Lola as she opened her apartment door. ‘My God, where’ve you been? We heard what happened in Rome – everyone’s been so worried! Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Nina replied. She glanced along the corridor to make sure nobody was around. ‘Listen, there’s a really huge favour I need to ask you, but first, Don isn’t here, is he?’
Lola’s fiancé was a firefighter. ‘No, he’s working night shifts at the moment.’
‘Okay, good. Now, I need you to promise me that you will keep this an absolute secret for now. You can’t tell anyone, not even Don – and definitely not the police. If you think that’s going to be a problem, then don’t worry, I’ll just leave.’
‘Nina, it’s me,’ Lola said firmly. ‘You know you can trust me. You saved my life! We Gianettis, we remember that kind of thing.’
Nina smiled. ‘That’s good to know.’ She checked the corridor again, then waved her increasingly intrigued PA back from the door. ‘Okay,’ she called, ‘come on.’
The stairwell door opened and Eddie poked his head out before hurrying down the hallway into the apartment. ‘Hi, Lola,’ he said casually as he passed her.
Lola stared open-mouthed after him. ‘Oh, my God. Oh my God!’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Nina, following Eddie inside and closing the door. ‘Now you see why you need to keep this quiet?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Lola said, nodding. She went to Eddie, regarding him with amazement. ‘Where’ve you been? What have you been doing? How did you get back here without the police catching you?’ A more quizzical look. ‘Why did you grow a beard? It doesn’t suit you.’
‘There’s nowt wrong with my beard,’ Eddie insisted jokily. ‘Tchah! Anyway, they don’t give you razors in Zimbabwean prisons.’
Lola’s eyes widened. ‘You were in—’
‘Let’s save the travelogue for later, huh?’ Nina cut in. ‘There’s something more important to deal with first – namely, Eddie’s innocence.’ She extracted her MacBook Pro from a bag.
‘I knew you were innocent!’ Lola exclaimed.
‘Well, we’ve still got to actually prove it,’ Eddie admitted. ‘But thanks.’ He looked down at her baby bump. ‘So, either the pregnancy’s going well, or you’ve been eating a lot of pies.’
‘Eddie!’ Nina chided.
Lola giggled. ‘Both, actually.’
‘How far along are you now?’
‘Seven months.’
‘You know if it’s a boy or girl?’
‘No, we want that to be a surprise.’
‘If it’s a boy, Eddie’s a good name,’ he said with a grin before turning to his wife. She had put the laptop on a table and opened it. ‘You all set there?’
‘Nearly,’ she replied. ‘Lola, we need to watch a video. It might help prove Eddie’s innocence, but . . . you probably won’t want to see what happens in it.’
Lola looked uneasy. ‘Is it the one Interpol sent you?’ Nina nodded. ‘Oh. Okay, yeah, I definitely don’t want to see it.’
‘I’m sorry about this.’
‘It’s okay. I’ll be in the bedroom. Or the bathroom. It’s where I seem to spend half my time anyway.’ She glared at her belly. ‘Bad baby! Very bad baby. Stop squishing Mommy’s bladder, okay?’ She headed for another room. ‘If you need me, just shout.’
‘Will do,’ said Nina as she left. ‘Wow, Lola’s gonna be a mom. That’s such a weird thought. Exciting, though.’
‘We could have tried for one by now if you’d wanted,’ Eddie said.
She snorted sarcastically. ‘Are you kidding? Can you imagine me going through what I have lately if I’d been pregnant?’
‘You’d have survived. And so would the baby. I’ve seen pregnant women in war zones who’ve been through Christ knows what, and still gave birth to healthy kids. People are always panicking about every little thing that might go wrong, but the whole pregnancy process is pretty reliable. If it wasn’t, humans would have died out before we even got out of Africa.’
‘Thank you, Dr Chase, Ob-Gyn. Bet you wouldn’t be so casual if it were your baby,’ Nina said, giving him a sly smile. ‘Anyway, this is the video.’
Eddie regarded the screen. It showed a grainy still frame from the Peruvian gas pumping station, a catwalk with a multitude of pipes and valves beneath it cutting diagonally across the camera’s view. Near the left of the screen, a ladder ran from ground level to the gridwork walkway.
He remembered the scene well. ‘That’s where I climbed up,’ he said, pointing at the ladder. ‘Kit and Stikes were further along here –’ he indicated a point out of frame – ‘talking to Sophia.’ There was a timecode at the bottom right. ‘How long before I turn up does it start?’
‘Not long.’