The Chairman In The Garage

Chapter Eight: Two Different Doors

Juliet looked at the photograph for a long time. On Yannis's cracked screen, she sat halfway down her own dinner table in her green dress, glaring at someone out of frame. Somebody she had known her whole life had held a phone under the tablecloth that night and sent her face to the men who would put a knife to her ribs.

"Hayden or Camille," she said.

"Or neither." Grayson took the phone back. "A photograph tells me where the camera was. It doesn't tell me whose hand was holding it. I won't accuse anyone over the angle of a picture."

"Then we make them show us." She said it so calmly that it took him a moment to understand. "We give each of them a different place to find me, and we watch where the men go."

He didn't like it, and he told her so. She listened to every word, then told him she would do it with or without him. In the end they agreed on one condition. On Thursday night, Juliet would be at home behind a locked door with one of Renata's men outside it, nowhere near either of the places she named.

***

On Wednesday she took Camille to lunch.

Camille arrived braced for a fight and found an apology waiting instead. Juliet said the toothbrush had gone too far. She said she'd been frightened and angry and had taken it out on the wrong person, and after a moment of wounded silence, Camille let herself be forgiven over a second glass of wine.

Then Juliet lowered her voice. "Don't tell anyone, but I'll be alone in the back office on Thursday night, signing the Solace allocation. It's the only time I can do it without Mum hovering."

Camille squeezed her hand and promised.

That evening, Juliet found Hayden alone in the kitchen and told him, just as quietly, that she'd be next door in her father's old workshop on Thursday night, going through the last of the old files on her own. He nodded without looking up from his phone. Nobody else heard either version.

***

On Thursday night, Grayson sat in a borrowed builder's van in the dark yard between the two buildings, with Yannis hunched in the passenger seat beside him. Renata had found the van for him. Tonight Grayson didn't want to sit in anything the Governor could stop.

From there he could see both doors. On his left was the back office of Rothwell Motors, with its frosted window and one lamp left burning. On his right stood the old workshop where Frederick Rothwell had started out, low and brick, its roller door rusted shut and a single side door facing the lane. Renata's security team waited in the shadows around both.

Eight o'clock came and went. Yannis bounced his knee until Grayson put a hand on it. Grayson kept his eyes moving between the two doors. If the men went left, it was Camille, the friend who had sat beside Juliet at every birthday since primary school. If they went right, it was family. He honestly didn't know which would hurt her more.

At twenty to nine, headlights swept the lane.

A white van with its plates taped over crept round the corner and stopped behind the old workshop. Two men got out and walked toward the side door, while the driver stayed at the wheel with the engine running.

Yannis went rigid. "Him," he whispered. "The driver. He works at the broker's garage. He's the one who gave me the box."

Renata's team came out of the dark from three sides. It was over in under a minute, with the two men face down on the cobbles and the driver hauled out through his own window. One of the officers jogged across to the builder's van and handed Grayson the phone from the driver's pocket.

The last message was still open on the screen. "Old workshop. Alone. After eight."

Grayson knew the number. He had seen it every morning for four years, above messages like "My car, seven sharp" and "You missed a spot." He thought of Juliet sitting behind her locked door at home, waiting for him to ring, and of the name he would have to give her.

Across the yard, the lamp in the back office burned on. Nobody went near that door all night.

***

Hayden was in the Rothwell garage when Grayson got home, pacing between the cars with his phone in his hand and checking a screen that refused to light up. This was where he had stood every morning for four years, jingling his keys while the car-washer finished his windscreen, always finding something to sneer at.

He stopped pacing when Grayson held up the driver's phone. For a second his face ran through surprise and quick calculation, and then settled into something close to relief, like a man who had been waiting days for someone to catch him.

He didn't deny it, and that surprised Grayson more than anything. Hayden just sat down heavily on the step by the kitchen door, as if his legs had given out.

"Laurent promised me the dealership," he said. "Once Juliet was out of the way, it would come to me, the way Gran always said it should. He said those men would only frighten her into signing. They'd drive her around and scare her a bit, and then she'd sign, and that would be the end of it." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Nobody was supposed to get hurt."

"A man is dead," Grayson said.

Hayden flinched as if he'd been slapped.

Grayson slid the phone into his pocket. He could have called the station right then. But Garvey would bury a confession like this by morning, and Hayden would walk out smiling by lunchtime. Grayson wanted him somewhere else entirely. He wanted him in this house, at that table, where Grayson could see him every single day.

"You're not going anywhere," he said. "And you're not calling Laurent."

Hayden laughed, a little wildly, his eyes too bright. "You think I brought the Governor into this family?" He shook his head slowly. "He was here long before you, car-washer. Ask yourself why Sable ever gave my uncle Frederick a franchise he never even applied for."