“Well save your goddamn breath,” Simone told him in a savage whisper, and this time Ella didn’t bother to admonish her mother for swearing. “It’s nothing to do with you what I choose to do, or where I choose to go, or who I choose to see anymore. Get used to it!”
She straightened, juggling a tear-streaked Ella to the other hip, and swept her eyes over Harrington’s shocked and immobile figure. He was still standing by the table, with his napkin still clutched in his hand. Si-mone’s defiant gaze met mine over the top of Matt’s tethered body.
“I think I just changed my mind about needing a bodyguard, Charlie,” she said, her voice tired and bitter to the bone. “You’re hired.”
Three
By the time we got back to where Sean had parked one of his company Mitsubishi Shoguns, I knew I was in trouble. Even for Sean, he was much too quiet.
Sean Meyer was quiet on many different planes. His hands and body were always quiet unless there was something to engage them. It made his actions all the more intense.
Even back when he’d been one of the most feared sergeants on the Special Forces training course I’d abortively attempted in the army, he’d never had to shout and bawl in order to instill a dread respect in his trainees. The quieter he was, the more scared of him we’d all become. The clever ones, at least.
And now, most people wouldn’t have spotted there was anything wrong. He’d been nothing but coolly professional while we’d ejected a still-protesting Matt from the restaurant and evacuated Simone and Ella to the safety of Harrington’s office at the bank, where security was tight as a matter of course. For speed we’d used Harrington’s waiting car and driver rather than retrieving our own vehicle, and I’d half-expected Sean to order me to stay with them while he went to fetch it. Instead, he ordered me along, and that was my first inkling that something was seriously awry.
He strode along the icy pavements from the bank to the car park with an easy poise, plaiting his way smoothly between the other pedestrians, who were making their hurried assaults on the last remnants of the January sales. He moved without ever missing a step, but under the surface I could sense something simmering. It was there in the slight angle of his head, the way his arms swung fractionally tense from his shoulders.
I held out, waiting for him to make the first move, until we’d actually reached the multistory parking structure and were on the right level, almost at the car. Then I sighed and stopped walking.
“OK, Sean,” I said, short. “Spit it out. Don’t give me this silent treatment.”
He deliberately kept moving so there were half a dozen paces between us before he stopped and turned. For a few moments he just stood there, staring at me, hands loose by his sides, his face that of a stranger.
A sullen, sneaky wind whipped into the open concrete building, causing his long overcoat to flap lazily round his legs like that of a western gunslinger. It was only three in the afternoon but already the sky was darkening and the sodium lights strung across the concrete ceiling lit us both with an unearthly orange glow. The whole place smelt of diesel and burnt clutches.
Just when I thought he wasn’t going to speak at all, when an unnamed fear had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart tight shut with it, he said:
“You hesitated.”
It was said flat, without inflection, but I heard the accusation as an underlying harmonic, even so.
“I took him down,” I said, defensive. ‘And kept him there. What more do you want?”
“It was messy. He nearly got away from you, and he wasn’t even a professional.”
I felt my exasperation rise, partly at the harsh criticism and partly annoyance that I knew he was right. “Don’t you think you’re being overly critical? OK, so you feel I made a mistake. But I contained it-nobody else noticed. And come on, Sean-he was the kid’s father, for heaven’s sake!”
Sean cocked his head from one side to the other, slowly, like he was shifting the weight of his thoughts. “So?” he said coolly. “What difference does that make?”
What I’d heard of his own father, I recalled belatedly, sketched the man as a drunken bully, both to his wife and to his children. When Sean spoke, rarely, of his father’s premature death in a largely self-induced car accident, it was with a kind of quiet resentment. It had taken me quite a while to realize that was probably because Sean had harbored a secret ambition to kill the man himself.
I sighed. “In this case, it makes all the difference. Simone had just got through telling me how she still loves the guy. If she could be sure he was after her for herself and not just her money, she’d probably take him back in a heartbeat.”
“That’s only a small part of the story, seen from her perspective.” Sean threw me a skeptical glance. “Quite apart from the fact that you gleaned all this from what-a two-minute conversation in the ladies’ room?” he said mildly. “Did she have time to show you a photograph while she was about it?”
I knew where this was going but it was like playing chess with a grand master. Defeat was coming, but I didn’t begin to have the skill to fend off the inevitable.
“No,” I said, and felt my pawns scatter as my knights fell and my queen faltered.
He nodded briefly and went in for the kill. “So how did you know that the guy who came into the restaurant was Matt?” he said. Check. “He could have been any psycho stalker you care to name. Just because you’ve only been told about one threat doesn’t mean there won’t be others. You should know that, Charlie. You of all people.”
His voice was gentle and he hadn’t moved, but that very stillness seethed.
“Ella called him Daddy,” I said between my teeth, in a last-ditch castling to regroup. “He was carrying a pink rabbit.”
“You didn’t know that until after he’d made his move — and you’d made yours,” Sean countered. He took a step towards me, then another. It took conscious effort not to retreat. “You had him under control and you let yourself be distracted. The fact that he was Ella’s father shouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference. Children are murdered by their fathers and women are murdered by their spouses every day.”
Checkmate.
Exasperation curled into anger like smoke into fire.
“So I made a judgment call,” I bit out.
“Really? Is that what you think it was?” He paused. “It was an emotional call, certainly.”
I felt my chin come up, almost bobbing to the surface. There may as well have been a red flag attached to it for the signals it sent to him. I snapped, “Of course, and that’s a failing.”
“In this job, yes,” he said, closing his eyes in a slow blink, like he was gathering strength. “Carry on making decisions like that in the field, and I can’t use you.”
My mouth dried. I swallowed in reflex and tried not to make it obvious that’s what it was. But I saw him note my body’s automatic reaction with cold hard eyes, and something flickered in his face. Disappointment?
“I can do the job,” I said, keeping my voice even only with willpower. “Haven’t I proved that to you already?”
He paused again, just fractionally, then inclined his head in slight acquiescence. Just when I thought he’d given ground, he said, in a voice I wasn’t sure I recognized, “Prove it to me again.”
My eyebrows arched in surprise. “What? Now?”
He nodded, more fully this time. “Here and now.”
I glanced around me, took in the dirty, oil-blotched concrete floor, the rows of parked cars. Both of us had shifted our stance, I realized. Sean into offense, me into defense. My elbows were bent and my hands had come up slightly, but I didn’t remember raising them.