Second Shot

Nineteen

My father arrived later that evening and stalked straight into the bedroom, ordering Sean outside when he would have stayed with me. They had a brief stare-out competition, which my father won. He examined me without a word other than curt instructions for me to move or bend or breathe deeply, most of which hurt to perform.

When he was done he rose and said crisply, “Well, Charlotte, you’ve certainly managed to knock yourself about and have almost undoubtedly delayed your recovery, but by some miracle you don’t appear to have done anything permanent. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

“Thank you,” I said.

For a moment he was silent as he folded his stethoscope neatly into his bag, his movements very deliberate and precise, as always. “This cannot continue,” he said, without looking at me directly. “You can barely stand. I fail to see what purpose is served by your continued presence here, other than to lay yourself open to further attack, or as a burden to your colleagues.”

Neither can I. “I’m staying,” I said.

He closed the bag, snapping it shut with a briskness that could almost have been mistaken for temper in someone more human. “Well, I regret that I am not,” he said.

There was a slight tap on the door and Neagley stuck her head round without waiting for an invitation. “Can I offer you coffee, Dr. Fox?” she asked.

My father stiffened. “Thank you, but no,” he said with icy politeness. “And my name is Foxcroft-Mr., not Dr.”

He ignored her puzzled frown. At the doorway, he turned to fire one last salvo. “I shall be taking a flight out of Boston tomorrow, and if you had any sense you would do the same,” he said. “I cannot keep doing this, Charlotte. I’ve done my best to help you, but if you won’t heed my advice.. well, there has to come a time when one calls a halt, don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I said, and he paused, surprised. “But I’d call it making a stand.”

Something tightened in the side of his jaw He strode out past Nea-gley and I heard Sean intercept him in the hallway to get him to check Matt’s head wound.

There was a long pause and something that sounded suspiciously like a sigh. Then my father’s voice said, brusque, “Show me.”

Neagley came farther into the room and shut the door behind her.

“He really is a doctor, right?” she said.

I raised a smile. “He’s a consultant orthopedic surgeon-they look down on mere doctors from a very exalted height.”

“Ah,” she said, understanding. “I thought for a moment he meant he was an ex-doctor-like he might have had his license revoked or something.”

My smile fleshed out. “Oh, how I wish you’d asked him that. …”

She smiled with me for a moment before her face sobered. “So, does he think you’re OK?”

“Oh, just peachy,” I said. Of course, he s probably disowned me, but what else is new?

“What really happened this afternoon?” she said. “Matt was being kind of vague.”

“I’m not surprised. He got quite a belt round the head.”

Neagley came forwards and sat on the foot of the bed, regarding me with that serious cop’s face.

“When I gave you the rundown on Oliver Reynolds the other day at the hospital, I didn’t go into a lot of detail,” she said. “I told you he was good at putting the frighteners on women, but I didn’t tell you how.”

She flicked her eyes in my direction, but I was concentrating on straightening out the bedclothes, smoothing the rumpled sheet.

“He threatens to rape them,” she said flatly. “And if they have young daughters, so much the better.”

“He threatened the kids?” I said sharply, remembering Reynolds’s mention of Ella.

Neagley grimaced. “Only that he’d make them watch.”

I looked her straight in the eye. “Good job we were able to get the better of him before that thought crossed his mind, then,” I said levelly “Have you said anything about this to Sean?”

“No,I-”

“Well, don’t,” I said. “Please.” And when she still looked dubious, I added, “Believe me, you don’t want to be responsible for what he’ll do if he finds out.”

Surprise crossed her face first, followed by a grim understanding. She nodded, got to her feet. “You know where I am when you want to talk,” she said gravely

“Yes — and thank you,” I said, but I knew I’d never take her up on the offer.

If the look she gave me as she went out was anything to go by, she knew it, too.

You’re very quiet,” Sean said. “Penny for your thoughts?” “We’re in the U.S.,” I said. “Shouldn’t that be a cent?” “No, it still works with a penny, I think,” he said. “And you’re hedging.”

It was four days after my father’s final visit and we were sitting in the Explorer in the car park at the Shaw’s supermarket in North Conway. Inside the store itself, Lucas and Rosalind had taken Ella with them to do their weekly grocery shop.

It was the first time I’d laid eyes on her since the night I was shot, and I was shocked by how clearly I remembered every little nuance of behavior or movement. I could almost tell what she was thinking, feeling- even saying-just from watching her at that distance. As she trotted away from us towards the entrance, a tiny figure between the two adults, I was aware of having something vital stripped from me.

I would have liked to tail them into the store, but I had to admit it wasn’t practical. I still wasn’t moving anything like freely enough for covert surveillance. I would be needing a crutch to walk for a while, although my right arm was improving every day. Sean had brought me coffee in a polystyrene cup when we’d stopped for fuel, and I was able to hold it in my right hand while I drank, even if I’d had to get him to remove the plastic lid for me first.

And, besides anything else, there was always the fact that Ella would instantly recognize me-at least, I hoped she would. I’d now been away from her almost as long as I’d been with her. Children forget easily, I knew, but still I hoped that I hadn’t disappeared entirely from her consciousness. She certainly hadn’t disappeared from mine.

So, Sean and I sat in the car and waited for the three of them to come out. There was only one entrance and one exit, at opposite ends of the building, but Sean had positioned us so we could keep an eye on both of them. I knew from my own experience with Ella that she had opinions of her own about shopping that were likely to slow the proceedings down. We were prepared for a long wait.

At the moment, we still weren’t quite sure what we were waiting for, but people tend to fall into a routine in their daily lives and it didn’t do any harm to learn it. It beat sitting around in the apartment all day, that’s for sure.

Now, I shrugged. “I was thinking about work,” I said, half-truthfully answering his original question. “How long can you afford to be away from London?”

Sean gave me a shrug of his own, sipping his coffee. ‘As long as Harrington continues to pay me to be here instead,” he said. His eyes were on the flow of people and cars coming and going, constantly checking. “By the sounds of it, Madeleine’s coping without me with embarrassing ease.”

“But is that because she’s being her usual wildly efficient self, or because we’re just not picking up the business at the moment?” I persisted.

He pulled a face. “Well, we’re not quite down to pawning the family silver yet,” he said. He sighed and turned to face me. “We’re surviving, Charlie. Madeleine’s been chasing electronic security work and it’s starting to pay off, to the point where I feel I’m almost superfluous. But business has dropped off since we lost Simone-and Jakes — I won’t lie to you about that.”

“Does his boss, this guy Armstrong, blame.. us?” I wasn’t sure if I’d been about to say “you” or “me”-“us” was a compromise.

“Parker Armstrong knows the risks of the game as well as anyone. If he blamed us he’d hardly be helping Matt with the legal side of things. Besides,” Sean added with another shrug, “it certainly won’t do any harm if we can make some sense of what happened. Help quash the rumors.”

“What rumors —?” I began, stopping abruptly when Sean came upright fast in his seat, eyes narrowing. “What? What is it?”

“The dark blue Ford Taurus that’s just pulled in at the end of the next row,” he said. “Two guys just got out who don’t look like they’re here just for a bag of cookies.”

I followed his gaze and saw two big men, their bulk accentuated by their heavy winter clothing. The sun was bright today, but the wind was cutting. Both wore hats, pulled down low over their ears, and gloves. Nothing unusual about that. It was the way they did such a studiously casual appraisal of the car park, which had nothing casual about it, on their way into the store. It was the kind of action I’d seen Sean carry out a hundred times. Only I suspect he would have died rather than have been quite so obvious about it.

The men had their backs turned as they walked towards the giant building, but halfway there one of them turned to do another countersur-veillance sweep and I saw his face clearly for the first time.

“That’s one of Vaughan’s men,” I said. “In the green jacket. With the mustache. He’s one of the pair that grabbed me that night and took me for my nice little chat with Felix.”

“I’ll go in and keep an eye on them,” Sean said. He leaned over and unobtrusively slipped the reclaimed Beretta out of the glove compartment, then reached for his jacket from the backseat. “Stay here.”

I hadn’t been contemplating trying to join in on this one, but the fact that he felt he had to order me to sit and stay put like a disobedient puppy put my back up. “Yes, sirl” I muttered.

He just paused, halfway through shouldering his way into his jacket. “Charlie, we don’t have time for this. I’m not trying to treat you like a child, but, please, just stay put.”

“OK,” I said, with ill grace.

“Attagirl,” he said. ‘And if you’re very good I’ll buy you a Happy Meal on the way home.”

“Try it,” I said sweetly, “and I’ll throw up in my car seat before we get there.”

He slid the gun into his pocket and gave me a quick bright smile as he climbed easily out of the Explorer, shutting the door behind him and hurrying after the two men. As he went, he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and stared at it with what appeared to be his full concentration. He was frowning heavily, just some harrassed guy who knew he’d left something off his shopping list and was trying to remember what it was before he got inside. The performance was so convincing that neither of Vaughan’s men made him.

I was suddenly aware of being very alone inside the confines of the vehicle. Reynolds’s face loomed in my mind’s eye and I experienced a momentary wish, entirely selfish, that Sean had left the gun behind. Then it passed. If either of these two was a threat to Ella, then I’d much rather Sean was armed. He would, I knew, use the Beretta without a qualm if he had to, to protect the child. Regardless of the consequences.

It was hard to realize just how much I missed Ella. Her inventive food combinations, her occasionally sage pronouncements, her comical grumpiness first thing in the morning. I missed them all with a sharpness that surprised me.

I remembered Sean’s report on Lucas’s behavior towards his daughter as a baby, the injuries Simone had received before her mother had divorced him and run. He’d been a bully, pure and simple. Would he return to that now?

You didn’t just stop abusing. Lucas might not always have had the opportunity to indulge himself-certainly not since he left the army-but now he had another child to take his temper out on, over time he would surely revert to type. It was human nature.

And it was up to me and Sean to stop him before he hurt her.

The Explorer had started to mist up a little and the cold had a sullen dampness to it. Sean had left the keys in the ignition and I leaned across and flipped the engine on, just to run some heat through the car. The front screen demisted slowly.

It was another twenty minutes before I saw the Lucases emerge. Greg Lucas was carrying three bags of shopping in each hand, and his wife had Ella balanced on her hip.

They were some distance away and I craned forwards, trying to read Ella’s body language. Was there anything about her that seemed scared or anxious? She was wearing a pink jacket with a fake-fur-trimmed hood that was up around her face, and she had one hand to her mouth, probably chewing her hair. I could almost hear Simone’s voice telling her daughter to stop it.

While Lucas sorted his car keys and put the bags away, Rosalind stood happily holding Ella, rocking with her and talking, their heads very close together. Ella reached out and touched Rosalind’s hair and she smiled. Whatever Lucas’s feelings towards his granddaughter, I saw Rosalind was forming quite a bond. I wondered why that fact hurt me quite so much.

Now, Lucas fumbled a little with the keys and it was Rosalind who put Ella down long enough to open the tailgate of the Range Rover. Ella stood, a couple of paces away, fiddling with the buttons on her coat, in a world of her own while people hurried past to their cars.

I skimmed the sparse crowd for signs of danger but could see nothing immediate. I couldn’t see Vaughan’s men, either-or Sean. Not seeing them and knowing they were there was worse by far. I shifted in my seat, only too frustratingly aware of my physical limitations. They could be planning just about anything and I wouldn’t be able to stop them.

Then the bags were inside the back of the Range Rover and Rosalind was fussing with the order of them, leaving Lucas to turn his full attention to Ella. I tensed as he crouched in front of her. I was watching them through the side window with Ella three-quarters facing me and Lucas almost dead side on. I could see both their faces, blurred slightly by the distance between us. Ella’s showed a trace of wariness and her eyes kept darting over Lucas’s shoulder-then back over her own-as though she was expecting something major to come and take her away. Or she was waiting for someone.

Lucas stroked a gentle hand down her flushed cheek. And it was gentle. There was no hidden message in the gesture. It was affection and nothing more.

The driver’s door of the Explorer swung open and my head whipped round so fast I nearly ricked my neck.

“Sean!” I said. “Damn, you put the wind up me.”

“Nice to know you’re getting something out of it,” he said as he climbed in, throwing a small bag of groceries onto the backseat-a decoy to allow him to linger at the checkout. “My God, it’s like an oven in here.”

“Sorry, being so inactive makes me feel the cold like crazy,” I said. “So, what happened in there?”

He shrugged his way out of his coat. “They came. They shopped. They went,” he said. “The two guys we saw didn’t do much beyond hang around trying to attract the attention of security-or that’s what it seemed like, anyway. They followed Lucas around, flexing their muscles, then left at the same time as we did.”

“But they didn’t try anything?”

“No, why?”

“I just thought Ella was looking a bit uneasy, that’s all,” I said, turning back to watch the Range Rover. Lucas had the rear door open now and was strapping Ella into her seat.

Sean looked a little discomfited. ‘Ah, well, she spotted me,” he said.

I said nothing, just turned back and raised my eyebrows. He gave me a wry smile.

“She didn’t say anything, I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean she won’t at some point.”

We were both silent for a moment. The Range Rover’s brake lights flicked on as they climbed in and Lucas started the engine.

“What are we hoping for here, Sean?” I asked. “That we’ll catch them mistreating her? That we’ll stumble across some reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to keep her?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly, “but at least we’re watching her- watching out for her. And it’s not just the Lucases we have to worry about, is it?”

As he spoke, the blue Ford we’d seen Vaughan’s men arrive in turned up the row where the Range Rover was parked. The Taurus accelerated hard towards them, then braked to an abrupt halt, blocking Lucas in. I tensed in my seat, waiting for the attack.

“Sean!”

He already had the Beretta out of his pocket, but there was no clear shot. And, besides, nobody had emerged from either car. Standoff. The Taurus sat there for half a minute, ticking over, the men inside staring at Lucas, who was staring right back at them through layers of glass and mirrors.

As abruptly as it had arrived, the Taurus pulled away, rearing back on its suspension as the driver planted the pedal, engine and transmission protesting hard enough to turn heads. A warning, then. Nothing more. But a warning about what?

There was a brief pause. Then the Range Rover swung out of its space, lurching a little to show that Lucas had been as unsettled by the whole thing as, no doubt, he was supposed to be.

We followed them out onto the main road, keeping three cars between us. Lucas had been through all the same training Sean had and in some ways it was a surprise he hadn’t spotted us tailing him before, but now he would definitely be on his guard.

“What are we going to do about this, Sean?” I demanded. “We can’t follow them around forever. What good are we doing?”

“Parker’s legal man is making progress,” Sean said. “He seems to think Matt’s claim for Ella is stronger, bearing in mind she’s lived with him all her life. He thinks Matt would get custody if it came to a fight.”

“Which Matt can’t afford to fund,” I put in. “Is Harrington prepared to back him?”

Sean shrugged, braking for traffic lights. “Well, we’ll just-,” he began, then broke off as his mobile phone started to ring. He checked the incoming number and handed the phone to me. “It’s Neagley,” he said.

I answered the phone. “Sean’s driving,” I told the private eye. “What’s up?”

“I think you’d better get back here,” she said, and there was something in her voice that hooked me. Was that excitement? “Matt’s found something and it could be important.”

“Like what?”

“We don’t think Greg Lucas was Simone’s father.”

I frowned. Whatever I’d been expecting-or hoping for-that wasn’t it. “But the DNA tests were a match,” I said, nonplussed. ‘And the police double-checked.”

“Yeah, but… it’s complicated. We’ll explain when you get here.” And she rang off.

When we got back Matt had the apartment door open before the Explorer had even stopped rolling. He was almost hopping from one foot to the other like a little kid with a secret that’s bursting to be let out. For the first time he allowed his impatience to show at my slow progress across the icy ground from car to doorway. Until Sean glared at him. Then he slunk indoors and waited for us to come to him at our own pace.

“OK, Matt,” Sean said when I was back on the sofa. “Let’s hear it.”

Matt shuffled the papers spread out over the replacement coffee table in front of him. There was an uncertainty to his fingers as they leafed through, as though if he handled the information badly it might evaporate right in front of his very eyes.

“First of all, I need to know how good is your researcher-Madeleine, isn’t it?”

“The best,” Sean said without hesitation, and the bluntness of his tone would have flattened someone less buoyed up.

“So you’re absolutely sure the dates she’s given you about Lucas’s army career stack up?” Matt said, wilting a little but still dogged in his persistence.

“Yes.”

Matt swallowed. “OK, then,” he said, picking up one particular sheet. “Simone’s birthday was the sixteenth of September.” His voice gave a tiny waver as he said her name, pricking my sympathy. He had not had time to grieve for Simone, I realized. And probably wouldn’t until their daughter’s fate was settled. I hoped that then he would just have one loss to mourn, not two.

Neagley came to sit down, bringing fresh coffee for Sean and me. As she passed Matt she put her free hand on his shoulder, giving it a slight squeeze of support. He threw her a wan smile.

“Er, yeah, anyway, according to the reports you have, Lucas was at the height of his bad-boy phase in the eighteen months before she was born. It was around that time that he chucked two trainees out of a helicopter and one of them broke his shoulder.”

“Collarbone,” Sean said absently, sipping his coffee. “And we know all this. How does it relate to him not being Simone’s father?”

“Well, just stick with me on this. At the end of the previous November he got into an argument in a pub in Hereford and ended up making one bloke eat the cue ball off the pool table.”

“Eat it?” I queried.

“Yeah, he forced it into the bloke’s mouth and apparently they had to surgically dislocate his jaw to get it out again. Caused a real ruckus at the time. It seems that the bloke he injured had connections-his uncle was the local chief constable or something. The end result was that top brass came down hard on Lucas. They didn’t just kick him out of the SAS — they stuck him in clink for it.”

Sean had gone very still, like a dog on the scent of prey. “Go on,” he said.

“Sergeant Greg Lucas was a guest of Her Majesty in the glasshouse in Colchester for a couple of months over Christmas and the New Year while they sorted out what they were going to do with him.” He singled out a sheet of paper and handed it across. “From the third of December until halfway through February, actually.”

Sean took the sheet and stared at it. “The dates don’t line up,” he said slowly.

Matt nodded, eyes suddenly very bright like someone in the grip of religious fervor. “I’ve seen Simone’s birth certificate. She was just short of nine pounds in weight when she was born. And bang on time-not premature, not overdue. There’s no way on this earth that Lucas could have been her father.”

“But he is,” I said blankly, looking up. “The DNA test proved it.”

“That DNA test,” Neagley said, breaking in for the first time, “just proved that the two of them were father and daughter. It didn’t prove that the man who was Simone’s father was Greg Lucas.”

“In other words,” Matt chipped in, “just because Greg Lucas happened to be married to Pam- Simone’s mother-it doesn’t automatically mean that he was Simone’s father.”

“But that’s … impossible,” I said, and even as I spoke I knew it wasn’t impossible at all. In fact, it made a lot more sense than anything else I could think of.

Neagley smiled at my obvious confusion. “Trust me, Charlie,” she said. “We’ve done nothing but tear this thing apart all morning. There’s no other conclusion that’s feasible.”

“But he’s a match, so if he isn’t Greg Lucas, he must be — “

“John Ashworth,” Matt supplied, nodding. “Her mother’s boyfriend. The boyfriend who magically disappeared at exactly the same time Greg Lucas upped sticks and moved over here. The boyfriend who everyone thought was dead but no one could find a body for.”

“The boyfriend,” Neagley said, producing another sheet of paper from the pile, “whose middle name just happens to be Simon-which you have to admit kinda adds weight to the he’s-her-real-father argument.”

“If the DNA test is correct-and we can only assume it is,” Matt said, his voice tight, “then the only possible explanation is that the man who’s been posing as Greg Lucas for the last twenty years is, in fact, John Ash-worth.”

“We thought the DNA test would prove Greg Lucas was who he claimed to be,” Sean said, looking at me. “Whereas in fact, it’s proved him to be the one man he couldn’t possibly be.”

“And he knew,” I said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have agreed to take it. He knew he really was her father.”

“Just as the real Greg Lucas must have known that he wasn’t,” Matt said, suddenly more subdued. “Maybe that was why he was so bloody cruel to her when she was a baby.”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The personality change from vicious psychopath to doting grandfather, the fact that I just hadn’t got that professional soldier vibe from the man-and he hadn’t picked anything up, in return, from me.

So what the hell happened to the real Greg Lucas? And even as the question formed, the answer bloomed over the top of it.

“Ashworth killed him,” I said suddenly. I snapped out of my reverie and found everyone looking at me. “And Simone knew. The night she was shot,” I said, aware of Matt’s flinch at the words, “she went ballistic at Lucas. ‘I saw him do it. I loved you. I trusted you.’ That was what she shouted at him. She was only a child at the time, but I think somehow she must have remembered back to the night Lucas and Ashworth both vanished. Think about it-Lucas was ex-SAS and a natural killer. He’d been stalking them for months. If Ashworth ended up with Lucas’s identity, he must have had to kill Lucas to get it. You’ve seen his record. There’s no other way the guy would ever have given in unless he was dead. I don’t know what set Simone off, but what if she remembered seeing Ashworth kill Greg Lucas?”

“So,” Matt said grimly, “he may not be quite the psychopathic killer we thought he was, but he’s still a psychopathic killer, just the same.”

Sean frowned. “Wait a minute. If I remember right, this Ashworth guy was a salesman. He wasn’t even in the army. How did he manage to kill a fully trained SAS soldier?”

“He could always have shot him,” Neagley suggested. “Guns are a great leveler.”

Sean shook his head. “Guns just aren’t that common in the UK-and certainly not twenty-odd years ago,” he said. ‘And besides, the police searched the house pretty thoroughly, according to the reports. If he’d been shot it would have left a trace. They didn’t find anything.”

“What about Rosalind-do you think she knows that Lucas isn’t really Lucas?” Neagley asked.

“How can you keep that kind of a secret from someone you’re living with for all that time?” I said.

Sean shot me a sly glance. “Some people are very good at keeping secrets.”

I ignored the jibe and reached for my crutch, struggling to my feet. “Well, there’s one way to find out.”

“How?”

“I’ll ask her,” I said.