Page 19 of The Trap by Catherine
But she desperately needed to dosomething. Sell the butcher’s or sell the house. Or sell the house and open the cafe. Or sell everything and go somewhere else to start a new life for herself. In the meantime, the cafe—or rather, the butcher’s shop with its linoleum floor removed, newspaper blocking the view out of its floor-to-ceiling window and a few mismatched patio chairs arranged in a circle around an upturned tea chest—was a physical manifestation of where she was in her life: trapped in a useless, desolate limbo.
“Lucy?”
She had the cafe’s door propped open for air, and now when she turned she saw a man standing just inside it.
He was in his forties and wearing jeans, a faded blue T-shirt, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses he was in the process of taking off. She could smell his cologne: something musky and pungent that must have been sprayed on recently, perhaps as recently as just before he got out of his car. His face had the strange, porous sheen of too much Botox and his skin was so tanned that, as he smiled now, the contrast between it and his teeth was genuinely alarming.
She’d never met him in person, but she recognized Jack Keane from his TV shows.
Or the ads for them, anyway.
Jack lifted the hand that wasn’t holding the sunglasses to show her what he’d brought: a cardboard tray with two takeaway coffees on it. “Cappuccino on the left, latte on the right,” he said. “Take your pick. I know it’s a bit strange to bring coffee to a cafe, but I did a search online and found nothing, so I guessed it wasn’t open yet, so...”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the nearest cup. “And thanks for coming so quickly.”
“Not at all. Thanks for calling me.”
“We can sit here,” Lucy said. She motioned to the motley crew of chairs. “If you don’t mind a little dust.”
When they were both seated, she asked him if anyone else had called him too.
“You mean any of the other families? No.” A brief smile. “Not yet.” He arched an eyebrow. “Why didyoucall me, Lucy?”
She took a sip of the—bad—coffee while she considered her answer.
“Because I want to know what you know,” she said. “What they aren’t telling us.”
Jack nodded. “I imagine you do.” He set his coffee down on the tea chest and relaxed into his chair, crossing his legs and leaning back. “You said on the phone you’d already heard about Lena Paczkowski?”
“Yes. Our FLO visited us this morning.”
“Is that Denise Pope?”
“It is, yeah.”
“What did she tell you, exactly?”
Lucy repeated what they’d been told: about how Lena had gone missing two weeks ago, re-emerged miles away near the Great Sugarloaf only to get hit by a car and, before she fell unconscious from her injuries, told the paramedics that she’d been held in a place where other women were being held too.
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” Jack said.
She waited for him to elaborate, but instead he sighed deeply.
“Look, Lucy. I’m going to be blunt with you, OK? This isn’t a gift. It would have to be an exchange. I’m here because I want an interview. Now, I know what you’re thinking:asshole. And I get it. But you wouldn’t be the first person to call me that. You wouldn’t be the first person to call me thattoday. But I’m the asshole with the information no one else is going to share with you, least of all your so-called friends in the Gardaí. I will tell you what Denise Pope won’t, or can’t. And trust me, you’re going to want to hear it.”
Lucy was a little lost.Jack was saying all this as if he was breaking news to her, but she’d assumed that that’s what he’d come here to say.
Ofcoursehe was trying to get an interview with her. Why else would he have put his business card through her door in the first place? And if she wasn’t prepared to give him an interview, would she have bothered arranging to meet?
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a job to do,” he was saying now. “And a mortgage to pay.Twobloody mortgages, since the wife decided she couldn’t stand the sight of me any more. And please don’t say it.”
“What?”
“That you’re on her side.” He smiled briefly, then returned to Serious Face. “And what you need to know is that this wouldn’t be for my... let’s say, usual fare. This won’t beMurder on the Motorway.”
“What’s that?”
“That was my last show,” he said. “Craig Lewis? The guy who murdered that woman at the tollbooth? Still annoyed they wouldn’t let me call itHorror on the Hard Shoulder, to be honest.But anyway, no. This would be for a special edition of the six o’clock news. We’re going to do a full hour with some pre-taped reports on Operation Tide, and the interview would be the centerpiece. This would be worth doing, Lucy. I promise you.”
