“What the fuck,” Johnny says, when the breath goes back into him. He makes an instinctive move towards Rushborough.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to stay where you are, Johnny,” Cal says, in his cop voice. “We don’t want to compromise a crime scene.”
Johnny stays put. “Is he dead?”
“Oh yeah. Someone made good and sure of that.”
“How?”
“I look like a doctor to you?”
Johnny makes an effort to get himself together. He eyes Cal and gauges his chances of convincing him to dump Rushborough in a bog and forget the whole thing. Cal doesn’t feel inclined to help him reach a decision. He gazes blandly back.
Eventually Johnny, genius that he is, concludes that Cal is unlikely to play along. “Go home,” he says sharply to Trey. “Go on. Get home to your mammy and stay there. Say nothing about this to anyone.”
“Trey here’s the one that found the body,” Cal explains, nice and reasonable. “She’s gonna have to give a statement. The police are on their way.”
Johnny looks at him with pure hatred. Cal, after weeks of feeling that way about Johnny and being powerless to do a thing about it, looks back and savors every second.
“You say nothing to the Guards about that gold,” Johnny tells Trey. Trey may not be taking on board the implications here, but Johnny sure is; Cal can practically see his brain cells ricocheting among them all. “D’you hear me? Not a fucking word.”
“Language,” Cal reminds him.
Johnny bares his teeth in what’s supposed to be a smile but lands closer to a grimace. “I don’t need to tell you, sure,” he says to Cal. “You don’t want that hassle either.”
“Gee whiz,” Cal says, scratching his beard. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll take it under advisement.”
Johnny’s grimace tightens. “I’ve somewhere to be. Am I allowed to head over that way, am I? Guard?”
“Be my guest,” Cal says. “I’m sure the police’ll find you when they need you. Don’t you worry about us; we’re just fine here.”
Johnny throws him one more vicious look, then cuts through the trees to give the body a wide berth and heads up the higher path, towards the Dwyers’ places and incidentally towards Rushborough’s holiday home, at a near-run. Cal allows himself the hope that the little fuck will trip and go head over heels into a ravine.
“Bet he’s going to get your camera,” Trey says. “Rushborough took it offa me. I was gonna rob it back, only I didn’t get a chance.”
“Huh,” Cal says. That camera has been on his mind, along with the fact that it stopped being mentioned right around the time Trey got that fat lip. He was blaming Johnny. “What’s on there that Rushborough wanted?”
“You and them lads putting the gold in the river.”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Didja know I was there?”
“Nope,” Cal says, carefully. She’s not looking at him; she’s watching the path where her father vanished, eyes narrowed against the sun. “I half wondered, but nope, I didn’t know. How come you filmed it?”
“To show Rushborough. So’s he’d fuck off.”
“Right,” Cal says. He adjusts his ideas. Trey wasn’t just doing her filming behind Johnny’s back; she was doing it, with preparation and care, to fuck him over. This leaves Cal even more baffled about what she was doing waving Johnny’s cute little gold nugget around the pub.
“I didn’t know you’d be there,” Trey says. “At the river. You never told me.”
She’s turning the water bottle between her knees, head bent over it. If she’s watching Cal out of the corner of her eye, he can’t tell.
“You figure I should’ve,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“I was planning to. The day before, when I lent you that camera. Only then your dad showed up and took you off home, and I didn’t get a chance.”
“How come you went with them? To the river?”
Cal is moved by the fact that she’s asking: she knows him well enough to take for granted that he wasn’t there to rip off some damn fool tourist. “I wanted to keep an eye on things,” he says. “Rushborough always looked squirrelly to me, and the situation seemed like it could get messy. I like having a handle on what’s going on around me.”
“You shoulda said it to me from the start. I’m not a fuckin’ kid. I keep telling you.”
“I know that,” Cal says. He’s still picking his way with every bit of care and delicacy he has. He knows better than to lie to her, but he also knows better than to tell her he needs to look out for her. “I wasn’t thinking you were too little to understand, or anything. All’s I was thinking is that Johnny’s your dad.”
“He’s a fuckin’ tosspot.”
“I’m not denying that,” Cal says. “But I didn’t want to put you in the middle of anything by sounding like I was bad-mouthing him or his big idea, and I didn’t want to go pumping you for information. I figured I oughta leave you to make your own calls. I just wanted to stay clear on what was going on.”
