“I paid for that food.”
“About bloody time you paid for something.”
Pierce sneered at me. And something in me snapped.
My arm ratcheted back, winding up to punch him, but his eyes leveled on mine, suddenly sober and I realized he had the bread knife in his hand.
“Try it, girl. I dare you.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a red dot hovering, but I blinked and it was gone.
And then the top pane of glass in the multi-paneled sash of the semi-basement room we were in cracked sharply. The whisky bottle on the table exploded in on itself, shards of glass splintering across the stripped pine top, and the both of us spun sharply around to face it.
I looked to the window, but there was nothing to see, other than a crude hole with jagged edges in the very top corner, cracking the square pane so the shards were held in place only by the putty at the edges.
Pierce blundered over, leering up towards the street.
“Bloody kids throwing stones.” He stormed off up the stairs, and I heard his heavy footsteps as he charged out into the street, the front door thrown wide, bellowing out into the night. Something in me knew before he got up there that it had nothing to do with stones.
There was nothing in the pile of broken glass on the table.
I looked over my shoulder, back towards the Welsh dresser which was full of all the kinds of things I wasn’t supposed to touch. There was a neat little pile of sugar forming directly below the rapidly empty bag of Tate and Lyle. I had a feeling Pierce wasn’t going to find any kids out on the street.
A prickle of tension ran up the back of my neck and I crossed the kitchen to pick up the bag, already knowing what I was going to find when I tipped the rest of the sugar out. There, embedded in a lump of rapidly cooling molten sugar that almost looked like melted glass, was a round from a gun.
My heart rate quickened, and I went back over to the window, peering out of it. Above the low wall that circled the house, through the iron railings, I could only just glimpse the windows of the middle floor of the mansion block opposite us. The sash was open at the bottom about a foot. Just enough for someone to point a gun through and take aim.
I swallowed hard.
Who was the bullet meant for, and did they really miss? I didn’t think so. It would have taken skill, and an insanely powerful scope to aim for the sugar bag. I hadn’t imagined that red dot. If whoever was holding that gun had wanted to kill either of us, they could have done it right there and then.
One thing I knew for sure – someone was watching every single thing that went on in this house. That wasn’t going to do me any favours when I finally brought all Pierce had been brewing down on top of him.
I couldn’t kill the man with a bloody sniper watching. Not when I didn’t know whether they were there for protection, or to do one of us harm. That was a chilling concept. But I couldn’t afford to let my imagination run away, I had to find out for myself.
After I swept up the remains of my dinner, and the pile of sugar on the floor, I took the empty paper bag and the bullet with me upstairs.
CHAPTER 3
Elizabeth
Our house was tall and skinny, going up all four floors, right through from the basement to the attic where my room was, up in the eaves. Dad had done well in business, before he died, but he and Mum had bought this place back when a million pounds still sounded like a lot of money for a house.
These days there were studio apartments around the corner going for more than they paid for the whole thing.
Anything with more than one bedroom was at least four times the price. The opposite building was a mansion that stood empty most of the time, then full of Russians and sheikhs and princes from Saudi and the UAE that Pierce was so determined to pin down with his stupid little book.
Personally, I thought it was all one big vendetta against Mrs Koskova two doors over, and her little dog who always leaped and snarled at him whenever they passed in the street, because the dog was clearly a good judge of character. It gave me more pleasure than it should have to see him flinch away from it. Mrs Koskova was very grand and liked to pretend she didn’t notice that it kept leaving little steaming presents in the front garden. Pierce narrowed his eyes and muttered darkly about bloody Russians and Cold Wars all over again whenever he saw her.