Parker pushed his chair back and rose, the movement sudden but smooth and controlled all at the same time. He leaned forwards slightly and planted both his fists very deliberately onto the desktop, letting his shoulders hunch so that Collingwood was left in no doubt about the width of them, normally so well disguised by careful tailoring.
“Do I need to remind you that one of your agents is guilty of kidnapping?” he asked, his voice gentle enough to make me shiver. “That she and Kaminski threatened to torture and rape a defenseless old lady? How would that look on tomorrow’s front page?”
“Almost as bad as the old lady’s highly respectable husband getting caught in a bordello with a teenage hooker,” Collingwood shot back. He gave another gusty sigh. “Look, this is getting us nowhere. I just want to recover my agent and find out what her involvement is with Storax, and what they’re hiding. Foxcroft can help.”
He returned Parker’s glare with a cool stare of his own before shifting its focus to me. The upper corners of his eyelids folded down until they almost touched his lashes, making his gaze seem deceptively sleepy. “You want a way to get your father out of the mess he’s in, and no doubt he wants to get to the bottom of this other guy’s death up in Boston. Am I right?”
Slowly, reluctantly, I nodded.
Collingwood smiled at me. “See? Same goal.”
“This is all very romantic,” Sean said, his voice dry, “but how do you intend to consummate this marriage of convenience?”
Collingwood frowned briefly at the flippancy. “We trade,” he said. “First off, you, ah, assist me in recovering my rogue agent.”
“Always assuming that we have any ideas in that direction,” Sean agreed placidly. “And in return?”
Collingwood shrugged. “I listen to Foxcroft’s side of the story, drop the word in the right ears to make sure all that, ah, trouble he got himself into over in Brooklyn goes away,” he said, “and in return he gives me his professional take on the death of this guy Lee, and any possible connections he can make between that and Storax.”
We fell silent. It was an answer. In fact, from where I was sitting, it was the only answer—or the start of it, at least. Collingwood’s fingers were twitching again as he regarded us.
“Well?” he demanded. “Do we have a deal?”
“I think that’s up to the good doctor, don’t you?” Parker murmured. He glanced at me, eyebrow slightly raised. I nodded slightly and he leaned forwards, pressing the intercom button on his phone. Bill Rendelson’s voice barked from the speaker in acknowledgment.
“Bill, ask Mr. and Mrs. Foxcroft to step into my office, would you?”
Parker let go of the intercom button and sat up to face Collingwood’s obvious consternation that one of his objectives, at least, had been within such easy reach. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
CHAPTER 15
My father listened with absolute concentration to the proposal the government man put forward, as though he had any number of choices in the matter. When Collingwood was done outlining what he had in mind, my father’s face was grave despite the fact that he was being offered deliverance, or something pretty close.
It was my mother who spoke first.
“What are the risks?” she asked, glancing around the group of us. “These dreadful people have already threatened us and only a few days ago someone tried to kill my husband—and my daughter, too,” she added, a touch belatedly for my taste. “Will agreeing to help you make them stop? Or will it only make them try harder?”
Collingwood pursed his lips, but I saw that gleam was back in his sad-looking eyes again. He’d clearly dismissed my mother from his calculations almost as soon as they’d been introduced. She was the dictionary definition of genteel, if far from the defenseless old lady Parker had described. I sometimes found it easy to forget that under that blue-rinsed exterior lay a formidable, albeit largely dormant, brain.
“Ma’am, we’ll do our best to ensure your safety. We need your husband’s testimony if we’re going to make anything of this. Besides,” he added with a reassuring smile, gesturing around Parker’s office, “these people are the best in the business. My recommendation would be for you to put yourself entirely in their hands.”
“In that case, are you also going to foot the bill for their services?” she said pleasantly.
Collingwood looked momentarily taken aback. “I will certainly put that to my superiors, ma’am,” he said, noncommittal.
She nodded and smiled, seeming placated. Collingwood waited a moment, as if to make sure she wasn’t going to come back with anything else, then began gathering up his papers. He picked up the flight manifest I’d looked at, and in doing so uncovered the blowup of Vondie Blaylock that had been hidden underneath it. The photograph suddenly seemed to lie starkly exposed in the center of the table and was all the more shocking because of it.
I heard a simultaneous sharp intake of breath from both my mother and father.
Then my father stretched out and picked up the photo and there was the slightest hesitation in the reach, as though he didn’t really want to look but couldn’t help himself. He took his time studying the image and, when he was done, he glanced across at Sean with taut disdain curling his lip.
“Your handiwork, I presume,” he said coldly.
“No, actually,” I said. “Mine.”
For a second he allowed his bitterness to have free rein before he ruthlessly clamped down on it. But there was something in his face when he looked at me that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps now when he looked at his only child, the product of both his genes and his nurturing, there was something missing.
I turned away and caught Collingwood watching our frosty exchange with apparent amusement lurking in those mournful eyes. They were a dark brown color, I noticed. That, together with the drooping lids, gave him the appearance of an elderly bloodhound. But one who had suddenly picked up a hot new scent, and was hunting.
“So,” Collingwood said, dropping his hands onto his thighs as though preparing to get to his feet, “no doubt you’ll need to discuss this—”
“I don’t believe so,” my father said, interrupting him. Just when I thought his arrogance had reached new levels, he did cast his eyes sideways at his wife, for all the world like her opinion mattered. She nodded, and the slightest flicker of a smile crossed my father’s thin lips. He turned back to Collingwood. “I’m prepared to help you all I can.”
Collingwood continued to rise, but only to lean across the table and offer my father a solemn handshake. “Glad to hear it, sir,” he said, shaking my mother’s hand also, almost as an afterthought, and subsiding again. He shifted his attention to Parker, waving a hand towards Vondie’s picture, which he’d left—deliberately, I’m sure—on the table. “So, Mr. Armstrong, can you help me to, ah, locate my agent so I can bring her in?”
My mother gave a start of surprise. “Oh, but surely that’s—”
“The woman who held you hostage—yes,” I cut in to stop her blurting out that she’d watched Sean and me take both her unwanted houseguests prisoner and that they were still being held at our behest. Regrettably perhaps, the only quick way I could think of to shut her up was to remind her. “The woman who allowed her partner to threaten to rape you.”
She paled, then a dark, mottled flush bloomed across her cheeks. Peripherally, I saw my father’s head snap round, but I held on to my mother’s distraught gaze until I saw the understanding creep into it and strip from her tongue whatever words she’d been about to voice.