by Zoe Sharp
He reached out and pushed a few strands of hair back from my face with infinitely gentle fingers. My heart stammered in my chest, then overreached in its effort to catch up.
“In my head, I know how good you are, Charlie,” he said. “I’ve always known. Right from the moment I first started to train you—you had that instinct, that spark. You should have had a brilliant career as a soldier. You burned so bright you were dazzling.” He paused, looked away and said quietly, “What happened to you was criminal, in every sense of the word.”
I didn’t speak. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say.
Somewhere below, on another floor, a multitone car alarm siren was sounding, muffled by the distance and ignored anyway. London teemed and bubbled around us. We were encircled by millions of people, and utterly isolated from all of them.
“But in my heart,” he went on, “I’m so afraid for you every time I send you out on a job, I can hardly function.”
Part of me knew what he was saying, but something goaded me into provoking him, even so. “You don’t trust me,” I said, an accusation rather than a query.
He made an uncommon gesture of frustration. “Christ, you know that’s not it. It’s not being able to be out there with you.” The Shogun’s engine note dipped as the cold-start disengaged and it dropped back to slow idle. “It would break every rule in the book if I put us on a team together when we’re involved. How could I be sure, if you were in the line of fire, that I’d always cover the principal? And if that happened, well—,” he shrugged his shoulders, “I’d be finished.”
“So instead you have to keep reassuring yourself that I’m ready,” I said slowly. “Is that why you assigned me to work with Kelso in Prague? Is that why you’ve sprung this trip to the States on me? Some kind of test?”
“Partly,” he said, throwing me a tired smile. “Kelso’s a useful man but a hopeless misogynist, and you proved—yet again—that you’ve got what it takes to cope with the Kelsos of this world.”
He’d carefully avoided the rest of the question, I noticed, but I wouldn’t let it go.
“And what about America?”
“You’ve got to get over it sooner or later, Charlie,” he said gently. “This should be a nice easy job. You’ve got weeks to get used to the idea. And once you get to Boston, away from Simone’s ex, it’s just a case of holding her hand while she reacquaints herself with Daddy.”
It sounded simple enough when he put it like that. And besides, I knew all about difficult family relationships from firsthand experience.
So why couldn’t I shake off the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach?
“OK, Sean,” I heard myself saying. “If you want me to take this, I’ll do it.”
He fastened his seat belt and set the car into gear before regarding me, and his face was suddenly hard again, the way it had been when he’d first shown me the knife.
“Just remember, Charlie, today you let emotion cloud your judgment and you must not let that happen, do you understand me?” he said, so coldly it was almost impossible to imagine that he had ever softened towards me. “It will kill you if you do.”
Four
I didn’t expect to hear from Simone again for a couple of weeks. Not until her tame private investigators had made more progress, at any rate. And because that meant I could put off making a decision about whether I was really ready to go back to the States or not, I put it off.
It was something of a surprise, therefore, to get a call on my mobile just before six thirty the next morning.
It was still dark outside and I could hear rain slatting against the outside of the window Disorientated, I rolled over in my bed and groped for the phone. By the time I’d flicked it open and recognized Sean’s number as the caller, I was fully awake.
I hadn’t gone back with him to Harrington’s office the afternoon before. Instead, Sean had taken Simone and Ella home himself and had offered to arrange overnight cover for her. Apparently she’d dug her heels in at the idea of being surrounded by a group of strangers, insisting that Matt was unlikely to try again and she’d be in touch when she needed us.
“Sean,” I said now by way of greeting. “What’s up?”
He heard the wary note in my voice. He must have done. He’d been cool towards me since our altercation of the day before. For the first time in weeks pride had dictated that I go back to the room I was renting near his base of operations in King’s Langley rather than to his place. But as soon as I’d shut the door behind me and the silence had closed in, I’d regretted it. I knew I was punishing myself as much as Sean, but forgiving him too readily had seemed much worse an option.
“I’ve just had a call from Simone,” he said. “Apparently the press have got wind of what happened yesterday and they’re camped out on her doorstep.”
“The press?” I repeated, alarmed, my first instinct one of guilt. For a moment I had the irrational fear that somehow the run-in Sean and I had had with the security guard the day before had leaked out and made the headlines.
“Yeah, it would seem that her ex didn’t appreciate being slung out on his ear and he must have decided to go very public about the whole thing.”
“Oh,” I said, hit by relief and then dismay in equal parts. “Shit.”
“Yeah, you could say that,” he said, his voice wry. “Anyway, she’s under siege and she needs some support. I told her to close all the curtains and stay inside, and offered to send a full team, but she just wants you. How soon can you be up there?” He gave me the address, a quiet suburb in northwest London. Not exactly your usual lottery winner neighborhood.
I sat up in bed and swung my legs out from under the covers. “On the bike? About forty-five minutes,” I said, thinking of my Honda FireBlade sitting chained up in the garage below. Nothing sliced through the morning rush quite like a big-power motorcycle.
“No, I think you should swing by the office and pick up a pool vehicle,” Sean said. “Then if things get too bad you can always move the pair of them to a more secure location.”
“If I do, it could take me another hour to get to her now.”
“She’s not in any immediate danger. The press are a nuisance, but they’re not about to break down her front door for the sake of a story.”
“OK,” I said, on my feet and heading for the shower. “Tell her I’m on my way and I’ll be with her as soon as I can.”
“I already did,” he said with the ghost of a smile in his voice. There was a pause, almost a hesitation. “Are you OK?”
I stopped moving, heard the tension under the words and knew there was a lot riding on my answer, one way or another.
“Fine,” I said at last, and found I had to force myself to breathe. I swallowed, started again, more casually this time. “I’m fine, Sean. Don’t worry about it.”
“Good,” he said, so devoid of emotion that I didn’t know if I’d said the right thing or not. “I’ll let you get sorted,” he added, more businesslike. “Take care, Charlie.” And with that he was gone.
“Yeah,” I said to a dead connection. “You, too.”
Simone’s house was an ordinary postwar semidetached, with fake Elizabethan-style timber on the upper story and crisp red brick below The front door was solid wood and painted pillar-box red. There was an integral garage to one side, with a tall narrow gate leading to the back garden.
It looked as though the front garden had been on the neglected side, although the booted feet of the journalists and photographers now trampling all over it had reduced it to a soggy brown mush underfoot and made it difficult to tell.
I braked to a halt just short of the patchy gravel driveway and called ahead on my mobile before I attempted going in. It rang out at the other end for what seemed like a long time before Simone answered.
I wasn’t brave or foolish enough to attempt getting out of the car while I waited for her to pick up. As I eyed the movements of the pack in front of me, it was like watching hyenas bickering among t
hemselves while they waited for the next kill.
It had taken me two and a half hours, all told, from Sean’s phone call to my arrival, including the time I’d spent detouring to pick up one of the company Shoguns.
I’d spent a lot of the journey sitting in neutral, looking at the brake lights of the car in front through the sweep of the windscreen wipers, and thinking about Sean. Or, more specifically, thinking about his actions of the day before.
I understood his motives, in a way, but surely he could have found another method of expressing his doubts over my abilities, short of pulling a knife on me. I could just imagine what my father would have to say on the subject, if anybody ever tortured me enough to make me tell him. He and Sean had never exactly been close, and this would hardly have endeared him further.
One of the photographers turned in the driveway, spotted the Sho-gun and tried to get his camera up without his fellow paparazzi noticing. When the rest finally cottoned on they all surged towards me, elbowing one another out of the way, their apparent camaraderie vanishing the instant there was the scent of fresh blood in the air.
I put the car into gear and nudged forwards. The pressmen took one look at the substantial bull bars on the front of the four-by-four and reluctantly parted to let me through. Had they not done so, I was in two minds about whether I was prepared to stop.
I pulled up as close to the front door as I could manage, checked my shirt collar out of habit and shoved my way through the jostling pack, ignoring the questions and microphones and flashguns that were thrust into my face. Simone must have been watching for me because she opened the front door just as I reached it and I slid through the gap with hardly a pause.
The baying of the press continued outside, muffled by the thickness of the wooden door. Simone leaned back against the timber and closed her eyes momentarily.
The hallway was small and painted pale yellow, with three doorways leading off it and a carpeted staircase to the upper floor. The pictures on the walls were conventional mass market prints in cheap but cheerful frames. I wondered briefly if the fact that Simone could now afford to shop for originals would change her taste in art.
“How long have they been here?” I said, jerking my head towards the driveway.
“It seems like forever,” Simone said wearily, opening her eyes. “Since first light, I think. That’s when they started ringing the goddamn doorbell, anyway.”
“Where’s Ella?”
She rolled her eyes upwards. “They were scaring her, banging on the front windows, so I told her to stay upstairs. She has her own TV and stuff in her room.”
“Sean said Matt had gone public. What happened?”
Simone glanced briefly towards the stairwell as though to check there were no tiny ears within hearing distance. Then she picked up a folded newspaper from the hall table and thrust it towards me.
“Here. Read it for yourself.”
I scanned the front page quickly. It was all laid out under a big bold, if somewhat coy, banner headline:
R!CH B!TCH!
Underneath it was a luridly written story about how Simone had won millions and had then, with casual cruelty, thrown the father of her child out of the house they’d shared for the past five years. I glanced up to find Simone watching me, her face tight with embarrassment and anger. I read the piece again, more fully this time, making her wait.
Even allowing for gutter press exaggeration, Matt had clearly wasted no time airing his grievances. The way he’d told it, the moment Simone had realized the size of her win, she had more or less sent him out to the supermarket and changed the locks while he was gone. Now she was refusing to give him access to the daughter he idolized and, when he’d tried to bring the little girl a simple present in a public restaurant, Simone’s “hired thugs”—that was us—had jumped him.
It was the stuff of tabloid editors’ dreams. A scorned lover, a tug-of-love child, a whiff of violence, and—best of all—money. Lots of money. They’d wrung every last ounce of salacious indignation out of the story.
Somehow they’d managed to snatch a long-range picture of Simone, cradling Ella, with a caption claiming she was “heartlessly out on a spending spree in London’s Knightsbridge” while her rejected suitor was reduced to camping on a distant relation’s sofa.
In the picture both Simone and Ella were wearing the same clothes they’d had on the previous day Some fast-moving paparazzo had obviously snapped them in the street as we’d left the restaurant. The fact that there were clearly no shopping bags to be seen was conveniently overlooked.
When I’d reached the bottom of the page I looked up and caught the sheer disgust on Simone’s face.
“How could Matt do this to us?” she demanded, her voice low with rage. “And how the hell can they get away with printing crap like that? It’s all pure fabrication.”
“People lash out without thinking when they’re hurt,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to come to her ex’s defense. “And what Matt didn’t tell them they’ve probably made up anyway. Once you’ve let them out of their cage, you can’t hope to control them.”
She swallowed, pulling a face, and was about to say more when Ella edged into view at the top of the stairs. She’d lost the bounce I remembered from the day before, seeming listless and subdued.
“What is it, sweetie?” Simone said quickly.
“I’m thirsty, Mummy,” she complained, her voice whiny “Is it OK if I come down and get a drink of water?”
Simone’s face softened. “Of course you can.”
Ella negotiated the stairs with care, holding on with one hand and trailing a comfort blanket and a small rather grubby stuffed Eeyore in the other, its detachable tail obviously long-since lost. She clutched the bedraggled toy donkey tight to her chest as she came past us, giving me a wide berth.
Simone’s smile for her daughter hardened as she watched her disappear into the kitchen at the end of the hallway. A moment later I caught a glimpse of the little girl dragging a wooden chair across the floor so she could climb onto it and reach the sink under the kitchen window.
“I hate what this is doing to her,” Simone said quietly.
“Is there anyone you could go and stay with?” I asked.
She frowned and shook her head. “Nobody I’d want to subject to something like this,” she said, jerking her head towards the swarming pack at the front of the house.
“Are you sure —no family or friends?” I pushed. “It might help if you can get away, even just for a few days. The press are vicious while they’re after you, but they tend to have a pretty short attention span.” As I well knew from personal experience.
“No, there’s only me and Ella,” Simone said firmly, wrapping her arms around her body as though she was cold. She bit her lip. “Matt was the one with the big family.” She spoke of him in the past tense now, I noted, like he was dead.
“What about a hotel?” If nothing else, it would provide an additional layer of security. Without that, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that I was going to have to get Sean to send in more people, regardless of how Simone felt about that. Just getting the two of them out of the house was probably going to be a nightmare. Damn. I hadn’t been on the job ten minutes and already I was thinking about calling for backup.
Then, in the kitchen, two things happened almost simultaneously.
Ella dropped her drinking glass and let out a piercing shriek of terror. Her cry, and the sound of the glass shattering on the tiled floor, hit us at the same time or so close together that it was impossible to tell which event had caused the other.
Simone and I both sprinted for the kitchen. I was the one who reached it first, elbowing the door wide. Inside, we found Ella standing frozen on the chair, surrounded by a pool of water and shards of broken glass.
She was still screaming at the two-headed apparition that loomed at the kitchen window—two rogue photographers, pressed up against the glass with their flashguns firing like machine pistols. Sim
one had drawn the blinds, but one was snagged on a potted plant on the window ledge and there was a big enough gap for a lens to get a perfect view.
I took two strobe-lit strides into the room and snatched Ella off her perch, spinning her out of line of the cameras and yelling at Simone to sort out the blinds and blank off the window as I did so. The pressmen jeered and hammered on the glass outside.
Ella got a death grip on my shirt collar and continued to screech in my ear, even after we were safely back in the hallway. Out of my depth, I patted her back and made shushing noises. Simone appeared by my side, white-faced, and tried to take her daughter from me, but Ella held on tighter still and wailed all the louder. I could feel her bony little knees digging into my ribs as she clung on.
We ended up unpeeling her, the way you disentangle a frightened cat that’s got its claws firmly hooked up in your sweater. Eventually, she was forced to let go of me and grabbed for her mother’s hair instead, still grizzling.
For a moment Simone and I stood and stared at each other over the top of Ella’s head.
“Do you think you could find us a hotel for tonight?” Simone asked in a small, shocked voice.
I nodded, pulling out my phone. Sean had a list at the office of places all over the country that had good security and who were prepared to work with us to protect a principal.
Before I could punch in the number she added, ‘And tomorrow we’ll go—get away, like you suggested.” The horde outside continued to roar and clamor like a lynch mob, inflamed by their minor success. Simone rocked Ella and listened to them and her face grew stony “Would America be far enough, do you think?”
She wants to go to the States,” I said. “We know that—,” Sean began. “Not next week, or next month, but now,” I cut in. “Today, if Madeleine can get her on a flight. What were her exact words? Oh yes. ‘Everybody’s telling me how rich I am—I’ll buy a goddamn private jet if I have to.’ I think that was the gist of it.”
