Fifth Victim

FIFTH

VICTIM

A CHARLIE FOX THRILLER

ZOË SHARP

For David Thompson of

Murder By The Book and Busted Flush Press.

Damn, you’re going to be missed …

CHAPTER ONE

The only thing more terrifying than fighting for your life is fighting for someone else’s.

Especially when you’re losing the battle.

On my knees in the warm sand, I gouged at the reluctant earth with a driftwood shovel, with both hands and my every breath. And the more I burrowed, the more the sides of the hole folded in quietly to meet the void. I knew then, gritted in the face of defeat, that there was only one way this was going to end.

Badly.

Pig-headed, I ploughed on, seeing nothing but the next scoop of sand that rushed in, mocking, to fill the last insignificant hollow. Dig, twist, throw. Dig, twist, throw. Up and out into the coastal wind, over and over, while my mind stamped and cursed and wailed silently inside my head.

How could you let them take you? Why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you fight? And – more bitter, more self-indulgent – an almost childish cry: Don’t you think I have enough damn blood on my hands?

I’d lost a principal two winters previously, had watched her die, helpless, only metres away. Might as well have been light years, for all the use I’d been to her then. But that was better than this agony of grim expectation, of not knowing life from death one way or the other. I was overwhelmed by a sense of waste and dread, so strong I feared the stink would always linger.

Dig, twist, throw.

Just ahead of me, one end of the shallow pit was marked by an upright length of pipe. Ordinary grey soil pipe, about forty mil in diameter, like any plumber would install for the drain of a sink or a shower. Before I’d begun my ragged excavation, it had stuck a hand’s breadth out of the ground, protected from the elements by an upturned plastic bucket. Now I could see half a metre or more before the pipe disappeared into the sand beneath.

I stopped digging and scraped around it carefully with cupped hands, creating a protective moat and driving granules deep under my broken nails as I did so. And, all the while, I had visions of someone watching this frantic rescue from a safe distance and laughing at my attempt to exhume what might so easily turn out to be nothing more than a false thread laid into empty ground. I resisted the temptation to grab and rive, just to make sure the other end really was attached to something. Because if it was, and I yanked it free …

To come this far and face failure, so close to the finish, would be worse than never finding the bloody burial site in the first place.

I heard the swish of footsteps approaching fast across the loose surface behind me, but didn’t stop, didn’t turn.

Dig, twist, throw.

‘Charlie!’ Parker’s voice, hoarse against the ocean breeze rippling up the beach. I glanced over my shoulder then, in time to see him rip off his jacket and tie, bunching himself to jump down into the hole.

‘Don’t,’ I said, gasping with the effort of speech. ‘We don’t know what the box is made out of – how much extra weight it will take – and I’m lighter.’

Parker must have seen the desperation in my eyes. To his credit, he didn’t point out that he was stronger, fresher, and could probably clear the grave a hell of a lot faster than I could.

Instead, he squatted near the open end of the tube, cocked his ear close for any sound of movement below, any sign that we were not too late. I could have told him I’d already tried that and hadn’t come away reassured, but I saved what little breath I had left for the ground.

‘Hang on in there,’ he shouted downwards, paused. Silence. ‘If you can hear me, we got you. Help’s coming.’

I kept my head down and my thoughts to myself.

Dig, twist, throw.

‘They should have thought of this hours ago,’ I muttered. ‘Where the hell are they?’

‘On their way,’ Parker said, but his face was white.

He scrambled round to the side of the pit and began clearing the sand I’d already raised, levelling the ground, kicking it away to stop it sucking back into the hole. It suddenly seemed that I’d made much less progress than I’d thought.

I prayed our gravedigger hadn’t favoured the traditional depth of six feet under. By my reckoning, every extra foot was another half a ton of fill to shift. I’d attended enough funerals over here to know that the modern American trend was to go down only four feet, then encase the coffin in concrete to make it solid enough to be driven over, and not rise in a flood or be raided by scavengers.

If that was the case, we were all fucked.

Dig, twist, throw.

And then, at last, I thudded into something solid yet strangely hollow, jarring my arms hard enough to make me grunt. I dropped the driftwood and scrabbled at the sand, fingers meeting roughened timber. I battered down to the surface, found cheap chipboard, like you’d use to board up a derelict house.

A spurt of renewed anger flushed through me at this crude vulgarity, as though bird’s-eye maple with rosewood inlay would have made it any better. I snatched up my driftwood again and attacked the remaining sand, sending it up and out of the hole like flung hail. Even Parker stepped back in the face of it.

By the time it was half cleared, the outline spoke for itself. Not a simple rectangular box but a long taper towards the end furthest from the pipe. Parker, higher up, realised the significance first. He began to swear, soft and vicious under his breath.

I have utterly no concept of what it’s like to be put underground in something that’s so obviously shaped like a coffin, still alive and scared out of your wits.

Still alive? I bloody well hope so … or why bother with the pipe?

I swept the last film of sand away and stopped, panting. The lid was held down with screws around the outer edge, already beginning to corrode with the salt. They were spaced at irregular intervals, as if whoever had built this monstrosity had been in a hurry, and careless about the details.

I fumbled in my pocket for my Swiss Army knife, wrenched out the screwdriver attachment and went down on my knees, hand slapping hard onto the surface.

‘Hold on,’ I yelled in a voice not quite my own. ‘Hold on!’

Parker slithered down behind me, his own pocket knife out. I met his eyes and saw my own tightly clamped emotion reflected right back at me. Then I was bending close to the first screw head, blowing away the grit so the tool would bite hard enough to turn.

A faint scuffle of noise reached my ears and stopped my breath. I froze, glanced up at Parker, hope flaring until I saw his eyes. He shook his head, and I realised it was just a clump of sand dropping back into the pit to scatter with cruel deception across the exposed wood.

A sudden image reared up, vivid enough to stun, of another reaching out to me, unable to make himself heard or gain anyone’s attention, trapped in a soundless, wordless, motionless nightmare. Everything seemed to lurch under me. I put a hand up onto the damp sand to steady myself.

‘You OK?’

I blinked. The vision was gone. Parker’s gaze was concerned, but his voice was tight. He understood, empathised even, but this was not the time to start unravelling on him.

‘Yeah,’ I said, and bent to the task.

We went as fast as we dared, which must have seemed appallingly slow if you’re trapped in your own premature grave waiting for release. I worked along one side, Parker along the other, from the head down, clambering over ourselves in the confined space like some macabre game of Twister. One screw loosened after another until my forearms and wrists were screaming and the blisters bled.

The lid was too thick to bend – thick enough to take the weight of both of us without a bounce. We probably could have driven over it, even without a concrete casing.

‘That’s the last of them,’ Parker said. ‘Get clear. I’ll do this.’

‘No chance.’ I shoved the knife back in my pocket, stilled when he caught my arm.

‘Charlie,’ he said quietly, ‘you’ve done enough.’

But I hadn’t, and we both knew it.

Expressionless, he nodded as if I’d spoken, released me and stepped back. We grasped the lid together, braced ourselves, and heaved.

Dig deep, twist, throw …

CHAPTER TWO

I liked the Willners right from the off, and in some ways that made it all so much worse. Far easier to protect a principal if you can be objective about the exercise – ambivalent, even. Dedication to duty is one thing, but emotional investment is the way madness lies. And if not that, then certainly a spectacular burnout.

Still, by the start of that summer I was probably heading for both.

It was the first week in May when Parker Armstrong drove me out to Long Island for our initial consultation with the formidable Caroline Willner. I remember her fixing me with a piercing eye and asking the million-dollar question.

‘So, Ms Fox, are you prepared to die to keep my daughter safe?’

Despite the intensity of her gaze, her voice was little more than calmly curious.

My answer mattered to her, of course it did. But her attempt to hide that fact behind a cool facade was revealing. It made me more deliberate in my choice of words than I might otherwise have been, facing a wealthy potential client for the first time.

‘If it comes down to it, yes,’ I said. ‘But I’d rather we didn’t have to find out.’

She raised an eyebrow at that, lifting her teacup. Beside me on the sleek leather sofa, my boss twitched in sympathetic response.

We were sitting in the huge living area on the top floor of the Willners’ ultramodern house in the Hamptons, with plate glass windows offering a widescreen view of the shoreline. Below us, beyond a stark white security wall, the Atlantic surf rolled in all the way from North Africa. Caroline Willner had been sitting with her back to the glass when we were shown in to meet her, leaving us to be overawed by the open vista. She clearly did not share our concerns about the potentially uninterrupted field of fire.

‘What Charlie means, ma’am,’ Parker said smoothly, ‘is that close protection is all about anticipating trouble – keeping the principal out of danger in the first place. Dying on the job is considered a failure in our line of work.’

Even as he spoke, he realised what lay beneath and behind the words. His eyes flickered across to mine.

Charlie, I’m sorry …

Forget it.

If Caroline Willner noticed this silent apology, she gave no sign of it. The woman opposite was no doubt used to people hesitating around her. She had the steely demeanour of someone who took no prisoners, suffered no fools. The crow’s feet radiating from her eyes and the lines ringing her neck showed she had the self-confidence to reject surgical intervention as the years advanced. Her hair was unashamedly silvered, but cut in a style as severely modern as her home.

An interesting mix of defiance and pride that would not, I noted, make her accept advice easily, particularly when it came to matters of personal safety. Such people tended to confuse caution with cowardice, and react accordingly.

Parker had given me the background on the drive out from the office in midtown Manhattan. That she was rich went without saying. You don’t own beachfront property in Suffolk County and scrape by on your uppers. The money came from investment banking and was largely of her own making. Since her divorce from some minor branch of the German aristocracy, though, she was no longer entitled to call herself Countess. I took in Caroline Willner’s fiercely upright posture and wondered if that rankled.

‘And have you ever failed?’ she asked now. She spoke with that New York old-money clip I’d come to recognise.

‘Yes.’

The baldness of my answer – or perhaps the truth of it – surprised her. She covered by taking another sip of tea from a cup so delicate it was almost translucent. There was a smear of lipstick on the gilt rim, but none seemed to have come away from her mouth. It wouldn’t dare.

Her pale-blue eyes held mine with a certain arrogance, awaiting my elaboration. I said nothing.

‘But you didn’t die.’

I returned her stare blandly. ‘Not entirely.’

She nodded, disengaging for a moment as if checking with some internal database, nodded again slowly as the figures tallied when she hadn’t quite expected them to.

So, she had done her homework on us.

Or on me …

Parker and I sat side by side, holding our own cups in which the liquid had already cooled beyond comfort. We waited, unfazed by her brief silence and not rushing to break it. Clients of Caroline Willner’s status moved at their own speed. When it came to judging the pace of their mood, Parker was an expert.

He was a quiet man, not overly tall, not overly muscled, a chameleon who blended perfectly with whatever company he kept, without ever losing the essence of himself in the process. His prematurely grey hair gave him an air of maturity that inspired confidence in any client, belying a face that could turn surprisingly youthful when he smiled. And sitting here, in this exceptional house, he looked relaxed and quite at home.

Eventually, Caroline Willner said, ‘Dina came late in my life. By that time, both my husband and I did not expect to be blessed, and then … we were.’ A brief smile, almost rueful, but affectionate. Then she glanced up and it was gone. ‘An unfortunate side effect is that I have always felt a generation removed from my daughter, Mr Armstrong. My focus has been on my work and I regret that while Dina was growing up I probably did not pay her as much attention as I should have. We are not as … close as I would like.’

Caroline Willner sat very still as she talked, only her face showing animation. She looked from one to the other of us closely, checking for censure. We were careful to show her none.

Her hands were folded in her lap and now she straightened her fingers, absently inspecting the rings on her right hand. Habit rather than vanity, although I’d escorted enough precious gem couriers to know that the emeralds she wore must have cost well over twenty thousand dollars.

‘Has she been in any trouble?’ Parker asked, neutral.

‘No!’ Caroline Willner’s head snapped up, but her gaze slid on past. ‘Just a few foolish games. Drinking, partying, that kind of thing. She’s young and she’s fallen in with a crowd who are something of a bad influence. I never know where she is or who she’s with.’ Her eyes settled on mine again, more resolute. ‘I’m hoping that is something Ms Fox’s presence will rectify.’

A flutter of movement beyond the glass caught my eye. A girl on a big muscular white horse came bounding along the surf line, the horse’s gait snatchy through the knee-high water, neck flexed against taut reins. I had the impression he was more than a handful, and his rider’s decision to go paddling had been taken more in an attempt to regain control than for pleasure.

‘If I’m to take this job,’ I said mildly, ‘it will be on the understanding that I am not the girl’s gaoler, nor your spy. I can only suggest, not enforce. And I can’t protect her if she doesn’t trust me.’

Parker shot me a warning glance, but if anything Caroline Willner looked faintly gratified, as if having someone who would stand up for her daughter – against any detractor, regardless – was a personal vindication in her eyes. Proof that she had made the right choice.

‘You’re close to Dina’s age,’ she said. I was nearer thirty than twenty, but naturally I let that flattery pass. ‘And you’re British, well-spoken. It gives you, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, my dear, a sophistication not often found in someone of your … professional background. I hope she will take note of you, at least.’

I considered telling her that if she was looking for a role model for her daughter, she had best look elsewhere. My own parents had been at times both shocked and disappointed by the way I’d turned out. But then Parker asked, ‘Is Dina close to her father?’ and the moment passed.

Caroline Willner shrugged beneath her beautifully cut jacket. My own black wool business suit – the most expensive thing in my wardrobe that didn’t contain Kevlar – suddenly seemed like peasant garb by comparison. So much for my worldly air.

‘My husband and I separated when my daughter was eight,’ she said tightly, as if forced into group therapy against her will. ‘He returned to Europe after the divorce. There has been no … regular contact since.’

She rose, turning away from us and smoothing down her dress with an unconscious gesture that reminded me of my mother. Dignity at all costs. There was a large canvas on the wall to my left, a huge bold splodge of abstract colour exploding diagonally across it like multicoloured blood spatter. She moved over towards it and, after a moment’s apparent absorption with the brushwork, twisted back, poise almost masking the tension.

‘So, can you protect her?’

Parker put down his cup. ‘We can certainly do our best – and our best is pretty good,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘But you have to appreciate, ma’am, that preventing kidnappers who are well prepared, well financed and highly motivated is almost impossible without the kind of restrictions on your daughter’s lifestyle that she would find unacceptable. All we can do is minimise the threat – make your daughter no longer seem like a soft target.’

‘Make them look elsewhere, you mean?’ She gave another quick frown, not liking the idea of passing the buck.

‘If we can liaise with the authorities, study the reports on the previous kidnappings, and get a handle on the way these people operate, maybe we …’ His voice trailed off, then turned sharp. ‘Mrs Willner?’

‘The authorities know nothing of any of this.’ Another stern stare. ‘I was assured that the discretion of Armstrong-Meyer could be relied upon absolutely.’

‘It can.’ Parker stilled, eyes narrowing. He knew as well as I did that only around one in ten kidnappings were ever reported, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. ‘You should be aware that there has been considerable success in apprehending kidnappers inside the United States – far better than in many other countries around the world,’ he said flatly. ‘I would strongly advise full cooperation with local and federal law enforcement agencies.’

Caroline Willner inclined her head, almost graceful. ‘What I feel about the matter is irrelevant at this point, Mr Armstrong. My family is personally unaffected.’ She aimed a level stare. ‘I should very much like that state of affairs to continue.’

‘Nevertheless, a number of young people have been kidnapped – young people of extremely wealthy parents with homes on Long Island – over the past year,’ Parker pointed out. ‘Keeping it under wraps can only make things worse.’

‘Nobody likes admitting that they gave in to extortion,’ I agreed. ‘And if the victims were not precious, they would not have been taken.’

Caroline Willner did not appreciate being ganged up on. Her spine stiffened. ‘In the kind of social circles in which I move, involving the authorities would generate bad publicity that is something to be avoided at all costs.’ She glanced at me again, something calculating in her face now. ‘If word of this had gotten out, it would be open season.’

‘There have been – what? Three so far, I believe you said?’ I asked dryly. ‘The first of which was the middle of last summer and the last was only a few months ago. I rather think it already is.’

‘I am not saying I condone the decision of the people involved to handle things without the intervention of the authorities, Ms Fox, only that I can understand the reasons behind it.’ Faint colour lit her cheekbones. ‘That is why I am taking these steps to avoid the same fate befalling my daughter.’

‘Of course,’ Parker said. ‘The final decision in such an eventuality would be yours to take.’

She straightened, regal, her voice remote as if this was a business deal in which she only had marginal interest. ‘So, do we have an agreement?’

Parker glanced across at me, but I shook my head. ‘That’s up to your daughter,’ I said. ‘I can only protect a principal with their willing participation. If she’s against the idea, or obstructive, and refuses to take sensible precautions, then I can’t hope to do my job.’

Caroline Willner flipped back the sleeve of her jacket and consulted a wafer-thin wristwatch. ‘Dina should be back momentarily,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ask her yourself?’

CHAPTER THREE

I stood in the lee of the security wall and watched Dina Willner wash clods of salt-laden sand from the white horse’s legs and belly. The animal delicately sidestepped the gush of the hosepipe with much snorting through distended nostrils, making a production out of it.

Dina was a slim girl, not much more than my height, and she seemed to handle him a lot more confidently on the ground than she had done while on his back.

Strictly speaking, white horses were referred to as ‘greys’, but such a dull term didn’t do justice to his haughty magnificence. I detected Spanish blood in the thick-crested neck and long sloping shoulder, pedigree temperament in the clearly delineated veins standing out through his coat. And if perhaps he wasn’t the most prudent match for Dina’s equestrian skills, I could understand, once she’d set eyes on him, how it would have been hard to settle for anything less.

As he scraped and stamped amid the spray, shoes ringing on the concrete pad that lay beneath the high wall, I briefly considered offering to hold his bridle, but quickly kept hands and thoughts to myself. I wasn’t yet officially in the Willners’ employ, and horse slobber, as I knew from my youth, would require dry-cleaning to remove. The white horse was producing enough froth around the metal in his mouth for me to imagine he’d been gargling with Alka-Seltzer. He distributed it freely with every temperamental shake of his head.

I had introduced myself as Dina rode up the beach to the house. Or rather, as soon as I’d stepped out of the gate in the wall at her approach, she’d smiled and called out brightly, ‘Hi! You must be the bodyguard.’

So much for keeping a low profile.

She was wearing a loose white blouse and a black felt hat with a wide brim and a flat crown that matched the nationality of the horse a little too carefully, I felt. Her hair was dark, pulled back into a ponytail that hung between her shoulder blades. And she had on a pair of pearl drop earrings. I wondered briefly what kind of person wore such expensive-looking jewellery to go riding on the beach?

There didn’t seem to be an answer to her question that wasn’t inane. I slipped on my sunglasses against the glare of sun on the water and said, ‘Did the way my knuckles drag on the floor give it away?’

For a moment she looked startled, then flashed a quick grin and dismounted, landing lightly in the sand. She looped the reins over her arm and elbowed the horse aside, not unkindly, when he tried to rub his sweaty face against her shoulder.

‘I’m Dina Willner – but I guess you knew that already.’

I shook the gloved hand she offered and murmured my name in response. She had a firm grip, backed by composure and the cool self-assurance that seems to come naturally to the offspring of the very rich. All too often, I’d found, brattishness and stroppy tantrums were bundled in as part of the package, but Dina’s gaze was frank and refreshingly open in its appraisal. She led the horse up onto the hardstanding near the gate, and pulled out the retractable hose.

‘When Mother said you were a girl, I wasn’t sure what to expect,’ she admitted, suddenly doubtful. ‘You don’t look like a bodyguard.’

‘I wouldn’t be much use if I did.’

A stock answer to a stock question. Parker usually wheeled me out when the client was looking for a more discreet level of security. There were plenty of guys on his books who really did look like they could drag their knuckles, and they had their time and place.

‘But …’ She paused, face clearing. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that. You’re right, of course – this will be much more fun.’

Less like having a babysitter, you mean.

She flicked me another sideways glance as she played water over the horse’s tendons. ‘So, are you … armed? Right now?’

The weight of the 9 mm SIG sat neat and snug in its Kramer holster at the small of my back, but the wool suit had been carefully tailored to mask the outline of the gun. I smiled blandly. ‘If I did happen to be carrying concealed,’ I said, ‘and I told anyone about it, then technically it wouldn’t be concealed anymore.’

‘Ah … I suppose not.’ The horse shifted again, bored now with this game. Dina shut off the water and let the hose reel wind back in. I obligingly held the gate open and the pair of them went through, Dina walking by the horse’s shoulder. They both had a long purposeful stride.

Inside the gate was a pleasant shady courtyard containing the horse barn. It was a building about the size of a small bungalow, with a sliding door at one end and far enough from the house not to bother either set of occupants with noise or smells. When Dina opened the door, the air-conditioned gloom revealed a row of ornately constructed loose boxes down one side. Even the horses over here were spoilt rotten.

‘You’re not offended that I asked, I hope,’ Dina said over her shoulder as she led the white horse into the nearest stable, pivoting him round to unsaddle him. I stood in the open doorway and watched her deft movements, impressed as much by the fact that she was doing this herself as by her competence. ‘I’ve never had my own bodyguard before.’

‘That doesn’t mean you get to dress me up and put ribbons in my hair.’

She laughed out loud at that and the horse gave a surprised snort as if in agreement. ‘You’re funny. We’re going to get along just fine.’ She slipped the bridle down the horse’s long nose and rubbed his ears. ‘Just fine. Aren’t we, Cerdo, hmm, boy?’

‘Cerdo?’ I queried. ‘Isn’t that Spanish for—?’

‘“Pig” yes,’ Dina agreed, eyes dancing. ‘He has some long fancy name in his papers, but sometimes he can be real stubborn, so it seems to suit him.’

She gave the horse a final pat and came out of the stable, carrying his paraphernalia with her and clipping a chain across the opening. She paused in the wide central corridor, still holding the saddle in her arms. I wondered if her devotion to horse riding extended to cleaning tack and mucking out.

‘So, when do you start?’ she asked. ‘Or have you already?’

‘I think that’s rather up to you,’ I said, neutral. ‘And your mother, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Dina echoed. ‘But she wouldn’t have sent you down here to meet with me if she didn’t approve, so I don’t know what you said to her, but congratulations – you obviously passed the test.’ And for the first time there was a tinge of resentment in her tone.

I deduced ‘mother’ was not an easy woman to live with, never mind live up to, so I took a gamble and said easily, ‘Well, I didn’t wipe my nose on my sleeve and I managed to drink my tea without slurping it from the saucer, so I suppose she realised I was house-trained at least.’

It paid off. The lines of strain flattened out of her forehead and the quick grin was back, making her seem very much still a teenager. A pretty girl who lit the place up when she smiled. I guessed she hadn’t yet learnt to adjust the intensity. If she was this unguarded around boys, I thought privately, I would certainly have my work cut out fending off the hordes. Whether they had ransom on their minds, though, was quite another matter.

‘So, I guess Mother’s told you about the kidnappings,’ she said. ‘I mean, everybody’s behaving like nothing’s going on, but you have to know, don’t you? Otherwise, how can you try to stop them?’

‘There doesn’t seem to be much to know at the moment.’ I paused, wondering if she was tougher than she looked, and decided she’d be better with the truth now rather than later, however unpalatable. ‘But to be honest, because none of the victims have gone to the police or the FBI, there isn’t much can be done to stop these people.’

‘Oh … you mean they could just go on and on doing it for ever, and never be caught?’ She seemed astounded by the idea. I supposed that unless you’ve been personally touched by violent crime, your views are formed by the cosy propaganda of the TV cop shows, where the good guys always triumph before the closing credits.

I shrugged. I’d already disconcerted her enough, by the looks of it, without adding that the decision to keep things under wraps meant the perpetrators were indeed likely to go on making comparatively easy money until it couldn’t be covered up any longer.

Until somebody died.

As an illegal earner it was less risky than robbing a bank, but just as profitable. More than half a billion dollars a year disappeared into kidnappers’ pockets around the world, and the annual number of victims was rising rapidly. The relatively few kidnapping cases in the States was down to the high detection rate, a moot point in this case. Rich parents who would do anything to avoid bad publicity – I bet they can’t believe their luck, I thought. What reason do they have to stop now?

Still frowning, Dina put the saddle down onto a shaped wooden rack and laid the bridle across it. She swept off the hat, loosing her hair at the same time, and ruffling it distractedly back into a style mine never seemed to achieve after being flattened under a bike helmet. This despite the best efforts of my hairdresser, who’d talked me into a chin-level bob that had proved surprisingly durable otherwise.

‘So … what will you need for me to do?’ she asked at last, trying for her previous nonchalance. ‘I mean, I assume you don’t want me to hide in the basement or anything silly like that. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much point in having you around, would there?’

I shook my head. ‘We’ll go into details later, but the basic rules are just don’t go anywhere without an escort – namely, me – and vary your routine. If you drive yourself to work, don’t always take the same route. That kind of thing.’

She laughed. ‘No worries there – I’m taking a year out. Mother tells people I’m “considering my options”, which sounds so much better than “bumming around with horses”, don’t you think?’

The white horse, piqued by no longer being the centre of attention, had shuffled forwards until his broad chest was hard up against the chain across the stable doorway. He stretched his neck towards us, ears flicking like radar, and grubbed at Dina’s sleeve with his lips. She reached out absently to scratch his nose.

‘Do you ride him on the beach at this time every day?’ I asked.

‘Usually – before it gets too hot. But they wouldn’t try for me then, surely?’ Her voice was shocked. ‘What about Cerdo?’

I shrugged again. Kidnappers had been known to shoot bodyguards, boy- or girlfriends, employees, dogs and innocent bystanders, in their quest to secure a valuable hostage. A horse would present few problems. Besides, all they had to do was turn him loose on the sands. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to pick them out of a line-up afterwards.

‘Best not to go out alone, then, just in case.’

Her smile was less confident than it had been. ‘That’s only a problem if you don’t ride.’

I thought of all those years spent Pony Clubbing back at home in rural Cheshire. ‘I’m a little rusty, but I’m sure it’ll come back to me.’

The door at the far end of the barn opened and Caroline Willner walked in with Parker Armstrong beside her. His eyes flicked straight to mine. I gave him a fractional nod, saw his surprise and relief only because I knew him well enough to discern it.

‘Ah, there you are, darling,’ Caroline Willner said. ‘You have not forgotten we have the senator and his wife coming to lunch, I hope?’

‘Of course not, Mother,’ Dina said in a slightly drawling voice she hadn’t used with me, but she made no moves to go and change, which I assume was the motive for the reminder.

There was a long uncomfortable pause during which time the only noise was the circular whirr of the ceiling fans inside the barn and the rush of surf from the beach. Even the white horse seemed to be waiting, still and expectant, to see who won this minor stand-off.

‘Well, I see you two have gotten acquainted,’ Caroline Willner said carefully at last, and I wondered why she didn’t want Dina to know what this meant to her. I glanced at the girl, caught her slightly mulish expression and realised it was all power plays between the two of them, had probably been that way for years.

‘Of course,’ Dina said, her tone airy as she pulled off her leather gloves. ‘Charlie was just telling me it would be dangerous to go out riding alone.’ A slight exaggeration, but close enough for me not to contradict her. ‘So, I guess she better start soon. I can’t leave Cerdo standing idle for more than a day or two. You know how wild he gets if he isn’t exercised.’

Caroline Willner’s only response to this veiled double-edged threat was an enquiring glance in Parker’s direction.

‘If you’ve come to a decision about needing close protection for your daughter,’ he said, non-committal and diplomatic, ‘then it would be prudent to have it in place as soon as is practicable.’

Caroline Willner didn’t quite sigh, but it was pretty close. Her gaze flickered over me with less warmth than she’d shown upstairs, as if I’d fed her daughter’s fantasy rather than squashed it, as she’d hoped. ‘Very well. I’ll leave the arrangements to you, Mr Armstrong.’

She had already begun to turn away, focused on her impending lunch party no doubt, when Dina’s voice brought her up short.

‘In that case, Mother, there’s every reason for me to go to the regatta party next weekend,’ she said, very clear, her triumph almost – but not quite – under control. ‘Don’t you think?’

Caroline Willner turned back, frowning, and I realised that Dina had lured her into check, playing a game I wasn’t aware of, by rules I didn’t understand. ‘I—’

Parker came to her rescue with a suitable line of escape. ‘We would have to assess the risks, of course,’ he said. ‘What kind of a party?’

‘Oh, it’s a friend’s birthday, but it’s also a kind of big celebration.’ Dina smiled, that bright open smile she’d given me at first sighting, down on the beach. ‘For the victims of the previous kidnappings. They’re all going to be there, so if Charlie really wants to find out what happened to them – so she can try to stop the same thing happening to me – well, what better place to start?’

CHAPTER FOUR

‘You OK?’

It took me a moment to focus on Parker’s voice. I swivelled in the passenger seat and realised we were driving through Queens, the chic elegance of Long Island far behind us in favour of cheap high-density housing. I’d never quite got over how much wiring seemed to be on view in American cities, the buildings festooned with it as though wearing their blood vessels on the outside of their bodies.

‘Yeah, I’m OK,’ I said, leaning back against the headrest. Ahead of us, a passenger jet was pulling out of LaGuardia and lumbering doggedly skywards. I could sympathise.

I was tired, I recognised. The kind of bone-deep utter weariness that long-term stress produces. But I kept on going through the motions, treading water, marking time.

Waiting.

We were in one of the Lincoln Navigators Parker favoured as general runabouts, heading back towards Manhattan where Armstrong-Meyer had its prestigious offices. I wondered briefly how long Parker would keep the ‘Meyer’ part of the name intact, without the man himself to back it up.

From behind the wheel, my boss flicked me a brief speaking glance. His eyes were hidden behind Ray-Bans, but I didn’t need to see them.

‘If you’re not sure about this job, tell me now and I’ll assign someone else.’ To his credit, there was nothing to react to in his matter-of-fact voice. Sympathy was the last thing I could cope with.

I lifted my head. ‘I thought you didn’t have anyone who fitted the bill.’ That was how he’d persuaded me to go out to the Willners’ in the first place. Not that persuaded was quite the right word, but neither was bullied. Cajoled – that was more like it.

Anything to take my mind off Sean Meyer.

‘I don’t,’ he agreed candidly. ‘Mrs Willner specifically requested a female close-protection officer, one who was young enough to get on with her daughter. Apparently Dina developed a crush on one of the house security guys last fall, and she doesn’t want a repeat performance.’

I raised an eyebrow at that. The guy who’d answered the door to us this morning was obviously more than just an ordinary flunkey, and when Caroline Willner had suggested I go down to the beach to wait for her daughter’s return, I’d seen at least two other bulky members of staff who had the unmistakable carriage of ex-military men. No doubt they had their share of war stories, calculated to impress someone as impressionable as Dina. Had I ever been that young at twenty?

‘What about Gomez?’ I said. ‘She’s closer to the daughter’s age than I am. OK, she lacks a little experience, but her instincts are sound.’

‘I need her for Paraguay.’ He smiled faintly. ‘You could trade with her if you like, but I kinda assumed you’d want to stay close to New York for a while.’

I dredged up a smile of my own. ‘Yes … thank you.’

It didn’t matter that I knew I could be back from just about anywhere in the world in less than twenty-four hours. A lot could happen in a day. Or, nothing could happen at all. Not for one day, not for a hundred days. Three months, one week, four days of suspended animation.

Parker sighed. ‘It’s OK, Charlie,’ he said gently. ‘If I was in your position, I’d want to stay close, too. I just thought … you need to work. At least the farthest this kid is likely to travel is up and down the east coast, from one party to the next.’

I swallowed and stared sightlessly at the scenery flashing past beyond the tinted glass, feeling disconnected as a ghost from the lives outside. I’d stopped trying to tell myself that it could all be so much worse, because deep down I knew that wasn’t true anymore. Concentrating on a job – any job – had to be better than the wretched loneliness of my own thoughts. For a while this morning, out at the Willners’ place, I’d felt almost … normal.

And the prospect of a temporary change of scene, of living in, somewhere that wasn’t silent and filled with empty spaces, had definite appeal. At this point, I might even class it as essential.

I took a breath, made a conscious effort to divert my brain into more productive tracks. ‘What’s your take on this birthday bash Dina’s so set on?’

His hands relaxed very slightly on the wheel. ‘Could be she just wants to show off the pretty new toy her mommy bought for her.’

My lips twisted. ‘Ah, that would be me, then – this season’s must-have accessory.’

‘Yeah, something like that.’ He flicked me another glance as he changed lanes around a slow-moving bus. ‘Whatever her reasons, you can’t fault the logic of her argument.’

‘In favour of going, you mean?’

He nodded. ‘Without any official reports, we’re working blind. Anything you can learn about what happened to the other victims might make the difference to Dina being taken or not.’

I fell silent. Since I’d joined Parker’s outfit I’d worked family protection details numerous times. Usually in places like Mexico or Columbia, where prevention was always better than the alternative. There, it was a toss-up whether the hostage would be returned alive, even if the ransom was paid. And if it wasn’t, well, less than a quarter of hostages in Latin America survived rescue attempts, and only a tiny fraction of kidnappers were ever caught. If the ransom was large enough, a whole rake of people could be included in the pay-off, including local police officials.

But this was not some dusty South American backwater. The parents must have known the odds of detection and capture were far better here, that by keeping silent they had, in effect, given the kidnappers a licence to continue their deadly game. So, what were they so afraid of, that it was worth risking their children’s lives?

‘Is it coincidence, I wonder, that all three families paid up without going to the cops?’

‘Might be, but I kinda doubt it,’ Parker said. ‘Which means they were targeted very carefully. Somebody knew they had the available cash and the inclination to pay up clean and fast.’

‘An inside job, you mean?’ I murmured. ‘And if they all had the kind of general security Caroline Willner employs, you’d need pros to make the snatch in the first place. Disgruntled ex-employees perhaps?’

‘Maybe. I’ll check it out. Finding a common link between the victims is our best lead to tracking down a multiple kidnapper.’

I gave him a long level stare while he pretended to be absorbed in negotiating traffic. ‘Either I’m supposed to be protecting Dina or playing detective,’ I said mildly. ‘Which is it, Parker?’

‘The two objectives are not mutually exclusive.’ He allowed himself a fractional smile. ‘You may think you hide it well, but lack of exercise is sending you as stir-crazy as that horse of Dina’s.’

I paused a beat, then said, ‘Even if I do go with her to this regatta thing she mentioned, I’ve no authority to question these other kids. They may still be traumatised, not want to talk about what they’ve been through.’

Every kidnap victim reacted differently, but all too often there was guilt at the sacrifices made by the family, resentment at their own helplessness, and an overwhelming general sense of fear at going out and doing normal things again. Feelings that could last for weeks or even years after the event. Some former hostages never fully recovered.

‘Sure,’ Parker said, and there was satisfaction in his dry tone. He had me hooked, and he knew it. ‘And that’s why they’re all turning out for a birthday party aboard a million-dollar yacht, huh?’

I opened my mouth and shut it again, acknowledging defeat. ‘Good point. Well made.’

‘I thought so.’ He smiled out loud then, creasing the corners of his eyes and taking years off his face, and added casually, ‘Mrs Willner wants you on duty first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I had nothing else planned.’

‘You were organising logistics for Paraguay …?’

‘All in hand. I emailed my report to Bill Rendelson before we left this morning.’

‘That was fast work.’

‘Ah well, I try constantly to disappoint Bill with my unexpected efficiency.’ It was better than admitting I didn’t sleep much these days, either.

Parker sighed. ‘You don’t have anything to prove, Charlie,’ he said quietly. ‘If anyone ever thought you were just along for the ride, they kinda revised that opinion a long time ago.’

‘Even Bill?’

‘Even Bill,’ he agreed gravely.

Bill Rendelson ran Parker’s office with an iron fist inside an equally iron glove. Invalided out of active duty after the loss of his arm, his only pleasure now, it seemed, was in dissatisfaction with the rest of the staff – and me in particular. I’d only seen one brief flash of humanity from him, gone so fast it might have been a trick of the light, never to be repeated since.

But if I’d been about to comment, it was cut short by Parker’s cellphone ringing from its hands-free cradle on the dashboard. He had, of course, switched it off while we were at the Willners’ and the calls began to pile in now.

He talked on the phone almost constantly for the remainder of the journey onto Manhattan Island, swapping easily from one subject to another, going over itineraries without pause for thought or recollection, smooth, unflustered and professional. An ideal boss.

He’d proved an ideal friend, too, over the past three months, when the shock and pain and all-consuming sense of loss had sometimes threatened to overwhelm me. Sean was, as Parker had once pointed out, my soulmate.

I expected Parker to go directly to the office in midtown, but to my surprise he continued north, eventually pulling up outside the front entrance of my apartment building on the Upper East Side.

Strictly speaking, the building was Parker’s – or some wealthy relative of his at any rate. It was in a prime location and should have been financially way out of reach, but the heavily subsidised rent had been another of the incentives that lured Sean and me to New York in the first place.

As I reached for the door handle, Parker put his hand up suddenly and I stayed put, waiting for him to tie up the last call. The Navigator sat idling by the kerb, sporadic traffic passed, the sun came and went behind high cloud. An elderly lady, wearing a huge amount of make-up and swaddled in furs, tottered by dragging a small shivering hairless dog by its diamanté-studded collar and lead. She was a regular fixture of the neighbourhood and I’d never seen her without the fur – or the dog with any – even in the height of summer. Life with all its oddities, staying the same and moving on.

After no more than a minute or so, Parker hit the End button and removed his sunglasses.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Look, Charlie, I want you to keep in close contact on this one. If you need help, call me – day or night – OK?’

‘O … K,’ I said slowly. ‘What are you not telling me?’

He shrugged. ‘You know as much as I do.’

‘So why the fuss?’

‘I’m worried about how you’re holding up, that’s all,’ he said at last. He put his hand on my arm, lightly, saw my surprise and lifted it away again. ‘You’re looking tired, Charlie. You should get some rest.’

‘I will – later,’ I said. I opened the door and climbed out, glanced back to find him still watching me, narrow-eyed. ‘After I’ve been to see Sean.’

He smiled briefly, put the car into gear and drove away, and as I watched him go I wondered what he’d really been about to say.

CHAPTER FIVE

When I walked into Sean’s room, he was lying on his right side in the bed, with his back to the doorway.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said softly. ‘I brought you coffee.’

He didn’t respond. It was warm in there and the sheet was rumpled around his waist. Above it, I could see the steady rise and fall of his ribcage as he breathed, the bones forming a series of ridges under the skin like sand along the tideline.

He was thinner than he’d been at Christmas, the visible shoulder angular and pointed where once it had been as sleekly clad in muscle as Dina’s white horse. Just as graceful, and just as dangerous to underestimate.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, gripping the frame and uttering the usual silent prayers. That this time it would be different.

It wasn’t.

Carefully, as if afraid of waking him, I moved round to the other side of the bed. He had always been a light sleeper, almost catlike in his reflexes, but his face was soft in total relaxation. I reached out a hand, hesitant, and stroked the pale skin of his upper arm. Under my fingertips, I felt a little quiver of response and I watched his face minutely, as I always did. His eyelids, with their ridiculously long dark lashes, remained resolutely closed, as I had known they would. But, inside my own chest, something twisted.

Sean’s coma had lasted since his near-fatal gunshot injury in California, a hundred days ago. After the shooting, he’d been airlifted to the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center. The surgical team there had spent seven painstaking hours removing the shattered fragments of skull from his brain and repairing the damage caused by the path of the single 9 mm round. It had been a glancing blow rather than full penetration, but that had been enough.

In the several weeks that followed, it was to LA that Sean’s mother had briefly flown to weep with quiet dignity by his bedside. A calm, sad woman who’d known her share of grief, she’d talked of Sean in the past tense as if he were already lost to her.

My own parents offered to make the trip but I’d refused – to, I suspect, their secret relief as well as my own. My father might have retired from his own speciality as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, but he would have cut to the heart of the medical jargon with a little too much clinical precision for me to stomach back then.

The doctors had been initially dubious that Sean would survive at all, but he’d defied their gloomiest prognoses. He’d responded well after surgery, to the point where they were able to remove him from the ventilator and allow him to breathe unaided. Sometimes he reacted to touch, moving under my fingers, and sometimes to speech, turning his head towards the sound of my voice.

But he didn’t wake up.

The fact that the guy who’d shot him had been caught – that I had caught him – was no consolation, I’d found.

As soon as Sean was stable enough to travel, Parker had chartered a private flight and brought him back to New York, to a specialist neurological rehabilitation centre where they were experienced in dealing with long-term coma patients. Here they fed him, kept him hydrated and gave him passive physio to keep his joints in working order, even if his muscles were wasting. I’d been coming every day since then.

I flipped the lid from the coffee and put it down on the side cabinet, close enough for the aroma to reach his nostrils, and dragged the visitor’s chair closer to his bedside. Out of habit, I glanced at the cardiac monitor, wired to patches on his chest. I was no medical expert, but I’d grown to know the rhythms of his body well enough to recognise there had been no change.

Sean’s hair was longer than he would probably have preferred, falling dark and straight over his forehead. I pushed a lock of it back from his temple, revealing the narrow scar that streaked back into his hairline from the corner of his left eyebrow. If he continued to wear his hair in a style less military to the one he’d always favoured, I realised, it was likely people would hardly notice. The surgeons had made a neat job of putting the pieces back together. Time alone would tell how much was missing on the inside.

A nurse appeared in the doorway, a motherly figure in brightly patterned scrubs. Nancy. She lived across the river in New Jersey and enjoyed the reading time offered by her daily commute. Her husband was in the construction industry and she had two sports-mad teenage sons who drove her to affectionate distraction. I’d come to know a lot about Nancy.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said, her voice slow and musical, as always. ‘It’s time to turn him.’

I helped her shift Sean onto his back, his limbs slack under our careful hands. He had to be moved every few hours to prevent sores and Nancy was often the one who did it. She had a gentle touch and bottomless compassion and it seemed to me that if Sean made one of his apparently random physical responses – a twitch or a turn of his head – it was for Nancy that he moved most often.

She rearranged the sheet low across his stomach, checking the monitor patches were still firmly attached, and the gastric tube that disappeared into the wall of his abdomen. Initially, they had fed Sean using a nasogastric tube down his nose and through his oesophagus, but that, I was told, could lead to complications. As soon as it became obvious this wasn’t going to be over quickly, they’d inserted something more permanent, through which puréed food could be squirted directly into his stomach.

The thought of it did little for my own appetite. When Sean finally awoke, I thought, refusing to consider another outcome, he would be about ready to kill for a taste of the daily coffee I brought to tempt him.

Nancy smiled serenely and departed. I tucked my fingers into Sean’s open hand and began to tell him about my visit to the Willners, about the recent kidnappings and Dina’s apparent glee at my employ. I sought his opinion, unvoiced, on the wisdom of Dina going to the party she was so keen to attend, and reported Caroline Willner’s own hesitation over the same event. And all the time I wondered if doing this was for his benefit, or my own. Sean always had been a good listener.

‘These three kids who’ve been taken so far all live on Long Island, at least part of the time,’ I said. ‘I say “kids”, but they’re late teens, early twenties, but so far that’s all we know. I suppose this party is a good opportunity to look for patterns, but at the same time, there’s the risk that if someone is watching them – working security for one of the families, maybe – am I exposing Dina to danger by agreeing that she go? We don’t know how the victims were selected, or even how they were taken. They can’t remember much after the initial abduction, apparently, which probably means some kind of pre-med relaxant, like we used in California for that cult extraction – remember?’

I paused. Sean’s head seemed to rock a little in my direction. Involuntary, no doubt, as most of his movements were, but it still felt like he’d reacted with discomfort, as if trying to warn me of something. I’d read about coma victims who were actually locked into their paralysed bodies but totally aware of everything going on around them, screaming silently into the void, sometimes for years. Like being buried alive.

Bearing that in mind, I looked for meaning in every gesture, however pointless they told me that might be.

Sighing, I let my thumb stroke the back of his right hand. Without animation from within, his skin felt different, alien to the touch. And I remembered, with splintered clarity, every moment we’d spent together. Sean was everything I’d ever wanted, even before I’d known what that was. He understood me better than I understood myself, and he would have understood, better than anyone, how this slow limbo was crushing me from the inside out.

‘I need you,’ I said out loud. It sounded stark and craven in the quiet room.

Gently, I let go of his hand and stood up. I shrugged into my jacket, picked up the cooling coffee from the cabinet.

‘Last chance,’ I murmured, waggling the cup slightly. Sean didn’t stir. ‘Maybe tomorrow, hey?’

I walked out of the room and along the corridor, resisting the urge to look back.

We’d talked about death, in a roundabout kind of way. We couldn’t do the job we did without the subject coming up and being faced in advance. Sean had always said, calm and casual, that when his time was up he wanted to go clean, fast, and know nothing about it.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

A sudden dazzling image exploded behind my eyes, the way his head had snapped sideways from the bullet’s impact, the slash of blood, the instant drop.

It didn’t give any comfort that he’d gone down in the line of duty, as he would have seen it. Doing his job. Hesitation had never been a possibility with Sean and it seemed that to hesitate now would be to let down everything he’d stood for. So if it came to it, I thought fiercely, then yes, I would die to protect Dina Willner, as her mother had asked.

And maybe I’d do it just a fraction more willingly than I might have done, a hundred days ago.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Isn’t this just to die for?’

Dina opened the ring box and turned it towards me. Inside was the biggest, ugliest yellow diamond I’d ever seen. It looked like nicotine-stained glass and cost the same as a car.

I held up my unadorned hands with the fingers splayed, and shook my head. ‘I’m the wrong person to ask about jewellery,’ I said evasively. ‘But couldn’t a ring as a birthday present be … misconstrued?’

She coloured slightly, snapped the box shut again and handed it back to the eagle-eyed sales assistant. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed. Her eyes drifted indecisively across the glittering display cabinets. We’d been into a dozen similar high-end stores so far on this street alone, and all that dazzle was starting to give me a bad head.

‘The party’s the day after tomorrow. I just wish Mother had given in earlier, then I would have had more time to find something suitable,’ Dina said. She sighed. ‘Tor’s so difficult to buy for. I mean, what do you give the guy who’s got everything?’

Recognising that Dina was clutching at straws on the ideas front, I refrained from the old joke about penicillin. Torquil Eisenberg, whose twenty-first birthday celebration was the cause of all the fuss, was the son and heir to a vast transportation empire. Eisenberg Senior, so I understood, owned a large percentage of everything that flew, drove or floated with a bellyful of bulk goods, from crude oil to car parts. There was rich, and then there was Eisenberg rich. I took a wild stab that suggesting some aftershave and a pair of socks was probably not quite going to cut it.

‘You’ve seen the necklace Tor’s mother has, of course – the Eisenberg Rainbow?’ Dina said now, undeterred by my silence. ‘All these rows of beautiful diamonds – different cuts and colours. Not just white, but some are pale pink, or deep blue like sapphires. It’s priceless, and utterly fabulous.’

She sighed, as if – by courting Tor’s favour – she might get to wear it herself one day. I’d seen news photographs of the jewellery in question. To me it looked as fake as something from a cheap Christmas cracker, but I thought it best not to say so.

‘What’s he like – Torquil’s father?’ I asked instead as we walked back out into the sunshine. I checked the passers-by out of habit before we crossed the street and I blipped the locks on Dina’s Mercedes SLK. ‘Have you ever met him?’

‘Mr Eisenberg?’ Dina looked blank for a moment, then shrugged. ‘A couple of times. He’s OK, I guess,’ she said, and heard the doubtful note in her own voice. ‘Well, he can be OK – when everything’s going Tor’s way. Which is kinda weird, because from what Tor says, he’s hardly ever around.’

So, money can’t buy you everything.

We climbed into the car. I fired up the engine to let the air con disperse the heat that had built up inside the cabin, and found Dina watching me.

‘Why did you ask?’

My turn to shrug. ‘I’m just surprised, that’s all,’ I said, ‘that he’s putting on a big birthday bash for his son when there’ve been these kidnappings. You would have thought he’d be wary of conspicuous displays of wealth – go out of his way to make his son seem a less attractive target.’

She laughed. ‘From what I hear, Tor hasn’t had to ask twice for anything since he was about six years old,’ she said wryly. ‘Can you imagine what would happen if his twenty-first birthday party was cancelled because it might be risky?’

‘He likes taking risks?’

‘He wrecked his first Ferrari when he was sixteen. He’s into skydiving, snowboarding, you name it,’ she said. ‘If it’s dangerous, Torquil will do it.’ But where there should have been a certain amount of respect or admiration in her voice, something more heartfelt took its place.

I checked the mirrors and slid the Merc out into traffic. ‘You don’t like him very much, do you?’

‘I—’ She flicked me a telling glance and lapsed into glum silence for the next couple of blocks before finally admitting, ‘It’s not that. He just doesn’t know when to stop, you know? Like, it’s not funny until someone gets hurt.’

‘Yeah, and then it’s hilarious,’ I muttered, glanced across and caught her frowning. ‘So, why are you going to all this trouble over his birthday? Your mother obviously didn’t want you to go, and you’ve admitted you don’t really like the guy …’

‘It’s not for Tor—,’ she began, biting off whatever she’d been about to say next. ‘Oh, never mind!’

I wasn’t being paid to be easily offended so I just shrugged. ‘OK.’

We drove on in silence, with Dina staring pointedly out of the window. It was the first hint of discord, of temperament, she’d shown in the three days since I’d been assigned to her.

Dina swam every morning in the heated outdoor pool on the lower terrace, while I made a show of apparently lounging around, keeping her company. At varying times we rode out on the beach – Dina on the showy white Cerdo, and me on an elderly chestnut Quarter Horse that had apparently been her previous mount.

Dina had been friendly and chatty enough, without actually revealing much of herself to me, nor enquiring too deeply in return. She seemed most interested in my riding skills, acquired in my childhood and not used much since.

Apart from that, she’d shopped, and gone to hairdressing and beauty appointments, all with me firmly in tow. I’d done my best not to crowd or irritate her and it had seemed to be working fine ’til now. When she’d lunched with her mother at a fashionable restaurant, I’d excused myself to the adjoining bar area and kept a discreet watch over the pair of them from there. If body language was anything to go by, they ended the meal in excruciatingly polite disagreement over something. I didn’t ask, and Dina didn’t tell. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.

And today, she’d quickly accepted that I was not going to act as her own personal pack mule, not that she’d bought much so far. Certainly nothing suitable as a birthday present for the thrill-seeking only child of a billionaire.

I checked my mirrors again before changing lanes, indicating late before our turn-off to flush out a possible tail. There had been no hint of anything so far, but it did no harm to be cautious.

Our destination was a shopping mall that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in all directions. My heart sank at the prospect of a long afternoon’s continued dithering, but when I parked up near the main entrance, Dina made no immediate moves to get out.

‘I’m sorry about … before,’ she said in an awkward rush. ‘But, you see, there will be other people there – at the party. People I kinda like …’

‘So, putting up with an evening of Torquil’s dubious sense of humour is the price you’re prepared to pay.’

‘Yes … I guess it is.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘Doesn’t make it any easier to choose a gift for him, though.’

So, her earlier dreaminess had been strictly for the necklace. I sighed. ‘From what you’ve said, it sounds like you can’t hope to buy anything that’s going to impress him, so why not get him something quirky instead? Something that will make him smile. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune.’

She stared at me like I’d suggested she dance naked in the streets. ‘Like what?’

I resigned myself to yet more shopping and nodded to the mall looming ahead of us. ‘Let’s go and find out, shall we?’

CHAPTER SEVEN

In low heels and an all-purpose evening dress, I leant on the balcony rail of the yacht club and stared out across the glittering lights of the harbour.

When Dina had said the birthday celebration was taking place at a regatta, I’d envisaged sailing boats of some kind, slim and sinuous. What greeted me instead was a collection of floating gin palaces, halfway to cruise ship size, bobbing fatly, gleaming and self-satisfied in their allotted mooring spaces, like prize pigs at a trough.

Below me was a wide outside terrace area overhanging the water, strung with fairy lights and bordered by waist-high glass panels, presumably to stop the more enthusiastic partygoers tumbling into the murky depths. There were currently about thirty or forty of them down there, doing their damnedest to put that to the test.

Our host for the evening, Torquil Eisenberg, was at the centre of things and working a little too hard at being the life and soul of his own party. He was a thin geeky kid with a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple above the bow tie of his white tuxedo. I guessed, in different circumstances, he would have had buck teeth and sticking-out ears, too, but Daddy’s considerable riches had fixed what it could and showered him with money in the hope of taking your mind off the rest. If he was into the extreme sports Dina had mentioned, it hadn’t helped convert his stringy physique into anything immediately impressive.

It took me about ten seconds after meeting him to decide I didn’t like the kid. Dina had handed over her beautifully wrapped gift with studied casualness, like his reaction didn’t matter to her. He tore his way through the brightly coloured paper and ribbons and looked suddenly nonplussed when he came to the manufacturers’ logo on the box.

‘Victorinox?’ he said blankly. ‘What’s this?’

‘Why don’t you open it and find out?’ I suggested.

He managed to open the box itself and found, nestling inside, the most comprehensive and expensive Swiss Army knife in the shop, bristling with attachments for every occasion. After she’d chosen it, Dina had gone back to the jeweller’s and had six words neatly engraved along the side of the casing.

FOR THE GUY WHO HAS EVERYTHING

Torquil stared for a moment longer and I could have sworn I caught the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth, then he looked up and it was gone, replaced by an indifferent contempt.

‘Is that it?’ he demanded, dumping the gift into the hands of a flunkey and elbowing his way towards the next hopeful bearer.

Dina tried to affect a blasé pose in response, but I saw her quickly bitten lip and wanted to slap his legs for him. Sadly, such an action was not part of my remit, however much personal satisfaction I might have derived from it.

The party had been going for about three hours by that point. Torquil had made a showy arrival by chauffeured Bell Jet Ranger, touching down on the yacht club’s private helipad, and been swept into a huge marquee on the lawns for a short but concussive set by a moody rock group. I initially had them pegged as a particularly good tribute band and only realised, when the lead singer nearly punched out the birthday boy for making a grab at his favourite guitar, that they were actually the real thing.

The catered meal that followed defied belief, from the massive ice sculptures on the tables to the vintage champagne freely available. Then it was on to the yacht club itself and the partying had started in earnest. What it had all cost was anybody’s guess.

Now I sipped my ginger ale on the rocks slowly, as if it were whisky, and looked for trouble.

There was general perimeter security in place, a load of guys built like American football players, squeezed uncomfortably into dinner jackets and bow ties. Not bad as a gatecrashing deterrent, but with neither the agility nor the experience, in my opinion, to prevent an organised, well-orchestrated attack. They’d given my evening bag a cursory search on the way in, but had completely missed the SIG hidden beneath the back of my short jacket. I hadn’t enlightened them.

If I’d been trying to guard Dina against potential assassination, the rear terrace of the yacht club would have been a nightmare to control and contain, even with a full team. Open on three sides, brightly lit against the darkness, the exposed location offered too much concealment on the far shoreline for a sniper, with too easy an exfil once the job was done.

As a possible ambush site for kidnapping, however, it wasn’t nearly so attractive. Anyone approaching from the water would be clearly highlighted all the way in to the lower landing stage, and the only landward exit meant climbing the short flight of stairs to the balcony where I now stood. From here, I could keep a watching brief on my principal without cramping her style, as per my instructions.

And Dina seemed to be following hers – for the moment at least. She stayed in plain sight and kept tight hold of her champagne glass at all times. The three kidnap victims so far had all been slipped something to make them compliant, I’d pointed out. They could have been injected – any exposed muscle would do the trick – but there was no point in taking chances that the drug had simply been palmed into their unguarded drink.

She had shaken off her earlier embarrassment without, I was interested to note, entirely blaming me for its cause. I had a feeling Torquil would have been determinedly unimpressed with anything she might have given him, and at least the Swiss Army multi-tool I’d suggested was a fraction of the price of that yellow diamond.

After a few minutes of self-pity, she’d shaken herself out of it, agreed with my assessment that he was an ungrateful little bastard, and made a firm decision to enjoy the rest of the party as best she could.

I remembered Caroline Willner’s quietly murmured last words before the limo had collected us from the house to bring us here.

‘Take care of her for me.’

So far, so good.

I caught movement behind me, shifted a little to see a young man step out of the bar, and recognised him as one of the many guests I’d seen earlier. He moved forwards to lean on the railing a couple of metres away. We nodded to each other. I kept my face blank to discourage small talk, but made a mental note of him, all the same. Sandy hair, medium height, thickset but light enough on his feet for it to be athletic muscle rather than junk food. He dressed like money was not a problem and probably never had been.

I checked him out under cover of taking a drink, but his eyes were on the group below, where Torquil was refilling the champagne glasses of two giggling girls. They both had a lot of blond hair and tanned skin on show, and could well have been twins.

‘A regular Prince Charming, isn’t he?’ said my companion, as if reading my thoughts. I glanced across, surprised. His accent was classless English, with just a hint of American inflection in the way he asked the question to suggest a long stay here.

‘I’m barely able to contain my lust,’ I agreed dryly.

He laughed, a pleasant uncontrived sound, accompanied by a flash of teeth. ‘You say that, but half the girls down there would crawl over broken glass to be the one he takes home tonight.’

‘Really?’ I murmured as I watched Torquil drape his arm across the bare shoulders of another girl, leaving it there just a little too long before moving on. I didn’t miss her exaggerated shudder and pulled face behind his back. If they really think so little of him, why are they all here? ‘What’s his trick, then? Can he breathe through his ears?’

In the middle of taking a mouthful of drink, my companion spluttered and came close to choking. I kept my eyes on the throng, double-checking Dina’s location and too wary of deliberate distraction to come to his immediate aid.

He recovered enough for speech, wiping his mouth on a folded napkin. ‘English, right?’ he said. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Here and there,’ I said. ‘London latterly.’

‘I’ve been out here five years. Was at Oxford before that. Nice to hear a familiar accent.’ Something had sharpened in his gaze. ‘And here I was, expecting just another boring evening.’

I cursed inwardly. If I’d smiled sweetly and made some vacuous comment, he would have soon ignored me. As it was, his patent interest was an inconvenience at best, and – if anything went down and he was overcome with stupid ideas of chivalry – it could turn into a serious handicap.

‘I’m Hunt, by the way – Hunt Trevanion,’ he said then, moving closer to offer me a tanned hand. He was older than I’d first thought, maybe approaching thirty rather than twenty, which gave him ten years on the average age of the crowd.

I touched my fingers to his briefly, not letting him get a decent grip even if he’d been so inclined, and said, coolly offhand, ‘Trevanion? Isn’t that a Cornish name?’

He shrugged. ‘Is it? I’ve never done the whole family history thing.’ He eyed me, assessing. ‘Have I seen you around before? At the tennis club, maybe?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m Charlie – I came with Dina.’

I had insisted that my new principal introduce me simply as a family friend, which she had done without undue awkwardness. Popping up out of nowhere with a claim to be bosom pals, I’d found in the past, led to too many difficult questions.

‘Dina?’ Hunt said. ‘Oh, yeah, I know – down there in the orange number? She’s a sweet kid.’

I thought of the hours Dina had spent earlier this afternoon, trying on what seemed to be every single frock in her substantial wardrobe. In her quest for the right air of alluring sophistication, she’d finally settled on some designer gown in apricot silk which I’d privately thought was too old for her. A sweet kid. Not exactly the effect she’d been aiming for.

It was so much easier, I reflected, to be restricted in choice to my one all-purpose evening dress. When I’d bought it, I’d been largely influenced by the fact that it was dark enough for blood not to show too badly, was machine-washable, and made of some stretchy synthetic material that not only allowed a reasonable degree of movement, but was also apparently impossible to crease. Anything else was a bonus.

‘So, why are you lurking up here instead of mixing down there among the bright young things?’ Hunt asked now, ignoring my best attempts at cold shoulder. He wasn’t good-looking in any conventional sense, I thought, but there was something attractive about him, even so. The more he spoke, though, the more I realised there was something a little off about his speech cadences, as though he was trying to cover some kind of regional accent. There were only so many rough edges, I considered, that an Oxford education could polish off.

I sipped my fake Scotch. ‘I might ask you the same question.’

He grinned and shook his head. ‘Oh no. It’s not me they’ve come to see.’

It clicked then, that when I’d seen him earlier, his arm had been around a petite black-haired girl in what I hoped was a fun-fur coat, who’d been treated like she was something special. Although, in a crowd of minor celebrities, that didn’t narrow it down much. The Eisenberg name, it seemed, had brought them all out of the woodwork.

‘Oh yes, the girl you came with,’ I said vaguely. ‘She’s famous, isn’t she?’

Hunt grimaced into his drink, almost a reflexive twitch. ‘Infamous, more like,’ he muttered. ‘Poor kid.’

‘You don’t mean … she was one of the people kidnapped?’

He looked up sharply. ‘Who told you that?’

‘With that kind of a reaction? You did.’

A flicker of distaste crossed his features. He drained his glass. ‘Nice to meet you, Charlie, but if you’re just after gossip for the tabloids …’

CHAPTER EIGHT

I stared at him, then said mildly, ‘Hey, you’re the one who started chatting me up, remember? Not the other way round. And Dina’s mother mentioned the kidnappings, that’s all. She’s worried that the same thing might happen to her daughter. You can’t blame her for that.’

Hunt hesitated for a moment, then his shoulders relaxed a little inside the well-cut jacket. ‘Yeah, well. OK then, fair enough,’ he agreed at last, casting me a still-dubious glance. ‘Yeah, Orlando was the first victim.’

His eyes drifted to where the girl in question was standing at the centre of an admiring circle that included both Torquil and Dina. For once, Torquil seemed content not to be the focus of attention. Dina hovered on the outskirts, not quite included – or excluded, either.

I briefly wondered why she hadn’t pointed out Orlando to me as soon as she and Hunt had arrived. Getting useful information out of the previous victims was supposed to be one of the main reasons for us being here. We would, I determined, have words about that later …

Because it was always easier to start with a question to which you already knew the answer, I opened with, ‘How long ago did it happen?’

Hunt’s gaze turned suspicious again, but it must have seemed a reasonable thing to ask because he said grudgingly, ‘Last July.’

Ten months ago. ‘She’s doing well to be here, then,’ I said. ‘It can’t be easy for her to feel safe coming out again.’

‘Yeah, she’s quite a girl,’ Hunt said softly. ‘But they grabbed her from home, so I don’t think being outside is the issue.’ He waved his empty glass towards the darkness beyond the lights. ‘Besides, it looks as though old man Eisenberg has laid on plenty of security around the place.’

I debated on telling him the guardian gorillas weren’t up to much, but decided that would raise too many questions – not least of which was how I could tell.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said instead. ‘It’s scary, though, don’t you think? I heard three people round here have been held to ransom over the last year. I mean, aren’t you worried?’

‘I’m not rich enough to be worried,’ he said with candour. ‘My folks are well off, don’t get me wrong, but hardly in the same bracket as Orlando’s people.’

‘Or Torquil’s?’

He laughed at that, his former amusement seemingly part-way restored. ‘Nobody is quite in that bracket.’

I asked him what line of business his family was in and, with that easy flash of teeth again, he told me they’d made their money in the music business, which seemed to cover a multitude of sins.

I would have asked more, but at that point Torquil bounded onto the bottom step below us and clapped his hands for silence, which he achieved with a speed that must have gratified him. Someone even turned the music down a notch.

‘All those of you lucky enough to have gotten a special invitation, we’re moving this party up a gear and onto my father’s yacht,’ he shouted. ‘The rest of you – you’ve had your fun, now go home.’

There was a smattering of laughter, as though he’d said something funny instead of merely downright rude. Torquil grinned at their confusion and continued up the staircase, leading one lucky lady by the hand. It wasn’t hard to recognise the tiny figure of Orlando being pulled along in his wake. She was barely five feet tall, slim to the point of undernourishment, in a floaty kind of a dress that was not far from being a nightgown.

Behind the pair, the crowd jockeyed for position and an undignified scramble developed, as if proximity alone would convey favour. Dina was among them, I noticed, but it was hard to tell if she was making the running or just being carried along in the crush.

As Torquil reached the top of the staircase, his eyes glided over me totally without recognition, then flared when they landed on Hunt.

‘There you are!’ he said with a mix of annoyance and relief. ‘Where are the others?’

Orlando disengaged herself and moved to Hunt’s side, wrapping herself around him like a cat. Despite what he’d said about her comparatively settled state of mind, she was clinging to him for more than physical comfort. Hunt ignored Torquil’s question long enough to smile indulgently down at her. She blossomed under his gaze.

Sean, I recalled starkly, had made me feel like that. Although we had not been able to show it much in public, it had still been there.

Torquil opened his mouth again, but it was Orlando who tore her eyes away from Hunt’s to say calmly, ‘They might come, or they might not. It kinda depends on if they have something better to do.’

She had a cool, clear voice that carried. Certainly, those hurrying up the steps on Torquil’s heels heard it and there were one or two audible gasps, and then a giggle.

The birthday boy’s head reared back – shock or anger, it was hard to tell. And as the initial jolt passed, his mouth twisted into a sneer. He rounded on the people behind him, glaring furiously. There were enough smiles among the eavesdroppers to tip annoyance over the edge into full-blown temper. Did anybody like him, I wondered, watching their faces? Clearly not.

And Torquil must have seen that, too. Whether it came as a surprise to him or not was something else.

‘Oh, just get the hell away from me – all of you!’ he cried suddenly, taking a step towards them and jerking his arms as if to scare birds off a lawn.

It was unfortunate that Dina reached the top of the stairs just at the moment Torquil’s tantrum exploded. Propelled from behind, she had no option but to keep moving. She stumbled, reached out blindly and caught hold of the sleeve of Torquil’s white tuxedo in a completely reflex attempt to save herself from falling.

Her champagne glass was still in her hand as she did so, and the remaining contents splashed up and out in a pale arc. The majority of the liquid landed, inevitably, across Torquil’s chest. Enough spattered onto his face to make him flinch, and the involuntary reaction seemed to piss him off all the more.

There was a moment’s stunned silence, then someone sniggered. It was infectious, and within seconds everyone was either laughing or making too obvious attempts not to. If Torquil had possessed an ounce of class, he would have laughed with them.

But he didn’t.

Dina recovered her balance and put a hand to her mouth to try and mask a sound that was half gasp, half moan. Torquil’s wiry body was actually quivering. I caught the expanding rage in his eye and shifted my weight, fast.

‘You stupid, clumsy, little, bitch!’ he got out, his voice rising to a breathless howl. Dina cringed, and Torquil’s straightforward anger turned into something much more dangerous. He moved forwards, arm rising as if to strike.

I stepped in under his wild swing and grabbed his wrist, whipping his palm down and round into a rotated lock that brought him up short with my body blocking the action from most of the onlookers.

He briefly tried to resist. I tightened the lock and, almost to my surprise, he had the sense to freeze before I was forced to dislocate his wrist. I guessed it had more to do with saving face than pain. Our entwined hands were jammed between our bodies, mostly hidden in the folds of clothing. If he didn’t struggle, they were likely to stay that way.

I butted my shoulder against his chest and met his furious gaze from a lot closer than either of us would have liked. From that distance I could tell he plucked his eyebrows to stop them meeting in the middle.

‘Don’t spoil the party,’ I murmured. ‘And don’t make me spoil it for you.’

His instinctive first reaction was scorn, followed swiftly by the knowledge that the torsional pressure I was applying to his hand was slowly but relentlessly forcing apart the bones of his forearm. He was involved in enough dangerous sports to know what physical damage felt like. I don’t think I was prepared to actually break his wrist, just to prove a point, but for a moment I wasn’t sure about that, and neither was he.

‘All right!’ he managed through his teeth, loathing me with his eyes.

I let go abruptly and moved back, keeping between him and Dina just in case he got brave again. He went instinctively to cradle his injured hand, then realised how that would look and let it dangle.

When I glanced across, Hunt had drawn Dina aside and was looking slightly bemused by the whole episode. Dina herself had turned as pale as Torquil. Orlando’s face was expressionless, as though any hint of violence caused her to shut down.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Dina said. ‘It was a complete accident. I’ll have the jacket dry-cleaned, of course.’

Torquil tore his eyes away from me long enough to stare at her like she was something he’d stepped in. Into the buzzing silence came the thump of boots through the bar leading to the balcony and two of the bulky security men finally elbowed their way through. They were both out of breath.

‘What’s the problem, Mr Eisenberg?’

‘There’s no problem,’ Torquil said at last. He jerked his head towards Dina. ‘But see she leaves, right now.’ His eyes flicked over me, very quickly, as if he was afraid of what he might see in my face. ‘And take your … friend with you.’

I retrieved Dina from Hunt with a nod of thanks for his care, putting my arm around her shoulders. She was shaking.

‘Come on,’ I said quietly as the security loomed beside us. ‘I’ll take you home.’

She allowed me to guide her silently through the stares of the bar, and down onto the wide wooden jetty that led towards the exit gate into the parking area. I glanced at her face as we went, and found her eyes were dry but hollow with misery.

‘It’s all over,’ I said, aiming to comfort, but the effect was not what I expected.

Something like a sob rose in her throat and she whirled to face me, hands clenching in frustration and anguish. ‘Oh, Charlie, how could you?’

CHAPTER NINE

‘I’ll never be invited to anything ever again!’ Dina moaned. ‘He’ll tell everyone what you did and nobody will even speak to me.’

I waited for her outrage to subside, then said carefully, ‘Don’t you think you’re maybe overestimating how popular Torquil is?’

She threw up her hands. ‘What’s being popular got to do with anything?’

I felt my eyebrows climb, heard the trace of acid creep into my voice. ‘Would you rather I’d just let him hit you?’

Her eyes skated away from mine. ‘He wouldn’t have,’ she said, but it wasn’t me she was trying hardest to convince. She stared glumly at the sparkling toes of her evening shoes. ‘What am I going to do now? They’ll all be laughing at me.’

I regarded her for a moment. ‘So, encourage them.’

That snapped her head up. ‘What?’

‘Make light of it,’ I said. ‘Make a joke of it. Tell everyone he should be bloody grateful you were drinking champagne and not red wine or he would have looked like an extra from a Tarantino movie.’

She tried to look scandalised but couldn’t sustain it. I caught the distinct edge of a smile curve her lips, quickly squashed. The gesture reminded me of Torquil himself, when she’d given him the engraved Swiss Army knife. What was it about being rich, I wondered, that made these people so determined to be miserable?

We plodded on towards the exit gate, Dina stepping carefully over the gapped planks in her high heels. Behind us, Torquil’s two heavies followed at a suitable distance, just to make sure we really did vacate the property.

The sound of a vehicle pulling up beyond the security fence had me instantly wary. I put a cautionary hand on Dina’s arm.

‘Slow down,’ I murmured, eyes on the new arrival – a stretch Lincoln with the usual limo-black tint on the glass, riding low and heavy. From it, four obvious close-protection guys emerged with the care and technique needed for debussing from an armoured personnel carrier in a hot zone. To my mind, it was way over the top for the situation, calling unnecessary attention to the occupants, but they certainly made the existing gate security look like monkeys. Maybe that was the point.

After a long pause, during which time they stared hard at anything that moved, and at quite a bit that didn’t, one nodded to the others. The rear door of the limo opened again and a couple climbed out. They were both in their late teens or early twenties, and dressed to kill.

Alongside me, Dina gave a gasp. I guessed without being told that these two were the other kidnap victims, whose possible non-arrival had caused Torquil such anxiety. They were ushered through the gate without the usual checks and strode towards us along the planking.

The boy was short, almost squat, with dark curly hair and Mediterranean heritage written in the olive skin and the facial bones. He had on a dark dinner suit with the bow tie undone and he kept one hand in his pocket as though he’d practised the brooding-yet-casual look in the mirror before he came out.

The girl wore a voluminous sable coat, together with a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, even in the dark. I waited to see if any of this would cause her to trip and fall into the water, but she negotiated the jetty with practised ease.

Dina froze, giving a fairly good impression of a deer in the headlights. It was only when the couple neared us that any flicker of recognition passed across the boy’s face at the sight of Dina. It was followed by a hint of contempt, and he would have swept right on past us, had the girl not stepped round him and grasped Dina lightly by her upper arms, air-kissing her on both cheeks. I suddenly saw her profile in the light for the first time, and I realised with shock that I knew exactly who she was.

‘Dina, honey!’ she said. ‘Surely you’re not leaving already?’

Yeah, Dina. Let’s go. Let’s go right now.

My attempts to will my principal into a course of action proved a failure. Dina stepped back with confused surprise on her face at the unexpected warmth of this welcome. She threw a quick glance in my direction, as if afraid of my reaction. ‘Uh, well, I—’

‘Oh, but you can’t go now,’ the girl said firmly, linking her arm through Dina’s and steering her back in the direction of the yacht club. ‘Not when this party’s just about to get interesting.’

I was pretty sure I knew what constituted her definition of interesting, and was equally positive I didn’t want to stick around long enough to make sure.

The boy gave an impatient shrug. ‘She wants to leave, let her go, Manda,’ he said, dismissive.

‘It’s not that,’ Dina said quickly, voice rising. She snatched another look at me and disengaged herself with obvious regret, swallowing. ‘Look, I’d love to stay, honestly, but maybe this isn’t a good time. Torquil and I, we had a-a falling out over a glass of champagne. I tripped and he kinda ended up wearing most of it …’ Her voice petered away at their blank expressions. She straightened her spine with a determinedly carefree little smile. ‘Lucky for him I wasn’t drinking red wine, huh?’

Manda’s eyebrows rose far enough to appear over the frames of her designer sunglasses, then she let loose a big grin that belied the cool appearance. Even the boy stopped scowling for long enough to look briefly amused.

‘Priceless,’ Manda drawled, glancing at him sideways. ‘I told you we should have gotten here earlier, Ben-Ben.’

The boy did not look like he enjoyed being called ‘Ben-Ben’ in public. ‘We’re here now, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Where the hell’s Tor? I need a drink.’

Right on cue, I felt the planks bouncing under our feet as someone came hurrying along the jetty. I turned and saw Torquil had emerged at the far end, near the yacht club, and was approaching as fast as he could without actually running.

‘Manda! Benedict! Great to see you!’ He was trying desperately for casual, but the stress of relief came across all too clearly in the pitch and timbre of his voice. He swallowed, said more normally, ‘Glad you could make it.’

‘Hey, Tor,’ Manda said, offhand. ‘How could we miss your little party?’ She reduced all this extravagance to the level of having half a dozen kindergarten tots round for a slice of cake and a cup of flat lemonade. And just as he began to look crestfallen, she hit him with, ‘Dina was just telling us all about your silly little spat.’

Torquil flashed me a look that was part hate, part fear, but pure poison. I stared right back, keeping my face bland, and he wisely refrained from comment.

Manda eyed Torquil for a moment longer, expectantly, then turned to Dina. ‘Come on, let’s go aboard Tor’s little boat and find Ben-Ben a drink before he dies of thirst, and then you can tell us all about it.’

‘No!’ I would have objected myself, but it was Dina, to my surprise, who dug her toes in first. She realised it had come out too stark and softened it down with a smile that held genuine regret. ‘I’m real sorry, Manda,’ she said hastily. ‘But I don’t want to spoil Torquil’s birthday, so we’ll—’

‘Oh, that’s so sweet of you,’ Manda interrupted. ‘Well, honey, our limo’s still here. Tell you what, why don’t the three of us go find somewhere to have a drink? Tor won’t mind if we skip out, I’m sure.’

But it didn’t take an expert in body language to tell that Tor did mind. He minded like hell.

The two security men he’d sent to escort us out were hovering with their mouths open, unsure what to do next. The other partygoers who’d received their special invitations had emerged from the yacht club and were closing fast on their way to the Eisenberg liner, with Hunt and Orlando in the lead.

Torquil must have known that for Benedict and Manda to leave now, so soon after arriving and with Dina so publicly in tow, would be the ultimate humiliation. He only had one realistic option, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

‘It would spoil the party if you left, Dina,’ he said, with an almost credible attempt at sincerity. ‘Stay.’ I’m sure it was only shock that made her keep him waiting for a response, but he flushed at her silence and added through clenched teeth, ‘Please.’

‘I … er … yes,’ Dina said faintly. ‘Of course. Thank you, Torquil.’

He glared at her. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said, his tone ominous. His gaze swung to me. ‘But your friend still needs to leave.’

CHAPTER TEN

There was a long pause after Torquil’s last statement. It was eventually broken not by Dina but by Manda, who threw her head back and began to laugh.

‘Oh Tor, honey, that’s just priceless,’ she said, indicating me with a languid wave. ‘But there’s no way she’s going to walk out of here and leave Dina behind to your tender mercies.’ It was the first time she’d acknowledged my presence.

Torquil subjected me to a rapid scrutiny as if afraid he’d missed something obvious. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he finally had to admit defeat. He knew the joke was on him somehow, but he couldn’t work out what or how. ‘Why the hell not?’ he demanded.

Manda laughed again as she removed her dark glasses. I caught the brief flicker of her eyes and realised she’d been waiting for the crowd to arrive. She wanted an audience.

Some things never change.

‘Because, honey, that’s not how professional bodyguards behave, is it, Charlie?’ she said, loud enough to carry. ‘And I ought to know, huh?’

If I’d been hoping for anything else, it was too late now. In my peripheral vision I registered shock in varying degrees. There was no point in denial. Suppressing a sigh, I agreed gravely, ‘Yes, Amanda, you ought.’

Her face twitched. ‘It’s Manda,’ she said sharply. ‘I haven’t been called that for years.’

Two years, certainly. Two years since Amanda Dempsey had briefly proved the bane of my life, trying to protect her old-monied family from threats largely manufactured by their own wilful teenage daughter. Caroline Willner’s fears for Dina, by comparison, were mild and unjustified.

I jerked my head towards the limo. ‘I see you’ve progressed from sneaking out over the castle wall at night.’

‘Yeah, my trust fund finally kicked in.’

I nodded slowly. ‘How is your father these days?’

‘He’s dead,’ she said with a ripe satisfaction, and when that failed to elicit the expected response, she added reluctantly, ‘Natural causes, I’m sorry to say. The old bastard had a stroke.’

Well, you’ve been doing your best to bring that on since you were fourteen.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said with spirit that held more than a touch of bravado. ‘I’m not.’

Benedict made an impatient noise in his throat. ‘Sorry to break up the touching reunion,’ he said acidly, ‘but are we gonna stand around here all night, or are we getting on the damned boat?’

Torquil jerked out of stasis. ‘Yeah, uh, let’s go aboard.’ He brushed past me without eye contact and shook his head briefly to the two gorillas. They shrugged and turned away. Manda determinedly took Dina’s arm again.

With Torquil in the lead, we followed him along the network of jetties, through another security gate, and approached what must have been the largest and most luxurious vessel in the place. I let out a low whistle under my breath. With an unblemished dark-blue hull, white upper decks and tinted glass, the superyacht’s huge superstructure was raked back so that it seemed to be moving at high speed even lying graceful at its berth. It screamed of money and class.

The yacht must have been the best part of three hundred feet long. It was wider than a house. I counted about four separate deck levels, plus a helicopter pad. Every deck had big sliding glass doors that opened out onto private balconies, and most had a jacuzzi or a hot tub. Even by Long Island standards, the whole thing was a monstrous display of wealth.

As we neared it, the yacht suddenly lit up, underwater neon turning the surrounding water into an ice-blue glow and sending any aquatic life scattering. Deck lights blazed. There was an audible intake of breath from those approaching, and Torquil turned to catch the reaction. It must have been all he hoped for, because he treated us to a wide smile, the first sign of genuine pleasure he’d shown all evening.

Short of grappling hooks, the only way to scale the endless smooth sides of the yacht was via the lower deck area at the stern, presumably for diving or swimming – although why you’d want to get into the nasty old sea when there were so many private swimming pools on board was anybody’s guess.

Two crewmen wearing an approximation of naval officers’ white dress uniform were standing by to help us along the short gangplank. A gently curving staircase led to the next level, a pool deck, with yet more discreet neon under the water and flanked by sunloungers. I took one look at the acres of teak decking on view and was glad my evening shoes did not have the kind of spiked heels that would leave a trail of damage. Nobody else seemed to bother.

More crew appeared with trays of canapés and drinks, their faces carefully blank to the revelry winding itself into full swing around them. The yacht boasted a sound system with external speakers that must have had half the harbour reverberating to the beat. After about ten minutes, I began to wish I’d brought the ear defenders I normally reserved for visits to the gun range.

It was the kind of party where several people were bound to end up flinging themselves, shrieking, into one of the pools before the night was out – either fully clothed or completely naked, take your pick.

Nobody seemed to bother much about that, either.

I tried to keep a careful eye on Dina without gluing myself to her side, although the yacht had been designed with the privacy of its guests in mind. Every deck had its own personal sun deck, none of which were visible from the others. I was only too aware that things could very quickly get out of hand.

As standard operating procedure, I’d already identified myself to the ship’s captain, pointed out my principal and asked for notification if anyone tried to take her off the yacht without me in attendance. By his reaction, this kind of request was not unusual.

Still, she was my responsibility, and she didn’t need to be taken ashore in order to be taken advantage of, so I ended up doing a constant roving sweep, no mean feat on a boat that size. Dina, apparently oblivious, danced with various people on the pool deck, sat and chatted to others in the thickly carpeted main salon area below. If her earlier experience with Torquil and the glass of champagne had unsettled her, she gave no sign of it. I saw nothing to alert me that she was in danger.

I suppose it was inevitable, sooner or later, that I’d run into Manda Dempsey again as I prowled round the decks. I was up near the slim pointed bow, far enough forward to have a glimpse onto all the balconies and where the volume of the music was less combative. She stepped out of one of the open sliding doorways and made a beeline for me. At first I thought it was purely coincidence, but I quickly realised she’d sought me out. I put my back to the guard rail and waited. She stopped a couple of metres away, took a sip from her champagne glass and said at last in a cool voice, ‘I always wondered if I’d end up meeting with you again, Charlie.’

Smiling to take the sting out of it, I said, ‘And I always wondered if you’d end up in gaol.’

She continued to regard me for a moment, her body swaying to the pulse of alcohol or music, I wasn’t sure which. Then she smiled.

‘That’s what I always liked about you. You were so damned unimpressed by this kind of thing,’ she said, nodding towards the magnificent yacht laid out behind us. ‘I may have despised my father and the sycophants with which he surrounded himself, but at least you were never in awe of him.’ She laughed. ‘You once told me, if I hated him so much, to stop taking his money and go make my own way, do my own thing.’

Her own thing, I recalled grimly in the face of this charm offensive, had included seducing a gullible boyfriend into an attempted hit on the old man. It hadn’t worked, and the Dempseys’ flat refusal to do anything constructive about their only child had been one of the reasons I’d asked to be taken off the job. A decision I’d never regretted.

‘Nice to see you took my advice to heart,’ I said dryly. ‘Trust fund, didn’t you say?’

She smiled again. ‘From my grandparents. So, technically, I did listen to you.’ She took another sip of her drink. ‘I wanted to let you know that you were a big influence, though I guess it didn’t seem like it at the time.’

I waited for the flash of guile, but saw enough apparent sincerity to deliver a cautious, ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she responded. A girl with looks that were striking rather than pretty, with dark hair which – now she’d discarded the hat – I could see she’d had cut sleek and stylish, feathered in around her neck. The dress probably cost more than my entire annual clothing budget, and she wore it with the careless elegance of someone entirely used to such expense. ‘I’ve done some growing up over the last couple of years,’ she said, almost rueful. ‘About time, huh?’

‘You were kidnapped,’ I said, recalling the fortress-like parental estate, made even more secure by the installation of the electronic surveillance equipment and sensors that I myself had overseen. They should not have been able to get within a mile of her.

I cursed the sketchy reports, the lack of official investigation, and asked, ‘How did they get to you?’

Manda’s lips twisted. ‘Too easily,’ she said. Her eyes flicked across to me. ‘I was almost home. It was late, dark, and there was something in the road. I thought maybe someone had hit a dog, so I stopped and – just like you always told us not to – I got out of the car.’ She shrugged, her smile turning wan. ‘I don’t remember much after that. Apparently they had me for four days. I kinda lost track of time.’

She moved alongside me and rested her forearms on the polished mahogany capping rail. She leant out over it slightly, staring down into the artificial blue glow beneath the hull. ‘My father once told me I’d had everything I could ever wish for,’ she said quietly.

‘I remember.’ At the time, she’d flung back a furious denial. Told him that, on the contrary, she’d had everything money could buy and if he didn’t understand the difference, there was no point in her trying to explain. There had been more swearing and raised voices to it, but that was the gist.

She straightened, turned so her back was to the rail and gazed at the ongoing party with a cynical eye.

‘I guess you don’t appreciate what you have, until there’s the chance of losing it all,’ she said then. ‘Not just your lifestyle, but your life.’

‘They threatened to kill you?’ I said, keeping my voice absolutely level.

‘Oh yes,’ she said with a bitter smile. ‘They told me in great detail what was going to happen to me if the ransom wasn’t paid. And if my family went to the police, involved the authorities in any way, I’d suffer because of it.’

I thought back to the rebellious teenager I’d once known. ‘I can’t imagine you took that lying down, Manda.’

‘Oh, I tried to fight back, and after they beat me, they sent photographs of the bruises to my family,’ she said. Her voice was devoid of emotion, as though retelling a mildly interesting story of things that had happened to someone else. I’d used it myself as a natural defence mechanism. ‘For every delay, they said, they would … mark me. Somewhere permanent. Somewhere it would show.’

‘And did they?’

She gave a shrug. ‘I was lucky,’ she said. ‘My family paid.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

With very little prompting, Manda told me the story of her captivity and release. It didn’t take long. She had seen or heard nothing that would help to identify her kidnappers. She thought there were three or possibly four of them. They had been of similar size and weight, had spoken with no discernible accent, never used names, and had worn shiny chain store sports clothing and gloves and masks at all times.

In other words, they were professionals.

She recounted the tale with a dry wit, and a lack of self-pity or exaggeration that I found intriguing.

‘How much did they demand for your return?’

‘One million.’ She said it casually, as though it was too small a sum to be worth mentioning. ‘Wired direct to an account in the Caymans.’ She shrugged again. ‘My father had been dead six months by then. The trustees eventually agreed to pay half.’

Half a million dollars. Cheap, by heiress standards. Not much to split between three or four perpetrators, for four days of high tension and no doubt months of planning leading up to that. Perhaps that explained why they’d found another victim comparatively quickly.

‘Benedict was taken not long after me,’ Manda said, matter-of-fact. She had her hands wrapped around her bare arms, gently rubbing her own skin as if for comfort as much as warmth, but the night had begun to turn chilly so I couldn’t read too much into it. ‘I didn’t know him then. We didn’t get together until afterward.’ She smiled. ‘Not many people understand what you went through, unless they’ve been there.’

‘Was he taken by the same means?’

Manda shook her head. ‘Not really – car trouble. He’d gotten a flat and called OnStar assistance, and he was waiting for them to arrive when they grabbed him.’

‘He’d called out help to change a wheel?’ I queried, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice entirely, but Manda just gave me a wry glance where the old Amanda would have sulked.

‘His folks gave him a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade on these huge chromed wheels,’ she explained. ‘He said it was a two-man job, taking them on and off. And it was kinda dark, and raining.’

Another roadside ambush. I made a mental note to be particularly vigilant when Dina and I were out in the car. I’d arrived at the Willners’ place on my motorbike, a Buell Firebolt, and I’d been using whatever was in their garage since, like Dina’s Merc. Maybe I’d call Parker in the morning about using one of the company SUVs, which had a certain amount of non-standard reinforcement in the bodywork and chassis, and run-flat tyres.

‘Did his kidnap follow the same pattern as yours?’ I asked now.

‘If you mean did they threaten to kill him – slowly and painfully – if the police were called in?’ she demanded. ‘Then, yes, it did.’

‘And the amount they wanted was the same?’

Another head shake, harder this time. ‘This time, they wanted two million.’ She saw my reaction and added with a surprisingly resentful edge, ‘That amount is loose change to the Benelli family.’

‘And how much did they get?’

She gave me a cool straight stare. ‘Two million.’

‘They paid up the whole amount, just like that?’ This time I didn’t bother to hide my disbelief. Such a move was not only practically unheard of, it was also unwise and possibly downright bloody dangerous.

Unless …

Manda was watching my face. She levered upright abruptly and began to turn away. ‘No. It wasn’t just like that at all.’

I heard something quiet and brittle in her voice, took a step after her. ‘Manda, what—’

‘Hey, Manda, what’s the matter – you don’t love me anymore?’

A figure had appeared from one of the brightly lit doorways and was standing silhouetted against the light, with a glass of champagne in one hand and the other still stuffed into his pocket. Benedict’s usual studied pose.

‘Of course I do, honey,’ she called, almost bringing off a relaxed drawl while at the same time shooting me a warning glance. ‘Charlie and I were just catching up on the bad old days.’

Benedict sauntered across the deck, looking darkly handsome and completely aware of his own animal magnetism. He draped the arm with the champagne glass around Manda’s shoulders.

‘Come,’ he commanded, giving her a narrow-eyed pout that, to my mind, made him look both sleepy and grumpy. Never two of my favourite dwarves. Each to his – or her – own.

I would have expected her to laugh off this display of machismo, but Manda gave me a vague smile and allowed him to lead her away. I watched their departing backs and wondered what the hell had been so different about Benedict’s kidnapping that his parents were prepared to pay up, in full, an amount that was four times what had been accepted before. And why Manda was so wary of talking about it in front of him. Not for the first time, I cursed the lack of investigation that had taken place into these crimes.

Shrugging off the irritation, I checked the time – a little after two – wondering when I could legitimately insist we pack it in. The night still classified as young, if this lot were anything to go by. I began to feel correspondingly old.

The watch was a cheap-and-cheerful model I’d bought to navigate by on a job in California. Sean had given me a beautiful Tag Heuer when we’d first moved out to live and work in America, twelve months before. The day they flew him back to New York, still in his coma, I’d put the Tag away in a bedside drawer and decided only to get it out again when he was awake to see it.

I’d hoped to have been wearing it again long before now.

I sighed, glanced up at the deck where Dina had been dancing a few minutes before, only to find she was no longer in plain sight.

Swearing under my breath, I headed for the nearest staircase that curved around the superstructure to the upper deck. Nothing.

Working in a logical pattern, I began a sweep of the yacht, checking cabins and walk-in lockers as well as the more crowded areas. It was amazing, the kind of places I found occupied for clandestine reasons, but none of the fumbling encounters I interrupted involved Dina – willing or otherwise. The minutes ticked by, and my anxiety level rose with each one.

Finally, I found Hunt, lounging on one of the built-in sofas that lined one of the smaller sun decks, playing with his iPhone.

‘Where’s Dina?’ I demanded.

Hunt looked up sharply, apparently taken by surprise at my approach. The heels were not only low, they were quiet, too, and the fact he had the phone’s earpieces in place hadn’t helped.

He slid the whole lot into his pocket before uncrossing his legs and rising from the sumptuous cream upholstery with an elegant smile. ‘She’s having a heart-to-heart with Orlando in one of the staterooms, I think,’ he said. ‘Did you want her for anything in particular?’

I gritted my teeth. Yeah, so I can do my job. ‘I just need to know where she is, that’s all.’

‘Relax, Charlie.’ His tone was gently chiding, as though I was taking all this much too seriously. ‘She said if you came looking for her, to tell you she was OK but wanted to talk privately, and you were to just chill out and wait for her.’

‘Nice of her,’ I said shortly, ‘but that’s not how it works.’

He moved in front of me, still affable. ‘Do you really think a kid like Dina is a likely prospect for a kidnapping?’

‘Was Orlando considered at risk?’ I asked quietly. ‘Were any of them?’ He didn’t answer. I sighed. ‘Dina’s parents are not exactly on the poverty line, and she’s twenty – hardly a kid anymore. She’s a legitimate target, and it’s my job to see that she stays safe.’ I started to turn away, mind already on finding the staterooms, when Hunt’s question stopped me dead.

‘Have you considered that she might not want to feel safe?’

‘What?’

‘She might not want to feel safe,’ he repeated. ‘Her father lives in Europe – Vienna, I think. Dina was supposed to go and stay with her old man for the summer to get her out of the way, but she’s refusing. You didn’t know,’ he added flatly, seeing my face. ‘So, how exactly are you supposed to protect her, Charlie, if they haven’t told you what’s going on?’

‘Good question,’ I muttered, already on the move. ‘When I find that one out, I’ll let you know.’

I went below. The first familiar face I encountered there was the last person I wanted to bump into again that night.

Torquil.

I was rushing along a plushly carpeted internal corridor when he came out of a cabin just ahead of me, pulling the door closed behind him. He gave a kind of start when he saw me, face colouring furiously as recognition flashed in, and he muscled sideways as if intending to block my path.

‘I’m in a hurry and not in the mood,’ I said tightly. ‘Which stateroom is Dina in with Orlando?’

His head jerked with shock and I suddenly realised how my question might be misconstrued. Give me strength!

‘I believe they’re only talking. But I need to find Dina,’ I explained. Still he hesitated, but when I checked his face I saw indecision rather than obstruction, and tried a more reasonable approach. ‘Look, Torquil, I’m sorry about what happened earlier, but I’m sure you’ve had enough bodyguards of your own over the years to know how we respond to a perceived threat.’

For a moment I thought he was going to sneer, then he grinned at me, all sunny like a little kid distracted from a grazed knee with a lollipop. ‘Yeah, I’m … um … sorry, too, I guess,’ he said, surprising me utterly with the apology.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said blankly. ‘Do you know where they are?’

He took a breath, let it out. ‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

Naturally distrustful of this sudden change in behaviour, I kept half a pace behind him as he led the way along another short corridor. If my bearings were correct, we were working our way towards the stern of the yacht. We passed through an open salon area with an oval ceiling, beautifully inlaid with different coloured hardwoods, and a curved bar at one side. The only large vessel I’d been on before this was an Irish Sea ferry and it really didn’t compare. The art on the walls here was genuine, and didn’t look cheap, but I was in no mood for admiration.

Eventually, Torquil stopped outside a pair of double doors and jerked his head. ‘You wanna do the honours, or shall I?’ he asked with a grim smile.

I shrugged. ‘It’s your boat.’

Torquil forgot his supercilious demeanour for long enough to grin at me again. I just had time to wonder why he was enjoying this so much before he grabbed both handles at once, flung the doors wide, and strode in.

If Torquil had been my principal, I never would have allowed him to go first, but he wasn’t, so I waited half a beat before I followed.

Our arrival was greeted by a moment’s immobile silence and I flicked my eyes across the whole scene. Inside, the stateroom had every convenience, from its own private sun deck beyond the wall of tinted glass, to a huge oval four-poster bed carved from some semi-precious timber. On the wall opposite was the biggest flat screen I’d seen outside a multiplex cinema.

But the people in the stateroom were not there to use any of those facilities, it seemed.

There were three of them – Orlando, Benedict and Dina. They sat in the curved easy chairs, which were grouped around a low coffee table set with lilies to perfectly complement the decor.

Orlando gave a startled gasp when Torquil made his grand entrance, and couldn’t stop the dismay from passing across her features shortly afterwards. Benedict shoved his fist in his jacket pocket so fast I didn’t catch what might have been in it. There was a buzz about them both that sent prickles of apprehension racing across my skin.

Dina was jazzed, eyes glittering. She stiffened at the intrusion, but there was a reckless challenge in every line of her body.

‘Charlie!’ she said, shock making her voice haughty. ‘I told you to wait.’

‘That’s not your order to give,’ I snapped. ‘What the hell are you doing in here, Dina?’

She brought her chin up stubbornly. ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘It is when you sneak off without telling me where you’re going—’

‘I left a message!’

‘Not good enough.’ I moved closer, saw the size of her pupils, the excited jitter she couldn’t quite hide. ‘What have they given you? What have you taken?’

‘Nothing! And how dare you speak to my friends like that!’ Her voice was an outraged squawk. ‘How dare you?’

I whirled on Benedict. ‘What did you try to hide so fast when we came in?’ I demanded. ‘Because if I find you’ve given her anything, I’ll have you arrested as a dealer, and I don’t give a damn who your family is.’

‘Charlie …’

I ignored Dina’s sharp protest, holding Benedict’s gaze. Eventually, he got to his feet, slow and insolent.

‘It’s not what I’ve got that I’m trying to hide,’ he bit out. ‘It’s what I haven’t.’

And with that he took his hand out of his pocket, fingers spread, and with a cold ripple down my spine I discovered exactly why the Benelli family had been prepared to pay up all that ransom money without haggling.

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘They cut off the little finger of his right hand,’ I said. ‘Straight through the knuckle of the first joint. Used a meat cleaver or something pretty similar, and no anaesthetic.’

Parker winced. ‘Nasty.’

‘Yeah, but apparently the worst thing is that Benedict was reputed to be quite a talented classical guitarist.’

My boss let out a long breath. ‘Well, I guess that’s the kinda thing where you need all your fingers.’

I shrugged. It was uncharitable of me, but I couldn’t help it. Benedict had taken on a distinctly martyred air after he’d done his big reveal of the missing digit – more so after Manda had come rushing in to comfort him. I’d been on the receiving end of more than a few daggered or reproachful looks.

But I remembered Bill Rendelson, who was missing his entire arm, and my initial sympathy for Benedict’s situation rapidly dissipated. Bill might not be the easiest person to get along with, but on the whole I preferred his general bad temper to Benedict’s ‘woe is me’ attitude.

Dina, needless to say, had barely spoken to me for the remainder of the evening. The party had finally wound down at about 4 a.m., and by the time we arrived back at the Willners’ place, the sun was on the rise.

I saw Dina to her room, where she slammed the door smartly in the face of my murmured ‘goodnight’. I suppose that was only to be expected.

More in hope than expectation, I’d called Parker’s cellphone. It went straight to voicemail, which wasn’t a surprise, either, but was still a disappointment. I recognised that I needed to talk as much as make my report, that on previous jobs I would have been able to call Sean, any time, and he would have been there for me. Instead, I left my boss a brief precis of the night’s events, including the details I’d learnt of the road ambushes used to grab both Manda and Benedict. I knew that he would immediately suggest upgrading Dina’s transport to something more substantial without me needing to put in the request.

Anticipation was one of Parker’s qualities.

I wasn’t quite so appreciative of his efficiency, though, when he turned up at the house a little after eight the following morning. He called when he was less than ten minutes out to warn me that he was personally bringing over one of the agency Navigators. It just about gave me time to scramble out of bed and take the world’s quickest shower. Dina, I’d been reliably informed, was more than likely to sleep in until noon after partying half the night, and I confess I’d been quietly hoping for the opportunity to do the same.

As it was, Parker was already in the open-plan living area, sipping tea with Caroline Willner, when I made a belated entrance with my hair still wet, in khakis and a hastily donned shirt, both chosen more for proximity than style.

Parker had forsaken his usual line of immaculate dark suits. To blend in on a Saturday morning, he was in jeans and brown leather deck shoes, and a polo shirt in a pale washed-out shade of blue. Caroline Willner passed a critical eye over my own appearance, made her scrupulously polite excuses, and left us to it.

Wary of prying ears among the staff, I took Parker down to the garages, which occupied the entire ground floor area at the front of the house. He’d pulled the Navigator into an empty bay, next to Dina’s Mercedes. There was also a Range Rover, a couple of anonymous vehicles the staff used to run errands, and a little bright-yellow Mazda two-seater convertible. I’d recognised it as an MX-5 from home, but over here it was called a Miata instead. Caroline Willner had described it to me as her personal toy, with just the suspicion of a reckless smile hovering round her mouth. I’d found space for my Buell in a quiet corner, and not used it since I’d arrived.

Parker handed over the Navigator’s keys and I examined all the usual areas that might be vulnerable to sabotage, following protocol rather than demonstrating a lack of trust. He watched me without comment. And while I worked I gave him the full information, as it had come to me, about what had happened to the previous victims of the kidnap gang.

‘I’ll check out their stories, as far as I can,’ he said when I was done. ‘But without any official paper trail, there won’t be much I can confirm.’ He paused. ‘You said you have some history with the Dempsey girl. That going to cause you a problem?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘She seems to have grown up a lot since I was working for them.’

‘But she still told everyone at the party what you are. If the connection between the victims is the circle they move in, you’ve been made.’

‘Maybe. But it doesn’t stop me doing my job, Parker.’ I paused. ‘Did you ask Caroline Willner about trying to talk Dina into going to stay with her father?’

He nodded, frowning, and turned a slow circle as if admiring the gleaming paintwork on the Miata, but I saw the flick of his eyes and knew he was pinpointing the two CCTV cameras that monitored the garage area.

‘What’s the set-up here?’ he asked.

‘Video but no audio, monitored live off site, and recorded to hard drive via an Internet link to the security company’s own server. Local cop response time is eight minutes.’

He smiled very slightly, in such a way that I realised he already knew the answer before he’d asked the question. He was just checking that I knew it, too.

‘She confirmed, but was evasive,’ he said then. ‘Tried to pass it off as some kinda short vacation.’

‘But you didn’t believe her?’

‘No.’ He gave a slight smile. ‘She was too tense. There was clearly more at stake than just a battle of wills between the two of them.’

‘Ah.’ My turn to frown. ‘Is it just that she doesn’t believe she’s in real danger, or that she doesn’t want to leave her horses, I wonder?’

‘That you might have to ask Dina – when the two of you are speaking again,’ he said gravely. ‘Meanwhile, stay sharp. Don’t forget that the first girl, Orlando, was snatched from the family property.’

I nodded. ‘And her parents are rolling in it, by all accounts, so their home should not exactly be a soft target.’

‘We already know these guys either have very good intel, or they’re real pros,’ Parker agreed. ‘But some folk are remarkably careless with their own safety. Until the worst happens.’

‘Yeah well, Orlando and the boyfriend, Hunt, certainly left with some pretty heavy security in tow. Could you put out some feelers in the industry – find out how much of it was put in place after the kidnap? It would give us a better idea of what we’re up against.’

‘Of what you’re up against, you mean.’ He watched me for a moment, the kind of narrow-eyed stare Benedict could only ever aspire to. ‘You need backup, Charlie, you let me know.’

‘I will.’

He held the eye contact a beat longer. ‘Sean would not forgive me if I didn’t take real good care of you while he’s out of action.’

‘I don’t need taking care of, Parker,’ I said gently, touched but strangely discomfited by the pitch of his gaze. ‘Have you … been to see him?’

‘Went yesterday, right after his scan—’

‘Scan?’ I interrupted. ‘What scan? He didn’t have anything scheduled or I would have been there. Do they think …?’

Unable to finish forming the words of wretched hope, I turned away, moved across to the Buell and ran a hand over the smooth acrylic tank. Whoever habitually kept the Willner cars gleaming had gone to the trouble of wiping the dust off the bike, I noticed absently.

When he spoke again, Parker’s voice was much closer behind me than I was expecting, and perhaps because I couldn’t see his face, I heard the hesitation in his voice more clearly. ‘Look, Charlie—’

‘Just tell me, Parker.’

He sighed. ‘The consultant ordered him up for another CT scan yesterday,’ he said at last. ‘Apparently his physical therapist has been growing kinda concerned about some of his responses.’

‘Concerned how? About what?’

‘His brain activity,’ Parker said flatly. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, but … they think it may be slowing down.’

Slowing down. You mean he’s dying?

My shoulders went rigid. When I made a conscious effort to relax them, it seemed my self-control went at the same time. I let my chin drop, stifled a kind of half gasp, half sob, and felt Parker’s hands on my arms. He turned me back to face him and ducked to get a good look at the misery I couldn’t hide.

‘Do not give up on him,’ Parker said with quiet ferocity. ‘Whatever happens, Charlie, we’ll get through it. You’re not alone in this.’

I took a steadying breath and stepped out from under his fingers. He made no moves to stop me, letting his hands drop.

‘Yeah,’ I said with a shaky smile. ‘I know. Thanks, Parker.’

‘I’d tell you to be careful on this one, but I know you will be anyhow,’ he said. ‘Apart from that, how’re you finding things here?’

‘OK,’ I said carefully. ‘I thought Dina and I were getting on pretty well – until last night. I’m waiting to see how she behaves when she wakes up. If she’s still not talking to me, you might have to use Gomez for this after all.’

Parker smiled more fully then, as if glad to be back on safer ground. It made him look younger, too, despite the old gaze. ‘According to Dina’s mother, you’re the only one she’d trust to get the job done and not give a damn who you rode over to do it.’

‘Ah.’ I recalled with discomfort the reckless comment I’d thrown at Benedict Benelli the night before, about how if he turned out to be peddling drugs to his friends, I’d take him down regardless of family influence, and the ripples it was likely to cause. ‘I don’t suppose she qualified that at all, did she?’

Parker made an amused sound in the back of his throat, too dignified for it to be a snort. ‘She likes you well enough and thinks you’re doing a fine job, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Someone offers you the moon, don’t ask for the stars as well.’

I would have remarked on the exaggeration of that statement, had it not been for the fact that we both knew he wasn’t talking about Caroline Willner.

Sean was still alive – for the moment. I tried to tell myself that anything else was a bonus.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I sat on the old Quarter Horse, whose name was Geronimo, and watched Dina cantering in decreasing circles on an increasingly het-up Cerdo. We were in the Olympic-size all-weather outdoor arena at the local riding club, where Dina took the white horse every week for private lessons in equestrianism.

The instructor was a tall, well-built Australian called Raleigh, who seemed to take delight in pushing horse and rider to the point of explosion. They’d been trying to perfect a difficult dressage move, canter pirouette, for the best part of an hour, so far without satisfying Raleigh’s exacting standards.

To my mind, Dina hadn’t attained nearly enough willing submission from her horse in order to achieve the lightness and balance required for the movement, so each attempt rapidly degenerated into a hauling match. I reckoned Cerdo was consistently ahead on points.

But I kept such an opinion firmly to myself.

Raleigh turned and caught me watching. ‘Taking a breather already, hey?’ he demanded. ‘Let’s see you try it, then, Pom.’

I gave him a bland smile, ignoring the vague insult, and nudged Geronimo forwards. First into an ambling trot – not his best pace – and then into a collected canter around the outside edge of the arena. Although I hadn’t been on a horse seriously since I’d left home as a teenager, riding out with Dina on the beach every day had rekindled those half-forgotten skills. In that respect, it was very much like riding a bike, as well as giving me aching seat bones for the first few days.

This was our second time under the stern scrutiny of Raleigh. Dina told me that his nickname was the Wizard of Aus because of his ability to turn out first-class competition riders in a very short space of time. It seemed to me that his reputation was rather more important to him than the kind of gradual progress that Dina and Cerdo needed to make together.

I kept that one to myself, also, but I’d made a point of riding just a little more sloppily than I was capable of in front of Raleigh. I’d found out very quickly in this business that nothing gets a bodyguard fired faster than showing up their principal in public, particularly at any kind of sporting activity. Obviously, that did not include anything involving firearms or martial arts. If your principal thought they could outshoot or outfight you, they also tended to think they could do without you. The best plan was not to accept that kind of challenge in the first place.

We were riding with English saddles, which were not as armchair-like as their western counterparts, and it was clear that Geronimo was more at home in less formal attire. Now, I neck-reined the Quarter Horse in a fast tight circle, feeling him squat down on his ageing haunches as he spun round like we were roping a zigzagging steer.

As expected, Raleigh yelled, ‘Jeez, Pom, call that dressage? Useless!’ and turned his attention back to Dina.

I let Geronimo fall back to a walk and patted his sweating neck as I scanned the area near the arena. The riding club consisted of a smart collection of horse barns built around a central courtyard, surrounded by white-railed paddocks and a substantial cross-country course that ran for the best part of a mile.

In the yard, there was even a clock tower with a weathervane on top, tubs of well-tended flowers evenly spaced along the neatly swept concrete, and a café with tables arranged along an open balcony for a view of the arena where we practised. I ran a critical eye over the few spectators, but none of them rang any alarm bells.

Adjacent to the outdoor arena was an indoor one of similar enormous size, for use in bad weather. A far cry from the muddy farmyards and patchwork buildings of my youth.

It had rained lightly during our previous visit, and Dina’s lesson had taken place indoors as a result. From a security point of view, I would have preferred the same again, but Raleigh told us it was already in use. I thought about making an issue of it, then just shrugged. Dina and I had still not regained our earlier easy relationship after the party, and I knew that she would consider any insistence on my part as showing her up in front of her mentor.

Something else to be avoided.

Besides, in light of the previous two ambushes, I was more worried about being tagged while we were en route from the Willners’ house to the riding club in the Navigator, which was considerably slowed down by having a horse trailer on the back. Making aggressive evasive manoeuvres with such an unstable cargo would be impossible.

I didn’t like the arrangement, and said so, at which point Dina dug her heels in, much as she was doing now. Cerdo didn’t appreciate it any more than I had.

It was late morning and the day was nearing its hottest hour, but that alone wasn’t enough to cause the sweat to cream into lather where the reins rubbed against the horse’s arched neck. He gave off waves of agitation in the lash of his tail, the uneven stamp of his gait, the laid-flat ears and white-rimmed eyes.

He couldn’t have given any more warning of impending trouble if he’d hired a giant neon billboard in Times Square.

Eventually, after another barrage of scorn from Raleigh had translated its inherent tension into Dina’s seat and hands, Cerdo threw in the towel.

Or rather, he used a couple of squabbling birds as an excuse to leap sideways towards the middle of the arena and drop his outside shoulder. Dina, unbalanced by his sudden swerve, didn’t stand much of a chance. She went catapulting off into the sand at his feet and the horse shot off loose for a victory lap, tail streaming out behind him like a banner.

Abandoning finesse, I booted a startled Geronimo into action and was by Dina’s side in moments, almost sliding the poor old Quarter Horse onto his rump in his anxiety to obey my instant go-stop commands.

Dina was floundering on the ground. I jumped down alongside her and ran my hands quickly along her limbs, despite her gasping protests. All her bones were the shape they were supposed to be, and she gave no flinches of pain anywhere.

Just winded, I concluded. Wounded only in pride.

I sat back on my heels, saw that Raleigh had managed to recapture Cerdo, who was looking more frightened than triumphant by the success of the ditching operation.

Dina scowled in his general direction, although to be fair she might have been pulling a face at her instructor as much as her horse.

‘What did I tell you?’ she muttered. ‘Lives up to his name, huh?’

I put out my hand to help her to her feet and murmured quickly, ‘He’s confused and frustrated, Dina. You’re pushing him too fast and he doesn’t understand what you want. Have you come off him before?’ She shook her head, watching as Raleigh walked the horse back towards us. ‘Well, he’s just scared himself as much as you – look at him. Take five or ten minutes just to walk him round and reassure him that he can trust you again, otherwise that’s not going to be the first time you bite the dust today.’

She threw me an entirely disbelieving look as she slapped the loose sand off her clothing, but when Raleigh brusquely ordered her to get back up there and do it again, she looked him firmly in the eye and said she wanted to give the horse a breather to resettle him.

Raleigh shrugged as if to say the meter was running and it was up to her how she spent the remaining time, but agreed more readily than I’d been expecting, giving Dina a leg-up into the saddle and watching them walk away on a loose rein. Maybe he, too, had realised they’d been getting nowhere. Somehow I doubted I’d get him to say so out loud.

‘Go easier on her,’ I said to him, keeping my tone light to offset the words. ‘They both need a bit more confidence in each other before they aim for greatness.’

The Australian gave me a calculating glance, then went back to studying Dina, walking large circles at the far end of the arena. She was leaning forward to stroke the white horse’s neck and was talking softly to him. Cerdo had started to relax, his stride smoothing out and one ear flicking back and forth to listen to her.

‘Shame it’s not you on that horse,’ Raleigh said, keeping his own voice low. ‘Got some great potential.’

‘Oh yeah? I thought I was a useless Pommie bastard,’ I said dryly.

‘I was talking about the horse,’ he said, back to arrogance, but there was a smile lurking behind his eyes as he looked down at me. ‘And you are bloody useless – when you’re deliberately not trying.’

I didn’t answer that, just said, ‘I’ll put Geronimo away, if you don’t mind? I think the old boy’s about had enough for today.’

He waved me away, his interest lost. We were only a short distance from the gate out of the arena and I didn’t bother remounting to get there. Raleigh did not offer me a helping hand back into the saddle, in any case.

As I reached the gate, one of the army of teenage girls who seemed to hang around the riding club just to be near the horses appeared and offered to walk Geronimo round for me to cool off. ‘So’s you can watch your friend ride.’

Dina was still slowly circling, watched by Raleigh who seemed content, for the moment, not to interrupt.

I thanked my wannabe groom and climbed the wooden steps to the café balcony, peeling off my gloves and riding helmet as I went. The latter left me with worse hat-hair than any bike lid ever did.

When I reached the small balcony overlooking the arena, there was only one person in occupation. He was sprawled at the end table, with a large coffee, an expensive sleek cellphone and an extreme-sports magazine on the surface in front of him. His style of dress leant very much towards urban, rather than rural – baggy jeans and a huge warm-up jacket and baseball cap, which would have looked great … if he’d happened to be a black teenage rap star.

He looked up with a grin at my obvious consternation. The last person I expected to see here. Or wanted to see anywhere, for that matter.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Hiya, Charlie,’ Torquil said. ‘Surprised, huh?’

His voice was almost a taunt. I made a point of looking round very carefully before I moved in his direction. He took that as the insult it was intended to be and fidgeted with the insulated band round his coffee while I bought a cold drink from the serving window.

‘Yeah, I’m surprised,’ I allowed at last, taking a seat at his table without waiting to be invited and angling my chair so I could keep an eye on Dina at the same time. ‘You alone?’

Now it was his turn to make an exaggerated show of looking around. ‘Looks that way.’ He faced me with a sly grin. ‘Why – you wanna go somewhere?’

I sat back in my chair and took a long swig of cola straight from the can. It was cold enough for condensation to have formed on the outside already.

‘You normally have a two-man detail covering you twenty-four/seven,’ I said, sidestepping the question. ‘One stays with the car, but the other should be all over you like a rash. Where is he, Torquil?’

‘Maybe I sent them home.’ Torquil shrugged. ‘Maybe I just got fed up with having someone looking over my shoulder. All. The. Damn. Time,’ he said, the precision of his words making a lie of the apparently light tone.

I glanced around, keeping it casual, and saw a big short-clipped man in jeans and a casual jacket that he wore unzipped. The man was loitering by the edge of one of the horse barns, alert, balanced, and watching me with slitted eyes.

I put down my drink slowly and gave him a slight nod, letting him get a good look at my empty hands. He tensed, then nodded back, one pro recognising another. I saw him relax, but wasn’t sure if it was because he’d discarded me as a possible threat, or thought I might be prepared to lend a hand if things went bad.

He must have known that the latter was unlikely, though. Bodyguards, by their very nature, had to be utterly single-minded about their field of responsibility, or chaos would ensue.

Torquil, catching my nod, followed its direction and scowled at his bodyguard, shooing him away with an exaggerated flap of his hand. He was not, I surmised, the easiest principal to protect. When they were young and arrogant, they sometimes seemed determined to do half a potential kidnapper’s work for them, defying precautions and creating a perfect window of opportunity.

Out in the arena, Dina had gathered the white horse together again, but this time the pair seemed a little less combative with each other, as if that brief flash of equine temper had cleared the air. They had a long way to go, but I thought I detected the beginnings of trust between them.

I turned my head, realised Torquil was watching her intently with a faint frown, like he was trying to work out how a conjuring trick was done.

‘You ride?’ I asked.

He took a moment to drag his gaze back to me. ‘Horses?’

I suppressed a sigh. ‘Considering our present location, what else?’

Torquil dipped his head to leer over his designer shades at the girl groom who was walking Geronimo round in the yard for me. She was probably fifteen or sixteen, with blond hair in a plait, and she was wearing skin-tight jodhpurs that left remarkably little to the imagination about the nature of her underwear. ‘Well, I guess I could be persuaded to … mount up.’

‘Thoughts in that direction will land you in gaol,’ I said dryly, but the comment provoked a weary laugh.

‘You think?’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t know how things work in this country, do you?’

‘Why don’t you enlighten me?’

Torquil sprawled back in his chair, as if he couldn’t believe I seriously needed to ask such a dumb question.

‘My old man has more money than God. Don’t ask how he made most of it. Hell, even I don’t ask how he made most of it,’ he added, as if he and his father had conversations about high finance all the time. He grinned. ‘But the long and the short of it is, money don’t talk – it sings. And, when it does, everybody dances.’ He leant forwards, elbows on the table, the smile dropping away. ‘And that means I can do, or have, anything I want, and nobody will lift a finger to stop me. Capiche?’

I waited a beat. ‘How very boring for you,’ I said, letting my voice drawl.

Torquil looked momentarily surprised at my lack of proper intimidation, and then he laughed out loud, a proper bark of amusement. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why, ’cause you’re a bitch, but I really do like you.’

‘Thank you … I think.’

He held my gaze for a moment longer, then turned his attention back to Dina. Beyond the waist-high kick boards that edged the arena, she had managed to coax Cerdo into a creditable canter pirouette to applause and cries of ‘Way to go, Dina!’ from Raleigh.

Any moment now, I thought cynically, he’s going to suggest a group hug.

‘I wouldn’t put that untouchable status to the test as far as she’s concerned, if I were you,’ I said quietly. ‘She’s well protected.’

‘I kinda like her, too,’ Torquil said. ‘That was a cool gift.’ And as if to prove it, he reached into a pocket and dragged out the Swiss Army knife Dina had given to him for his birthday. He fingered the engraved casing, looking almost unsure of himself. ‘I thought I might invite her to dinner. As a thank you and an apology. You think she’ll come?’

I thought of Dina’s comment before the party, that Torquil was the price rather than the object of going. It was not part of my job description, I decided, to vet my principal’s choice of date unless they posed an actual threat.

All I said was, ‘A little early in the day for that, isn’t it?’

‘Depends.’ Torquil checked the encrusted Rolex that swamped his wrist. If he ever fell into deep water wearing it, it would pull him to the bottom so fast his eardrums would burst. ‘I know a place does great seafood in Miami,’ he said, almost diffident. ‘And Dad’s just bought a new Lear 85.’

‘Nice choice,’ I said sedately. His expression turned slightly mulish, as if he’d been hoping for more surprised admiration of his father’s executive jet. I put my head on one side, asked in mild tones, ‘How do you live with such certainty? Once you’ve had everything – done everything – how will you even bring yourself to get out of bed in the morning?’

Just for a moment, something flitted across his face. It took me a moment to recognise it as panic and I realised he’d already reached his boredom saturation point. He was a week past his twenty-first birthday.

At that moment, his cellphone began to vibrate and emit the theme from Mission: Impossible. Now why didn’t that surprise me? Torquil snatched it up immediately.

I tuned out his mumbled phone conversation and watched Dina instead. She was walking Cerdo in a cooling-off circle around her instructor at the far end of the arena. Raleigh was talking animatedly, mainly with his hands, and Dina was nodding seriously, a buzz of excitement about her. At least she hadn’t reached the same plane as Torquil. Not yet.

It was a testament to the newly attained state of relaxation between horse and rider that the sudden clatter of hooves on the concrete yard didn’t startle Cerdo beyond a slight quickening of his stride, a twitch of his ears. But at least he didn’t try to dump his rider again.

A girl on a fine-boned bay Arabian horse arrived from the direction of the cross-country course, both looking hard-ridden. The girl swung down in the yard, where another of Raleigh’s girl groom groupies rushed to take her reins. As the rider removed her crash helmet, I recognised Orlando’s delicate features. She handed over care of her horse without eye contact or a backward glance, and climbed the steps to the café balcony.

There were grass stains on her knee, elbow and shoulder, I saw as she approached. Looked like Dina wasn’t the only one who’d hit the dirt today.

When she saw me sitting with Torquil at the end table, her stride faltered momentarily.

‘Hey, Tor,’ she greeted him stiffly as he finished his call, nodding to me in a vague way that suggested she’d completely forgotten my name. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Came to see what all the fuss was about,’ Torquil said airily. ‘After all, Dad has a couple of horse farms out in Kentucky, so maybe I should give this stuff a try.’

Orlando almost smiled. ‘Your father has thoroughbreds, for racing,’ she chided. ‘They’re not the kinda animals you could learn to horseback-ride on.’

‘I’m a quick study. And how hard can it be?’ Torquil grinned, draining the last of his coffee and getting to his feet, leaving the empty cup on the table. For a moment I harboured the vain hope that he might be leaving, but he merely wandered over to the serving window for another coffee. ‘Get you ladies anything?’

‘Coffee,’ we both said together.

That seemed, if not to break the ice, then certainly to start a thaw. Orlando considered me out of the corner of her eye for a moment, then leant in closer, keeping her voice conspiratorially low. ‘He gives me the creeps.’

I glanced over my shoulder to where Torquil was still at the serving window. I didn’t like to tell her he was growing on me. ‘At least you know they’re the best creeps money can buy.’

She giggled suddenly, hiding her mouth behind her hand like a kid. The gesture seemed to emphasise the anxiety in her eyes. They were an incredible shade of emerald green, I noticed, but then I saw the faint outline around her iris and realised she probably wore tinted contact lenses.

‘What is it?’ I asked gently. ‘What’s scaring you?’

She let her hand drop away, the laughter falling with it. ‘He did this before,’ she said, speaking fast. ‘Tor. He’d just turn up, out of the blue, wherever I went. Like he was following me—’

Over her shoulder, Torquil had finished paying for the coffees, amazing me with the fact he bothered to carry loose change, and was carefully working out how to pick up and carry three cups at once. Judging by the hash he was making of such a simple task, it was a new experience for him. I knew I didn’t have much time.

‘Did this before what, Orlando?’

She looked at me, and now I saw a roiling mix of fear and guilt and shame. ‘Before I was kidnapped.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Before I’d time to fully process that information, or even ask Orlando for more, the riding club’s runabout, a GMC pickup, pulled up in the yard and Hunt got out. He appeared up the steps to the balcony, hands casually in the pockets of his chinos. Orlando’s boyfriend was wearing a lightweight tweed jacket over a blue Oxford shirt, and his air of cool polish made Torquil’s pseudo-rapper outfit seem like a child’s fancy dress.

Hunt greeted me with cautious reserve, frowning at Orlando as though he immediately sensed her unease and suspected I might be the cause of it. She gave him a wan smile and he stopped behind her chair to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

‘Charlie,’ he said with a fraction more warmth. ‘How goes it?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are you into horses, Hunt?’

He gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘I dabble. My family kept quite a string before the anti-hunting lobby had their way and riding to hounds was banned. Damn shame.’

I didn’t point out that it wasn’t following the hounds that people objected to, so much as setting the dogs on errant foxes as the object of the exercise. Still, I was in no position to be squeamish.

Hunt and Torquil were eyeing each other with tolerance rather than friendship, until Hunt asked if that was Torquil’s new Bentley Continental Supersports in the parking lot, and then the two of them segued into a conversation about cars from which Orlando and I were pointedly excluded.

I rapidly tuned out Torquil boasting languidly about his latest toy – a birthday gift from his father. He incorrectly described the Continental’s six-litre engine as a V12 when I knew for a fact Bentley used a W12 configuration. I’d always been more of a motorcycle nut than a car nut, but it was hard not to pick up the specs of high-performance luxury cars in this job.

In the arena, Dina and Raleigh were now ambling in our direction, the lesson over. I made my excuses and headed down the wooden steps into the yard, just as Raleigh opened the gate and Cerdo’s hooves rang on the concrete.

Dina flashed me a wide smile as they halted. She patted the horse’s damp neck with gusto, and I guessed that my advice to settle him down before she tried again might just have improved relations between us.

Raleigh took the horse’s bridle as she dismounted, but as soon as Dina’s feet hit the ground, her right knee buckled under her and, if the burly instructor hadn’t been right alongside her with a steadying arm, she might have fallen.

‘Dina! You OK?’ He handed off Cerdo onto the girl groom who had been walking Geronimo round. By the time he turned back, I was already putting my arm around Dina.

‘Lean on me,’ I told her. ‘We’ll find you a chair.’

‘Out of the way, Pom,’ Raleigh said with a wink, brushing me aside. ‘This is man’s work.’ And with that he swung Dina into his arms and carried her lightly up the steps to the café balcony, leaving me biting my tongue as I trailed on his heels. Torquil, Orlando and Hunt immediately crowded round us.

Raleigh deposited his pupil onto the nearest chair and crouched in front of her, noting the smudge of dirt on the knee of her jodhpurs. ‘Must have clobbered it on something when you came off,’ he said. There was a hint of strain to his reassuring smile, as if he were worried about being sued if she was injured on his watch.

I flipped out my cellphone. As a matter of routine, I had already input the numbers for the Willners’ personal doctor and dentist, as well as all the major local hospitals and trauma centres. Dina put up a staying hand before I could hit speed dial for any of them.

‘I’m fine, really,’ she said. ‘Please don’t fuss. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve fallen off of a horse. My knee’s been aching some, but I just wasn’t expecting it to give out on me like that.’

‘You need to rest up,’ Raleigh told her, his hand still on her leg. ‘Why don’t you leave the horses here tonight, see how you go? You can always run over tomorrow and pick them up.’

Dina shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she reiterated doggedly. ‘I’d rather take them home. Charlie and I can manage, if you’ll help us load them into the trailer?’

Raleigh bounded to his feet. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the girls untack them and give you a shout when they’re ready to go.’

‘So, your horse threw you?’ Torquil asked, and I realised that incident must have taken place before his arrival. ‘You gonna get rid of it?’

‘Of course not,’ Dina said, and it was a toss-up which of them looked the more astonished.

‘Orlando took a tumble, too,’ Hunt pointed out. ‘All part of the game, eh?’

‘What did you do every time you fell on your backside when you were out snowboarding, Tor?’ Orlando asked in a wry voice. ‘Sack the mountain?’

‘Only if I’d bought it first.’ He gave a sigh. ‘I guess that dinner in Miami will just have to wait,’ he grumbled, returning to his original seat and slumping into it. Anyone would have thought that Dina had damaged her leg with the sole intention of spoiling his plans. Not that he’d actually asked her out – or that she’d accepted – but he seemed to have taken it as read.

The girl groom who’d been walking Orlando’s little Arabian horse round, meanwhile, called up that she seemed to have gone lame in her off foreleg.

‘Aw, crap,’ Orlando said. She glanced at Hunt. ‘I told you she dropped a leg coming out of the water.’

‘Hmm, I may need to pop over and do some minor repairs to a few of the cross-country fences for you at some point,’ Hunt said, smiling apologetically at Raleigh. ‘For such a little thing, that pony of Orlando’s does tend to go through them as much as she goes over them.’

‘The ground staff will be laying new sod around some of the fences where the ground’s gotten a little churned up, so the course will be out of action for a couple of days next week,’ Raleigh said, frowning. ‘There’s no need for you to get your hands dirty, though. They’ll fix anything that’s busted.’

‘I’d feel better about it,’ Hunt insisted with a disarming smile. ‘Like replacing your divots on a golf course.’

Raleigh made a ‘no sweat’ kind of a gesture and Hunt nodded to him before following Orlando to see to her horse.

Dina put her foot up onto a chair and the café provided a bag of ice wrapped in a cloth to deal with any swelling in her knee. Raleigh hovered, giving her a running list of advice for recovery. There was some horse-related event coming up that he was trying to persuade her to enter with Cerdo, I gathered. ‘You gotta be fighting fit for that,’ he warned. ‘But it’s still a few weeks away. You’ll be OK.’

Dina did not look reassured on any level. ‘Look, Raleigh, I’m still not sure we’re ready for this—’

‘Rubbish, Dina! You could do it in your sleep. Just look at how well he went today. That horse could be a champion.’

‘Yeah,’ she muttered, ‘after he’d thrown me in the dirt.’

A look of frustration crossed Raleigh’s features, but he seemed to realise that arguing further right now would just make her more stubborn. He got easily to his feet. ‘Well, think about it, OK?’ he said, more neutral, and glanced down as one of the girls waved to him from the yard. ‘I think we’re all set.’

I wondered about Raleigh’s attitude, just a tad. What did he hope to gain by forcing Dina to enter a competition she didn’t feel ready for – other than possibly more fees for intensive tuition on the run-up?

And I wondered about the possible connections, too. The kidnap victims might have been taken by someone who knew them. But Manda Dempsey had shown no interest in ponies when I’d been working for the family, and Benedict Benelli seemed more likely to bet on a horse than climb onto its back. I shrugged. Maybe I was just getting paranoid.

Dina refused to be carried back down the steps and insisted that she would lead her horse out to where the trailer was parked. Raleigh walked slowly alongside her, eyes on her face as if ready to sweep her off her feet the moment he saw she was in pain. I followed with Geronimo, who obviously realised we were going home and strode out briskly by my shoulder, barging me when I tried to slow him down.

I spotted Torquil’s huge gold-coloured Bentley sitting in splendid isolation off to one side of the riding club’s parking lot. Through the heavily tinted glass I could just make out the figure of one of his bodyguards in the passenger seat.

Dina’s trailer was parked, still hitched to the tow bar of the Navigator, in the middle of the lot, in a line of similar vehicles. I saw nothing amiss as we approached, stopping about four metres away.

‘You sure you’re OK?’ Raleigh asked Dina. ‘I’ll lower the ramp and walk Cerdo up for you.’

‘Thanks, Raleigh,’ she said with a sideways glance towards me as I brought Geronimo up alongside her. ‘Nice to have two guardian angels today.’

‘I do my best.’ As he reached up to unfasten the top catch on the far side of the ramp, he looked back over his shoulder towards me. ‘You wanna put your horse in first, Pom? Then you can give Dina a hand.’

I didn’t have time to agree, because at that moment a masked figure stepped out from behind the trailer. He had an aluminium baseball bat gripped in both hands and he swung it with all his might at Raleigh’s unprotected head.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Look out!’

Even as I shouted the warning, Raleigh must have seen the shock in both our faces, sensed the rush of movement behind him. He hunched his neck down instinctively, but neglected to snatch his arm down from full stretch. The bat whistled past his head, skimming his hair, and landed across his extended forearm with a solid crunch. Some corner of my mind registered the sound of bones breaking. The shock of the sudden injury put him down, and the pain of it kept him there.

Geronimo had a sudden change of heart about being eager to get home. He spun on his haunches with a grunt of effort, jerking his lead rope through my hands. I’d taken off my riding gloves, so I let go rather than waste time trying to control him. He hightailed it back towards the safety of the horse barns.

At that moment, a second figure emerged from behind another parked trailer, over to our right this time, and closed in on us from the other side.

Like the first man, he was wearing dull nondescript clothing and a ski mask, dark glasses covering his eyes. But this one was unarmed apart from what looked like PlastiCuff restraints.

His focus was completely on Dina, hardly even glancing in my direction until I moved to intercept. Then he tried to shoulder me aside with blatant disregard. To protect my hands, I hit him hard with an upswept elbow under his jaw. He dropped.

Cerdo had started to panic as soon as the attack began, skittering in a circle around Dina. Hampered by her injured leg, she could do little to stop him, although something made her refuse to jettison him as I had with Geronimo. With more courage than sense, she clung to his lead rope with both hands even when he reared up to wave steel-shod front feet in her face.

It was a toss-up, at that moment, whether the greater threat to my principal came from our attackers or from her own horse.

The man who’d clouted Raleigh, meanwhile, was standing over his writhing quarry with the bat still at the ready, as if he’d expected the downed instructor to put up more of a fight. It was only when Cerdo began his antics that he looked across and saw his partner on the ground. He twisted in my direction and stood there a moment, frozen, then hurdled Raleigh’s legs and came for us with the bat upraised.

For a split second, time seemed to slow almost to a standstill, so I had time to analyse our situation with my options spread before me. All I had to do was choose. None of them looked good.

The parking area was out of direct sight of the yard itself. I could only hope that Geronimo’s sudden flight would bring people running, but how much use they’d be when they got here was another matter.

In my peripheral vision, I could see the nose of Torquil’s gold Bentley, one of his bodyguards still in the passenger seat. The man had jacked upright to get a better view – might even have drawn his weapon – but he was too well drilled to get out of the car and come to Dina’s rescue. As far as he was concerned, I was on my own.

I gave momentary thought to reaching for my own SIG, but dismissed the idea before it had formed. If I drew against a charging batsman at such close quarters, I’d have to fire to stop him. And not just shoot, but keep shooting until the threat was neutralised.

Instead, I chose the biggest and best weapon I had to hand.

Cerdo.

The horse’s flailing had spun him so that he was facing away from the trailer. As the man approached, I shoved Dina around onto the opposite side of the horse’s neck, keeping her behind me and the horse between both of us and our attacker. Cerdo reared again, stabbing out furiously with his hooves like a giant boxer. Even armed with a baseball bat, the man faltered in the face of this towering aggression.

As the horse’s front feet touched down again, I made a grab for his headcollar and, ignoring Dina’s protests, yanked his head around towards me, reaching back to prod him sharply in the ribs with the stiffened fingers of an open hand at the same time.

Horses, like people, have a collection of nerve endings in their side which makes them sensitive to signals from the rider’s leg. Cerdo, being a dressage horse, was more sensitive than most. The effect of a strike in that spot was calculated to produce maximum effect. I wasn’t disappointed.

The white horse reacted immediately. I heard the furious clack of his teeth as he leapt away from the blow, ears laid flat, swinging his hindquarters in a rapid arc and cannoning into the man with the baseball bat. Three-quarters of a ton of fast-moving Andalusian, scared and pissed off in equal measure. It was not an even contest.

Cerdo’s primeval fight-or-flight reflexes were well and truly awoken now. They told him to run from the danger. And if he couldn’t run, to lash out at the thing behind him, before it had a chance to jump onto his back and sink teeth and claws into his neck. He humped his back and let rip with both hind legs.

If the man with the bat had been directly behind those flying hooves, he would have been in serious trouble. Fortunately for him, Cerdo’s initial impact had knocked him to the side and he caught a relatively glancing blow to his upper arm. It was enough.

He dropped the bat and scrambled away, obviously terrified of what the animal might do next. People not familiar with horses are often frightened by the sheer size and unpredictability of them close up. Such animals may no longer be asked to go charging towards the enemy on a battlefield, but the basic fear they instil is why police forces around the world still use them for crowd control. A mounted officer is deemed six times more effective than one on the ground.

I reckoned I’d get no arguments from our assailants on that score. The man with the restraints – the one I’d hit – had come round enough to reach his hands and knees, groaning. For a moment I watched his partner debate on leaving him to his fate, then he realised the drawbacks of such a move. He grabbed the fallen man with his uninjured left hand and dragged him to his feet. Together they stumbled through the line of trailers and were lost to view.

I was tempted to give chase, but Cerdo’s nerves were in tatters and Dina was struggling to hold onto him with only one good leg to balance on. With a last regretful glance in the direction of our attackers, I managed to get a hand through the horse’s headcollar and tried to calm him. He took some convincing that it was all over.

Out of sight, an engine cranked and fired. I caught a glimpse of a medium-sized van, possibly a Chevy Astro, go fishtailing over the gravel towards the driveway and freedom. It was moving fast and there was enough dirt liberally spread across the licence plate to make identification impossible.

Dina hobbled over to Raleigh and helped him sit up. He had turned a disconcerting shade of pale green and was clutching his arm. Dina wasn’t looking much better.

‘Be careful he doesn’t throw up on you,’ I told her. She flashed me a look of distaste and said nothing. Cerdo had finally stopped trying to rip himself free of my grasp and was standing with his head low, blowing hard through flared nostrils, his muscles quivering.

Running feet nearly set him off again and I saw Hunt and Orlando hurrying across the gravel. I made a ‘slow down’ gesture with my hand behind me and they finished their approach at a more cautious pace.

‘What happened?’ Orlando demanded, eyes huge as she took in Cerdo’s distress and Raleigh’s obvious signs of injury. ‘Did the horses get into a fight?’

Dina’s face snapped in my direction and I saw the sudden pleading in her expression.

‘Something like that,’ I agreed, rubbing Cerdo’s damp ears. It was true, after all – to a point. I just didn’t say who or what he’d been fighting.

Hunt helped get Raleigh to his feet, swaying. He stared at me through a hazy filter of pain and shock. ‘What the bloody hell—?’

‘Don’t talk,’ I said quickly, a warning wrapped up as solicitude. I glanced at Hunt. ‘Perhaps you could take him back to the yard and get some sugar down him.’

Hunt nodded. Orlando began insisting that Raleigh go to the nearest ER and that distracted him from questions into making half-hearted protests about not leaving the yard unattended.

‘We can stay—’ Dina began, but I silenced her with a cutting stare.

‘We’re leaving,’ I said firmly. ‘Your leg needs ice and elevation, and both horses need a night in their own stable to calm down from all of this.’

And I want you somewhere secure.

Dina might have thought about arguing, but not for long. She nodded meekly and limped back to take the lead rope from me. ‘Where’s Geronimo?’

‘He shot through the yard like his tail was on fire,’ Hunt said. ‘One of the girls caught him, I think. I’ll check.’

I nodded my thanks and he and Orlando walked back towards the horse barns with Raleigh stumbling dazedly between them. I leant down and picked up the baseball bat our attacker had dropped, handling it carefully even though I knew there was little chance of useable prints.

Movement caught my eye and I glanced across towards the yard, only to see two figures standing by the edge of one of the buildings, staring at us. It wasn’t hard, at that distance, to recognise Torquil and his bulky bodyguard, the one he’d dismissed while he watched Dina finish her lesson. Now, the man was glued to his shoulder, tense, head constantly moving to survey the scene with his hand never far from the weapon hidden beneath his open jacket.

But it was Torquil himself who really caught my eye. He stood with both hands clenched at his sides, shoulders hunched and his neck rigid. I had no idea how long he had been there, or how much he’d seen, but where I expected to see shock, or maybe even a tinge of excitement at what he’d just witnessed, instead it looked for all the world like someone had just broken his newest best toy.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘I don’t know who those two were,’ I said, ‘but they were amateurs.’

‘Tell that to poor Raleigh – they bust his arm,’ Dina said tartly. ‘And if they were so amateur, how come you didn’t catch them?’

I heard the slightly shrill note in her voice and resisted the urge to snap at her, taking a quiet inhalation before I spoke. We were back safe in the living area of the Willners’ house. Caroline Willner was in her customary seat with its back to the windows. Opposite was Parker Armstrong, while Dina and I were on another sofa to the side.

Parker had not come alone, arriving with Erik Landers in tow. Landers was a big guy from Colorado, solidly built, ex-US Marine Corps and proud of his service. He still carried himself with that fierce pride, took everything a little too seriously, never let standards slip. He was utterly dependable in a firefight, but was still adjusting to the very different world of executive close protection. Parker had struggled to persuade him to let his hair grow longer than the regulation millimetre of fuzz.

Landers currently stood behind Dina and me like a sentinel. Dina had changed into a pair of denim hot pants – which looked ‘distressed’ via an expensive designer label rather than prolonged wear and tear – and a silk T-shirt. She had her foot up on a stool with an ice pack draped over her knee. I, too, had taken the trouble to change when I’d finished unloading the horses and now presented my client and my boss with as tidy and unruffled a facade as I could conjure.

I’d called Parker from the riding club and he’d surprised me by coming out right away, arriving back at the house before we did. I hoped that the only reason he’d arrived so fast – and brought Landers with him – was in case I needed more permanent backup, rather than to demonstrate a lack of trust in my ability to handle the situation on my own.

‘Why didn’t I catch them?’ I repeated, keeping my tone even and pleasant. ‘Because that’s not my job, Dina. My job is prevention, not cure.’

‘Which you appear to have done quite well,’ Caroline Willner said, her voice dispassionate. ‘Nevertheless, it is … unfortunate that these people escaped when the opportunity might perhaps have presented itself to apprehend them.’

Before I could defend my actions, Parker spoke for me. ‘Charlie couldn’t have gone after them without leaving your daughter unacceptably exposed,’ he pointed out. ‘It has been known for the initial attack to be just a diversionary tactic to try and draw off the close-protection team.’ He met my eyes, just the hint of a smile lurking in his. ‘And while it may be somewhat unorthodox to throw a horse at an inbound threat, there’s no doubt what she did was effective.’

But despite the praise, I heard vague disappointment in his voice.

‘Next time,’ I promised gravely, ‘I’ll throw it harder.’

His cheek twitched in an otherwise stony face. ‘Unfortunately, I think it’s likely that there will be a next time,’ he said. ‘They’ve tried once and been unsuccessful. They may feel they now have your measure and try again – with more … determination next time.’ He pinned me with a gaze that willed me not to make an issue of this. ‘That’s why I’ve brought Erik out to join you, purely as a little extra insurance. So, if they do make another run at Dina, you might just be able to grab one of them without putting her in harm’s way.’

‘No!’ Dina said, more sharp than firm. ‘I don’t want anyone else.’ She twisted to offer the man behind us an appealing smile. ‘No offence to you, Mr Landers, but I want Charlie.’

‘Dina, be reasonable,’ her mother said stiffly. ‘We’re merely trying to keep you safe.’

‘I am safe,’ she said. ‘You asked me to accept a bodyguard, and I’ve done that. Now you want me to have two. Where does it end – with me barricaded into my room, afraid to leave the house?’

Mother and daughter locked gazes, duelling silently. It was Dina who gave way first, but her weary yet dignified tone was more effective than any shouted argument. ‘Leave things as they are, Mother – please. I’ll be fine.’

‘You’re taking risks,’ Caroline Willner said quietly. ‘I … don’t like it.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Dina repeated. Her body was tense. More was at stake here than just the question of an additional bodyguard. I wondered again at the power plays between them, about Dina’s refusal to go to Europe, and who was winning their long-running, tortuous game.

After a moment longer, Caroline Willner sighed. ‘All right, darling,’ she said, glancing down as if distracted by an imaginary speck on her dress. ‘In that case, Mr Armstrong, I’m afraid I must decline your offer of extra protection, and trust to Ms Fox to do her best.’

‘She always does,’ Parker murmured. He rose, inclined his head to them both, his manner almost courtly in his capitulation. ‘Charlie. See me out, would you?’

‘Of course.’

I led both men down to the entrance hall and through the massive front doors into the gentle warmth of the late afternoon. Landers stepped to the edge and stood looking outward, head moving slowly as he checked the perimeter, the neighbouring houses, and the view of the road. The Navigator that had brought Parker and Landers out to Long Island sat off to one side of the driveway under the shade of the trees. It looked small in a space that would have swallowed a dozen limousines.

I could see by the tilt of his head that Landers was waiting for what Parker would say to me with avid concentration, but I suppose I couldn’t really blame him for that.

Parker had leant back against the low wall that bordered the front of the house. ‘You carrying?’

Wordlessly, I reached under my open jacket and slipped the SIG from its holster. I thumbed the release to drop the magazine, worked the action to send the chambered round tumbling out onto the paving at his feet. I showed him the open breech to prove the gun was safe as I dumped it into his hands. Then I stooped to retrieve the fallen round, wiped it with my fingers and thumbed it back into the magazine, handing that over, too.

Parker gave the SIG no more than a cursory inspection, weighed the magazine in his palm to judge the load before slotting it back into the pistol grip without a fumble, even though his eyes never left my face. He could have done it all just the same in the dark.

He returned the weapon without comment. I pinched back the slide to feed in the first round again, the action working with a slick metallic double click, well oiled and well cycled. The SIG had no conventional safety catch, only a slide lock to hold the action back. Carried with the first round already chambered, it was instantly ready for use.

‘So why didn’t you use it?’ Parker asked, as if reading my thoughts.

I tucked the gun away under the hem of my jacket, smoothed the cloth down again over the top. ‘Are you honestly telling me you’d rather be up to your neck in policemen at this very moment?’ I asked. ‘Because if I’d drawn on the guy, the only way I could have stopped him was to shoot him. I wasn’t prepared to use deadly force against a man armed with a piece of sports equipment. I don’t suppose you’re likely to get anything from the bat he left behind, incidentally?’

‘You said they were wearing gloves, so I doubt it, and it’s a cheap make, available from just about any sporting goods outlet,’ Parker said, brushing aside my attempt to divert him. ‘And you didn’t know for sure he wasn’t carrying.’

‘I didn’t know he was, either,’ I countered. ‘And if he was armed, why did he bother clobbering the riding instructor? Why take the risk of losing control of the situation by physically engaging with Raleigh when he could have simply stood back and threatened all of us into submission at the outset?’

Parker’s eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘Did you work all this out at the time, or after?’

I smiled. ‘If the first guy had shot Raleigh instead of smashing his arm, Parker, I would have put two through his mouth in a heartbeat, of that you need have no doubts.’

Parker’s answering smile was rueful. ‘Yeah, I guess you would,’ he said. He leant back against the wall again and folded his arms, reminding me painfully of Sean. ‘I just needed to make sure you didn’t hesitate for the wrong reasons.’

My chin came up. ‘Because of California, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

I’d come under attack while covering a principal out there and had fired on three men I’d been convinced were aiming to kill us. It turned out that I was mistaken – about part of it at least. I had escaped an attempted murder charge by the skin of my teeth, and had no wish for a repeat performance.

‘There was also the additional factor that I seriously doubted Dina’s horse had ever been in close proximity to a discharging handgun before,’ I added. ‘If I’d fired on our attackers and he’d gone crazy, who knows what kind of damage he might have done to the girl.’

Parker’s head tilted slightly, considering. ‘Now that one you definitely came up with after the fact.’

I shrugged. ‘OK,’ I agreed meekly, ‘but the logic still holds. You didn’t see the way Cerdo was acting up, or how determined Dina was not to let go of him. And he was panicking enough as it was – adding gunfire into the equation would have been a recipe for disaster.’

‘So instead you used the horse as an offensive weapon.’

‘It was the only thing I could do that allowed me to keep some kind of control over the situation. Besides, like I said – they were amateurs.’

‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ Landers broke in, his voice almost diffident, ‘but just ’cause they was not carrying sidearms does not make them amateurs – nor does failing to overwhelm a professional close-protection officer, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. You underestimate yourself, ma’am.’

‘Thanks, Erik, but for God’s sake call me Charlie, not ma’am. I was an ordinary grunt, not a Rupert,’ I said, grinning at him. No way had I been considered officer material back in the army. ‘And my assessment has very little to do with how they were armed.’

Parker caught my eye and nodded his agreement. ‘If they’d been pros they would have taken you out as their primary objective, even though you were not the most obvious target,’ he said softly, ‘because they would have gathered enough intel to know exactly who and what you were.’

‘But they didn’t,’ I said. ‘They were sloppy and slow to react and too fixed on Dina to see danger coming from another direction, so either their intel was bad, or they were working without any. Either way, that makes them amateurs.’

Parker frowned. ‘But the other victims described well-planned and well-executed ambushes or snatches.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘So either we have two different groups at work, or the connection between these kidnappings is not the social circle in which the victims move.’

‘Because anyone who was at the party on the yacht would have known you were Dina’s bodyguard,’ Parker finished. He paused. ‘Doesn’t narrow it down much.’

‘Yeah, but it may put Dina’s mind at rest if we’re looking for complete strangers rather than among her friends,’ I said. ‘Although …’

He waited a beat, eyebrow raised. ‘The Eisenberg kid,’ he supplied. ‘Orlando told you he was hanging around her before she was taken, and now he shows up at the riding club out of the blue, on the day an attempt is made on Dina. Coincidence?’

‘I sort of doubt it,’ I said. ‘And you didn’t see him after it was all over, standing there watching. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he looked thoroughly pissed off that the attack failed.’

‘And his close-protection guys didn’t intervene when this thing went down,’ Landers said, a soldier’s disgust tightening his voice.

‘I wouldn’t have expected them to – they had their job to do and I had mine.’ Landers still looked dubious, but didn’t outright contradict me.

‘You tread very carefully around Torquil Eisenberg, Charlie,’ Parker warned. ‘His father has all kinds of influence you do not want to tangle with.’

‘If an opportunity arises to ask him a few questions,’ I said, stubborn, ‘I’ll take it.’

And if it doesn’t, I might just have to make that opportunity happen …

Parker sighed. He moved forwards to rest his hands gently on my upper arms. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Landers catch the gesture and snap his head away so fast he nearly ricked his neck in his efforts to see nothing untoward going on between us.

‘I trust your judgement, Charlie,’ Parker said at last. ‘Whatever decisions you make in the field, I’ll back them if I have to – you know that, don’t you?’

I was reminded sharply of another time, when Parker’s confidence in my judgement had been sadly lacking, to the point where he’d allowed me to undergo hostile interrogation at the hands of the security services. What had changed? And why?

Horribly aware of Landers’ presence, I forced myself to step back, forced a cool note of distance into my voice. ‘What a shame you didn’t always have such faith, Parker.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dina didn’t want to talk about what happened at the riding club in the period that followed. Instead, she wanted to talk about me.

Or rather, my relationship with my boss. Not an easy topic, because I had no idea about my feelings for Parker at that point.

It was two days since the ambush. Dina’s knee had recovered, thanks to three sessions with a remedial masseur who’d come out to the house and applied ultrasound and various other treatments at some ridiculous cost. All this for a minor injury that probably would have sorted itself, given rest and ice, within a couple of days anyway. What it was to be so pampered.

Dina had an ulterior motive for wanting to be fit, however, which was an upcoming charity auction and gala dinner. It seemed to be the focus of just about anybody who was anybody on Long Island.

The biggest surprise, as far as Dina was concerned, was the fact that Torquil Eisenberg had texted to see if she wanted to accompany him. After agonising over the brief wording, she sent a message of assent by the same means, and all the logistics of the exercise were sorted without the pair exchanging a spoken word. Dina seemed to think this was entirely normal. I felt very old.

So, this morning she decided she was feeling sufficiently recovered to hit the boutiques of Fifth Avenue. Caroline Willner graciously lent her personal driver to save the hassle of parking garages, but I relegated him to the passenger seat for the drive into Manhattan – a considerable blow to his ego, if his sniffy silence for the entire journey was anything to go by.

We crossed onto Manhattan Island via the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and I surrendered car keys to our mute chauffeur. After that, Dina and I trailed round countless stores while she added to her already bulging wardrobe.

When it came to clothing, she had variable taste, ranging from some items I thought looked great on her, to others that just didn’t work at all. I baulked at the point she started suggesting outfits for me, especially when I took a sneaky look at the price tags. You could have shifted the decimal points a place to the left and most of them would still have been too rich for my blood.

Eventually, we stopped for a late lunch at Brasserie Les Halles on Park Avenue South, and there she began her interrogation over casual Parisian food.

‘So, what is it with you and Parker Armstrong, huh?’

I put down my glass of sparkling water very precisely. ‘There’s nothing going on between us, Dina. Parker is strictly my boss.’

‘Oh, come on,’ she said, eyes dancing. ‘There’s got to be more to it than that. I saw the way he watches you when you’re not looking.’

How did I tell her that Parker was probably checking for signs I was cracking up? That he knew, better than anyone, what I’d been through – was still going through, every day – with Sean.

‘We’re friends. Good friends. No more than that.’

She was still smiling in a way that was a sudden irritation, but I knew if I let that show she’d assume she was right. I kept my expression neutral as the waiter deposited my French onion soup and Dina’s green salad in front of us. I’d chosen a table inside rather than on the street, quietly insisting on a corner where I could watch the exits. I’d already recced our escape route, should we need one.

‘Is he married? Is that it?’

Give it a rest!

I suppressed a sigh. ‘He was. He’s a widower.’

‘Oh.’ She digested that for a moment. ‘What was she like, his wife? I mean … what happened to her?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, not wanting to admit that until a few months ago I hadn’t known that Parker had ever been married in the first place. A very private man, self-contained. ‘It was before my time.’

‘So, what’s stopping you?’ she pressed, not taking the hint. Her tone turned teasing. ‘I mean, he’s kinda good-looking – for an old guy.’

‘He’s only just turned forty,’ I said. ‘That hardly puts him in his dotage.’

‘And that makes him how much older than you?’

‘Twelve years,’ I said. Not much in the great scheme of things. Sean was thirty-four, sitting halfway between us – and not just in age. I picked up my knife and fork. ‘Maybe Parker’s not my type. Or maybe I’m not his.’

‘Hey, you’re lovely. And if you’d let me take you in hand for a day, you could be stunning,’ Dina countered with a smile. ‘Don’t sell yourself short!’

I remembered Landers telling me not to underestimate myself, too, but his assessment was all to do with how much I might scare a potential opponent, rather than lure them. Was it normal, I wondered, to value his opinion more highly?

‘I’m not a doll you can dress up, Dina,’ I warned.

‘I wouldn’t dare – I have a feeling I’d lose my fingers,’ she said, laughing out loud now, but after a moment she sobered. ‘He’s interested, though, I can tell.’

I applied myself to my soup bowl, cutting through the cheese crust to the rich liquid and onion beneath, chewing, swallowing. When I glanced up, though, Dina was still watching me, her own cutlery poised. ‘Maybe I’m spoken for.’

‘Really?’ she said, letting her hands drop. ‘You have a boyfriend? No way.’

‘And there you were only a few moments ago, telling me how pretty I was,’ I said, lightly mocking. ‘I’m wounded.’

She had the grace to flush. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ She took a breath. ‘What I meant was, it must be some special guy who understands what it is you do, and … lets you do it.’

I debated briefly on telling Dina that it was Sean who’d recruited me into the business in the first place. That he’d recognised both a need within me and the means to fulfil it. It was only when I put down my soup spoon, very neatly in the centre of my empty bowl, that I answered.

‘He understands.’

She tipped her head on one side, considering. ‘Is he a bodyguard too?’ she asked then, saw from my face the accuracy of that sudden flash of intuition. ‘He is! Oh, how romantic! Travelling all over the world to dangerous and exotic locations together. It’s like something out of a movie.’ Her voice was positively wistful. ‘Tell me, have the two of you ever been in one of those life-or-death situations?’

I closed my eyes briefly, saw again the snap of Sean’s head, back and right, as the fateful round hit, and felt my throat threaten to close up entirely. ‘Yes.’

‘So, spill – what’s he like?’ She was leaning forwards in her chair and her sparkling gaze had turned voracious.

Now there’s a question. Saying nothing would only make her dig harder. Saying anything light-hearted would half kill me. I spread my hands in a helpless shrug and hoped the truth would shock her into silence.

‘Sean is … the other half of me.’