Lethal Intent

Eighty-six

She was awake when he returned home just before eight, in the kitchen making breakfast for herself and the children, while Trish readied them for school. As he came through the door, she thought he looked more tired and dishevelled than she had ever seen him and her heart went out to him. 'Was it bad?' she asked him.

He nodded. 'It was worse than bad, worse than terrible. I'm sorry to be coming in like the cat, but I've been up all night being debriefed.'

'In the circumstances, I won't make the obvious wisecrack. But don't let the kids see you looking like that. Go shave and shower; sleep if you have to.'

'That's a luxury I can't afford today. I don't look that bad, do I?'

'Yes, but that's not what I'm protecting them from. That looks to me like blood on your pants.'

He looked down and saw that she was right. There were dark stains on each of his knees: the blood of Adam Arrow, his dead, anonymous friend, unmourned except by him, and he hoped by a family somewhere, who would be told a discreet lie. He rushed out of the kitchen and upstairs, into his bedroom, where he stripped naked, tearing his clothes off and shoving them into a bag, to be burned in the garden incinerator at the first opportunity.

It was only when he came out of the bathroom in his robe, still towelling his hair dry, that he realised that all of Sarah's familiar things had gone from the dressing-table: her perfumes, her lotions, her potions, and her most personal family photographs, which she had kept there. The bed had not been slept in either: the book that he had tossed on to the duvet after spreading it the morning before was still there, undisturbed. The scene began to answer the questions that had dogged his journey home.

He dressed, casually, and went downstairs: the house was its usual blaze of pre-school activity, with a special excitement because, finally, Mum was home. Yet as soon as he stepped back into the kitchen he realised that there was an edge to it. At the sight of him, Seonaid's eyes lit up, she screamed, 'Daddy!' and rushed over to him as fast as her toddler's legs would carry her.

If Sarah saw the slight, she gave no sign of it, but Bob knew her well enough to realise that the hurt would be there. He snatched up his daughter, and asked her, teasing, 'Have you hugged your mother this morning?' She giggled and tried to bury her face in his shoulder, but he turned her chin gently upwards. 'It's time you did, then. Let's both do it.'

He drew Sarah to him in a clumsy, three-sided embrace, from which he quietly withdrew, leaving her holding her daughter, who threw her arms round her neck and squeezed as hard as she could.

'Have you been teaching her a choke hold?' she asked, but her eyes were grateful nonetheless.

As the boys ate breakfast and Sarah fed Seonaid, Bob made his own, an unhealthy and untypical sausage, black pudding, bacon and eggs. James Andrew watched him jealously: his personal larder was being raided.

Sarah drove them to school. There was still snow on the ground, but it had started to melt, and she was all too aware of the slush-ball havoc that her younger son could cause had the boys been allowed to walk. When she returned, Bob was watching the BBC all-day news channel, seeing, for the first time, how the attack was being reported.

He saw the shots from the night before, and more live from the scene, as the reporter delivered a monologue to camera. He saw Clarence Tallent in the harsh media spotlights, and then Aileen, her name misspelled by the caption writer. He saw the prince, library footage of him in his red student robes. And then he saw himself, the smiling official photograph from the force's annual report, and heard himself described as the hero of the hour.

'Thirty seconds later and it would have been zero, not hero, pal.'

'But it wasn't,' said Sarah, from behind him. 'You came through for him.'

'Took a hell of a risk with his life,' he told her. 'I took a shot in the dark, literally, at one of the guys who was holding him. I got him, but I could just as easily have hit the prince.'

'And if you hadn't taken the risk?'

'They'd have got away, but I suppose the boat might have been intercepted.'

'The boat was destroyed.'

'Was it?' This was news to him, although no surprise.

'They said so earlier; it and the bigger boat that it was meeting. The RAF blew them up; no survivors.'

'Of course not,' he whispered.

'You were well known before,' she said, 'but now you're famous, nationally, internationally.'

'Will it make it more difficult to leave me?' he asked.

'Who said it was ever going to be easy?'

'You will, though; that's what you came back to tell me.'

'Yes, Bob.' She smiled at him, gently. 'Let me guess, you had a hunch?'

'Something like that.'

'I admire you,' she said, 'more than anyone I've ever known, and it would be great to go on being your wife and bask in whatever glory is coming your way. But I can't: because I don't love you, and I don't belong with you. That's the bottom line… and it's mutual, isn't it? Go on, admit it. I'm offering you the easy way out; all you have to do is sit there, silent, and let me be seen as deserting you. But don't, please. Tell me what you feel.'

'Don't worry: I won't let it be that way. I don't love you either, Sarah, not any more.'

'Don't cop out now,' she exclaimed, still smiling. 'You never did. Admit it, officer.'

'Not the way I should have, no. When I met you, I was a flawed, lonely guy.'

She looked at him, sadly. 'Bob, you still are.'

'Maybe, but you took it away for a while.'

'And, in the process, became flawed and lonely myself.'

'How's leaving me going to help that?'

'It'll give me a chance to find someone who does love me, the way it's supposed to be.'

'Mr Right, you mean? Watch out for that bastard: usually Mrs Right's expecting him home by midnight.'

She laughed and sat on the sofa beside him. He switched off the television and turned to look at her. 'What happened last night?' she asked him, quietly.

'You saw on the news. Some Albanians tried to hijack the prince and hold him for ransom; Neil, Mackenzie and I, and four soldiers, stopped them.'

'Yes,' she whispered, 'but what else happened?'

'Isn't that enough?'

'There's more. You're wearing it like a cloak.'

'Two of my soldiers were killed. I sent them to a place where someone was waiting.'

'But you didn't know that.'

'I should have guessed, though. I'll never make a general.'

'You are a general,' Sarah retorted. 'But there's still something you're not telling me.'

'Maybe I don't want to; maybe I can't, for your sake.'

'You've told me things in the past. I'm your doctor as well as your wife, remember: you're suffering from post-traumatic shock, I want to know the cause, and I'm bound to keep it confidential.'

'Okay,' he said abruptly. 'I'll tell you one more dark secret, never to be repeated. That attempted kidnapping last night was actually a plot by some right-wing intelligence officers who shared a paranoid fear of what might happen to this country if that boy becomes king. So they used an MI6 asset called Peter Bassam, who'd worked for them in the Balkans till they had to pull him out. He recruited the Albanians, sheltered them in Edinburgh, and kept them fed and quiet until the time was right to attack. We got on their track and put a man in under cover to find them. He was betrayed, and on Saturday night he was murdered. My two soldiers weren't ambushed by the Albanians, but by one of the plotters, who was in St Andrews to make sure that everything went according to plan. When it didn't, he tried to kill the prince, but I spotted him and I dropped him first. Before he died, he told me most of it. The rest of it we got out of an MI6 operative called Miles Hassett, one of the plotters, who was sent up, right into my very office, to find out how much I knew.' He stopped. 'How's that, Doctor?'

'It sounds like the thriller of the year; come on, you made all that up.'

He looked at her and saw that she was frightened. 'No, I didn't; my imagination isn't that good. Oh, yes, the man I killed? It was Adam.'

The colour fled from her face; she had known Arrow. 'It's not true,' she murmured. 'Tell me it's not.'

'I'd love to. I'd love to wake up and find that it never happened. But it did.'

She sank back into the couch, her hands pressed to her cheeks. 'And the morning after I come home to tell you that I'm leaving you. God, Bob, what lousy timing. I'm so sorry. I can't go now, not when you're trying to deal with this.'

He gave a huge weary sigh. 'Who would your staying help, Sarah? Not me. What are you going to do? Take me to bed and hug me till all the monsters go away? You can try, but they won't. I've been dodging the truth about you and me for long enough. I've been hiding behind you for years, tying you to me, watching you become sadder and less of a person as you took second, probably even third place in my life. If you'd come back and said, "Let's try to make it work," I'd have said, "No." So let's do what we know to be right, and let's do it now. I'll move out. I'll find somewhere in Edinburgh.'

'With your politician friend?'

'Maybe, but not straight away, and maybe never. I'm going to need a lot of breathing space for a while. Besides, Aileen's just like me: she's married to her job as well.'

'You sound just right for each other; I hope it works.' She pursed her lips. 'But listen, I don't want you to move out. I've been doing a lot of thinking of my own, and I've found my truths as well. Somewhere along the line, Bob… I don't know when exactly; maybe it was when my parents died, but maybe even before then… I handed control of my life to you.'

'I've never tried to control you,' he protested.

'I'm not saying you did, honey, but I let you nonetheless. Well, that's over: as of now I'm in charge of my own destiny again. Sarah Grace is coming out of hiding and back into the world, but with a whole new agenda, not like she was before.'

She looked at him, and he could see in her eyes a determination which, he admitted to himself, had been absent for a while. 'For a start, I've had enough of pathology,' she declared. 'Actually, I decided that a while back. Any people I cut up in future will be alive at the time, and hopefully afterwards. Where will that be? Bob, I'm an American, and I'm a doctor, so I'm going home, and back to work. All my property in Buffalo, and the up-state cabin, is on the market and it'll all sell fast. I've spent a lot of time in New York City and I still have friends there. So I'm going to buy an apartment in Manhattan, and I'm going to practise real medicine again. But I won't look after people who can afford me: I'll be a doctor for those who can't.'

He reached out and touched her cheek. 'Well, good for you, Doc'

'You don't think I'm just being idealistic?'

'The world could use a few more of us idealists. Your parents have left you wealthy. What you're proposing will let a lot of people benefit from it. I only have one problem with your plan. I don't think I want my children brought up in Manhattan.'

She paused, unsmiling, letting his final sentence hang in the air, gathering its own tension around it.

And then she grinned, dispelling it in an instant. 'I knew you'd say that,' she told him, 'and I admit that, for a while, it was a hurdle I couldn't clear. I love my kids, Bob, just as much as you do, and I don't want to be parted from them. But neither do I want them to be caught in the middle of a great adversarial battle between you and me… one which I might not win… so I'm prepared to negotiate. I recognise that fathers have rights too and, damn it, obligations as well. I made you a promise in Florida: I said that, whatever happened between us, the children would be educated as we've planned. Sure, that was before I'd had a chance to think things through, but now that I have, I'm prepared to stick to it. You did a pretty good job with Alex; I reckon you can handle this lot too, for half the year at least.

'That doesn't mean I'll give up all legal rights,' she said quickly, 'but I could live with joint custody, on the basis that they stay with you during the school term, and that they spend the bulk of their holidays with me. I'll fly them and the nanny over to New York, or to whatever resort we go to. Plus, I'll pay Trish's salary all year round, because I've got a lot more money than you, and I'll contribute half of their school fees. Agreed?'

He closed his eyes; it felt like closing a book. 'Agreed.'

'Good, but there are a raft of conditions.'

'Okay.'

'One, I have visiting rights here, whenever I choose.'

'Okay.'

'Two, until we're divorced, you don't move anyone else in here, at least not while the kids are around.'

'Agreed.'

'Three, when they finish school, they get to decide where they want to go to college, the US or Britain, without pressure from either of us.'

'Agreed.'

'Four, if we did a conventional property split, it would be a hell of a lot better for you than for me, so I propose that we each take away what we brought in: you keep this place and its mortgage, plus your Spanish property, and I keep my parents' entire estate, from which ultimately the kids will benefit.'

'Agreed.'

'Five, we'll always be friends.'

Bob opened his eyes again, and grinned. 'Yes, that too.'

'And six, that you will never ever put your job above the interests of our children.'

'That's a solemn promise.'

She touched his arm. 'I could argue that you broke it last night. Did you have to risk your life?'

'You mean that I should have risked someone else's instead? Do you want me to raise the boys to think like that? Of course you don't. Anyway, I could argue that the maintenance of national security is in their interests.'

'I suppose you're right. What I'm really saying, Bob, is that you're at an age and stage when you don't have to lead every charge.'

'Hopefully, there won't be any more.'

She laughed. 'Are you kidding?'

'Probably, but let me tell you this. I will do everything in my power to discourage our three from following in my footsteps. I want Mark to be an actuary or a maths professor, I want the Jazzer to be a professional golfer, and I want Seonaid to be a doctor like her mum. I will never countersign an application by any one of them to become a police officer.'

'Thanks for that,' said Sarah. 'The trouble is that I've always encouraged them to try to grow up just like their dad, and I don't plan ever to change that.'

'Poor confused wee sods!'

'Maybe.' She dug him in the ribs. 'Hey, pal, know what?'

'Tell me, why don't you?'

'All of a sudden I feel less lonely than I have in years.'