Simone switched her attention from me back to Sean. In contrast to the rest of us, she was dressed in battleship gray cargo trousers and a dark red chenille sweater with sleeves that came down almost to her fingertips. Her curly dark hair was pulled loosely back into a ponytail. Harrington had told us she was twenty-eight, a year older than I was. She looked about eighteen.
“You make it sound so much worse than it is, Mr. Meyer,” she said, folding her arms defensively. “Notes on my car? OK, they’re love letters. Unwanted deliveries? Sure, bouquets of flowers. Matt and I were together five years, for heaven’s sake! We share a child.” She swallowed, lowered her voice. “You’re making him out to be some kind of stalker.”
“Isn’t he?” Sean asked, head tilted slightly on one side. His voice had taken on the same cool note and his face the same impassive watchfulness that had always unnerved me so badly, back when he had been one of my army training instructors, and had always seen entirely too much.
Simone flushed and avoided his gaze. Instead, she spoke to Harrington directly. “I’ll talk to Matt again,” she said, her tone placatory now. “He’ll see sense eventually.” She smiled at the banker with a lot more affection than she’d shown to either Sean or me. “I’m sorry you felt you had to take such drastic action on my behalf, Rupert, but there wasn’t any need, really.”
Harrington looked about to protest further, but he correctly read the stubborn expression on Simone’s face and raised both palms in an admission of defeat.
“All right, my dear,” he said, rueful. “If you’re quite sure.”
“Yes,” Simone said firmly. “I am.”
“Mummy, I need to go wee-wee,” Ella piped up in a loud whisper. The smartly dressed elderly couple at the next table clearly subscribed to the unseen-and-unheard school of child raising. They were too British to actually turn around and glare, but I saw their outraged spines stiffen nevertheless.
If Simone noticed their disapproval, she ignored it and smiled at her daughter. “OK, sweetie,” she said, sliding her own chair back so she could lift Ella down and take her by the hand as she got to her feet. “If you’ll excuse us?”
“Of course,” Harrington said, good manners compelling him to stand also.
Sean had already risen, I noted, and for a second I was struck by the air of urbane sophistication he presented. This from a man who had left behind his roots on a run-down housing estate in a small northern city, but who still knew how to slide right back into that rough-diamond skin when the occasion demanded. The banker would not recognize Sean on his home ground.
My eyes followed mother and child as they weaved their way between the busy tables. Although Simone was not my principal-and at that stage I didn’t expect she would become so-watching people was beginning to become a habit, all part of the career I’d chosen. Or maybe the job had ultimately chosen me. I was never too sure about that.
Sean didn’t need to learn to watch anyone. For him it was an instinct ingrained deep as an old tattoo, indelible and permanent. He was just too driven, too focused, to ever let himself begin to blur.
“I’m awfully sorry about this,” Harrington said as the men sat down again and rearranged their napkins across their knees. “She just won’t listen to reason and, quite frankly, her refusal to admit there might be any kind of danger, either to herself or to little Ella, terrifies us, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
“How much did she win?” Sean asked, reaching for his glass of Perrier.
“Thirteen million, four hundred thousand, and change,” the banker said with the casual tone of someone used to working with those kinds of figures on a daily basis, but I still heard the trace of a sneer in his voice as he added, “It was, if I understand it correctly, what they term a double rollover.”
“Money’s still money,” Sean said. “Just because her ancestors didn’t steal it doesn’t make her any less rich.”
Harrington had the grace to color. “Oh, quite so, old chap,” he murmured. “But Simone is having some difficulty adjusting to the fact that, from the day she bought that winning ticket, her life was never going to be quite the same again. Do you know, she arrived at our office this morning having actually come into town, with the child, on the Tube? Didn’t want to have to try to park in the middle of London, she said.” He shook his head, as though Simone had suggested walking naked through Trafalgar Square.
“I told her she should have hired a car and driver to take her door-to-door and she looked absolutely baffled,” the banker went on. “It simply doesn’t cross her mind that she can afford to do these things. Nor does it occur to her that, by not doing them, she’s putting both herself and her daughter at risk from every crackpot and kidnapper out there-quite apart from the situation with her former, er, boyfriend.”
“It does, as you so rightly point out, make them prime targets-Ella especially,” Sean agreed. “How serious a threat do you consider her ex?”
“Well, if you’d asked me that a few weeks ago, I would have said he was a minor irritation, but now …” The banker broke off with an eloquent shrug. “One of the first things Simone did with her money was hire various private investigation agencies to try and trace her estranged father. One of them now believes they have a promising lead, and ever since that report came in, this Matt chap just seems to have become completely unreasonable.” Harrington paused, frowning. “Perhaps he believes a reunion between Simone and her father will spoil his own chances of a reconciliation with her,” he added with an almost imperceptible curl of his lip. “She’d have to be quite mad to take him back, of course.”
“What’s the story with Simone’s father?” I asked.
Harrington’s head came up in surprise. Not at the question, but that I’d been the one who’d put it. Even on such short acquaintance, I’d realized that Harrington didn’t speak to anyone he considered at servant level unless he had to, and even then he avoided eye contact. With that in mind I’d let Sean do most of the talking so far. From the expression on the banker’s face, he clearly hadn’t expected me to wade in at this late stage. His eyes swiveled warily in my direction.
Sean flashed me a lazy smile, one that would have made my knees buckle if I hadn’t already been sitting down, and raised an eyebrow to Harrington, as if to repeat the question.
Harrington coughed. “Naturally, one doesn’t wish to be indiscreet, but… well, as I understand it, Simone’s mother was an American, who came over here and married an Englishman, Greg Lucas-an army chap, so I understand. They divorced when Simone was not much more than a baby, and mother and child went back to the States — Chicago, I believe it was-but her father rather dropped off the map, as it were.”
He broke off as the wine waiter glided up to the table and smoothly topped up his glass, finishing the bottle. Harrington ignored him and I wondered briefly what kind of pivotal decisions were made in the afternoons in the world of high finance after boozy lunches just like this one.
“I assume Kerse is Simone’s mother’s name?” I said when the waiter had departed.
Harrington nodded. “She went back to it after the divorce. Anyway, Simone’s mother died a few years ago. There were no siblings, her grand-parents on both sides are long gone and Simone herself is currently expending considerable effort-not to mention her now not insubstantial resources — on attempting to locate this Lucas chap.” He stopped to take a sip of his wine.
“Unsuccessfully?”