For The Death Of Me

45

The waiting, again. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were singing in my brain all that night and all through Sunday. Maddy never left her room, and she was never left alone either. The security bolt was on all night and during the day either Mike or I was always with her.

I left all the arrangements until the Monday morning as a tiny piece of extra security. They didn’t take long to make. I booked a twelve-seater Gulfstream jet, to be on the ground and fuelled up by five thirty, ready to take off on command, destination Newark, ready to connect with a British Airways flight to Heathrow for Mrs Primavera Blackstone, Ms Madeleine January and me, and with the train to Penn Station for Mr Benedict Luker.

The terminal building at Trenton Mercer Airport is very small, they told me, but they did have a VIP room which they’d be happy to prepare for the private use of my party and me prior to our flight.

The charter company wanted passenger names in advance: a TSA requirement, they said. I gave them mine, Prim’s and Benny’s, and they didn’t quibble over the fourth member of the group, Doe, Jane, Ms.

When all that was done, I left Mike guarding our charge and took my ex-wife for a walk, a tour of the State Capitol building, an impressive pile, which is, they say, the second oldest in the US. Neither of us was really interested, though: there were things, I sensed, that we wanted, no, needed, to say to each other, but they’d take more time than we had available.

That’s the trouble with the really important things, and time. Too often, there isn’t enough of it; too often, it’s the wrong moment. That, of course, just ain’t true. For matters important enough, there’s always enough time; there’s never a wrong moment.

But, as it was, we whiled away a couple of hours, looking at old stones in silence, until it was time to gather the team and get the show on the road.

I drove us the short distance to the airport in the rental car. I’d arranged for Hertz to collect it. It was five forty when we arrived, were greeted by the airport manager and shown into our private room. As he left us, Madeleine stepped up to me. She kissed my cheek, and slipped a small square envelope into the breast pocket of my shirt. ‘Just a little card,’ she whispered, ‘to say sorry and thanks for everything.’

We sat on our hands for the next twenty minutes. I’d set the alarm on my watch for six exactly. Everybody jumped when it went off.

Two more minutes went by, before we heard a soft knock on the door. I went across, opened it, and almost cried out in my surprise. Standing there in a silk dress with a slit up the side, a bag over her shoulder and her letter of introduction clutched in her hand was Marie Lin. ‘What the hell?’ I gasped.

‘My father sent me,’ she said. ‘He trusts nobody in the world more than me.’