Maltese Steel

Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Around nine that evening, James Calver arrived back at his flat. His ginger tom, Percy, was curled up on a throw blanket that protected Calver’s brown fabric couch.

Naturally, Percy was too busy licking at its left leg to notice Calver.

Calver walked into the kitchen and placed the shopping bags onto the work surface. His cupboards and refrigerator were almost empty.

The kitchen was big enough for one – in fact, the whole apartment was perfect for a single person. It was a two-bedroom apartment, but one of those rooms was now a small gym

The kitchen and sitting room was open-plan, with only a breakfast bar to separate them. A large Ultra High Definition television hung on the right-hand wall so he could watch tv from the kitchen. The walls were painted off-white. It was also light enough to reflect the sun’s rays – making it bearable in the summer, which got up well into the high thirties.

He turned on his computer and pressed the button on his answering machine to check his messages. ‘You have seven new messages,’ said the electronic female voice.

One was from his mother. The others were just marketers, and another was from a girl who realised she had the wrong number. Calver smiled to himself as he listened to her voice. She sounded hot, but she was also drunk and wanting to kill some guy called Mike.

Lucky Mike, he thought.

Calver packed away a carton of eggs, some cheese, packs of cut meat into the refrigerator. Then he grabbed a beer to celebrate.

He had food in the apartment – yey!

The computer monitor showed a picture of a red moon setting over the ocean, with the Azure Window in the foreground. It was a photoshop picture, but he did not care. It looked great on the thirty-two-inch monitor. Calver typed in his password and waited the few seconds it would take to boot up.

He had around a hundred emails in his inbox. Most of it was junk and some links from several networking sites. He sat in his black office chair, sipping his beer and began to delete the unimportant ones. With a simple click of the mouse, and they were gone. He spotted an email from the Harley Davidson shop he had been to in Attard. They had sent him information on a Softail he had asked about the week before.

It was a luxury he could not really afford, but things were about to change for him in a big way. He would have enough to quit his job and live on a small island somewhere when that happened.

Seven more emails went in the trash. However, the next made Calver stop and sit up, his eyes fixed on the heading. Calver’s hand tighten on the mouse.

I know what you did on Gozo, it read. The email had probably come from a public place like an internet café, with no natural way of tracking the sender even if he found the computer.

Those few simple words could ruin everything he had started.

Calver wrenched himself from his seat, forcing the chair to slide away to the side, teeth and fists clenched in anger.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening; it was meant to be easy.

An evil grin crept across Calver’s face.

He knew people.

The sort who made problems go away.

The sort of people who weren’t squeamish – and did not ask questions.

Calver sat back down with a smile and finished going through his emails.

‘It will all be OK in the morning,’ he said to himself as he took another hit from the bottle.