Third Strike (11 page)
We spent the night down in Cheshire. A phone call on the way back had Madeleine arranging seats for the three of us on the first available return flight to New York, but it didn’t leave until the following morning so there was nothing we could do except sit tight overnight. I called ahead to warn my mother of the schedule. The conversation was brief and when I rang off she was fretting about canceling the milk and the newspaper delivery at such short notice.
For the rest of the journey, we speculated about Blondie’s and Don’s purpose, employer, and identity—mostly fruitlessly.
The only thing that was obvious was that they were both Americans. Accents aside, their clothing was all U.S. chainstore brands. No need to cut out the labels, because hundreds of thousands of each item were sold every year.
Sean and I had been through their belongings meticulously, but they were real pros and they’d carried nothing incriminating. No passports, no ID, no personal mementos or convenient books of matches, no credit cards. Just a stack of cash in a plastic envelope from an airport exchange bureau, and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone with the call register purged.
They’d arrived by taxi, my mother had told us, but in Blondie’s handbag we’d found a ticket for parking at Manchester airport, dated the day of their arrival, and a set of car keys. The keys were for a Citroën, so they obviously didn’t belong to Blondie’s own vehicle in the States, where Citroëns weren’t imported. That meant they were from a rental, which they’d picked up and almost immediately abandoned in one of the sprawling car parks. They’d carefully removed the key fob identifying which company it was hired from.
“I suppose that’s where they’ll have stashed their personal stuff,” I said. “Hire a car as soon as you land, leave everything you don’t want found on you inside, then dump it in long-term parking and pick it all up again when you leave.”
“It’s good operating procedure,” Sean said. “These days, the authorities are too nervous to let you leave luggage at the airport.”
They’d stuck to protocol over communication, too. My mother had never heard them make any outgoing calls, and they had always been very careful to take incoming ones well outside her earshot. Apart from Don’s increasingly creepy behavior, they hadn’t given any sign that things weren’t going according to whatever plan they’d devised.
“Interesting that they had no weapons on them,” I said, “but I suppose if they flew in they couldn’t exactly bring anything with them.”
“Mm, still, they’re not difficult to pick up over here—particularly so close to Manchester. Perhaps it’s fortunate they didn’t think of that,” he said with a wry smile. “But they must have known they didn’t need them. There were two of them against an untrained woman in her fifties, and they had the additional threat of doing something nasty to her husband if she didn’t play ball. They knew she wasn’t going to try anything.”
“But … she did,” I said, a little blankly as the realization hit. “She warned us.”
“Yes, she did,” Sean agreed. He threw me a little sideways look. “There’s more to your mother than meets the eye.”
“Well, let’s face it,” I said, unwilling to be impressed, “there could hardly be less.”
He smiled openly at that, reaching into his jacket pocket without taking his eyes off the road and pulling out his mobile phone.
“Here,” he said, handing it over. “Before I started asking those two any difficult questions, I took a couple of mug shots of each of them. They’re not very good—I’m no David Bailey, and they weren’t exactly willing subjects—but if you e-mail them across to Parker, he might be able to ID them.”
“You’re right,” I said critically when I’d scrolled through the menus and found the shots. I peered closer at the small view screen. “This one of Blondie’s so bad she ought to be using it on her passport.”
He glanced across. “I don’t think she trusted me to capture her best side, so she would keep shutting her eyes.”
After some fiddling, I managed to send the photos on, then called Parker to check they’d come through. I heard the rattle of computer keys in the background.
“No … nothing yet,” he said. “How’s your mom—she okay?”
“She is now,” I said.
“Ah. Trouble?”
“No more than we were expecting.”
“That
bad?” Parker said grimly. “Ah, hang on … yes, the pictures have just landed. Let me just check that they open okay … . Jesus! Is this woman actually dead?’
bad?” Parker said grimly. “Ah, hang on … yes, the pictures have just landed. Let me just check that they open okay … . Jesus! Is this woman actually dead?’
“No, she’s faking it.”
“I guess she’s faking the blood all over her face, too, huh?”
“Ah, no, that was me,” I said, and he laughed at the cheeriness of my tone.
“Okay, leave it with me. I’ll e-mail these to a guy I know who works with the Feds. He should be able to run them through a database or two and at least tell us if they’ve got any history.”
“The guy—Blondie called him Don—seemed to have some fairly distinctive behavior quirks,” I said, and summarized my mother’s halting admission. “That might help nail him down.”
Parker’s voice hardened. “Damn right he oughta be nailed down,” he said. “She must have been terrified.”
She’d certainly had a taste of the grim realities of life, I reflected, where previously her only brush with the dark side had been somewhat vicarious.
“Yeah, well, she bounces back pretty quickly.”
“Oh,” Parker said, sounding a little nonplussed but, at the same time, cynical. “So that’s where you get it from.”
It was dark by the time we got back to the house. My mother had cooked us an evening meal that was as elaborate as it was exquisite. She served it, accompanied by best china, starched linen and hallmarked silver cutlery, with all due pomp and ceremony in the formal dark red dining room. I imagined she’d done the same thing every night for her captors, a pointlessly stiff-upper-lip example of not letting standards slip, no matter what the circumstances. If she’d been any good at carpentry she’d have built them a river bridge in the jungle, too.
I was starkly reminded of the last time Sean had eaten a meal in that stuffy room, during the one and only time I’d brought him home to meet my parents on an illicit weekend pass from camp. I’d been filled with the vain hope that they’d be impressed by his quiet self-containment. Instead, they’d been horrified by his obvious working-class origins and gone out of their way to expose him, in their opinion, as little more than a vulgar, uncouth yob. Although he’d hidden it rather better, he’d been just as intimidated by their uppermiddle-class snobbery.
In truth, I never should have been involved with him in the first place. Not then. Not only was he a sergeant when I was a lowly private, but he was one of my instructors as well. As far as the army was concerned, the relationship was taboo on every level, and undoubtedly doomed from the start.
Now, I watched him in the flickering light from the twin candelabra, as he lifted a long-stem glass to sip the excellent wine he’d chosen from my father’s cellar to go with the main course. There was still an unmistakable lethality to him that anyone with half a brain couldn’t fail to recognize, but it was sleeker, slicker, more heavily disguised.
He could have been a corporate raider, a ruthless entrepreneur, even a prowling tiger on the Stock Exchange floor, rather than the obvious enforcer he’d always seemed in the past. My mother certainly responded better to his present gloss, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was due to some kind of residual gratitude. And, if it wasn’t, a part of me bitterly resented her belated approval now, when neither she nor my father had bothered to look beyond Sean’s rough-diamond exterior before.
After we’d locked down for the night, we quizzed her again about my father’s recent behavior, but it was heavy going.
“I simply can’t believe he could possibly be involved in anything illegal or immoral,” she declared resolutely, and wouldn’t budge from that standpoint, despite firsthand reports to the contrary. “I’m sure when I’ve spoken to him, everything will be all right.”
Eventually, I gave up and announced my intention of turning in, and that provoked more prudish maneuvering on my mother’s part. Anyone would have thought I was in my early teens rather than my late twenties.
She made a big song and dance out of showing Sean to the room she’d made up for him specially, as though that was going to persuade him to stay put for the duration of the night.
He just favored her with a bland smile and assured her he would sleep very soundly there. And, as she was fussing over pointing out clean towels in the neighboring bathroom, he passed by me close enough to murmur in my ear, “Won’t we?”
“If you were a gentleman
you’d
be the one doing all the creeping from bed to bed,” I whispered back, scalp prickling at the thought of trying to get away with that kind of thing under my parents’ somewhat puritanical roof.
you’d
be the one doing all the creeping from bed to bed,” I whispered back, scalp prickling at the thought of trying to get away with that kind of thing under my parents’ somewhat puritanical roof.
“Yeah, but I’m assuming your childhood bedroom doesn’t have the luxury of a double bed.” He smiled, wolfish. “Besides, I’m not sure I could stand the thought of being stared at by a shelf full of raggedy old stuffed animals and dolls.”
“Good point, although I was never a big fan of dolls.” I waited a beat. “Had an Action Man and a Meccano set, though.”
He rolled his eyes. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”
My mother came out of the bathroom in time to catch us grinning at each other. She was too polite to glare at us with outright suspicion, but it was lurking fairly close to the surface nevertheless.
I woke early and disorientated. Over the last few months I’d successfully managed to work my body clock round onto U.S. time. A day back in England seemed to have skewed all that careful programming.
My mother went for thick curtains, lined like there was likely to be another blackout, but I could see the first strains of dawn leaching in around the edges and the birds were already in full song. There was a wren somewhere close by—I’d recognize that strident little voice anywhere. But no traffic, no sirens. Weird.
Stretching with care, feeling the twang of sleep-shortened muscles, I turned my head to see Sean’s alongside mine and felt the familiar giant leap of emotion that simply being with him always provoked.
He lay quiet and still. The nightmares that had so often plagued him seemed to have diminished in both quantity and quality since we’d moved to New York, but maybe that was just my rosy-tinted perception.
For a few moments I took advantage of the lightening gloom to indulge myself and simply watch him. He lay on his back with his head turned slightly towards me, lips parted, those severe features relaxed and almost boyish. Viewed with a dispassionate eye, I acknowledged the cold beauty in the lines of his face and wondered what it was about him that inspired me to such devotion.
Back when we’d first met, when we’d both been in the army, an immediate, incendiary attraction had flared between us. I’d fought against it with a desperation born of the knowledge that any involvement with him could leave me badly burned. I’d known then that Sean was way out of my league.
In some ways, he still was.
I resisted the urge to smooth a stray lock of hair back from his forehead, aware that even the lightest touch would wake him when he deserved to sleep a little longer. Neither of us had got much rest during the night, that was for sure.
Shortly after one in the morning, feeling more nervous than on any covert operation, I’d crept soft-footed along the darkened corridor, stepping over the floorboards whose ageold creaks and groans had formed the sound track of my early life. I didn’t knock, just gripped the old brass handle firmly to stop it rattling, opened the door a crack and slipped into his room, with my heart already hitting the rev limiter in my chest and my temperature rising as the blood flushed my skin.
The bedside lamp had still been on. In its subdued glow, I could see Sean lying on his side with the covers pulled up only to his waist and his naked back towards me. I’d stood for a moment and watched the regular rise and fall of his rib cage, uncertain whether to approach him. Creeping up in the middle of the night on a man with Sean’s reflexes and bitterwon experience was not likely to be good for anyone’s health.
Just for a moment the doubts resurfaced and I was tempted to retreat. Then Sean had lifted his head slightly and said quietly over his shoulder, “The longer you stand there, the colder your feet are getting.”
You don’t know how close you are with that one, Sean … .
I crossed the room in half a dozen strides, lifted the heavy satin eiderdown and slipped in alongside him. And, shortly after that, any doubts I might have had about the exercise were comprehensively blown away.
And now, as I tried to slide out stealthily from under the rumpled covers less than six hours later, his eyes blinked open. I took their hazy focus as an enormous compliment. It meant that Sean felt safe enough with me to let his guard down completely. At least some of the time.
“Hi,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice.
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