Second Shot

Four

I didn’t expect to hear from Simone again for a couple of weeks. Not until her tame private investigators had made more progress, at any rate. And because that meant I could put off making a decision about whether I was really ready to go back to the States or not, I put it off.

It was something of a surprise, therefore, to get a call on my mobile just before six thirty the next morning.

It was still dark outside and I could hear rain slatting against the outside of the window Disorientated, I rolled over in my bed and groped for the phone. By the time I’d flicked it open and recognized Sean’s number as the caller, I was fully awake.

I hadn’t gone back with him to Harrington’s office the afternoon before. Instead, Sean had taken Simone and Ella home himself and had offered to arrange overnight cover for her. Apparently she’d dug her heels in at the idea of being surrounded by a group of strangers, insisting that Matt was unlikely to try again and she’d be in touch when she needed us.

“Sean,” I said now by way of greeting. “What’s up?”

He heard the wary note in my voice. He must have done. He’d been cool towards me since our altercation of the day before. For the first time in weeks pride had dictated that I go back to the room I was renting near his base of operations in King’s Langley rather than to his place. But as soon as I’d shut the door behind me and the silence had closed in, I’d regretted it. I knew I was punishing myself as much as Sean, but forgiving him too readily had seemed much worse an option.

“I’ve just had a call from Simone,” he said. “Apparently the press have got wind of what happened yesterday and they’re camped out on her doorstep.”

“The press?” I repeated, alarmed, my first instinct one of guilt. For a moment I had the irrational fear that somehow the run-in Sean and I had had with the security guard the day before had leaked out and made the headlines.

“Yeah, it would seem that her ex didn’t appreciate being slung out on his ear and he must have decided to go very public about the whole thing.”

“Oh,” I said, hit by relief and then dismay in equal parts. “Shit.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” he said, his voice wry. “Anyway, she’s under siege and she needs some support. I told her to close all the curtains and stay inside, and offered to send a full team, but she just wants you. How soon can you be up there?” He gave me the address, a quiet suburb in northwest London. Not exactly your usual lottery winner neighborhood.

I sat up in bed and swung my legs out from under the covers. “On the bike? About forty-five minutes,” I said, thinking of my Honda FireBlade sitting chained up in the garage below. Nothing sliced through the morning rush quite like a big-power motorcycle.

“No, I think you should swing by the office and pick up a pool vehicle,” Sean said. “Then if things get too bad you can always move the pair of them to a more secure location.”

“If I do, it could take me another hour to get to her now.”

“She’s not in any immediate danger. The press are a nuisance, but they’re not about to break down her front door for the sake of a story.”

“OK,” I said, on my feet and heading for the shower. “Tell her I’m on my way and I’ll be with her as soon as I can.”

“I already did,” he said with the ghost of a smile in his voice. There was a pause, almost a hesitation. “Are you OK?”

I stopped moving, heard the tension under the words and knew there was a lot riding on my answer, one way or another.

“Fine,” I said at last, and found I had to force myself to breathe. I swallowed, started again, more casually this time. “I’m fine, Sean. Don’t worry about it.”

“Good,” he said, so devoid of emotion that I didn’t know if I’d said the right thing or not. “I’ll let you get sorted,” he added, more businesslike. “Take care, Charlie.” And with that he was gone.

“Yeah,” I said to a dead connection. “You, too.”

Simone’s house was an ordinary postwar semidetached, with fake Elizabethan-style timber on the upper story and crisp red brick below The front door was solid wood and painted pillar-box red. There was an integral garage to one side, with a tall narrow gate leading to the back garden.

It looked as though the front garden had been on the neglected side, although the booted feet of the journalists and photographers now trampling all over it had reduced it to a soggy brown mush underfoot and made it difficult to tell.

I braked to a halt just short of the patchy gravel driveway and called ahead on my mobile before I attempted going in. It rang out at the other end for what seemed like a long time before Simone answered.

I wasn’t brave or foolish enough to attempt getting out of the car while I waited for her to pick up. As I eyed the movements of the pack in front of me, it was like watching hyenas bickering among themselves while they waited for the next kill.

It had taken me two and a half hours, all told, from Sean’s phone call to my arrival, including the time I’d spent detouring to pick up one of the company Shoguns.

I’d spent a lot of the journey sitting in neutral, looking at the brake lights of the car in front through the sweep of the windscreen wipers, and thinking about Sean. Or, more specifically, thinking about his actions of the day before.

I understood his motives, in a way, but surely he could have found another method of expressing his doubts over my abilities, short of pulling a knife on me. I could just imagine what my father would have to say on the subject, if anybody ever tortured me enough to make me tell him. He and Sean had never exactly been close, and this would hardly have endeared him further.

One of the photographers turned in the driveway, spotted the Sho-gun and tried to get his camera up without his fellow paparazzi noticing. When the rest finally cottoned on they all surged towards me, elbowing one another out of the way, their apparent camaraderie vanishing the instant there was the scent of fresh blood in the air.

I put the car into gear and nudged forwards. The pressmen took one look at the substantial bull bars on the front of the four-by-four and reluctantly parted to let me through. Had they not done so, I was in two minds about whether I was prepared to stop.

I pulled up as close to the front door as I could manage, checked my shirt collar out of habit and shoved my way through the jostling pack, ignoring the questions and microphones and flashguns that were thrust into my face. Simone must have been watching for me because she opened the front door just as I reached it and I slid through the gap with hardly a pause.

The baying of the press continued outside, muffled by the thickness of the wooden door. Simone leaned back against the timber and closed her eyes momentarily.

The hallway was small and painted pale yellow, with three doorways leading off it and a carpeted staircase to the upper floor. The pictures on the walls were conventional mass market prints in cheap but cheerful frames. I wondered briefly if the fact that Simone could now afford to shop for originals would change her taste in art.

“How long have they been here?” I said, jerking my head towards the driveway.

“It seems like forever,” Simone said wearily, opening her eyes. “Since first light, I think. That’s when they started ringing the goddamn doorbell, anyway.”

“Where’s Ella?”

She rolled her eyes upwards. “They were scaring her, banging on the front windows, so I told her to stay upstairs. She has her own TV and stuff in her room.”

“Sean said Matt had gone public. What happened?”

Simone glanced briefly towards the stairwell as though to check there were no tiny ears within hearing distance. Then she picked up a folded newspaper from the hall table and thrust it towards me.

“Here. Read it for yourself.”

I scanned the front page quickly. It was all laid out under a big bold, if somewhat coy, banner headline:

R!CH B!TCH!

Underneath it was a luridly written story about how Simone had won millions and had then, with casual cruelty, thrown the father of her child out of the house they’d shared for the past five years. I glanced up to find Simone watching me, her face tight with embarrassment and anger. I read the piece again, more fully this time, making her wait.

Even allowing for gutter press exaggeration, Matt had clearly wasted no time airing his grievances. The way he’d told it, the moment Simone had realized the size of her win, she had more or less sent him out to the supermarket and changed the locks while he was gone. Now she was refusing to give him access to the daughter he idolized and, when he’d tried to bring the little girl a simple present in a public restaurant, Simone’s “hired thugs”-that was us-had jumped him.

It was the stuff of tabloid editors’ dreams. A scorned lover, a tug-of-love child, a whiff of violence, and-best of all-money. Lots of money. They’d wrung every last ounce of salacious indignation out of the story.

Somehow they’d managed to snatch a long-range picture of Simone, cradling Ella, with a caption claiming she was “heartlessly out on a spending spree in London’s Knightsbridge” while her rejected suitor was reduced to camping on a distant relation’s sofa.

In the picture both Simone and Ella were wearing the same clothes they’d had on the previous day Some fast-moving paparazzo had obviously snapped them in the street as we’d left the restaurant. The fact that there were clearly no shopping bags to be seen was conveniently overlooked.

When I’d reached the bottom of the page I looked up and caught the sheer disgust on Simone’s face.

“How could Matt do this to us?” she demanded, her voice low with rage. “And how the hell can they get away with printing crap like that? It’s all pure fabrication.”

“People lash out without thinking when they’re hurt,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to come to her ex’s defense. “And what Matt didn’t tell them they’ve probably made up anyway. Once you’ve let them out of their cage, you can’t hope to control them.”

She swallowed, pulling a face, and was about to say more when Ella edged into view at the top of the stairs. She’d lost the bounce I remembered from the day before, seeming listless and subdued.

“What is it, sweetie?” Simone said quickly.

“I’m thirsty, Mummy,” she complained, her voice whiny “Is it OK if I come down and get a drink of water?”

Simone’s face softened. “Of course you can.”

Ella negotiated the stairs with care, holding on with one hand and trailing a comfort blanket and a small rather grubby stuffed Eeyore in the other, its detachable tail obviously long-since lost. She clutched the bedraggled toy donkey tight to her chest as she came past us, giving me a wide berth.

Simone’s smile for her daughter hardened as she watched her disappear into the kitchen at the end of the hallway. A moment later I caught a glimpse of the little girl dragging a wooden chair across the floor so she could climb onto it and reach the sink under the kitchen window.

“I hate what this is doing to her,” Simone said quietly.

“Is there anyone you could go and stay with?” I asked.

She frowned and shook her head. “Nobody I’d want to subject to something like this,” she said, jerking her head towards the swarming pack at the front of the house.

“Are you sure — no family or friends?” I pushed. “It might help if you can get away, even just for a few days. The press are vicious while they’re after you, but they tend to have a pretty short attention span.” As I well knew from personal experience.

“No, there’s only me and Ella,” Simone said firmly, wrapping her arms around her body as though she was cold. She bit her lip. “Matt was the one with the big family.” She spoke of him in the past tense now, I noted, like he was dead.

“What about a hotel?” If nothing else, it would provide an additional layer of security. Without that, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that I was going to have to get Sean to send in more people, regardless of how Simone felt about that. Just getting the two of them out of the house was probably going to be a nightmare. Damn. I hadn’t been on the job ten minutes and already I was thinking about calling for backup.

Then, in the kitchen, two things happened almost simultaneously.

Ella dropped her drinking glass and let out a piercing shriek of terror. Her cry, and the sound of the glass shattering on the tiled floor, hit us at the same time or so close together that it was impossible to tell which event had caused the other.

Simone and I both sprinted for the kitchen. I was the one who reached it first, elbowing the door wide. Inside, we found Ella standing frozen on the chair, surrounded by a pool of water and shards of broken glass.

She was still screaming at the two-headed apparition that loomed at the kitchen window-two rogue photographers, pressed up against the glass with their flashguns firing like machine pistols. Simone had drawn the blinds, but one was snagged on a potted plant on the window ledge and there was a big enough gap for a lens to get a perfect view.

I took two strobe-lit strides into the room and snatched Ella off her perch, spinning her out of line of the cameras and yelling at Simone to sort out the blinds and blank off the window as I did so. The pressmen jeered and hammered on the glass outside.

Ella got a death grip on my shirt collar and continued to screech in my ear, even after we were safely back in the hallway. Out of my depth, I patted her back and made shushing noises. Simone appeared by my side, white-faced, and tried to take her daughter from me, but Ella held on tighter still and wailed all the louder. I could feel her bony little knees digging into my ribs as she clung on.

We ended up unpeeling her, the way you disentangle a frightened cat that’s got its claws firmly hooked up in your sweater. Eventually, she was forced to let go of me and grabbed for her mother’s hair instead, still grizzling.

For a moment Simone and I stood and stared at each other over the top of Ella’s head.

“Do you think you could find us a hotel for tonight?” Simone asked in a small, shocked voice.

I nodded, pulling out my phone. Sean had a list at the office of places all over the country that had good security and who were prepared to work with us to protect a principal.

Before I could punch in the number she added, ‘And tomorrow we’ll go-get away, like you suggested.” The horde outside continued to roar and clamor like a lynch mob, inflamed by their minor success. Simone rocked Ella and listened to them and her face grew stony “Would America be far enough, do you think?”

She wants to go to the States,” I said. “We know that-,” Sean began. “Not next week, or next month, but now,” I cut in. “Today, if Madeleine can get her on a flight. What were her exact words? Oh yes. ‘Everybody’s telling me how rich I am-I’ll buy a goddamn private jet if I have to.’ I think that was the gist of it.”

“What happened?” he said, clipped.

I went through the events of the last hour, adding, “Now she’s getting over being scared, she’s pretty angry instead.”

“Hardly surprising,” he said, and then was silent for a moment at the other end of the line. “And how do you feel about it?”

I shrugged. A useless gesture when he wasn’t there to see it.

I was in the living room, with the curtains firmly drawn. Simone’s house didn’t have double glazing and I kept my voice low, only too aware of the movement and raucous chatter going on outside the window. Si-mone was upstairs, trying to settle a still-tearful Ella in her bedroom. I reckoned she was likely to be there for some time.

“I think getting Simone — and Ella-out from under the media spotlight would be the best thing for them right now,” I said carefully. “I’m just not exactly thrilled about the prospect of going along for the ride.”

“The circumstances are very different from Florida, Charlie,” he said quietly

I shut my eyes, gripping the phone more tightly and feeling like a coward. “Yes, I know.”

He sighed. “OK, I’ll call you as soon as we’ve got Simone’s travel arrangements sorted out,” he said. “We’ll contact the private investigators as well, make sure they’re briefed. I’ll get Madeleine onto it.”

Madeleine ran Sean’s office for him and handled the electronic security side of the firm as well as being an organizational genius and general paragon of virtue.

At one point I’d thought she and Sean were more than work colleagues, and that was probably yet another reason she and I had never quite got along as well as we might have done. Somehow it didn’t help that, in the last few months, Sean had started talking about making her a partner. With more and more clients coming to Sean to secure their data as much as their personnel, I couldn’t argue with his logic, but on some lower level it still rankled.

“Look,” he went on now, sounding weary. “If you’re really not ready for this, Charlie, tell me and I’ll assign someone else.” He paused a moment, as though giving me one last chance to change my mind.

“Right now, I don’t know,” I said, aware of a prickle of nervous tension down my spine at my own vacillation. “I suppose I thought I’d have longer to get my head round the idea.”

“I’ll call you back in an hour,” Sean said, without inflection. “You’ve got until then to make your mind up.”

“OK,” I said, chastened. “Would you tell Madeleine if we’re not on a flight out of here today then we’re going to need a hotel for tonight as well?” I glanced at the curtained window “Simone wants to get out of the house as soon as possible.”

“Mm, I can’t say I blame her,” Sean agreed. “For the moment, though, just sit tight and let’s hope the press get fed up with hanging around in the cold. We’ll have her out of the country within a couple of days at the outside, in any case.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I’m being a pain about this, but-”

“Don’t worry about it,” he cut in. “If you’re not ready, you’re not ready. Just make a decision and let me know when I call back.”

His tone was nothing but reasonable and I ended the call aware of a deep stab of disappointment that he seemed to have given in to my weakness quite so easily

It was another half an hour before Simone reappeared downstairs. I was in the kitchen by that time, mopping up the spilt water and wrapping the bits of broken glass in newspaper so I could put them into the dustbin later. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t my job, but it needed doing and I wasn’t about to stand on ceremony. The blinds were still drawn and I had the lights on, making it hard to tell that it was still morning.

“How’s Ella?” I asked, getting to my feet.

Simone hovered in the doorway, looking tired and strained. “OK, I guess,” she said. She paused, more of a hesitation. “She wants to see you.”

“Ella?” I said, surprised.

Simone nodded and stepped back into the hallway, taking it for granted that I’d follow

I dumped the wrapped-up package of glass onto the kitchen worktop and went after her, aware of a prickle of nerves. I had almost no experience with children of Ella’s age. I had no real experience with children of any age, for that matter. She’d been through traumas over the past two days that no four-year-old should have to endure and I had no idea how to counsel or comfort her, if that was what was required. Hell, I couldn’t even do that for myself.

I opened my mouth to ask Simone why Ella was demanding an audience, but she was already halfway up the stairs and I had to hurry to catch up. By the time I reached the landing she was waiting for me by one of the bedroom doorways, beckoning me on.

My immediate impression of Ella’s bedroom was that it was overwhelmingly pink. Pink carpet, pink curtains, pink quilt cover with pink unicorns on it. Even as a small child I remember disliking the color and my mother would have died rather than decorate so heavy-handedly. She wouldn’t even buy anything other than plain-colored lavatory paper.

Ella was sitting up in bed with the covers banked protectively round her. She was cuddling the battered Eeyore tightly against her chest and absently chewing on one of his ears. From the state of the animal, I gathered this was something of a regular habit. Those violet eyes regarded me, wide and unwavering.

Simone went over to her and perched on the edge of the single bed. Ella tugged on her mother’s sleeve until their heads were together, then whispered something into Simone’s ear, hiding her lips behind her cupped hand. And all the time, her eyes never left me.

I tried to keep my expression bland, but I never did like being talked about behind my back. Even by a four-year-old.

Now Simone was looking at me, too, her cheeks flared pink to match the bedroom decor.

“Urn, she wants to know what happened to your neck,” Simone said.

“My neck?” I repeated, dumbly Automatically, my hand went up to my shirt collar, checking it was in place. It was. For a moment I couldn’t work out when Ella might have caught a glimpse of my scar, but then I realized she must have done so when her mother was wrestling her away from me in the hallway

Simone’s gaze met mine and I saw shock in her eyes. I think for the first time it really came home to her what it meant to be a bodyguard. And what it might mean to need one.

The scar was a thin line that ran round the base of my throat from my voice box to just below my right ear, crossed by fading stitch lines like something from a horror flick. Too uneven to be surgical, too precise to be accidental, it looked like what it was. An attempt to murder me that had very nearly succeeded.

Simone nodded, just a single jerk of her head, still looking embarrassed. ‘And she wants to know if it hurts,” she said, speaking like her lips were numb.

I shook my head. “Not really,” I said. “It happened a long time ago.” Not quite two years, but to Ella that would be half a lifetime.

Ella whispered again. Simone’s discomfort deepened. Ella tugged insistently She was hiding her face behind her hair now, peeping out at me from underneath it.

“She wants to know if she can kiss it better,” Simone said, flushing. There was a pleading message in her eyes, but I couldn’t tell if she was desperate for me to refuse or comply.

Ella snuck another coy glance through her lashes and suddenly I found myself saying, “Of course she can,” in a disconnected voice I didn’t entirely recognize.

The right choice, obviously. Simone’s answering look was one of relief. She half picked Ella up so she could lean up towards me across her mother’s lap.

I found my feet moving me forwards. I bent and dragged the collar down and felt the lightest touch of Ella’s lips on the side of my neck before I stepped back quickly, yanking my shirt back into place.

“There,” Ella said with satisfaction, pulling back, smiling. “All better now?”

I dredged a smile from somewhere even though my mouth tasted of ashes. “Yes, Ella,” I said, my voice hollow. ‘All better now.”

I waited by the doorway while Simone settled Ella down and switched on the portable TV on the shelf at the foot of her bed, tuning it to the cartoons. On the screen a pair of pink hippos in what appeared to be ballet dancing outfits were hitting each other over the head with frying pans, each blow accompanied by the sound effect of a hammer hitting a cast-iron rivet.

I wondered at the wisdom of letting Ella watch something like that, all things considered. I had visions of wild and uncontrollable nightmares. But, after her eyes had blankly followed the action for a few moments, she began to giggle. Good job I’m not a parent.

Simone ushered me out of the room and pulled the door almost closed behind her.

“Don’t shut it, Mummy,” Ella called.

“Don’t worry, sweetie. I won’t.”

I led the way back downstairs. Simone followed me into the kitchen and I offered to make coffee just so I had something to do with my hands. I noted the way Simone’s shoulders came down a fraction, seemingly thankful for the distraction.

“Actually, I’d rather have tea,” she said with a hesitant smile. “My English half coming out, I guess.”

I filled the kettle from the kitchen tap and plugged it in, half-waiting for Simone to start asking questions about the scar. When I glanced at her she seemed to be waiting for me to offer an explanation without prompting. No way.

“I’ve spoken to Sean,” I said instead. “He’s arranging flights to Boston for you as soon as possible.”

“Oh. Great.” She looked so relieved I shied away from telling her that there was a possibility I might not be going with them. “Thank you for doing that before-for Ella, I mean.”

“It’s no big deal,” I lied, then switched to the truth. “She’s a nice kid.”

Simone smiled. “She is,” she agreed softly. Her eyes slid to the blind that still covered the kitchen window and her next words seemed almost to be to herself. “I’d do anything to protect her.”

I said nothing. The kettle clicked off and I poured the boiling water onto teabags and mashed them with a spoon. I was more of a coffee drinker myself but Simone only had cheap instant, so tea seemed the lesser evil.

“Do you think it’s wrong to take a child away from its father?” she asked abruptly, as I was opening the fridge door.

I paused, milk bottle in hand. “That depends on why you’re taking them away,” I said. I shut the door and poured milk into the tea until it seemed about the right color, then put one cup on the worktop in front of her. She hardly seemed to notice it.

“I don’t really remember my father,” she said abruptly “He left when I was about the same age as Ella is now. My mother went back to her maiden name-Kerse. God, I’ve always hated that name.” She glanced at me and managed a tired smile. “The other kids at school always used to call me Curse. Can you imagine?”

“Children can be very cruel,” I said.

She nodded, distracted. “Mom would never talk about him. I suppose, the less she’d say, the more I wanted to know-just awkward, I guess.”

“I think that’s a natural reaction.”

“Not knowing why their marriage broke up-that’s the worst thing. Wondering if, somehow, I might have been to blame, you know? When we went over to Chicago just before my mom died, I hoped she’d tell me then, but she never did. She must have had her reasons, but she took them with her.”

“And you’re hoping-if you do find your father-that he might be able to give you his side of it?”

She nodded again, then gave a nervous laugh. “Maybe Matt’s right, and I should leave things as they are, but I’ve reached a stage in my life where I can’t move forwards without knowing who and what he is. And if he’s a monster, well-” She shrugged, with more bravado than nonchalance. “I’ll just have to deal with that one when I get to it. At least I’ll have you to protect me, won’t I?”

She lifted her cup, drank absently, oblivous to the way my face must have frozen. “It’s made me decide that I won’t ever try and keep Ella away from Matt,” she went on. “Not unless he does something really awful. If I thought for a moment he’d ever try to hurt her-”

My mobile started shrilling at that moment. I put my drink down and flipped the phone open. I hardly needed to glance at the display to know who was on the other end of the line.

“Hi, Sean.”

“Madeleine’s got seats reserved for Simone and Ella on tomorrow’s Virgin Atlantic flight to Boston out of Heathrow,” he said without preamble. “Whose name do you want me to give her for the third ticket?”

I remembered the look of stark terror on Ella’s face in the kitchen and then the delicate touch of her lips on the side of my throat.

I glanced across the room to where Simone stood now, wrapped in turmoil and memories, clutching her cup with both hands like it was some kind of lifeline.

What were my own fears compared to theirs?

“Mine,” I said.