Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,22

on what I have had to do to survive?’

Azarov stepped towards her, raising his fist. The red mark left by her hand was clearly visible on his cheek.

Alix stood her ground. ‘Go on, then,’ she said raising her chin defiantly, presenting it as a target. ‘Hit me. Show me what kind of a man you really are.’

Azarov stood for a moment with his arm raised, then took a step back, his breathing heavy and his lips white with a fury it was taking all his self-control to contain. They seemed to stare at one another for an age before he turned on his heel and strode to a console table on which was a telephone. He picked it up.

‘Tell Connors to pack me an overnight bag. Now,’ he commanded. ‘I want my Ferrari brought to the front door immediately. And book me a suite at the Ritz … Yes, for tonight. Mrs Vermulen will be staying here.’

Azarov slammed the phone down, then turned to face Alix again.

‘Satisfied?’ he said.

Burlington, Ontario, Canada: six months earlier

The shoes were a statement of defiance. Classic black brogues by Luca del Forte, reduced from three hundred and fifty bucks to one-eighty at the Browns store in Mapleview Mall, right off the Queen Elizabeth Way. These were investment shoes, the kind that would never go out of style; shoes a man could treasure for years, feeling the leather mould itself around his foot, getting ever more comfortable as time went by. Kev Lundkvist was forty years old. He should have had decades to get those brogues just the way he liked them.

Kev didn’t want to come home with nothing but presents for himself. He went along to the Swarovski crystal outlet and got his girlfriend, Alyson, a couple of little beagle figurines. They were cheesy as hell, but Kev knew that she would think they were cute. She’d stick them on her special shelf, right by her dressing table, and they’d make her think of him, every time she saw them.

He stopped off for coffee and a double-chocolate muffin. So by the time he left the mall it was dark. When he got outside, the wind off Lake Ontario whipped up the thin snowfall so that it almost stung when it hit his face. Ken had to stop and wipe his glasses clear just to see where he’d left his car, and it was while he was standing there, right in the middle of the parking lot but well off the main driveway, that he was hit by a speeding Nissan Frontier truck.

Kev was knocked right off his feet, and sent crashing into a parked SUV. His body ended up motionless on the ground, with his broken limbs splayed in unnatural angles around him. He was dead on arrival at Joseph Brant Hospital.

As for the Frontier, it slewed after impact and skidded on the slushy tarmac, but the driver managed to regain control and was racing for the exit before any of the other shoppers making their way to or from the mall had worked out what had just happened.

When it was found a couple of hours later on a residential street close to the Tyandaga Municipal Golf Course, the Frontier stank of whisky from the discarded bottle of Crown Royal, whose dregs had seeped into the carpet of the passenger-side footwell. A forensic search yielded no significant fingerprints. Detectives were disappointed, but not surprised, by the negative results. They’d already opened the glove compartment and found a crumpled receipt that indicated the truck had just been cleaned inside and out by a local company. The people there couldn’t remember much about the guy who’d picked up the truck, but they did recall that he was wearing mitts. It was midwinter. Who wasn’t?

The truck belonged to a contractor more than seven hundred kilometres away in Sault Sainte Marie. He’d reported it stolen four days earlier, and was in a bar with four of his men when the hit-and-run occurred. One of the guys had even posted a picture of them all on his Facebook site that same evening.

Someone had got drunk in a stolen truck and committed an act of homicide. But who that person might have been remained a total mystery.

‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ the pathologist reassured the detective in charge of the investigation when he handed over the post-mortem report. ‘Lundkvist had Stage 3B liver cancer. There were a bunch of tumours in the liver itself, and it had spread into the