by Kate Johnson
There were times when I loved Luke utterly, and there were times when he was a patronising git. ‘Oh really? I thought it was all for fun.’
‘Sophie –’
‘I have to go.’
‘Soph –’
‘Bye,’ I said, and ended the call.
‘Loverboy?’ Jack asked, snatching at clothes from his bag.
‘Sarah Wilde had a fake passport.’
‘Natch.’
‘It’s an alias. Probably it was fake when she went to see BBC&H.’
‘Who we can’t go back to, because your best friend Harvey is now on our trail. He probably tipped off Harrington.’
‘I don’t think –’
‘No, that’s obvious,’ Jack snapped, and stalked back into the bathroom to get dressed.
Harvey. Well, this day just got better and better. Why the hell were the CIA involved in this? Because Jack was a foreign national? Because Irene had once worked abroad? That didn’t make sense.
Then a little voice reminded me what my old job had been, and I winced. Two connected murders, and the main suspects are a foreign national and a former British intelligence agent. Yeah. If I was the CIA I’d be all over that, too.
They’d probably assigned Harvey because they thought he’d have some special insights, having worked with me. It was a small measure of comfort that Harvey thought I was cheerfully insane, and hopefully wouldn’t be able to predict a damn thing I did.
I kicked off my shoes and looked around the hotel room. It was as boring and featureless as every single other hotel we’d been in. Another big double bed. I should have complained about that but I was too hungover.
Jack came out of the bathroom in jeans and a charcoal sweater. He looked good in it. Stubbornly, I superimposed Luke’s head over his. Yes. Luke would look better in it. If he wasn’t a patronising git.
‘You know we’re gonna have to leave,’ Jack/Luke said.
I blinked and shook my head. ‘Why? We’ve only just arrived.’
‘Yeah, and your friend Harvey could find us here.’
Well, at least he wasn’t yelling at me any more. ‘I have to get changed first.’
‘Why?’
‘I look too memorable in this dress.’
Jack, mercifully, didn’t comment on that. I got back into jeans and a t-shirt and we walked out of the hotel without getting the bill. A year ago I’d never have done something like that. Now I found it hardly bothered me at all.
‘So where are we going?’ I asked when we were in the car.
‘I’m tempted to leave the country again.’
‘And go where?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jack headed out of town. ‘Who did you call when the maid told you about the woman with the deformed hand?’
‘Luke. I wanted to check up on someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Her name is Alexa Martin. She was a colleague of mine at SO17 but she turned on us. I shot her in the hand.’
‘Any particular reason?’
Yes. I was aiming for her head.
‘She was irritating me,’ I snapped. ‘But she’s still in jail. Max security. It couldn’t have been her.’
‘Any ideas who it might have been?’
‘Well, it was a woman who attacked you in France,’ I said, and enjoyed Jack’s scowl at the thought of nearly being killed by a woman. ‘And there’s that Sarah Wilde person.’
‘Who is going to be hard to track down because she doesn’t exist.’
‘We really need to talk to BBC&H.’
‘Yeah. We really do.’
We both lapsed into silence, and pretty soon I became aware that Jack was driving towards the airport.
‘Not here,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The fewer connections the better. All that disguising stuff really takes it out of me,’ I said, but that didn’t seem to wash. ‘Plus, well, don’t you think Consuela Sanchez might mention something to Harvey about us? Hartford airport is the first place he’ll check.’
Jack just stared straight ahead. ‘Sure,’ he said, and changed lanes.
He didn’t seem mad. Maybe he’d just got past it now. Maybe he was in that oasis of calm that came before ripping my head off.
‘Can you have a look at the map and see what other airports are nearby?’
All I could find were small, regional airports. We ended up driving the not inconsiderable distance to JFK, abandoning the car, stealing another wallet and catching the Red-eye to Heathrow. By now an old hand at transatlantic flights, I settled into my seat, ordered a vodka straight up and watched Sky News on my little TV screen.
After half-an-hour, I was asleep.
Chapter Twelve
Luke winced as another pothole jarred his spine and sent shooting pains radiating from his shoulder. Last night’s cheap hotel bed wreaking its revenge on him for sitting up half the night, spilling whiskey all over it as he ranted and remonstrated with his absentee girlfriend.
Bloody Sophie. Because of her, he was practically on the run, too. Had to play these elaborate games of hide-and-seek just so he could make a phone-call without being watched or listened to or otherwise tracked. Just to get a car no one would recognise. And as soon as he decided to go home the games would start all over again.
The crunch of the gravel under the wheels of his rental car wasn’t doing much to alleviate his hangover. Neither was the looming Gothic insanity of his grandmother’s house.
Sophie’s grandmother lived in a council flat in Sheffield. He’d never been there, but Sophie described the place as grey. ‘Nothing else,’ she said, ‘just grey. Grey buildings, grey sky, grey faces. Grey, grey, grey.’
He considered Grandmother Sharpe’s house as he lurched to a stop outside. It was pretty grey too, but not, he conceded, in quite the same way. It was grey in the way that steel was grey. In the way that Gothic castles were grey. In the way that a mixture of good and evil was grey.
He hadn’t driven to the front door, but gone around to the back, where the house was less grand but more grey. In contrast to the grim splendour of the front of the building, the back had been added to over and over again, by people who expected no one of consequence would ever see it. An ugly patchwork of bricks and stone, windows in the wrong places, doors that were too big or too small, and drainpipes plastered on over the lot.
Maybe Sheffield council flats had something going for them, after all.
He opened the kitchen door, automatically shoving against it with his good shoulder. It had stuck when he was a child, and it still stuck now. The place was deserted but for an ancient Labrador dozing in an equally ancient basket by the fire, and a chicken carcass placed exactly in the centre of the table.
Luke glanced at the dog. He couldn’t remember its name, but he remembered that, like all Labradors, its stomach was a bottomless pit. The chicken had been placed foursquare out of long habit so the dog couldn’t steal it.
He nudged the chicken closer to the edge of the table, thought again how ancient the dog was, and put the meat right at the edge.
Then he wandered out, calling, ‘Hello?’
Silence. Not surprising, really. This time of day the stable-yard might be frantic, but there would be no one in the house, except for maybe the housekeeper or his grandmother’s secretary. The trainer had his own house next to the manège and the stablehands lived above the horses. They didn’t come into the house unless summoned.
The kitchen smelled of mud, horses, dogs and chicken stock. Dust motes danced in the light from the window. Far away, a horse whinneyed.
If he closed his eyes, it was almost exactly like being eight years old again. He could be ten, on exeat from school. He could be fifteen, resenting another frigid family Christmas. He could be twenty-one, wondering why he’d expected his family to be proud of his latest promotion.
But the fact was he was always a child when he came back here. Always bewildered, angry, and grieving. He was a child when he was orphan
ed, and he’d always be that way to his family.
He made his way from the kitchen into the back hall, from where he could enter the larger of the utility rooms, the one that contained the deep freezer for the results of the winter hunting. When he was a kid he used to stand and watch the butcher carving the magnificent deer into hunks of red meat, right at this table.
From the large utility room, he turned into a series of hallways. Four of them, small and narrow and full of identical, unmarked doors. Open the wrong one and you’d find yourself in a cupboard full of rubber boots no one wore any more, or the old butler’s pantry with its ancient bottles of poison, or, if you were spectacularly unlucky, in another small hallway, featureless except for another collection of anonymous doors.
Robbing this place would be like robbing a maze.
Normally, Luke would have considered the idea of hiding out with a relative to be really, really stupid. But quite apart from the fact that anyone looking for him would already have encountered his grandmother’s freezing disdain for him, it would take an unsuspecting person about a week to search the place, and even then they’d never find the exit.
Luke navigated it on autopilot, hesitated over whether to enter the dining room or not and glanced at his watch. No, bugger, it was eleven in the morning. He retraced his steps through two doors and turned left. Next to the boot room was a large door, standing slightly ajar.
‘Jenson, is that you?’
Luke rapped his knuckles lightly on the door and opened it. ‘No,’ he said.
His grandmother paused in her writing, but didn’t turn from her desk. He saw her back stiffen, which Luke considered an interesting feat, since he was fairly sure her spine was a steel rod.
He waited for her to greet him or at least recognise him, and then he sighed and said, ‘It’s Luke.’
He waited. Oh, for fuck’s sake. She knew who he was. He knew for a fact that she’d chosen this room for her office because it gave her a view of pretty much everybody coming and going.
‘Your grandson? You may remember you once had a son, who for unknown reasons you decided to call Giles. He –’
‘Got married, had a child, and then died,’ said his grandmother. Her voice was like a ringing bell. ‘I remember.’
She rose gracefully to her feet and turned. She didn’t seem to have aged in the thirty-odd years Luke had known her. Forever elegant, white-haired, and softly lined.
When Sophie had watched Downton Abbey she’d asked Luke if his grandmother was like the Dowager Countess. Luke scoffed at the very idea. His grandmother made the Dowager look like an eager puppy.
‘Is it acceptable now to visit one’s relatives without announcement?’ she asked.
‘Well, I looked for a footman, but it must be his day off.’
She swept a disapproving glance over him. Luke let it slide away. He’d mastered that art by the age of ten.
‘I hear nothing from you for years, and now this. Last time I saw you, you were off in the SAS, getting shot at.’
She made it sound like some kind of hobby.
Her sapphire gaze rested on his sling. ‘What on Earth are you doing now?’
‘Still getting shot at, I’m afraid,’ Luke said. ‘This isn’t a social call.’
She eyed him shrewdly. ‘It never is.’
Luke pinched the bridge of his nose. It had seemed like such a good idea last night with his friends Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo and Jim Beam egging him on. This morning the half-empty bottles had taunted him with his lack of resolve.
‘You look terrible,’ said his grandmother.
‘Got shot three days ago and haven’t slept in a fortnight,’ he answered. ‘You want to talk about the weather next?’
Her eyes were hard and bright. If they were revealed to be pure sapphire, Luke wouldn’t have been surprised.
‘You always throw affection back at whoever offers it,’ she said, and Luke almost laughed.
‘First, telling someone they look terrible is not affection,’ he said, ‘second, you’ve never shown the slightest thread of affection towards me my entire life, and third, I must ask you to appreciate the magnificent irony of what you just said. I’m here for my mother’s engagement ring.’
There. He’d said it. For a moment his grandmother stood very, very still, then her right eyebrow shifted incrementally and she said, ‘That dreadful girl –’
‘You’ve never even met her,’ Luke snapped.
‘Your Great-Aunt Matilda told me all about her last year. A drug addict who started a screaming match at the garden party, and invited those terrible young people who nearly killed you.’
‘Okay, first off –’
‘I see she has made your habit of interrupting people worse.’
Luke ground his teeth. ‘And your habit of not listening has hardly improved either.’
His grandmother stared at him stonily.
‘Sophie is not a drug addict. Someone stuck her with a heroin needle in an attempt to force a lethal overdose. All she got was septicaemia. She nearly died, in case you’re wondering. Those young people weren’t invited by Sophie – I’ll grant you the “terrible” though, since they were the ones who tried to kill both her and me. And before you level your next accusation,’ he held up his hand to pre-empt her, ‘yes, she did go running off to America while I lay bleeding to death. She thought I was already dead. She was trying to catch the killer. Any other accusations?’
‘She’s –’ his grandmother stopped, caught his eye and went on more carefully, ‘not our kind of people.’
Luke looked around at the beautifully proportioned office, where even the filing cabinets were things of beauty, and he looked out of the window, which had a triple aspect over the gardens, the parklands, and the stables. He looked at his elegantly cold grandmother, whose eyes were the same as his own, whose bone structure he shared, whose gene pool he’d been trying to climb out of for years. He looked at a shared history of chilly politeness and an utter lack of affection for an orphaned boy.
‘You forget, Grandmother,’ he said. ‘I am not our kind of people, either.’
She stared icily at him for a long moment, then looked away, as if she was indescribably bored of the subject. ‘I don’t have your mother’s engagement ring,’ she said. ‘It was buried with her. The rest of her jewellery is in the safe. I’ve been wondering whether to pass it back to her family.’
Luke felt his shoulders slump.
‘There are other rings –’ his grandmother began, a thread of uncertainty in her voice he’d never heard before.
‘No. Forget it. Send it all back to my mother’s family. I’m sure I have some cousins on that side who’ll appreciate it.’
Another pause. ‘It’s quite valuable.’
‘I’m sure it is. If you’re asking if I want to sell it, then no, I don’t. I don’t need the money and it ought to go to someone who can get some sentimental benefit from it. Ought to have done it years ago, I just … I never thought of it.’
You never do think of family. She didn’t say it, but he could see the thought in her eyes.
Well, they never thought of him either.
‘I’ll buy another ring. I just thought – I saw it in a photo and I thought it might be the sort of thing she’d like.’
The clock ticked.
‘You’re going to marry her,’ said his grandmother quietly.
‘I’m going to ask.’
‘Where is she?’
Luke’s head came up. Well, of course she knew, she knew everything. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said. He sincerely doubted she’d still be in Connecticut now. Was she as tired as him? Were people watching her, tracking everything she did and everyone she spoke to? Were people shooting at her? Was she safe?
‘It’s difficult,’ said his grandmother softly, ‘losing someone you love.’
‘I haven’t lost her,’ Luke snapped, ‘I just don’t know where she is.’
Something like a smile touched her lips.
‘From what Matilda told me,’ she began, and Luke shot her a warning look, ‘she’s a tenacious young woman. I’m not sure how terribly bright she is, but stubbornness can be a virtue.’
‘God knows it is in this family,’ Luke muttered.
‘What I mean is, when offered a choice, some will sink and some will swim,’ his grandmother said. ‘Take you, for instance.’ Those sapphires alit on his shoulder.
‘Are you saying I’m a sinker, or a swimmer?’ Luke said, confused. She’d never paid him anything even approaching a compliment before.
‘I’m saying you’d never drown if you were pushed in,’ said his grandmother. ‘And nor, I expect, would Sophie. Now. I assume you’ll be needing somewhere to stay?’
He stared at her. He’d expected to have to beg to stay here. He’d expected to have to sleep in the stables.
‘I have twelve bedrooms, Luke, plus I think Jenson has a spare room in the Trainer’s House and since Tariq left there’s space in the Head Lad’s flat. We have stabling for forty-five horses, owners and jockeys coming and going at all hours of the day plus, of course, various estate workers. At the last count I had twenty-three permanent employees about the house and stables, five temps, five jockeys, horses belonging to seven different owners, plus four cars, seven trucks, three horse-boxes and two lorries registered here. Keeping a low profile shouldn’t be hard. What’s that face for?’
Luke realised he was gaping. ‘It’s just my face,’ he replied stupidly.
For the first time in his memory, Luke’s grandmother looked amused. ‘I saw the hire car by the kitchen door. I can’t imagine why you’d use one of those unless you were trying to hide from something.’
For a surreal moment, Luke considered calling Evelyn to see if his grandmother had ever been in the Service.
‘You are my grandson, Luke,’ she said. ‘So you will stay here, and you will drive one of the estate vehicles, and nobody will even blink at the sight of you wearing a sling. This is a racing yard. Accidents happen. Now. It will shortly be lunchtime. Have you got over your aversion to pea-and-ham soup?’
Luke forced himself to nod, then cleared his throat and said, ‘No one can know I’m here.’