Third Strike (9 page)
Sean had been standing with his back almost to the door when it opened. Without a flicker, he brought his right arm sweeping back, elbow bent, to smash it into Don’s windpipe. His reaction was instinctive, deadly as a striking snake. He hardly even seemed to look to find his target.
The big man staggered back against the wall, hands to his throat, making urgent gurgling noises. Sean crouched and spun, using the momentum to load his full bodyweight behind a punch to the man’s groin. Don’s gurgles momentarily rose in pitch and volume, then he went utterly silent and started to slither floorwards.
Blondie, meanwhile, overrode her natural startle reflex to leap for Sean. I ducked and hit her hard with my shoulder as she flew past me, deflecting her back onto the sofa. She bounced straight up again, eyes slitted, and instantly threw a vicious kick. Whatever that dress was made of, there was plenty of stretch to it.
She must have been used to sparring with male opponents. It was the only reason I could think of that she automatically aimed for testicles I clearly didn’t own. I twisted slightly and took the brunt of it on my hip. Left hip. Bad idea. The pain sizzled down through my leg like hot fat.
I blocked it with adrenaline and anger, and charged her. If you’re fighting someone with a short weapon, you stay out of range. But against a long weapon, you have to get in close. I reckoned those well-muscled legs counted as a pair of long weapons. She was quick, though, grabbing both my upper arms with viselike fingers, her breath hot in my face.
Her skill so far had told me she was trained but was not a fighter by nature. And she clearly didn’t spar with anyone who was willing to mess up those elegant features. I snapped my head forwards to butt her full in the middle of her long slim nose with my forehead, hearing the solid crunching tear of cartilage right before the scream.
Mother!
I reared back. My mother had shrunk into her chair, terrified into silence by the sudden eruption of violence around her. It was only when she saw the blood start to squirt that she’d let rip.
Blondie tried to boot me in the stomach but I was close enough to downgrade the blow into a shove. Even so, I cannoned back into the arm of my mother’s chair. As I sprawled over it, the abandoned knitting loomed large in my field of vision. I grabbed for one of the needles and yanked it straight out of the web of wool that anchored it.
When Blondie tried to launch another venomous kick—towards my head this time—I stabbed the twelve-inch needle straight through the fleshy part of her right thigh with enough force to penetrate the muscle completely and tent—but not break—the skin on the other side.
She collapsed back onto the sofa, yelping in her distress. I glanced at Sean. He’d got Don on his knees with his face jammed hard up against the wall by the doorway. He had the big man’s feet crossed at the ankles and fingers linked on top of his head. Sean’s hand almost disappeared into the folds of flesh at the back of his captive’s neck with the force he was using to keep him there.
He nodded to me. I nodded back.
“I’m guessing the polo was pushing it too far, huh?”
I managed a rusty half smile. Blondie was still rolling around on the sofa, trying to evade the pain. She certainly knew a lot of very innovative swearwords for someone so well-bred but, other than invective, she was out of fight. The shock of the unexpected blow to the face had more to do with it than the severity of either injury, in my opinion.
Her nervous system had certainly prioritized the broken nose over the hole through her leg. I’d managed to split the skin of the bridge as well as damage the underlying structure. Hardly surprising that my forehead felt like I’d a lump the size of a golf ball on it. Blondie needed her nose packed and set and probably glued back together as well, but it wasn’t life-threatening. She could damn well wait.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t going to leave her with a weapon, albeit an embedded one. I leaned down and, before she could protest, yanked the needle back out of her flesh with deliberate carelessness. That seemed to bring the leg wound back to prominence again. I felt the ache in my own thigh and was aloof to her pain.
I glanced over at my mother. She was quiet now, but with that dangerously calm demeanor that usually denotes a part of the brain is refusing to accept the input offered to it and has temporarily closed for repair.
Very slowly, she got to her feet, her movements jerky and stiff.
“Actually, I think a cup of tea might be a very good idea, Charlotte,” she said, her voice rather reedy. “Don’t you?”
“For heaven’s sake, Mother—” I began, but Sean caught my eye and gave a tiny shake of his head.
Let her do it. Something normal. It’s her way of coping.
Let her do it. Something normal. It’s her way of coping.
I took a breath. “Yes, please,” I said meekly. “That would be lovely.”
She headed for the kitchen, carefully stepping over Don’s feet almost without seeming to register the nature of the obstruction. At the doorway she paused, turned back, and her eyes swept slowly over the alien tableau that had just been acted out in her drawing room, as if seeing it for the first time.
“I’ll bring a tea towel and some ice for that nose,” she murmured vaguely. “Try not to make too much of a mess on the sofa.”
Her eyes focused on me, on the bloodied knitting needle drooping from my left hand.
“I do wish you hadn’t done that, Charlotte,” she went on, a little pained note in her voice. “It was a rather complicated pattern and you’ve made me drop all my stitches.”
“They arrived five days ago,” my mother said. “Introduced themselves as colleagues of your father, from America. Said that he’d issued an open invitation to look us up whenever they were in England. I—I had no real reason to doubt them. From the things they said, they clearly knew Richard, and they seemed very pleasant … at first.”
She took a deep breath that wavered on the way out, and sipped a mouthful of tea from a delicate Spode cup. It rattled slightly when she put it back onto its saucer and she frowned at it, as though the cup had shaken of its own volition.
“When did you realize they were … serious?” I asked.
We were at the long table in the kitchen, sitting across the corner from each other, so I was close but she didn’t feel I was staring right at her, accusing her. Like this was some kind of interrogation.
Sean had found a roll of duct tape in the back of the Shogun. I’d helped him drag my mother’s unwanted houseguests out to the garage and left him to deal with them. I didn’t ask what he intended to do and, if I’m honest, I didn’t much care. I was too busy trying not to concentrate on the throbbing in my left leg, or how easily I could assuage that ache with one of the painkillers I’d wanted ever since we’d got off the flight.
Instead, following Sean’s silent prompting, I’d sat at the table and let my mother go through the ritual of making tea, spooning loose leaves into a warmed pot, adding water right on the boil, letting it brew, and then filtering it through a strainer into cups so translucently fragile that you had to pour the milk in first or they’d shatter. By the time she’d stopped fussing she seemed more settled, but it proved a transient state.
“More or less as soon as they’d finished their first cup of tea,” she said in answer to the last question, looking fretful again. “I should never have let them into the house, but you just don’t expect …”
“They’re professionals,” I said dryly. “I’m not surprised you didn’t clock them.”
She tried for a smile but couldn’t summon the will required for it to stand up by itself. As soon as she let go, it fell over. “As a JP who’s heard I forget how many cases of fake Gas Board inspectors conning their way into old ladies’ houses and rifling their handbags, I feel very foolish to have been taken in by them,” she admitted, “however briefly.”
“I would say you’ve coped extremely well for a hostage,” I said, taking a sip from my own cup. I don’t know if it was the pot or the china, but it tasted perfect. Unless it’s over ice and awash with slices of lemon, the Americans just can’t do tea. A bag on a string dunked into a cup of lukewarm milky water. I’d given up drinking the stuff.
“I didn’t want them to see how afraid I was, so I tried to ignore them as best I could,” she said in a small, austere voice, gesturing to her hair and clothes. “Not let them get to me. Carry on as though nothing was happening. I suppose you find that rather silly.”
“Not at all.” I shook my head. “Most people would have totally fallen apart. Trust me—I’ve watched it happen.”
She stared at me for a moment with a slightly puzzled expression on her face, and I realized with a sense of guilt that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d offered her praise for anything.
But that one, I reminded myself, was very much a two-way street.
I swallowed and asked with great care, “Did they … hurt you?”
She gave me a quick glance, but her gaze wouldn’t latch with mine and went sliding off past my shoulder. “Not as such,” she said, evasive. “But the chap—Don—made it painfully clear what he was prepared to do if I wasn’t ‘a good girl,’ as he put it.”
Her gaze skated round the kitchen walls and finally dropped into my cup, which was three-quarters empty. Relieved by the excuse, she jumped up and stretched for the teapot from beneath its cosy in the middle of the table. I tried not to let my impatience show while she did what she needed to in order to settle. And to come to a decision about how much of it she was willing to let out into the open.
“He seemed to have some particular perversions of a sexual nature that revolved around older women,” she said at last, prim but all in a rush, sitting ramrod-straight on the hard-backed chair. “He spent some time expounding on the subject, about what he—” She broke off, pressed a shaky hand to her mouth as though just to speak of it made her physically sick. I started to reach for her, instinctively, but she waved me off.
And I could empathize with that completely. I knew exactly what it was to abhor the thought of being touched. By anyone. It didn’t matter who.
“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” she said, low, when she could speak again. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said, my voice rough with a prickling sense of rage that wasn’t directed at her but had no other outlet. “What the hell have you got to be sorry about?”
“I never understood what it was really like for you, did I?” she murmured, and the sudden unwelcome swerve in the conversation made the hairs stand bolt upright all along my forearms.
Oh no. Don’t go there. Not now … .
I had to look away from her at that point, focusing instead on an errant fleck of tea leaf that had escaped into my cup and was floating on the surface, because my mother had begun to cry.
Although,
cry
was the wrong word to describe it.
Cry
suggested a maelstrom of unbearable feeling but if I hadn’t been watching her face I would never have known. She cried almost without emotion, without great sobs racking her body, without the telltale catch in her voice or the clog in her throat. Instead, as she stared into the past the tears fell unheeded from her eyes and dropped onto the surface of the table below her, like offerings to a long-forgotten god.
cry
was the wrong word to describe it.
Cry
suggested a maelstrom of unbearable feeling but if I hadn’t been watching her face I would never have known. She cried almost without emotion, without great sobs racking her body, without the telltale catch in her voice or the clog in her throat. Instead, as she stared into the past the tears fell unheeded from her eyes and dropped onto the surface of the table below her, like offerings to a long-forgotten god.
And just when I was considering prayer myself, I heard the slam of the front door and footsteps on the tiles. A moment later, Sean appeared in the kitchen doorway.
He saw the pair of us like that and froze in mid-stride. It was only when I threw him a desperate
Don’t leave me here alone
smile, that he came forwards. He was wiping his hands on one of the old rags that my father kept stored in a corner of the garage, although for what purpose I’d never discerned. My father’s idea of do-it-yourself was
personally
telephoning for a tradesman.
Don’t leave me here alone
smile, that he came forwards. He was wiping his hands on one of the old rags that my father kept stored in a corner of the garage, although for what purpose I’d never discerned. My father’s idea of do-it-yourself was
personally
telephoning for a tradesman.
My mother suddenly seemed to register both Sean’s presence and the unaccustomed wetness of her eyes at the same moment. She turned her head away sharply and whipped out her handkerchief.
“Well,” Sean said to me, tactfully ignoring her distress, “either that pair are better versed at not answering questions than I am at asking them, or they genuinely don’t know anything.”
He moved across to the sink, raising an eyebrow at me over the top of my mother’s head as he went. I shook my head a little.
He ran the hot water and squeezed washing-up liquid onto his hands. The rag he’d put down on the draining board was, I saw, stained a distinctive dark red that would no doubt turn brown as it dried. I got up, took the sugar bowl off the table and tipped half the granulated contents into his hands as he scrubbed at them, so the sugar would act as an abrasive. He nodded and his eyes went to my mother again.
How is she?
I don’t know.
I shrugged, but it was a truthful response.
“If we’re going to turn them over to the local police, we have to do it soon,” he said out loud. “We’ve already delayed almost longer than we can justify, not to mention interrogating them.”
My mother’s brittle poise had recovered, but at Sean’s quiet comment it seemed to shatter afresh.
“Oh! Do we have to?” she said wanly. “Can’t we just let them go? I mean, surely, now you’re here …”
“Mother, what do you think will happen if we let them go?” I demanded. “We can’t stay more than a day or so. Do you expect them to give us their word that they’ll leave you alone in future?”
She swung a beseeching gaze towards Sean, but he proved no softer touch.
“I’m sorry,” he said, face grave, “but we really do need to get back to the States as soon as possible.”
Her face began to crumble. She jerked her chin away from us and busied herself by fetching Sean a mug from the row hooked under the shelf on the Welsh dresser and pouring tea from the pot. Still no best china for him, I saw with a little spurt of anger.
We sat. Sean took the chair alongside me to give my mother space, and sedately drank his tea. As I watched his fingers curl through the handle of the mug, I realized that the delicacy of a Spode teacup would have discomfitted him. Perhaps that was why my mother hadn’t offered that choice. Belatedly, and somewhat ashamedly, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Even more so when she offered Sean a tentative but apparently genuine smile.
“Well, thank you—both of you—for coming so quickly,” she said. Her eyes flicked back to me. “I wasn’t sure, when you rang, if I’d said enough, but that dreadful woman was listening in and I couldn’t say more—”
“You said enough,” Sean assured her.
“Yes,” she said faintly. We were all silent. Then she took a breath and said, “I know I should prosecute them, for what they did, but I … can’t. Besides anything else, we don’t know what that might do to Richard’s situation.”
“Did they say anything to you at all—about why they were here?” I asked. “Or what this is all about?”
She shook her head, frowning. “Not really,” she said. “I knew something was wrong, of course, but until you told me, I’d no idea it was … as bad as you say.” She looked up suddenly, hope growing on her face. “But he can come home now, can’t he? That would solve things.”
“Not yet,” I said, feeling mean for dashing her back down again. “I’m sorry. He was still in jail when we left.”
“You said he’d been arrested in a b—brothel,” she said bravely, wincing either at the sound or the very thought of the word. “What on earth was he doing there?”
I felt my mouth start to open while I scrambled to cobble together a believable lie, but my brain refused to do anything other than replay the memory tape of us barging into that room and finding my father well on the way to a compromising position with the naked, painfully young Asian girl. It was an image I didn’t think I’d ever fully erase.
“He was most likely coerced,” Sean said coolly, stepping in. “Charlie saw him picked up from his hotel and taken there, and he didn’t exactly look willing. They were probably holding the threat of your safety over him.” He glanced at me. “It would explain why they didn’t need to stay with him to make sure he … played his part.”
He’d been putting a little too much realism into that particular piece of acting for my taste, but I didn’t voice the opinion.
“I see.” She was silent for a moment. “But what I don’t understand—about any of this—is why? Why pick on us to …
torment
in this way?”
torment
in this way?”
“We were rather hoping,” I said, “that you might be able to tell us that.”
“I can’t!” she said, voice climbing towards shrill. She stopped, took a breath, and continued in a lower register. “What I mean is, I have no idea why those …
people
turned up on my doorstep. Richard never mentioned anything before he left.”
people
turned up on my doorstep. Richard never mentioned anything before he left.”
“Are you sure?” I said, adding quickly, “I’m not suggesting you’re going senile, Mother. But with hindsight, has he seemed distracted, or worried about anything lately?”
“Well, he certainly hasn’t been himself since he last returned from America,” she admitted, sliding me a reproachful little look over the rim of her cup.
I don’t remember much about the four days immediately following my near-fatal shooting, which was probably just as well. But when I was finally allowed to wake in that hospital in Maine, my father’s unfriendly face was the first thing that greeted me. He’d made his displeasure at my situation pretty clear without, it seemed to me, managing to express much concern for my welfare. I’d taken what comfort I could from the fact that he was there at all but, afterward I’d wondered if he’d been lured across the Atlantic mainly by a professional interest in the intricacies of the surgery I’d undergone.
“What about this doctor friend of his they mentioned on the news?” Sean asked, cutting into my gloomy thoughts. “Jeremy Lee. They were dropping hints that your husband might have had something to do with his death.”
“He most certainly did not,” my mother said stoutly. The speed of her response had a knee-jerk quality to it, but the words were underwritten by a tremor of doubt. She rushed to cover it. “Richard believes life is absolutely sacrosanct. He’s dedicated his career—his life—to its preservation,” she said, more firmly now. And, just to prove she was feeling more like her old self, she added, “Something
you
might have difficulty understanding.”
you
might have difficulty understanding.”
Sean was hard to read at the best of times, and now he gave no indication that he took offense at her remark. Whether he did or not was immaterial. I took offense enough for both of us.
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