Run Among Thorns (6 page)

“No, you first. As a gesture of goodwill, Kier,” she said, her voice quite without sarcasm.

McAllister relaxed back in his chair, deliberately loosing the tension in his neck and shoulders. “What do you want to know?” His mind ran through the questions he expected, trying to catalogue them, find innocuous answers.
When can I go free? Who do you work for? Why won’t you believe me?

“Are
your
parents alive?”

He blinked, nonplussed, and suddenly felt uncomfortable, having her prying about his folks. Taken by surprise, he didn’t lie. “Yes,” he said.

Her face was impassive. “They died in a car crash,” she said, calmly.

He snorted. “Come on, Jenny, you can do better than that.”

She simply raised an eyebrow at him, scorning his own short answer.

McAllister sighed, leant forward again to pick at a crumb on the tablecloth. He thought about his folks and their quiet, unassuming life. “They’re both alive. Both retired, live quietly in a typical white picket-fence deal in a typical small town in a typical state. I don’t see them all that often.”

“Why not?” She almost sounded interested.

He raised an eyebrow right back at her. She huffed, and the curls at her temples bobbed.

“It was bad weather,” she said. “They were by themselves in the car. They had a blowout at seventy miles an hour on the motorway and lost control. Dad was driving. He was a good driver, but he just … ran out of luck.” Jenny shrugged slim shoulders. “They came off the carriageway and hit the buttress of a bridge.”

The file had said it had happened almost three years ago now. Despite all that time, the loss was plain to see in her face. McAllister found himself wondering what sort of a relationship she’d had with her parents.

Whose question was it? “When did you start to take special training, Jenny?”

She looked up at him, frowning slightly. But that turned into a wry look, and she leant back in her chair, folding her arms. The checkered shirt he’d allocated her was hardly flattering, but he couldn’t stop his eyes from dropping to the enhanced cleavage now visible where the shirt fell open. She wasn’t wearing a bra. He hadn’t given her one.

“I rather think we’re not talking about the conservation of the natural environment, are we, Kier?”

“No.”

“Nor improving footpaths and bridleways?”

He only smiled.

“And I don’t think we’re talking about the last training course I took?”

The smile matured into a grin. Her gaze flicked away and then back to his. “You tell me,” he said.

“It was a one-week residential course on community involvement with conservation projects.”

“Not that training, no.”

“Then the answer is never. I have never had special training of the type you mean,” she said.

“And you expect me to believe that?” he asked derisively.

She put her head to one side, twisting her mouth in an angry parody of a smile. “That’s another question, Mr. McAllister.”

His eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward, conscious of a sense of satisfaction, when that simple movement made all her uncharacteristic cockiness evaporate, just like that. Jenny wouldn’t look at him again, and she set her hands in her lap and sat still.

Scared Jenny was back.

But he was conscious of something else, too. Regret? Had he liked that flash of rebellion that much? Guilt? Nonsense. He was only doing his job.

Suddenly that wasn’t such a valid reason for doing this to people.

He pushed the thought away, trying to think of questions to provoke her, to push her. Then he remembered it was her turn. “So, next question?”

She took a breath. Expelled it. “Why don’t you see your parents often?”

I don’t understand them.

“We have nothing in common.”

“Come on,” she chided.

He looked over her head, towards the door, not seeing it.

“They’re … mediocre. They’ve never really done anything real, never used all their resources, been the best they can be. They’ve never challenged their pathetic little precepts, found out what they can achieve. Dad turned down a partnership in a big, prestigious firm of architects to play around with cheap little small town projects. He gets excited about extending a porch. They’re living a half life.”

Glancing back at her, he saw she looked shocked, and he was surprised to feel diminished by it. He wondered what on earth had possessed him to open his soul to her like that. She was a subject, for God’s sake, a job.

His stomach churned. “So, where were they going when they piled into the bridge?”

She hesitated, looking wary. “They were coming to visit me.”

“So it’s your fault? You killed them?”

Kier had never seen anyone go that white so fast. He kept his face blank as he watched her swallow, watched her hands grip the chair under her like she had at breakfast. Like she expected the ground to shift under her.

“I’ll bet you were pressing them to come visit, too, really excited about it, pestering them to get on up there.”

When he saw her start to shake, he fought the urge to stand up and walk away. He felt like someone trampling wildflowers underfoot. He felt sick.

Do it, McAllister. Do your job.

“Maybe Dad didn’t want to travel, thought the weather was too bad, but, no, you told them it would be okay, didn’t you? So impatient to see them.”

He leaned in to her across the table, and she edged back away from him, turning her head aside, eyes tight closed, face like marble. Her profile was achingly beautiful.

“When did the guilt hit, Jenny? Did you think,
I
killed them
, straight away, or did you try to work out what they were worth first? Maybe that was the plan. Were they redundant when you started your new work, Jenny? Did you hope they’d crash, Jenny? Hell, maybe you rigged the tyres—”

“Stop it.” It was only a thread of a whisper, choked and strangled. A voice like that from her mouth was a travesty, like a dejected eagle in a cage, obscene, horrific.

“Sure, I’ll stop it. Tell me who you work for.”

“The N-National Park,” she stuttered. Her mouth was trembling.

“Not the cover, Jenny, the real one,” he said.

“There isn’t a real one!” She shook her head, violently. “I mean that
is
the real one! I am Jenny Waring. I work for the Lake District National Park Authority. I was in America on an exchange programme. I’ve never killed anyone before. I …”

“You’re not kidding anyone, Jenny. Who do you work for?”

“Stop it, please.”

“Come on, Jenny.”

“Stop it.”

“You can do better than that.”

“Why don’t you let me go?” she shrieked at him, finally, her voice breaking, her face crumpling.

“I’m not going to let you go, Jenny,” he shook his head. “Not till you tell me what I need to know.”

He only had a moment’s warning, seeing the intent in her tear-filled eyes, the shift of balance, the shuddering breath she took.

Jenny launched herself over the table at him, no regard for where she might end up, fingers reaching for his face. He jerked back and sideways, catching at her wrists, twisting. Her body hit the table at the same time he got out of his chair and away, and her own momentum tumbled her over the edge of the table to the floor. Keeping his grip on her wrists, he dropped to one knee between her and the rocking table.

Fighting to keep his voice level, he said, “I didn’t say you could do that, Jenny.”

She lay on her side, eyes wide, chest heaving. She had to be in pain. If only from landing on her hip on the stone floor. Kier could feel the soft skin on the inside of her wrist bunching and pinching under his fingers.

But when she spoke, her voice was steady. “You don’t have a right to know. You don’t
deserve
to know.”

Steady or not, the words were drenched in desperation.

“I can take any right I choose to take, Jenny. Don’t forget that.”

He let her go and got up, and she just lay there, letting her cheek press on the cold, dusty floor. Every time she breathed, another twisted lock of hair fell forward over her face, obscuring her blank stare. The blue-white skin on her inner wrist was already bruising.

With something approaching disgust, Kier remembered his arrogant resolution that he never physically harmed his subjects.

This Jenny threw him so far off course, so far out of his usual mould, he couldn’t even rely on his professionalism anymore. He’d been this close to really damaging her, and now he was this far from self-disgust.

The woman tied him up in knots.

There were three men in the room when John Dawson entered. Three very different men, in three different poses. Davids was flying the desk, sat foresquare behind it, hands folded on the jotter. To his left, Groven occupied another chair, contriving to look as if all the other people in the room were there by his permission only. Despite the fact it was Davids’s office.

The other man Dawson had never seen before. But he knew him from the file. He didn’t look much different from his photo, only the camera hadn’t quite captured the reality of all that arrogance, only the potential of it.

His name was Kendrick.

Davids spoke. “Make your report, Dawson.”

“McAllister called in last night, as scheduled. Although he has made no progress as yet, he is confident this will be a short job.”

Kendrick snorted, and turned back from the window. “And the girl?”

“She’s tired, out of her depth, and threatened,” John replied, not making much of an effort to keep his concern out his voice.

“You don’t approve?” Groven asked.

He managed to look surprised and answer quick enough. “Approve? The project was approved by Davids, sir, that’s not my role.”

“True, true,” Davids said with false affability.

Groven was impatient. “Remember that.”

“Sir.”

Davids’s eyes flicked back and forth between them.
He’s lost power
, John thought suddenly.
Groven’s an employee, just like I am. So why is Davids deferring to him?
He wasn’t a field agent—he thrived on the regularity of his job, the predictability. Everything was shifting subtly, and he didn’t like it.

“Well,” said Davids. “If he’s thinking this is going to go fast, we’d better be prepared. Dawson, you need to charter a flight for a team.”

“Yes, sir. Who’s travelling?”

“I am,” said Kendrick, the only man in the room who was smiling.

The rest of the day passed quickly for Jenny because she wasn’t paying it any attention.

Most of the time she just sat at the table, sometimes dozing with her head pillowed on her arms. McAllister moved about the place and outside, but she didn’t much care what he was doing. She’d stopped keeping tabs on where he was. Didn’t even jump now when he came close.

He put tinned soup in front of her at lunchtime. And although it was tomato, which she didn’t really like, she ate it anyway, just to get it done. Once or twice she looked up at him, trying to see him as the man who’d hurt her. But all Jenny saw was a powerful, mesmerising man, who had everything she was cradled in his hands, and seemed somehow reluctant to meet her eyes.

At dinnertime she really couldn’t eat, but oddly, he didn’t press her. After he had eaten and cleared up, he went outside, and once, when she glanced out one of the tiny windows, she saw him with the bonnet of the SUV up, bent over the engine. In the background the wind was harassing the tops of the pines.

Jenny didn’t think about what he’d said, about what she’d said. She didn’t think about killing those three men. She spent all her meagre energy on keeping her mind blank and calm, and not going out of her mind.

She pictured blackness, and breathed deep. But even then he passed through the darkness like a beacon.

Wreckers
, she thought, obliquely. Eighteenth-century thieves and murderers who would set false lights on the shore to bring gallant ships in to the rocks, like moths to a flame, singeing their wings, drowning them in the midnight surf.

Kier was a wrecker. And she had to know the false light from the true.

Wearily, limping from her bruised hip, she got up and went to bed.