“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.”
The 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.