Second Shot

Twenty-one

So, I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us the whole story now, would you?” I asked as we drove down the sloping driveway away from the White Mountain Hotel.

Rosalind paused as she reached a junction, pretending a preoccupation with checking for other cars when the darkness would have made it easy to spot them. She was a slow and cautious driver, and I didn’t think that was just down to the conditions.

“What ‘whole story’ is that?” she said, noncommittal.

“You’ve been married to the guy for fifteen years,” I said, “and you were an army brat. You’ve spent most of your life around soldiers. There’s no way Lucas could have kept up the pretense of being ex-SAS for long, Rosalind. Not in front of you.”

In the glow from the car’s instrument lighting I saw her suppress a small smile. A compliment’s a compliment, after all. I was sitting alongside her in the front, with Matt relegated to the rear seat.

“You’re right,” she said. “But I knew he wasn’t who he said he was, long before I married him.”

“So why did you?” It was Matt who asked the question, sounding baffled. “You loved him, right?”

“Love?” Rosalind almost scoffed. Then her voice turned bitter. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for a woman to be in the kind of business I’m in?” she demanded as she pulled away. “After my daddy died I couldn’t get anyone to deal with me on any account. We were going under and there were plenty of my daddy’s so-called friends who were just waiting for that to happen so they could step in and buy up the business for a rock-bottom price.”

We were driving past individually designed houses set close to the shoulder of the road, home lights spilling out brightly across the crystallized snow.

“So he was a figurehead,” I said, almost to myself. “Weren’t you worried someone else might spot him for a fake?”

She shrugged. “The British SAS has a certain reputation and I coached him some,” she said with just a hint of a sneer in her voice. ‘As long as he talked quiet, stared hard, and didn’t blink, people believed he was what he said he was.”

“And he was,” I agreed. “Or the real Lucas was, at any rate, if anyone cared enough to check the records. Speaking of which, did Greg ever tell you what happened to the real Lucas?”

We stopped at a junction and turned left, the road twisting through the trees looming over us, over a small flat bridge with steel barriers at either side.

“He was in the house alone, just Greg and Simone,” she said at last, her voice dull, almost monotone. It took me a moment to realize when she said “Greg” she wasn’t talking about the original.

“Simone was in her room. It was a tiny cottage somewhere in Scotland, he told me, a cheap rental, but they moved around a lot and they couldn’t afford to be fussy. Lucas was searching for them, threatening them, but they’d been there six months and heard nothing. They thought they might be safe. They weren’t.”

“He found them.”

She nodded, slowing again as we reached another junction, each one connecting to a larger road. This one had houses set back farther into the woods, with mailboxes lining the edges of the road.

“Greg said there was a phone call that afternoon, but when he answered there was nobody there, and he knew that they were going to have to run again, and the child was just starting nursery and she was old enough to be making friends and Pam had a job that she enjoyed. And he knew they couldn’t keep doing this forever.”

“So he killed him.”

Rosalind shook her head. “It wasn’t like that,” she said, softly bitter. “He started to gather up a few essentials, waiting for Pam to get home. He heard something upstairs and, when he went up to see, he found Lucas coming out of Simone’s bedroom, carrying the child. She was terrified.”

Rosalind paused again as we made another turn, each junction bringing us onto a larger road, heading towards the middle of North Conway. It was snowing harder now, big flakes that rushed towards the beams of the headlights like distant stars. The luxury of the Range Rover closed out the elements, separating us. We crossed a series of bridges over frozen water, the ice showing a dull gray between the pale snow of the banks.

“So he killed him,” I said again. “How?”

She flicked me a fast glance and the tail of it cracked like a whip. “Lucas attacked him,” she said, dogged, her speech becoming jerky, staccato. “Greg just defended himself, as best he could. Lucas was a trained killer, for God’s sake, and Greg didn’t want Simone to get hurt. They struggled. It was a tiny cottage and there was hardly any room. Lucas tripped, fell down the stairs, and Simone fell with him. She was screaming, but she didn’t have a mark on her. His neck was broken. It was an accident, but what could Greg do?”

“He could have called the police and taken the consequences — if indeed there were consequences,” I said. Self-defense was a plea that was sometimes accepted by the courts, as I had cause to know only too well.

If it was genuine.

“He panicked,” Rosalind said, as though she had a bad taste in her mouth. “He and Lucas were similar enough in looks to pass for each other. He told me he sometimes wondered if that was what Pam saw in him-almost the same face but without the brutality”

“What about the body?” I said. “What happened to that?”

“Apparently, the cottage was pretty isolated,” Rosalind said. “Greg knew there were plenty of places in the Scotch countryside to hide a body where it wouldn’t be found easily”

“So he buried the real Lucas, took the dead man’s identity and scarpered over here,” I said flatly. “That takes some forethought and planning. That’s not just something you can do on the spur of the moment.”

“Lucas had already planned it,” Rosalind said. “Greg said that he found Lucas’s car nearby. In the trunk was a bag, all packed, with his passport and airline tickets already booked for a flight the next day. Greg said he knew that Lucas had come north solely to kill Simone and his ex-wife-his last act before he left the country.”

“I don’t know how he could just walk out and leave Simone-an

infant-on her own in the house, after she’d just witnessed a murder,” Matt said, his voice paled with shock.

“She was young,” Rosalind dismissed, braking for the traffic lights onto the main road now. She indicated right and edged out of the junction, even though it was on red. I still couldn’t get used to the idea that you were allowed to do that over here. “Young enough to forget what she’d seen.”

Blanked it out, more like. The human mind has a way of blanketing trauma, like growing a scab over an open wound. But all it took was a careless nudge and suddenly the scab was off and the wound was bleeding afresh. …

“She remembered, didn’t she?” I said quietly “When Jakes took a tumble down your staircase and broke his neck, Simone remembered.”

We were on the main street now, heading east, passing the Eastern Slope Inn and the old-fashioned Zeb’s General Store, draped with lights that spoke of Christmas celebrations overrunning. I’d never felt less like celebrating anything.

“It was all my fault,” Rosalind said quietly then. “Greg didn’t tell me about the DNA test. I didn’t want them to take it. I thought it would ruin everything. Greg never told me Lucas’s daughter really was his, after all,” she muttered, almost to herself. “He should have told me!”

I glanced across and found her face was filled with sorrow. I remembered her words that day at the house when we’d talked about her childless marriage. It was never to be, she’d said, wistful. Her grief now was not caused by her husband’s sins of omission, I realized, but by her own. It was not the fact that the man she’d called Greg Lucas really did turn out to have a child. It was the fact that she did not.

“So how did you find out they’d taken the test?” I asked.

“The results arrived back by courier. Greg was out. I didn’t know what they were and I was curious, so I opened them … and then I knew he’d lied to me, all these years.”

You should have been expecting that, Rosalind. His whole life’s been a lie since before he ever met you.…

“So you rang Simone at the hotel,” I said. “Why? What was that going to achieve? If it was the money you were after, surely your best course would have been to keep quiet and say nothing. Simone was already convinced Greg was her father, and she turned out to be right. Why spill the beans?”

“I was jealous,” she said simply. ‘And hurt, and angry. So, I told her to come to the house because the results were back … and then I told her the truth.”

I sucked in a breath. “Which part of it?”

“I told her that Greg wasn’t really Greg Lucas,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “And I also told her that he’d killed the man she thought of as her father.”

“Does that mean,” I said carefully, “that you neglected to tell her the part about Greg actually being her real father?”

There was a long pause while we drove on, Rosalind’s eyes fixed so firmly on the taillights of the car ahead that she couldn’t possibly actually be looking at them. Then she said, barely audible, “Yes.”

My God, I thought. That would have been enough to send anyone off at the deep end. I was suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness that went bone-deep. What a waste. What a bloody awful waste.

‘And how did she react to that?”

“She went crazy,” Rosalind said, sounding not surprised exactly but maybe slightly awed at the force of Simone’s reaction. “She went for me with her claws out. I ran upstairs to try and get to my bedroom-at least there’s a lock on the door-but she caught up with me before I’d reached the top of the stairs and she was screaming because she was angry, and Ella was screaming because she was frightened. Then the bodyguard she had with her-Jakes-he came to try and break us up.”

She paused again, took a deep shaky breath. “I don’t think she meant to hit him, but somehow she did and he fell… and I knew as soon as I saw him hit the floor that he was dead. And then Greg walked in and Si-mone looked at him, standing over Jakes’s body in the hallway, and then she really lost it.”

I thought back to the words I’d heard that night and even I had to admit that it all fitted. I glanced back over my shoulder. Matt was sitting behind Rosalind, leaning forwards so his head was almost between the front seats. He was listening with a mix of emotions playing round his thin features, from anger to disbelief to an all-engulfing grief. I could see the tears had finally broken cover and were running freely down his cheeks, but he didn’t seem to be aware of them and made no moves to brush them away I closed my heart to his pain and pressed on, regardless.

“So how did you all get from the upper floor to the basement?” I said.

Rosalind glanced at me. “I shouted to Greg that Simone had gone crazy, that she had killed her own bodyguard and I needed his help. He bolted for his gun safe in the basement but-”

“What about that Smith amp; Wesson revolver? Wasn’t he still carrying it?”

She looked momentarily surprised. “No,” she said slowly, frowning. “I suppose he can’t have been. He doesn’t always.”

We’d turned off the main street now and were starting to thread through the quieter residential side roads leading towards Mount Cran-more. The lights for the ski runs were clearly visible, stretching above us.

“So he got to his gun safe and pulled a gun,” I prompted. “What then?”

“He couldn’t do it,” Rosalind said, her voice barely audible. “It didn’t matter than Simone could have killed me as well as Jakes. He let her walk right up to him and take the gun out of his hand.” She glanced sideways again. “And then you arrived and, well, I guess you pretty much know the rest.”

Not really….

“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that you happened to mention any of this to Detective Young after Simone was killed?”

Rosalind shook her head. “How could I and still protect Greg’s identity?” she said, mournful. “And what good would it have done? My duty was to the living.”

“Including Ella?”

“Of course,” Rosalind said, brusque. “She may not be mine-in any sense of the word,” she added with a rueful little half smile, “but I’ve come to love her like she was my own. I’m sure we both do.”

“So why let Greg take her? If he’s so fond of his granddaughter, why did he use her like a human shield out there in the forest?”

Rosalind made the final turn into the car park and slotted the Range Rover into a parking space outside the apartment, right next to Neagley’s Saturn, putting the gear lever into neutral.

“He’s not a professional soldier, Charlie,” she said, with just a hint of the patronizing in her voice. “He was frightened and he genuinely thought that by taking the child he could get her to safety After all, it was you who brought her down to the basement and put her into danger.”

I sat for a moment without speaking, working through what she’d said and trying to get it straight in my own head. Matt was silent behind us. I undipped my seat belt and turned to face Rosalind.

“You’re good,” I said, reflective. “Very good, in fact.”

“Excuse me?”

“Very convincing,” I said. “You damned near had me convinced, that’s for sure. I think claiming Simone was the one who hit Jakes was overegging it a little, but otherwise you play the loyal wife and the doting grandmother almost to perfection. Academy Award stuff, really”

She tensed and her eyes narrowed. “What the hell are you talking about?” she said, almost a growl. “I’ve told you nothing but the truth.”

I gave a short laugh devoid of mirth. “Oh, there might be some truth mixed up in there, but it’s been so watered down with the lies, it’s difficult to tell.”

Her mouth opened, closed again. “Frankly, Charlie, I don’t really care much one way or the other what you think.” She reached down to unclip her seat belt. “What matters at the moment is Ella.”

“Of course it does,” I agreed. “And the ten million dollars you hope to get for her. This has nothing to do with Felix Vaughan, has it, Rosalind?” I raised an eyebrow but she didn’t answer. “That’s just a wild-goose chase.”

“Oliver Reynolds-it is you he’s working for, isn’t it?” I cut across her, my voice turning harsh. “Just remember one thing, Rosalind. If he hurts her, I will kill you myself.”

Rosalind’s face was blank for a moment longer before it twisted into a derisive smile. She brought her hand back up again-the one that had been fiddling with her seat belt-only now there was a 9mm Beretta in it, and she was pointing it firmly in my direction.

“Oh yes?” she said silkily. ‘And just how do you propose to do that?”

I mentally cursed myself for not seeing that one coming and made sure I kept my hands very still.

“Give me a minute and I’m sure I’ll think of something,” I said, and she snorted.

“How did you know? I thought I’d covered all the bases.”

I nodded towards the apartment building in front of us. “You never asked directions,” I said. “But Reynolds knows where we are. He paid us a visit.” I eyed the gun but she held it confidently, relaxed, like she was only too familiar with handling and firing a weapon. Hardly surprising when I thought about her background. Shame I hadn’t thought about it earlier. “If you’d kept up the outraged innocence, you might even have got away with it.”

A flicker of annoyance skimmed across her face. Then she shrugged. “Ah well,” she said. “Too late for that now.”

There was a moment of silence while the big, fat snowflakes floated down softly and lay on the windscreen and died in the residual warmth coming up through the glass.

I sat quiet in my seat with my right hand lying in my lap and felt the sharp throbbing in my back that had been there since the shooting, and the dull ache in my left leg that never quite seemed to go away.

Oh, I knew all the theories for dealing with armed opponents. I’d studied the methods and in the past I’d practiced until the bruises wrote their own record, but it was always a last resort. Besides, any of the moves I knew required outstanding speed and strength and agility, and at the moment I was severely lacking in all three.

I thought of Matt, frozen in shock or fear-or quite possibly both- in the rear seat, but I resisted the urge to glance at him and draw Rosalind’s attention there. He’d come to my rescue with Reynolds, but Matt wasn’t a fighter by either instinct or training. I couldn’t-and didn’t- expect him to butt in now.

I looked up.

“What is it that you want, Rosalind?”

She smiled, recognizing my capitulation for what it was, and rooted in her coat pocket with her left hand, quickly pulling out her mobile phone. She keyed in a number without having to take her eyes off me. All the time the gun never wavered.

“Just in case you get any ideas,” she said, tucking the phone up to her ear while the call rang out, “my daddy taught me well and I’m a very good shot. Not up to your standard, probably, but at this distance I hardly need to be. Of course, I’d rather not make any additional holes in this car, if I can help it, but if it comes down to it, well-” she shrugged, careless, “-the lease agreement’s in Greg’s name.”

Tinnily, I heard the phone answered. Rosalind’s face was tense now, but she never dropped her guard.

“Get me Felix Vaughan,” she said, clipped. My heart started to canter at an uneven rhythm, accelerating. “Felix? … It’s Rosalind. Oh, let’s dispense with the pleasantries, shall we? I have a proposition for you.”

The voice at the other end-obviously Vaughan-gave some short indication of assent.

“I want my business back, Felix,” Rosalind said, her voice ringing with conviction like struck steel. “No, that old threat won’t work anymore,” she interrupted when he began to speak again. “Greg’s about to be unmasked anyway…. That’s right.. the bodyguard.” She said the words looking right at me, contempt rich in her voice.

There was a long pause and I could picture Felix Vaughan taking the information in, sifting through it, analyzing the content, looking for the angles.

“Yes, I know the agreement’s watertight, Felix, believe me. What I’m proposing is a trade,” Rosalind said when he began to speak again. My chest tightened. I knew where this was going. There could only be one outcome. “You sign the business back over to me and I’ll give you something much more valuable in exchange-Ella.”

Vaughan’s derision was clear. Rosalind cut across him like a razor, so sharp he didn’t feel the slice of the blade until it was already through his skin. “She’s worth approximately twenty-five million dollars, Felix. The money was Simone’s, but Ella is, after all, her only heir. I’ll give you an hour to think about it. Then call me. Oh, and as a gesture of good faith, I think I should warn you that Greg is on his way over there now. He’s got a couple of hired guns with him. Professionals.” She gave a tight little smile. “Yes, I’m sure you will, Felix.” And she ended the call without saying good-bye.

In the backseat, Matt began to hyperventilate like he was about to have an asthma attack.

“You bitch,” he muttered. “How could you just-just sell her off like that? What kind of a monster are you?”

“The desperate kind,” Rosalind said calmly.

Matt started to curse her then, getting louder and more fluent as he got into his stride. Rosalind sighed and twisted a little farther round in her seat so her back was more against the window glass and she could keep both of us in view.

“Don’t make me shoot you just to shut you up,” she said to him, her dispassionate tone silencing him better than venom would ever have done.

She stiffened as another car turned into the parking area, its lights sweeping across us. For a moment I entertained a tiny glimmer of absurd hope that it was Sean and Neagley, who’d somehow seen through Lucas’s story-and Rosalind’s trap-and come back to rescue us. The car drove past and disappeared round the end of the next apartment block.

“OK,” Rosalind said. “Let’s go inside. Who has the keys?”

For a moment neither of us spoke.

“You’re not just making things worse for yourselves by being awkward,” Rosalind said, holding the mobile phone up. “Perhaps you’d like to consider Ella’s welfare.”

“I’ve got the keys,” Matt said, speaking fast and a little breathless. He fumbled in his pocket and brought them out, his hands shaking so badly that they jingled on their ring. “Just don’t let him hurt her. Please.”

Rosalind made no moves to take the keys. “We’re all going to go inside-you first,” she said. “We’ll be right behind you.”

Matt scrambled down out of the Range Rover’s backseat, too frightened to get creative. As soon as he was out of the car, I said softly, “I meant what I said. If you hurt Ella, I will kill you. You do know that, don’t you?”

Rosalind gave me an assessing glance, one hand on the door handle.

“If I was foolish enough to give you the opportunity?” she said. “Yes, I reckon you would.”

I took my time about getting out of my side, exaggerating it, trying to give Matt time to do something. I’m not entirely sure what I expected of him, exactly. But he didn’t do it, anyway.

Eventually, Rosalind tired of my tactics, moving in behind me and kicking into the back of my left knee. The leg buckled and I collapsed against the side of the Range Rover, gasping. I let go of the crutch, which bounced off the bodywork and clattered onto the icy ground.

“Pick it up,” Rosalind said to Matt. “And quit stalling,” she added to me. “Get inside before I lose my patience completely.”

This time, the way I hobbled to the door to the apartment didn’t have to be feigned. It was eight degrees below freezing that night, but by the time we reached the doorway I was sweating under my coat.

Rosalind stayed well back from the pair of us, keeping the gun steady. At some point during the walk from the car, she’d taken the time to screw a suppressor to the end of the Beretta’s barrel, very like the one Reynolds had used when he’d made his abortive attempt to snatch Ella from the house. At least I now knew where he shopped for his weaponry. All those ex-military M9 Berettas. I hadn’t given it a second thought.

She kept us standing in the hallway while she moved farther into the lounge area, sweeping books off the coffee table and even the scatter cushions off the sofa before she motioned the pair of us to sit there. Not giving us anything we could throw, however lightweight, to distract her.

“What now?” Matt asked, trying to control the waver in his voice and not quite succeeding.

“We wait,” Rosalind said. She sat in one of the chairs opposite and pulled the mobile phone out of her coat pocket again. She keyed in a different number rather than hitting redial, her eyes flicking to her wrist-watch before she put the phone up to her ear.

“It’s me,” she said when the call was answered. “How’s our little guest behaving?”

Reynolds.

I felt Matt stiffen alongside me, felt him draw breath and hold it, trying to hear what was being said even though he knew he didn’t stand a chance.

“Good, let’s hope she stays that way,” Rosalind said now, giving the pair of us a cold straight look.

There was another burst of speech that might have been agitated, or it might just have been the quality of the speaker in the handset.

“Not much longer,” Rosalind said in reply, soothing. “Listen, I may need you to arrange another nice little auto accident for me-Charlie and the child’s father.” A smile. “Yes, I thought you might. By all means make it look that way I’ll bring them down to you shortly. Who?” The smile widened. “Oh, I’ve sent Sean Meyer and Greg off on a wild-goose chase. Divide and conquer. They won’t be any trouble.” The smile blinked out. “When Tm ready. Just you be ready to move the child. I’ve offered her to Felix Vaughan. Oh, you’ll still get paid. Don’t worry about that. Just make sure she’s ready to go in an hour.” And she ended the call. Clearly not one for long good-byes, Rosalind.

“Where is she?” The question fought its way past Matt’s clenched teeth, as though he’d been trying to force himself not to beg.

“Somewhere safe, nearby,” Rosalind said, putting the phone away, giving him a look that clearly said he wasn’t going to get any more than that out of her.

“I assume from that,” I said, “that you and the charming Mr. Reynolds were behind Barry O’Halloran’s crash.”

She nodded.

Frances Neagley would be relieved to find out the truth behind her partner’s death, I thought. If only I could be sure I was going to live long enough to tell her the news.

“What happened, Rosalind? You decided to get rid of him and then you found out about the money, was that it?”

“Something like that,” she agreed. “I thought it was too risky for Greg to meet with her, but I let him talk me into it-of course, I didn’t realize at the time why he was so keen on that.” She shook her head, almost crossly. “I wanted just to let Reynolds get in there and snatch the child from the start, keep us out of it, but Greg hightailed it down to Boston with his tongue hanging out. Couldn’t wait to bring her back up here and parade her in front of me.” She let her breath out fast, annoyed. “Maybe it would have been simpler all round if I’d gotten Reynolds to arrange an accident for Greg instead.”

“Very probably,” I said. I paused and only kept my voice neutral by sheer force of will. “You’re very patient, keeping Reynolds on when he bungled Ella’s kidnap first in Boston, and then again at the house. Must have been quite a shock for you when I caught him.”

“I told him to make sure he took care of you first,” she said, shaking her head. “He was lucky I managed to help him get loose while you were downstairs. Good thing Greg isn’t a soldier, or we’d never have gotten away with it right under his nose like that.” She allowed herself a small smile. “Reynolds sure wasn’t happy, though. You made yourself quite an enemy there.”

I matched my tone to hers and there was no warmth in any of it. “If Reynolds has something special planned for us, it’s going to be hard to make it look like just another accident.”

“Oh, you’d be amazed what can be covered up by a good strong fire,” she said.

“Sean will know.”

She smiled with every indication of amusement. “What makes you think he won’t be dead by then, too?”