club was closed Saturday night—we all got the night off and a pathetic handout from Norland to compensate us. Then business as usual on Sunday.”

  All I could think about was Dylan. No wonder he hadn’t called. If there had been a raid at the club, he would have been preoccupied, to say the least.

  “You know Fitz was joking about it: how you left and the next minute the club got raided. He thought it was you.”

  She laughed as she said it, but even so my whole body felt suddenly cold.