by Zoe Sharp
I don’t know what it was that made me realise that I believed him utterly. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never lied to my face, not directly. Maybe there was some part of me that was still clinging to the hope that, whatever else he was capable of, he couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to believe him, but I just couldn’t help it.
Without speaking, I moved to sit opposite, facing him across my coffee table. Slowly, carefully, I thumbed the magazine out of the Glock and placed them down together on the table top, then sat back, leaving them between us.
Sean’s shoulders dropped a fraction. He’d played it so cool I hadn’t recognised the tension in him. He linked his fingers together and sat with his chin propped on them, just looking at me. I kept my face expressionless.
“Colonel Parris was a fool to let you go,” he said at last. “You were perfect for Special Forces.”
I said nothing, managing to convey polite enquiry in the lift of an eyebrow.
“If anyone else had been pointing that at me,” he went on, gesturing to the Glock, “I might not have taken it so seriously, but you were one of the best shots with a pistol I’ve ever come across, Charlie. Cool-headed. Deadly.”
“There were plenty who were just as good.” I shrugged off the compliment, feeling gauche.
He shook his head. “A lot of people had a reasonable ability to aim,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’d got the stomach to pull the trigger for real. Not like you, Charlie, you had what it took. Still do, at a guess.”
“Thanks,” I said, tartly. “I’m not sure it’s very flattering to be told you’ve got all the makings of a cold-blooded killer.”
“Not quite. A sniper, more like. A soldier. With the nerve to kill when necessary, that’s true, but under the right circumstances. For the right cause.”
If only you knew, I thought, and the pain of it seared like fire. “Like a terrorist?” I shot back. “Or an assassin?”
He sighed and made no reply, reaching for the Glock and snapping it back together with practised ease.
“I suppose you do know that carrying one of those things is illegal these days?” I pointed out mildly, watching the unconscious skill in his deft movements.
“In my line of work, they’re often a useful, if not essential bit of kit,” he said, cheerfully unrepentant. “Besides, I have contacts with the security services, and they allow me some leeway.”
“And what is your line of work, Sean?” I said, feeling a sudden chill seep through my bones.
He smiled unexpectedly, transforming his severe facial structure. “I don’t kill people, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Not even a damned Paki who gets my sister pregnant,” he said, mocking me gently as he tucked the gun away out of sight. “In fact, if I’d known Nas was in danger I probably could have helped him. I’m in close protection now, Charlie. After I left the army, I became a bodyguard.”
That one threw me and I didn’t trouble to hide the fact. “Do your family know what you do?” I asked.
He paused, frowning as he considered the question. “No, they don’t,” he said eventually. “They know I work in security, but I’ve always tried to make it sound boring – like it involves sending night-watchmen round building sites. They don’t know I do personal stuff. No-one round here does. Only you.”
I filed away the possible significance of that for reflection at a later date. Standing, I said, “If we’re not going out for that drink, would you like some coffee?”
Sean smiled again. “OK.”
He followed me as I moved through to the kitchen and dug out the ingredients. I hadn’t stocked up for a while, but fortunately I had a pack of long-life milk in the bottom of a cupboard. Sean leaned in the doorway and watched me spoon instant coffee granules into two mugs.
“It’s come to something when you feel you can’t get the truth out of me without a gun to my head,” he said quietly.
I glanced up at him as I flicked on the kettle, kept my voice dispassionate. “Old wounds take a long time to heal.”
“Yeah, well.” He raked a hand through his hair, looking tired again. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you went shooting from the lip and told everyone about us—”
“Hang on, before I told anyone?” I spun round, slamming the milk down hard enough to slop some of the contents over the side of the carton. “I didn’t say a word. I thought it was you.”
“Me?” He looked genuinely astonished. I saw the anger building in the bunching of his shoulders. “OK, let’s backtrack for a moment here, shall we?” he said tightly. “When I took up that last posting everything was fine, yeah? I was out of touch for what, three weeks? Then I try to contact you and I’m told you’re on leave. Permanently on leave. It went on for months. I even rang your damned parents, not that I expected them to be helpful. And what was I told? Charlotte doesn’t want to speak to you again. Ever.” The bitterness welled up in his words, overflowed. “What the hell was I supposed to think?”
I wanted to stop him going on. To tell him he’d been wrong. To reach out to him, but I couldn’t seem to move. He threw me a single, dark unfathomable look, then went on.
“So, next thing I know I’m being hauled into the local company commander’s office and told I’m up on a charge for screwing one of my trainees. They told me you had failed the course, but when they’d RTU’d you, you’d started screaming about slapping them with a suit for sexual harassment against me, if not actual rape. I was told there’d been a court martial, and you were out, but not before you’d brought me down with you.”
“I didn’t,” I whispered, stricken. “Sean, I swear that’s not how it happened.”
“So, what did?” he threw back.
I swallowed, unwilling to tell him what had really gone on that dark, and miserable night. I opted for half-truth instead, and hoped that would be enough. “I-I was attacked,” I said at last, “the week after you left. A group of them jumped me and I was pretty badly beat up. That’s why I was on leave.”
That much at least was true. The secret of a believable lie was to stick as closely as possible to reality. There was less opportunity to stumble.
Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay. The names went round and round again. I shut them out.
“There was a court martial,” I went on, “but it went against me. They said I’d provoked them, made it out to be my fault. I tried to get hold of you, to speak up for me as one of my instructors, nothing more than that, but you never returned any of my calls. So,” I shrugged my shoulders, “I was out.”
“I never got any messages. They kept me moving around a lot, out of regular contact. I never knew you’d called me.” He shook his head, then looked up at me intensely. “And you let it rest there?” he demanded. “After what they did to you?”
For a moment my breath stopped, fearing he’d tumbled to it. Then I saw his eyes shift to my throat, understanding dawning, laced with compassion. I knew I should have told him he was jumping to the wrong conclusions about that, but I was too much of a coward.
“No, I didn’t. I wish I had.” The kettle boiled and clicked off, giving me the chance to turn away, fuss with pouring boiling water into the mugs, stirring them. “I went for a civil action against them. That was when it all came out about us. I don’t know who told them, but it certainly wasn’t me.”
“You never told anyone?” he demanded. “What about those two other girls on the course? What were their names? Woolley and Lewis. You all seemed to get on OK. You’re sure you never had any heart-to-heart girlie chats with them?”
I shook my head, not insulted by the question. “We were never that close, so yes, I’m sure,” I said.
In fact, Woolley, Lewis and I had never really liked each other. We knew we were in the minority, as women training for the job we hoped to do, and that we had to stick together. But, at the same time the three of us were in direct competition with each other. I knew without undue conceit that I’d been a better soldier. They knew it too, and
they hadn’t liked me for it.
Woolley in particular had been struggling to keep up. She was supposed to speak up in my favour at the trial, but her carefully neutral testimony about my general behaviour had a damning effect. Afterwards, she’d left the courtroom without talking to me, unable even to meet my eyes.
I learned later that although Lewis failed to complete the course, Woolley passed it and went on to active service. In my more bitter moments I wondered if that was her reward for sinking me.
“However it came out about us,” I said, “I lost the case because of it. I went from model soldier to—” I broke off, aware of how close I’d come to letting too much slip. “Well, I’m sure you can guess.”
“That’s why you disappeared, changed your name?”
I nodded. In the army I’d been Foxcroft. In an effort to escape the hounding of the press afterwards, I’d shortened it to Fox. It had seemed like a good way to disappear, and it had worked.
“I did try to find you, you know, but I kept coming up empty. When I realised it was you the other night I’ve had my people working round the clock to find out where you were. I couldn’t believe it when they told me about this place. I never dreamed you’d ended up so close to home.”
I gave him a rueful smile. “If I’d known how close to your home it was, I probably would have gone somewhere else,” I admitted, holding his coffee out to him.
He stepped forwards, eyes fired. I froze while he peeled the mug out of my nerveless fingers and plonked it back on the worktop, grabbing hold of my upper arms. “I didn’t betray you, Charlie,” he said fiercely. “You have to believe that.”
“I-I do,” I said unsteadily, mildly surprised to discover that it was the truth. “I didn’t, for a long time, but I do now. They screwed us both over, didn’t they Sean? Madeleine told me they did their damnedest to get you killed afterwards.”
“Yeah, well,” he relaxed his fingers, took a breath, “it wasn’t the easiest of times, but I survived.” He picked up his coffee mug with a steady hand, took a sip and regarded me over the rim. “It seems we both have that knack.”
Seventeen
I lurched awake the next morning from a night’s sleep fractured by dreams of anger and betrayal, pain and death. I sat up abruptly on a raft of tangled bedclothes, and shivered at the rapid cooling effect of the sweat on my goosebumped skin.
It was a long time since I’d been hit by the nightmares, to the point where I even thought they’d gone away completely. I should have known my luck wasn’t that good.
They always followed the same pattern. I went through the rape again and again, unable to change a word of the dialogue, or a moment of the action. This time around events took place in a public arena, and they’d sold tickets. My parents were in the front row, eating popcorn and cracking jokes with my commanding officer. Woolley and Lewis were chatting together a couple of rows further back.
I could no longer clearly remember the faces of the four men who’d attacked me. They’d faded into that area of the subconscious that hides trauma from your waking mind. I had a hazy knowledge that Morton was short and wiry, and Clay had been built like a Challenger tank, but beyond that, they all blurred into one.
This time, though, there had been an unpleasant variation to the dream. This time, the quartet all had the same, familiar face.
Sean’s face.
I swung my legs over the side of the soft mattress, and stayed there for a while, gripping the edge, head bent, trying to catch my breath. When my heartbeat had slowed to something approaching a normal level, I looked up slowly, and found myself staring into my own haunted face in the mirror on Pauline’s wardrobe door.
I looked terrible. My eyes were sunk into shadowed sockets, my hair lank, and my skin had the waxy tinge of long-term sickness. I tried a smile, but somewhere along the line my nerves fumbled the message and it warped into a grimace.
Somehow, it all came back down to Sean Meyer. Much as I hated to admit it, my mother was right. I just couldn’t afford to get involved with him again.
I might believe Sean now, that he’d been just as much a victim in the whole mess as I had, but there was too much pain and too much bitterness surrounding both of us to try and recapture a happier time. The very fact that I’d been so convinced he was capable of such a gross act of betrayal had destroyed whatever fragile bond of trust had been growing between us.
What we’d had was dead and buried. I’d done my grieving. It was time to finally lay the ghosts, and move on.
Downstairs, I gave Friday his food and left him shovelling his bowl round the kitchen floor. I made a coffee and stood for a while, cradling the mug and staring out into the back garden without seeing much of it at all.
The dream still disturbed me. I recognised the need for closure, and that I wasn’t going to get it until some lingering questions had been answered.
On impulse, I went back through to the living room, and picked up the telephone, dialling a number I’d known off by heart since I was a child.
A man’s voice answered, calm, cool. My father.
“Hello,” I said, warily. “I was hoping to speak to my mother. Is she there?”
There was the slightest pause. “I’m afraid she’s not here at the moment,” he said, but somewhere beyond him, I swear I heard a door closing. “Can I help you at all?”
I took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me that Sean Meyer had tried to contact me after – after I left the army?”
“Ah,” my father said, almost on a sigh. “So, you know about that.” He didn’t even have the grace to sound embarrassed.
“Yes, I know about that,” I snapped. “Tell me, were you ever planning to tell me? Or were you just hoping I’d never find out?”
“Find out what exactly, Charlotte?” For the first time he let the irritation creep into his detached tone. “Find out what excuses Meyer had managed to dream up for what he did?”
“They weren’t excuses,” I argued. “He didn’t know. They posted him.” I was sure of my ground now, but I didn’t like the defensive note in my voice, even so.
“If you’re happy to believe that then, of course, that’s your choice,” he said, indifferent. “Your mother and I discussed it at the time, and we decided that it was better that you didn’t know. It was too late to affect the outcome of the case, and it would only have served to distress you further.”
I felt temper rise in my throat like bile. “You decided,” I said bitterly. “What right did you have to make that sort of choice for me?” Didn’t you realise the effect it would have?
“We had every right, Charlotte,” he said, in the same tone he would have used to rebuke one of his junior doctors for some badly handled diagnosis. “You were under our protection, and in no fit state to make your own decisions. You would rather have known everything that was being said about you? That we’d reported every phone call, showed you every lie the papers printed? You wouldn’t have thanked us for it. Then or now.”
I tripped up a little over the word “lie”. It was the first time he’d let his neutrality slip and actually seemed to come down on my side. My God, he might be human after all.
I’ve no doubts at all that my father was an excellent surgeon, his obvious success notwithstanding. He had that arrogance, that total belief that he was doing the right thing, making the right decision. You listened to him and you knew that the hand holding the scalpel would not slip at the vital moment.
“We shielded you as much as we could,” he went on now, almost coldly. “If you will take some advice, Charlotte, you won’t go raking it over again now. It won’t do anyone any good to open up old wounds again. Least of all yourself.”
“Somebody betrayed us,” I said, stubborn. “Even if I was prepared to let it go, don’t think for a moment that Sean is.” And I put the phone down without giving either of us the chance to say goodbye.
***
Getting out of Lavender Gardens that morning proved difficult. A gang o
f kids had set light to a stolen Citroën BX, which was blocking one of the main roads out of the estate.
The fire brigade were already on the scene by the time I arrived, running out hoses to deal with the wreckage. On the far side of the burning barricade, a young crowd had gathered. The firemen looked nervous as they worked, as though they weren’t sure if the real danger came from the flames, or the mob.