“No,” Simone said without pause for thought.
I took a breath. “I’m not armed, Simone,” I said quietly “I can’t legally carry a gun over here. Maybe, if Neagley’s right, you should think about bringing in someone who can.”
“No. I won’t have guns around Ella.” Simone met my eyes, determined, stubborn. “Looks like you’ll have to do the best you can, Charlie.”
W
e picked up the trolleybus for our tour of Boston at the stop just outside the Aquarium, retracing our steps along the harbor front to get there. No more snow had fallen since our arrival, but despite the pale sunshine, what was on the ground was showing no signs of melting. Ella still seemed enthralled by it, dragging her mother on a meandering course to inspect the larger piles of the stuff.
As usual, I walked a pace or so behind Simone and to the side, keeping my eyes open. After her confession of the night before, she didn’t seem much inclined to talk to me, in any case.
There were around twenty stops on the tour and—with buses running every twenty-five minutes—you could get off and get back on again more or less at will. Simone sat next to Ella in the seats directly in front of mine. It was below freezing outside and the little girl was dressed up warmly against the bitter chill in the air, with fake-fur ear warmers and some new sheepskin mittens that were actually on strings from her coat sleeves. Just because Simone was rolling in it didn’t mean she was going to be happy if her daughter lost a brand-new glove.
The trolley took us on a set route, the driver giving an informal and joke-laden commentary that mainly seemed to center on how badly the British army had got its arse whupped during the War of Independence. I tried not to take it personally. We passed the house where Paul Revere lived with his fourteen children and the obelisk-like memorial to the battle of Bunker Hill.
Stop number six on the tour was Boston Common, an open area that presented a startlingly white blanket. The sun had put in an appearance and the reflection off the crystallized surface was almost too bright to look at directly
Ella jiggled in her seat at the sight of it, tugging on her mother’s sleeve, and when Simone bent towards her, whispered in her ear.
“I promised, didn’t I, sweetie?” Simone said as the bus came to a stop. She twisted in her seat as the bus slowed, and said casually over her shoulder, “We’ll get off here, Charlie. Ella wants a walk in the park.” And before I had a chance to object, they were on their feet and moving towards the doorway.
I hurried after them, trying to clamp down on my irritation. I had time briefly to wonder what part of the possibility of the increased danger Simone and I had discussed the night before she was having difficulty taking on board.
Boston Common was surprisingly quiet. Apart from the skaters on the frozen Frog Pond, who were all progressing in a slow clockwise crawl, I think the squirrels outnumbered the people. Ella quickly wore the novelty out of the huge white carpet that covered the grass, and it wasn’t until her mother suggested building a snowman that she perked up.
Ella was an enthusiastic but not very scientific snowman builder. Si-mone ended up being the one who scooped together enough snow to make a rounded body, while Ella ran round chucking wild fistfuls of the stuff at both of us and shrieking whenever she thought we were going to retaliate.
Simone just grinned at her and flicked me a reproachful little side ways look, as if to say,
How could you want to deprive her of this?
I picked up a handful of snow myself and molded it absently into a ball, but apart from dodging Ella’s less inaccurate throws, I didn’t join in the fun and games. Boston Common was open enough for nobody to be able to creep up on us without my being aware of it, but we seemed a long way from the surrounding streets and any passersby who might help to deter any attempt as well. Neagley’s warning went round and round in my head. Why hadn’t anyone asked more questions right from the start about Simone’s mystery father?
Without any activity to keep my circulation going, it was bitterly cold. I was glad I had a hat pulled down over my ears, but my cheeks were going numb. I huddled down farther inside my coat and tried not to shiver as I did yet another sweep of the area surrounding us, as I’d been doing every minute or so since we’d got off the trolleybus, without spotting anything that set any alarm bells ringing.
This time, though, there was a man walking along one of the pathways towards us. A big guy in a tweed flat hat and a three-quarter-length tweed coat, unbuttoned. It was too cold to be wearing a coat that way and I didn’t like the way his eyes never shifted away from Simone and Ella as he moved. Surely Tweed had seen a kid and her mother building a snowman before? I checked around me, looking for a second prong before I edged sideways so I was directly in his line of sight, blocking his view of my principals.
Not for the first time, I missed the weight of a 9mm SIG SAUER P226 on my hip. There were a lot of countries around the world where accredited UK bodyguards were allowed to carry a concealed weapon while they were on the job. The U.S., sadly, wasn’t one of them.
Tweed flicked his gaze onto me. Our eyes held for a second, and it was
only
then that I realized where I’d seen him before. It was the man from the Aquarium who’d lured Simone away from her daughter and me by the sea lion enclosure.
A nice, normal guy, huh?
I wheeled away and scooped up Ella, ignoring her wail of protest.
“We’re leaving,” I said sharply to Simone. She had just finished rolling a snowball the size of a watermelon for the snowman’s head and was halfway through lifting it onto the larger sphere of his body. She gave me a startled look but must have caught enough of what was in my face to quell any arguments she’d been about to make. She dropped the snowman’s head, which broke in two on the frozen earth. I thrust Ella into her arms and hurried the pair of them back towards Beacon Hill, which ran along the north side of the Common.
“What?” Simone demanded, breathless, as I hustled her along. “What is it?”
“Just keep moving,” I muttered, resisting the urge to glance round until we reached the edge of the park and scrambled up the steps by the Shaw Memorial. Tweed—Aquarium man—was still fifty meters behind us but closing in a leisurely kind of way Like he knew we didn’t have to hurry because he knew we had nowhere to go.
But luck was on our side for once. A lone cab was cruising towards us up the hill with its “for hire” light on. I stepped off the curb and stuck my arm out, abandoning my usual reluctance for transport I didn’t know. The driver swerved slightly towards me and pulled up right alongside, so all I had to do was lower my arm and my fingertips touched the rear handle. I yanked the door open and piled a baffled Simone and Ella inside, climbing in after them and slamming the door behind me.
I gave the driver the address of the hotel and he set off with commendable haste, setting up a wallow in the suspension like an ocean liner.
I looked back through the rear window as we made the first corner by the gold-domed State House building, to find Aquarium man standing by the curb, staring after us. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but it wasn’t difficult to read his body language, even at that distance, and I know anger when I see it.
I
t took Simone just about until we were back at Rowe’s Wharf before she’d got Ella quietened down enough to turn her attention to me. I greeted Simone’s shocked questions with a meaningful nod towards the back of the cabdriver’s head. For a moment Simone seemed set to protest, but then she looked away, concentrating on distracting Ella instead, and we didn’t speak at all until we were back at the hotel.
But as soon as we’d paid off the cab and headed for the hotel entrance, she grabbed my arm.
“What the hell was all that about, Charlie?” she demanded, keeping her voice low. I don’t know why. She was holding Ella balanced on her hip. The little girl was watching the pair of us intently and looked like she was picking up on every nuance.
“Remember the guy from the Aquarium?” I said. “Well he turned up again at the park, heading right for us. I don’t know if you believe in coincidence, Simone, but I — “
“The guy from the Aquarium,” she repeated flatly, and I didn’t like the dull flush that crept up her cheeks any more than I liked the glitter in her eyes. ‘And that’s what you were panicking about, was it?”
“I did not panic, Simone,” I said, struggling against a rising temper. “I got the pair of you away from what I considered was a possible source of danger. That’s my job.”
“I don’t suppose it occurred to you to tell me what you were up to before you hustled us away from there, huh?”
I stopped and turned round. We were halfway across the lobby, which was almost deserted. Just a gray-haired guy with a short beard talking to the concierge and a middle-aged couple sitting reading guidebooks at the far side. I moved in, getting right in Simone’s face and not caring about the way she flinched back from me.
“I can’t run this as a democracy,” I said through gritted teeth. “If I feel there’s a threat, I can’t stand around and ask your opinion on it. I have to use my judgment and act.”
“Uh-huh,” Simone said, ominous. “And I also don’t suppose it occurred to you that I might have
wanted
to see that guy again. That he just might have been interested enough in me to have given me his phone number and
I just might
have given him a call… ?”
“You did what?” I said, and even though I spoke hardly louder than a whisper I heard the cold anger and the disbelief in my own voice. “No,” I said blankly “You couldn’t have been so stupid.”
Simone flushed fully then and opened her mouth to snap back at me when I suddenly realized by the shift in Ella’s gaze that someone was approaching us across the lobby’s polished floor.
The gray-haired man who’d been talking to the concierge stopped a few meters away and looked uncertainly from one of us to the other. He was in his late fifties, the neatly trimmed beard giving him a distinguished air. He wore a good coat and expensive shoes. His eyes were darting from one of us to the other, as though waiting for his opportunity to break in without getting clawed.
“Pardon me,” he said politely to Simone, “but you
are
Simone, er, Kerse, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Simone said immediately, shooting me a defiant glare. “Yes, I am!”
‘Ah,” the man said. He smiled, a little uncertain at the vehemence of her response. “Well, in that case … I understand you’ve been looking for me. I believe I’m your father.”
Y
ou OK back there, Charlie?” Greg Lucas asked. “Comfortable? Warm enough? Shout out if Ella needs to stop to go to the bathroom or anything.”
“We’re fine at the moment, thanks,” I said. It took an effort to keep my voice pleasant. I didn’t think Lucas was being deliberately patronizing, but Simone had presented me more as the hired help than anything else and, so far, I hadn’t found a reason other than pride to contradict the opinion he’d formed. Now, his eyes flicked to meet mine in the rearview mirror and I saw the crow’s-feet at the sides of them crinkle as he smiled at me. I couldn’t see the rest of his face but so far he’d behaved without apparent guile, however hard I’d looked for signs of treachery.
We were in a new-model Range Rover Vogue SE, barreling north out of Massachusetts and into New Hampshire on Interstate 95. Simone up front with Lucas, and me and Ella in the rear seats. Our luggage — including the giant bear with the scowl—was piled up behind us.
It was the day after Greg Lucas had introduced himself to Simone in the lobby of the Boston Harbor Hotel, and, to my mind at least, it was much too soon to be going anywhere with him. Convincing Simone of that, however, had caused major ructions.
From the outset, she hadn’t liked the fact that I’d headed her off from inviting Lucas up to the suite to talk but had instead suggested more neutral territory in the restaurant. He’d momentarily looked a little surprised at my cool reception, but had agreed equably enough. We’d left him to secure us a table in the Intrigue Cafe while I took Simone back upstairs,
ostensibly
to drop off our coats and change Ella out of her boots, but mainly so I could get her on her own long enough to advise caution.
Not exactly what Simone wanted to hear.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Charlie!” she snapped, and there was a glitter in her eye I didn’t quite like. She was almost feverish with a kind of scared excitement. “Why would he pretend to be my father if he isn’t?”
I could think of over 13,400,000 good reasons, but didn’t voice them. Maybe Simone had realized that as she’d spoken, because she sighed without waiting for an answer and said, “OK, I’ll be careful, but you don’t know how long I’ve waited and wished for this.”
“I know,” I said, gently, “but that’s exactly why you shouldn’t rush into anything now It’s been twenty-five years since you last saw him. You admitted yourself that you couldn’t remember much about him, and he wouldn’t have had that beard while he was in the army. So, he must expect that you’re going to ask questions, that you’re going to be suspicious. Anybody would be. And that’s quite apart from telling him about your win. I certainly would not mention anything about that for a while—at least until you’re sure.”
She was quiet for a moment, then nodded.
“OK, Charlie,” she said, more subdued now but with a stubborn set to her jaw. “But he doesn’t exactly look as though he’s living out of soup kitchens, does he? And this is what we’re here for, isn’t it? So I could find and meet with him? And now I have found him—or might have,” she allowed when I opened my mouth to interrupt. “Look, either I get to know him a little and find out for sure, or we may as well go home now.”
I shrugged. “OK, Simone,” I said. “Just be careful, all right?”
She smiled, too fast, too bright. “I am being careful,” she said. “I have you with me, don’t I?”
Back down in the dining room, Lucas rose as we approached the table he’d selected near the fireplace at the far end, reminding me of the old-fashioned manners of Harrington, the banker. Lucas had shed his coat and was wearing a polo-necked sweater in some fine-knit wool that could well have been cashmere. He was quite slim apart from a barrel chest that enabled him to carry off a little excess weight around the center of an upright frame, and he looked confident and successful.