Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [75]
‘This.’ He raised the bag. ‘I want to show you.’
For a few seconds David didn’t move. Then he stood back and held out his hand towards the table. ‘I’ve just opened a bottle of champagne. You’ve always had a taste for champagne, Jakey boyo.’
The two men moved to the table, their reflections a shoulder’s width apart. David pulled back a chair and Jake sat down, the holdall in his lap. David got the champagne bottle out of the cooler and unstoppered it, then poured some into a long flute. ‘Just the one, mind. Don’t want my Jakey boy driving under the influence. Would never do. Terrible waste of talent, you with your brains smeared all over the M4.’
David got himself comfortable, raised the glass. Jake raised his in reply, drank. Even in the conservatory Sally heard the hard, metallic clink of it knocking against his teeth. He was nervous. He didn’t know she was here – her car was parked at the bottom of the grounds, out of sight. As far as he was concerned he was on his own with David.
‘Nice camera system you’ve got out front. Records everything, does it?’
‘Oh, yes. Records everything.’
‘I’ve got a system like that. After a week the image gets recorded over. Unless you wipe it.’
‘Yes,’ David said reasonably. ‘But to do that you’d have to have a code.’
‘Yeah. A code.’
‘Which the owner of the system would change on a regular basis. The same way he’d change the code on the security gates. I mean, say, there was someone that person had had confidence in at one point. Such confidence that they gave him – or her – their security code. Say, then, those two people developed differences, little niggles they couldn’t iron out – well, the system owner would be a mug, wouldn’t he, not to change the codes? Otherwise what’s to stop the guy with the codes coming in and misbehaving in the house? Even, God forbid, doing something silly to the owner.’
‘Something silly.’
‘Something silly.’ There was another silence, then he said, ‘What’s in the bag, Jake?’
Sally closed her eyes for a moment, put her head back and drew a slow, silent breath – tried to get her heart to stop throwing itself against her ribcage. When she opened her eyes Jake was opening the bag and everything in the house had a vague silvery glaze, as if it was holding its breath too. Even the big clock on the conservatory wall seemed to hesitate, hold its hand still, reluctant to click forward.
Then Jake pulled a DVD out of the bag. He placed it on the table. David looked at it in silence. After a moment or two, he held out his hand.
‘And the rest,’ he said. ‘Show me whatever else is in there. I ain’t scared of you.’
‘There’s nothing. Just more of the same.’
David nodded. ‘Yeah. Of course. Let me see.’
Jake held the bag out. David took it, gave it a shake, peered inside. Put his hands in and sifted around. He raised puzzled eyes to Jake, as if he still suspected him of something underhand. Jake shrugged. ‘What? What now?’
David gave him a suspicious glare, but he handed the bag back. Sally slowly let out her breath. In her chest her heart was still bouncing around like a rubber ball.
‘DVDs? What are they?’
‘My latest venture.’ Jake inched forward on his chair, suddenly enthusiastic. ‘Jake the Peg’s done every city in the UK – I couldn’t afford to take it out of the country so I had to look for something cheap and I thought, Hey, old man, how about Jake the Peg does the alphabet?’
‘The alphabet?’
‘A girl whose name starts with every letter of the alphabet. She wears the letter on her outfit here.’ He put a hand to his stomach. ‘I got one of those basque things and had a letter A stitched on. A for Amber. B for Brittany. C for Cindi. We’ve got to F for Faith so far. Her real name was Veronica. But serious mahongas. The type they like in the States.’
‘Shows a touching faith in your audience, boyo, thinking they know the alphabet.’
‘If I put the letter on the spine they become a set – a collection. The real fans’ll want to have the whole lot – A to Z – on their shelves.’
David turned one of the DVDs over, studied the back.