Parker stared back, unintimidated. “I like to keep my people fully informed,” he said.
Collingwood ducked his head, smiling apologetically. “I’d be a whole lot happier, at this stage, if we kept this whole thing as low-key as possible, Mr. Armstrong. I’m sure you can understand our … concerns.”
I was getting better at placing regional American accents. Not quite Deep South enough to be Alabama or Georgia. Maybe one of the Carolinas.
Parker nodded reluctantly and waved us to sit down. Sean and I took the chairs on either side of him, positions of support and solidarity that weren’t lost on the government man. Those heavy-lidded eyes gleamed a little as they regarded us.
Despite his observant gaze, Collingwood struck me as an official rather than an agent—the kind who’d once been in the field, but was now firmly anchored behind a desk. His suit had the bagged knees to prove it. He had a briefcase lying closed on the low table near his right hand and a buff-coloured folder, also closed, in front of him, which he fiddled with while he waited for us to settle, fussily lining it up with the edge of the table.
His hands were misshapen across the backs, I noticed, like he’d spent his youth bare-knuckle fighting or suffered from premature arthritis. Perhaps that explained the lackluster handshake.
“Why don’t you bring everybody up to speed,” Parker suggested.
The little man ducked his head again and smiled at us. His hair was very thick, its glossy blackness at odds with his lived-in face. It couldn’t have looked more like a wig unless it actually had a chin strap.
“This business came to our attention because Mr. Armstrong was attempting to identify, ah … this woman,” he said, opening the folder just far enough to peer inside and lifting out a blowup print, which he spun the right way up and slid across the table towards us.
“Yes,” Sean said, barely glancing at the picture. He didn’t need to. It was the one he’d taken of Blondie lying on the floor in my parents’ garage with her eyes closed. The blood from her obviously broken nose formed a mustachelike stain on her upper lip.
Collingwood sat back and rested his elbows on the arms of the chair, steepling his fingers and tapping the ends together so his nails clicked.
“What can you tell me about this photograph?” he said carefully. “First off, where did you, ah, obtain it?”
He looked from one of us to the other. We stared right back, giving him nothing. Collingwood cleared his throat, trying to hide his desperation behind a nervous laugh. “I mean to say, we know when it was taken. That’s the beauty of digital these days—there’s a time code embedded in the image. But we don’t know where. Or under what, ah, circumstances.”
“Perhaps it might help if we knew why you need to know this,” Sean said, pleasant but noncommittal. “Who is she?”
Collingwood’s gaze swung across him, then he gave a weary sigh, raising his hands a little.
“Okay. Her name is Vonda Blaylock,” he said, eyes still on the photo, lying untouched on the tabletop. “And she’s one of ours.” He looked up, his face ever more sorrowful. “Or, leastways, she was … .”
Oh shit.
I glanced back at the photo, as if knowing Blondie’s real name and status as a government agent might change my memory of her in some way. No, I decided, it didn’t. She and her heavy-duty sidekick had still conned their way into my mother’s house, threatened her, frightened her, and been prepared to do untold damage to whoever came to her aid. I relaxed, shrugging off the guilt that had been nudging at my shoulder. All things considered, she’d got off lightly.
Vonda. Not a name I’d come across before. It suited her, sort of, although she’d always be Vondie to me.
“When you say she’s one of yours, does that mean she was on an assignment of some kind?” Sean asked, picking his words to be as neutral as possible.
Collingwood winced, as if he’d been hoping for something more reassuring than that. Or at least something different. There was a light sheen of sweat coating his forehead. “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s been on leave for the last couple of weeks. Look, can you at least tell me if she’s still alive or—”
“She was when that picture was taken,” I said, taking pity on his patent distress.
“Well, thank the good Lord for that,” he said, slumping back in his chair, hands dangling. “That shot came down the wire and we thought … I thought …” He stopped, shook his head and added, almost to himself, “Whatever she’s gotten herself into, she didn’t deserve—”
“Just what has she gotten herself into, Mr. Collingwood?” Parker asked, still in that dangerously quiet tone.
“Hm?” Collingwood looked up, distracted, and Parker had to repeat his question. “Well, I can’t go into details—you understand—but we suspect that Miss Blaylock has been doing a little, ah, freelancing, put it that way. Either on the company dime, or on her own. I had a conversation with her about it, gave her the opportunity to come clean.” He looked at the photo again. “She didn’t take it—just put in for vacation time. An internal inquiry was scheduled for when she got back at the start of this week, but she never showed, and all our attempts to locate her have failed—until that arrived.” He jerked his head to the photo. “What happened to her?”
I did.
Rejecting brutal honesty, I said, “She took part in a scheme to blackmail my father, Richard Foxcroft, by kidnapping my mother.” I was watching his face while I spoke to see if any of this was news to him. If it wasn’t, he gave a pretty convincing display of bewildered consternation. “In England,” I added, as though that made it so much worse.
“Are you sure about this?” He looked blankly around us, as if we were all going to crack up and admit that we were joking. “I mean, ah, how reliable is your intel?”
“Very,” I said. “By the time we arrived to, ah, remedy the situation,” I went on, matching my style of delivery to his, “your Miss Blaylock was pretty well dug in and prepared to repel boarders. How else do you think she ended up with her nose splattered all over her face?”
Collingwood wiped a thoughtful hand across his chin and I heard the slight rasp of his fingers against the stubble. The guy had a few tufts of body hair protruding from the ends of his shirt cuffs and just below his Adam’s apple, too. He must have had to shave twice a day just to stop people calling out Animal Control.
“So you took the picture,” he said. “I did,” Sean said. He shrugged, untainted by guilt of any kind. “We wanted to know who she was and who she was working for, and she wasn’t keen to tell us.”
“So all you did was ask, huh?” Collingwood demanded with outright suspicion. “No rough stuff?”
“I may have raised my voice towards her,” Sean said blandly, carefully sidestepping what he’d done to her companion instead. “But the fight was over by then. And I’m hardly a torturer.”
No, he wasn’t, I reflected, but he was a damned good interrogator. Cold, ruthless and utterly relentless. I’d been on the receiving end during my Special Forces training and, even though a part of me had always clung to the shrinking reality that it was all just a game, his innate menace and his aptitude for arrowing in on fear and weakness had terrified everyone who’d had to endure it.