Free Incinerator by Niall Leonard Page A

a month or two. I could see Delroy wanted to protest, but he just nodded. He was out of his depth, I realized, and weak and ill and weary, and again I felt ashamed that I had ever got him involved in this business.
    Delroy hung the last helmet up on a hook to dry off. “Oh yeah,” he remembered. “Youhave a visitor.” I looked around. “She’s upstairs.” I would normally have expected him to announce news like that with a dirty grin, but he just looked grim, and abruptly I knew who it was.
    Susan Horsfall was sitting on my ripped vinyl sofa, reading. She had draped my discarded shirts over the back and, I noted with some embarrassment, picked up my discarded underwear from the floor and put it in the bin liner I was using for dirty laundry.
    “Make yourself at home,” I said.
    She jumped, and looked up and laughed, a little nervously. “Finn. Hey. Sorry—your friend Delroy sent me up, and I thought you’d be here, or at least be back soon. And there wasn’t much in the way of reading material except these …” She held up one of the case files I had carried away from Nicky’s office. I decided this wasn’t the moment to explain why my place wasn’t strewn with novels and magazines. “How did you get hold of them?” she asked.
    “They’re the files on Nicky’s other clients,” I said, ducking the question for Vora’s sake.
    “You really think she hasn’t absconded? That something happened to her?”
    “Presumably you do too,” I said, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
    She wasn’t as cocky as the last time we’d met; she looked worried, and slightly ashamed. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “I kept thinking, what if you were right? It’s easier to believe she did do a runner, that she’s safe somewhere spending someone else’s money, than …”
    “Whatever the alternative is,” I said.
    “Nicky and I didn’t always get on,” said Susan. “I mean, there was a lot of crap in our childhood, and some of it was my fault. But the thought of her being taken, maybe being held prisoner, and nobody even knowing … it’s horrible. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone … even my cow of a sister.” I could see she was trying to lighten the darkness with a feeble gag, and it wasn’t working. I heard a catch in her throat, and the papers trembled in her hands.
    “If you want to do something about it, you could help me,” I said.
    “How?”
    “You could tell me what’s in those files. I’m not the fastest reader in the world.”
    “You think one of her clients might have had something to do with her disappearing?”
    “I’ve no idea,” I said. “I’m just shaking all the trees to see what falls out.”
    She turned back to the two box files. “There are only two personal clients here, as far as I can see,” she said. “Joan Bisham, and Jeremy Zeto.”
    “Who’s Joan Bisham?”
    “Property developer being charged with insurance fraud. A building her company bought—some old pub—mysteriously burned down, with two squatters inside. One of them died in the fire. This guy Leslie survived.” She passed me a photocopy of an article from what looked like a local free newspaper. The main picture was of a man in his thirties with half of his face swathed in bandages.
    “Fraud? Why isn’t she being done for attempted murder?”
    “Her husband got done for the fire. The insurers think she was in on it. The case comes to trial in a week or so.”
    “What about the other file?”
    “Zeto? There’s not much to that one. He’s a vicar being done for drink-driving.”
    “All that paperwork for one drunk driver?”
    “Nicky really went to town on the defence, by the look of it. Witness statements … psychiatric report …”
    “Let me have a look.” I held out my hand and she passed the report to me. It was unreadable jargon, as I expected, but at least there wasn’t much of it—it was only two pages long. Maybe Zeto was paying for his own defence, and