Free Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory

‘What are you doing up here?’ he asked.
    She shrugged, felt a little awkward. ‘Just took a walk.’
    ‘You don’t open the store on Saturdays?’
    ‘I do, yes,’ she said, ‘but today … well today I just didn’t feel like it.’
    She thought then of coincidence, and before the thought had even half-formed in her mind she remembered that he’d mentioned his move to the other side of Morningside Park. From East Village to the north-western edge of Harlem.
    From his jacket pocket he took a pack of Marlboros.
    ‘Cigarette?’ he asked.
    She smiled. ‘I quit a long time ago,’ she said.
    ‘You mind?’
    She waved her hand nonchalantly. ‘Have some coffee too,’ she suggested.
    He smiled, seemed so at ease in that moment, as if they had indeed been long-lost friends. A chance meeting after so many years.
    How’ve you been?
    Good … very good. And you?
    Fine. Working hard
.
    And what do you do now … seem to remember you always wanted to be an architect
.
    I am, yes, and actually I’m down this way working on a plan to level some of these tenements and build a godawful mirrored monolith
…
    Annie smiled to herself as David Quinn rose from his chair and went inside to order coffee.
    He came back with two cups, set one ahead of Annie, and then he sat again, was quiet for a time as he poured cream, as he stirred, as he lit his cigarette.
    ‘You have nowhere to be?’ she asked.
    He shook his head, his hand around his cup as if to draw warmth from it. ‘Nothing special,’ he said. ‘I was going to get some groceries.’
    She didn’t say anything in response, and for a little while there was silence between them. She felt strangely at ease. She sipped her coffee, her third cup of the day.
Living on the edge Annie
, she thought, and then
Well, you know what they say … if you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much room
.
    And it was then that she asked him. ‘And what is it that you do? If you don’t mind me asking.’
    ‘Not at all,’ David said. ‘What I do is marine insurance.’
    She frowned. ‘Like boats and things?’
    He nodded, smiled a lazy half-smile with an undercurrent of warmth she found immediately appealing. He wasn’t what she would have called a handsome man, not in the classic sense of the word, but his face had that lived-in feeling, the same way that Jack Sullivan carried his whole life in a single expression.
    ‘Like boats and things yes,’ he said. ‘Especially the things.’
    Annie smiled. His humor was dry, a little caustic. ‘So what
is
marine insurance?’ she asked.
    ‘Commercial stuff mainly, cargo ships, ferries, things like that … we cover the insurance, and then when they sink or go aground I go out and investigate, make sure it wasn’t scuttled just to claim the insurance money.’
    ‘And that’s why you were in Canada?’
    He nodded. ‘An icebreaker went aground in the Amundsen Gulf, a boat that does the trip round Sachs Harbor, Cape Prince Alfred and back down the Prince of Wales Strait. Tore its belly out and sank like a stone.’
    ‘You don’t dive, do you?’
    ‘Out there, minus three thousand degrees, God no. If it’s a big enough contract they’ll haul it up. If it’s not so big we send underwater cameras down.’
    ‘And the icebreaker?’ she asked.
    ‘Was driven ashore intentionally, at least there’s every indication that was the case.’
    Annie frowned. ‘How can you tell?’
    David smiled. ‘The same way I’m sure you can tell if a book’s gonna be good from the first paragraph. There are all sorts of signs you look for.’ He paused for a moment to drink his coffee. ‘Anyway, enough of work … what are you doing today?’
    Annie shook her head. ‘Nothing much of anything really.’
    ‘So let’s take a walk, go see something, have some lunch.’
    Annie O’Neill looked at the man facing her, this David Quinn, marine insurance investigator, and she remembered the thoughts she’d woken with – the exception that