Free Why We Die by Mick Herron

ground. Insurance companies were mentioned, and their famous reluctance to pay out on policies. Zoë had been prepared to whistle this theme, but Jeff explained he had work to do.
    ‘And you’ll only be happy,’ he said, ‘when they give them away with boxes of cornflakes.’
    ‘It’d have to be the supermarket brand,’ Zoë said. ‘Lend me a car, Jeff?’
    ‘How long for?’
    ‘. . . Couple of years?’
    So now she had a Beetle until Wednesday – an orange Beetle. ‘Sometimes I have to follow people,’ she’d reminded him. ‘Have you anything in taupe?’
    ‘I’m straight, Zoë. I’ve never heard of taupe.’
    The orange Beetle worked, though, despite being sticky on hills. And it was somewhere to sit while she watched Sweeney’s. Watched and waited . . . She’d brought a bag of apples along. Since giving up smoking she’d been hungry all the time, and rumour had it apples were healthy.
    This was Monday morning. In Sweeney’s shop, there’d been no activity since nine thirty, when he’d opened. It was now pushing twelve. Divide the business rates by the pre-noon profit, and you could see why Harold might have been tempted off the straight and narrow . . . A lorry passed, chugging exhaust fumes, while on the pavements parents pushed prams and buggies, stopping to compare children every so often; a demographic varied by the odd group of students flexing their youth – talking too loudly; fondly imagining the interest of others. In the doorway of a boarded-up shop, a woman of indeterminate age huddled in a blanket, swearing at an ancient enemy who wasn’t there.
    A creep in a used-car salesman’s coat with a face that belonged on Gollum oozed past.
    There was nothing new here. Zoë had seen this before. Life was a series of vanishing circles that sucked you in faster, the smaller they got – life was a whirlpool. Life, in fact, sucked. She couldn’t remember the first time she’d sat in a car, watching the same door never open, waiting for the same face never to appear . . . She could hazard a guess, though, that the job had involved something unpopular: another bill to pay; another court appearance. She’d pretty quickly grown used to being unwelcome. It must have wreaked havoc on her character, though nothing like the damage it did to her opinion of other people’s . . . It was possible there were trustworthy souls out there, but a glass wall had dropped between her life and theirs. When she’d been those students’ age, one million and twenty-five years ago, she’d no doubt had a vision of how life would be – so what happened? It must have had something to do with Joe, her late husband, whom she didn’t miss. She rarely thought about him, and even when she did, he was still dead. There was nothing new there, either.
    Puffed-up contrails crosshatched the sky, as if something large and bored were about to play noughts and crosses.
    To work. Sweeney, in Zoë’s view, was dirty; or perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, merely grubby – the difference being, how rough you played. Either way, she was ninety per cent sure, he was a trafficker in stolen goods. As for his ‘trade associates’, they’d be his fences, and ugly pals like that weren’t in the game to shore up a failing business. She wasn’t surprised he didn’t want them knowing he’d been ripped off. She wondered, though, that it hadn’t occurred to him they’d been the ones doing it.
    She plucked another apple from the bag. She was approaching her limit already – would wind up with stomach cramps if she didn’t watch it – but she was so damn hungry, or at least, so damn needed to be doing something with her hands . . .
    Anyway: the ugly pals were playing rough. Two men (there’d have been a third in the car) had paid an early call on Harold Sweeney, relieving him of loot he kept out of sight of the public. How did they know about the loot? Inside job . . . The ugly pals’ version of victimless crime: one that