This is a book about parents, and I
shall always be profoundly grateful to mine.
For Derek and Jill
CHAPTER 1
I was running when I saw my father kill himself. Not that he jumped off a tall building or stepped in front of a truck but—professionally, personally—what I watched him do was suicide.
Although I hadn’t been keeping a check of the distance, I reckoned I’d covered around eight miles at that point. Not fast, not slow. Just nicely settled into a rhythm where I could concentrate on working through the pain barrier. After six months’ slog, it didn’t seem to be getting any less solid, nor any further away. The doctors had told me I’d probably make a full recovery from the double-gunshot injury that had damn near been the end of me. They just hadn’t said when.
But just as I thought I might finally reach the finish this time before I hit that particular wall, I ran headlong into something else entirely.
As soon as I saw him, my stride faltered, all coordination leaving me. I stumbled and fell against the guardrail of the treadmill, rebounding heavily. The heart rate monitor pads came away from my chest and the alarm began to screech.
“Charlie!” Nick, my personal trainer, reached out a steadying arm. “Are you all right? Your leg—”
I shook my head, shook him off. “Turn it up,” I said, swiping the sweat out of my eyes. When Nick just gaped, I jerked my head towards the overhead TV. “The sound, Nick. Turn up the damn sound!”
I hadn’t immediately recognized my father on the morning news program playing silently above me during this latest fitness test, but that was no great surprise. I was in New York City and he was safely back home in England—or so I’d thought. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d moved out here in the spring.
Not that relocating permanently to the States had greatly widened the rift that already existed between us. My parents had always disliked the career that had chosen me, almost as much as they’d disliked the man who’d helped make that choice: Sean Meyer.
Knowing the main reason I’d come here was to be with Sean didn’t exactly make them enthusiastic about the whole scheme. And the fact that the pair of us had been offered jobs with Parker Armstrong’s exclusive close-protection agency working out of midtown Manhattan probably put the final seal of disapproval on it for them.
The Americans, I’d discovered, had a policy about persistent offenders—three strikes and you were out. As far as my parents were concerned I’d had my third strike and they were finished with me, and I’d done my best to put them out of my mind.
So, my father was the last person I’d expected to see on one of the news channels, but it was the scrolling headline across the bottom of the screen that identified him with the words DISGRACED BRITISH DOCTOR FACES QUESTIONS that really rocked me.
The “doctor” part was familiar, at least, although that was a little like describing Field Marshal Montgomery as a mere soldier. My father was a consultant orthopedic surgeon, brilliant, arrogant, at the top of his game.
But the rest of the caption—now that didn’t square with the man I knew at all.
So, what the hell …
Nick, slow with sculpted muscle, had dropped the clipboard on which he’d been keeping a nitpicking note of my progress and had grabbed for the remote control, fumbling with the volume. He overdid the balance and suddenly my father’s cool clipped tones cut across the gym, startling the handful of other occupants.
“Patients die,” he said with a bluntness that would never win him the sympathy vote. “Sometimes it happens, despite one’s best efforts.”
“So tell me, Doctor,” said the woman with the big hair and the microphone, “exactly how many patients would you normally expect to die in your care?” Her tone was snappy, verging on a gloat.
“I have been a surgeon for over thirty years,” my father said, supercilious. He was holding his shoulders tightly bunched and the normal wealthy tan of his face was bleached out, the skin drum taut across his bones. “I don’t expect to lose any.”
“So you’re claiming this is an isolated case?” the woman said blandly. “Surely, Doctor—”
“It’s Mister, not Doctor,” he cut in acidly over the top of his gold-framed glasses, the same way he would have castigated a junior trainee who bungled a simple diagnosis. “Kindly make some attempt to get your facts correct, madam.”
I sucked in a breath. I’d skirmished with the media myself in the past, enough to know that outright provocation was a grave mistake. They had the ultimate power, after the event, to maneuver you into the role of villain or fool, according to their whim. They’d played both ends of that game with me, and won with insolent ease.
Her eyes narrowed momentarily, but she was too much of a pro to let him rattle her. Instead, she tilted her head and smiled unpleasantly. “Oh, I think you’ll find that I’ve done my research very carefully,” she said. “Last week, for instance, I know that one of your patients died suddenly and unexpectedly in a hospital in Massachusetts.”
He paused just a fraction too long before responding. “Yes, but no surgery had been performed—”
“And that your first reaction was to try and shift the blame for this away from yourself by claiming that the patient in question had deliberately been given an overdose of morphine. Despite the fact,” she went on, steamrollering over any attempt at interruption, “that no evidence has been found to support this.”
“I have withdrawn my comments,” my father said stiffly, with such self-control that I could almost hear his teeth enamel breaking up under the strain. “And it would be unethical for me to discuss—”
“‘Unethical?’” She cut in, her voice cool even though her eyes betrayed the glitter. “Isn’t it the case that the patient in question, Jeremy Lee, was an old friend of yours and was suffering from a painful degenerative disease? You were very … close to his wife, I understand,” she murmured. Her voice was artfully casual, but the unspoken inference came across loud and clear. “You were staying with Mrs. Lee—alone, at her home—while you were treating her husband in the hospital. Isn’t that somewhat … unethical?”
Walk away. I found myself willing him, hands clenched. Why are you standing there like a bloody fool and letting her carve you up like this? Walk. Away.
But he didn’t.
“I’ve known both the Lees for many years,” he said instead, keeping his impatience in check only with visible effort. “It’s natural that I should stay with Miranda—Mrs. Lee—while I’m in America. It was Mrs. Lee herself who asked me to come and advise on her husband’s condition. Nothing more.” I wondered if he knew that his uneasy denials only added weight to the reporter’s snide insinuations.
“I see,” she said, injecting an artful note of doubt into her voice. She frowned, as though considering his words and her own carefully, but underneath it I saw the triumph building, and realized that she’d been leading him to this point right from the start. “And is Mrs. Lee aware that you’ve been suspended from your duties for being drunk on the job?”
“I have never endangered a patient through alcohol,” my father snapped, but as he spoke something flickered in his face. I saw it only because I was looking, but I knew others would be watching him just as closely and they would have seen it, too.
Guilt. Unmistakable.