Siege

Thirteen

‘WHAT WAS THAT, Mom?’

‘I don’t know, honey,’ said Abby Levinson, giving her son a reassuring smile as they walked back towards the hotel. ‘Probably nothing.’

But the heavy bang had unnerved her. She looked across at her father, who was walking next to the road on the other side of Ethan, and now it was his turn to give her a reassuring look – the sort of look he’d been giving her all her life. As always, he was a strong, calming presence.

‘Definitely nothing,’ he said, ruffling Ethan’s hair. ‘You always hear stuff like this in big cities. New York’s much noisier than London.’

‘Is New York nicer?’ asked Ethan.

His grandpa laughed. ‘I’m biased. I grew up there. But I like both. Although maybe we should have come to London at a different time of year.’

He pushed his hat down over his head as a gust of wind threatened to send it flying. It was beginning to rain again, and Abby contemplated pulling out her umbrella for the last fifty yards of the journey, before deciding against it and increasing her pace.

It had been a fun, if exhausting, day. A visit to the London Dungeon, lunch at McDonald’s, the London Eye, and finally the Aquarium. Ethan had had a great time, and in the end, that was what counted. It had been almost a year to the day since his father left the family home to supposedly ‘find himself’, having concluded that, actually, parenthood and its attendant responsibilities wasn’t for him, and Ethan had taken his absence hard. This trip, combining the Thanksgiving holiday with his seventh birthday, was a way of taking his mind off his father and having some fun. Although Abby had to admit she was amazed at how expensive London was. And how grey and cold. She should have expected it, of course. After all, the UK had never been known for its fine weather. But maybe she’d just got too used to Florida’s blue skies and its warm sunshine on her back. Tomorrow she was going to do some Christmas shopping in the West End on her own – a little bit of much-needed ‘me’ time before they flew home on Saturday morning – while her dad took Ethan to the Natural History Museum. The two of them loved spending time together, and it was important that Ethan had a strong male role model in his life now that Daniel was gone.

The second bang stopped her dead in her tracks. It was louder than the first. Other passers-by had stopped too, and they were now looking in the direction the noise had come from. One man looked at her and raised his eyebrows, before turning away.

‘And what do you think that was, Mom?’

Abby didn’t answer her son. She was watching a thin plume of smoke rising up through the rain and gathering dusk, somewhere beyond the other side of Hyde Park. She suddenly felt very vulnerable out here in the cold and gloom of this sprawling foreign city far from home.

A police car raced through the traffic past Marble Arch with sirens blaring. It was heading in the direction of the smoke.

‘Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with us,’ Ethan’s grandpa replied over the noise of the siren. ‘And I’m getting wet out here. Come on, let’s get inside.’

He put a protective arm round both their shoulders, steering them towards home, and even though he was barely as tall as her and almost seventy-five years old, his touch made her feel a little safer.

Trying hard not to grip her son’s hand too hard, Abby hurried past the tall concierge – a guy who’d smiled mischievously at her every time she’d seen him before but who was now frowning anxiously – and into the warmth and security of the Stanhope Hotel.