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CHAPTER ELEVEN

T omatoes – the room looked like the streets in Spain after the tomato harvest festival. What did they call it? Nina couldn’t remember. She’d been to Spain that time of the year, a few years ago, and spent the day hiding in her room, remembering Holi, the festival of colours, in her own home country. Only – Nina sniffed – it didn’t smell pungent or acidic but rather musky and metallic, like… blood?

She dug her elbows into the hard floor, wincing at the pain, and pushed up. The scene was straight out of Stephen King’s The Shining .

Blood pooled on the concrete floor; her shirt was drowning in it. There was splatter on the walls.

Nina shivered at the sight, and then from the cold in the room.

She turned her head and saw… him.

‘Jonas! Jonas!’

Nina moved her legs to sit up and slipped, smacking right back into the blood – Jonas’s blood.

‘Jonas!’ Her hand landed on him, and she shook him. ‘Jo?—’

His lips were blue – too blue. Nina gripped his wrist, trying to slow her own heartbeat so she could listen. But no matter what, no matter how long she clutched his wrist, she knew – no one could have survived that sort of gash across their throat.

She’d slit Jonas’s throat, then lain in his blood?

Bile rose up, vomit threatening to erupt, but instead?—

‘Noo!’ Nina jerked awake, her limbs kicking as if fighting the dream… nightmare… memory?

She massaged her forehead, trying but failing to keep her hands from shaking. It was too vivid to be a dream.

Maybe her brain had imagined the blood… The scene had been bloody, but there was only so much a human could lose.

Nina scrambled up, resting her head back on the bed’s headboard to gulp oxygen.

He’d been dead before the building had caught fire. And if she hadn’t slit his throat, she’d certainly left him to his own devices in a burning building.

Nina stumbled out of bed, still shaky. As an investigative reporter, she’d encountered a lot of gut-churning stuff – the worse humanity had to offer. But that scene… Nothing had ever been so personal.

As she dressed, Nina knew she had to rip the bandage off. Sooner or later, a diligent police officer would find her, and she hadn’t exactly taken measures to protect herself.

The fire would have made it harder for the forensic team, but coupled with the images in Jonas’s camera – which she’d belatedly realised came with “Cloud Sync” technology – any halfwit prosecutor had a case against her.

Nina tied up the laces of her boots and picked up her backpack. The hotel’s card beeped against the scanner when she unlocked the door.

No, she would fight this in the only way she knew how.

Nina had to do what she’d initially set out to – investigate sham marriages taking place in the UK under the name of love but for the sole purpose of acquiring a visa. That would give her answers to what had happened – to her and to Jonas.

Nina shut the door and descended the steps.

Glasgow’s Merchant City buzzed with people. It wasn’t a weekend, but the sun had made a particularly rare appearance given it was November, and when the sun appeared, most Glaswegians – in Nina’s opinion – went raving mad.

The chairs and tables on the pavement were filled with groups drinking, eating, and blethering. In fact, there were so many tables, she barely had space to walk on the pavement.

If she’d been living in this area full time, she’d have hated this. Too many eyes, too easy for someone to hide amongst the crowd and spy.

Nina sidestepped a group meandering down the road as if they had nothing better to do with their time. She supposed with the right company, particularly a man with soft, spiky blond hair, kissable lips and a hunky built, she could be encouraged to do so too.

She swallowed. She’d tried, truly tried to forget the man she’d been drinking with. But somewhere in those hours they’d spent together, his face had imprinted itself on the back of her eyelids, and he’d become a recurring character in her dreams.

Nina knew she’d landed in deep trouble, particularly when in her dreams, he’d asked her to leap off a roof in an attempt to get away from Shah and she had – without hesitation.

What spooked her the most was the knowledge that her misplaced trust in him extended to the real world, too.

How? She barely knew the man.

Nina gritted her teeth at her own stupidity. With her life hanging on by a strand of a thread, she had no business tripping over herself for a man. She’d been there and done that. And she was no longer the blind twenty-year-old who thought marriage was a union where love always blossomed.

Nina turned her attention back to her destination. Work, investigation. Right.

The last thing she’d done, before she’d got the call to meet up at that dilapidated building, was visit a law office. Malcolm and Associates were immigration lawyers specialising in spousal visas, and her investigation into sham marriages had led her directly to them.

Last time, she’d left their offices with questions but hadn’t had a chance to follow up. Today, she’d do just that.

Nina cut across George Square, skirting the fencing, vehicles and props all assembled for the Christmas market. In Glasgow, the Christmas markets opened around the end of November.

Nina dodged a few tourists, powered past the glass entrance of the subway station with its orange-and-grey logo and halted at the entrance of an old Victorian building.

To an outsider, the entire structure might look abandoned, just an accessory dotting Buchanan Street, one of the main shopping thoroughfares. But the buzzers with numbers next to the wooden doors said otherwise.

Nina found the buzzer and the number of the office she wanted and pressed down on it. Silence. She tried the wooden door, but it didn’t budge.

She pressed the buzzer down longer, almost demanding they pay attention to her, until the intercom crackled. ‘Yes?’

‘Hiya! I’m here to meet?—’

‘Come in.’ The buzzer sounded, and the lock clicked open.

Nina pushed through and shivered. The stairwell lacked any heating. How the hell was it colder in here than outside?

The corridor boasted chipped yellowed tiles and peeling paint, and her booted feet thudded on the stairs, the sound echoing back at her in a way that reminded her of schools once the pupils went home… creepy.

She made her way to the first-floor landing then to the right where the law office was. Before she could knock on the door, it swung open to reveal a smiling woman.

Her eyes shone a bright blue, framed with dark-rimmed glasses. Her hair hung loose and straight around her round face.

She waved her hands around. ‘Oh hello! Come in, come in.’

Unsure why the woman was so… smiley and nice, Nina followed, holding herself back a little. It wasn’t the sort of greeting you’d expect in a law office. Or the sort of greeting she’d received the first time she’d visited.

‘The door has a security system, so you can use fobs for employees.’

Er… why would Nina need to know how they let their employees into the office? She smiled back, playing along. Perhaps the woman was trying to be friendly?

They stepped through the door, and the woman gestured to the room. ‘The previous tenants used it as a waiting and reception area.’

Nina followed her and was met with an empty room. There were no chairs, no desks and certainly no receptionists smiling at her. Before, there’d been a team of them behind a semi-circular desk, under a large banner announcing ‘Malcolm and Associates: Solicitors’.

That banner was now gone, and so was the desk.

‘I’m sorry.’ Nina halted the woman’s ramblings. ‘Sorry – what happened to the lawyers?’

The woman blinked at her. ‘Er, the lawyers?’

‘Aye, the immigration lawyers who had an office here. I was here a few months ago,’ Nina clarified, pointing to where the banner had been. Of course, that only confused the woman.

‘Aren’t you here to see the place? To rent it?’

Oh God! Nina scratched her forehead. ‘There seems to have been a mistake. I thought this was a law office.’

The letting agent – that’s what she must be – clicked her fingers. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Aye, this used to be a law office. But they gave their notice a while ago and have since moved away.’

That wasn’t helpful at all. And what sort of law office moved away without letting its clients know? Not that she was a client. Maybe she could look them up online…

‘Do you have a forwarding address for them?’ Nina asked.

The letting agent shook her head. ‘Sorry, I don’t.’

Five minutes later, when the letting agent’s potential tenant arrived, Nina left. She walked back towards George Square, her mind a whirl.

Maybe if she looked them up online, she could get their new location. After that nightmare this morning, she really needed this to work.

Coffee – a coffee would whip her back into shape. A lot could happen over coffee.

Huffing out a breath, Nina lugged herself to the nearest café. She found a seat, opened up her laptop and took the first sip of her drink.

As the coffee disappeared, which was quickly replaced with another, Nina’s research drilled deeper and deeper. She revisited the websites she’d browsed before when doing her usual background checks on the lawyers, trying to search them out using all possible angles, and found nothing. The lawyers had vanished under an invisibility cloak it seemed.

Two hours after she’d started, Nina sank back in her chair and came to terms with what had happened. She’d been completely and utterly duped.