Free Cleanskin by Val McDermid

over your shoulder every day for the rest of your life, watching over you and keeping you safe. You were the only woman for me .
    All my love, your Ben
    ‘You bastard,’ I said again. With his fake account of where the money had come from, he’d slid out from under any link to Jack Farrell or any other criminal stuff.. And he’d pointed the finger straight at me. I couldn’t hand this in, not without spending the rest of my career as the subject of whispers and gossip about my honesty.
    And I’d thought he was my friend. I felt an ache inside me, the kind you get when you’ve held back your tears for too long.
    It wasn’t Ben’s death that was making me feel so bad.
    It was what he’d done with his life.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    T HERE WAS GOOD NEWS and bad news waiting for me when I got back to the office. Kirsty Blythe had returned with the news that John ‘Pirate’ Hawkins, the tattoo artist who had done Jack Farrell’s tattoos, had been reported missing by his girlfriend the day before the fake suicide. He was still on the missing list.
    The good news was that Manuela the Spanish nanny wasn’t as clever about covering her tracks as Farrell. I’d had an alert put out on her credit card after she’d skipped the country. It had paid off. According to the report on my desk, she had used the card to buy a load of groceries, toiletries and clothes in a hypermarket on the outskirts of Calais.
    Things were starting to fall into place. We knew Farrell had been using his boat as a base for making the deals when he’d been selling up, and that Fancy Riley had taken him off on a speedboat at the end of every day. That wouldmake sense if Farrell had a second boat that we knew nothing about. It would also explain why there had been no sightings of him. If he was using his boat to move between England and France, he could come and go more or less as he pleased. He could come here to torture and kill, then slip back to France the same night.
    It didn’t narrow things down much, but it was a start. That evening, sitting at Stella’s dining table and working my way through a Chinese banquet, I brought her up to speed. I could see she was shaken by the depth of the sleaze Ben had crawled into. ‘What did you do with the money?’ she said.
    I gave her a quick look out of the corner of my eye. ‘I gave Karen the insurance policy,’ I said. ‘I burned the letter. And the money’s sitting in my car.’
    ‘What are you going to do with it?’ Stella put down her chopsticks and gave me a stern look.
    ‘Give it away,’ I said. ‘Where it’ll do some good.’ I took a gulp of wine. ‘Karen’s got more than enough.’
    Stella reached across and covered my hand with hers. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Andy. What Ben did, it’s not your fault.’
    ‘I should have seen it. I should have known,’ I said, a bitter taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with the food. ‘He was my right hand, and I didn’t know he was dirty. How can I call myself a cop when I let that happen?’
    ‘He chose which way to go. He chose to turn his whole life into a lie,’ Stella said. ‘I won’t sit back and let you blame yourself for that.’
    ‘I’m not blaming myself for his choice, I’m blaming myself for trusting a man who didn’t deserve it.’
    Stella squeezed my hand. ‘You’re right about that, at least. But he must have worked very hard to make you trust him. He must have been scared shitless that you would find him out. And, frankly, he deserved every second of that fear. You’re a good man, Andy. And a good cop.’
    I snorted. ‘I don’t think so, Stella. Ben fooled me. Jack Farrell’s still fooling me. He might be in France. He might be at sea.’ I drank more wine. ‘He might be sitting outside your flat laughing at us, for all I know.’
    ‘Why France?’
    I told her about Manuela and the credit card. Stella let go of my hand and stood up. ‘I’ve gotan idea,’ she said. It must have been a good one. She was