Lethal Profit Read Online Free PDF

her. She took a large gulp of the red wine and tasted the tartness on the roof of her mouth.

    It struck her that perhaps she should feel sad about being in such a romantic city alone. Paris was well known as a destination for proposals and honeymoons and there were plenty of couples in the streets glued together at the palms of their hands. Why didn’t she feel sad about that? Eva couldn’t remember the last serious relationship she’d had. She tended to treat men as distractions, entertainment, or a release, but never anything more permanent. She rarely planned for the future but when she did it wasn’t with a wedding in mind. Not that she was immune to the pressures of someone her age. For several years now friends had been pairing off and her summers had been filled with weddings. Some followed a familiar, stiff formula and others were spirited and fun, but to Eva it was always just a party. A shrink would pin this to her father’s affair, maybe even Jackson’s disappearance, she thought, consuming more of her wine. Presumably the theory would be that she was afraid to trust a man because all the men in her life let her down. Was it really that simple? Maybe she just wasn’t the marrying kind.

    Eva realised she had finished her wine and ordered another as the food arrived. She ate slowly, deliberately, chewing each mouthful, tasting the creaminess of the eggs in the omelette and the fragrant tomatoes. Her meal came with a basket of soft, white sliced baguette and a small salad with a vinaigrette dressing and by the time she had finished the whole plate, and her second glass of wine, she was feeling distinctly sleepy. She ordered a cognac and a noisette coffee and settled back in her seat. For a moment, the post-food heaviness made her feel calm and satisfied, almost content. But as the coffee kicked in, her current situation seemed to come back into focus.

    She thought once again about Shaun, forcing herself to go back over every detail of his flat to try and recall any possible clues about who had been there and why. She already knew that he was simply a delivery courier and his ‘meeting’ with Jackson had been accidental. They had shared a cigarette outside the front of her brother’s office moments before he seemed to have disappeared, Jackson providing the nicotine in exchange for Shaun’s lighter. A friendly gesture, an amicable moment between complete strangers. But then why was Shaun dead? Eva pulled his phone out of her bag and began scrolling through the records. On the missed calls screen she saw the name ‘Jackson’ at the time that she had received the earlier call. Seeing his name made her heart start to beat faster. Who was making those calls? She looked further down the list but his name didn’t appear again. It seemed that the first time ‘Jackson’ had called Shaun was when she’d had the phone in her hands. The two men didn’t know each other so how was Jackson’s name in his phone and how had the phone call even come about? At the back of her mind, Eva acknowledged the possibility that ‘Jackson’ was not in fact Jackson but someone else. Someone with motives she didn’t even want to think about; and someone who through this phone and her own appeared to be trying to make contact with her. Perhaps the phone had even been left there for her to find. She had a sudden sense that she was outside of normal life, as if the moment she had stepped inside Shaun’s flat today had changed everything. Unsettled, she looked up from the phone and glanced around. Her waiter was rearranging glasses on a shelf; on the other side of the room two pensioners sat in companionable silence looking through the condensation on the glass window. The room was warm, quiet and smelled of coffee and steak. Nothing out of the ordinary. Eva dropped her gaze back to the phone and navigated back through all Shaun’s call records, his text