Riot Act

Sixteen

Despite his promise, Sean didn’t call me on Monday. I’m ashamed to admit that I stayed up late, pretending to watch a mind-bendingly tedious film, just in case. Still, the delay gave me some time to work out what I was going to do about his invitation, when it came.

The strategy I’d worked out was going to take some nerve, but I’d been running scared from the spectre of the man for over four years. It was time to confront my demons.

It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon, just after five, that the phone at the gym rang. By chance, I was standing nearer to the counter than Attila, so I was the one who picked it up, without the faintest stirring of alarm to warn me.

“Hi, it’s me,” Sean’s voice said, assuming that I’d automatically know who. It nettled me that he was right. “Sorry, I know I said I’d ring yesterday, but we’ve had another panic on.”

I put my irritation on hold. “What’s happened?”

“First my brother does a runner, now my sister Ursula’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” I repeated. Where did that fit in?

“Yeah, she was staying at a friend’s flat, but she hasn’t been there since late last week. Nobody’s seen her. I suppose Mum told you she’s pregnant? That doesn’t help.”

He sighed, sounding tired even at the other end of a phone line. For a moment I thought he was going to postpone our date indefinitely. After I’d spent all day Monday screwing up my courage to face him, I felt oddly let down.

“Look,” he said, “I know it’s short notice, but are you free later tonight? Can we meet?”

My mouth opened, but no words came out straight away. I had to shut it and start again. “Erm, yes OK,” I said, and suggested that he pick me up from the gym when I clocked off at eight. “I’ll need to change, but we could stop in at the flat.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll see you at eight.”

I put the phone down with my heart suddenly clonking against my ribs. Of all the bad ideas I’d ever had, why did I get the feeling that trying to play Sean Meyer on a line like a marlin could well turn out to be the worst of them?

***

He strolled into the gym only a few minutes after eight o’clock, wearing a gorgeous long black leather coat. Some of the lads were in catching a late workout, including Wayne, who favoured Sean with a slight nod. That kind of quiet acknowledgement of old ties. It had never occurred to me that the two might know each other.

The others gave the new arrival a wary appraisal, but there was an air of calculated violence about Sean that held their tongues. They took in the width of his shoulders, and the cool, flat gaze, and showed more restraint than I would have given them credit for.

Attila greeted him with a big grin, and a friendly slap on the back that would have had most other men reeling. Sean rode the abuse easily enough, then turned to me. “Hello Charlie, you all set?”

I nodded. “I’ll pick the bike up later,” I said to Attila as I shrugged my way into my own somewhat more battered leather jacket, and followed Sean to the door.

The Grand Cherokee was parked outside. It felt weird to climb into it without having been beaten up or shot at first.

“Do you mind if we stop for a moment on the way?” he said as we set off round the one-way system. “I need a cashpoint machine.”

“No problem.”

He pulled over on one of the quiet city centre streets without having to ask where the nearest branch of his bank could be found. For someone who’d been away from Lancaster for so long, he still seemed to know his way around.

“I won’t be long,” he said as he slid down onto the pavement. “Feel free to fly the radio.”

I watched him disappear across the road and past a row of shops, the coat flapping round his legs as he walked with that long easy stride. I gritted my teeth and reminded myself to focus on the facts. It had been easier to hate Sean without having him in front of me.

I reached for the stereo in the centre of the dashboard, but as I pulled my hands out of my jacket pockets, my sleeve caught on something and I heard the dull metallic thunk of my keys dropping down the side of my seat.

I muttered under my breath as I stuffed my hand into the narrow gap between the seat bolster and the central transmission tunnel. The keys dropped away out of sight under the seat itself.

“Damn it.” I undid my seatbelt, leaning forwards until the dashboard made my neck crick, reaching blindly underneath me. All I could feel was carpet.

I shifted off the seat until I was almost crouching in the footwell. I glanced up, hoping that Sean wouldn’t return and catch me making a contortionist fool of myself, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The move gave me another couple of inches and this time my groping fingers touched something cold and hard. Metal. I tried to push it aside, heard the clink of it brushing against my keys, then my hand suddenly stilled.

Very slowly, carefully, I managed to work my forefinger and thumb onto the object, gripped it, and pulled it out onto the rubber floor mat. The hooked-up keys came with it, but they were suddenly of minor interest.

I whispered, “Oh shit.”

It was a gun.

In the gloom of the footwell, it gleamed dully, a blue-black semiautomatic. Hesitantly, I picked it up, weighing the cold heaviness of it in my hand, smelling the sheen of gun-oil like some half-remembered brand of scent.

Just for a moment my imagination moulded it into the FN that Nasir had used that night at the gym, but then sense kicked in, and I realised this was different. There was no hammer at the back of the slide and that jogged distant memory banks. A Glock, Austrian made.

What the hell was Sean doing with a handgun under the front seat of his car?

Numbly, I operated the release for the magazine. It dropped smoothly into my hand. The first snub-nosed round was clearly visible wedged up against the top lip of the mag. When I thumbed it out into my palm, the next one sprang up to take its place. Standard full-metal-jacket ammunition, definitely not a blank.

Suddenly, my carefully worked-out plan of pumping Sean gently for information over the course of the evening shattered around me. I’d been trying not to acknowledge the possibility that he could be in this much deeper than he seemed. Now it was drowning me.

“Oh Jesus, Sean,” I muttered. “What the hell are you up to?”

Sean! I flicked my gaze up again, but still he was out of sight. Quickly, I rammed the round back into place, feeling the resistance. The spring at the base of the magazine must have been wholly compressed. A full load.

I slotted the magazine back into the pistol grip and pushed it home firmly with the flat of my hand. It seemed like a hell of a long time since I’d handled firearms, but the drills drummed into us on the ranges meant it was done on a reflex, even under the shadowed streetlight. I actually had to stop myself snicking back the slide to chamber the first round.

I looked up again and this time a dark figure rounded the corner by the row of shops. I grabbed my keys and slid back up into my seat. Instinct made me shove the Glock into my inside pocket, hoping the bulk of it wouldn’t pull the jacket noticeably out of line.

Sean opened the jeep door and climbed into the driver’s seat. I blinked as the interior light came on, tried to act calm and casual.

He reached for the ignition key, then paused. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling, lying through my teeth. “I’m fine.”

***

Sean drove down onto St George’s Quay as though he knew the way. I waited for him to ask for precise directions, because my place is above a cheap carpet wholesalers, and doesn’t follow any numbering pattern recognisable in the modern world, but he pulled up right outside. I felt a cold finger of suspicion trip down my spine.

How did he know where I lived? He couldn’t have been following me, because I’d hardly been back to the flat since Pauline had gone away, and that was before Sean turned up on the estate. Or was it?

When he switched off the engine I opened my door and forced another smile. “Come on up, if you like,” I said. “This won’t take long.” I hope . . .

He followed me up the wooden staircase to the first landing, and waited for me to unlock my front door. I flicked on the lights as we moved inside.

“This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Sean said, looking round as he moved further into the living room.

While his back was towards me, I pulled the Glock quietly out of my jacket pocket, bringing it up level with my right hand even as I worked the slide with my left. My movements were a little jerkier than I would have liked, but it was an old rhythm. One I hadn’t danced to for years.

As Sean caught what must have been to him the familiar sound of the mech working, he stiffened, then started to turn round very, very slowly. All the while he sensibly kept his hands where I could see them, fingers outspread.

Finally, when he was staring narrow-eyed into the muzzle of his own gun, he said calmly, “Well, Charlie, I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what this is all about?”

I ignored him, concentrating on keeping the sights of the Glock steady and lined up on a point about two inches down from his Adam’s apple. “On your knees first, Sean,” I said, and my voice was cold. “You know the drill. Hands linked behind your head, feet crossed at the ankles.”

I almost missed the look of surprise that passed over his features. It was chased on by anger that left just a trace of bitterness behind. “You really don’t trust me at all, do you?” he murmured, not moving.

“Come on, Sean,” I said, shifting to a standard double-handed grip. “You always got the better of me when we went hand-to-hand. I’d like you on your knees if we’re going to talk.” When still he hesitated, I added dryly, “Even this far out of practise I can slot you from here without thinking about it, and I don’t have any curious neighbours, so make your mind up.”

I don’t suppose either of us believed for a moment that I was actually going to shoot him dead in my own living room, but I kept my face just neutral enough for there to be a sliver of doubt.

He allowed himself a half-smile that lapsed into a grimace, then he finally complied, playing the game. He laced his fingers together behind his neck once he was down. “I take it that is my Glock, by the way?”

I nodded. “Under a car seat is really not the best place to keep a loaded handgun, you know. Anyone could come across it, and then where would you be?”

He smiled again, rueful this time. “Ah, well, I only put it there when I picked you up this evening,” he admitted. He had the grace to look a touch sheepish. “Since that trouble at Attila’s I’ve been carrying it tucked into the back of my belt, but I didn’t want to risk you finding it there.”

I raised an eyebrow at that, battled with a smile and only just beat it. “And just what would I be doing investigating any part of your trousers on a first date?” I demanded. “Taking a little for granted there, aren’t you, Sean? Have you forgotten the lovely Madeleine so quickly?”

“Hardly our first date, now is it, Charlie?” he said softly. “We go back a long way.”

I didn’t want to think about that one. It brought back too many old memories. Some of them I was so very tempted to refresh. “And Madeleine?” I prompted.

“Ah yes, the lovely Madeleine,” he said with a certain amount of dark relish, then grinned suddenly. “Not jealous, are you, by any chance?”

“I don’t have the right to be jealous,” I pointed out levelly, “But by the looks of it she does. If that’s how you treat your women these days, I don’t want to get involved.”

He nearly flinched. The smile blinked out like an extinguished light. “Madeleine is camouflage,” he said bluntly. “On the rare occasions I come home my mother loves to matchmake. Madeleine works for me, and when I need her she’s happy to keep the heat off my back. She’s living with a West Indian chef who’s six-foot five and would gut me like a trout if I laid a finger on her. There’s nothing sexual going on between us, and there never has been. OK?”

I thought for a moment he was going to declare that he never mixed business with pleasure. If so, I could have called him an outright liar without fear of contradiction. Perhaps that was why he didn’t bother.

I swallowed. “You wanted to talk, Sean, so let’s talk,” I tried instead. “Nasir Gadatra. Remember him at the gym with your baby brother? You go after him across that waste ground and next thing I know his body’s turned up dumped in a skip in Heysham, shot dead with a nine millimetre semiautomatic. Like this one.”

Sean nearly laughed out loud. “You don’t seriously think I killed him, do you?” He sobered fast when he saw my face. “My God, you do,” he added. “So that’s what this is all about.”

“Not entirely,” I said coolly, “but I’d be happy to hear your side of the story.”

“I told you,” he said, speaking clearly and slowly, as though repeating something for the tenth time, “he cleared the blockage and took a shot at me, so I let him go. Why would I want him dead?”

“You tell me.”

He shrugged, not an easy motion when your elbows are bent up level with your ears. “Look, you don’t really need to keep me on my knees like this do you, Charlie?” he pleaded, giving me a disarmingly boyish grin. “I’m hardly likely to try anything sitting quietly on your sofa, am I? Not if you’re still half as good with one of those things as I remember.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I nodded warily to his request, tensing as he came to his feet with a lithe ease that belied the awkwardness of the position I’d put him into.

I had a nasty feeling that I’d just somehow tipped the balance into Sean’s favour, played into his hands, but he merely strolled over to my sofa and sat down, keeping his hands in plain view. “That’s better,” he said, looking more relaxed than he had any right to. “You were saying?”

“Nasir Gadatra,” I repeated. “You didn’t like him, did you, Sean? Why was that?”

He shrugged again. “I didn’t really know him,” he said, side-stepping the point. “Providing he didn’t try to mess Ursula around, or slide out of his obligations, then I’d no real objections to—”

“He what?” I demanded, cutting him short. “Now wait a minute. Nasir was the father of your sister’s kid?”

Sean looked at me almost blankly. “Of course, didn’t you know? You don’t think I’d kill my own would-be brother-in-law, do you?”

“Not even if he was a damned Paki?” I taunted, aiming for provocation.

It worked. Sean’s head came up, and there was a flush along his cheekbones that could have been brought there by anger, or it could have been shame. “Now whatever gives you the idea that something like that would matter to me?” he queried, his voice dangerously soft.

I disregarded the warning bells and pushed on recklessly. “There can’t be many former National Front members who would exactly welcome an Asian into the family to dilute their pure Anglo-Saxon blood.”

“National Front? Me? You’re joking,” he bit out. “Anyway, on my mother’s side I’m Irish, and on my father’s I’m German. You’ve got your facts well screwed there, sweetheart.” The endearment sounded like a threat.

“Yeah? So you deny that you’ve ever had any connections to any right-wing organisations? That you were arrested as a member of a neo-nazi group for a racially motivated attack?” Go on, Sean, I thought bitterly, deny it. Tell me how wrong I am. Tell me I can trust you. Just don’t expect me to believe it.

He paused and took a breath, then leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his knees. “No,” he said, sounding suddenly tired, “I don’t deny it. When I was a kid, not that much older than Roger is now, I mixed with a bad crowd. They just happened to be involved with the National Front, but that wasn’t their main attraction, and I was never actually a paid-up member. Yeah, they pulled me in for the attack on that Asian kid. My God you should have seen the pictures. They burned off half his face. It sickened me, convinced me I had to get out. I cut loose, started afresh, joined up.” He glanced up, met my gaze and held it constant.

I don’t know what it was that made me realise that I believed him utterly. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never lied to my face, not directly. Maybe there was some part of me that was still clinging to the hope that, whatever else he was capable of, he couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to believe him, but I just couldn’t help it.

Without speaking, I moved to sit opposite, facing him across my coffee table. Slowly, carefully, I thumbed the magazine out of the Glock and placed them down together on the table top, then sat back, leaving them between us.

Sean’s shoulders dropped a fraction. He’d played it so cool I hadn’t recognised the tension in him. He linked his fingers together and sat with his chin propped on them, just looking at me. I kept my face expressionless.

“Colonel Parris was a fool to let you go,” he said at last. “You were perfect for Special Forces.”

I said nothing, managing to convey polite enquiry in the lift of an eyebrow.

“If anyone else had been pointing that at me,” he went on, gesturing to the Glock, “I might not have taken it so seriously, but you were one of the best shots with a pistol I’ve ever come across, Charlie. Cool-headed. Deadly.”

“There were plenty who were just as good.” I shrugged off the compliment, feeling gauche.

He shook his head. “A lot of people had a reasonable ability to aim,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’d got the stomach to pull the trigger for real. Not like you, Charlie, you had what it took. Still do, at a guess.”

“Thanks,” I said, tartly. “I’m not sure it’s very flattering to be told you’ve got all the makings of a cold-blooded killer.”

“Not quite. A sniper, more like. A soldier. With the nerve to kill when necessary, that’s true, but under the right circumstances. For the right cause.”

If only you knew, I thought, and the pain of it seared like fire. “Like a terrorist?” I shot back. “Or an assassin?”

He sighed and made no reply, reaching for the Glock and snapping it back together with practised ease.

“I suppose you do know that carrying one of those things is illegal these days?” I pointed out mildly, watching the unconscious skill in his deft movements.

“In my line of work, they’re often a useful, if not essential bit of kit,” he said, cheerfully unrepentant. “Besides, I have contacts with the security services, and they allow me some leeway.”

“And what is your line of work, Sean?” I said, feeling a sudden chill seep through my bones.

He smiled unexpectedly, transforming his severe facial structure. “I don’t kill people, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Not even a damned Paki who gets my sister pregnant,” he said, mocking me gently as he tucked the gun away out of sight. “In fact, if I’d known Nas was in danger I probably could have helped him. I’m in close protection now, Charlie. After I left the army, I became a bodyguard.”

That one threw me and I didn’t trouble to hide the fact. “Do your family know what you do?” I asked.

He paused, frowning as he considered the question. “No, they don’t,” he said eventually. “They know I work in security, but I’ve always tried to make it sound boring – like it involves sending night-watchmen round building sites. They don’t know I do personal stuff. No-one round here does. Only you.”

I filed away the possible significance of that for reflection at a later date. Standing, I said, “If we’re not going out for that drink, would you like some coffee?”

Sean smiled again. “OK.”

He followed me as I moved through to the kitchen and dug out the ingredients. I hadn’t stocked up for a while, but fortunately I had a pack of long-life milk in the bottom of a cupboard. Sean leaned in the doorway and watched me spoon instant coffee granules into two mugs.

“It’s come to something when you feel you can’t get the truth out of me without a gun to my head,” he said quietly.

I glanced up at him as I flicked on the kettle, kept my voice dispassionate. “Old wounds take a long time to heal.”

“Yeah, well.” He raked a hand through his hair, looking tired again. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you went shooting from the lip and told everyone about us—”

“Hang on, before I told anyone?” I spun round, slamming the milk down hard enough to slop some of the contents over the side of the carton. “I didn’t say a word. I thought it was you.”

“Me?” He looked genuinely astonished. I saw the anger building in the bunching of his shoulders. “OK, let’s backtrack for a moment here, shall we?” he said tightly. “When I took up that last posting everything was fine, yeah? I was out of touch for what, three weeks? Then I try to contact you and I’m told you’re on leave. Permanently on leave. It went on for months. I even rang your damned parents, not that I expected them to be helpful. And what was I told? Charlotte doesn’t want to speak to you again. Ever.” The bitterness welled up in his words, overflowed. “What the hell was I supposed to think?”

I wanted to stop him going on. To tell him he’d been wrong. To reach out to him, but I couldn’t seem to move. He threw me a single, dark unfathomable look, then went on.

“So, next thing I know I’m being hauled into the local company commander’s office and told I’m up on a charge for screwing one of my trainees. They told me you had failed the course, but when they’d RTU’d you, you’d started screaming about slapping them with a suit for sexual harassment against me, if not actual rape. I was told there’d been a court martial, and you were out, but not before you’d brought me down with you.”

“I didn’t,” I whispered, stricken. “Sean, I swear that’s not how it happened.”

“So, what did?” he threw back.

I swallowed, unwilling to tell him what had really gone on that dark, and miserable night. I opted for half-truth instead, and hoped that would be enough. “I-I was attacked,” I said at last, “the week after you left. A group of them jumped me and I was pretty badly beat up. That’s why I was on leave.”

That much at least was true. The secret of a believable lie was to stick as closely as possible to reality. There was less opportunity to stumble.

Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay. The names went round and round again. I shut them out.

“There was a court martial,” I went on, “but it went against me. They said I’d provoked them, made it out to be my fault. I tried to get hold of you, to speak up for me as one of my instructors, nothing more than that, but you never returned any of my calls. So,” I shrugged my shoulders, “I was out.”

“I never got any messages. They kept me moving around a lot, out of regular contact. I never knew you’d called me.” He shook his head, then looked up at me intensely. “And you let it rest there?” he demanded. “After what they did to you?”

For a moment my breath stopped, fearing he’d tumbled to it. Then I saw his eyes shift to my throat, understanding dawning, laced with compassion. I knew I should have told him he was jumping to the wrong conclusions about that, but I was too much of a coward.

“No, I didn’t. I wish I had.” The kettle boiled and clicked off, giving me the chance to turn away, fuss with pouring boiling water into the mugs, stirring them. “I went for a civil action against them. That was when it all came out about us. I don’t know who told them, but it certainly wasn’t me.”

“You never told anyone?” he demanded. “What about those two other girls on the course? What were their names? Woolley and Lewis. You all seemed to get on OK. You’re sure you never had any heart-to-heart girlie chats with them?”

I shook my head, not insulted by the question. “We were never that close, so yes, I’m sure,” I said.

In fact, Woolley, Lewis and I had never really liked each other. We knew we were in the minority, as women training for the job we hoped to do, and that we had to stick together. But, at the same time the three of us were in direct competition with each other. I knew without undue conceit that I’d been a better soldier. They knew it too, and they hadn’t liked me for it.

Woolley in particular had been struggling to keep up. She was supposed to speak up in my favour at the trial, but her carefully neutral testimony about my general behaviour had a damning effect. Afterwards, she’d left the courtroom without talking to me, unable even to meet my eyes.

I learned later that although Lewis failed to complete the course, Woolley passed it and went on to active service. In my more bitter moments I wondered if that was her reward for sinking me.

“However it came out about us,” I said, “I lost the case because of it. I went from model soldier to—” I broke off, aware of how close I’d come to letting too much slip. “Well, I’m sure you can guess.”

“That’s why you disappeared, changed your name?”

I nodded. In the army I’d been Foxcroft. In an effort to escape the hounding of the press afterwards, I’d shortened it to Fox. It had seemed like a good way to disappear, and it had worked.

“I did try to find you, you know, but I kept coming up empty. When I realised it was you the other night I’ve had my people working round the clock to find out where you were. I couldn’t believe it when they told me about this place. I never dreamed you’d ended up so close to home.”

I gave him a rueful smile. “If I’d known how close to your home it was, I probably would have gone somewhere else,” I admitted, holding his coffee out to him.

He stepped forwards, eyes fired. I froze while he peeled the mug out of my nerveless fingers and plonked it back on the worktop, grabbing hold of my upper arms. “I didn’t betray you, Charlie,” he said fiercely. “You have to believe that.”

“I-I do,” I said unsteadily, mildly surprised to discover that it was the truth. “I didn’t, for a long time, but I do now. They screwed us both over, didn’t they Sean? Madeleine told me they did their damnedest to get you killed afterwards.”

“Yeah, well,” he relaxed his fingers, took a breath, “it wasn’t the easiest of times, but I survived.” He picked up his coffee mug with a steady hand, took a sip and regarded me over the rim. “It seems we both have that knack.”