The First Time I Saw Your Face Read Free Page B

attempt at smuggling and hiding. After all, both he and Tess had double-checked all the usual and unusual hiding places regularly since. Only this morning, while Tess was putting her in the car, he’d swept the place again. It was a mad game of hide-and-seek and he wanted to shake Phyllida and say, ‘Even when you win this, you’re losing.’
    Suddenly weary of the whole thing, he walked back along the hall and upstairs to his flat. Without even bothering to remove his jacket he sat on the sofa and must have dozed off because he woke to hear his mobile ringing. By the time he had extracted it from his pocket, the call had gone through to voicemail. Perhaps it was someone wanting him to write a ‘particle’.
    He laughed at that thought, but the laugh became a kind of strangled cough as he retrieved his message. It was short and brutal, very like the man who had left it.
    ‘O’Dowd here,’ it said. ‘Meet me at the Stairbrook Hotel, Paddington, two p.m., Friday. Room 751. As they say in all the best spy films, I’ve got a little job for you.’ There was that nasty, raspy laugh Mack hadn’t heard for three years. ‘’Course, you could stand me up, my son, it’s no odds to me. It won’t be my mum’s name splashed all over the papers. Won’t be my windows getting smashed by bricks.’

CHAPTER 2
    Mack had tried to prepare himself for this moment ever since that phone call, and now, seated in the dull-brown chair drinking his dull-brown coffee, he watched the man opposite as you might watch a wild animal, in the hope that you could spot the moment when it was going to spring at your throat.
    There he was, his ex-boss and everlasting bastard, Gordon Edward O’Dowd.
    Before he had worked for the old slug, Mack had suspected that a lot of things about O’Dowd were constructed to mimic every hard-nosed newspaper man he’d ever seen at the cinema. There was the way he sprawled back with his hands behind his head, his suit looking as if it had been slept in and his tie always askew. There was the brutally cut hair; the Mockney growl. All he needed was an eyeshade and a curl of cigarette smoke to complete the picture.
    Mack knew now that none of this was merely affectation.Gordon O’Dowd was a hard-nosed newspaper man right to the bone, one of the last, great, grubby dinosaurs, and there were journalists walking around with ‘QWERTY’ indented in their foreheads to prove it. Mack was sure his own backside still bore the imprint of one of O’Dowd’s size nine lace-ups.
    Out in the wider world, anyone with a cupboard holding a skeleton took a deep breath when O’Dowd’s name was mentioned: ferreting out skeletons was what made O’Dowd happy; that he got paid for it was a bonus.
    The important thing was not to show him how much he intimidated you. Which was why Mack, even though his heart had been on double-quick time since walking into the room, was not jumping straight in to ask why he was there and what the hell had Phyllida and bricks through windows got to do with it?
    But whatever the reason he’d been summoned, it was huge. He could still smell a big story in the offing.
    ‘You listening, or am I just blowing hot air out my ass?’ O’Dowd snapped from the sofa.
    Mack tried not to let that image burn into his brain and steadied his breathing so that when he spoke his voice sounded untroubled.
    ‘Yup, listening, but not sure why. What are you playing at? First-class rail fare up from Bath, all this secrecy? You’ve even got your Hobnobs out.’
    O’Dowd glanced down at his flies before the realisation dawned that Mack was talking about the plate of biscuits on the low table in front of him.
    ‘Very funny,’ he said, ‘but let’s leave the small talk. You heard of Cressida Chartwell?’
    ‘I’ve been in Bath, not on another planet.’
    ‘Well then, you know about the feeding frenzy stirred up by her move to America? “English Rose, national treasure and hottest actress on the planet leaving us