‘What the fuck are you playing at with my husband?’ she said. ‘What’s this crap he’s been telling you about Delgado taking bribes from the French and messing with the drugs cartels? Who’s Sabina? Who’s Alpha?’
But despite the force of her words she spoke uncertainly, in a voice neither loud enough nor convinced enough to penetrate the cloakroom door. And Osnard with his instinct for weakness sensed at once the fear in her: fear of himself, fear for Harry, fear of the forbidden, and the biggest fear of all, which was of hearing things so terrible she would never again be able not to hear them. But Osnard had heard them already. With her questions she had answered all his own, as they had gathered like unread signals in the secret rooms of his consciousness over recent weeks:
She knows nothing. Harry never recruited her. It’s a con.
She was about to repeat her question or enlarge upon it or ask another, but Osnard could not risk this happening within Luxmore’s hearing. Clamping one hand over her mouth, therefore, he lowered her arm, folded it behind her, turned her back to him and frogmarched her on one shoe into the dining room, at the same time as he banged the dining room door shut behind him with his foot. Halfway across the room he came to a halt, clutching her against him. In the flurry two of her buttons had come undone, leaving her breasts uncovered. He could feel her heart thumping under his wrist. Her breathing had slowed to longer, deeper gasps. He heard the front door close as Luxmore took his leave. He waited and heard the ping of the arriving lift and the asthmatic sigh of electric doors. He heard the lift descend. He took his hand from her mouth and felt saliva in his palm. He cupped her bare breast in his hand and felt the nipple harden and nestle into his palm. Still standing behind her, he released her arm and saw it fall languidly to her side. He heard her whisper something as she kicked off her other shoe.
‘Where’s Harry?’ he said, keeping his hold on her body.
‘Gone to find Abraxas. He’s dead.’
‘Who’s dead?’
‘Abraxas. Who the fuck else? If Harry was dead he couldn’t have gone to see him, could he?’
‘Where did he die?’
‘Guararé. Ana says he shot himself.’
‘Who’s Ana?’
‘Mickie’s woman.’
He put his right hand over her other breast and was treated to a mouthful of her coarse brown hair as she shoved her head hard into his face and her rump into his groin. He turned her halfway to him and kissed her temple and cheek bone and licked the sweat that was pouring off her in rivulets, and he felt her trembling increase until her lips and teeth locked over his mouth in a grimace, her tongue searched his, and he had a glimpse of her squeezed-up eyes and the tears seeping from the corners and he heard her mutter ‘Emily.’
‘Who’s Emily?’ he asked.
‘My sister. I told you about her on the island.’
‘Hell does she know about all this?’
‘She lives in Dayton, Ohio and she fucked all my friends. Do you have any shame?’
‘Afraid not. Had it out when I was a kid,’
Then one of her hands was hauling at his shirt tails, the other was delving clumsily in the waistband of his Pendel & Braithwaite trousers and she was whispering things to herself that he didn’t catch and anyway were of no interest to him. He groped for the third button but she hit his hand impatiently aside and pulled the housecoat over her head in one movement. He stepped out of his shoes and peeled off his trousers, underpants and socks in a single damp roll. He pulled his shirt over his head. Naked and apart, they appraised each other, wrestlers about to engage. Then Osnard grabbed her in both arms and, lifting her clean off the ground, carted her across the threshold of his bedroom and dumped her on the bed where she at once began attacking him with great lunges of her thighs.