“It wasn’t reported,” I said. “But you must have noticed that there was a brand-new window at the top of the stairs?”
Young checked her notebook again. “I don’t recall there being any damage to the property apart from a couple of fresh bullet holes in the basement,” she said carefully. “And Mr. and Mrs. Lucas didn’t mention anything about a break-in.”
“Simone didn’t want anything getting into the papers. She’d had a rough time with the tabloids before she left home.”
“Wait a minute,” Bartholemew said, sitting more upright in his chair. ‘Are you telling us you failed to report a serious crime because Miss Kerse didn’t want it getting into the newspapers?”
His voice had started to harden and Sean sliced across him instantly. “Simone had just come into money,” he said. “Charlie felt the break-in was possibly a kidnap attempt on the child. Any kind of publicity would have only increased the danger to Ella.”
“Money?” Bartholemew said. “What kind of money?”
“Several million,” Sean said shortly, severely playing it down and still provoking a jerked reaction from the cop. “According to her banker, Simone made a will just before she left England. If anything happened to her, then everything went to Ella,” he went on. His eyes flicked to me. “I spoke to Harrington yesterday about it. There are plenty of strings attached, but if they become her legal guardians, the money will probably end up under the control of Ella’s grandparents.”
I knew Lucas was aware of Simone’s money—had been practically from the start. But if his motive in contacting her had been financial gain, why did he come to the hotel that day and almost beg me to take her back to England? Why did he refuse Simone’s offer? Unless he knew things were about to turn nasty. …
I remembered Vaughan’s words in the restaurant, just before I left. He’d asked if Simone had found out the truth about Greg Lucas. What truth? What had he done?
“We caught one of the guys who broke in, but he got away from Lucas,” I said, trying to drag myself back on track. “Maybe if Simone found out— I’ve no idea how— that Lucas was in any way responsible, she would have flipped. What happened to Jakes, by the way?” I asked. My mind was starting to disconnect now, and coherent speech was becoming noticeably more difficult. I had to fight to stay with Bartholemew’s answer.
“His neck was broken.”
“Lucas is supposed to be ex-SAS,” I managed. My eyes had drifted shut without my realizing it and I forced them open. The effort made my vision quiver. “One of the first things they teach you is how to break someone’s neck. Practically the first lesson, huh, Sean?”
The two cops exchanged a look I didn’t catch the meaning of. “The pathologist seems of the opinion that his injuries were consistent with a fall,”
Young
said at last, carefully.
“O-K,” I said slowly, slurring badly now, “but what if Lucas wasn’t her father? His partner knows something—Felix Vaughan. Have you spoken to him? Only-”
Young cut me short. “Mr. Vaughan was polite but unhelpful,” she said, and I remembered Vaughan laughing when I’d asked him the same question about Lucas.
It wasn’t that simple, Vaughan had said.
Why?
“If Lucas
wasn’t
her father, that would be a pretty good reason for a massive falling-out between them. Simone was already pretty convinced, but they were supposed to have had a DNA test to settle it,” I mumbled. “If she found out he wasn’t who he said he was, she might well have reacted badly. I’ve never been entirely happy that he — “
“The tests came back,” Bartholemew cut in. “They were positive— and our own lab has run their own independently, just to be sure.” He paused, looking almost disappointed that I’d come up with such feeble reasons for Simone to turn psycho. “As close as the science can call it, Greg Lucas was definitely Simone’s father.”
I
dreamed of Ella. It was Simone who’d died, but it was her daughter who haunted my sleep. Constantly. A jumbled-up barrage of splintered reflections, always anchored in that frozen forest. So cold it woke me shivering, my fingers numb with the psychosomatic effect.
Sometimes it was Simone who was holding the child. Or Matt, dressed as I remembered him from that first day at the restaurant, with that damned stuffed rabbit he’d been clutching sitting on his shoulder, egging him on. Or Rosalind, her face and clothing dusted with flour. Or sometimes it was Lucas again, and the dream was more vivid for the ghosted image of reality overlaid on top of it.
It never made a difference to the outcome. Sometimes I took the shot and watched in slow motion as the mist beaded outwards from the exit wound in the skull, Ella’s screams reverberating inside my own head.
And sometimes I stayed my hand but the mist splayed out anyway. I saw the body tumble, but I could never reach them before they both fell. Didn’t know for certain who’d been hit. I kept trying to turn and look behind me, to see who had fired the shot when I knew it wasn’t me, but the shooter always moved too fast for me to focus on them, slipping away like a shadow into the trees.
This time, it was Felix Vaughan who held Ella in my dream. He smiled as he slid his thumb under the skin of her soft belly and peeled it up and away from her body as easy as a boiled shrimp.
I woke with a gasp to find Frances Neagley sitting in the chair Sean had occupied beside my bed. It was two days since the visit from the two cops. Two long frustrating days and nights, punctuated by periods of fearful sleep. I’d got to know the patterns in the ceiling pretty well by then.
The private investigator had clearly been flicking through the pages of
Sports Illustrated
magazine when my gasp had alerted her. There was a can of Tab in her right hand. I vaguely remembered seeing Tab in the UK, years ago, but the clear stuff, whereas this looked more like regular cola. I locked onto it with envious eyes.
“Sorry,” she said, catching the line of my stare and putting the can down by her chair, out of sight. “Last time I was in the hospital, having my appendix out, it drove me crazy that they wouldn’t let me drink anything for a couple of days.”
“I think I’m starting to obsess about it,” I admitted. “Still, they gave me some real food for breakfast—if you count jelly.”
“Jelly?” Neagley said blankly. “What—on toast?”
I dimly recalled that “jelly” had a different meaning in America. “Ah, I meant Jell-O.”
Her careful gaze told me she probably knew I hadn’t been dreaming about kittens tied up with string or whatever the hell else Julie Andrews had been singing about in that old film but, by some tacit agreement, she didn’t bring it up. And neither did I.
Instead, she smiled ruefully. “So … would it be stupid to ask how you’re doing?”
“Better than I was yesterday. Not as good as last week,” I said, easing my position slightly. “At least they took the chest drain out yesterday, which means my lung’s on the mend. If sheer boredom doesn’t get me first, it looks like I’ll survive.”
Her smile grew serious. “You were lucky,” she said, and her face clouded. “I was sorry to hear about Jakes. He was a nice guy Friendly, but didn’t try anything, you know?”
I didn’t answer, mainly because I realized that I didn’t know. I’d hardly had time for much of a conversation with Jakes before he died. I’d no idea if he was married or single, even—couldn’t remember if he’d worn a ring. I remembered him the last time I’d seen him alive, reading that stupid story to Ella, and before I knew it the tears had rushed up out of nowhere, prickling behind my eyes, leaking across my face.
‘Aw, I’m sorry, Charlie,” Neagley said, sounding mortified. “I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I managed, shaky. “I think while the surgeons were messing around in there they must have wired me up wrong. I can’t seem to stop damn well crying at every available opportunity.”
She handed me a couple of tissues from the box next to the bed. The nursing staff were obviously well prepared for the outpourings — emotional and otherwise —of their patients.
I mopped my face and after a minute or so I had myself more or less back under control. I tried a smile that seemed to alarm Neagley more than reassure her. She sat uncomfortably on the edge of her seat, like she expected to have to leave in a hurry at any moment.
“I suppose,” I said, trying to be brisk and businesslike, “with Simone gone you’re off the case.”
“Not exactly,” she said and paused, as though uncertain how much to tell me, brushing at some imaginary lint on her black trousers. “Mr. Meyer’s asked me to stay on it,” she said at last. “There are a lot of things about this case he’s not happy with—not least you getting shot. And besides, if Lucas is somehow mixed up in this, well, he might just have had something to do with my partner’s accident after all.” She looked up, her mouth thinning. “I want answers and so does your boss. Determined kind of a guy” There was respect in her voice.
“Yes, he is that.” I closed my eyes for a moment, surprised but grateful. After the two cops had gone I’d thought Sean was going to tell me that was an end to it, to let it go. Simone was dead. Her prints were on the gun that had shot me. Lucas was proven as Ella’s grandfather and had claimed his right to the child. My job was over.
Dismally, deficiently, definitely over.
Or—as it now seemed—not quite.
I opened my eyes again to find Neagley watching me, speculative, and I had the feeling that she was drawing her own conclusions about my relationship with Sean. I wondered if I should let that bother me and decided I had other things to worry about.
“So, have you made any progress?”
“I’ve been doing some digging on the guy you saw at the Aquarium,” she said, reaching down by her chair and hauling a large brown leather shoulder bag onto her lap, pulling out a slim gray file. She opened it but hardly needed to refer to the pages of notes inside. “From the description you gave me, and a couple of other things, I think we might have one or two promising candidates. The guy you mentioned didn’t seem like an amateur.”
“He wasn’t,” I said.
She caught something in my voice, glanced up, frowning. “Well, I’ve got some photos, if you’re up to looking through them?” she said, slipping some glossy prints out of the file.
I reached out my left hand for them. The IV line had twisted in among the bedsheets and I had to untangle myself first. It was awkward to straighten it, one-handed, but my right arm still did little more than flop, and forcing any more than that out of it caused sufficient pain and frustration to curtail further attempts. Not to mention the fear.
I saw Neagley eyeing me, unsure whether to let me struggle or risk offending me with an offer of help. She settled for pretending a sudden interest in the pictures in front of her, sorting them as though into order, and I was glad that was the path she’d chosen.
Once she’d handed them over, I leafed through the prints. Some were formal police mug shots, but others were more candid, taken in a hurry with a long lens and very fast film if the grain was anything to go by. I didn’t ask where they’d come from.
Near the bottom of the pile was one of a couple of men talking to each other. They were on a street and the photographer had been on higher ground. One man had his back to the camera and was wearing a hat. The other was caught in midsentence, or possibly laughter. His mouth was open, slightly amused, and his hands were spread as though he was shrugging. Difficult to identify anyone from that. The hair looked similar, but he was taller than I was and I’d only seen him standing, so the view of his crown was unfamiliar. I looked again, and something about the pure self-confidence of him struck a cord. That and the coat. He was wearing what looked very like the same tweed coat that Aquarium man had on when he’d approached us on Boston Common. I hesitated a moment longer, then set the shot aside, separate from the others. None of the remainder were even vague possibilities, and I came back to that one shot again.
“This one might be him,” I said. “ ‘Might’ being the operative word.”
She sighed. “I always hated relying on eyewitnesses when I was a cop,” she said, pulling a face. “Give me good solid forensic evidence any day.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Who is this guy, by the way?”
She took the shot back and studied it, though I was sure she knew the details without needing the memory jog.
“A fine upstanding individual called Oliver Reynolds,” she said. “Ex-military. Fancies himself as a bit of a ladies’ man. Works freelance as a debt collector, hired muscle. According to my sources, his specialty is putting the squeeze on women—particularly if they’ve got kids. He’s very good at worming his way in, then turning nasty, but he’s never been arrested for it. Mostly people are too frightened to stand against him.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Yeah, well, by all accounts he’s a man who enjoys his work.”
Vividly, I remembered tackling the masked intruder on the landing of the Lucases’ house, of having my forearms clamped around the man’s neck and tightening my grip. That infinitesimal moment in time when we were balanced rocking on the blade edge of fate. If I was right and Aquarium man
was
this Reynolds character, and if I’d known his history then, would I have done it? Would I have finished him? Something shuddered down my spine.
Probably better that I hadn’t known.
“Are you OK?” Neagley asked, and I realized that she’d stopped talking and was watching me again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry, my concentration is all shot to hell—if you’ll excuse the pun.”
She pulled a face again. “Anyway, if you think this might be our guy, I can dig a little deeper, see what I can find out about who he might be working for.”
“That would be useful,” I said. “He picked us up in Boston, before Lucas made contact, and I don’t think it was chance. He knew who Simone was and that must mean he also knew about—” I broke off abruptly
“It’s OK, Charlie,” she said, her voice wry “Mr. Meyer filled me in on the details. I know about Simone’s fortune. To be honest, the amount of money she was spending on the search, we kind of had an idea she must have been pretty rich.”