He made me a damn fool.
Luc Charles didn’t know much about Harry Graham. But he intended to find out more.
A lot more.
As soon as Graham’s boat was out of sight, Luc Charles picked up the phone.
JEFF STEVENS’S BOAT DRIFTED quietly a few yards behind Hunter’s.
Jeff’s hotel kept two old-fashioned, gondola-style canal boats with long punts that were available to guests day or night. They employed three old men whose sole job it was to slide the wooden poles into the water and gently propel these vessels along Bruges’s famous waterways.
It was quiet tonight. Jeff was the boatman’s only customer, and even he didn’t go far, asking to be let out after only a few bridges had passed. Hunter had stepped out at one of the many mooring spots along the Spinolerai into a barely lit cobbled street. Just managing to catch him before he disappeared from view, Jeff followed him towards Steenstraat. Drexel glanced around him briefly, but didn’t seem to notice anything untoward. He turned right into the pretty cobbled square of Simon Stevinplein, then left into Oude Burg, where small crowds of tourists were still milling around, even at this late hour. Bruges’s famous Belfry was lit from below, giving it a quasimagical glow that made the surrounding gabled houses even more fairy-tale-like than they were by day.
It’s like Disneyland, Jeff thought, taking care not to lose Hunter as he weaved through the crowds on Breidelstraat, past the lace and biscuit shops, before coming to a stop outside a bar in Burg Square. Wedged next to the magnificent Gothic Basilica of the Holy Blood, Gerta’s was the kind of hole-in-the-wall sliver of a place you could find in any European city, a haven for thirsty tourists. After one last glance around, Hunter slipped inside.
The bar backed directly on to the Basilica wall. That meant there was no way out, other than the way in.
I could take him right now, Jeff thought. End this thing.
But both Frank Dorrien and Jamie MacIntosh had been clear about his brief:
Follow. Gather intel. Do not confront.
The problem was that its frontage was so small, it was impossible for Jeff to see anything without either standing right by the window or actually going inside. Pulling his baseball cap lower over his face, he decided on the latter. As far as he knew Hunter didn’t know who he was, still less what he looked like.
Jeff made straight for the bar and ordered a whisky. Only once the drink was in his hand did he look up.
Drexel was sitting at a table in the corner. He was with a woman. From the corner of his eye, Jeff could see that she was a brunette, somewhere in her thirties. She
was attractive and well dressed, expensively dressed, in cream wide-leg pants and a gossamer-thin cashmere sweater. She wore a classic gold chain at her neck, and diamonds on her fingers, which she was jabbing accusingly at Hunter.
“Take it,” he was saying, pushing something in the woman’s direction. Without turning around and looking directly it was hard for Jeff to make out what it was, but eventually he realized it was a check. Harry Graham’s winnings.
“I don’t want it. I don’t need it!” She was angry. Upset. “Do you think I came here for money?”
“I didn’t say that.” Hunter’s tone was conciliatory.
“This was never about the money. Never!”
To Jeff’s dismay, someone behind the bar turned up the music. He could no longer hear what the two of them were saying. Even worse, right at that crucial moment his phone rang, so loudly that both Drexel and the woman turned and stared at him.
Turning his face away, Jeff left a note for the barman and hurried back out into the street. To take the call. Only two people had this number. One was Tracy.
But it wasn’t her.
“What the hell?” Jeff barked at Frank Dorrien. “I had Drexel sitting five feet away from me! Why are you calling?”
“Where are you?”
“In a bar. He’s meeting a woman.”
“A girlfriend?”
“I don’t know. Could be. They seem close. He tried to give her money but she wouldn’t take it. It could be Althea, Frank. I need to get back in there. They were talking . . .”
“Did he go to the bar straight from the game?”
Frank’s tone sounded urgent.