I put the car into gear and nudged forwards. The pressmen took one look at the substantial bull bars on the front of the four-by-four and reluctantly parted to let me through. Had they not done so, I was in two minds about whether I was prepared to stop.
I pulled up as close to the front door as I could manage, checked my shirt collar out of habit and shoved my way through the jostling pack, ignoring the questions and microphones and flashguns that were thrust into my face. Simone must have been watching for me because she opened the front door just as I reached it and I slid through the gap with hardly a pause.
The baying of the press continued outside, muffled by the thickness of the wooden door. Simone leaned back against the timber and closed her eyes momentarily.
The hallway was small and painted pale yellow, with three doorways leading off it and a carpeted staircase to the upper floor. The pictures on the walls were conventional mass market prints in cheap but cheerful frames. I wondered briefly if the fact that Simone could now afford to shop for originals would change her taste in art.
“How long have they been here?” I said, jerking my head towards the driveway.
“It seems like forever,” Simone said wearily, opening her eyes. “Since first light, I think. That’s when they started ringing the goddamn doorbell, anyway.”
“Where’s Ella?”
She rolled her eyes upwards. “They were scaring her, banging on the front windows, so I told her to stay upstairs. She has her own TV and stuff in her room.”
“Sean said Matt had gone public. What happened?”
Simone glanced briefly towards the stairwell as though to check there were no tiny ears within hearing distance. Then she picked up a folded newspaper from the hall table and thrust it towards me.
“Here. Read it for yourself.”
I scanned the front page quickly. It was all laid out under a big bold, if somewhat coy, banner headline:
R!CH B!TCH!
Underneath it was a luridly written story about how Simone had won millions and had then, with casual cruelty, thrown the father of her child out of the house they’d shared for the past five years. I glanced up to find Simone watching me, her face tight with embarrassment and anger. I read the piece again, more fully this time, making her wait.
Even allowing for gutter press exaggeration, Matt had clearly wasted no time airing his grievances. The way he’d told it, the moment Simone had realized the size of her win, she had more or less sent him out to the supermarket and changed the locks while he was gone. Now she was refusing to give him access to the daughter he idolized and, when he’d tried to bring the little girl a simple present in a public restaurant, Simone’s “hired thugs”-that was us-had jumped him.
It was the stuff of tabloid editors’ dreams. A scorned lover, a tug-of-love child, a whiff of violence, and-best of all-money. Lots of money. They’d wrung every last ounce of salacious indignation out of the story.
Somehow they’d managed to snatch a long-range picture of Simone, cradling Ella, with a caption claiming she was “heartlessly out on a spending spree in London’s Knightsbridge” while her rejected suitor was reduced to camping on a distant relation’s sofa.
In the picture both Simone and Ella were wearing the same clothes they’d had on the previous day Some fast-moving paparazzo had obviously snapped them in the street as we’d left the restaurant. The fact that there were clearly no shopping bags to be seen was conveniently overlooked.
When I’d reached the bottom of the page I looked up and caught the sheer disgust on Simone’s face.
“How could Matt do this to us?” she demanded, her voice low with rage. “And how the hell can they get away with printing crap like that? It’s all pure fabrication.”
“People lash out without thinking when they’re hurt,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to come to her ex’s defense. “And what Matt didn’t tell them they’ve probably made up anyway. Once you’ve let them out of their cage, you can’t hope to control them.”
She swallowed, pulling a face, and was about to say more when Ella edged into view at the top of the stairs. She’d lost the bounce I remembered from the day before, seeming listless and subdued.
“What is it, sweetie?” Simone said quickly.
“I’m thirsty, Mummy,” she complained, her voice whiny “Is it OK if I come down and get a drink of water?”
Simone’s face softened. “Of course you can.”
Ella negotiated the stairs with care, holding on with one hand and trailing a comfort blanket and a small rather grubby stuffed Eeyore in the other, its detachable tail obviously long-since lost. She clutched the bedraggled toy donkey tight to her chest as she came past us, giving me a wide berth.
Simone’s smile for her daughter hardened as she watched her disappear into the kitchen at the end of the hallway. A moment later I caught a glimpse of the little girl dragging a wooden chair across the floor so she could climb onto it and reach the sink under the kitchen window.
“I hate what this is doing to her,” Simone said quietly.
“Is there anyone you could go and stay with?” I asked.
She frowned and shook her head. “Nobody I’d want to subject to something like this,” she said, jerking her head towards the swarming pack at the front of the house.
“Are you sure — no family or friends?” I pushed. “It might help if you can get away, even just for a few days. The press are vicious while they’re after you, but they tend to have a pretty short attention span.” As I well knew from personal experience.
“No, there’s only me and Ella,” Simone said firmly, wrapping her arms around her body as though she was cold. She bit her lip. “Matt was the one with the big family.” She spoke of him in the past tense now, I noted, like he was dead.
“What about a hotel?” If nothing else, it would provide an additional layer of security. Without that, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that I was going to have to get Sean to send in more people, regardless of how Simone felt about that. Just getting the two of them out of the house was probably going to be a nightmare. Damn. I hadn’t been on the job ten minutes and already I was thinking about calling for backup.
Then, in the kitchen, two things happened almost simultaneously.
Ella dropped her drinking glass and let out a piercing shriek of terror. Her cry, and the sound of the glass shattering on the tiled floor, hit us at the same time or so close together that it was impossible to tell which event had caused the other.
Simone and I both sprinted for the kitchen. I was the one who reached it first, elbowing the door wide. Inside, we found Ella standing frozen on the chair, surrounded by a pool of water and shards of broken glass.
She was still screaming at the two-headed apparition that loomed at the kitchen window-two rogue photographers, pressed up against the glass with their flashguns firing like machine pistols. Simone had drawn the blinds, but one was snagged on a potted plant on the window ledge and there was a big enough gap for a lens to get a perfect view.
I took two strobe-lit strides into the room and snatched Ella off her perch, spinning her out of line of the cameras and yelling at Simone to sort out the blinds and blank off the window as I did so. The pressmen jeered and hammered on the glass outside.
Ella got a death grip on my shirt collar and continued to screech in my ear, even after we were safely back in the hallway. Out of my depth, I patted her back and made shushing noises. Simone appeared by my side, white-faced, and tried to take her daughter from me, but Ella held on tighter still and wailed all the louder. I could feel her bony little knees digging into my ribs as she clung on.