Free Sympathy for the Devil by Howard Marks Page B

photos, and Della’s word counted for nothing.
    ‘How do you know he wasn’t playing you?’ she asked.
    ‘What? Rhys?’
    ‘Mocking stuff up to get more money from the client?’
    ‘Rhys wouldn’t have risked playing me,’ Della said. ‘I owned him, he got every penny he ever earned through me. I was his meal ticket.’
    Della moved her hand up to the stem of her glass, was touching it gently. ‘In any case, he still loved me.’
    Catrin kept her head down, focused on her drink, she wasn’t going to rise to this. ‘But even if Rhys believed the shots were genuine, it doesn’t exactly give them credibility. Rhys was a street junkie.’
    ‘That’s how he looked on the outside, maybe, but he was still as smart as they get. A bit like you, eh?’
    Della leant forward, smiling thinly, tight leather rustling like a lizard through the undergrowth. Gently she put one hand on Catrin’s: it felt soft, moist with some expensive lotion.
    ‘You and Rhys, you’re very alike, aren’t you?’
    Catrin could feel the heat gathering under her collar, making her skin prickle. She wanted to reach up, loosen her shirt.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You act like a rock chick, hard living, but underneath you’re all steel and muscle and alpha-plus brains.’
    A compliment of sorts. That meant Della was trying to sell her something, and whatever it was Catrin wasn’t going to buy it. She’d hear her out, pick up any useful information, then leave and hope never to see the woman again.
    ‘How did Rhys seem to you when you last saw him?’ Catrin asked.
    ‘A mess as usual, just looking for money for his next fix.’
    ‘Was he still doing his origami? Those little birds he made?’
    Della shrugged. ‘So far as I know, why do you ask?’
    ‘Because if you were still close to him, you’d have known that.’
    A brief image flickered through Catrin’s mind of the photos she’d seen in the case notes of his desolate room in Riverside. The backpack full of Oxfam clothes and three battered books of poetry, and that single origami bird they’d found in the fireplace.
    ‘Look,’ she said, ‘how about you fill me in on some ancient history. Last I heard of Rhys was twelve years ago. He takes himself off in the middle of the night to live with you. Haven’t heard a word from either of you since.’ Haven’t spent a day since without thinking about Rhys either .
    Della slid closer along the bench so that their thighs touched briefly. She lowered her voice, though there was no one else in the room.
    ‘We split up after a few months, I’d begun walking on the other side of the street if you know what I mean.’ She was so close now that her breath tickled Catrin’s ear. Their thighs were touching again. The bitch is actually getting off on this, she thought.
    ‘So how come you were still even in contact? You a successful media type, him a street junkie.’
    ‘Over the years he’d been getting by on scraps I fed him to pay for his habit.’ Catrin was pretending not to look too interested. She was good at that.
    ‘As he went downhill, he just got the shitty stuff, sitting in dives eavesdropping, going through people’s rubbish. Doorstepping, that kind of thing.’
    ‘So how did this lead to the Owen Face job?’
    ‘Six months back I got a call from a documentary maker, he was asking for leads on Owen Face. Like you, I thought it was a waste of time, nut job material.’
    ‘Why involve Rhys?’
    ‘This film-maker was spreading a lot of money about. And I mean a lot, all up-front, with big bonuses for any sort of result. So I put everyone I had on the case. It just happened Rhys was the one who came across the photos.’
    ‘Documentary makers don’t usually have a lot of money to spread around,’ Catrin said.
    ‘This one’s rich, a multimillionaire, made his money in commercial TV. The film is his personal hobby horse. The Owen Face mystery is something of a life’s obsession for him, apparently.’
    Catrin drained