Third Strike

CHAPTER 9

“They arrived five days ago,” my mother said. “Introduced themselves as colleagues of your father, from America. Said that he’d issued an open invitation to look us up whenever they were in England. I—I had no real reason to doubt them. From the things they said, they clearly knew Richard, and they seemed very pleasant … at first.”

She took a deep breath that wavered on the way out, and sipped a mouthful of tea from a delicate Spode cup. It rattled slightly when she put it back onto its saucer and she frowned at it, as though the cup had shaken of its own volition.

“When did you realize they were … serious?” I asked.

We were at the long table in the kitchen, sitting across the corner from each other, so I was close but she didn’t feel I was staring right at her, accusing her. Like this was some kind of interrogation.

Sean had found a roll of duct tape in the back of the Shogun. I’d helped him drag my mother’s unwanted houseguests out to the garage and left him to deal with them. I didn’t ask what he intended to do and, if I’m honest, I didn’t much care. I was too busy trying not to concentrate on the throbbing in my left leg, or how easily I could assuage that ache with one of the painkillers I’d wanted ever since we’d got off the flight.

Instead, following Sean’s silent prompting, I’d sat at the table and let my mother go through the ritual of making tea, spooning loose leaves into a warmed pot, adding water right on the boil, letting it brew, and then filtering it through a strainer into cups so translucently fragile that you had to pour the milk in first or they’d shatter. By the time she’d stopped fussing she seemed more settled, but it proved a transient state.

“More or less as soon as they’d finished their first cup of tea,” she said in answer to the last question, looking fretful again. “I should never have let them into the house, but you just don’t expect …”

“They’re professionals,” I said dryly. “I’m not surprised you didn’t clock them.”

She tried for a smile but couldn’t summon the will required for it to stand up by itself. As soon as she let go, it fell over. “As a JP who’s heard I forget how many cases of fake Gas Board inspectors conning their way into old ladies’ houses and rifling their handbags, I feel very foolish to have been taken in by them,” she admitted, “however briefly.”

“I would say you’ve coped extremely well for a hostage,” I said, taking a sip from my own cup. I don’t know if it was the pot or the china, but it tasted perfect. Unless it’s over ice and awash with slices of lemon, the Americans just can’t do tea. A bag on a string dunked into a cup of lukewarm milky water. I’d given up drinking the stuff.

“I didn’t want them to see how afraid I was, so I tried to ignore them as best I could,” she said in a small, austere voice, gesturing to her hair and clothes. “Not let them get to me. Carry on as though nothing was happening. I suppose you find that rather silly.”

“Not at all.” I shook my head. “Most people would have totally fallen apart. Trust me—I’ve watched it happen.”

She stared at me for a moment with a slightly puzzled expression on her face, and I realized with a sense of guilt that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d offered her praise for anything.

But that one, I reminded myself, was very much a two-way street.

I swallowed and asked with great care, “Did they … hurt you?”

She gave me a quick glance, but her gaze wouldn’t latch with mine and went sliding off past my shoulder. “Not as such,” she said, evasive. “But the chap—Don—made it painfully clear what he was prepared to do if I wasn’t ‘a good girl,’ as he put it.”

Her gaze skated round the kitchen walls and finally dropped into my cup, which was three-quarters empty. Relieved by the excuse, she jumped up and stretched for the teapot from beneath its cosy in the middle of the table. I tried not to let my impatience show while she did what she needed to in order to settle. And to come to a decision about how much of it she was willing to let out into the open.

“He seemed to have some particular perversions of a sexual nature that revolved around older women,” she said at last, prim but all in a rush, sitting ramrod-straight on the hard-backed chair. “He spent some time expounding on the subject, about what he—” She broke off, pressed a shaky hand to her mouth as though just to speak of it made her physically sick. I started to reach for her, instinctively, but she waved me off.

And I could empathize with that completely. I knew exactly what it was to abhor the thought of being touched. By anyone. It didn’t matter who.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” she said, low, when she could speak again. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said, my voice rough with a prickling sense of rage that wasn’t directed at her but had no other outlet. “What the hell have you got to be sorry about?”

“I never understood what it was really like for you, did I?” she murmured, and the sudden unwelcome swerve in the conversation made the hairs stand bolt upright all along my forearms.

Oh no. Don’t go there. Not now … .

I had to look away from her at that point, focusing instead on an errant fleck of tea leaf that had escaped into my cup and was floating on the surface, because my mother had begun to cry.

Although, cry was the wrong word to describe it. Cry suggested a maelstrom of unbearable feeling but if I hadn’t been watching her face I would never have known. She cried almost without emotion, without great sobs racking her body, without the telltale catch in her voice or the clog in her throat. Instead, as she stared into the past the tears fell unheeded from her eyes and dropped onto the surface of the table below her, like offerings to a long-forgotten god.

And just when I was considering prayer myself, I heard the slam of the front door and footsteps on the tiles. A moment later, Sean appeared in the kitchen doorway.

He saw the pair of us like that and froze in mid-stride. It was only when I threw him a desperate Don’t leave me here alone smile, that he came forwards. He was wiping his hands on one of the old rags that my father kept stored in a corner of the garage, although for what purpose I’d never discerned. My father’s idea of do-it-yourself was personally telephoning for a tradesman.

My mother suddenly seemed to register both Sean’s presence and the unaccustomed wetness of her eyes at the same moment. She turned her head away sharply and whipped out her handkerchief.

“Well,” Sean said to me, tactfully ignoring her distress, “either that pair are better versed at not answering questions than I am at asking them, or they genuinely don’t know anything.”

He moved across to the sink, raising an eyebrow at me over the top of my mother’s head as he went. I shook my head a little.

He ran the hot water and squeezed washing-up liquid onto his hands. The rag he’d put down on the draining board was, I saw, stained a distinctive dark red that would no doubt turn brown as it dried. I got up, took the sugar bowl off the table and tipped half the granulated contents into his hands as he scrubbed at them, so the sugar would act as an abrasive. He nodded and his eyes went to my mother again.

How is she?

I don’t know.

I shrugged, but it was a truthful response.

“If we’re going to turn them over to the local police, we have to do it soon,” he said out loud. “We’ve already delayed almost longer than we can justify, not to mention interrogating them.”

My mother’s brittle poise had recovered, but at Sean’s quiet comment it seemed to shatter afresh.

“Oh! Do we have to?” she said wanly. “Can’t we just let them go? I mean, surely, now you’re here …”

“Mother, what do you think will happen if we let them go?” I demanded. “We can’t stay more than a day or so. Do you expect them to give us their word that they’ll leave you alone in future?”

She swung a beseeching gaze towards Sean, but he proved no softer touch.

“I’m sorry,” he said, face grave, “but we really do need to get back to the States as soon as possible.”

Her face began to crumble. She jerked her chin away from us and busied herself by fetching Sean a mug from the row hooked under the shelf on the Welsh dresser and pouring tea from the pot. Still no best china for him, I saw with a little spurt of anger.

We sat. Sean took the chair alongside me to give my mother space, and sedately drank his tea. As I watched his fingers curl through the handle of the mug, I realized that the delicacy of a Spode teacup would have discomfitted him. Perhaps that was why my mother hadn’t offered that choice. Belatedly, and somewhat ashamedly, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Even more so when she offered Sean a tentative but apparently genuine smile.

“Well, thank you—both of you—for coming so quickly,” she said. Her eyes flicked back to me. “I wasn’t sure, when you rang, if I’d said enough, but that dreadful woman was listening in and I couldn’t say more—”

“You said enough,” Sean assured her.

“Yes,” she said faintly. We were all silent. Then she took a breath and said, “I know I should prosecute them, for what they did, but I … can’t. Besides anything else, we don’t know what that might do to Richard’s situation.”

“Did they say anything to you at all—about why they were here?” I asked. “Or what this is all about?”

She shook her head, frowning. “Not really,” she said. “I knew something was wrong, of course, but until you told me, I’d no idea it was … as bad as you say.” She looked up suddenly, hope growing on her face. “But he can come home now, can’t he? That would solve things.”

“Not yet,” I said, feeling mean for dashing her back down again. “I’m sorry. He was still in jail when we left.”

“You said he’d been arrested in a b—brothel,” she said bravely, wincing either at the sound or the very thought of the word. “What on earth was he doing there?”

I felt my mouth start to open while I scrambled to cobble together a believable lie, but my brain refused to do anything other than replay the memory tape of us barging into that room and finding my father well on the way to a compromising position with the naked, painfully young Asian girl. It was an image I didn’t think I’d ever fully erase.

“He was most likely coerced,” Sean said coolly, stepping in. “Charlie saw him picked up from his hotel and taken there, and he didn’t exactly look willing. They were probably holding the threat of your safety over him.” He glanced at me. “It would explain why they didn’t need to stay with him to make sure he … played his part.”

He’d been putting a little too much realism into that particular piece of acting for my taste, but I didn’t voice the opinion.

“I see.” She was silent for a moment. “But what I don’t understand—about any of this—is why? Why pick on us to … torment in this way?”

“We were rather hoping,” I said, “that you might be able to tell us that.”

“I can’t!” she said, voice climbing towards shrill. She stopped, took a breath, and continued in a lower register. “What I mean is, I have no idea why those … people turned up on my doorstep. Richard never mentioned anything before he left.”

“Are you sure?” I said, adding quickly, “I’m not suggesting you’re going senile, Mother. But with hindsight, has he seemed distracted, or worried about anything lately?”

“Well, he certainly hasn’t been himself since he last returned from America,” she admitted, sliding me a reproachful little look over the rim of her cup.

I don’t remember much about the four days immediately following my near-fatal shooting, which was probably just as well. But when I was finally allowed to wake in that hospital in Maine, my father’s unfriendly face was the first thing that greeted me. He’d made his displeasure at my situation pretty clear without, it seemed to me, managing to express much concern for my welfare. I’d taken what comfort I could from the fact that he was there at all but, afterward I’d wondered if he’d been lured across the Atlantic mainly by a professional interest in the intricacies of the surgery I’d undergone.

“What about this doctor friend of his they mentioned on the news?” Sean asked, cutting into my gloomy thoughts. “Jeremy Lee. They were dropping hints that your husband might have had something to do with his death.”

“He most certainly did not,” my mother said stoutly. The speed of her response had a knee-jerk quality to it, but the words were underwritten by a tremor of doubt. She rushed to cover it. “Richard believes life is absolutely sacrosanct. He’s dedicated his career—his life—to its preservation,” she said, more firmly now. And, just to prove she was feeling more like her old self, she added, “Something you might have difficulty understanding.”

Sean was hard to read at the best of times, and now he gave no indication that he took offense at her remark. Whether he did or not was immaterial. I took offense enough for both of us.

Instead, he rose and nodded to her, expressionless. “I’d better go and check that our guests are still sitting uncomfortably. If you’ll excuse me?” he said with excruciating politeness. “Thank you for the tea, Mrs. Foxcroft.”

He walked out and, a few moments later, I heard the front door slam behind him.

My mother, as if only just realizing what she’d done, showed her distress in the flutter of a hand to her throat, the tremulous mouth and doe eyes.

I rose, too, unmoved by the tricks I’d seen her use too many times before. At least it was a sign she was almost back to normal.

Didn’t take her long after a four-day ordeal, though, did it?

“Pack some things,” I said, abrupt. “If we can’t bring my father to you, we’ll have to take you to him, and try to get to the bottom of this. Make sure you’ve got your passport.”

I gathered Sean’s and my empty crockery and took them to the sink to rinse out. When I was done, I turned back to find my mother had risen but not approached, as if she wasn’t sure of her reception if she got closer.

“Charlotte, I’m sorry,” she said, sounding convincingly wretched. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, you probably didn’t,” I said tiredly. “But just bear this in mind, Mother, before you’re so quick to condemn Sean. If he wasn’t the way he is—if we both weren’t, come to that—you’d still be stuck here listening to Don’s plans for a funfilled evening by the fire.”