I said nothing. The kettle clicked off and I poured the boiling water onto teabags and mashed them with a spoon. I was more of a coffee drinker myself but Simone only had cheap instant, so tea seemed the lesser evil.
“Do you think it’s wrong to take a child away from its father?” she asked abruptly, as I was opening the fridge door.
I paused, milk bottle in hand. “That depends on why you’re taking them away,” I said. I shut the door and poured milk into the tea until it seemed about the right color, then put one cup on the worktop in front of her. She hardly seemed to notice it.
“I don’t really remember my father,” she said abruptly “He left when I was about the same age as Ella is now. My mother went back to her maiden name—Kerse. God, I’ve always hated that name.” She glanced at me and managed a tired smile. “The other kids at school always used to call me Curse. Can you imagine?”
“Children can be very cruel,” I said.
She nodded, distracted. “Mom would never talk about him. I suppose, the less she’d say, the more I wanted to know—just awkward, I guess.”
“I think that’s a natural reaction.”
“Not knowing why their marriage broke up—that’s the worst thing. Wondering if, somehow, I might have been to blame, you know? When we went over to Chicago just before my mom died, I hoped she’d tell me then, but she never did. She must have had her reasons, but she took them with her.”
“And you’re hoping—if you do find your father—that he might be able to give you his side of it?”
She nodded again, then gave a nervous laugh. “Maybe Matt’s right, and I should leave things as they are, but I’ve reached a stage in my life where I can’t move forwards without knowing who and what he is. And if he’s a monster, well—” She shrugged, with more bravado than nonchalance. “I’ll just have to deal with that one when I get to it. At least I’ll have you to protect me, won’t I?”
She lifted her cup, drank absently, oblivous to the way my face must have frozen. “It’s made me decide that I won’t ever try and keep Ella away from Matt,” she went on. “Not unless he does something really awful. If I thought for a moment he’d ever try to hurt her—”
My mobile started shrilling at that moment. I put my drink down and flipped the phone open. I hardly needed to glance at the display to know who was on the other end of the line.
“Hi, Sean.”
“Madeleine’s got seats reserved for Simone and Ella on tomorrow’s Virgin Atlantic flight to Boston out of Heathrow,” he said without preamble. “Whose name do you want me to give her for the third ticket?”
I remembered the look of stark terror on Ella’s face in the kitchen and then the delicate touch of her lips on the side of my throat.
I glanced across the room to where Simone stood now, wrapped in turmoil and memories, clutching her cup with both hands like it was
some
kind of lifeline.
What were my own fears compared to theirs?
“Mine,” I said.
T
he private investigator’s dead,” Sean said. Whatever else he added to that was drowned out by the PA system above me, announcing a final boarding call for all passengers for some charter flight to Malaga.
With scant regard for the possibility of brain tumors, I jammed my mobile phone hard up against the side of my head and stuck my finger into the other ear. It was only partially successful at damping down the outside noise.
“What?”
“The private investigator Simone hired to trace her father—guy called O’Halloran,” Sean explained, raising his voice beyond the tolerances of the phone’s tinny speaker, which buzzed painfully in my ear. “He died in a car accident last week.”
“When you say ‘accident,’ I assume that’s what it was?”
“As far as we know, yes,” Sean said. “I’ve spoken to his partner. They’re arranging for someone to collect the guy’s files and brief you. They’ll meet you when you land.”
“Great,” I muttered, unable to shake the uneasy feeling this latest news provoked.
It was just after nine the following morning and Simone, Ella and I were waiting at Heathrow for our flight to Boston. Madeleine was nothing if not efficient.
We’d spent the previous night in one of the big hotels near the airport, having braved the press pack to escape from the house around lunchtime. The hotel was part of a major chain that was used to celebrity guests and took a very dim view of letting journalists and photographers harass them unduly. The hotel also employed a number of rather large door staff who wouldn’t have looked out of place outside a town center nightclub and who had a definite no-nonsense reputation.
I’d made a point of going and chatting to them briefly once I had Si-mone and Ella safely tucked away in their room. I was polite and respectful and gave them as much information as I could about the situation.
In return for this professional courtesy, they’d promised to be extra vigilant, and proved it by firmly repelling the first paparazzi incursion shortly afterwards. The reporters had made a few more experimental forays, then retreated to lurk sulkily in the car park. I was pleased to note the rain had hardened into sleet as the light began to fade.
Madeleine, meanwhile, had been doing some furious coordination behind the scenes, setting up all our travel arrangements.
She had automatically assumed that Simone could afford—and would want—the best of everything. She’d reserved us seats in Virgin Upper Class for the transatlantic and rooms in the best hotel, overlooking Boston Harbor, for the open-ended duration of our stay Simone had flipped when she’d seen the cost.
Privately, I thought she was making a fuss about nothing, but I recognized it would be all too easy to develop a money-doesn’t-matter attitude that lasted right until it was all frittered away Eventually, Madeleine had talked her into sticking with the plans on the grounds that there wasn’t time to change them. Madeleine had also sneakily sent her an e-mail link to the hotel she’d selected. One look at the sumptuous rooms and the in-house health spa had Simone’s objections crumbling.
“One more thing,” Sean said now. “You might be interested to hear that I went and paid a visit to Matt yesterday afternoon.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to preempt any problems. There was a chance he could have kicked up a fuss about Simone taking his daughter out of the country without his agreement, and the law would have been on his side,” Sean said, his voice grim.
“Hell,” I said. “I never even considered that.”
“Mm, well, the guy’s seriously paranoid about Simone getting in contact with her father, let me put it that way.”
“So, is he going to make trouble?”
“No, he saw sense eventually,” Sean said, his tone dry. I had a pretty good idea of the form Sean’s persuasion would have taken. I could almost feel sorry for Matt. Then I remembered Simone’s anger, and Ella’s fright, and my sympathy faded somewhat. “He’s denying he had anything to do with the press invasion, by the way,” Sean went on, “and I think I might even believe him.”
My eyebrows went up. “Really?”
“He’s been borrowing a bed at his cousin’s place since he and Simone split, and the cousin turned up while I was there. I wouldn’t actually be surprised if he was the one, rather than Matt, who went to the papers.”
“Based on … what, exactly?”
“A feeling,” he said, and I heard the smile in his voice. “That and the fact that his cousin is possessor of a lot of nervous twitches, a permanent sniff, and a glass-topped coffee table with an interesting set of scratches on it. I get the impression he’s the type who might well have been tempted by the offer of some easy cash to dish the dirt.”
“He could just have a head cold and be particularly careless with his furniture,” I pointed out.
“True,” Sean allowed. “Or he could have an expensive coke habit and need of some extra income. Either way, he’d just been out and spent a fortune on games and DVDs and—when I arrived with a rake of tabloids — I think even Matt figured it out. To be fair to Matt, he did seem to be pretty upset by what happened to Ella.”
“He’s going to be even more upset when he gets the papers today, then,” I said, thinking of the two photographers jammed up against the kitchen window. Madeleine was already taking the breach of privacy up with the Press Complaints Authority, even though I felt it was too late for an apology “But he’s definitely agreed to let them go?”
“Relax, Charlie. If it means they’re out of harm’s way for a while, yes,” Sean said. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble providing it doesn’t take these private eyes months to find this guy.”
“What happens if it does — ?” I began, just as the PA issued another raucous reminder to reduce the number of security alerts by not leaving baggage unattended.
“Bloody hell, Charlie, where are you?” Sean asked. “I thought you were all supposed to be tucked away in the VIP lounge?”
“We are. At least, I’ve left the pair of them up there—security’s pretty tight, so I thought they’d be quite safe,” I said hurriedly, in case he thought I was being unforgivably lax. “I’m just raiding the concourse shops to try and find enough puzzle books to keep Ella occupied across the Atlantic. She may be cute, but she’s also four years old and hyperactive —and it’s a seven-hour flight.”
“Good luck,” Sean said, amused. “You can always get the cabin crew to slip her a Mickey Finn.”
“It might come to that.”
“Look, something’s come up and I’m going to have to go. Call me if you have any problems, but we’re just going to have to play things by ear on the time front,” he said. His voice softened. ‘And you take care of yourself, Charlie, OK?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, with way too much confidence. “We’ll be fine.”
T
he flight itself was uneventful. One of the things that had most surprised me when I first started working for Sean’s agency was the way the rich travel. The kind of people who need to surround themselves with close protection personnel don’t go anywhere on the cheap. In the six months since I’d got stuck into the job I’d never flown anything less than Business Class when actually accompanying a client, and twice I’d gone by private jet.
Even Simone, after she’d boarded the plane and accepted a glass of champagne from the cabin crew who greeted her like an old friend, had seemed to forget her initial reservations. I’d glanced across from my seat in the center of the aircraft and caught the little smile on her face, like it was suddenly dawning on her that from now on she could afford to always fly this way.
Despite my worries, Ella played with her food, watched some TV, crayoned in a couple of pages of one of the books I’d bought for her, then we folded her seat into a bed and she fell asleep like a seasoned traveler. She looked tiny, snuggled down amid the mussed-up blankets and pillows. The cabin crew stopped by regularly to cluck and coo over her.
Things didn’t go quite so smoothly once we’d landed, though. Nobody from the private investigation firm who’d been tracing Simone’s father met us at Boston’s Logan International, and I didn’t want to hang around long waiting for them.
Madeleine had arranged for a limo service to be available on our arrival. Once we’d cleared U.S. Immigration and reclaimed our luggage, I called to make use of it. Whatever spiel Madeleine had given them, they answered their phone with excessive courtesy that only deepened when I identified myself. They were already aware of the arrival time of our flight and had the driver circling the airport waiting for us as we spoke, they said. They would call the man, who would be with us in minutes. Madeleine was very good at clearing a path, too.
The limo was a new Lincoln Town Car with a mild stretch, in discreet black rather than the gaudy white I’d been fearing. The driver was a big black guy in uniform, whose company badge said his name was Charlie. I resisted the urge to say, “Hey—twin!”
We crossed underneath Boston Harbor using the Ted Williams Tunnel, which seemed to go on forever. As we drove into Boston there were several feet of snow blanketing the city, much to Ella’s obvious pleasure. She pressed herself eagerly against the car’s tinted window, occasionally giving out little squeaks of delight as though someone had laid on this special weather just for her.
“It’s just like Christmas, Mummy,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” Simone said, craning forwards to stare at the outside landscape herself. “But that doesn’t mean you’re getting any presents.”
Ella’s brow wrinkled as she gave this considerable thought. “Well, as it’s
so
like Christmas,” she said thoughtfully, “perhaps I ought to just have
one
present. …” She could have charmed gifts out of Scrooge.
“We’ll see,” was all Simone said, but when she sat back she was smiling.
I’d studied the city maps before we’d left and it seemed that the limo took us into the city by a very roundabout route. Charlie the driver blamed what he called the Big Dig, which, he told us over his shoulder, had been going on in Boston for more than ten years. “By the time they’re all done, they’ll be tearing it all up again and starting over, yes, ma’am,” he said as we drove past yet another construction crew attacking the frozen earth.
I watched two bargelike white Ford Crown Victoria cabs jostling for position in traffic alongside us, and craned my neck up at the somber brown stone and brick buildings. The snow flurries that were still falling made it all seem alien and slightly distant.
I tried not to think about the last time I’d been in America, sweating in the Florida heat. I couldn’t even prevent a tiny jerk of alarm when a pair of full-dress police cruisers came flashing across an intersection in front of us, their sirens yelping in and out of sync with each other.
Relax. They’re not after you,
I told myself.
Not this time.
T
he Boston Harbor Hotel, when we reached Rowe’s Wharf, was a magnificent building with an impressive arched rotunda next to the discreet entrance.
The hotel lobby was as grand and tactfully opulent as the outside led me to expect, all marble archways and huge paintings of harbor scenes from days gone by Even the wallpaper was padded. Again, Madeleine had made the arrangements so that the bags were whisked up to our rooms with the minimum of fuss. Simone herself grew more quiet and tense with every passing minute, clearly overwhelmed by the sudden elevation in luxury.