Second Shot (25 page)

“Sean,” I said and something broke inside me. I was suddenly filled with a relief so sharp it reduced me to tears. I felt them sliding sideways across my face, pooling between my cheek and the pillow. And now they’d hit the surface, I couldn’t seem to stem the flow On and on I wept, trying to hold myself rigid through the sobbing and not succeeding, so the pain made me cry harder, and the crying caused only more pain.

“I take it, then, that you
do
wish to see him?”

I could only nod, unable even to voice the words of bitter recrimination towards my father that, once again, he’d conspired to keep Sean away from me when I needed him the most.

T
he next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight. I raised my head a little way off the pillow and saw Sean sitting back in the easy chair by the bed. His head was resting on his fist, elbow propped on the arm of the chair, and he was fast asleep.

Even sleeping, he looked dangerous. If it hadn’t been for the expensive Breitling watch on his wrist—and someone with the obvious seniority of the surgeon granting him access —any member of the nursing staff who walked in and found him here would immediately call security.

For a moment I just lay there and watched him. He was wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt and he hadn’t shaved that morning. The haze of stubble lined his face, making his skin look almost pale above it and the dark eyelashes ridiculously long against his cheeks.

There had been a time, a long time before, when I’d been injured and frightened and ashamed, and I’d prayed every day that I’d wake in my bed in the military hospital and see this man waiting for me. But he’d never come. He hadn’t even known what had happened to me, not until long afterwards, and by then it was much too late.

The involvement between us then had been clandestine, forbidden. He was one of my training instructors and any hint of a relationship between us would have been disastrous for both our careers. After the brutal assault on me but before the farce of the court-martial and my eventual disgrace—when I still thought, foolishly, that I had some kind of a future in the army—I hadn’t dared ask for him.

I sometimes wondered what difference it would have made if I had.

It was strange, now, to lie there in circumstances so similar yet so different, to wake and find Sean sitting alongside me. I was profoundly grateful that he was here, without doubt. As soon as the doctor had spoken I’d been aware only of a lifting of the total weight of responsibility that had been pressing on my chest far more heavily than a collapsed lung could ever have done.

But on top of that alleviation, guilt had come chasing hard. Guilt that I had been trusted to do a job and I’d failed in the most basic way possible. Guilt that I was alive, and Simone was not. And as for Ella …

No, best not to think about what Ella’s going through.

My thoughts must have provoked some small change in my breathing because at that moment Sean’s eyes twitched beneath his lids and then snapped open, instantly alert.

He saw me watching him and he smiled, without hesitation.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Charlie,” he said softly. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, great,” I said weakly. “But you’ll forgive me if I don’t come out dancing tonight.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You dance?”

“Only when I’m very drunk.”

“In that case,” he said, igniting one of those slow-burn smiles, “remind me to ply you with cheap booze at the first available opportunity.”

We both paused, our repertoire of inconsequential small talk exhausted.

“So,” he said, shifting so he was leaning forwards in his chair with his forearms resting on his knees, “do you feel up to a debrief?”

“I suppose so,” I said, not bothering to hide my reluctance. “I daresay this has caused a real mess all round.”

“We’ve had worse,” he said with a tired smile. “The police have been clamoring to talk to you about what happened, by the way, but your father’s been as good at keeping them away as he was with me.”

“I didn’t know you were here until the surgeon told me,” I said, suddenly defensive.

“That’s OK. I didn’t think it was a good idea to punch out your dear papa in the corridor. At least this way they let me wait just down the hallway instead of in the car park.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Don’t be,” he said. “You and I both know there’s no love lost there.”

I went through a brief summary of events between my last phone conversation with Sean and the moment I was shot, keeping it as impersonal and objective as I was able to.

Sean interrupted rarely, preferring that I work through the story in my own way, gently pushing me when I faltered. Forcing my mind to concentrate and hold on to the thread of the story required an almost physical effort. I was aware of gaps and pauses where seconds and maybe even whole
minutes
slipped by before I could bring myself back on track. By the time I was done I was sweating and shivering and I had a bitch of a headache thumping away behind my left eye. The pain in the bottom of my right lung was like a stone, pulling down on it.

When I was spent he sat there for a time, eyes fixed on a point on the bed frame, frowning.

“Tell me again what Simone said, when you walked in on her at the house,” he said.

“She said that he’d killed him and she’d seen him do it. That she’d loved him. Then she called him a fucking bastard and that’s when Lucas did a runner.”

“So, she-”

“What do you think you’re doing?” My father’s voice, from the doorway, was cold even for him.
Damn, I really must get them to shift some of this bloody equipment so people cant creep up on me like this.

Sean got to his feet automatically. “We were talking,” he said, in that blankly respectful voice he’d always used to disguise his intense dislike.

My father moved round to the side of the bed where I could see him, eyes sweeping over my face. He clearly didn’t care for what he saw there.

“She needs rest and no emotional upset,” he said tightly.

“Shame you didn’t always feel that way,” Sean murmured.

My father’s face paled beneath his tan. They faced off, almost toe-to-toe. Sean was taller and wider and exuded the kind of menace that made people leave seats vacant next to him in crowded bars. But my father had been at the top of a tough profession for more than thirty years and along the way he’d acquired the ruthless superiority of a despot. Until someone threw the first punch, I would have said they were fairly evenly matched.

“Say, is this a private party, or can anybody join in?”

The new voice from behind me had what was by now a familiar New England twang to it, and the heavy cynicism that could only have belonged to a cop.

“The more the merrier,” I said wearily, closing my eyes. “Did you bring a bottle?”

There was a grunt of laughter. “Round here, ma’am, the bottles seem to be mostly full of the kind of liquids you wouldn’t want to drink.”

“Charlotte, you’re not up to this,” my father said. I opened my eyes and found him watching me intently.

“Probably not,” I said, mustering a shallow smile, “but I’ve got to talk to the police sometime.”

He hesitated. “Just see that they don’t overtire you.”

“If they do that, I’ll just fall asleep on them,” I said. ‘And I don’t think they’re allowed to beat up witnesses anymore.”

“They won’t bully her,” Sean said, and the cold certainty in his tone earned him a sharp glance.

After a moment my father nodded slowly, as if reluctant to find himself in any kind of agreement with Sean. “No,” he said with the wisp of a smile, “I daresay they won’t.” And with that he turned and left. He didn’t even make it seem like a retreat—just that he simply had somewhere more important to be.

The cop who’d been doing the talking came round where I could see him. He was middle-aged and heavyset like he spent time in the gym rather than like he’d gone to fat. At home I would have put him down as a rugby player, right down to the broken nose. Over here I assumed he played American football in some kind of offensive position. With him was a small, wiry, dark-haired woman with a face that didn’t look as though it laughed easily. Partners, I assumed. Detectives, too, if their lack of uniforms was anything to go by.

They both dragged up chairs to the bedside and went through the rigmarole of introducing themselves and showing me their badges. The man’s name was Bartholemew. The woman’s was Young.

“We’d really like to speak to you alone, Miss Fox,” Young said pointedly, taking the lead so we didn’t mistake her for Bartholemew’s junior.

My eyes slid over Sean. “If he leaves,” I said, “so do you.”

Sean showed them his teeth and they both took on a pained look, like they’d been told if they really didn’t want the Rottweiler sleeping on the furniture, they’d have to physically remove it themselves.

“Er, we understand that you were acting as Miss Kerse’s bodyguard, is that correct?” Young asked, and something about the unbridled skepticism in her voice made me regret the decision to talk to them right from the start.

“Yes,” I said.

She raised a single eyebrow, mocking, and let her eyes travel over me, lingering over the tubes and lines I was hooked up to.

“Been doing the job long?”

“Long enough.” It was Sean who answered for me, staring out the two detectives. They’d been doing their own jobs for a while and they must have interviewed their share of murderers and gangsters, but neither of them liked being the subject of Sean’s dead-eyed stare.

“We assume, from the fact that you got it in the back, that you didn’t see who shot you?” Bartholemew took up the baton.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“But you have an idea, right?”

I took a breath in, too deep, and had to wait a moment for the stabbing in my chest to subside. “I don’t know,” I said, stubborn. ‘As you so gallantly pointed out, I was shot in the back. I didn’t see who pulled the trigger.”

Bartholemew sighed, a noisy careless gush of breath that made me instantly jealous. “We have a preliminary ballistics match between the bullet removed from you and the gun found with Miss Simone Kerse,” he said flatly He let that one settle on me for a while. “I don’t suppose you’d like to hazard a guess as to why Miss Kerse would take it into her head to shoot her own bodyguard, now would you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I paused. “Is there any possible doubt that she actually fired the shots?”

“Well, her prints were on the weapon and she tested positive for gunshot residue. That’s normally good enough for the jury,” Bartholemew said, laconic. “We would sure like to have some idea of a motive, though.”

“You and me both,” I said. But in my head I saw a slow-motion replay of the moments before I was hit. I saw once again Lucas’s head square in my sights. Saw the way I’d let the gun rise, taken my finger off the trigger. Even in the moonlit darkness, it must have been clear that I wasn’t about to take the shot.

Was that why Simone had done it? I remembered the sheer fury in her voice down in the basement, when she’d called Lucas a bastard, when she’d said she’d loved and trusted him and sounded so desperately betrayed. I didn’t believe those first two shots she’d fired had been meant to hit me—or anyone else, for that matter. But out in the woods, well, that was a different story, despite Ella’s close proximity.

And who had Simone seen Lucas kill? Jakes? Was he the subject of her anger? Why—when she’d known Jakes for less than a day?

“We understand from Mrs. Rosalind Lucas that Simone arrived at the house with her daughter, Ella, and her other bodyguard, Mr. Jakes, in a state of some agitation. Can you shed any light on why that might be?”

“No,” I said. “I had a message on my mobile phone from Jakes. It should be about somewhere, if you want to check it. He said something along the lines that Simone had had a call from her father and wanted to go over to his place and that she was getting angry about having to wait. By the time I arrived there I found Jakes dead at the bottom of the stairs and Simone in the basement threatening Lucas and his wife with a gun.”

“But you don’t know why?”

“Not beyond what I’ve already told you, no,” I said dully My voice was starting to rasp in my throat now and I desperately wanted something to drink. Not just the ice cubes and minute sips of liquid the nurses seemed determined to tease me with, but a long endless glass of iced water. The urge for fluids I could actually swallow was fast becoming a fantasy.

Young frowned and studied the notebook that lay open on her lap. “We understand that Miss Kerse had spent some considerable time and money tracing her father. Can you suggest any reason why she might suddenly turn against him like this?”

“Maybe,” I said. I glanced at Sean, as if for reassurance. We hadn’t had time to discuss any theories and I was loath to voice them now, untried, but I didn’t see much of a choice. “The reason we moved out of the Lucases’ house was because there was a break-in the night before.”

Young leafed through the pages of the notebook and glanced at her partner, making a brief I-have-no-record-of-that kind of gesture with her right hand. He responded with a slight dismissive roll of his eyes that instantly put my back up.