Lethal Profit Read Free Page A

he had raised his kids to be seen and not heard.
    Jackson, especially, had been unable even to look his father in the eye when that happened. At eighteen he still looked up to Paul Scott with childishly adoring eyes, but his father’s affair with Irene Hunt – cheating on their mother after twenty years of marriage – enraged Jackson. When he crashed his car several weeks later he simply walked away, leaving the family to believe he had died. In recent months Eva had realised that she never really grieved for Jackson in the ten years that followed. Not like she was now. Perhaps somewhere deep down she had known he wasn’t actually dead. She checked the display on her phone and saw she had been sitting there for half an hour. Throwing a note and a few coins into the red plastic bowl, she zipped up her leather jacket, jammed a Russian hat down over her ears and headed for the door.

    The train to the suburb where Shaun Thompson lived took less than half an hour, but getting off at the station was like stepping into another world. Whilst Eva was used to the dirty, occasionally mean streets of London, by comparison Shaun lived in a very rough suburb. The area was populated with low, square blocks of flats up to four storeys high, either dirtily whitewashed or preserved in their original grey concrete. Other than the flats and the graffiti that decorated them, the area didn’t seem to have much else to offer. Gangs of kids of all origins hung around, hands in pockets, kicking balls at passers-by or listening to music pumping out from the tinny speakers on their phones.
    Eva felt the heaviness of being a fish out of water. She wondered why Shaun, as a foreigner, and therefore presumably a natural outsider, had made his home somewhere like this. She pulled the post-it note she had written his address on out of her bag and looked at it again: 134 Rue des Villiers. According to the very old map she had managed to acquire from her hotel – the only one they had that went out as far as this suburb – the flat was on the same road as the station.
    When she reached it, she found that Shaun’s block of flats was one of the nicest on the street, although that wasn’t saying much. Running to four storeys, the whitewash had retained a little of its gleam and someone had planted flowerbeds either side of the path leading from the road to the front door. There was a small, white-haired man standing outside with a brush, repeatedly sweeping the same spot of concrete.
    â€˜Hello.’ Eva smiled directly at him, choosing to speak English to try and discover straight away whether she could avoid having a whole conversation in painful broken French. The man continued to sweep his spot and totally ignored her.
    â€˜Hello?’
    As she leaned in a little closer, Eva noticed he was singing to himself and smelled quite badly of urine.
    â€˜Oh, I’m sorry, don’t mind my father.’
    She jumped as a younger woman appeared from the ground floor flat and placed her hands around the old man’s shoulders. He stopped rocking and looked at her.
    â€˜Can I help at all?
    â€˜You speak English,’ Eva smiled, unable to contain her relief.
    â€˜Yes, I learned from my father, he used to be very good at it.’ She stopped and gazed at the vacant old man.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ said Eva awkwardly.
    â€˜It will happen to us all someday!’ the woman said cheerfully and rearranged her long, dark hair into a tortoiseshell comb that sat just above her left ear. ‘Did you want something?’
    â€˜Yes, I’m looking for someone called Shaun Thompson. Apparently he lives here.’
    â€˜Shawan…?’ The woman frowned.
    â€˜Thompson.’
    The woman thought for a second. ‘You know, I know everyone in this block – there are only sixteen flats – and there is no one by that name.’
    â€˜I was given this as his address.’ Eva handed over the post-it