Shredder (27 page)

I realized I'd been staring down at the coffin so long most of the mourners had drifted away, and the gravediggers were hovering in the background, fiddling with their shovels, waiting for me to go too. They looked incongruous in their muddy jeans and
bright orange jackets, but of course this was just another morning's work to them; it was the rest of us, with our best suits and black ties and shiny shoes, who were in fancy dress. All the same, I was curious to know why gravediggers needed to wear hi-viz jackets. Had any of them ever been run over by a hearse? Even council employees didn't move that slowly.

I turned from the grave to let them get on with it, and almost immediately stopped again, and took a deep breath and counted to ten, trying to ride out the jolt of pain from my leg. I'd been standing still for so long, it had nearly seized up. The Spanish physio had ordered me to stay in a wheelchair for six weeks and use crutches for two months after that, but I'd given up on the wheelchair after seven days and dumped the crutches a fortnight later. Screw Karakurt, and Dean; I might never run again, but I was never going to be a cripple on account of them.

Not everyone had left, I noticed, as I limped towards the tarmac path that led down between the rows of graves. Two men in suits and long raincoats were observing from a distance, one of them wiry and pale with rimless specs and thinning ginger hair, the other black, with skin so dark it shone. I didn't know whether Amobi and his colleague had
come to pay their respects to Zoe or to ask me more questions about Karakurt, but I wasn't interested either way. I owed the cops nothing—the only favors Amobi and his people had done me had been grudging and halfhearted, to save themselves from some bad PR.

I walked straight past them, heading for the cemetery gates. I'd organized a reception at a riverside pub, because that's what you did after funerals. Zoe's friends from York were headed there, and I was going to join them. Not to swap stories about Zoe, but to find out if my dad had been right when he'd told me that booze might not be the answer, but it did help you forget the question.

“Finn, wait.”

There was no point in trying to outrun Amobi: my knee felt like it was on fire. I'd left my painkillers in my hotel room, and now I cursed the macho pride and stupidity that had led to this—to me standing in the rain, forced to listen to Amobi spouting clichés about sorrow and loss, and to Zoe lying in a dank London graveyard, fading away into the clay.

“I am very sorry for your loss, Finn,” said Amobi.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I am sorry for everything that happened. You must not blame yourself. None of this is your fault.”

“Right,” I said, because I couldn't punch him in the face, not in a cemetery.

“I know this is not a good time, but we would like to talk to you, before you go back to Spain.”

“I told Interpol everything I know,” I said. “Ask them.”

“Not about Karakurt.”

“What, then?” I don't know why I asked that, because right at that moment I didn't give a shit.

Amobi bowed his head briefly; his hair had gone properly gray, I noticed, almost silver, and now it glinted with tiny beads of rain. When he looked up again his eyes were full of pain and shame, and for a moment I forgot how much I hated him, and how I'd once thought of him as a man too decent to ever succeed as a copper. He sighed, as if it was too late to turn back, and he had to get this over with. For a moment I thought he was going to arrest me.

“I wanted to know if you might be interested in working for us,” he said.

I stared at him, then at his red-haired friend standing wordlessly behind him, then back at Amobi.

“You must be out of your fucking mind,” I answered.

And I turned and hobbled away.

Niall Leonard is a drama and comedy screenwriter, born in Northern Ireland and currently living in West London with his wife, bestselling author E L James, and their two children. Among his many television credits, he has created episodes of
Wire in the Blood, Silent Witness, Ballykissangel
, and
Hornblower
. He has also led seminars and workshops on screenwriting and script editing for the BBC, the Northern Ireland Film Council, and the Irish Screenwriters' Guild, and has lectured on the creative process at the University of Reading.
Shredder
is the companion novel to
Incinerator
and
Crusher
.