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?”
S
he 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
I
t 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.”